Memories of Martin Niemöller

A chief reason that the U.S. War Department immediately after World War II granted accreditation to a special correspondent for religious affairs was the desire to find and support the Christian leaders who had resisted Hitler and survived. Thus I was offered accreditation as a correspondent for Religious News Service. Funding was provided by the American Conference of the World Council of Churches.

One of my most urgent priorities was to locate and aid Martin Niemöller, who had been freed by U.S. forces after eight years in Nazi concentration camps. I found him and some of his family in cramped quarters at Leoni on the Starnberger See, Bavaria. We talked far into the nights. We took long walks. I was able to “liberate” food for them from the kitchen of an American Air Force weekend recreation hotel, where I was given a room. The cooks didn’t dare give Germans, even the resistance hero Niemöller, any provisions. But I hung my greatcoat, with its roomy pockets, near the kitchen, and several times a day they were filled with cheese, butter and meat. Jeeps were plentifully available at the motor pool. A signal corps facility was nearby. I had a mini-press camp at my disposal.

I had gotten to know Niemöller when I had come to the American Church in Berlin in 1930; he to the prestigious Berlin-Dablem Church in 1931. After 1933 I had frequently been asked to take ecumenical visitors to meet with him. Within a year he had organized the church opposition to Hitler, enlisting 5,500 of the 15,000 Evangelical (Protestant) pastors in the Pastors’ Emergency League. He knew some English (as every German navy officer would), but he refused to use it. I had to serve as translator.

After leaving the American Church in Berlin in 1934, I returned annually for two months; I was frequently in the Niemöller parsonage after his imprisonment in 1937. On one occasion we were trying to talk above the noise of the seven children -- a violin was being played in one room, a piano in another. Else Niemöller said with a wan smile, “As a group they are simply impossible, but individually they are very nice.” Another time Helmut Gollwitzer, Martin’s successor at the Berlin-Dahlem Church, was holding the infant Martin, Jr., on a pillow. ‘Tini,” the child of the church struggle, as he was called, was swinging Gollwitzer’s big watch on its chain, while the young pastor waxed ever more anxious.

When I found them at Leoni, Else told me that Martin was deeply depressed. “Er sieht alles schwarz,” she said. “He sees everything black.” The joy of liberation had been smothered for him by the harsh treatment of the “Morgenthau clique,” who wanted a hard peace which would reduce Germany to its preindustrialized, agricultural status. Twice he protested with hunger strikes. For months he had not been allowed to be reunited with his family. Furthermore, the devastation of his country and the unrepentant nature of many clergy and laity left him in despair. Bolshevism was flooding in from the East.

During our long walks I used every appeal of the gospel. Yet his gloom persisted. Probably the fact that I was in a U.S. Army uniform didn’t help. No Americans were allowed to be stationed in occupied Germany in civilian dress, however.

One day in early October I appealed to Mutti, as we all called Else. “You must save him. He can do more than any living person to cleanse Germany and restore her through reconciliation to a positive place in the community of nations.”

“How?” she asked.

“By blowing on the coals of the gospel. At the end of World War I he was disillusioned and wanted to flee to sheep farming in Argentina. You encouraged him; do it again. Germany -- and the world -- needs the gospel: repentance, forgiveness, united Christians, trust in the grace and mercy of God, the power of the resurrection -- all the great things he has been preaching. You can do it.’’

She went to work on him. There was not much time, for the first meeting of German church people with world Christian leaders was scheduled soon in Stuttgart. After World War I had taken four years before German church leaders were invited to ecumenical fellowship; this time it took only four months.

The Berlin-Dahlem parish was pleading for a reunion with its beloved pastor. Further, the Niemöllers’ son Hermann had escaped the Soviets, trying to make his way through Czechoslovakia to reach Berlin. (Germans were forbidden to travel, especially in the Soviet Zone.) A good friend of mine in the American Military Government, Captain C. H. Bischoff, secured a Mercedes-Benz, painted on it the official AMG emblems and gave Martin written authorization to drive to Stuttgart, then on through the Soviet Zone. The document, dated October 14, 1945. read:

An Authorization from the Commanding Officer of Detachment H291, Company F. Third Military Government Regiment, Wolfratshausen, Oberbayern. Signed by Capt. C. H. Bisehoff.

Certified that Pastor Niemöller, Martin, is attached to the USA High Command in Frankfurt AM., and is travelling to Berlin and return, on an official mission, and that every courtesy and facilities are to be given him on the way.

Any discourtesies are to be reported immediately to American High Command to this office. or to any other AMO officer and to be forwarded to General EISENHOWER,

Off we went to Stuttgart, enjoying a good meal at a U.S. airfield on the way. In a suburb of Stuttgart, Martin stopped at the parsonage of a resistance pastor who had been released from prison. He returned to the car in a state of mild shock. “He told me that I was to give the opening sermon [at the Christian leaders’ gathering], and that it would be broadcast. Oh, well, if I get through the sermon I guess I will get through the broadcast.”

Imagine the scene amid the ruins of Stuttgart as leaders from “enemy” countries -- from the West, W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, Samuel McCrea Cavert, G. K. A. Bell. and the highest church people from France, Norway. Sweden; and from Germany. such men as Otto Dibelius, Gustav W. Heinemann, H. Meiser, Theophilus Würm, Hans Lilje and Niemöller -- met after years of separation.

Else and I told Martin that the issue at Stuttgart would be guilt: not sins in general, but confession of one’s own sins. We listened with some trepidation, wondering what he would say in his opening sermon.

I wrote in a dispatch on October 18:

The need is for German Christians to testify before the world to the guilt of the Fatherland in invading and despoiling Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Russia, France, etc. So far the German church leaders have only expressed general guilt, but that isn’t enough. The Bible says, before you go to pray go to your brother; if he feels you have wronged him, first get right with your brother, then come and pray. Last night Pastor Niemöller rose to heights in laying this out in just this concrete way, exactly as he used to before the Nazis imprisoned him. . . . This may be the turning point in the postwar world.

It was indeed a turning point for world opinion, foreshadowing Douglas MacArthur’s policies in Japan and the Marshall Plan in Europe. Dr. Cavert’s comment on the sermon was, “If Christians the world over could achieve such humility and repentance, a new world would be born.” In his sermon Martin had said:

We have no right to pass off all guilt on the evil Nazis. We have done little to stop the corruption and, above all, we the church failed. For we knew which way was false and which right, yet [we] let people run unwarned into ruination. I do not exclude myself from this guilt, for I too have kept silent when I should have spoken.

On October 20, 1945, we set off for the Soviet Zone and Martin’s first reunion with his parish since 1937. We carried an illegal passenger: a young physician with two enormous suitcases of medicines, bound for Magdeburg in the Soviet Zone. Also illegal were two great cartons of personal mail for Berliners.

At the Helmstedt border crossing the U.S. officer asked who those people were in the car. I said, “Pastor Niemöller.” Martin and Else charmed him a bit, and although he questioned the doctor and the mail, he waved us through. At the turn-off to Magdeburg the doctor left us, trudging through the fog.

When we arrived in the rubble city, West Berlin, Martin did not go first to find his son, but to the home of Ludwig, Bartning, the architect who as chairman of the board of Jesus Christ Church had, resisted brutal Nazi pressures and had housed Else and the children in the Dahlem parsonage. There the Niemöllers later found son Hermann -- in the bomb-damaged parsonage.

We left for Berlin-Spandau and the first postwar meeting of the resistance Brotherhood Council (Brüderrat), which had inspired the anti-Nazi church leaders. It was in session in the Johannes Stift, the great cluster of buildings of the Inner Mission. “We must pause here,” Martin said as we passed a hospital. Their daughter Jutta, who had died during the war, had served there as a nurse’s aide. Martin entered, returning with a serious look on his face.

“What happened?” Else asked him.

“I met the head nurse. She told me that one Sunday she had lost her temper with an inexperienced nurse and had reproached her harshly. As she was putting on her bonnet to go to church, Jutta Niemöller said she had better not go to divine worship. For the Bible says, first be reconciled to any person you have injured. The head nurse sought to defend herself by saying that the nurse had been repeatedly stupid beyond forgiveness. Jutta replied, “My father was put in a concentration camp by Adolf Hitler, but he has forgiven Hitler.”

Arriving at the building where the surviving Brüderrat members were meeting in an upper room, Martin bounded up the outside stairs. Not one of his old comrades knew he was back in Berlin. Martin flung open the door. Every one of the survivors had been in prison or a concentration camp. After a stunned moment they slowly rose, joined hands in a circle with Niemöller and his wife, and the famous sculptor from Sachsenhausen, the layman Wilhelm Grosz, started the hymn “Nun danket alle Gott.”

On the return trip we almost lost the Niemöllers to the Russians. Approaching Helmstedt, we came to the Soviet Zone border. The British control post was within sight, down the Autobahn. There was no Russian frontier shack of any kind, only a barrier across the road. A few armed guards emerged from the woods. One of them took our papers and passports.

He asked who those three were in the car. “Deutsche” he yelled, “Heraus.” The guards hauled the Niemöllers out. “Verboten,” he shouted.

Then he fingered our papers. I pointed to the Russian-language authorization from the Soviet authorities. To my horror, I saw that the guard was holding it upside-down: he was illiterate. “Come, come,” the guard said, and tried to push Martin and Else into the woods.

I knew that in confrontational situations one’s best chance was to issue bold counterorders. Speaking a mishmash of German, English and Russian, I demanded to see his captain. The guard hesitated, then disappeared into the woods. He finally came back with a lieutenant. Next a captain was summoned, and the harangue began all over again.

At that moment a big U.S. Army truck rolled by. A GI yelled, “Having trouble? Ivan is in a mean mood today.” I called back, “I have German civilians on an MG mission. Get help for me.”

I saw the truck pause at the British control post. A British officer strolled toward us, swinging a cane airily and whistling. The Russians paused to eye him. The officer ceremonially lifted a whistle to his lips and blew a blast. What that meant to the Soviet border patrol, I will never know. But the Russian captain barked an order and the bar was raised.

We hopped in -- and the car refused to start. We ground away -- and the welcomed roar finally assailed our ears. Thus we crossed over into freedom land before the Russians changed their minds.

Mordecai Kaplan: Prophet of Pragmatic Theology

A large Mercedes taxi was taking me to 3 Ibn Ezra in Jerusalem, one of the most unusual cities of this world, to the home of Mordecai M. Kaplan. I had been told that he was living in Jerusalem, alert and testy, but feeling somewhat neglected. Deciding that no student of religion in America could afford to neglect him, I phoned for an appointment. His voice, firm and resonant, did not sound at all like that of someone who had been born in 1881, and he seemed quite eager for me to stop by for some conversation.

Mordecai Kaplan is a man who cherishes his American citizenship almost as much as his Israeli status by "right of return." After all, Kaplan’s understanding of the meaning of Judaism and Jewishness was discovered in America; it is a product of America, and he is certainly the formulator and major spokesman for the movement known as Reconstructionism. My knowledge of the movement was limited; I had some conception of it as part of Jewish adjustment to American society and culture. It had seemed more of an articulation of the effects of modernization on Judaism -- therefore a description of what was occurring -- than a program of prescription or advocacy. As a movement, Reconstructionism had little to show by way of institutional success.

I discovered, however, that Kaplan’s articulation of that process of modernity is more profound than I had thought. Not only does it contribute to an understanding of American religion, but, indeed, it may be of assistance in the evaluation of American Christianity and of civil religion, or what Sidney E. Mead calls "the Religion of the Republic."

Our discussion moved rapidly into some rather controversial and complicated subjects. It quickly became apparent that the venerable 97-year-old scholar was accustomed to being taken seriously. I was told, respectfully but firmly, that my not having read certain works -- such as Pirke Abot and Bernard J. Bamberger’s The Story of Judaism, not to mention some of Kaplan’s own writings -- was quite inexcusable. He spoke of the importance of higher criticism, of rigorous and realistic scientific thought, of the superiority of the Jerusalem Bible as a translation, and of many other topics. I listened without arguing, in order to get at his style of thinking and his evaluation of the American character.

The radical rabbi was settling in for a long session, and I had been planning to attend a reception. When my friends called for me, Kaplan stopped his discourse, peered across the room and said: "What I am speaking about is very important. I would like everyone to hear it." Instinctively I became a pupil, almost with a sense of being in a school of the rabbis, learning the concentration of Talmudic exposition. Born in Russia, Kaplan had been reared in the traditions of Orthodox Judaism and, after coming to New York, had become an Orthodox rabbi. It was his advanced study at Columbia University that had radicalized him and made him a pragmatist.

People really think sociologically, not philosophically, asserted Kaplan. According to his definition, "Philosophy is the immaculate conception of thought not sired by experience." I believe that there exist some such preludes to virgin birth in Kaplan’s own thought. But he would deny it, and his ideas tend to be very incarnational, very much immersed in the substance of human existence, which he understands sociologically. His thinking is structured by the rabbi’s method of deliberation, accustomed to discussing reality in relational and ethical, rather than metaphysical, terms. For Kaplan, those mental habits require use of language other than the traditional, departing from the pat- terns of what he considers to be the superstitious within Orthodoxy. Having studied with John Dewey, Kaplan is a pragmatic, instrumental American whose Jewishness has been awakened to universal dimensions by the American experience.

"Reconstructionism" means that the Jewish people must reinterpret and reconstruct the entire range of Jewishness in ways that are credible in and appropriate to the modern world. The Reconstruction must move beyond narrow notions of religious groups and philosophical schools which conceive of themselves as tiny options, points of view, or faiths that exist solitarily in an otherwise cosmopolitan world. It is to be a civilization. That’s what a religion was meant to be. The Hebrew Bible makes the point quite clearly.

Kaplan’s conviction that thinking is sociological, he told me, is derived from American pragmatism. America is not philosophical or ideological. American culture is the working out of the necessities and responsibilities of interpersonal existence in an environment more hospitable to activity than to reflection. Jewishness is to be reconstructed because the modern world, as America has shaped it, requires a greater pragmatic demonstration of Jewish people-hood and world view than earlier formulations have given it.

The position held by Kaplan represents a Jewish appropriation of certain characteristics "sired" by the American experience. It is modernist as well as pragmatic. He formulated his seminal ideas as an American of the 1920s and ‘30s. Religious modernism of the type which flourished at the University of Chicago early in the century was in the American spirit. The label "modernist," usually reserved for only a segment of the liberal thrust of theology in the late 19th and into the 20th century, might conceivably be used to describe the entire liberal movement. For modern ideas, churned up by the pragmatic turning of "modern science, scholarship, philosophy, and global knowledge," provided the basis and stimulation for much of the religious thought which began at that time.

Out pragmatism makes us always either modernists or fundamentalists in our method. It would be contrary to the American spirit not to be in tune with "the latest," not to be ready for something new, not to be modern. Modernism is an American characteristic, and it was prominent during the days of Mordecai Kaplan’s intellectual debut, especially the publication of Judaism as a Civilization in 1934.

Kaplan’s thought, born of the modern and pragmatic spirit of America, carries that spirit into Judaism and represents the mission of America itself. Although we Americans have tried to repent of our sense of mission, purpose and agency, there is no necessity for doing so. The world needs it and responds to it. And even though we also turn penitent for imposing our universalism on the world, there is no escaping it, or the truth of it.

Mordecai Kaplan finds the pragmatic and modernist spirit which he learned in America to be at the heart of Judaism as expressed in the Bible (found in a good translation, like the Jerusalem Bible, which reflects the best of higher criticism and modern scholarship). The very name of God, Kaplan told me, stands for unity, community, change and diversity. "It says so in the Bible," he assured me. The attributes of Ya are very pragmatic; therefore, God is in the collective mind which reveals him. Coalition in government, peace among nations, and ecumenism among religions are all accounted for by the pragmatic manner in which the characteristics of God are known in social existence.

Kaplan has not time for what he calls mysticism (he mentioned Heschel and Buber by name in his reproach), because to him it is inimical to an ultimate reality which is constantly becoming, constantly encountered in the midst of responsible human action. If Jews are faithful, they are the witnesses to this truth which the world needs. Their faithfulness means that their civilization is destined to be international in character. Note that Kaplan settles upon "faithfulness" rather than "faith." Faithfulness is the more nearly correct translation of Hebrew Scripture, he maintains, and it indicates the interpersonal and pragmatic manner in which the divine and human are known.

III

I have pondered for some time on what it is that I learned from Mordecai Kaplan. Now I am ready to offer some specific conclusions about America and Christianity. First, Kaplan’s ideas bring Judaism and American religion into sympathetic encounter. They are of the same spirit even though the Jewishness at the heart of Kaplan’s commitments makes its own particularistic claims. Jewish-Christian dialogue, currently stalemated, needs to continue at greater depths than before. Perhaps Kaplan’s position can serve as context for renewed discussion between Jews and Christians in America.

Second, since an earnest attempt is needed to return Christianity to its Jewish roots, Kaplan’s thought provides a welcome bridge for an American to traverse. Our Christian faithfulness must find its Jewish heart, in order that we may learn again the distinctiveness of the gospel. And if we share in the extended promise given to the Jews, we must make a total civilization out of the living of that promise. Kaplan can help us to learn what that means; he can help us to understand that the catholicity of the biblical tradition is not an abstract Greek universal, but a concrete Hebraic wholeness that is universal in its implications.

Third, the ideas of Mordecai Kaplan may assist American Christians in overcoming the denominational fallacy. In addressing the problem of religious pluralism in the 19th century, the study of American religion commonly points out our unique solution: we invented the denomination. A denomination is a functional entity in which the issues of truth and tradition are laid aside so that a religious group may conduct its activities in a setting characterized by a lack of political or cultural dominance for any one group.

It may be fortunate for us that we have managed that adjustment, but it is based on a false understanding of the nature of religion. Religion must succeed in providing a sacred center which organizes the totality of one’s existence in space and time. Denominationalism compartmentalizes that which should not be compartmentalized. We are falsely led to assume that religion is what one denomination does in a certain way while a second one does it in another. The result is that the religious impulse is forced into a schizoid situation, wherein a way to go must be sought amid other cultural forms outside the orbit of our denominational boundaries.

Religion is thereby frequently privatized -- but only in our understanding of it. That is, we may think that religion consists of what we think and do in our solitude and within the denominational resort. But the impulse is not satisfied because it seeks totality, wholeness; it must touch all of existence and bring it together. Privatized religion is unhealthy, and the denominational fallacy comforts and sustains the malady.

America’s public faith (a term I prefer to "civil religion") emerged precisely because denominationalism could be tolerated only if a creative relationship to the larger political and cultural dimensions of religious necessity were maintained. Denominationalism tends to reduce Christianity to a private faith based on a narrow revelation under the protection of competing agencies. Among the intellectual elite it is at best a religious "philosophy" -- a set of beliefs and ideas which can be accepted if properly adjusted to an enlightened mind. But Kaplan shows us that Judaism is a civilization or it is nothing, and I now conclude that Christian faithfulness demands the same total dimensions of civilization.

Together the Christian and the Jew must forge the civilization which is the Kingdom of God -- a total culture of law, art, music, literature and worship. What Christians can learn in the midst of this common enterprise is that tradition and law are indispensable. For too long we have mouthed platitudes to which people have responded by saying: "That’s all very well, but you haven’t told us how to do what you suggest." We have been divested of halacha, a tradition of "how" that assists us in the living of these days.

Mordecai Kaplan was not yet finished when I left him. He expressed disappointment that only two hours had been spent in discussing the most important agenda that a 20th century Jew could consider. But the Jerusalem I contemplated after meeting him was indeed new. It stretched out across the seas to my own world among the saguaros of Arizona.

Now that I am back in this country, Kaplan’s insights have continued to stimulate me, and I can understand why his thought disturbed many people. I can understand why it is that his dominion has subtly permeated much of the creative thought of modern Judaism. And I wonder whether we shall be able to learn to be open to the civilization of the Kingdom of God. I wonder whether Mordecai Kaplan would appreciate this pragmatic extension by one American of "Judaism as a civilization."

The Word Becomes Flesh (John 1:1-3)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made [John 1:1-3].

It is the truest of all insights. There must be a time to celebrate it! Perhaps the time is Christmas -- a season for solemnizing the truth of the Word made flesh. The Word makes flesh. The Word makes flesh make flesh! Without the Word there is no flesh.

But something -- stranger perhaps -- is also true: without the Word there is no spirit. The Word makes flesh! The Word makes flesh into spirit. You look into someone’s face as you pass. The person is just a face. You see that person again and again, but nothing important registers. You may remember an expression, some feature -- a nose, eyes, a mouth. But some special word may be necessary for you to remember even that much. Then one day you go to a party. In the crush of people moving from room to room, a hand touches your arm: "Excuse me, please; I didn’t want to spill your drink." There it is again, that face. The flesh emboldened by some words.

The hostess intercedes: "John, dear! Have you met Elvira? I think you have something in common. She loves Mozart as much as you do." Elvira! The word becomes a person. The person becomes a word. Something is being created. Someone! The Word has become flesh. And, in becoming flesh, it has also become more than that. It has become spirit -- if it is to be, a very beautiful spirit. Perhaps the Word will bring love, as the Divine Word means it to be.

I am trying to train my dog. She’s a year old, an English springer spaniel -- in good churchly tradition, vested in black and white. We’ve named her "Holly." Or rather, our daughters did -- because she was a Christmas gift. "Holly" is a pretty dog, and intelligent -- I think. I look into that sad but friendly little black face and see that she wants to please, so much. Gradually she begins to feel the presence of certain words: "Sit"; "Lie down"; "Stay" -- and, of course. "Holly" and "No." I sit there watching her, and I begin to think: What happened long ago -- thousands of years into the folds of time? This creature, this dog, was called into being.

How fascinating it must have been when homo sapiens saw the word become flesh! One of those prowling brutes, wolflike, lurks about the edge of the campfire, cleaning the bones of carcasses left from the hunt. The human being utters certain sounds, forms a word, says it again and again! Gradually the animal raises its head and takes several steps forward. "Holly," you have been made flesh. You have become a dog. You were once a curious creature of the wilderness. Now, a word has made’ you. You are a dog! You are Holly. Now you are; before you were not!

Without the word, there would be no human race, no civilization. If you take from me the ability to speak and to record words, you take away all that is. Without the word, there is nothing. If it is true that nothing exists without a word, then everything that is, is the speech of God. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and without him was not anything made that was made," All about us, at every moment, the miracle of Creation itself breaks forth. The Word becomes flesh! It becomes spirit; it becomes love.

Christmas is the incarnation of the truth we do not want to see, the truth that is always with us. The miracle goes on all the time, and we do not see or respond. But if you will reach out and touch the manger, you will see the Word become flesh. You will know that it dwells among us. The Word who breathes in the child of Mary -- that same word wants to create in you a clean heart and renew a right spirit within you so that you may become as God.

The American Spirituality of Loren Eiseley

I am treading deeper and deeper into leaves and silence. I see more faces watching, non-human faces. Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.

The religious forms of the present leave me unmoved. My eye is round, open, and undomesticated as an owl’s in a primeval forest -- a world that for me has never truly departed.

I have come to believe that in the world there is nothing to explain the world.

Like the toad in my shirt we were in the hands of God, but we could not feel him; he was beyond us. totally and terribly beyond our limited- senses.

Man is not as other creatures and. . . without the sense of the holy, without compassion, his brain can become a gray stalking horror -- the deviser of Belsen [from All the Strange Hours and The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley].

In an announcement of recent book arrivals, The Christian Century called attention to a critical study of Loren Eiseley by saying: “The religious chord did not sound in him, but he vibrated to many of the concerns historically related to religion.” The statement is somewhat ambiguous, but is typical of the dilemma of contemporary religious scholarship. We do not really know what to do with religiousness when it expresses itself outside those enclosures which historians and social scientists have carefully labeled religions. What, after all, does it mean to say that the religious chord does not sound in someone, but that the person vibrates to the concerns historically related to religion? If the person vibrates to such concerns, the chord is religious whether or not it manages to resound in the temples and prayer houses of the devout.

It seems to me that that is precisely what Loren Eiseley had in mind when, in his autobiography, he stated: “I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.” In fact, I find the primary thrust of Eiseley’s literary and personal essays to be religious. He was indeed a scientist -- a bone hunter, he called himself. Archaeologist, anthropologist and naturalist, he devoted a great deal of time and reflection to the detective work of scientific observation. However, if we are to take seriously his essays, we cannot ignore the evidence of his constant meditation on matters of ultimate order and meaning.

Such reflection seems to have been part of his every scientific observation, although he was careful not to permit it to ruffle the protective feathers of his fellow academics. “I have had the vague word ‘mystic’ applies to me,” he writes, “because I have not been able to shut out wonder occasionally, when I have looked at the world. I have been lectured by at least one member of my profession who advised me to explain myself -- words which sound for all the world like a humorless request for the self-accusations so popular in Communist lands” (The Night Country [Scribner’s, 1971], p. 214). His earliest thought of a career, when he was still in high school, was that he might be a nature writer. He remained prophetically loyal to that vocation. As a scientist, he was a lover of wisdom, a contemplative and a literary artist of considerable power. Elseley’s editor, Kenneth Heuer, puts it all in tender prose when he writes: “He wrote always about the nature and animals he loved. With the passing years, his poems became more personal and philosophical” (All the Night Wings [Times, 1979], p. xi). Like the poems, his essays are also personal and philosophical -- and profoundly religious.

There are several reasons why Loren Eiseley’s work has not been examined from the perspective of religious thought. First, many scholars and other intellectuals who appreciate Eiseley’s writings have little understanding of what religious thought is and prefer to treat such matters by the use of safer language. Second, there is Eiseley’s own desire to protect his scholarly credibility. He sought to avoid, and rightly so, any facile or sentimental deference to religion. He also found it difficult to identify himself with any tradition because he had learned from the great spirits of religious history and was dissatisfied with religion’s institutionalized form. Having discerned the secret, the power at the depth of the religious quest, he found the churches and their leaders wanting. Finally, Eiseley’s ideas are not the spidered webs of abstract systems. His thought takes the form of contemplative involvement in the stuff of existence; it is best understood as a type of American spirituality.

Loren Eiseley is very much in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. He takes the circumstances of whatever “business’’ he is about as the occasion for new questioning, new searching for some sign, some glimpse into the meaning of the unknown that confronts him at every center of existence. For many scientifically oriented individuals, the unknown is a “not-yet” at the outer edge of the known. For reflective thinkers like Eiseley, who understand their science as experience, the unknown is always encountered in the midst of the known. That is to say, the more one is aware of one’s own involvement in a scientific enterprise, the more one understands it as participation in a mystery, rather than as a conquest of exterior and objective territory.

Loren Eiseley thought that much of the modern scientific enterprise had removed humanity ever farther from its sense of responsibility to the natural world it had left in order to create an artificial world to satisfy its own insatiable appetites. Appetites, our spiritual geniuses have taught us, must be disciplined if we are to understand ourselves and to be open to insight into ultimate reality. “The one great hieroglyph, nature,” wrote Eiseley, “is as unreadable as it ever was and so is her equally wild and unpredictable offspring, man. Like Thoreau, the examiner of lost and fragile surfaces of flint, we are only by indirection students of man. We are, in actuality, students of that greater order known as nature. It is into nature that man vanishes” (The Star Thrower [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978], p. 237). Eiseley understood Thoreau as a “spiritual wanderer through the deserts of the modern world,” as one who “rejected the beginning wave of industrialism.” However, Thoreau had left the seclusion of Walden Pond in order to pace the fields of history, sorting out the artifacts that people had dropped along the way. It was those “fossil thoughts” and “mindprints” that Eiseley himself explored in his wanderings. These explorations gave depth, a tragic dimension and catharsis to what he called the “one great drama that concerns us most, the supreme mystery, man”

Just as Thoreau sought a proper way to see the world as it really is. so Eiseley learned that the only remedy for life’s displaced blundering is to be found “somewhere in the incredible dimensions of the universal Eye.” In essay after essay, he writes as a magus, a spiritual master or a shaman who has seen into the very heart of the universe and shares his healing vision with those who live in a world of feeble sight. We must learn to see again, he tells us; we must rediscover the true center of the self in the otherness of nature.

As the works of any naturalist might, Eiseley’s essays and poems deal with the flora and fauna of North America. They probe the concept of evolution, which consumed so much of his scholarly attention, examining the bones and shards, the arrowpoints and buried treasures. Every scientific observation leads to reflection. To observe flowers is to become aware of our relationship to them -- that all of life from the beginning has depended on their existence.

While discussing a peculiar species of giant wasp, he tells us that in the world there is nothing below a certain depth that can truly be explained. “Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life . . . .” And as an evolutionist he tells us that “the human version of evolutionary events [is] perhaps too simplistic for belief.”

The speculation today is that an evolutionary plateau may have been reached, on which humanity must either associate itself intimately with machines or give way to “exosomatic evolution” -- transferring self and personality to machines. To this Eiseley replies: ‘‘Cyborgs and exosomatic evolution, however far they are carried, partake of the planet virus. They will never bring peace to man, but they will harry him onward through the circle of the worlds.’’ It would be well, he tells us, to heed the message of the Buddha, who knew that “one cannot proceed upon the path of human transcendence until one has made interiorly in one’s soul a road into the future.” Spaces within stretch as far as those without.

Using narrative, parable and exposition, Eiseley has the uncanny ability to make us feel that we are accompanying him on a journey into the very heart of the universe. Whether he is explicating history or commenting on the ideas of a philosopher, a scientist or a theologian, he takes us with him on a personal visit. In The Invisible Pyramid (Scribner’s 1972) his analysis of the differences in evolutionary development on continents like Australia, South America and Africa leads to speculation about races of human beings on other planets. Without jargon or the pretense of system, he leads readers through a course of thought wherein conclusions reach them at a level of knowing not unlike that attained after meditation on a koan. “There is no trend demanding mans constant reappearance, either on the separate ‘worlds’ of this earth or elsewhere. . . . Nature gambles but she gambles with constantly new and altering dice.” Suddenly we find the rationality of our ordinary understanding of evolution shattered.

There is a melancholy climate to much of Eiseley’s meditation. When he confronts the end of humanity in its beginnings, there is a deathliness in his images. But it is not a death that is unaware of resurrection. He knows that something new is born of every ending. While telling of the giant wasps which fill him with wonderment, he writes:

Beneath the midsummer sunlight of another year a molecular alarm will sound in the coffin at rest in that silent chamber; the sarcophagus will split. In the depth of the tomb a great yellow and black Sphex will appear. The clock in its body will tell it to hasten up the passage to the surface.

On that brief journey the wasp may well trip over the body of its own mother -- if this was her last burrow -- a tomb for life and a tomb for death. Here the generations do not recognize each other; it remains only to tear open the doorway and rush upward into the sun. The dead past, its husks. its withered wings are cast aside, scrambled over, in the frantic moment of resurrection [All the Strange Hours (Scribners, 1975), p. 243].

Eiseley is at his best when he narrates an event or describes a poignant revelatory moment. In an early essay, ‘The Judgment of the Birds,” he tells of awakening at night in a room on the 20th floor of a hotel in midtown Manhattan. As he gazes at the cupolas and lofts outlined in the darkness below, he makes out he silent wings of pigeons, floating outward through the city. He is overcome by a sense of the world’s transformation that bids him launch out across the windowsill and join the birds who know that humanity is asleep and that the barely perceptible light is theirs alone. Only a little courage is necessary, “a little shove from the window ledge to enter that city of light.” Then, carefully, he brings us back into the room where we re-enter the human city. The account is a record of revelation: ‘‘I had seen, just once, man’s greatest creation from a strange inverted angle, and it was not really his at all. I will never forget how those wings went round and round, and how, by the merest pressure of the fingers and a feeling for air, one might go away over the roofs. It is a knowledge: however, that is better kept to oneself.”

For Loren Eiseley, writing itself becomes a form of contemplation. Contemplation is a kind of human activity in which the mind, spirit and body are directed in solitude toward some other. Scholars and critics have not yet taken the full measure of contemplation as an art that is related to the purpose of all scholarly activity -- to see things as they really are. Therefore, most scholarship is a carefully crafted veneer of rationalistic activity, helpful perhaps on its own level, but not usually leading to genuine insight. Scholars like Loren Eiseley confront us with the impoverishment of our understanding. “You,” a friend told him, “are a freak. you know. A God-damned freak, and life is never going to be easy for you. You like scholarship, but the scholars, some of them, anyhow, are not going to like you because you don’t stay in the hole where God supposedly put you. You keep sticking your head out and looking around. In a university that’s inadvisable.” Eiseley was a contemplative who gazed into and through the otherness of reality. One discovers through contemplation that reality consists of various encounters with an other without which we ourselves are incomplete. Finding that otherness is almost always a matter of vision, a way of knowing that we have forgotten.

Eiseley is more than a recording scholar. The latter reports on what he or she has discovered, sharing the observations made and the conclusions reached in the course of discovery. His or her ideas are clearly developed in advance; the writing is a matter of giving record. For the writer, on the other hand, the process is itself part of the result. Writers do not completely see and understand until they are engaged in writing. Images and metaphors are fundamental to the process of observation and understanding that writing makes possible. For thinkers like Eiseley, there is a kind of metaphorical imperative at work.

“Primitives of our own species, even today,” he writes, “are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts. Only in writing can the cry from the great cross on Golgotha still be heard in the minds of men.” Written words unlock the private brain and link it with generations of humanity. Words have a way of bringing into consciousness the beginnings and the endings of being itself. Scrivening makes that consciousness impressionable and communicable. The poet, the literary stylist, is intensely aware of the significance of his or her creative actions. Such a person knows that the form, the images and the metaphors that emerge from the marriage of mind and pen are impressions that no other human activity can duplicate. When we read Eiseley’s essays and poems we realize that this scientist knows something of the order and meaning of being that the recording scholar gives little evidence of knowing. Images and metaphors are indispensable to the contemplation in which the latter is engaged. The result is a form of religious thought that is in itself a means of contemplation.

Although Eiseley may not have considered his writing as an expression of American spiritually, one feels that he was quite mindful of its religious character. As an heir of Emerson and Thoreau, he is at home among the poets and philosophers and among those scientists whose observations also were a form of contemplation of the universe.

Loren Eiseley had been a drifter in his youth. From the plains of Nebraska he had wandered across the American West. Sometimes sickly, at other times testing his strength with that curious band of roving exiles who searched the land above the rippling railroad ties, he explored his soul as he sought to touch the distant past. He became a naturalist and a bone hunter because something about the landscape had linked his mind to the birth and death of life itself. As he delivered a lecture in Texas late in his career, he pondered the coming of European settlers to America:

We had starved helplessly in our first winters; Indians had fed us. Generation by generation we had had to relearn the arts of a vanished era. In order to survive we had had to master what our paleolithic forebears had taken for granted. The farther we pressed into the forest the more rank, prestige, and fine garments would dissolve into rags and buckskin. We would be reduced to elemental man [All the Strange Hours (Scribner’s. 1975), p. 5].

It was in that same America that humanity had refused to remain elemental. It had purged itself more and more of the green plants and the waters that washed in its blood. It had sought to take itself out of nature and to envelop itself in a sheath of its own technical fashioning. It is perhaps in America that we most misjudge the evolutionary journey. We insist on progress and impose it upon reluctant evidence. “The creation falls and falls again. In mortal time . . . it must ever fall. Yet the falling brings not only strange, dark and unexpected ends to innocent creatures but also death to tyrannous monsters (Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X [Dutton, 1979], p. 228). Eiseley’s writings hold no great optimism for humanity’s time on earth: that time is running short and its end is inevitable.

Yet the man who dug for bones in the Badlands and lowered himself into caves and crevices to find the evidences of changing life was an American. Like the Emerson he admired, he perceived the “weary slipping, the sensed entrophy, the ebbing away of the human spirit into fox and weasel as it struggled upward while all its past tugged upon it from below.” But he was also, as Whitman said of Emerson, “transcendental of limits. a pure American for daring.” And in this American daring, there is the hope that we can learn to contemplate, rather than to subdue, the nature from which we can never separate ourselves absolutely, try as we may. Nature is the otherness which we observe as distinct, but which we must rediscover as part of ourselves.

Long ago, says Eiseley, people learned to contemplate and we have not improved upon that contemplation, though we have tried to relegate it to the refuse heap of lesser attributes of reason. Long ago our ancestors painted on the walls of caverns and buried the revered dead because they sensed a discrepancy in existence. Then, as Americans, we somehow knew we were more than we understood ourselves to be. There was in us the “strong optimism of the Early Republic.” Our untouched forests confronted us with a silence that penetrated the soul with mysterium tremendum. It has been unfortunate that we have thrust aside this religious terror, refusing to contemplate it. For it is contemplation that teaches us that we, and, indeed, all of nature, are more than we observe. In that contemplation is our hope:

Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. 1 say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face. [Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X (Dutton, 1979), pp. 233-34].

The Churches and Day Care

Child care -- provided to preschool children outside of their homes -- once was considered to be remedial care for children of pathological or needy families. Today it is America’s way of raising its children. Child care is available in a dizzying array of forms and price ranges. Often the form it takes is dictated by local need:

•In the hard-scrabble coal country of Pennsylvania, employment is hard to come by. When there is work, it is in shifts. The child-care center opens early, before 6:30 A.M., and closes late. It serves well over 100 children, many of them poor. The fees are low and on a sliding scale: government subsidies and food programs enable the centers to survive. The children range in age from a few months to five years old, and they have come because their parents must work or look for work. Providing a stimulating environment, the center fills the day with activities and friends.

• In a small Rocky Mountain town, life is even less generous. When the crop is ripe the farm workers must labor from morning’s first light. Their infants must accompany them, for there is nowhere else to go. It is hot in the fields and hotter in the cars where the young children wait. A group of local women became distressed about the conditions. Early in the day they go to the fields and gather such children as will come with them. Until the parents return at night, these volunteers give care and love. Providing a meal, telling a story, conveying concern, they change the whole nature of the day for the little ones. The children’s parents cannot pay for the cost of such care, but they are grateful: burdens have been diminished, their families enriched.

• In a California community everything about the child-care center says affluence. The children are well fed and nicely clothed. Often they are only children or have siblings already of school age. Without this place they would miss important opportunities for socialization -- learning to share, to get along with others, to find fun in learning. It is a “co-op” nursery school. In addition to the paid staff, parents, mostly mothers, take turns working with the children.

• In a university town in Washington state, the children are at the center while their parents -- predominantly students or faculty members -- attend classes. Some live with two parents, others with only one. They like this place, where there are good toys, activities that amuse and teach and, above all, people who are interesting and interested in them. In the afternoon they will be joined by other, older children, who will come here after school because their parents are still working. By 6 P.M. the families will be together for dinner and the evening, and then tomorrow there will be this happy place once again.

Such diversity of programs is common. Common, too, is the location of these programs: all are housed in churches. More often than not, perhaps in as much as 70 per cent of center-based care, the church is the location. Quite simply, the overwhelming answer to the question “Who is minding the children?” is “the church” -- if not directly, then through a wide variety of providers who locate their programs in church buildings.

In 1982 the National Council of Churches conducted an extensive survey of church-housed child-care centers. By contacting every congregation in 15 of its 31 member denominations, the NCC Child Advocacy Working Group gained a clearer picture of the role of the church in providing child care. Some 28,000 congregations replied, and more than 1,500 agreed to supply detailed information through an extensive secondary questionnaire.

The findings of this study, revealing the church’s major role in the provision of child care, ought to provoke discussion in both the religious and child-care communities. More than 18,000 church-housed programs have been identified, half of them operated by congregations and half functioning under a use-of-space agreement. A large majority of these centers -- 80 per cent -- are open for more than 30 hours per week, thus serving the needs of working parents. Virtually all programs -- 94 per cent -- report that they receive some subsidy from the host church. Over one third of the programs receive federal funds, an indication that many low-income children are being served. Only 16 per cent indicate that spiritual development constitutes a primary goal of the child-care program. While no accurate figures are available, we can conservatively estimate that approximately 40 per cent of all child care in the United States takes place in churches. Such a figure suggests the extent of the changes in American child-rearing practices. The recent history of child care as an ‘‘industry” further indicates some of the issues that now confront the church.

Formalized child care is a burgeoning industry in America. While care for children by those other than their parents is not new, it has taken various forms through the years. Early in the century ‘‘day nurseries’’ were provided for immigrant children, and day-care centers sprang up during both world wars to accommodate the children of women working to support the war efforts. But it has been only in the past decade that day care has acquired a sense of permanency and service to all social classes. Since 1980 a majority of the mothers of children under five have been employed outside the home. Trends in birthing patterns and divorce rates have also contributed to the rising need for child care. Gone, too, are the days of the nearby extended family. Grandma and Grandpa are now more often several states rather than several houses away.

Child care is as varied as are the values of parents. Some seek out programs embodying specific cultural or religious teachings or educational philosophies. Others spurn the introduction of values dissimilar to those embraced at home. Child care is a fluid and an unpredictable industry, and it is costly. Parents ordinarily pay fees, with the government providing some subsidies directly for the poor, and indirectly -- through tax credits -- for the middle- and upper-middle income groups. Still, child-care workers are poorly paid, and the programs themselves frequently receive cash and in-kind contributions from the parishes that provide space.

Unlike most other commonly sought social services, the child-care industry largely lacks governmental support or regulation. Further, there is no professional association of providers, no dominant “corporation” and no clear image of the industry in the popular mind. Left wholly to the creative resources of providers and of families in need, child care sought its own way and soon found the church. It is not surprising that the church, long an institution engaged in family programming, has become deeply involved in this new cultural pattern. What is peculiar, and perhaps a matter for some concern, is the way in which it has become involved.

It is most accurate to say that child-care providers and families needing such care “found” the church. Because the church has had a poorly developed concept of its mission with regard to child care, it has sought the role of provider relatively infrequently. Until the recent National Council of Churches study, denominations did not keep records of parishes providing this service. Few denominations have adopted policy statements regarding child care, or have printed curricular or program-resource materials for it. National leadership, of course, is only one measure of church commitment to an issue. Even though such ordinary hallmarks of commitment as policy statements and printed materials are missing, one might argue that the church has actively sought a role in ministry at the local level. Yet even there, day care seems to have come to local parishes more by happenstance than by intentional ministry.

Nearly half -- 44 per cent -- of all churches surveyed reported that they merely house, rather than operate, the programs taking place within their buildings. This impression is reinforced by conversations with pastors and child-care providers. It is not uncommon to hear “we just rent them space” or “we don’t have anything to do with the church -- unless something gets broken; then we have conflict.” Even many programs that are “operated” by congregations have only a financial relationship with them, sharing their tax exemption and incorporation. Child-care providers point to several compelling reasons why so many programs have come to be housed in church buildings. Frequently these facilities are not only conveniently located but are ideal for people traveling to the workplace. Classrooms full of age-appropriate equipment often have been established for use by the congregation’s Sunday church school and are underutilized during the rest of the week. Then, too, the churches already have the status of not-for-profit organizations and this eases the administrative burden directors must face. But the advantages do not stop there. Because child care is so often the result of the entrepreneurial activities of young women with little or no capital or business experience, finding space at low cost is especially attractive to the industry. Moreover, the church frequently is a forgiving and indulgent “landlord.” Young children are messy and noisy: they damage equipment and leave behind fingerprints and other reminders of their presence. Quite often congregations -- or at least those members who make decisions about building use -- are willing to put up with these inconveniences.

There is much to celebrate in the story of the church and child care. Low-cost programs serving millions of children and their families have provided quality care for years, and have, in their own way, contributed to the lives of congregations. Yet all is not well with child care and the church. Some predictable consequences of the religious community’s rather unintentional entry into the field are becoming apparent.

Local providers, now drawn together by the NCC into the Ecumenical Child Care Network, frequently lament the seeming indifference of congregations. Often church members themselves, they say that their work is not affirmed or viewed as a valid ministry. Sometimes it is even considered suspect. Says one, “It is as if the church is saying that the child who is welcome at Sunday school is an intruder at day care on Monday.” At the same time, churches complain about the children’s lack of participation in the religious programs of the parishes.

Nearly all (98 per cent) of the programs studied are open to all community members without regard to their religious affiliations. While there is cause to rejoice in this sort of service to the community, a congregation that enters into a relationship with a child-care center solely in the hope of involving new families in parish life is likely to be disappointed. Similarly, parents who select church-housed child care partly in the hope that their children will receive instruction in Christian teachings may be disappointed. Less than 16 per cent of all programs report Christian education as a primary goal. Providers who do wish to include Christian ethical teachings are quick to point out the absence of printed curricular resources giving an adequate nondenominational, age-appropriate basis for such work. Plans now call for the publication of a technical assistance manual for congregations in June 1984, and for the development of a printed curriculum for child-care programs, but one wonders how such an extensive need has gone unnoticed for so long.

The price of this unplanned involvement is paid not only by providers and children, but by the churches themselves. Many congregations take justifiable pride in the bricks and mortar that symbolize generations of faithfulness in a given location. Many have a sense of stewardship that instructs them to make these resources available to the community. Nonetheless, untold conflicts over shared space and equipment arise each year between child-care centers and host churches. Equipment that once lasted for years now is worn out rapidly by hard daily use. Not uncommon is the feeling expressed by a parishioner in an aging congregation: “It used to be our building; now it seems to be theirs. My grandparents helped raise this structure as a church.”

Clearly much remains to be done in clarifying the relationships between child-care centers and the congregations that host them. Often these congregations provide direct subsidies through scholarships, and indirect subsidies through utilities, equipment and space. Despite this generous support, the potential for warm ties between center and congregation often is obscured by the day-to-day complaints inevitably arising.

Congregations will need to consider their missions within their communities. Some will doubtless conclude that they can best serve by allowing others to operate day-care programs containing little or no religious education. Others will conclude that families in their community seek and need programs with a Christian emphasis, as well as with educational and custodial functions. America’s families surely need this variety, and the church is uniquely able to provide it. The challenge will be to do so with less conflict and more mutual affirmation than now exist. Recognition and affirmation of the church’s role as a child-care provider must take place at all levels of its life. With a clear perception of their mission and ministry, congregations can take concrete steps to bolster the quality and to support the work of child-care programs.

Through the Ecumenical Child Care Network, the church is now in contact with the largest number of child-care providers that has ever been identified. Many of the challenges that confront the congregations and the programs can and will be met. A proposed comprehensive child-care policy statement will be presented to the NCC Governing Board and circulated broadly among local parishes. And, happily, thousands of churches have found ways to work with and support child-care programs so as to enhance both the care offered to children and families, and the larger ministry of the parishes.

The church’s close association with so many providers gives it a unique opportunity to stimulate a long and much-needed national dialogue about child care. Although some would prefer to glorify the past and return to simpler days, their wish does not alter the economic and social realities that have created the enormous need for child care. The dialogue now needs to focus on establishing a just and equitable child-care policy. The United States is one of the few industrialized countries wholly lacking in such a policy. Governmental attempts to become involved have been piecemeal and fraught with problems. Those states that have attempted to regulate child care have uneven and unenforceable regulations. Parents -- and indeed all of us -- would do well to question our seeming inability to ensure minimum standards of quality in a field so significant and basic as care for our children.

Related problems also cry out to be addressed. A majority of those who work in child care -- nearly all of them women -- are underpaid and lack the most basic job benefits, even when employed in church-housed centers. Can we in conscience ignore their plight, given the church’s long history of advocacy for fair-employment practices?

The church community often has been a source of moral authority within our nation. It has helped to shape and gather support for some of our most important public policies. Today it is in a unique position for bringing this moral authority to bear on child-care legislation. Through the Network, the church has access to a large number of child-care providers well aware of the problems caused by our national policy of child “care-lessness.” It can, if it will, give those providers new channels for voicing their fears and hopes.

The occasion of Francis of Assisi’s 800th birthday anniversary in 1982 commanded the attention of the Christian world, Catholic and Protestant. Last year Protestants of every stripe (and many Catholics) put aside denominational differences to celebrate the 500th year since Martin Luther’s birth. In the words of Isaiah, we “look to the rock from which [we] were hewn, and to the quarry from which [we] were digged”(51:1 RSV).

Ulrich Zwingli, the Reformer of Zurich, was born January 1, 1584 -- 500 years ago. Who will celebrate? What is there to celebrate? In fact, does the sequence of Francis, Luther and Zwingli demonstrate how loyalties became divided and narrowed -- a baleful history of the rending of the Body of Christ?

More questions. How might the Reformed churches be persuaded that Zwingli is their true ancestor a generation “BC” -- before Calvin? How could those of us in the Reformed tradition convince Lutherans and other Protestants that for the sake of Christ they should study and celebrate Luther’s theological adversary at Marburg?

Can Protestants persuade Roman Catholics that, just as they have come to appreciate Martin Luther, so they should embrace others of our forebears, including one quartered and burned by Catholics on a field of battle?

An appreciation of Zwingli is not without its problems, especially in coming to terms with his violent death. Like many aspects of his life and thought, however, Zwingli’s death indicates his role as a prophet of the modern world. Today both right-wing North American fundamentalists and left-wing Latin American Christian radicals claim a divine call to take up arms against regimes perceived as evil. That faithful Christians are so totally opposed to one another in their identification of the oppressor should give us pause. Zwingli’s history can shed light on our own search for the path of a faithful life in Christ.

There is much to celebrate, too. Zwingli’s boldness for reform was not a mere copying of Luther. Far from simply jumping on a bandwagon, he was an original. Before anyone in my neighborhood had even heard Luther’s name mentioned.” he wrote, “I began to preach the gospel of Christ in the year 1516” -- one year before the 95 Theses. The real onset of the Swiss Reformation, however, came three years later when, on his 35th birthday in 1519, Zwingli mounted the pulpit of the Great Minster in Zurich as people’s priest. At that time he said. somewhat defensively: “None of us had known anything of Luther except that something had been published by him about indulgences. . . . Nor will I bear Luther’s name. . . . . I did not learn Christ’s teaching from Luther but from the very word of God.”

John Calvin had little that was good to say about Zwingli’s theology, but he was more indebted to it than he ever admitted. Moreover, Calvin could not have carried forward his constructive work in Geneva in the 1540s and thereafter had Zwingli’s Reformation in the turbulent decade between 1519 and 1531 not occurred. Zwingli’s greatness lay in his ability to forge a new theological understanding based on close study of the Bible at a time of intense political turmoil. The limitation of his success in part reflects his circumstances: Luther and Calvin were both able to study and write under the relative peace of stable political situations which Zwingli never experienced in the volatile Switzerland of the 1520s. He merits our celebration not only because he is the father of a great theological tradition, but because of his unwavering witness to the gospel in the direst of straits.

Zwingli was not a monk with a doctorate and a university chair, like Luther, but a parish priest from start to finish. He was intensely loyal to his people, construed narrowly as the flock of his parish and broadly as the heroic and humble Swiss. At the two churches he served between 1506 and 1518. the traditional ministry of saying mass and the cure of souls engaged his attention.

Even his wider activities were extensions of this parish ministry. On three occasions Zwingli served as chaplain to his Glarus parishioners who were sent as mercenary soldiers to war in Italy. The Reformer’s well-known opposition to mercenary service stemmed not from theological doctrine, but from pastoral concern. Similarly, his vehement preaching against a visit of an indulgence salesman, a priest named Sanson, was aimed at awakening his people to the true saving grace of Christ. The protest was double-barreled: for the gospel and against Rome. “Hence people began to take notice of these foolish Roman practices,” he wrote.

A secular priest. Zwingli was inclined more to action than to contemplation or debate. The “affair of the sausages” illustrates his difference from Luther. We commonly think of Luther’s posting of the Theses as a bold act of defiance, whereas in fact he was calling for academic debate in a conventional fashion. When Zwingli met with a group of Zurich lay leaders during Lent in 1522, not debate but ecclesiastical disobedience was on their minds. The printer Cristopher Froschauer served sausages, in conscious opposition to the Catholic Church’s Lenten fast requirements. All ate the meat but Zwingli himself, although he supported the action and it had in fact stemmed from his biblical preaching. Eating those sausages, as historian Steven Ozment points out, was tantamount to burning a flag or draft card today.

Zwingli instigated reform in a thoroughly pastoral fashion. While supporting the change in religious practice, he did not eat the meat because he did not want to endanger his position as pastor of the whole people. His sermon the following Sunday justified the abolition of the Lenten fast without condemning the traditionalists: “If you want to fast, do so; if you do not want to eat meat, don’t eat it; but allow Christians a free choice.”

Zwingli began to look solely to the Bible for doctrinal authority as early as 1516, and his two-year pastorate in Einsiedeln (1517-1518) cemented his recognition of the Bible’s supreme importance. He had left Glarus amid turmoil over the mercenary issue, and it seems that he viewed his second parish as a brief retreat for study. In addition to his duties as priest, he spent a large amount of time mastering Greek, studying Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the New Testament, reading the classics and Greek Fathers, and beginning to learn Hebrew. His correspondence with Erasmus reveals Zwingli as a leading humanist scholar, and subsequent theological disputations and colloquies show that he was among the foremost biblical scholars of Europe in his day. He acquired much of his erudition as a scholar-pastor while actively serving a parish.

Zwingli wrote about his period of private study in this way:

I know for certain that God teaches me, for I know by this experience. . . . In my youth I devoted myself as much to human learning as did others my age. Then [at Einsiedeln], I undertook to devote myself entirely to the Scriptures, and the conflicting philosophy and theology of the schoolmen constantly presented difficulties. But eventually I came to the conclusion -- led thereto by the Scriptures -- and decided “You must drop all that and learn God’s will directly from his own Word.”

Biblical study proved to Zwingli that many practices of Roman Catholicism were unfounded. Sanction for fasts, indulgences, celibacy, the authority of the pope, the use of icons and ornate ritual, and the mass itself, was nowhere to be found in the Bible. The gospel, in contrast to traditional Catholicism, appeared to Zwingli to be simple and clear. He began to preach sermons directly from the Bible, no longer following the officially prepared homilies.

From his first Sunday at Zurich in 1519, Zwingli gained renown for his biblical preaching. Week by week he preached his way through the Gospel of Matthew. Zwingli’s strict doctrine of sola scriptura was as much a key for him as sola fides was for Luther. The Zurich Reformers published their vernacular New Testament in 1524 and the entire Bible in 1530, four years before Luther’s translation became available. From Zwingli, even more than from Luther, comes Protestantism’s insistence on the centrality of the Bible.

Significantly, Zwingli’s elevation of the Bible did not reflect an ignorant arrogance, but a faithfully critical Christian humanism. His scholarly study established the authority of the scriptural text as overriding the church’s traditions, the history of interpretation, or the decrees of popes.

Zwingli the pastor, like Luther, was slow to abolish the mass. Although the liturgical implications of reform were evident by 1520, Zwingli remained (except for his marriage, unofficially in 1522, publicly in 1524) outwardly a Catholic priest for several years more. In 1524, under his leadership, the canton of Zurich endorsed the iconoclasm always bubbling just beneath the surface of the Reformation. Pious citizens stripped the churches bare of statues, stained glass, bones and other relics, pictures, candles and other altar equipment. Zwingli, who loved music, oversaw the dismantling of organs and the whitewashing of walls. Nothing “appealing to the senses would distract worshipers from hearing the Word of God. Yet he stuck to the traditional mass for one more year.

Anabaptists and other radicals were already worshiping without the mass, and Zwingli felt pressed to produce an acceptable Reformed liturgy. Finally, in Holy Week of 1525 he was ready to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in plain style. Seated around ordinary tables in the aisles of the nave, with Zwingli at the head, worshipers said a few of the biblically sanctioned portions of the mass, such as the Gloria in Excelsis, in their Swiss German dialect. Zwingli prayed in the vernacular and read the words of institution and other biblical passages over a common loaf of bread. After he communed with his assistants, they distributed both the bread and the wine to the tables.

While most would agree that Zwingli went too far in excluding all music from his service, Protestantism stands in his debt for recovering the simplicity of congregational worship. “Few ceremonies have been left us by Christ,” he wrote, believing that God intended worship not as the enactment of a ritual, but as a time for the communication of the gospel and the Spirit of Christ.

Early in his ministry, Zwingli saw how fine was the line separating politics and religion. Indeed, critics fault him for failing to recognize any line at all. His concern was pastoral, but his prophetic ministry constantly carried him into the world of politics and war. His experience as chaplain at the bloody, disastrous battle of Marignano led him to speak out against the longstanding practice of employing Swiss peasants as mercenaries by the European powers and by the pope himself. Zwingli the Christian patriot was appalled by the savage abuse dealt his countrymen and by the corrupting influence of money and foreign campaigns on the Swiss soldiers.

Although no pacifist, Zwingli protested the inhumanity of war:

If a foreign soldier violently bursts in. ravages your fields and vineyards, carries off your cattle, puts your magistrates under arrest, kills your sons who stand up to defend you, violates your daughters, kicks your wife to get rid of her, murders your old servant hiding himself in the granary, has no consideration for your supplications, and finally sets your house on fire, you think that earth ought to open and swallow him up and you ask yourself if God really exists. . . . But if you are doing the same thing to other people, you say: “Such is war!”

Zwingli’s first published works were poetic political allegories, The Fable of the Ox and The Labyrinth. His vocal opposition to mercenary service did not meet with universal agreement at Glarus, and the disapproval of influential laity was one reason for his move to Einsiedeln. But his reputation for having spoken out boldly attracted the Zurich search committee’s attention. The church there welcomed the prophetic posture in his ministry. In 1522 the city council of Zurich outlawed mercenary service.

In the 16th century, theological debate almost always had political overtones, and such was the case in Switzerland. In 1523 the Zurich civil government wanted to clarify the city’s official beliefs, in opposition to Roman Catholicism. A large number of clergy and laity, including delegates from the Roman Church, were called to a disputation on the chief religious questions. Not surprisingly, the result was a total victory for the Zwinglian viewpoint. The Roman Catholic cantons reciprocated a year later with a similarly one-sided debate at Baden. Zwingli refused to attend, out of either fear or principle, or a combination of both. The lines -- theological, political and military -- were now drawn hard and fast.

Zurich’s position became increasingly precarious. Berne established itself as Reformed in 1528. but none of the Protestant cantons was prepared to advance as rapidly as Zurich. Zwingli aggressively sent missionary preachers into Catholic territory. He attempted to secure Protestant political dominance through diplomacy but prepared for a military conflict. The plan for a Christian Civic Union was as much a military alliance as it was a federation of churches.

Zwingli’s political involvement made his voice a dominant one in the Zurich city council. Luther stood more aloof from politics partly because of the hierarchical nature of the German states, but in Switzerland a proud tradition of self-governance close to participatory democracy prevailed. The situation was less stable than in Germany, and more demanding of attention by religious reformers. Since the city council possessed authority to reform the church, the pastors felt called to make their voices heard in the council.

There is a historical lineage from Zwingli’s Zurich, to Calvin’s Geneva, to the Puritans’ England, to colonial America, to a democratic United States of America. What is less clear in the minds of some American Christians, in light of our constitutional separation of church and state, is the extent to which the church today should make its voice heard in the councils of state. Zwingli provides a model of vigorous Christian political involvement. To him, an essential part of Christian life was the struggle for God’s righteousness in the social and civic sphere. He was a thoroughly political pastor and paid the price: at Glarus by losing his pulpit, at Zurich by losing his life.

Luther and Zwingli were prevented from presenting a united evangelical front by their irreconcilable differences over a four-word sentence. Luther wrote the sentence in chalk on the table at Marburg Castle in 1529 where, for political and religious reasons, Philip of Hesse was striving to bring the two leaders together. The sentence was “Hoc est corpus meum” -- ”This is my body.”

Just as Zwingli believed that Luther had not gone far enough in simplifying worship, so he felt Luther was unreformed in his sacramental theology. Luther argued for the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in and through the bread and wine: Zwingli insisted that the ascension of Christ meant that his physical body was at God’s right hand and thus no longer on earth. Luther argued for ubiquity; Zwingli paraded numerous scriptural texts, the most important being John 6:63: ‘‘It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing,” which he returned to doggedly. Luther held fast to the literal sense of Jesus’ words; Zwingli read the words in a strikingly new way by pointing to the wide use of trope and metaphor in the Bible.

He wrote that the word is “does not always mean ‘to be’ but can also mean ‘signify.’ “ Jesus referred to himself as the door, the vine, the light; throughout the Bible, the word is frequently introduces a figure of speech or some symbolic language. Most significantly, according to Zwingli, the words “This is the passover” were figurative: “For the lamb that was eaten every year with the celebration of the festival was not the passover, but signified that the passover and omission had been formerly made.” In the upper room. “the passover was succeeded by the Lord’s Supper,” and “Christ used similar words.” Like the passover, the Lord’s Supper was a commemoration.

Did Zwingli negate the real spiritual presence of Christ in the sacrament? He stated firmly that any presence had nothing to do with priestcraft and also denied that Christ was present for unbelievers. He continually emphasized the memorial and fellowship aspects of communion, but he did believe that Christ is present in the sacrament, saying, “Everything rests on faith.” In faith Christ is present, and believers experience him in several ways.

I believe that in the holy meal of the eucharist, the true body of Christ is present in the mind of the believer; that is to say that those who thank the Lord for the benefits conferred on us in his son acknowledge that he became true flesh, truly suffered therein and truly washed away our sins by his blood. Thus everything done by Christ becomes as it were present to them in their believing minds.

The body of Christ is at God’s right hand, but Scripture also teaches that his spiritual presence on earth continually becomes physical in his church. The church, as St. Paul said repeatedly, is the body of Christ. Jacques Courvoisier has pointed out that Zwingli’s truly stunning insight into the meaning of the sacrament was his revolutionary understanding of transubstantiation. Zwingli wrote: “This body is Christ’s church In eating this bread we confess before our brothers that we are members of Christ’s body.” Thus, the sacrament constitutes the church. When believers eat and drink in faith they become through that act the body of Christ on earth. There is a change, but not in the bread; the transformation takes place among those who eat and drink together in faith.

Zwingli’s this-worldly view of the Lord’s Supper was in line with his general pastoral vocation and political preoccupation. He was, pre-eminently among all the Reformers, a theologian of the church and a theologian of action. Christ was present not in a piece of bread, but in his people. Zwingli believed that his mission was more than to reform individuals, and that his activities were not limited to his own parish. The Reformation would, he prayed, transform his whole nation, all of Europe, the entire earth.

Zurich opposed any compromise that would hinder evangelical preaching expeditions into Catholic cantons. War broke out in 1529 when Catholics executed a Protestant preacher who had encroached on their territory. Zwingli effectively aroused Zurich’s martial spirit and prepared elaborate military plans, taking on a broad role in the strategic planning and subsequent leadership on the field of battle. The massive force that marched from Zurich so alarmed the Catholics that they quickly agreed to a peace.

Zwingli saw the armistice as appeasement. He came disturbingly close to the doublethink of George Orwell’s 1984 and to the world’s real political rhetoric in 1984 when he wrote:

This peace which some are strenuously pressing upon us means war, not peace. And the war upon which I am insisting is not war, but peace. I am not out for anyone’s blood. . . I want to cut the sinews of the [Catholic] oligarchy. Unless this takes place neither the truths of the gospel nor its ministers among us will be safe. . . . I wish to save some who are perishing through ignorance. I must uphold the cause of freedom.

Zwingli insisted that the missionary forays continue, in violation of the terms of the treaty. He voiced his dream of an all-Protestant Swiss Confederacy. Zurich attempted to crush Catholic power with an economic blockade, but when the armies of the Catholic cantons attacked without warning in 1532, Zurich stood suddenly alone and surprisingly unprepared.

Zwingli rallied the troops at Kappel, but they were woefully inadequate to the challenge. Scores of the clergy and members of the city council died as soldiers on the front line. When Zwingli’s enemies discovered him among the wounded, they instantly killed him. Tradition holds that his last words were, “They can kill the body but not the soul.” For his heresy, Catholic soldiers quartered the body and burned it.

Luther’s response to the news of Zwingli’s death was a cold “All who take the sword, die by the sword.” That, of course, is true enough. But Luther sat in judgment from a position of comfort, under the protection of a powerful prince. Nor had Luther hesitated to use the sword -- more precisely, to order its use -- against the peasants. Zwingli was caught in what he saw as a life-and-death struggle for the gospel. His was a small country where a volatile, somewhat democratic political situation seemed to require of him every possible effort: pastoral, theological, political -- even military.

Who has a greater claim to Zwingli’s military activist heritage -- fundamentalist militarists in the United States or liberation theologians and radical priests in Latin America? Both of these contemporary Christian movements may justify their aggressive approach to the world by an appeal to history. Does God ever approve our endorsement of and participation in violence for “just” ends? Or may we judge that Zwingli was entirely wrong to take up the sword in the name of Christ against those he viewed as oppressors?

The Reformed theological tradition should embrace Zwingli as its first ancestor, a generation before Calvin, but should look closely at his excessive and bloody zeal. Subsequent events demonstrated that Protestants and Catholics could coexist productively in Switzerland. Would Zwingli have sold short his duties as pastor of the Great Minster in Zurich if he had satisfied himself with such an ecclesiastical peace? How do we Christians today live with the tension between total commitment to God’s righteous kingdom as we conceive it and the humble gospel of love of enemy espoused by our Lord?

We are challenged by God, just as Ulrich Zwingli was challenged, to live our faith boldly in a complex and violent world. God speaks to us through our history, and so we should use history not only for triumphalist celebration; but also for sober learning. What lesson does Zwingli’s death teach? He fell when he failed to follow his own favorite verse, John 6:63. That verse could, indeed, serve as an ironic epitaph to his memory and as a light for all modern Christians on the difficult path ahead: “It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.”

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