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Metaphor and Sacrament

As a text I used Theory of Literature, by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren (Harcourt, Brace, 1956). The students wouldn’t read it. Those were bad days for the theory of anything. But in that book I came across a sentence that has anchored my intellectual life ever since: "The four basic elements in our whole conception of metaphor would appear to be that of analogy; that of double vision; that of sensuous image, revelatory of the imperceptible; that of animistic projection" (p. 197). That is to say, there are four basic ways of using language to make connections and meanings. These may have waxed and waned with fashion, taste, culture, perhaps even with scientific or political necessity, but over the centuries of human speech these four ways of metaphor have emerged and remained.

Upon reading the sentence, my mind went immediately to my seminary course on the sacraments. Wasn’t I told that four basic theories of the sacraments had arisen in the church, each grounded in the history and theology of a particular way of faith? There is the Roman Catholic theory of "transubstantiation," in which the bread and wine are said to become the body of Christ in actual identification. Then there is Luther’s idea of "consubstantiation," in which Christ’s body and blood are thought to be present "in, with and under" the sacramental elements, a parallelism or double vision. Calvin taught that while the body and blood of Christ are not locally present in the sacrament, they are spiritually present through faith, which can reveal much more than one can see. And finally, the Anabaptist position said that the sacraments were just symbols or analogies for the body and blood of Christ, clearly the most rational view.

The four ways poets use metaphor and the four ways the church has understood the sacraments correspond to each other almost exactly. I believe we are looking at something basic to human communication and basic to our ways of knowing and expressing reality. George Santayana said, "Poetry and religion are one." The correspondence between metaphor and sacrament would tend to bear him out. The means of grace and the figures of speech seem to operate in the same four ways.

In Chaucer’s great poem Troilus and Criseyde we have magnificent examples of parallel metaphor. The positions of the stars in the heavens reflect the fortunes of the heroes in the story, even while the two realms never merge. The same kind of situation is present in William Snodgrass’s "Heart’s Needle," a complicated poem which speaks of a divorce and of the war in Vietnam in such a way that the two themes remain side by side, each serving as counterpoint to the other. It is a common device and can be suggestive and powerful.

Poetry is full of the third type of metaphor, the sensuous image which pushes us to see what we have not seen. William Butler Yeats’s "Sailing to Byzantium" not only sings, it seeks to reveal a new vision of meaning in the artifacts and riches of the Byzantine civilization. More accessible to us, perhaps, are Robert Frost’s "Mending Wall" or "The Road Not Taken," in which the well-rendered and fully developed images of ordinary things reveal our own experiences and attitudes to us. There is mystery here, but not complete identity.

Wellek and Warren call the fourth type of metaphor "animistic projection." I take issue with the term, though I support its intention. "Animism" has been used by cultural anthropologists to describe the religion of primitive peoples. The term relies on the assumption that a primitive person sees a tree, has a concept of spirit, and puts the two together. What seems to be the case, however, is that the primitive mind is dominated by vast networks of collective notions in which all is spirit, all matter, all miracle. It is a world in which absolute identities exist, a world in which utterances can call objects into being, a world in which reasoned analysis is barely necessary or possible. This is the world of the fourth kind of metaphor. I call it the metaphor of absolute identity.

To my mind, it is this fourth type of metaphor which gets closest to expressing the mystery of divine grace. In the work of writers like William Carlos Williams, things become present in words. For him and his followers, the poem does not so much say something as mean something through what it is. "The poem creates its own world of virtual reality," says Suzanne Langer. The poem becomes a metaphor of itself, a sacrament of the world it creates. If sacrament depends on Word becoming flesh, then metaphor depends on flesh becoming word. The two processes are that close.

Williams’s short poem ‘‘The Red Wheelbarrow" selects the wheelbarrow, some white chickens and rain, and arranges them in sixteen ordinary words. It gives a clear, particular perception and little more. The poem bids us stand within its world; and we do. Something new has been created by the act of naming it. To me, this is not only how the fourth kind of metaphor works, it is also the deepest way we experience the sacraments. We enter the reality the sacrament creates.

You may suspect that I, a Protestant, am coming out in favor of a rather Roman Catholic view of the sacraments, that I am urging us toward the least rational approach to the means of grace. If so, you are right. For all the value of rigorous thought, there are times when we need to let it go -- not forever, not even for very long, but for a brief season while we are in the presence of such mysteries as the sacraments. We should not invoke our mysteries too early in theological discussion, lest we have nothing to say. But when we honestly come upon them, when we are face to face with the Word become flesh, the most radical acceptance of the words as they are spoken is what is called for. "This is my body broken for you."

Our problem is that we have gotten stuck on a theory of substances -- transubstantiation, consubstantiation -- rather than looking into the nature of language and the ways meanings are made. I hear there have even been chemical analyses done on the sacramental elements in order to prove this or that. God help us. What violence is thereby done to a metaphor or a sacrament! Poets have always brought incongruous things together, creating new realities of thought and word and deed. Our metaphors and sacraments need not be amenable to chemical or any other kind of analysis. They need only be powerful and real, pleasing and helpful, guides for our wandering minds, warmth for our coldness of heart.

I am always impressed, when I attend a Roman Catholic mass, at how the altar boys hold a special dish under the chins of the communicants to catch the wafer should it fall, or to catch any crumbs that might drop while the wafer is being bitten into and chewed. I also notice how the priest takes care of the chalice, wiping it, folding the cloth, wiping again in an effort to make sure that not a particle of what has now become Christ’s body and blood is left to lie around on the altar. What an appreciation for the thingness of it all! What a demonstration of how deeply certain utterances can affect us and our world! I believe that if at the most sacred point in the liturgy we hear the words "This is my body broken for you . . . ," then by the grace of God who gives us life and language, we ought to receive that piece of bread as being Christ’s body, impossible though it is, irrational though it is, distasteful though it may seem. It is only impossible, irrational and distasteful if we resist the power of metaphoric speech.

Finally, this fourth mode of metaphor and sacrament rests more firmly than the others on the premise that all things are intrinsically one. Within the mystic oneness there must be a way to grapple with the obvious diversities we experience. There must always be room for all the figures of speech to operate. But there must also be times and places when and where the pull of diversity is set aside in favor of truth’s essential coherence. Our view of the sacraments must not prevent that from happening. After all, the church’s preaching also depends on the bringing together of incongruous realities. Do we not say that darkness is really light, sadness a phase of joy, surrender the way of freedom, weakness a form of strength, and death finally life? We can say these things because language allows us to express unities we may not have experienced. These unities rest, abide in and gather us to the one true, holy and everlasting God. And so, for the Word and the ways of words, all praise.

Four Churches in One: Latin American Catholicism

In Latin America the Roman Catholic Church, though officially a single institution, actually takes four forms. As I learned about Latin American Christianity during two stays at the Cuernavaca Center for International Dialogue on Development (CC1DD) and during a trip to Nicaragua, I felt that I was also gaining insight into North American Christianity -- Protestant as well as Catholic. By paying attention to these four expressions of the church, we can all better understand some of the personal and institutional struggles Christians are experiencing during these times of global change.

For the masses of people in Latin America, the church consists of a popular religion embedded in the culture and history of the region since the time of the Spanish conquest. Popular religion features fiestas and holidays, as well as huge gatherings in honor of various statues of the virgin, or of patron saints. The celebrations take place near small parish churches or in the courtyards of fine old cathedrals. Many festivals can only be described as religious, cultural and commercial bashes, made up of drinking, dancing. buying, selling, weeping, crassness and devotion Such festivals are still common in Nicaragua, as well as in other Latin American countries where the revolutionary process has not gone as far.

I experienced one of these celebrations outside of Managua, on the road past the home of the United States ambassador. I found myself in a crowd that seemed to be made up of at least half a million people, crushed between the walls on either side of the road as they made their way to the Church of the Black Virgin. Some cried and prayed. Some crawled on their knees all the way up the hill to the church -- a distance that seemed close to a mile. Many people were covered with a dark grease, perhaps as a way of emulating the blackness of the Virgin. Those who walked on their knees left trails of blood on the rocky pavement, though their friends spread towels before them to make their way a trifle easier. Explosions, firecrackers and rockets added to the din. Ambulances blared their sirens in all but futile attempts to rescue those who were overcome. Vendors hawked beef, rice, beans and beer. Next to the church, down a little swale, young people were bopping and grinding in a tent set up for disco dancing. A huge enclosure contained a bullring, where frenzied men taunted the darting bull. The church itself was packed with bodies. People pressed forward, gave an offering, received a blessing and then tried to get back through the crowd and out the door.

The religious focus of the celebration was not easily apparent. Surely it provided for a great release of energy, an expression of some kind of longing or desire, an outpouring of something deep in the Latin heart. Part of its significance lay in the manda, the concept of command or obligation that may be at the heart of popular religiosity. The idea is that if I do something for God, God will do something for me. If I say prayers for 20 days, my daughter will pass her examinations. If I crawl on my knees to the temple, my mother will be healed of her sores. That the daughter may be too tired to study because she has to work for two dollars a day to help feed the family, or that the mother can’t afford medicine, are not things taken into account in popular religion. What is hoped for is a miraculous intervention.

Obviously, this form of religion does not question the political or social system. It does not look for human causes or human answers to problems. but projects the issues of life into a nonhuman, magical realm where ritualistic performances are believed to have influence. It is escapist religion -- an opiate for the people, and an economic boon for vendors and other opportunists. It is a way of faith that does not challenge the status quo, for it does not take the elements of human life seriously.



The second expression of Latin American Christianity is the traditional church. This is the church of the Council of Trent, that series of meetings in the 16th century which, in reaction to the Reformation, declared the Roman Catholic Church the sole vehicle of salvation, defined the nature of the seven necessary sacraments, approved prayers to the saints and set down the requirement of attending mass. In short, the concept of the church is limited to what happens inside the church building. The mass is central to salvation. and there is a sacrament for each stage of life, linking its great moments to God through holy rites that communicate wholeness. For many of Latin America’s older and somewhat wealthier Christians, this powerful and comforting expression of faith is what the church is all about.

The theology of this type of faith makes strict distinctions between body and soul, history and eternity, politics and religion, this world and the next. The goal of faith is to extricate oneself from worldly realities so that the soul can enter the heavenly realm. The sacraments are the means by which this is accomplished. Thus, although the church is highly institutionalized,, the emphasis is on personal salvation. Again, there is little motivation for addressing social, political or economic problems because they are seen as tainted worldly concerns. As a result, the traditional church also buttresses the status quo. Like popular religion, it does not recognize the validity of a secular historical process. In more sophisticated ways, it also encourages people to withdraw from the crises of their time.

Third. there is the progressive church, the church of Vatican II, which attempts to bring traditional Christianity into contact with the contemporary world. The mass is celebrated in the languages of the people, guitars and mariachi bands enliven the liturgy, the Bible is studied and brought into the center of celebration, Surely there are Latin American services of worship that are among the most stimulating and uplifting in the Christian world. Through color, word and sound the senses are focused, the mind is challenged and the heart is warmed. The progressive church is a relevant and vital form.

Many scholars, younger priests and even some bishops are found in this expression of faith. Discussions of birth control and other formerly taboo subjects are part of the program. Progressive theologians find that they have much in common with their Protestant counterparts, and an ecumenical spirit grows. Good will, a respect for differences, and intellectual integrity are valued. Serving humanity is considered a main purpose of the Christian community, and a number of excellent service enterprises find their source in the new energy that this progressive church has tapped. This is the church of the somewhat younger; somewhat better-educated Latin Americans -- Catholics who know and live fully in the contemporary world. Aware and concerned, the progressive church moves beyond itself in word and deed, but it tends to stop, short of an analysis-of and actions-against the strictures of injustice, even while it promotes programs to alleviate misery.

In the midst of its own struggle, Latin American Christianity provides a vital fourth option that I like to call the new church. It has also been called the radical church, the revolutionary church and other, less-gracious. names. This church focuses on the reality that the overwhelming numbers of people in Latin America live in day by day. The litany of the injustices that oppress those living south of the border has been recited many times -- hunger, disease, lack of education, repression. torture, and on and on. What one can learn in even a short visit to most Latin American countries is that there is no necessity for the abject poverty one sees. One finds a rich continent made poor by long-standing patterns of exploitation. The wealth of the land and the work of the people make others rich and powerful. To be aware of that and to work against it can be dangerous, but a significant part of the Latin American church is aware and working and accepting the risks entailed. Christian brothers and sisters have learned that to work peacefully for change brings violent repercussions. In this predicament, faith and life become fused, as do the individual and society. This fourth form of the church fully engages the structures of evil.

This is a church of the poorest of the poor. Bringing Bibles, people meet in a little shack in a shantytown or out in a field or under a tree. They also gather in churches and parish houses for exciting and heartrending celebrations. Often there are new martyrs for whom to give thanks, Always there is music of the most relevant and powerful kind. There is a sense in which everybody leads. At the very least, everybody has a chance to offer an interpretation or reflection. Commenting on a famous text in the letter from James, a peasant says, it is a good thing to take care of widows and orphans, but I would like to know why we have so many widows and orphans here and why their numbers seem to be growing day by day.” People without schooling are able to understand the structural implications of lessons and texts because they can see that their situation is the result of forces transcending individual piety or morality. Time and again, heard peasants comment on texts in ways that our most sophisticated northern Christians never think about. It is both thrilling and troubling to hear.

The main purpose of this fourth church is to encourage the liberation of the oppressed. Social and economic justice is its primary value. Important church councils have declared that the suffering of the people in Latin America is caused by “structural sin” and that to follow Christ the church must “exercise an option on behalf of the poor.” The broad outlines of these positions have not been contradicted by later popes or councils. Thus, while the fourth form of the church may represent a minority of Christians in Latin America, it operates within the framework of official Roman Catholic documents. In terms of spirit, prophetic force, depth of faith or just sheer courage, this church is gigantic, and its influence is everywhere significant.

The theology of the fourth church is, of course, being formulated by the liberation theologians of the southern continent -- José Míguez Bonino, Juan Segundo. Gustavo Gutiérrez and the rest. These theologians tend to agree with the progressive church’s attitude that no political or economic system is divinely sanctioned. However, whereas progressive Christianity interprets this to mean that the church must remain aloof from involvement with political parties and economic interests, the fourth church, at the urging of its forceful thinkers, supports the best systems available. Its social, political and economic analyses are often admittedly Marxist, but I found no one among its leadership, at least in Nicaragua, who wished to baptize Marxism or to merge Christianity and communism. “We are first of all Christians,” they will say. “We support the revolution here so long as it continues to carry out its program for the poor.”

Although the Sandinista revolution and the fourth church are related in various ways, they are certainly not identical. Given the “miracle” Nicaragua already is and could be -- a Latin American nation where the hungry are being fed, the sick are being healed and the homeless are finding homes, where schools and parks are being built and faith is being put into practice as well as proclaimed in temples -- it is hard to deny the reality expressed in a common slogan one hears there: “There is no contradiction between Christianity and the revolution.” Nicaragua is attempting to organize a nation in the interest of those who have been held down for generations -- 80 per cent of the people. They have suffered immensely from a regime that kept itself in power by brute force. Their struggle has made them free of one of the worst oppressors on the continent. Christians of the fourth church are involved at all levels of this struggle.

On the way to the village of Yalapa near the border between Nicaragua and Honduras. the group I traveled with paused to assess the dangers. We had heard that people were being killed here every day by U.S-backed forces that bomb, mortar, kidnap, massacre and otherwise terrorize the villagers of the area. Deciding to have communion, we found an old hot dog roll and a bottle of green soda pop, and though the only two clergy among us were Presbyterians who had not received permission to labor outside the bounds of their own presbyteries, we consecrated these elements as the body and blood of Christ. For a moment, we felt something of the poverty and powerlessness of our fellow Christians whose lives were daily in jeopardy.

Later that day we met with a group called the Mothers of the Martyrs, women who had lost sons and daughters to the revolution and to the continuing struggle along the border. I took away with me a piece of shrapnel from a mortar shell that had killed a four-year-old girl just two weeks before. Her mother was one of those who spoke to us. Broken by grief, these were still women of faith. Their sense that their young ones had lived important lives and died important deaths was staggering. “Now Nicaragua is a land where the poor have a chance to live,” they told us. “For this we must make sacrifices, even as Christ sacrificed himself for us.”

The new church is made up of people who live in dirt-floored stick houses. They work incredibly hard for just the necessities of life: they carry water; they travel by foot, by horse, by oxcart; they eat rice, beans and bananas. They know that they will probably always be poor, but they also know that there is no good reason for their misery. The land around them is rich, and the weather is conducive to growing good things. Left to organize and operate their land in their own interests, they would have plenty. And so out of poverty, out of struggle, out of the worst kind of oppression, a new form of the ancient church is being born. Here in North America, we may not feel called to be a part of that church, but we must not hinder it. This church working for liberation may be the single best hope for Latin America’s poorest of the poor and for bringing peaceful change to the continent.

No Communion Without Compassion: Visser ’ t Hooft , An Interview

Willem A. Visser ‘t Hooft’? Never heard of him!” We Can picture members of younger Christian generations thus responding to the too brief interview which follows. Sad to say. Christian heroes -- and Visser ‘t Hooft is an authentic one -- do not stay long in the public eye. We have a way of taking for granted the revolutions which remake our world. This Dutch theologian and Christian statesperson did as much as anyone on the yon side of Pope John XXIII to form the modern ecumenical reality. It is time to hear of him.

“W. A. Visser ’t Hooft: is he still around?” That could be the response of a middle-generation heir of ecumenical pioneering who considers the 1948 founding of the World Council of Churches to be almost ancient, but still recallable, history. While the Lowland theologian had been seeking ecumenical highways for decades before 1948. this first WCC general secretary and still most memorable leader -- a kind of Dag Hammarskjöld of spiritual internationalism -- did more than anyone else to give shape and tone to the organization. Yes, he is still around; we are about to learn of the three’ books that he has written since turning 80.

“Visser ’ t Hooft? I could sure tell you stories about him!” That might be the reaction of doughtier seniors who have walked ecumenical warpaths with him -- or have found their own paths blocked by this firm, courageous, sometimes plotting leader. (Plotting, I said, and meant it in generally good ways; plodding? Never.) Some younger-generation ecumenists who around 1964 came up with a critical book on the WCC called United at Mid-Career felt his wrath. Opponents of his ways in the WCC Central Committee could meet his scorn, or simply wonder what happened to them as he maneuvered parliamentarily or behind the scenes to thwart their schemes. There is, one must know, some politicking in even the most creative bodies, especially in the most creative bodies. And creative is what the WCC was in Visser ’t Hooft’s prime.

Even his opponents will unite with the host of this theologian’s friends in enjoying a short visit with him, through the good offices of our interviewer. Visser ’t Hooft shuffling, coughing, talking about a last book, retiring from retirement? Such things seem to be unthinkable, but here they are. Yet they are only reminders of finitude, parts of outer-shell existence, while the intrinsic value of the valuable lives on.

The World Council of Churches, like the United Nations, has changed immeasurably from the Euro-American-centered agency it started out as. From the beginning Visser ’t Hooft and the other pioneers took pains to see that “the younger churches” had voice and space and power. None of them could have foreseen the changes that the power of the Third World churches has brought. Many of these cannot have been congenial to a theologian in a mainline Continental Reformed tradition. Yet the fact that in the WCC as in few places, Christians -- or anyone -- can come together across boundaries of East and West, North and South, are signs of his vision.

The world of indexers has never been happy with this man. Does one locate him under, V. ’t or H? The enemies of Christian unity have been even less happy. The rest of us, who do not have to fret about indexing and who relish the ecumenical achievement that has come so far thanks in part to him, have reason to be happy with Visser ’t Hooft and the Christ he has tirelessly served. We shall read his books and wish him well.

Martin E. Marty.

 



The little street in the Geneva suburb of Chene-Bougeries is deserted in the afternoon heat, The white one-story house stands as if enchanted in a garden beginning to run wild. I walk over fallen cherries that no one has gathered.

From his veranda-like study he can see the front door. As I ring he waves me in. He is alone. During our conversation two women come into the house, seem to attend to something in the kitchen, and leave again.

“How are you, Dr. Visser ’t Hooft?” I ask. His emaciated hands speak for themselves. “Not good any more,” he says. “My lungs are giving up. I have difficulty in breathing. But,” and there it is already, the well-known ironical grin, “my head is still in good working order, thank God. Since I became 80, I have written three books. The last is lying on the table. It is about the teaching authority of the church. It will be my last book,” he adds without self-pity. Before me in his old leather armchair, surrounded by piles of books, papers and a radio, sits a man aware of his own finiteness.

I turn over pages of the loose-leaf manuscript. The amount of work that W. A. Visser ’t Hooft has achieved astonishes me. Two years ago the book The Fatherhood of God in an Age of Emancipation (Westminster, 1983); one year ago the forthcoming Inception and Formation of the World Council of Churches; and now this manuscript about the problem of teaching authority in the church.

“Yes,’’ he reflects, his words interrupted by short, convulsive coughs, “who really decides on what authoritative teaching is and how we are to draw closer ecumenically? Whose job is it? What use are the many jointly hammered-out declarations between the churches if no one is authorized to ensure that they play a role in the teaching and life of these churches?” Once again Visser ’t Hooft takes on unsolved problems and pushes the discussion further.

I tell him that I have come across one of his speeches from 1966 in which he particularly emphasized that ecumenism is a matter of attitude, of our way of thinking. Has he a different point of view today?

“I still maintain my standpoint,” he says, “but things have changed somewhat. There are positive and negative developments. Many more people, more churches, especially in the Third World, are interested in ecumenism today. And in many denominations the commitment to the ecumenical movement has become stronger. But at the same time the meaning of ‘ecumenical’ has undergone a certain watering-down. When people from one congregation drink a cup of tea with people from another, they call it an ecumenical event, The truth that ecumenical conviction has to do with a manifestation, an articulation of the essential unity of the Christian church, is unfortunately far too little anchored in our consciousness.”

Again and again he suppresses the burdensome cough. Passionate indignation rings in his rough voice: “They talk as if ecumenism were an open question. One is for it, another against. But it is a fundamental thing, grounded in the Gospels. For example, Paul simply cannot understand that people say ‘I belong to Apollos’ or ‘I belong to Paul.’ That we don’t make clear enough to the world that we all belong to Christ is a problem that can only be solved by real ecumenical conviction.” Then he adds a self-critical afterthought: “In each generation we must proclaim this in new ways, and probably in this generation we have not proclaimed it enough.’’

Indeed this seems to be a fundamental issue. Devotion to the unity of the people of God is not to be taken for granted; it is not passed on automatically from one generation to another. This passion must be discovered and recognized anew in each generation. But that goes not only for devotion to the ecumenical message, but also for the results and the agreements achieved. The experience and insight gathered in different fields of work can also not be taken for granted, but must be spelled out again, tested again, internalized again. Visser ’t Hooft is certainly right here: we have probably paid too little attention to this point.

“You once wrote a book titled The Pressure of Our common Calling (Doubleday, 1959). Now you suggest that this attitude of being under Jesus’ command is not as alive today as it was then, isn’t that it? You knew the pioneers of the ecumenical movement. Were they not strongly convinced that their mission stood under God’s command?”

‘‘Very strongly convinced! Therefore they were able to overcome great difficulties. Because they knew that they were strengthened by the Holy Spirit, they were able to create the ecumenical movement. The movement today must also live from this power. We need only look around us to see that denominational, theological and national differences separate us very readily. They are driving us apart again today. Only an ecumenical movement recognizing the pressure of its calling can achieve something in this world.”

Here again one can recognize the internal compass in Visser ’t Hooft’s lifelong work: the indefatigable conviction that he is doing God’s work when he helps the churches to find a way out of their divisions to a living and creative unity. Is it this steady listening and seeking that keeps this man so lively and persuasive?

I state that the great personalities of the ecumenical movement’s foundation time had benefited from the then prevailing wave of internationalism. Perhaps the ‘‘international” and the “ecumenical’’ had often been conceived together? Today, when the trend even in the churches is toward the regional, parochial and local, will ecumenism not suffer?

But Visser ’t Hooft will have little of this. I should not forget that ecumenism has prevailed in times when internationalism has broken down, during the Nazi period -- above all during World War II. After all, it was not only Germany that was nationalistic. “Really, it’s like this,” he continues, “where Christians suffer, ecumenism grows stronger.’

I object: “But today we have very many Christians who are suffering, and yet we have this weakening of the ecumenical calling.”

He replies: “But don’t we find this weakening among people who are not suffering, who simply have things too good, and who cannot think and feel themselves into the experience of suffering Christians?”

He knows exactly what the reality is, and he is polite enough to leave to me the conclusion regarding our Western situation. The lamentations over the dying-down of the ecumenical movement have no substance as long as we do not realize, that ecumenism has to do with our relationship to the suffering of Christians in different parts of the world. There is no communion without compassion. “Our relation to suffering Christians has to do not only with protesting or setting in motion actions for human rights, good and necessary though these are. It involves living and praying with these people -- a standing together with them under the cross.”

 

Living with, praying with, suffering with -- this with is at the heart of ecumenism. It certainly was so for Archbishop Nathan Söderblom of Sweden. I turn the conversation to him because it is known that Visser ’t Hooft is particularly indebted to him. Söderblom interpreted the ecumenical movement as a peace movement and did much to ensure that after World War I a strong (today mostly forgotten) disarmament movement existed, task Visser ’t Hooft if he must not often think of the old peace movement when he sees what is going on today.

“I remember particularly the time of the great disarmament conference of 1932,” he answers. “As correspondent for The Christian Century, I regularly wrote articles about the development of the conference. It was highly interesting to see how active not only the students but also women’s groups were then in working for disarmament. But the conference came a few years too late. The Far East and Germany had already begun to travel in the opposite direction. If it had been held five years earlier, the disarmament conference might really have altered something of the structure of international relations. But in 1932 it was no longer possible. It is a tragic story. We put on all the pressure possible, but it did not help.” Did he see parallels in the disarmament negotiations held in Geneva in recent years?

“No” he says. “The French adage ‘l’histoire se repète’ is not true. Events never happen again in the same way. The governments of the Great Powers then calmly calculated war. All of them quite happily reckoned with war asa possibility of international politics. Today no great power thinks of war in that way. Nuclear weapons have made the situation infinitely more dangerous. One almost concludes that it is just this danger that will prevent anyone from being so inhumane as to use these weapons.

“Can we rely on that?” The question remains open. Visser ‘t Hooft turns the conversation back to the time before 1932: “In those days we believed that the League of Nations was the answer, that through the League it would be possible to create an international system of law, so that war would simply not be necessary any more. Unfortunately not enough of this is said in the present day’s peace movement. People exclaim ‘No weapons, no weapons, no weapons!,’ but they say very little about how we will solve our problems without them. We must work on a system of international law either through the United Nations or through another, improved structure. I believe that the churches should concern themselves a great deal more with this question than they actually do.”

What should they do then, I want to know. Surely without the United Nations there cannot be any international peace regulation? Everyone would agree that the present structure of the United Nations is very unsatisfactory and must be improved in many respects; Visser ’t Hooft affirms this. The difficulty is one which he has experienced again and again in his long life: “We do not get any further with the question of the limits of national sovereignty. Everyone starts shouting whenever there is any suggestion for limiting it. Christians must make clear that national sovereignty is really an idol, a self-made god. Why does it have such an absolute value? Nations should have only a relative value; they must surely not be so idolized that this idolatry rouses them against each other.”

These strong words tempt me to respond: “As soon as someone expects the churches to give up a part of their sovereignty Visser ’t Hooft exclaims: “As if I were not particularly aware of that! I experienced that every day as general secretary of the World Council of Churches!”

The old trouble: Churches that are not ready -- despite far-reaching theological agreement -- to put their individual traditions and idiosyncrasies in the background forego the right to proclaim to the nations an international order of law and peace. That is plainly a classical example of how closely the witness of the churches is bound up with their unity. That explains the doggedness with which Visser ’t Hooft recalls the churches to their ecumenical mission.

We speak of the Sixth Assembly of the World Council of Churches at Vancouver last summer. ‘I am now like other people who look at Vancouver from a certain distance. I am no longer familiar with the finer points. It is the first Assembly without me,’’ he says.

The doctors long ago forbade him to travel. His body cannot take such stress anymore. He who once looked on the world as his parish is now tied to Geneva and to his own house. The daily work is in the hands of others. He remains the watchful guardian of unity for Christ’s sake. There he is in his quiet home, indispensable and tenacious, the steady conscience of the churches -- the unflinching witness of the great vision that must not be betrayed.

Practical Theology: What Will It Become

Only a few years ago this article might have been titled “Practical Theology: Will It Be?” Today there is good reason to believe that indeed it will. Now the question has shifted to “What will it become?” In this early stage, there are numerous formulations and recommendations. Thus far the conversation has tended to be centered in the academy; my intent is to make it more public.



Although my thinking is inspired by the seminal work Practical Theology: The Emerging Field in Theology, Church, and World, edited by Don Browning (Harper & Row, 1983), my thoughts essentially are an attempt to make sense of what I do, and thereby add one more opinion to the important effort to reform and renew theological education. While I owe much to the stimulating ideas of Don Browning, David Tracy and James Fowler in Practical Theology, I wish to attempt a small, constructive personal contribution rather than to enter into dialogue with them. That will need to come later.

Obviously, all of us are influenced by both our past experiences and our present activities. More of my life has been spent in parishes than in theological schools. Even now, as a professor in a school of divinity, I spend two days a week in parish ministry. As a result. I understand myself first as a parish priest and second as an academic. My faith in Jesus as the Christ is translated into a commitment to life in the church -- life in a community of faith called to live in, but not of, the world as a transformer of culture. I understand my role as priest to be that of a bearer of the community’s symbols, a mystagogue who leads others into mystery and a hermeneut who, as an instrument of knowing and interpretation, represents God to humanity and humanity to God. I understand my role as a professor in a theological school to consist of helping the church, critically and constructively, to reflect on its life and work so that it may be faithful in its mission, and of helping to form and educate people for various ministries in the church.

However, since first joining a theological faculty more than a decade ago, I have been troubled by the “professional” understanding of ministry that emerged in Protestant churches and their seminaries a quarter-century ago.

Having left behind an interpretation of profession as a response to a personal call from God, along with the church’s corresponding recognition of personal charisma (a God-given grace), Protestants adopted a modern secular view of profession as the possession of the specialized knowledge and skills necessary to qualify for institutional approval and, thereby, employment. Indeed, today most Protestant clergy think of themselves as professionals, and the Doctor of Ministry degree has formalized a credentializing process for the profession.

Over the past 25 years, theological education has followed two divergent models: some faculty, while committed to the church’s ministry, have adopted a graduate-school-of-arts-and-sciences model of education; others, while committed to scholarship, have adopted a professional-school model.

While I recall reading about the post-Schleiermacher tendency to understand practical theology as made up of numerous dimensions -- the liturgical, moral, pastoral, spiritual, ecclesial and catechetical -- within a clerical paradigm, I experienced it as a number of nonintegrated, specific disciplines of ministerial studies separated from other isolated disciplines dispersed throughout a confused theological curriculum.

I discovered that the liturgical concern among some had become preaching; among others, techniques for conducting worship; and among still others, historical modes of worship. Even in those schools keeping the study of liturgics in the curriculum (typically understood as the history, theology and practice of worship and/or preaching), those who taught theory typically did not teach practice. Further, separate specialists in liturgics and homiletics were being trained, professional organizations for each created, and journals to support these specialized fields established. The pastoral concern had become counseling, usually adopting a medical model informed by secular psychology and therapeutic practice. This separate discipline then developed its own training program and certification system known as clinical pastoral education (CPE). It trained its own specialists, offered its own degrees and had its own faculty, professional associations and journals.

The catechetical concern became Christian education, typically following a schooling model informed by secular pedagogy. It too developed its own degree program, granting master’s degree in religious education, and establishing a group of specialists, lay directors and ordained ministers working in the field. Along with this new specialty came the usual graduate programs, degrees, faculties, professional associations and journals. The spiritual dimension, I found, was ignored in most Protestant seminaries, but where it was retained, spirituality turned into either training in technique or a course or two in historical theology. The moral concern was taken from the practical field, and subsumed under systematic theology, creating a new field of theology and ethics.

Ecclesiology tended to adopt a business-management model informed by organizational development. While this specialized field assumed various names, such as the care of the parish,” it focused on organization, administration and, sometimes, the sociology of religion. Concerned primarily with institutional survival, it included leadership understood as church management, evangelism understood as church growth, stewardship understood as church finance, and so on.

Thus ministerial studies, a conglomerate of subdepartments and specialties, came to exist in ‘competition” with other faculty departments or divisions. More significantly, these studies tended to focus on “how-to” concerns, or the application of what was taught in the “theoretical’ fields of biblical, historical and theological-ethical studies (each also separate from the others and supported by its own professional associations, journals, degree programs and faculties). Thus a devastating gulf divided theory and practice. Ministerial studies tended to become devoid of theological foundations and neglectful of spiritual and moral concerns. They essentially were intended to provide future clergy with the skills necessary for employment as the professional ministers of the church.



I have never been happy with this situation, just as I have never been satisfied to be known solely as a Christian educator, restricted to predominantly applied courses training professional educators and ministers for parish education understood fundamentally as church schooling. Before I had any content for the title, I thought of myself as a practical theologian whose function it was to integrate theology and the various dimensions of ministry as they relate to church and society.

Theology I understand to be an articulation of a faith community’s experiential-reflective knowledge of God for the ends of living together as a sign of God’s presence in history, and of discerning and doing God’s will in the world as a witness to God’s intentions for history. Therefore, theology comprises three related processes of reflection and discourse: the foundational, the constructive and the practical.

Foundational theology, rooted and grounded in God’s revelation in the past, is a historical mode of reflection that, by exploring the origins of the Christian faith community, attempts to answer for each generation the fundamental question of what it is to be Christian.

Constructive theology, aware of God’s continuing revelation in the present, is a hermeneutical mode of reflection that, by exploring our particular historical, social and cultural situation in the light of the church’s tradition, attempts dialectically to make sense of both our contemporary experience-knowledge and our tradition.

Practical theology, emerging out of life in a faith community, is a doxological mode of reflection that, by placing itself within the context of the church’s service to God, attempts to facilitate the goal of a faithful life in the present on behalf of God’s future. As such, practical theology is composed of six dimensions. Although each is distinguishable, none is separate from the others. Indeed, they are necessarily integrated, for, properly understood, each is simply one doorway into and expression of a single whole. These six interrelated dimensions are the liturgical, the moral, the spiritual, the pastoral, the ecclesial and the catechetical.



The liturgical dimension (life as worship) focuses on life in a professing community. It includes both the community’s cultic or ritual life (repetitive, symbolic actions expressive of the community’s sacred story) and its people’s daily work (vocation or ‘profession”) in the world.

The moral dimension (life as seeking justice and peace) focuses on life in a witnessing community. The moral includes both the people’s character -- their perceptions, dispositions, intentions, attitudes and values -- and their conscience -- the processes by which they, as believers in Jesus Christ and members of his church, discern the will of God and, guided by the community’s ethical norms and principles, decide faithful action within particular moral situations.

The spiritual dimension (life as relationship) focuses on life in a praying community: it includes both interior experience -- the direct encounter with God resulting in a personal knowledge of God’s love -- and exterior manifestation -- daily life lived in an ever-deepening love relationship with God, or life as a testimony to the sifts of the spirit.

The pastoral dimension (life as caring) focuses on life in a serving community. It includes both consciousness, or the embracing of suffering and the identifying with the needy of the world, and sacrificial love: the capacity to live with others in relationships of healing, sustaining, guidance and reconciliation, expressed in caring for the sick, the needy. the poor, the hungry, the lonely and the captive.

The ecclesial dimension (life as being) focuses on life in a sacramental community. It includes both community life, lived as a sign of God’s grace expressed through a nurturing, caring family, and institutional life, lived in society in stewardship of God’s gifts and witnessing to God’s intentions.

The catechetical dimension (life as becoming) focuses on life in a learning community. It includes both formation through evangelization and enculturation -- the processes by which we are converted and initiated into the church and its tradition and thereby come to acknowledge ourselves as a people in covenant with God -- and education, or those processes of actualization that help us to live out our baptism by making the church’s faith more vital, conscious and active in our lives; by deepening our relationship to God; and by realizing our vocation in the world so that God’s saving activity may be manifested in persons and in the church.

Through the formational processes, the tradition is acquired, sustained and deepened. The aim of such processes is to conserve and provide roots in the past. It is an intentional, experiential, nurturing process within every aspect of parish life. Further, it is foundational to the whole catechetical process, and is essential and developmentally possible for children.

Through the educational processes, people critically examine the tradition, reshape it and apply it to life. Such education’s aim is to transform and provide openness to the future. It is an intentional, reflective, converting process related to every aspect of parish life. Secondary to the formational processes in that it necessarily follows experience in sequence, it is essential and developmentally possible for most adolescents and adults.

To illustrate: a person’s character is shaped or formed by life in community. It is both foundational to and prior to conscience, for conscience combines the advocacy of our visions and passionate convictions with the disinterested analysis necessary for moral decision-making, the latter resulting from education. Therefore, moral catechesis is concerned both with how our character is shaped and how our conscience is educated.

A third important responsibility for catechesis is its integrative, reflective task. For example, within the liturgical dimension there is a possible estrangement between the church’s worship and its action in the world. One essential task of catechesis is to help the church prepare for meaningful worship by reflecting on its life in the world. Another is to help it prepare for faithful action in the world by reflecting on worship. In this way, catechesis can bring about the integration of the two foci of the liturgical dimension.

Certainly, each dimension of practical theology is expressed in each of the others. For example, within the cultic-life foci of the liturgical dimension, the first half of the ritual (the service of the Word) is intended to be catechetical. Each dimension also contributes to each of the others. For example, the character is fundamentally shaped through participation in the community’s rituals.

Equally important, the two foci of each dimension of practical theology -- one in the church and one in the world -- help to encourage a dialectical relationship between the Christian faith community and other perspectives and efforts to shape our common life.

My dream is that the old divisions in ministerial studies, with their clerical emphasis and their specialized disciplines such as Christian education, will dissolve, and that a field of practical theology made up of people with broad theological knowledge and a deep, holistic understanding of each dimension -- as well as a focused concern for one dimension -- will emerge. Then all practical theology courses would be team-taught and would aim at integration. In some cases, a course in Christian initiation would integrate every dimension. Other classes would integrate two dimensions, as I do now in courses on liturgical catechesis, moral catechesis and spiritual catechesis. Each would integrate theory and practice, foundational theology and secular disciplines, as well as experience in church and society with reflection in the divinity school.

Of course, this is just one person’s limited imagination and explication. Both conversation and exploration must go on, The most difficult hurdle, of course, is the academy itself. How it educates, hires and rewards its faculty members influences how they behave. How its faculty designs its curriculum and determines its courses influences what is taught, and by whom. Still, I hope that this article will stimulate the process of forming the field of practical theology.

Seminary Education Tested by Praxis

How well does theological education prepare seminary graduates for the practice of ministry? Curiosity about the answer to that question led us to take a careful look at a Drew University Theological School class three years beyond graduation. The results were arresting. Although we had expected challenges to theological education, there were implications for denomination and profession as well.

We began by interviewing a random cross-section of class members who were pastoring congregations. Those conversations were a marvelous window onto the opening phase of the struggle to become ministers. Graduates were hungry to be heard, and we were anxious to know what good the seminary had done them. It was comforting to see how well they were managing a very difficult profession, how poised they were under pressure and how deeply engaged they were in the attempt to learn the skills that the profession requires.

To move beyond the interview phase, we found it necessary to define the major task of the first years. We had supposed it was to clarify the vision of ministry against the realities of parish life. That certainly was going on, but the emphasis lay elsewhere. The fundamental task seemed to be to acquire the self-image of being a professional capable of providing the services a congregation declares it needs from its minister. Rather than concentrating on satisfying their, own personal sense of calling, the fledgling pastors tried to satisfy the expectations of their congregations. For the time being the sense of calling was overshadowed by the incessant, manifold demands the churches were placing on them. Their foremost question became, what do congregations want of us?

Here was the first place where they felt let down by seminary. Expectations had not been identified for them in advance. One random comment caught the anxiety that tinged almost every interview. “There’s a sort of occupational shock. . . between seminary and the parish.

I felt to a great degree alone. . . . I felt a great deal of anxiety. . . . I felt that I was winging it a good bit of the time.”

In the absence of seminary guidance, we supposed that the supervising denominational body would make clear what was expected of the new clergyperson. But the response of one new pastor caught up the graduates’ whole experience with the denomination: “I don’t know what they expect other than that I do the minimum things that have to be done to keep a church going -- and keep out of people’s hair!”

Does the profession itself have standards of practice from which neophytes can deduce what is expected of them? Among those we interviewed, there was no hint of awareness that any such standards exist. We suddenly found ourselves dealing with a profession with no canons of good practice, and, consequently, no supervision by professional peers to inculcate them. It would be difficult to sue a minister for malpractice, with bona fide practice so ill defined. In the absence of professional standards, we would need to invent some criteria by which to estimate the integrity of practice we were observing.

We found beginning clergypersons almost completely at the mercy of the expectations of their first parish, without counterbalancing claims from denomination or profession. Formation of clerical identity depended on satisfying this first congregation.

One of the major questions our study raises is whether seminary, denomination and profession ought to be satisfied with this much uncontested influence by the first parish over the formation of clergy. The data we gathered gave little evidence that congregations were expecting of fresh seminary graduates what we hoped for them. This was especially true in denominations where the first assignments were routinely in churches at the bottom of the pecking order. These are often so marginal that their struggle to survive leaves little energy or vision for encouraging their pastoral leaders to practice ministry with integrity.

It became clear from the outset that the formation of ministers who not only satisfy the just expectations of congregations but who also satisfy the larger concerns of denomination and profession requires the concerted efforts of all three. As things now stand, the beginning minister has only his or her own convictions about calling to counter the demands of the first congregation. It takes a person with a fairly heroic sense of vocation to counter the pressure to settle for a ministry content to satisfy the needs of parishioners as consumers of ministerial services.



With the advice of colleagues in the university we constructed a questionnaire to gather data related to our graduates’ ease of entry into ministry, their sense of adequacy to the tasks of ministry, and their integrity in ministry. We were gratified at 100 per cent response from those members of the class who were engaged in the parish. These numbered four women and 18 men.

One important test of seminary preparation is the ease with which entrance into the profession is accomplished. Studies suggest it ordinarily takes four years for new clergy to experience themselves as persons who are not somehow impostors in clerical disguise. Fifteen of our 22 respondents had negotiated that turning point in their clerical identity. On this basis seminary had stood them in good stead indeed. But what about the seven who had not yet formed clerical identities?

While we remain uncertain about all the factors that make entry easier for some than others, we believe that one important factor is a warm, outgoing personality. Our data show that new clergy without much concern for the intellectual disciplines of ministry experience satisfaction with their performances if the congregations they serve have a marginal understanding of ministry and the clergypersons have outgoing personalities. Six persons in particular who had had little interest in theological education except as a passport to ordination had won positive support from their congregations on the basis of personality. They described themselves as “nice guys,” “likable,” “good humored” and “good in a group setting.”

Warmth is an obvious, even essential, asset in ministry, but charm can substitute for serious engagement with the root requirements of the calling. Too withdrawn a personality can disable one for ministry despite every other positive qualification; too gregarious a personality can compensate for the absence of the very qualities that make for competence and integrity. Seminaries and denominational committees that care for candidates need to take precautionary account of both types of personalities.

The short-circuiting of much of theological education by too facile an approach to ministry can begin well before graduation. One stunning result of our study was the discovery of the effect of student pastorates on the practice of ministry after graduation, and, by implication, on theological education while in seminary. To our complete surprise, we found almost no evidence that student pastoring for one or more years during seminary had had a positive effect on the competence of new clergy. Those who had been student pastors actually practiced ministry with less integrity than new clergy without such prior experience. Even more startling was the discovery that the experience did not ease entry into ministry upon graduation. The half of the class who had not had student pastorates entered the profession with significantly greater ease than the half who had. We defined student pastors as sole leaders of congregations, thus excluding those who had held student assistantships.

We are certain that seminaries and denominations will need to take greater care in monitoring what is happening to their candidates in student pastorates. We had supposed that such pastorates were laboratories for completing theological education by integrating reflection with praxis in the real world of the church. More likely they are an alternative system of schooling that offers immediate gratification in ministerial practice at the expense of the disciplined study that is a necessary preliminary to a more comfortable and more faithful ministry.



Professional education meets its most direct test in the concrete tasks of the profession. How well did we prepare our graduates to perform the seven roles expected of every parish minister? Our data suggest that the members of the class are performing well enough to satisfy their constituencies, but with very uneven reference to seminary preparation.

(1) Administration. The questionnaires confirmed the impression from the interviews that the class welcomed the task of administration, in some cases wishing to bring greater administrative order to a parish than it had ever had before. There seemed to be a correlation between doing well at administration and doing well in the tasks of ministry as a whole. Surprisingly, we found little correlation between readiness for administration and prior vocational experience.

(2) Preaching. Preaching is the one ministerial task seminaries prepare for intentionally and thoroughly. Drew is no exception. Our graduates preach to the satisfaction of their congregations.

(3) Liturgy. The questionnaires confirmed our hypothesis that liturgical leadership is an area in which new pastors feel they need more preparation. Our graduates wanted to conduct worship, and especially to lead public prayer, well. They wanted to perform marriages, conduct funerals and administer the sacraments well. They felt cheated that explanation of and preparation and coaching for these obvious, recurring pastoral duties had been given so little curricular emphasis. Not having been taught how to lead in prayer or how to construct their own orders of worship, they found themselves copying liturgies from others indiscriminately and wondering what the sacraments meant as they administered them.

(4) Evangelism. Evangelism was most often cited as the area of least preparation at seminary, although neglect of liturgy was more strongly felt. Curiously, this deficiency did not mean that the class’s congregations were not growing. For the most part, their churches were receiving new members, but, with the exception of one person who had taken postgraduate training in evangelism, they did not know why this was happening, or what, if anything, they had to do with it.

(5) Social Action. Although the class stated that training in social action leadership had also been lacking in seminary, they had no strong feelings about that lack. We felt it more strongly than they did, since the seminary had advocated social action as an important facet of ministry. Our guess is that in the first few years new clergy are so preoccupied with learning the profession, they have little energy left to look outside the congregation to its mission in the world. We hope to see more orientation toward mission among the class members five years after graduation.

(6) Pastoral Care and Counseling. This was a skill area addressed in seminary. Most seemed comfortable with their pastoral-care skills. The amount of counseling a minister did seemed unaffected by age, prior work experience, or sex. The counseling was by appointment; it did not come about as a result of visiting people in their homes -- except in cases of emergency, illness or bereavement. We found no evidence that the class members had been taught how, or how often, to make pastoral calls.

(7) Education. Although instruction in education was required in seminary and teaching was modeled at every turn, there was little evidence that the graduates did much direct teaching or were concerned with teaching strategy within the congregation.



In asking about preparation to perform the tasks of ministry, we found that an implicit strategy did underlie each of the above-mentioned discrete roles or tasks. That surfaced when our graduates reported that their peak experiences of ministry came in enabling lay people to engage in their own ministries. The class members found their favorite identities as enablers. Perhaps it would be a fair estimate of the seminary’s success in preparing graduates for the concrete tasks of ministry to say that we have been most effective at the level of strategic consciousness, but with the exceptions of preaching, administration and counseling by appointment, relatively ineffective at teaching the particular skills required to carry out that strategy. Indeed, for the most part we seem not to have attempted to teach the skills of the profession.

Perhaps we could claim benign neglect, caused by our preoccupation with other facets of theological education. Certainly there is more than enough theory to be covered in three years. In addition to the classical biblical, historical and theological disciplines, most seminaries now require nearly an equal amount of attention to the behavioral sciences as they speak to religion. Does theological education’s preoccupation with theological-behavioral reflection on ministry pay off in integrity of practice? That is the question we sought to answer by attempting to gauge the degree to which our graduates practice the profession with integrity.

With the profession so ill defined, there seem to be no commonly accepted canons for integrity in the practice of ministry. Pastoral theology used to identify such integrity, but that theological discipline has been in collapse since the turn of the century. We defined integrity in ministry as the integrating of the knowledge of the theological disciplines needed for performing the profession with personal devotional practices and the everyday tasks of ministry. In the absence of current norms, we invented a set to give content to our Integrity in Ministry Profile. That profile has six components.

(1) A conscious and articulate theological stance that informs the whole practice of ministry, including the ability to do exegesis of Scripture for teaching and preaching. This is the intellectual base for ministry.

The single least encouraging discovery of the study so far is that many of the class members do not seem to possess and are not working to acquire an intellectual base for their practice of ministry. More than one third were unable to name “a major theological resource that helps most to make your practice of ministry authentic.” Did they not understand the question? No one mentioned a single theology course when asked to specify the one course that best integrated theology of ministry with the practice of ministry. Three said no course had helped in this way. Four mentioned New Testament courses. The course most often cited -- by 40 per cent of the class -- was a field-learning seminar that required a 20-page theology-of-ministry paper, written under the combined tutelage of a pastor-adjunct and a resident professor from one of the classical disciplines. Here was the focal point of the whole curriculum for clarifying the students’ theologies of praxis, and yet more than half of them seem to feel none of its effects three years out of school.

The reading habits of the class did not suggest that people without a working theology of ministry were likely to develop one, or to keep an existing one current. Fewer than one fourth of the class members have read five or more theological or biblical books of substance in the past year. One third read no such books of any kind. Half of the class did not seem to engage in serious exegesis in preparation for preaching.

One might suppose that the practice of ministry would of itself drive people to tap biblical-theological resources in order to function acceptably. We judged that this was not happening because the habit of connecting theology and practice was never formed in seminary. Instead, most of the reading done by most of the class was oriented merely to practice. We do not wish to misrepresent the class. Members who do read do so omnivorously. For example, one reads two to four books a week. What we wish to point out is that seminary instruction did little to produce clergy who trace their practice to any intellectual foundation laid by the classical disciplines of theological education. For the most part, professors do not feel responsible for making the connection between theory and practice, and new clergy are not making that connection for themselves. Seminaries long to produce scholar-pastors; our graduates seem to have learned that being a scholar has little in common with being a pastor.

(2) Regular and lively personal use of the means of grace (common worship, sacraments, private prayer and meditation, and support group of peers). This is the experiential base for ministry.

Here the case was almost the reverse of that for the intellectual foundation. The class had not been taught to pray in seminary. Indeed, one of their major reservations about seminary education was its lack of encouragement of and instruction in devotional practices. One student’s comment caught the drift of the common complaint: ‘‘If you hadn’t had a spiritual or devotional life before you came to Drew, forget it. The seminary wasn’t going to give it to you.” Yet many practiced the spiritual disciplines after graduation. We had hypothesized that our graduates would acknowledge a need for daily private meditation and prayer, but would not have altered their schedules to accommodate it. This was true for only a third of the class, a third made up entirely of first-career people. More than half of the class members reported that their daily meditations included reading Scripture and praying. But only one third were making a connection between their prayers and their practice of ministry. These were mostly second-career people.

(3) Acceptance of the institutional context for ministry and willingness to take responsibility for administering the church as institution. Our graduates were surprisingly ready to tackle this area. Typical seminary graduates are supposed to be preoccupied with the prophetic-pastoral side of their calling and alienated from the responsibility for institutional leadership. Not so Drew graduates. The cause for this readiness may be the 12 out of 42 required hours in field education spent on administration. But it was not clear to the graduates how leading the church as an institution differed from leading other institutions.

(4) Concern for and leadership in mission aimed at social justice, including systemic change as well as relief of human need. Although our graduates scored high in their commitment to social mission, no course prepared them for leadership in it. A number of respondents commented that this was the weakest spot in their ministries.

(5) Concern for and leadership in mission as evangelism -- understood as launching people into a lifelong faith journey, and not as just receiving new members into the institution. To the extent that evangelism does include receiving new people, the members of the class have evangelistic skills. Nearly two thirds are bringing in new members. But they are uncomfortable with evangelism defined as church growth, and have not as yet formed any better definition. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that they know what to do with those new to the church.

(6) A theory of the unfolding character of the Christian life for assessing a person ‘s and a congregation ‘s place in the process, with the accompanying skills to guide and support spiritual maturing. There was little indication that the new clergy possessed a framework for assessing the spiritual health of persons or congregations. Some such theory, and the skills to facilitate growth, are necessary for planning a course of nurture and for guiding the overall administration of the church.

Our profile for integrity served as much to outline the course the profession needs to take to recover its identity, as to measure how well seminaries and denominations are doing at forming new clergy who possess a body of knowledge and a set of skills appropriate to their calling.



Factors other than seminary preparation seem to affect integrity. Second-career people without student pastorates scored highest in integrity, as they had in ease of entry. First-career people with no experience as student pastors scored lowest in both areas. The one advantage of student pastorates seemed to lie in the increase of integrity for first-career people over their counterparts who had not had them. Yet, for second-career people student pastorates seem to diminish integrity. Perhaps the seminarian’s attention to a congregation detracted from his or her attention to study, and set patterns of lowered integrity before the resources necessary to establish integrity were in hand. This reinforced our impression that second-career people who avoid student pastorates make the best use of seminary to prepare for ministry.

How can graduates be doing so well at satisfying the expectations of congregations for professional services? Congregations want warm, empathic, sustaining friends whose presence reminds them of God in the joys and traumas of common life. The personality of the minister fills the void in a profession that has lost its soul. Until the day when it finds it again, the most “formative” thing to do in judicatories and seminaries would appear to be to screen candidates carefully by personality type and then hone the considerable interpersonal skills the warm, outgoing, extroverted ones already possess. Such people will be judged to be good ministers until we all learn better what it is that ministers are supposed to be and do.

No doubt there are a multitude of heroic clergy who practice ministry with great integrity. Such people are heroic in that they must be largely self-taught and self-formed. Birth into clerical families or especially fortunate mentoring relationships have probably helped them. Somehow, they reach back through a living tradition to times when the ordained ministry was a better-defined profession. If there were powerful professional societies of clergy, they might reform the profession from within. But, with rare exceptions, Protestant clergy associate by denominational affiliation. Because the profession lacks the consensus and the organizational vehicles necessary for redefinition and renewal, the initiative for redefining its theory and standards of practice falls to the denominations and the seminaries.

The chief responsibility lies with the denomination, since it oversees the whole process by which people become, and continue as, ministers. At present, seminaries have a very constricted role in that process. They do not now certify readiness for ministry, let alone competence in it; they certify only that graduates have completed a particular course of study. Whatever standards there are for the profession are being brought to bear by denominational judicatories and congregations. Consequently, we recommend the following procedure:

Denominations need to convene task forces on the formation of effective clergy who practice ministry with theological integrity. Each task force should include ministers whom the denomination has identified as models of good practice, and seminary professors from classical disciplines who are willing to help define good practice from the vantage point of history and tradition. The task force would issue provisional standards for the practice of ministry that could guide the formation of new clergy in their crucial first seven or eight years in the parish. Denominations could then assign to seminaries and to local judicatories their shares of responsibility for those years.

Each seminary needs to develop a cadre of professors from the classical disciplines willing to make a subspecialty of correlating biblical-historical-theological resources with the current practice of ministry. Denominations need to specify to seminaries which particular professional skills they are charged with introducing and the measure of mastery expected. Concurrently, denominations need to describe to local judicatories the whole set of ministerial skills that they are expected to certify upon each candidate’s final ordination at the end of the four-or five-year postseminary period.

A major lesson of this study has been that the denominations must provide as close and careful supervision of their new clergy in the years immediately following seminary as they expect seminaries to provide beforehand. Above all, we have learned that if pastors are to have a fair chance at learning the profession, seminaries and denominations must begin to accept responsibility for clergy formation, a formation that currently falls by default to first congregations.

Caring as a Calling

An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. . . .To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. [C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Seabury, 1961) Pp. 10, 11]



We cannot go through life without the illness or death of a loved one, our own illness, the illness or death of a relationship. Yet something in us makes us shy away from those who are sorrowing deeply, keeps us from those who need us most.

Perhaps it is, as author C. S. Lewis suggests, our sense of embarrassment that inhibits us. In college, I was awakened abruptly in the early morning with the news that my suitemate’s father had died suddenly, unexpectedly. Half-awake, I followed some spontaneous, unprepared sense of how to respond. I went to her, held her, said how sorry I was. Had I been more alert, I would undoubtedly have felt more awkward and might not have been able to say or do anything. What I did was little enough, but it was, I see now, an important gesture, a sign, a symbol -- however meager -- of my caring.

Tiny gestures have huge importance to those who are grieving. And without some sign, some obvious, loving signal, no matter how caring we may feel inside, we will appear callous and cold.

Probably because our church communities are where we expect to find these signals of comfort in times of greatest need, we are bereft, almost spiritually injured, when we do not. I think of Rachel and Ed, who were devoted to their small church community, giving it much time and love. Several years ago, when Ed developed severe mental problems and was hospitalized, Rachel found herself isolated, alone, at a time when the community might have enveloped her with love. “People won’t talk to me,” she said. A year or so after Ed’s first hospitalization, they left their community and the denomination, seeking a more caring Christian home.

My friend Sylvia used nearly the same words to describe her situation. Both she and her husband were deeply committed to their nearby church community, but when he left her and their two small children, she went to one worship service, then could not continue. Those who had been her Christian companions talked about her, she said, not to her. She preferred to stay at home.

She needed to feel stronger before she could return. Unfortunately, that feeling is all too common. Instead of going to the community when in despair, we wait; we gather our resources outside the community. The grieving person puts up a good front for the church, but no real sharing occurs.



The act of condolence is a difficult task for most of us. We don’t know what to say -- we might even say something stupid -- and are afraid the distraught one might cry, break down completely; too much time has elapsed, and we’d feel silly, out of place, saying something now; maybe if we can just be extra nice . . . but really, she looks like she wants to be left alone. Or the ultimate excuse: It’s the clergy’s [other roles may be substituted] duty to comfort and care, not mine.

Most of these excuses are all too familiar. I know what panic I felt approaching a man who’d lost his wife of many years, both of whom were members of my church; or the man whose very young brother had died months earlier: Was it too late to say something? I remember only too well how I avoided the woman who (virtually asking for support) announced that she and her husband were separating. I am certain that when I have occasionally conquered my nervousness I have said ridiculous or foolish things.

But it’s not only awkwardness we feel; it’s fear, as Lewis also mentions. To approach the person who suffers somehow jeopardizes our own stability. It’s as if we come face to face with a part of life we don’t want to see, so that often it appears that instead of “protecting” the one who is suffering, we are protecting ourselves. When my mother died recently and I was trying to understand ‘the small response from my church community, I began to wonder if I also, because of my closeness to death, was a too-vivid reminder and repellent to others. I can’t be certain, but I had a sense of being ignored. People avoid each other because, quite simply, it isn’t easy to relate to the sorrowing, hurting person directly.

We sometimes deflect our concern to the spouse, other relatives or friends, but it isn’t enough. Nor is it enough after a discreet period of time to try to ask “How are you?” meaningfully, because we still have not named the sorrow -- the death, illness or desertion -- and we need to refer to it directly for healing to begin. But it’s that naming that we leave to someone else as we surround ourselves with excuses and fears.

While it is true that those who have experienced a particular grief may be better suited to help someone in the same situation, it is also certain that we don’t have to have a marriage coming apart at the seams to understand one that is. and we don’t have to have cancer to empathize with one who does. We must be cautious because, once more, we may be merely excusing ourselves when, in fact, we all know pain, little and big deaths. The key is to realize our commonality and connections.

Certainly grief is, in a sense, untouchable. No word or gesture can really alleviate the pain and sorrow that must be lived through, nor can we deny the ambivalence of the one we would approach; for that person (as Lewis also aptly describes) is often in a state of wanting/not wanting contact. But what the words and gestures do is let the griever know that she is not alone, that the community cares.

Thus, if we are a church we must somehow make our caring real, tangible. We can’t assume that people are aware of how much we feel without our showing them. And those moments when we do suspend our awkwardness and fears are special, hallowed moments. They are the simple, small gestures I recall so vividly: The eyes of a woman and her hug, no words needed; the Hallmark card with a few words written on the bottom; the brief “I’m sorry about your mother.” It’s not so much what we do (we should do what seems most suited), but that we do something.

Yet if one thing is clear it is that such caring probably won’t come without some real cost to the caring individual. It also probably won’t come without some education (some how-to) and life experience. Caring can be spontaneous, but often, especially in a diverse community, it is more a calling; a responsibility -- something we cannot neglect just because we feel we are no good at it or because we do not know the sorrowing person well enough. We are forced to choose. We can keep making our excuses, forming more rationalizations (parents are expected to die, after all -- it’s normal; my good marriage might be too hard for her to take; in an urban setting, what can you expect? people just aren’t as involved with each other), or we can face our responsibilities as Christians in and out of community.

Toward this latter choice, clergy can and must enable church members by education and example, for if they attempt to take on a caring role by themselves, they do a disservice to the church. Some communities have developed study and support groups for learning skills and using potential, and these are to be encouraged. (The Alban Institute in Washington, D.C., has written guidelines for such a formation in the booklet “My Struggle to Be a Caring Person.”) Always, however, our caring should be rooted in prayer, supported by others, surrendered to God.

What we are actually doing is God’s caring; that which seems difficult, impossible -- designed for the perfect beings which we are not -- can be done only by faith in God’s will and power. Whatever happens will be from God, not us: God in and through us working toward healing. Whatever we do is not done alone.

As Henri Nouwen has put it, there is great power (God’s power) in sharing our own wounded being with another; our wounds (recognized and embraced) can become a source of healing. Since we cannot escape being wounded and still be human, still be alive, all we are really doing is sharing ourselves. But when we do share, scars and all, the “wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision”; they “are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope” (The Wounded Healer [Doubleday, 1972], pp. 96, 95).

Something more also: If we can’t care about each other in community, in our little or large band of followers, how will we reach beyond those boundaries? It’s as if the church is a practice ground; we learn and struggle to care for each other and through this process begin to extend ourselves outward. If caring for the people inside the community is neglected, we will have even more difficulty (and a tendency toward superficiality) with those outside.

There is a passage in Luke in which Jesus meets a widow whose only son has died. The RSV reads, “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her,” while the New English Bible ending says, “his heart went out to her.” As a nurturing, Christ-formed community, we must seek to be compassionate, for it often does not come “naturally” -- so that our hearts may go out to others.

 

The Militarization of the American Rifle

Although the United States was spared any major assassination attempts during the past year, many Americans, both lawmakers and concerned citizens, are continuing to fight for gun control. The challenge of the Morton Grove, Illinois, no-nonsense handgun law has the National Rifle Association and other influential “pro-gun” groups scrambling for a major counterattack.

As usual, the gun-control campaign is focusing almost entirely on the handgun, unquestioned villain in thousands of murders and accidental deaths annually. There are currently some 60 million pistols and revolvers “in circulation” within the United States, a statistic that alone would appear to make gun control an unattainable goal. The rifle and shotgun, by contrast, are treated by most Americans -- proponents of gun control included -- as sacred. After all, people think of rifles and shotguns as hunting weapons, the tools of a game-and sport-conscious society. Large and bulky, they supposedly are not easily concealed, and, designed specifically for hunting, they are not considered effective antipersonnel weapons (and hence are subject to few legal restrictions). But recent developments in the gun world invalidate these perceptions.

In the past two years or so, a substantial proportion of America’s rifles and shotguns have been undergoing a metamorphosis into combat-oriented weapons. Their firepower has been dramatically augmented, their very configuration has been changed and, in many cases, they have blatantly been manufactured for killing human beings. The danger is not simply that a new class of firearms is finding its way to the potentially trigger-happy. The most frightening aspect of the problem is the quantum increase in short-range firepower (high cyclical rate of fire) which is now acceptable, and available to anyone with money. Unless this trend is reversed, we shall soon look back with nostalgia on the time when our worst threat was the “Saturday night special” in the hands of the local felon or psychotic. At least that weapon is prone to misfire, is wildly inaccurate and is able to fire only a small amount of ammunition -- slowly, at that.

Interested in purchasing a hunting rifle, I recently strolled into a local sporting goods store, with no malice in my heart toward firearms. Immediately, a clerk produced an intriguing rifle, which he claimed was a “bestseller” -- a sleek, lethal-looking instrument with a pistol grip and a rather short barrel. When I mentioned that it looked like a military arm, he told me that it, the Colt AR-15, is the same basic gun as the United States Army’s M-16, classified as a light machine gun (LMG). The only significant difference is that the AR-15 can fire only in the semiautomatic mode (that is, the trigger must be depressed anew for each shot).

Next, the voluble clerk proudly displayed some of the wide variety of extras, or “accessories,” available for the $500 rifle. Among these was a variety of telescopic sights designed especially for the AR-15, including an expensive night model giving extraordinary visibility in the dark. A bipod attachment would steady the rifle when fired from a prone position, without obstructing its bayonet mount (bayonets were temporarily out of stock). There was a special sale on AR-15 “Swat Paks,” canvas pouches normally worn over the shoulder. These carry three additional magazines for the rifle, each of which holds 20 rounds of .223 caliber (NATO 5.56 mm) ammunition. Thirty-round clips, in their own special Swat Paks, were also available, but were not on sale. If I felt, however, that I could make do with only one spare clip, I could buy a stock pouch in camouflage-color Velcro, to be strapped to the rifle’s stock for swift retrieval in case of an emergency. Amazed, I asked just what all this gear had to do with hunting.

“Nothing at all,” I was told. The AR-15 is, after all, a combat, self-defense or survival weapon, and even without all the accessories, it is not considered a decent hunting rifle.

The clerk told me that one of the AR-15’s major appeals, aside from its “macho” configuration, is its easy conversion to full automatic fire (the rationale for the Swat Paks, no doubt). After the conversion, the “hunter” can hit the trail with an M-16 LMG capable of a cyclical rate of fire of 1000 rounds per minute (assuming he could release and insert an impossible 50 magazines in 60 seconds). There are many people, I learned -- not all of them gunsmiths by any means -- who would be happy to do the (illegal) conversion for $100 or less.

That, however, might be money wasted, for one can buy a book titled Full-Auto AR-15 Conversion Manual (Desert Publications, $4.95), which, according to one advertisement, offers step-by-step instructions, with photographs and drawings, so that the handyman can do the work of conversion in the privacy of his own basement workshop. For perhaps $700, I could arm myself at least as well as an Army Special Forces trooper and, except for the conversion to the LMG category, could do it all legally. I could carry all the requisite gear, including the AR-15, out of the store immediately upon purchase, with no “cooling off” period (mandatory in most states for handguns only). My interest piqued, I soon learned to my horror that the AR-15 might well be one of the safest, most legitimate items being carried out of gunshops these days.



A brief perusal of standard mass-circulation gun, mercenary and survival magazines was a revelation. In one advertisement, the announcement that “Uzi is Here!” appears in one-inch type. It certainly is a grabber, for the UZI, “Manufactured by Israel Military Industries,” is a Special Forces, Secret Service and counterterrorist weapon of legendary proportions. Anyone who saw the televised report of the attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life saw the UZI, which magically appeared in the hand (and along the arm) of the most visible Secret Service agent. It is standard issue for the secret service of many nations because it is extremely small, short barreled, and fitted with a 20-round magazine.

On full automatic, the UZI belches bullets at an unbelievable rate, and like almost any other semiautomatic rifle or carbine, it easily can be converted to its intended fully automatic mode. With its folding, tubular stock and short barrel, it can be hidden beneath a suit jacket, thrust into a waistband or even taped to a forearm. Here is a weapon infinitely more dangerous than any pistol ever made, and it is now available to the general public -- albeit with a slightly longer barrel than the Secret Service’s version. Because it is classified as a rifle rather than a pistol, it is not subject to state and local regulations.

Properly impressed that UZI is here, I next learned that so is the equally legendary Ingram, with its folding stock. Almost pistol-sized, the Ingram won fame as a reliable “pocket machine gun” and Special Forces and commando weapon. It can now be purchased in either a 9mm (32-round magazine) or a .45 caliber (16-round magazine) version. In addition to holding the Ingram itself, its swat case has room for three spare clips (totaling 96 rounds of 9mm, or 48 rounds of the awesome .45 caliber ammunition), a flash suppressor (whose weight also stabilizes the barrel and keeps it from “climbing” during full automatic firing), a loading tool and cleaning accessories. The case itself, when loaded with “Kevlar” inserts and hung around the neck, becomes a bullet-proof vest stretching to the knees. Not at all a sporting proposition.

Within the past few months, another strictly military legend has appeared: the AKM. Infamous as the Kalashnikov assault rifle, this weapon has killed more American soldiers since 1952 than any other weapon in the world. Next to the Ingram, the AKM looks rather quaint. It is considerably longer, has a genuine wood (detachable) stock and a forward-curving magazine. It can be had with the full range of combat accessories, and is, no doubt, destined to be a big hit with the plinking crowd, many of whom, ironically, dodged Kalashnikov bullets in Vietnam.

There are many other such weapons currently and widely available. One of the favorites is the Heckler & Koch 91 Assault Rifle in 7.62 mm (the standard NATO combat round, which means easily available ammunition). Originally produced in Europe, the H&K 91 proved so popular with American “sportsmen” that it is now being manufactured in the United States to keep up with the demand. A recent gun-magazine review waxed rhapsodic about the accuracy of the gun: “The most noticeable feature of the 91 was that everyone seemed able to hit man-sized silhouettes at unknown ranges . . everything we looked at we could hit.”

Readers will be cheered to learn that, according to one advertisement, “Now you can own it. . . THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS GUN!” The object of this hyperbole is not the 19th century Colt peacemaker or the Winchester carbine: it is the tommy gun, the same Thompson submachine gun made famous by Eliot Ness and World War II marines. It is, of course, sold only in semiautomatic, to our tremendous relief. The Thompson can be purchased in either .22 or the original .45 caliber, with either a 30-round clip or the more “classic” drum magazine, holding a good deal more ammunition. Thompsons can also be had without a stock, becoming, when converted to full automatic fire, a dandy machine pistol, a tremendously effective short-range devastator. Hunters might be pleased to know that such a weapon could cut a full-grown Kodiak bear in half with less than two seconds of automatic fire.

M-S Safari Arms recently released its custom-made ($1,600) sniper rifle in .308 caliber, complete with a modified Marine Corps special issue sniper stock, in fiber glass, and a 20-round magazine. For the penny-wise, there is the intriguing BMF Activator for only $19.95. This little toy attaches to any Semiautomatic rifle in seconds. The marksman then simply turns a crank instead of pulling a trigger. The crank can turn so swiftly, according to the promo, that the rifle can spit out up to 1,200 rounds per minute -- 20 per second! For another $12.95, one can buy a bipod, so that one can steady the LMG and not shear down trees with it accidentally.

Paladin Press, Desert Press and others offer the “sportsman” such favorites as Home Workshop Silencers, Principals of Quick Kill, Get Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks, Special Forces Handbook, U.S. Army Sniper Training Manual, Techniques of Harassment and How to Kill, the latter in four volumes.

Some venerable and respected manufacturers, such as Ithaca, are now producing special riot guns for the public, and even shorter-barrel models for the police and military. Sporting goods stores routinely carry a variety of such lethal models (known in the popular argot as “intimidators” -- an understatement if there ever was one). Loaded with “double 0” shot, or perhaps the very new 12-gauge “Flechette” round, with its 20 tiny, finned steel arrows, these are perhaps the most devastating short-range antipersonnel weapons ever devised. Since it is almost impossible to aim or control the spray of shot, riot guns are also the least discriminating of weapons.

And what of the duck hunter’s darling, the all-American shotgun? It too has been transformed. Advertisements abound for “retooling” ones shotgun into a “swat combat” riot gun. Almost any commercially manufactured shotgun can have its stock removed and be fitted with pistol grips and/or folding stocks. This work can be done with common household tools by anyone with an hour or so to spare. Feature articles in prominent gun magazines enter into very explicit detail on how best to convert a common Mossberg or Remington bird gun into a riot gun, which, it goes without saying, has no hunting applicability whatsoever.

Finally, and on the cutting edge of the future, is a new technology bursting upon the rifle (and shotgun) scene. Laser Products Corporation is now marketing a laser aiming system designed to fit a variety of weapons, including the AR-15/M-16 and riot gun. This little gadget can make a Wyatt Earp out of an aged grandmother or a ten-year-old, for it sends a very narrow, concentrated beam of red light to the target. When the red dot appears on your target’s forehead, the bullet or shot will hit that forehead, for what you see is what you hit. It is all but impossible to miss. So far the laser system, costing in excess of $4,000, is restricted by law, but efforts are under way to make it “safe” for the “average” shooter. This simply entails blocking the emission of laser “radiation” to avoid harming the gunman.

Almost all of the weapons and gear described above (and much more of the same, such as the “restricted” and armor-piercing Teflon-coated bullet) are readily available to all but the obviously insane, and much of it can be purchased by mail. A modest survey of gun and sporting goods stores indicates that if the AR-15 and H&K are not on the rack at any given moment, it is because they sell so fast that they are difficult to keep in stock. They are, however, on order, rest assured. Tens of thousands of Americans are busily outfitting themselves like Army Rangers or SWAT police.



The implications of the transformation of the American rifle and shotgun are many. None of them inspires optimism. Here are a few not-so-outlandish scenarios of what could happen, based on incidents traditionally involving handguns:

Bobby Joe, drunk as a skunk in his local saloon and enraged by someone’s pawing his girlfriend, goes out to his pickup truck. Reaching into the glove compartment, he extracts his trusty Ingram, folds down the frame stock and stomps back inside. In two seconds or less he could empty his 32-round clip, spraying bullets hither, thither and yon. The Ingram’s rate of fire would more than compensate for any lack of marksmanship on Bobby Joe’s part. Even greater mayhem might be produced if our protagonist reached instead for his Mossberg ten-shot riot gun, with which he could hardly avoid blasting everyone near him to shreds.

Max, the urban sniper, could lie on a tenement roof with his M-16, equipped with telescopic sight, bipod, flash-hider and Swat Pak. Or, if he preferred the ultimate in accuracy at the expense of cyclical fire rate, he could use his M-S Safari Arms sniper rifle.

Terrorist Claudine could bring her stockless H&K or UZI (with a spare magazine or two) to political rallies. The UZI, like the Ingram, would fit into any large purse. If Claudine had steady nerves, if she could retain her sense of timing, she would almost certainly be assured of a score (or two, or three. . . .)

The potential for political or social havoc inherent in the availability of these weapons is staggering. Traditionally, the police and the Secret Service have at least had the advantage of being considerably better armed than society’s miscreants. This condition can no longer be taken for granted. Had President Reagan’s would-be assassin been armed with an UZI, an Ingram, an H&K 91 or a riot gun, the results would surely have been far more serious, and for more people.

If street gangs begin acquiring large numbers of such weapons the probability of major violence approaches the unthinkable. The police would have to laager their wagons, and America’s cities could become vast “Fort Apaches.” Today’s zip gun may become tomorrow’s shortened M-16, and today’s switchblade its bayonet.

Criminals, vigilantes and paranoid survivalists “gain” from such weapons; sportsmen and society as a whole do not. When members of a local gun club in New Hampshire, Indiana or New Mexico can control more devastating firepower than the armies of Tanzania or Paraguay, it is time to rethink priorities.

The Mentally Retarded: Recognizing Their Rights

About a year ago, I came across a brief news item in our diocesan newspaper that referred to the work of a group called the Society of the Holy Innocents. The name would have been welcomed by leaders in the field of mental retardation 40 years ago. But no more. The image of mentally retarded people as innocent, childlike creatures who can do no deliberate wrong is only one of many simplistic ways of describing them that have done more harm than good. Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger has identified a number of the traditional concepts that our society has had of mentally retarded people (The Principle of Normalization in Human Services [National Institute on Mental Retardation, 1972]). He points out that we have thought of these people as being less than human; as creatures to be pitied, ridiculed or feared; as eternal children; or as having a disease. Each of these images dehumanizes them.



Recent federal and state laws and court decisions have added authority to the current philosophy that the mentally retarded are persons who have legal and civil rights under the U.S. Constitution, just as all other citizens do. P.L. (Public Law) 94-103, the Developmentally Disabled Assistance and Bill of Rights Act (1975), identifies the rights of mentally retarded people, including the right to training to develop their capabilities to the maximum. P.L. 94-142 (1975) assures that all handicapped children will receive an appropriate education. Similar laws have been passed in most states, and numerous court decisions have proclaimed that mentally retarded people must be given the opportunity for a full life in the “least restrictive environment. For most of them, this means being in a home and a community like yours and mine.

Those who think of mentally retarded people as living in, and needing to live in, large institutions should consider the following facts. Most of them (approximately 90 per cent) are mildly retarded (I.Q. 55 to 69), and in the majority of cases, self-supporting. Most moderately retarded people (I.Q. 40 to 54) can live in a home environment and work successfully in a sheltered workshop (many corporations subcontract routine, repetitious jobs to such workshops). A number of studies have shown that the mentally retarded become more independent in small community programs where they are exposed to the experiences of everyday life. This “community” experience may mean living in their family’s home, in a supervised or unsupervised apartment, in a supervised group home with other mentally retarded people, or in any home in the neighborhood. The experience also may involve working in any one of a variety of competitive jobs that nonhandicapped people also hold, working in a sheltered workshop, or attending a program that teaches self-help skills like cooking and doing laundry, as well as various prevocational skills.

The thrust over the past 15 to 20 years has been to move mentally handicapped people out of institutions and into such community programs. This movement has been greeted with enormous enthusiasm by some, with overwhelming opposition by others. Neighborhoods where group homes are to be located have frequently been cautious and somewhat fearful about what this will mean for their image and for property values. But many people have taken a much more positive attitude toward their mentally retarded neighbors once they have gotten to know them.



The struggle for recognition of the rights of mentally handicapped people is reminiscent of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Both fought for the right of all people to be treated as human beings, able to live and work where they choose. John Gliedman and William Roth, in The Unexpected Minority: Handicapped Children in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), have demonstrated the numerous similarities between the prejudice toward black people and toward the handicapped.

The civil rights movement received a great deal of support from churches and clergy. Ministers, priests, nuns, monks and laypeople prayed, discussed, sang and marched to help win fair and equal treatment for black people. Seeing black people as their brothers and sisters in the Lord, they, attempted to live according to Jesus’ admonition that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

As Christians, we must learn to treat mentally retarded people with dignity -- not with pity or ridicule -- and to help change our society’s attitudes toward them.

Social change occurs in part because laws and court decisions mandate a change in the way people act. But it also comes about because people’s attitudes arc transformed. Laws and court decisions require that black people be treated as equals. However, it is obvious that blacks are still discriminated against, because many whites still do not accept them as equals. The same is true of the treatment of the mentally retarded. Their rights may be protected by law, but they will never be treated with dignity unless people’s attitudes change.

Churches should play a major role in fostering greater acceptance of and respect for the mentally retarded. Consider the following suggestions for action that could be taken by congregations:

• Encourage clergy to give sermons that highlight the dignity of all people, including mentally retarded children and adults.

• Sponsor educational programs for church groups and for the public, providing information about the capabilities and needs of mentally handicapped people. Provide information about current programs for these people.

• Make integration of mentally retarded people into regular church services and programs the primary method of providing services for them. Provide special programs only when necessary.

• Integrate mentally retarded children and adolescents into religious education programs. Provide special classes for those not able to participate in regular classes.

• Encourage mentally retarded children and adolescents to join in church-related activities such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and youth groups.

• Make special programs for mentally retarded people appropriate for their chronological age. (Adults should not be provided with childish Sunday school fare.)

• Provide moral support for residential and work programs that are planned for your community or neighborhood. This can be done at public hearings held to inform the community about programs that plan to locate in your area.

Many of these suggestions can also be applied to other handicapped people: those with cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, mental illness, amputated limbs and so on. Churches need to become more aware of the difficulties that handicapped people face, to become more involved in bringing Christ into their lives, and to become more active in challenging the nonhandicapped to recognize their responsibilities as Christians to their handicapped fellow Christians.

Teaching About Religion: A Middle Way for Schools

The 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Schempp-Murray decisions, proscribing prayer and Bible reading in public-school classrooms, took place in 1983. In the post-1963 controversy, it often has been all but forgotten that the justices’ decisions had a double intent: both the advocacy and the practice of religion (for example, worship) were forbidden; at the same time, the Supreme Court explicitly encouraged “teaching about religion” as part of a curriculum of secular education. This second part of the court’s prescription has received much less attention than the first, and the implementation of it has been only occasional at best.

Two conference-symposia held in the anniversary year attempted to appraise the progress made in teaching about religion in public education. Baylor University’s J. M. Dawson Studies in Church and State convened the first of these in March. The National Council on Religion in Public Education (NCRPE) extended its annual meeting in Indianapolis (with funding from the Lilly Endowment and Gemmer Foundation) to include a special symposium on the question early in October. When they are published, the papers from both meetings will be of importance in clarifying basic problems. Issues of principle, as well as practical needs, were considered.

The mood of both conferences was marked by concern over contemporary developments. Did the members of the high court recognize that part of their ruling would be so hard to implement? Did they understand that the symbolic power of their prohibition of prayer would continually overshadow other issues? Of course, the courts must uphold the First Amendment provision against any and all who wish to capture the public schools for their own sectarian teaching. But the question of what can be done to implement the court’s recommendation that schools teach about religion is also relevant.

Speaking at the Indianapolis coloquium, Dean M. Kelley, the National Council of Churches’ executive for religious and civil liberty, criticized advocates of school prayer. He argued that they seek to return to the polity of the period of William and Mary, when one form of religion was established and others only tolerated. But the total exclusion of religion from schools is not the only possible alternative. Teachers can be trained to treat it with both objectivity and historical perspective -- with an aim to inform rather than to convert.

Fundamentalists -- identified by their biblical literalism -- represent a pre-Enlightenment stance. By contrast, advocates of the total exclusion of all religion from the public-school curriculum speak from a post-Enlightenment perspective. The U.S. was founded on an Enlightenment ideology that recognized the importance of religion as well as the danger of its propagation by the state. It is to the Founding Fathers that the Supreme Court has appealed repeatedly in its decisions. Jefferson, for example, did not propose the total exclusion of religion at the new University of Virginia, but encouraged its nonsectarian presentation.

Any long-term view of American education must ask how well the nation’s total cultural heritage, including religion, is being passed on. In the Schempp-Murray decisions, the Supreme Court recognized that one’s education would be incomplete without some knowledge of the Bible and the history of religions. (“Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment.”) Yet the present population of the country, especially the student population, actually knows less and less about the Bible.

Teaching about religion is not just a way of avoiding issues. It is necessary to say and to know what religion, Christianity included, has been and done historically in order to talk about it responsibly. There is a legitimate place, therefore, for teaching about Judaism and Christianity, as well as other world religions, in public education. Curriculum strategies for such teaching deserve support from religious institutions and agencies even though they cannot sponsor them directly. Religion in the public-school classroom need not be as divisive as critics of the religious right allege.

How the national religious ethos has developed since the court’s 1963 decision was a first consideration for both the Baylor and Indianapolis meetings. Harvey Cox put the matter in perspective at the beginning of the Indiana colloquium. The Schempp-Murray decisions were made in the era of the death-of-God theology, when, moreover, religion was viewed increasingly as a private matter. Today, both trends have been reversed. Whatever else may be said about the American cultural scene, religion is not in decline today. Children who do not hear about God from their parents learn about God from television. Media religious programs usually reflect the popular, often fundamentalist interest in religion. Right-wing groups are becoming known for interest in social concerns that serve their own needs. Even for fundamentalists, religion is no longer simply a private matter. The religious New Right has taken a very vocal interest in education, charging that the public schools in particular are permeated with secular humanism.

Like school officials, the majority of pastors in mainline denominations have done little apart from making general policy pronouncements. No one in the power structures of education seems to be working effectively to find an appropriate place for religion. It is not difficult for religious groups to join with secular agencies like the ACLU in opposing fundamentalism, scientific creationism and school prayer. But positive strategies that would take religion out of quarantine in public education are another matter.

The field is left to the fundamentalists, who derive much of their following from an outspoken reaction against secularism. The issue of religion in public education has fallen largely into their hands. Never mind that they often confuse the private and public worlds, placing the Bible above and outside of history, as Samuel S. Hill and Dennis E. Owen point out in their excellent study The New Political Religious Right in America (Abingdon, 1982). Fundamentalist leaders attract large followings, in part, presumably, because of their easy answers. But it may also be because others have defaulted on this crucial issue.

The fundamentalist charge that secular humanism is a religion taught in the public schools is, of course, omnibus. Appraising the issue at Indianapolis, a specialist from Indiana University’s School of Law noted that the case would be helped if the definition of secular humanism as a religion could be made to stick -- but it cannot. Having sampled public opinion as well as having made a more precise legal interpretation, the lawyer concluded that the charge would not hold up in court; Religion evokes worship; secular humanism does not.

Fundamentalists and their allies do begin to have a case when their opponents argue simplistically that the public schools are God-neutral rather than godless. Indeed, much of American public education is conducted under the banner of religious neutrality, and public opinion is increasingly restless about it. Our uneasiness about living in a secular society seems to be influencing our feelings about education, often in irrational ways -- stimulated, in part, by television evangelists. But symptoms must not be mistaken for the underlying condition. As the legal specialist at the Indianapolis meeting remarked, religion cannot be taken out of public education simply by court rulings; it will disappear from the schools only if it ceases to live in the “thoughts and hearts of citizens.”

If one listens to superintendents and other school officials, it is clear that they have become generally more defensive. Many of them see themselves as caught between fundamentalists on the one hand and antireligious people on the other. Religion in public education seems to them to be explosively controversial. Most of all, they fear litigation. In reaction to fundamentalism, many administrators intentionally avoid any mention of religion in the public-school setting -- an unhappy educational situation, to say the least. In the face of threats from both the left and the right, they wish to continue its omission from the curriculum.

School officials who earlier were willing to speak out for at least some form of teaching about religion now retreat into silence despite the Supreme Court’s explicit encouragement. Even so, such people are often accused of having a “hidden religious agenda” because of the remnants of the Hebrew-Christian tradition in the schools’ religious values, holidays and customs. By contrast, public opinion seems to favor more, not less, religion in the schools.

School superintendents are agents of their school boards, hired to carry out board policy and wishes -- and this leads to dilemmas. If they are insubordinate, they are subject to dismissal. School boards often reflect that portion of popular opinion which is uncritically proreligion and wishes religion and/or its values to be recognized in the curriculum. Prayers are still said in more schools than might be expected. But when threatened with litigation, some local boards retreat and relent, to the dismay of their constituencies.



Instead of giving up, those interested in the intelligent treatment of religion in the schools might try various alternatives. Tuition tax credits, now court-sanctioned in Minnesota, could be followed by other revisions and changes. Milton Konvitz of Cornell University Law School has argued that earlier stands of principle have already been modified -- and not for the better. The Supreme Court justices recognized a wall of separation between religion and public education in the first decisions with which they entered the field directly after World War II. Yet even in their early decisions, Konvitz finds, this wall of separation was breached and compromised by the invoking of a general welfare provision.

Is there compromise in Senator Mark Hatfield’s (R., Ore.) proposal to allow religious meetings on high school premises? University student members of the “Cornerstone” evangelical group won court permission to meet on a state university campus in Missouri. The larger question is whether the courts will allow the same right at the high school level. Interestingly, the Hatfield proposal is supported by lobbyists for the National Council of Churches, who have long opposed school prayer and Bible reading. It is not the separation of church and state but the right of free speech which the court invoked in the Missouri precedent.

If the Hatfield proposal is written into law, it should be accompanied by very careful safeguards to protect school officials. One hears continually of cases in which evangelical student groups have been encouraged and allowed a place in school programs. A reason given is that they contribute to a healthy moral atmosphere. Later, it has become necessary to restrict such groups because of their exclusiveness and intolerance. However, like so much of the popular discussion, the Hatfield proposal has little or nothing to do with crucial curriculum matters.



At present, the NCRPE is the principal agency promoting teaching about religion. James Wood of Baylor University, the group’s president during the past year, is a seasoned, knowledgeable scholar of church-state relations. Charles R. Kniker, editor of the NCRPE bulletin (soon to become a full-sized magazine) Religion in Public Education, teaches in the department of education at Iowa State University.

Lynn Taylor, who directs the NCRPE administrative offices at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, lists five areas as relevant for teaching about religion: (1) religion and literature, including the Bible as literature; (2) religion and the arts; (3) value studies (values inevitably are taught, whether their religious basis is recognized or not in public education); (4) world religions; (5) American religion. Taylor favors what he calls “natural inclusion” rather than the imposition of religion on the curriculum. In his view, teaching about religion uses analysis and description, not proclamation or celebration. He has directed his efforts to giving already certified teachers the necessary tools and understanding for this kind of teaching. Largely because of his program, more than 30 per cent of the high schools in his state offer elective courses about religion.

Interfaith curricula have been developed in a number of states since the Supreme Court’s ruling 20 years ago. They offer a middle option between the extremes of fundamentalism and dogmatic secularism. There are alternative strategies: curriculum enrichment as well as full-length course offerings. The first is possible because social studies as well as literature courses must deal with religious subject matter: Islam in the Middle East, Buddhism in East Asia, religion in American life. Religious themes in the works of many writers need to be discussed in teaching literature.

By far the most influential program now in use is that developed by Lee Smith and Wes Bodin of St. Louis, Minnesota. Originating in a suburban system near Minneapolis, their course on world religion grew out of a controversy about school holidays. The local community, approximately one-third Lutheran, one-third Jewish and one-third Roman Catholic, was sharply divided. The high school elective course that Smith and Bodin developed has significantly improved interfaith relations. Its carefully crafted materials (filmstrips, tapes and texts) are used nationwide -- indeed, throughout the English-speaking world. Funded by three successive grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the project was able to develop class-tested materials and to enlist the support of recognized historians of religion.

An important aspect of Smith and Bodin’s material is their encouragement and support of pluralism. Each student is expected to be what he or she is religiously; there is no advocacy. At the same time, clergy in the communities where the course has been used report that younger members of their congregations come to them, seeking information.

Discussions of religion in education have been forced to include consideration of the Christian Day School movement as an alternative strategy. Such schools have grown rapidly and have an almost exclusively Protestant fundamentalist constituency. When viewed as part of a church’s ministry, schools have claimed freedom from state control in the name of the separation of church and state. At the same time, many seek government subsidy in the form of tax exemption. Tension about accreditation and government regulation continues to be sharp, and incidents receive national publicity. It is clear, however, that the “threat” to public education posed by the new religious schools can be exaggerated.

There need not be an either/or situation, with education divided between Christian schools that teach religion and public schools that exclude it -- all in the name of the separation of church and state. The kind of curriculum suggested by the Supreme Court continues to offer a “middle way” based on religion’s cultural role.

At the beginning of the Minnesota course, Smith and Bodin ask students to identify religious agencies (synagogues, churches, hospitals, schools), places and persons that they know in their local community. The list turns out to be a long one. Why should all that it represents be taboo in the American public-school curriculum, when it is so deeply a part of American life -- past and present? The NCC’s Kelley reported that recently a leading born-again Christian remarked in public that a great door had been opened by the Supreme Court’s decision on teaching about religion, but it has not yet been walked through. There will have to be more recognition of the need to walk through that door before major dilemmas are overcome.

The Supreme Court reference to teaching about religion is even more important and worthy of implementation today than it was 20 years ago. A better understanding of its meaning -- amid a growing pluralism -- could bring great gains for public education.

Buddhism and Christianity: Advancing the Dialogue



Many church congregations make their first contact with practicing Buddhists when they sponsor refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. In most American cities, the Buddhist community is not large, although it has grown with the influx of immigrants from Southeast Asia. The situation is very different in Hawaii -- sometimes called the “Buddhist state.” The rate of Caucasian-Oriental intermarriages there is high, and increasing; most of them are Buddhist-Christian. A denominational chaplain from one of the Hawaiian state universities told me that he spends a major part of his time counseling such prospective partners about the adjustments they will have to make. Buddhist-Christian relations are not abstract or theoretical in such circumstances; this chaplain is on the cutting edge of the encounter between the two religions.

The same can be said of the Second Conference on East-West Religions in Encounter, held under the sponsorship of the University of Hawaii’s department of religion on Oahu early this year (January 3-11). The theme suggested by German theologian Hans Küng, “Paradigm Shifts in Buddhism and Christianity,” was addressed by more than 100 Buddhist and Christian scholars from outside the islands. Hajime Nakamura, now retired from the University of Tokyo, was a major spokesman for Buddhism. The last three days of the conference included a Buddhist-Christian dialogue among a group of theologians under the leadership of John Cobb of Claremont.

A Buddhist-Christian dialogue group has existed in Japan for 20 years, largely inspired by Matoshi Doi of the National Christian Conference Center in Kyoto. David Chappell of the University of Hawaii, who directed the conference, held up the Kyoto dialogue group as a model to be followed in the United States, where Buddhist-Christian discussion has been sporadic. Doi was an observer for the United Church of Japan at the Second Vatican Council.

When I visited Doi in Kyoto early in 1983, he arranged several meetings for me. He made my first stop a visit to a modern, air-conditioned Buddhist temple where a group of very impressive, well-preserved statues of Buddha from early Japan was on display. I was sure that Doi, himself a committed Christian, was trying to remind me of the depth and power of the Buddhist heritage in his country; he was trying to say that it cannot simply be replaced by Christianity. At the Honolulu Conference, where Doi was honored for his leadership in dialogue, he spoke of the growing threat of nuclear warfare, pleading that this development alone makes it imperative for Buddhists and Christians to come together in mutual understanding.



The conference’s announced interest in “East-West Religions in Encounter” was symbolized on my arrival at Hawaii Loa College, where the meetings were held: Hans Küng was standing outside the college building surrounded by Tibetan Buddhist monks in their characteristic red robes.

Küng gave the opening and closing addresses of the conference, and participated in discussions throughout the week. The theme of paradigm shifts had already been discussed at an earlier meeting under his leadership at Tübingen in West Germany. European and American scholars reflected on model changes in Christianity in different periods of its history: the early church and the patristic, medieval scholastic, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods. The Hawaii conference represented an extension of this theme into the consideration of changing models in Buddhism.

Küng explained his approach to the theme as follows: Often he speaks with a coreligionist who is identified with the same confessional and ecclesiastical heritage as Küng’s; yet they seem to approach matters in radically different ways. Küng has come to describe the difference as one of paradigms. He picked up this theme from Thomas Kühn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kühn identifies sudden paradigm shifts as occurring when new scientific models, for example, are accepted -- such as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. Küng and his colleagues use this term to explain the history of religions, identifying varying religious paradigms in different ages.

Such analysis, of course, involves a certain historicizing of Christianity, one that Küng and others, like the late Karl Rahner, have used disturbingly in their own church. Can it be applied to Buddhism, a religion which is extremely diverse culturally, has no central authority and possesses a weaker historical consciousness than Christianity does? Hajime Nakamura, an expert on early Buddhism in India and noted for his book on ways of thinking, East and West, was very open to the discussion of diverse historical models as a new approach to East-West encounter.

One of the major achievements of the conference was that it supplied some of the scholarly research necessary for interfaith dialogue. And the proceedings moved beyond preparation for dialogue to actual give-and-take. For example, Küng commented on Nakamura’s opening address, “Buddhism and Christianity Compared,” given at the Central Union Church. In addition, the conference had excellent support and cooperation from the major religious groups in Honolulu; the addresses were well attended by the general public. My intention in the following comments is to identify what might be called the vanguard of the discussion, rather than to give an inclusive report on what was said and done.

The conference invited leaders in the Buddhist movement for social justice in Southeast Asia who are now dealing with problems that have long since surfaced elsewhere. However, most of the Buddhist participants were from Japan, either of Zen or Pure Land background. They face issues of secularization and disestablishment different from those in Thailand and Ceylon.

Perhaps the most “applied” approach at the conference was that of a professor at a southeastern university who simultaneously participates in Benedictine life and Zen meditation, attempting to understand these traditions concretely rather than as an observer. The theological dialogue led by John Cobb discussed the theme of suffering in Buddhism and Christianity. Again, the issues raised were practical as well as theoretical.

Of course, Gotama Buddha himself was concerned with practical matters. He likened the human situation to that of a man shot by a poisoned arrow. The question for Buddha was not where the arrow came from, much less what its essence is -- but how to get it out before it kills the victim. Zen Buddhism has been accused of carrying such a position to an extreme, and of anti-intellectualism, But Masao Abe, now teaching at the University of Hawaii, made it clear that Zen is not a reductionism. His concern is that Buddhist and Christian spirituality stand over against a simply secular approach.



On the other hand, conference members were reminded of the difficulties of Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Asia by the paper of Jan van Bragt of the Nazan Institute for Religion and Culture in Japan. He reported that most Buddhist intellectuals he knows presuppose an impersonal absolute, and hold to this view against any other approach. The Buddhist notion of “voidness’’ is a key reference in this regard. Ultimate reality is conceived of as empty rather than as intentional or substantial in terms of spirit. Christian interest in Buddhism and the attempt to appropriate its insights is far more widespread than Buddhist interest in Christianity Still, the situation is not a simple one in Japan, he said, Much of the vitality of religious life and practice in Japan is in the so-called new religions, some of which draw on Buddhism more than others. These new religions are also active in Hawaii. For most of them, evil is understood in terms of karma (each individual receives the consequences of past deeds in this or another lifetime). The Buddhist idea of dependent origination excludes creation. Causal sequences are recognized within the world of appearance but there is no ultimate First Cause. The new religions which are related to Buddhism refer to a transpersonal Nirvana.

Given the divergence of their religions, what is the point of East-West exchange? In his address. which was open to the public, Küng gave part of the answer, calling attention to the revival of religion going on around the World. Religion, in fact, has not withered away or been superseded, as advocates of scientism and Marxism have long prophesied; it remains a determinative factor in culture.

Küng called for religions to be presented in their modern, not their obscurantist, forms. It is clear that religious models or paradigms need to be examined critically if one is to avoid a fundamentalist approach. The issue becomes crucial in teaching about religion in public education, for example. Buddhism must be included: like Christianity, it ought not to be misrepresented or caricatured, its views of the world and the self stand over against those of Western secularism and Christianity. Buddhism needs to be understood on its own terms.

The two most illuminating moments of the theological encounter group were quite unplanned, and happened during the dialogue. The first was when Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago argued that for both Christianity and Buddhism, evil and suffering remain “inexplicable,” Gilkey knew more about Buddhism than many of the other participants, having spent World War II in a prison camp in China. The biblical fall story, he insisted, can no longer be regarded as an explanation of evil, but only as an exemplification of its structures.

A second crucial point came when Gordon Kaufman of Harvard argued that there is a metaphysics implicit in Buddhism, even in Zen. But metaphysics, like modern science, was not discussed at any great length. Of course, many Buddhist apologists argue that their religion fits better with modern scientific cosmology than does Western theism. Such a claim needs to be set over against the fact that modern science developed in the West.

The whole question of the West’s translation of the Greek cultural synthesis of Hellenism and Hebraism is inevitable in any inclusive discussion of the issues of the conference. How much is the Greek way of thinking intrinsic to Christianity? One asks this in particular when one seeks to relate it to a culture which does not share the legacy of Plato and Aristotle. How much can Oriental thought patterns replace these Western modes? John Cobb, as a process philosopher in the tradition of Whitehead, argued for a major appropriation of Buddhist outlook and philosophy as against Greek notions of substance

Cobb’s emphasis on incarnation, in particular, is important. It stands in contrast to that of his colleague at Claremont, John Hick, who turns away from this theme, essentially leaving it out in the dialogue among world religions. Cobb explores it in detail, especially in dialogue with Amida Buddhism. It seemed that all participants wanted to demythologize; the question was, how far? Demythologizing among Buddhists is carried full circle by Zen -- the position which has showed itself most open to dialogue with Christianity in Japan. Members of other schools give larger attention to “Mahayanist metaphysics.” Practically speaking, a religion -- Buddhist or Christian -- that becomes too demythologized may invite fundamentalism in reaction.

Some basic historical questions remained largely on the fringes of the dialogue. For example, the Mahayana revolution (greater than any change in Christianity) and the philosophy of Nagarjuna, its major theoretician, went undiscussed in any detail. These topics remain important in a dialogue situation in which religions need to be taken as wholes. The question is not just what the founder said, but what it meant for the followers.

Amida Buddhist conferees in the tradition of the 13th century Japanese teachers Shinran and Honen seemed closest to Christianity. Viewing Amida Buddha as a savior, they teach salvation through faith in his name. It was interesting to hear the comments of a Buddhist in this tradition who was contaminated with radiation from the American bombing during World War II. He must now be monitored periodically for the rest of his life to measure and control the radiation’s effects on his body. He examined the question of evil and suffering more personally than others. And Cobb’s emphasis on God as the principle or ground of creativity interested him in a question which did not concern Gotama Buddha -- namely, that of deity.

Any responsible dialogue implies willingness to hear and to accept the other. If either side believes that it possesses exclusive truth and defends its own ideas in a “bloc view,” dialogue becomes impossible. The most outstanding feature of the conference was the absence of promiscuous eclecticism. Buddhists are Buddhists, and Christians Christians; yet religions have always borrowed from each other. The question is how and under what circumstances -- on what theological premises. Kong, for example, knows Barth very well; Barth wrote the introduction to his book on justification. Yet he does not accept Barth’s claim that all non-Christian religions are only idolatrous strivings after God. And this Barthian idea certainly does not apply to Buddhism.

Nakamura’s study Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan makes an invaluable, indeed an indispensable, contribution in any exchange of religious ideas East and West. Not just theological presuppositions but life stances need to be probed. This was understood by the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, for example, as he attempted to appropriate Zen Buddhist insights. However, Zen is by no means all of Buddhism, but rather an iconoclastic form of Mahayana. It is an open question whether Zen can be thoroughly understood apart from Mahayanist history. The most serious Zen philosophical analysis has taken place in the school of Nishida. Katsumi Takizawa of this tradition was sent to study under Karl Barth and became a Christian. Still trying to appropriate Buddhist insights, he has written of a Buddhist Christianity - Among New Testament scholars, Seichi Yagi, who participated in the theological dialogue, has understood the power of Buddhist ideas and attempts to appropriate them.

The depth of insight of such thinkers makes it clear that the general Buddhist lack of interest in Christianity gives us no reason to abandon dialogue. Doi has shown his amenability in a practical way. His premise always has been that both sides have something to give. Cobb argues similarly that Buddhism grasps some aspects of “ultimate reality” which Christianity does not explicate as fully. The Hawaii conference was effective because the dialogue was fundamentally religious. Both Buddhism and Christianity were viewed as religions that have generated philosophies but that are not merely philosophies.

Whether Buddhism can supply a community ethic of social justice has been debated ever since neo-Confucianisms advent in China. The question surfaced at the conference. Gotaina himself did not have much to say about justice in itself, but spoke of compassion in a transitory world. Of course, Buddhism, as a quest for salvation (like Christianity), was not primarily political. Religions seek ultimate transformation, and their paradigms need to be appraised from this perspective. Buddhist soteriology and ethics initially were set in the very unmodern context of revolt against Hinduism. Like Christianity, Buddhism became identified with monarchy.

Buddhism’s relation to Western secular culture is still being formed. Christians, for their part, need to understand Buddhist paradigms if for no other reason than that they certainly will influence our society more, culturally and educationally, in the future.

Returning from Honolulu, I was reminded of the experience of my home congregation. Two years ago, it sponsored first a Vietnamese, then a Cambodian refugee family. Both projects led to disappointment. The Vietnamese family was Roman Catholic in background and soon stopped attending our Protestant services. The Cambodians never came to church. “Cambodians remain Buddhists,” it was said. I think my congregation might have done better -- or at least might have understood what was happening -- if it had received some of the information that came to the conference participants at Honolulu.