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Our Own Silly Faces: C.S. Lewis on Psalms

A recent article in the C. S. Lewis Bulletin maintains that while Reflections on the Psalms (Harcourt, 1958) is "one of the lesser known works in the Lewis Canon," it "remains the one book on the Psalms that would satisfy the general reader in our time" (Carol Ann Brown, "Mirrors of Ourselves: Reflections from the Psalms," CSLB X:8, June 1979, pp. 1-5). This is true only if that general reader welcomes the negative contribution that Reflections makes to the Christian’s understanding of Judaism. The book’s tone reflects the same smug triumphalism that is found in Lewis’s better-known works.

Lewis professes shock at all the "hatred" he finds in Judaism; even in the Psalms "this evil is already at work" (p. 67). Elsewhere he refers to some Psalms as "vulgar," "petty," "self-righteous," "contemptible" and even "devilish" (pp. 21-25). I do not think these damaging labels can be made to stick, but I know what causes Lewis to affix them. Lewis did not read Hebrew, a fact with which he is honest enough to begin his book. He immediately goes on to propose that this very lack of scholarly training makes him better able to communicate the ideas in Psalms to others as amateur as himself. The pupil, he says, can often teach other pupils better than the master can. So Lewis’s lack of Hebrew is really a virtue! (Would he apply this maxim to all fields of knowledge or only to the Old Testament? If the former, one wonders why he chose teaching instead of some more useful employment.)

One always feels a bit uncharitable going after dead authors, but Lewis’s reputation inevitably lends his remarks on Psalms a weight they cannot bear. Reflections is not intended as a scholarly work, but to abandon scholarship before beginning is like throwing away your compass before you enter the woods. No amount of enchanting prose makes good this lack.

As a self-confessed lower critic myself, I have some problems with the so-called higher criticism, but not nearly as many as Lewis has. For example, his idea of Psalms parallelism is that it is only "the practice of saying the same thing twice in different words" (p. 3). For someone whose own field of study, medieval and Renaissance English, requires a keen appreciation of language, this misunderstanding of the dynamics of Hebrew poetry is lamentable. Elsewhere, commenting on Psalm 119:l64, he informs his readers that for the God of Israel "mere quantity of praise seemed to count" (p. 91). The referent in this case is the number seven ("Seven times a day do I praise Thee"). His literary companions, in particular Charles Williams, might have told him that this number, like so many in Scripture, is conventional; but of symbolic numbers, Lewis shows no inkling. Worse, the cavalier treatment of Hebrew Scriptures also characterizes his treatment of Jews.

Apparently, Lewis’s chief informant on Judaism is Joy Davidman, his formerly Jewish wife, whose attitude toward the religion she left could charitably be described as poisonous. (See her Smoke on the Mountain [Westminster, 1954]. Davidman uses obscure, haggadic midrashism, or perhaps her own imagination, to pillory Judaism. She does not footnote.) Although the idea for Reflections dates from about 1948, the book was written during their brief marriage. They shared the common misapprehension that Judaism is runaway "legalism." And that the Law, like sacrifice, can take on a "cancerous life of its own" (p. 57).

Lewis sees legalism as further corrupted by the presumed vested interest of the Jewish establishment (p. 49). He uses John 7:49 to produce the notion that the rabbis considered any uneducated person to be "accursed." For a Christian audience he does not need to add that Jesus’s earliest followers were simple folk and that Christianity subsequently put no emphasis on knowledge. John’s Gospel is sufficiently unsympathetic to Judaism without this kind of "help." I have less argument with Lewis’s Greek, however, than with his cheerful lack of Hebrew.

Would Lewis have any patience with a commentator on Shakespeare who could read only Arabic? Why then does he allow himself to make remarks about a text that he, in fact, cannot read? Here one suspects that Lewis is simply following the Christian tradition that preferred Greek to Hebrew and, later, anathematized those who insisted on Greek in preference to Latin. Lewis admits that he is "no Hebraist," but does not recognize what follows from this admission. Putting it bluntly, if one doesn’t know Hebrew Scripture in Hebrew, one does not know it. Why?

For one thing, the different character of Semitic and Indo-European languages makes translation from one to the other extremely hazardous. For another, even languages within the same family often show a sort of lexical hypertrophy in areas that are of special importance to their users. Thus the Arabic vocabulary concerning camels is a legend among graduate students, as is the Eskimo for "snow." An example from Hebrew would be the group of terms that together constitute the semantic field we call "law." Lewis shows some familiarity with this abundance of names in his discussion of Psalm 119, but, like many other commentators, he assumes that the eight (or more) key words on which the Psalm is built are "more or less synonymous" (p. 58). Even if one agrees that synonyms may exist in a natural language (and I don’t), this casual treatment of such a large number of terms is unfortunate.

Lewis would probably agree that Hebrews initiated a notion of justice (as opposed to the Greek-derived idea of moira or fate). If it is our highest human task to "establish justice in the gate," as the Torah prescribes and the prophets exhort, we also need a fairly sophisticated notion of what human justice is. We have the "knowledge of good and evil," but deciding between the two is more complicated than flipping a coin. A well-calibrated vocabulary will also be required.

Hebrew manifests a fundamental distinction between "foreign" and "domestic" enemies. In fact, the word most English translations render by "enemy" denotes foreign powers almost exclusively. Given Israel’s precarious geography, this is not surprising. By contrast, the word we translate as "wicked" refers to those within the Israelite community who consciously and deliberately flout the law. Psalms alone contains about two dozen words all of which denote some form of malefactor (compare the five or six words commonly used in English). One could say that the semantic field "antagonist" in Hebrew is really a sort of shorthand catalogue for the whole spectrum of misdemeanors and felonies, each of which has its own particular dimensions.

For example, the word we translate as "sinner" denotes an Israelite who, though trying to do as he ought, "misses the mark" (see Josh. 20:16). That is, his sin is without evil intention. Obviously the same is not true of the wicked. But neither "sinner" nor "wicked" is applied to Israel’s foreign enemies. Foreigners, since they are not under the covenant of Moses, are not expected to conduct themselves as though they were.

To carry the subject further would require a dissertation, e.g., "The Concept ‘Antagonist’ in Hebrew Psalmography" which I wrote at Brandeis (1974). It should be clear, however, that the "hatred" in Psalms is not some sort of undifferentiated Jewish misanthropy. Rather, it is part of the attempt to recognize and respond to human failures to establish justice.

Probably few Bible readers ask themselves why the verse says what it does instead of saying "Do mercy, love justice, etc." Even fewer know that Hebrew sentences automatically emphasize what comes first. In this case, then, Scripture tells us that justice takes priority over mercy. Putting mercy first would invite injustice toward the victim. Of course, miscarriages of justice can roll in either direction; capital punishment is irrevocable, even for those wrongly convicted.

The Talmud (Makkot 1:10) recognizes this when it says that a Sanhedrin that carried Out one judicial execution in seven years would be called a "bloody Sanhedrin." To which Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah replies, "No, even one in seventy years." The point here is that human justice, no matter how imperfect, is what most differentiates us from animals. Leviticus 24:20; the much-maligned "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" passage, actually has as its purpose the establishment of government by law, not of humans. Doing justice requires an exacting precision -- even the very legalism of which the Lewises complain.

Delight in the law (Ps. 1), far from being in any way comparable to a love of one’s favorite subject (p. 56), is a real joy that God has given us guidelines to maintain the order which he initially rescued from chaos. It is no accident that the rabbis who canonized Psalms in the first century put delight in the law first. Lewis comes close to recognizing this in his discussion of Psalm 19.

In the midst of this discussion, however, he informs us that the poets of Psalms were hardly better than Coventry Patmore, the minor English poet about whom someone once wrote that he sometimes "wrote better than he knew." Lewis uses almost the same language to characterize Jewish knowledge of God (p. 61). No Jew, apparently, knows God in the way Christians do. As Lewis writes, "All Christians know what the Jews did not know about what it ‘cost to redeem their souls’" (p. 52). His attitude precludes serious discussion between Jew and Christian.

It could hardly be otherwise. Lewis steadfastly ignores any developments in Judaism beyond the distorted picture of Pharisaism that he derives from the New Testament. Consider Matthew 5:43: "You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemies." This curious utterance is claimed as a quote from Scripture, but it is not to be found anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. The closest one can come to it is the verse in Psalm 139, noted by Lewis with amused contempt (p. 66), in which the Psalmist avers that God’s enemies are his enemies, too. Hardly prescriptive. Even if there were such a prescription, knowing what the word "enemy" means in Hebrew would lend such a command some sense, especially in time of war.

It is depressing that humankind has not yet learned to beat swords into plowshares, but while the world remains in this fallen condition, it is just as well that our soldiers are not taught to love those against whom they must fight. One can hate evil without personal rancor; as Psalm 97:10 says, "Oh you who love the Lord, hate evil." It says nothing about hating evildoers.

Even the much-beloved Psalm 23 does not escape Lewis’s scorn. Lewis follows Moffatt’s translation of verse 5, "Thou art my host, spreading a feast for me while my enemies have to look on (Lewis’s italics). He continues, "The poet’s enjoyment of his present prosperity would not be complete unless those horrid Joneses (who used to look down their noses at him) were watching it all and hating it" (p. 21). It is more likely that the Psalmist is praising God for protecting him even though he is beset by human adversaries. Lewis’s remarks tell us more about him than they do about Psalm 23.

I do not mean to suggest that Christians must disqualify themselves from serious study of Hebrew Scriptures. But if they are to achieve any real insight into Psalms, several cautions must be observed. They must either know Hebrew or consult with someone who does; they should avoid invidious comparisons, explicit or implied; and they should hold their christological prejudices in abeyance. Otherwise, as Lewis himself recognizes (p. 121), "What we see when we think we are looking into the depths of Scripture may be sometimes only the reflection of our own silly faces."

The Jewish Uncertainty Principle

To outsiders it must often appear that through the centuries Israel has been the tail that wags the dog of history.

With the future so obviously in the hands of others, Jews have taken chunks of the Jewish heritage and fashioned new modes of self-expression at the various stops the train has made. In a forthcoming book, Marxism and Judaism (Cornell University Press), George Friedman identifies five such stops in modern Jewish history. In chronological order they are Hasidism (ca. 1740), Reform (ca. 1780), Zionism (ca. 1860), Marxism (Ca. 1880) and psychoanalysis (ca. 1900). The dates are approximate, and I do not intend my version of Friedman’s thesis to delimit his.

These five movements are not exactly denominations of Judaism, though two of them can make that claim. Rather, each is a kind of pseudopod into which the Jewish energies of their adherents have flowed. Like Christian heresies, the error of each is the error of all: an attempt at simplifying, by seizing upon one aspect of the whole, a complex system of counterweights that has kept Judaism In balance. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that each is like a blind person feeling one part of the elephant that is Judaism.

Hasidism, a branch of Jewish orthodoxy, was an Eastern European reaction to the Enlightenment and to the age-old Jewish notion that scholarship was the high road to piety. The Hasidim more or less substituted joyful prayer for pilpul (involuted Talmudic exegesis), but they had good historical precedent. Did not David dance before the ark (to his wife’s dismay) and compose many Psalms? The style of dress they adopted (kaftan and fur-brimmed streiml) was current in 18th century Poland, but it made them more and more identifiable as the fashions changed.

Not so the Reform Jews. When the fashions changed they shaved their beards, learned to speak German (instead of Yiddish), and expected their neighbors to accept them. If Jews could argue with God (Gen. 18:25) -- ”Shall not the Judge of all the earth judge justly?” --  could we not reason with humans as well? The idea that all people are rational has a kosher pedigree. Solomon is renowned for his ability to reason with people. Wise he was, but what is less known is that he wasn’t very smart -- for one thing he had 700 wives and 300 concubines. More to the point, one of his wives was an Egyptian princess whose pharaoh father, to cement friendly relations, gave to Solomon as a wedding present the town of Gezer. I have always hoped this young woman is responsible for some of Song of Songs: “I am dark but comely, ye daughters of Jerusalem.” In any case, the liaison didn’t help. Her father’s dynasty was replaced by another, and Israel was once again invaded.

Later on in the 19th century, when European nationalism could find no room for Jews, modern Zionism was born. Of course, there had been “Zionist” Jews since the Babylonian captivity of 586 B.C.E., but in the 19th century it became even more urgent to have a Jewish state wherein we could elect our own pharaohs.

At almost the same time, Marx proclaimed a classless, religionless society with room enough for everybody. Friedman points out that a near uncle of young Karl was the rabbi in Trier. It will be debated how important this uncle was to Marx, but the message of social justice is written in the prophets on almost every page. Marx’s attitude toward religion, by the way, is often misunderstood. His most-quoted remark on the subject is, of course, that religion is “the opium of the masses.” But the passage containing that statement also says this:

The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.

In the following paragraph he calls religion the “halo” in this “vale of tears.” Really. I seem to remember Gertrude Berg of the old Molly Goldberg Show saying something of the sort, but I’m not certain.

Some 20 years after Marx’s death, Sigmund Freud published his cure for human souls. At this point the objection may be raised that Marx wasn’t really Jewish and Freud even less so, but Freud was far more forthcoming about his Jewish connections than Marx was about his. Freud had a key insight that proper therapy for human problems involved the analysis of dreams. So did two other Jewish boys, named Joseph and Daniel. Of course, these biblical “analysts” thought of dreams as communications from God, while Freud found internal sources for them. But like the early rabbis, Freud also connected the “evil impulse” to birth and childhood.

To summarize: we see that in a period of 150 or so years Judaism produced five major hypertrophies, each of which has legitimate connections with rabbinic or even biblical Judaism. Why were we so prolific? Part of the answer is that after the French Revolution Jews were freer to dream up new theories of Judaism or humanity and to institutionalize them. But to say that is to see only the part of the iceberg that sticks up above the surface. New forms become necessary when people lose confidence in the older ones, and Judaism, by anyone’s count, is very old.



The revelation to Abraham, if it happened at all, occurred some 4,000 years ago; even the Sinai event took place at least 3,300 years ago. Jewish tradition reckons it that God stopped communicating to individuals, to the prophets, 450 years before Jesus and a whole millennium before Muhammad. (Since we are so much further from our source-revelation, the other monotheistic faiths may learn something from us about the morphology of religions.) Muslims bridge their gap by elevating ayatollahs (the word means “hand of God”) or descendants of the Prophet like King Hassan of Morocco. Muslims and Christians also have gathered a fine store of relics of Muhammad or Jesus, and some Christians have almost regular visions of the Virgin to renew their faith. Jews generally avoid this sort of thing. It is true that the chair belonging to Nachman of Bratslav (1772-181 I), a beloved Hasidic leader, is now to be found at the Bratislaver Yeshiva in Jerusalem, but Moses’ grave is lost to Jewish tradition. How can modern Jews renew and regain intimate contact with the source?

Our problem is particularly acute now because, as Walter Cronkite observed:

The Sixties Generation . . . learned falsely, in many cases, to expect a progression through life that included education, a good job, a house, a car, a family, and eventually retirement. Suddenly they saw the whole world turned topsy-turvy . . . the leaders we were once led to believe were trustworthy people . . . were still inadequate to handle the great problems of our day [Saturday Review, December 1983, p. 20].

Since he is speaking of the 60s, he can avoid mentioning Richard Nixon, but we can’t. A lot of Jews are Republicans. And if Mr. Nixon’s attempt to steal the 1972 election did not shake them, it certainly shook their children, the people born since World War II.

Just here another factor comes into play. Cronkite may or may not know it, but his words have a special poignancy for American Jews. Where ‘‘future shock’’ is concerned, consider the situation of Jews born in the U.S. in, say, 1927, the year Heisenberg published his theory of the “uncertainty principle.” Eastern European Jews (who constitute some 90 per cent of America’s Jewish population) born here in the ‘20s have children who grew to maturity in the ‘60s. But their parents probably -- and their grandparents certainly --  remember the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 that precipitated their headlong flight from Czarist Russia. In 1903 there were few Jews attending Russian universities. At one point sending a Jewish student to a Russian university meant that his or her parents had to pay to send three non-Jews as well In this country Jewish professors are now commonplace, and many have become university presidents -- two Jewish women among them.

In 1924 large-scale Jewish immigration to the United States was curtailed by Congress. That didn’t matter much to the older, German Jewish community that had come in the 1840s and 1850s, and it would not matter to those Jews who became communists in the 1930s. But actually it did matter more than either group could foresee. Even before the fountains of Yiddishkeit (Jewish culture) in Europe were blocked, the rich Jewish culture of America had already begun to dry up. We were progressively cut off from the wellsprings of European Judaism as we had been from the initial source of revelation so many centuries before. We became Republicans and communists and a lot of things in between: movie producers, labor leaders, concert violinists.



Jewish history here since the ‘20s is a bit like trying to walk down a sidewalk with one’s eyes closed. Having once seen the path ahead, we could take our first few steps swiftly and surely, but after that each succeeding step becomes more hesitant until, finally, we deviate to the right hand or to the left. Under the circumstances it is not all that surprising that many Jews have veered into left- or right-wing positions -- or, in the case of Norman Podhoretz (editor of Commentary) and Paul Cowan (author of An Orphan in History), both. Marxism and Hasidism give Jews a structure, a culture, something or somebody to believe in.

So does Zionism. When Yigal Yadin informed Israel’s then-president, Yitzhak Ben Zvi, of the discovery of the Bar-Kokhba letters, he put it this way:

Your Excellency, I am honored to be able to tell you that we have discovered fifteen despatches written or dictated by the last President of ancient Israel 1800 years ago [Bar-Kokhba (Random House, 1971), p. 15].

I am not sure how attractive psychoanalysis and Reform are today. The Reform rabbinate’s decision to allow children of one Jewish parent, father or mother, to consider themselves Jewish stems in part from the realization that Reform ranks are no longer swelling. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is expensive; yet there have always been Jews on both ends of the couch. To understand why, we have to look again at the Jewish generation gap.

Certainly the first native-born Jewish generation vastly outstripped the accomplishments of its parents; was it not for just this reason that so many of that generation came to the U.S.? If some expected the streets to be paved with gold, most simply resolved to plow themselves in as fertilizer for the next generation. Those of the second native-born generation crashed previously restricted professions as they did the previously closed neighborhoods. Jews can now be found at Ford Motor Company (the Naismith Motors of Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentlemen’s Agreement), and one Irving Shapiro was president of Dupont. Henry Kissinger’s Jewish-refugee background, like Joseph’s, did not prevent his attaining high (if nonelected) office. The question now is, what do their children do for an encore?

Rabbi Maurice Davis of White Plains, New York, points out that the present generation of Jewish young people, those born here in the ‘60s, is the first one that cannot reasonably expect to surpass its parents’ achievements, as those parents did their parents’. Still, the pressure to do so is enormous. Young people who, as adults, merely retain the same level of upper-middle-class success that their parents have can regard themselves as standing still or coasting on the momentum acquired by their forebears. But what else is there to do?

We play pretty good games of golf and tennis at our own clubs, and in 1972 Mark Spitz became the first Jew, as the joke goes, ever to win seven gold medals at the Olympic Games. (Of course, no one of any persuasion had done so before.) If Waspiola Country Club still doesn’t want to have Jewish members, that’s their problem. We don’t have to climb anymore; we’re at the top. And that’s the real problem, isn’t it?

In order to get there, we had first to take off our heavy religious clothes and throw our more cumbersome customs into convenient crevasses. We shaved our beards, learned English -- some of the best American novelists are Jews -- and assumed we could rely on the enlightened self-interest of our government to protect us. In the ‘60s and ‘70s that foothold failed everyone, Jews included. We are at the top, but it’s awfully cold up here with no clothes on.

Some of my Boston friends got together in 1968 to start the first havurah, “association of friends,” to practice a fairly conservative brand of Judaism away from the Jewish institutions they had grown to distrust. A few individuals moved farther right and found a home among the Hasidim, especially the proselytizing Lubavitcher movement. But the entire Jewish community is experiencing a rightward shift these days. The Reform movement now sends all of its first-year rabbinical students to Jerusalem -- a move that will certainly have a profound effect upon its laity. Not only has Reform turned 180 degrees on Zionism since 1885, but the Union of American Hebrew Congregations also enjoins its rabbis to refuse to marry mixed couples.

Will this trend last? Like Heisenberg, I’m uncertain. Better to say that even if it does not, such a shift to the right will happen again and again because the one good thing about being in the observation car is that you can see with some clarity where you have been.

Our Jewish uncertainty is unsettling, but it’s nothing new. Only shortly after Sinai, when Moses was barely cold in his grave, Joshua had to bully and cajole the Israelites into worshiping God (see Joshua 24). And it was not until Hezekiah’s time (ca. 700 B.C.E.) that Israelites gave up the practice of burning incense to Moses’s bronze serpent (II Kings 18:4). If we couldn’t be certain way back then, how much more will we be uncertain today?

The re-creation of Israel has been a big help, even to those who object to some of the present government’s ideas. The numerous archaeological finds made there since 1948 have given us renewed contact with the deep past of Judaism and a new appreciation of the Bible’s overall accuracy in depicting it. The point here is that any religious people needs a means of returning to its past. If we cannot do that through relics of Ruth, descendants of David, or sightings of Solomon, we must find some other path. There is, in fact, a Hasidic story about that sect’s charismatic founder which points the way.

Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, when confronted with a serious problem, used to retire to a certain spot in the woods, light a fire, and say a special prayer -- and God always answered him. His disciple and successor, Dov Baer of Mezhirech, did the same, except that for fear of Cossacks he did not light the fire. Still, it was enough. In the third generation, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak lost the spot in the woods, so he stayed home and only recited the prayer. Nevertheless, it sufficed. Finally, in the fourth generation they complained, “We have lost the spot in the woods and we cannot light the fire. We have forgotten the prayer even. All we can do is tell the story.” Even so, God answered them.

In Hasidic/Orthodox thought each generation accounts itself less worthy than the one before. Not a bad system, really. The opposite tack, taken by many moderns, is that each succeeding generation is ever so much more enlightened than its predecessors and can dispense with what passed for wisdom among the ancestors. Perhaps that is why the past 150 years witnessed so many varieties of Jewish experience. On balance, my sympathies are with the Hasidim, but there is one problem.

Besides being “less worthy,” we are fewer in number now than we were in 1939. One Jewish sociologist has estimated that if we extrapolate from present trends, by the year 2076 there will be only 10,240 Jews in the United States.

How can he be so certain?

What to Do Until the Messiah Comes: On Jewish Worldliness



In Walter M. Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, the symbolic Jewish character says, “I was told to wait, and I wait.” With admirable tenacity, Benjamin survives for centuries on the edges of a fast-flowing civilization, contributing little save his own Wandering Jewish presence, a lonely witness to the unredeemed state of the world. His Messiah does not come and he doubts now that he will. Either way, his is the perennial Jewish problem: what to do in the meantime.

What Jews seem to have done in the past, whenever chance allowed, was to heed Jeremiah’s advice to the Babylonian exiles to plant gardens, build houses and live in them; to seek after the good of those countries on whose shores we are cast. Some of us by doing good have done right well, and this has led to the charge that Jews are materialistic, or in any case “worldly.” The charge is meant as a reproach, but not only is the reality explainable with reference to our history, it is also defensible theologically.

First, it must be remembered that not all Jews, now or ever, believed in a Messiah. While modern Orthodox maintain that Messiah is implicit in Torah itself, scholars suggest that the idea, and the hope, grew as a function of Israel’s national powerlessness after the destruction of the First Temple. In the Middle Ages, Joseph Karo, compiler of the authoritative Shulchan Aruch, excluded Messiah from those beliefs required of Jews. No doubt his ruling came partly in response to the new, outdoor sport of disputation, the church-sponsored debates between Christian apologists, usually converts from Judaism, and local Jewish leaders. The latter were constrained to confute Christian claims concerning Jesus without refuting Christianity. If the rabbis lost, they were expected to convert; if they won, they could be exiled, tried for heresy or killed.

Then again, Karo may have been reacting to the exploits of David Reubeni, the latest in a long line of pseudo-messiahs. Jewish history shows no shortage of claimants; we know the names of 16 or 17, dating back at least to St. Paul’s time. But for Gamaliel’s mention of Theudas in Acts 5:36 we should have no record of the man and, indeed, it is probable that more messiahs have been lost to history than the number who are remembered. Johanan ben Zakkai, Hillel’s last pupil and a contemporary of Jesus, is quoted as saying, “If you are planting a tree and you hear that Messiah has come, finish planting the tree, then go and inquire.”

Several of the false messiahs achieved notable success: David Alroy, Shabbetai Zvi, Jacob Frank. (Zvi’s followers persisted for about 150 years after his death and despite his forced conversion to Islam.) In most cases, the duped disciples were induced to sell or give away all their possessions in preparation for a magic flight to the Holy Land. This shows either that Jews are not as smart as the popular stereotype has it, or that we would gladly trade our mess of pottage for the chance to live at peace in our own land. But “once bit, twice shy,” the Jewish people have borne enough teethmarks in the past 2,000 years to have become a bit skeptical of those pseudo-messiahs -- religious or secular, Marxist or Moonie -- who arise with almost monotonous regularity. Utopian promises will always attract more Jews than they reasonably should, but most of us have learned caution. Yet it was neither caution nor skepticism that prompted Johanan ben Zakkai’s remark; rather, he was commenting on Judaism’s basic thrust, the way it moves in and through the world.



A friend in graduate school confided to me that his ambition was to become the next great Jewish theologian. My response was, “Terrific. Who was the first?”

For all the thinkers Judaism has produced, ours is a religion of deeds. A key to this ethic is provided by the words in Exodus 24:7, na’aseh venishmah, “We will do, and we will understand.” Of course, the phrase is taken out of context, and others could be found (e.g., Exod. 24:3) that point in the opposite direction. But Exodus 24:7 has captured a large part of the Jewish imagination. And what is it that we are to do? Mitzvoth.

The mitzvoth (commandments, good deeds) are 613 statements, both positive and negative, regulating human behavior in virtually all of its aspects except thought. Every act is included, from Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply,” to the prohibitions of murder and adultery. The Shema (Deut. 6:4) is the only Jewish creed. We are not commanded what to believe, only how to act.

Since many of the commandments are cryptic or ambiguous, much rabbinic ink is expended to clarify them. The Talmud is, in a sense, the business record of the House of Israel, extending over a period of about eight centuries, from 300 B.C.E. to 475 C.E. Much of it is concerned with the business of business or legal relationships, leading again to the charge that Jews are more concerned with mundane matters than they are with morality, more concerned with letter than spirit. The charge is baseless. Nor is St. Paul (II Cor. 3:6) telling us something we did not already know. To quote a famous Midrash,

Six hundred and thirteen commandments were given

     to Moses. . . .

David came and brought them down to eleven; as it

     is written:

   “Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle: He

   that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteous-

   ness. . .” [Ps. 15:1-5].

Isaiah came and brought them down to six; as it is

     written:

   “He that walketh righteously and speaketh up-

   rightly   [33:15].

Micah came and brought them down to three; as it

     is written:

  “It hath been told thee, O man, what is good....

   Only to do justly, to love mercy and to walk

   humbly with thy God” [6:8].

Amos came and brought them down to one: as it is

     said:

   “For thus saith the Lord to the House of Israel,

   ‘Seek me and live’” [5:41 [Cited in Nahum

   Glatzer, The Judaic Tradition (Beacon, 1969)].

 

The Midrash offers an alternative ending, Habakkuk 2:4, “The righteous shall live by faith,” a phrase that meant a lot to Luther. Whether or not one’s soul is redeemed by faith alone, we should all agree that the world we live in is at present not redeemed. Jews accept the impossible task of redeeming it. Are we worldly? Emphatically yes, but in the best sense of the word.



We Jews are as overrepresented in the economic communities of the West as we have been in messianist movements, a fact that has been gleefully exhibited by both Christians and Marxists as further proof of our materialism. Few of either persuasion probably know how the situation came about. Forbidden by the newly Christianized Roman Empire from owning land or practicing most professions, Jews were herded into moneylending by church and state, the former purposing to humiliate them, the latter to milk them. (Edward I said, “The Jews are my cows” before selling the entire Jewish community of England to his uncle, the earl of Cornwall.) To criticize those Jews who nonetheless attained a certain level of proficiency in business is a bit like forcing someone to eat nothing but Hostess Twinkies and then upbraiding him when his teeth fall out.

Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac), the great French commentator, interpreted the last phrase of the response to the Shema, “You shall serve the Lord . . . with all your strength,” as meaning with all your wealth. Works are necessary for salvation, but they are not sufficient. We Jews do not expect to gain admission to heaven by presenting the stubs of our checkbooks. As we annually remind ourselves on Yom Kippur, our deeds count for nothing (ki ‘ayn banu ma’asim). Nevertheless, we are commanded to do them.

Jewish support for both non-Jewish and Jewish charities is too well known to need retailing here. Nor are all our alms given in public through community fund drives, encouraging individuals to do more than they would if appealed to privately. Names of public benefactors are inscribed on their works, in order to excite emulation, not admiration. These memorials, according to Isaiah 56:5, are better than sons and daughters, at least to those who cannot have children.

I used to be embarrassed by the plethora of name plaques at my alma mater, Brandeis University. We had a saying that if the Messiah appeared there, he would bear a plaque proclaiming who had donated him. Then I went to Israel and saw a donor’s inscription still readable on one of the columns from the third century synagogue at Capernaum (Kfar Na-hum): “Herod, son of Mo [ni] mos and Justos his son, together with their children, erected this column.” Jesus extolled the widow’s mite, and it was indeed a magnificent gesture. But many mites are needed to build a synagogue and millions for a cancer research laboratory. The synagogue is a ruin, but it survives. I wonder what became of that Herod’s grandchildren.

A fair number of Jews have been orphans and widows. Most Jews have been desperately poor and some of the rich have had all their wealth confiscated by rapacious states of which they were not citizens, merely subjects -- e.g., Aaron of Lincoln and Mordecai Meisels of Prague. The Hitler government made itself a tidy little profit of about 12 billion marks when it expelled Germany’s Jews, and an additional $10 million was extorted from Western Jewish communities frantic to rescue these captives.

What is often lost in these discussions of Jewish riches, however, is the wealth of Jewish contributions in fields that seek to ameliorate the human condition: science, teaching, the arts, medicine, in the first 70 years of Nobel Prize competition, almost 25 per cent of the recipients in physiology and medicine were Jews. An equal number of Jews were honored in chemistry and physics.

Of course, most Jews don’t win Nobel Prizes. The majority wish to be left alone under their vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid. Some would prefer to forget that they are Jews. Christians must wonder why we Jews are so heedless of the state and destiny of our “souls.”



For one thing, biblical Judaism does not begin with the same notion of soul as the one most Christians have. It is true that even in pre-Israelite times there was an almost universal belief that the spirits of the dead continued to reside near their bones or in the earth beneath them. Sunday schoolers may recall the original Ma Bell, the medium through whom Saul called up the shade of Samuel. But nephesh, the word that is so often translated “soul,” means much less (see Ps. 27:12) and much more.

Two of its more prominent uses are found in Leviticus 17:11. The King James Version reads, “For the life of the flesh (nephesh hayah) is in the blood; ... for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul (nephesh).” A long history of Christian translation apparently understands nephesh as equivalent to the Greek psyche, the “soul” of soul-body dualism. It makes no sense, however, to suggest that the soul is in the blood, else we should have to follow the Jehovah’s Witnesses and deny transfusions; even nosebleeds would be a theological problem. The generally late and poetic neshamah comes closer to soul; but even here “person” is a better rendering.

Philological niceties are best left to philologians, however. Since Talmudic times Judaism has upheld the idea of individual salvation. St. Paul’s trial (Acts 23) pinpoints resurrection as the subject of ongoing dispute between Pharisees and Sadducees. How, then, do we Jews save our alleged souls?

Here, I think, Judaism and Christianity are remarkably close in outlook. For most Christians, salvation is an act of grace, which is a free gift of God. For Jews, too, salvation is an act of God’s hesed, a word that the KJV obscurely translates “lovingkindness,” but which really means an unconditional act of love, uncompelled and unmerited. The major difference between us is that Christian grace is obtained through the intermediacy of Jesus, while our gimlet-eyed Jewish business mentality moves us to eliminate the middleman and apply for mercy directly from the Great Wholesaler. The Mishnah (Babylonian Talmuh Sanhedrin 10.1) says, “All Israel have a place in the world to come.” But the rest of the chapter is spent in listing exceptions to the rule. The problem for us Jews is that we lack the certainty of having obtained the grace some Christians are so sure they have.

What is more remarkable is the Talmudic opinion that the “righteous of all nations have a place in the world to come” (Sanh. 56-60). Not only is salvation from the Jews, but, like Levy’s Rye Bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it. (So much for the claim that Judaism is exclusive.) All you have to be is righteous.

Gentile righteousness is, according to us, also a matter of deeds. Judaism holds that all humanity is obliged to keep the laws of God’s covenant with Noah. They are seven in number and consist of prohibitions against blasphemy, idolatry, murder, theft, sexual offenses and eating from a still living animal, plus the positive mitzvah of establishing justice. There’s the rub.

Obtaining justice from gentiles has always been a problem. Until 1791 Jews had unequal legal standing in Muslim and Christian countries and so had to rely on their wits, bribes or the enlightened self-interest of the governing majority. None of these was sufficient to prevent their expulsion from the Spanish community on three months’ notice in 1492. Things were so bad that even at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Rabbi Levi Isaac of Beditschev (1740-1809), a follower of the founder of Hasidism, prayed, “Master of the Universe! If you will not redeem the Jews, your chosen people, at least redeem the gentiles.”’

After 1830 things got progressively better for the Jews in western Europe, but redemption of the gentiles was still beyond the horizon. In 1894, in the very place that gave birth to fraternité, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was assumed by many to be a traitor because, as a Jew, he could hardly be a loyal Frenchman, n’est-ce pas? In the more barbarous places, such as Russia, the Blood Libel persisted into the 20th century. (This slander, probably deriving from a pagan misunderstanding of Christian communion, insists that Jews use Christian blood in religious services.) The Blood Libel accusation against Mendel Beilis was the czarist government’s last blow in a 30-year campaign to destroy the Jewish world known to so many only through Sholem Aleichem’s stories.

In Fiddler on the Roof a young Jew implores, “Rabbi, we’ve been waiting for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?” The rabbi answers, “Certainly, my son. But we’ll have to wait for him someplace else . Meanwhile, let’s start packing.” Floods of Jews headed west for New York -- America, but others accepted another doleful necessity: if the Messiah would not re-create Israel, we would have to do it for ourselves.

After staining the margins of history for centuries, the blood of our brothers and sisters cried out for a place where Jews would not be subject to arbitrary expulsion. Political Zionism was more the bastard child of European nationalism than the legitimate offspring of Jewish religious aspiration. The Orthodox, whose longing for Zion kept the idea alive even when early Reform communities were declaring Germany (I) to be their fatherland, produced ultra-Orthodox splinters that reject the modern state of Israel as an imposter. Whatever one’s position on Israel as a theological necessity or a political reality, one must understand that the existence of the state is a ringing rejection of quietism. Without having to heed Gandhi’s 1936 suggestion that Germany’s Jews adopt an Indian-style civil resistance to the Nazis, Hitler’s Europe became a Jewish graveyard. It would have been a good time for the Messiah to come.

According to a Hasidic belief, the Messiah would come if every Jew in the world once observed the same Sabbath correctly. Conversely, the Hasids also hold that if a Sabbath comes on which no Jew observes, then the Messiah will have to come. If the world isn’t good enough yet, perhaps it isn’t bad enough either. Or we may believe with Franz Kafka, who wrote, “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary.”



The world of Canticle ends in nuclear holocaust. Benjamin, transformed now into the beggar Lazarus, makes his final appearance 50 pages before a small group of Catholics, of the world but no longer in it, make their escape by starship. Benjamin is not invited along, but I don’t think he would have accepted an invitation even if one had been forthcoming. There is a Talmudic Haggada (explanation) that posits the birth of the Messiah on the very day that the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The Jewish job of redeeming the world remained.

It still does. Some of us were told to wait, and we are waiting. We will do, and then, perhaps, we will understand.

The Inflated Self

Poised somewhere between sinful vanity and self-destructive submissiveness is a golden mean of self-esteem appropriate to the human condition.

Stanford Lyman.

 



There is no doubt about it. High self-esteem pays dividends. Those with a positive self-image are happier, freer of ulcers and insomnia, less prone to drug and alcohol addictions. Researchers have also found that people whose ego is temporarily deflated are more likely then to disparage other people, or even express heightened racial prejudice. More generally, people who are negative about themselves also tend to be negative about others. Low self-esteem can feed contemptuous attitudes.

There is also little doubt about the benefits of positive thinking. Those who believe they can control their own destiny, who have what researchers in more than 1,000 studies have called “internal locus of control,” achieve more, make more money, are less vulnerable to being manipulated. Believe that things are beyond your control and they probably will be. Believe that you can do it, and maybe you will.

Knowing the value of self-confidence may encourage us not to resign ourselves to bad situations, to persist despite initial failures, to strive without being derailed by self-doubts. But, as Pascal taught, no single truth is ever sufficient, because the world is not simple. Any truth separated from its complementary truth is a half-truth. That high self-esteem and positive thinking pay dividends is true. But let us not forget the complementary truth about the pervasiveness and the pitfalls of pride.

It is popularly believed that most of us suffer the “I’m not OK -- you’re OK” problem of low self-esteem. As Groucho Marx put it, “I’d never join any club that would accept a person like me.” Psychologist Carl Rogers described this low self-image problem when objecting to Reinhold Niebuhr’s idea that original sin is self-love, pretension or pride. No, no, replied Rogers, Niebuhr had it backwards. People’s problems arise because “they despise themselves, regard themselves as worthless and unlovable.”

The issue between Niebuhr and Rogers is very much alive today. And what an intriguing irony it is that so many Christian writers are now echoing the old prophets of humanistic psychology at the very time that research psychologists are amassing new data concerning the pervasiveness of pride. Indeed, it is the orthodox theologians, not the humanistic psychologists, who seem closest to the truth that is glimpsed by social psychology. As writer William Saroyan put it, “Every man is a good man in a bad world -- as he himself knows.” Researchers are debating the reasons for this phenomenon of “self-serving bias,” but they now generally agree that the phenomenon is both genuine and potent. Six streams of data merge to form a powerful river of evidence.

Stream 1: Accepting more responsibility for success than failure, for good deeds than bad.

Time and again, experimenters have found that people readily accept credit when told they have succeeded (attributing the success to their ability and effort), yet attribute failure to such external factors as bad luck or the problem’s inherent “impossibility.” Similarly, in explaining their victories, athletes have been observed to credit themselves, but are more likely to attribute losses to something else: bad breaks, bad officiating, the other team’s super effort. Situations that combine skill and chance (games, exams, job applications) are especially prone to the phenomenon. Winners can easily attribute their success to their skill, while losers can attribute their losses to chance. When I win at Scrabble it’s because of my verbal dexterity; when I lose it’s because “who could get anywhere with a O but no U?”

Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly at the University of Waterloo observed a marital version of self-serving bias. They found that married people usually gave themselves more credit for such activities as cleaning the house and caring for the children than their spouses were willing to credit them for. Every night, my wife and I pitch our laundry at the bedroom clothes hamper. In the morning, one of us puts it in. Recently she suggested that I take more responsibility for this. Thinking that I already did so 75 per cent of the time, I asked her how often she thought she picked up the clothes. “Oh,” she replied, “about 75 per cent of the time.”

Stream 2: Favorably biased self-ratings: Can we all be better than average?

It appears that in nearly any area that is both subjective and socially desirable, most people see themselves as better than average. For example, most American business people see themselves as more ethical than the average American business person. Most community residents see themselves as less prejudiced than others in their communities. Most drivers -- even most drivers who have been hospitalized for accidents -- believe themselves to be more skillful than the average driver.

The College Board recently invited the million high school seniors taking its aptitude test to indicate “how you feel you compare with other people your own age in certain areas of ability.” Judging from the students’ responses, it appears that America’s high school seniors are not plagued with inferiority feelings. Sixty per cent reported themselves as better than average in “athletic ability,” only 6 per cent as below average. In “leadership ability,” 70 per cent rated themselves as above average, 2 per cent as below average. In “ability to get along with others,” zero per cent of the 829,000 students who responded rated themselves below average, 60 per cent rated themselves in the top 10 per cent, and 25 per cent saw themselves among the top 1 per cent. To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the question seems to be, “How do I love me? Let me count the ways.”

Stream 3: Self-justification: If I did it, it must be good.

If an undesirable action cannot be forgotten, mis-remembered or undone, then often it is justified. If social psychological research has established anything, it is that our past actions influence our current attitudes. Every time we act, we amplify the idea lying behind what we have done, especially when we feel some responsibility for having committed the act. In experiments, people who oppress someone -- by delivering electric shocks, for example -- tend later to disparage their victim. Such self-justification is all the more dangerous when manifested in group settings: Iran justified its taking of hostages as a response to American policies it found to be morally reprehensible; the United States saw the moral lunacy on the other side. So everyone felt righteous, and a standoff occurred.

Stream 4: Cognitive conceit: Belief in one’s personal infallibility.

Researchers who study human thinking have often observed that people overestimate the accuracy of their beliefs and judgments. So consistently does this happen that one prominent researcher has referred to this human tendency as “cognitive conceit.”

One example is the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. Often we do not expect something to happen until it does, at which point we overestimate our ability to have predicted it. Researchers have found that people who are told the outcome of an experimental or historical situation are less surprised at the outcome than people told only about the situation and its possible outcomes. Indeed, almost any result of a psychological experiment can seem like common sense -- after you know the result. The phenomenon can be demonstrated by giving half of a group some purported psychological finding and the other half the opposite result. For example:

Social psychologists have found that whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are different from our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying that “opposites attract.”

Social psychologists have found that whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are similar to our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying that “birds of a feather flock together.”

Have people (1) write an explanation for whichever finding they were given, and (2) judge whether their finding is “surprising” or “not surprising.” In hindsight, either result can seem “obvious,” so that virtually all respondents will say “not surprising”  -- or “I could have told you that.”

Stream 5: Unrealistic optimism: The Pollyanna syndrome.

Margaret Matlin and David Stang have amassed evidence pointing to a powerful “Pollyanna principle” -- that people more readily perceive, remember and communicate pleasant than they do unpleasant information. Positive thinking predominates over negative thinking. In recent research with Rutgers University students, Neil Weinstein has further discerned a tendency toward “unrealistic optimism about future life events.” Most students perceived themselves as far more likely than their classmates to experience positive events such as getting a good job, drawing a good salary or owning a home, and as far less likely to experience negative events such as getting divorced, having cancer or being fired. Likewise, most, college students believe they will easily outlive their actuarially predicted age of death (which calls to mind Freud’s joke about the man who told his wife, “If one of us should die, I think I would go live in Paris”).

Stream 6: Overestimating how desirably one would act.

Researchers have discovered that under certain conditions most people will act in rather inconsiderate, compliant or even cruel ways. When other people are told in detail about these conditions and asked to predict how they would act, nearly all insist that their own behavior would be far more virtuous. Similarly, when researcher Steven Sherman called Bloomington, Indiana, residents and asked them to volunteer three hours to an American Cancer Society drive, only 4 per cent agreed to do so. But when a comparable group of other residents were called and asked to predict how they would react were they to receive such a request, almost half predicted that they would help.

Other streams of evidence could be added: We more readily believe flattering than self-deflating descriptions of ourselves. We misremember our own past in self-enhancing ways. We guess that physically attractive people have personalities more like our own than do unattractive people. It’s true that high self-esteem and positive thinking are adaptive and desirable. But unless we close our eyes to a whole river of evidence, it also seems true that the most common error in people’s self-images is not unrealistically low self-esteem, but rather a self-serving bias; not an inferiority complex, but a superiority complex. In any satisfactory theory or theology of self-esteem, these two truths must somehow coexist.



Many will no doubt find this portrayal of the pervasiveness of pride either depressing or somehow contrary to what they have experienced and observed. Let me anticipate some of the objections.

I hear lots of people putting themselves down, and I’m sometimes hampered by inferiority feelings myself.

Let us see why this might be so. First, those of us who exhibit the self-serving bias -- and that’s most of us -- may nevertheless feel inferior to certain specific individuals, especially when we compare ourselves to someone who is a step or two higher on the ladder of success, attractiveness or whatever we desire. Thus we may believe ourselves to be relatively superior yet feel discouraged because we fall short of certain others, or fail fully to reach our goals.

Second, not everyone has a self-serving bias. Some people (women more often than men) do suffer from unreasonably low self-esteem. For example, several recent studies have found that while most people shuck responsibility for their failures on a laboratory task, or perceive themselves as having been more in control than they were, depressed people are more accurate in their self-appraisal. Sadder but wiser, they seem to be. There is also evidence that while most people see themselves more favorably than other people see them, depressed people see themselves as others see them.

Third, self-disparagement can be a self-serving tactic. As the French sage La Rochefoucauld detected, “Humility is often but a . . . trick whereby pride abases itself only to exalt itself later.” For example, most of us have learned that putting ourselves down is a useful technique for eliciting “strokes” from others. We know that a remark such as “I wish I weren’t so ugly” will at least elicit a “Come now, I know people who are uglier than you.” Researchers have also observed that people will aggrandize their opponents and disparage or even handicap themselves as a self-protective tactic. The coach who publicly extols the upcoming opponent’s awesome strength renders a loss understandable, while a win becomes a praiseworthy achievement.

Perhaps all this “pride” is just an upbeat public display; underneath it people may be suffering with miserable self-images.

Actually, when people must declare their feelings publicly, they present a more modest self-portrayal than when allowed to respond anonymously. Self-serving bias is exhibited by children before they learn to inhibit their real feelings. And if, as many researchers believe, the self-serving bias is rooted partly in how our minds process information -- I more easily recall the times I’ve bent over and picked up the laundry than the times I’ve overlooked it -- then it will be an actual self-perception, more a self-deception than a lie. Consider, finally, the diversity of evidence that converges on the self-serving bias. Were it merely a favorability bias in questionnaire ratings, we could more readily explain the phenomenon away.

Is not the self-serving bias adaptive?

It likely is, for the same reasons that high self-esteem and positive thinking are adaptive. Some have argued that the bias has survival value; that cheaters, for example, will give a more convincing display of honesty if they believe in their honesty. Belief in our superiority can also motivate us to achieve, and can sustain our sense of hope in difficult times.

However, the self-serving bias is not always adaptive. For example, in one series of experiments by Barry Schlenker at the University of Florida, people who worked with other people on various tasks claimed greater-than-average credit when their group did well, and less-than-average blame when it did not. If most individuals in a group believe they are underpaid and underappreciated, relative to their better-than-average contributions, disharmony and envy will likely rear their heads. College presidents will readily recognize the phenomenon. If, as one survey revealed, 94 per cent of college faculty think themselves better than their average colleague, then when merit salary raises are announced and half receive an average raise or less, many will feel an injustice has been done them. Note that the complaints do not necessarily signify that any actual injustice has been done.

Does not the Bible portray us more positively, as reflecting God’s image?

The Bible offers a balanced picture of human nature -- as the epitome of creation, made in God’s own image, and yet as sinful, attached to false securities. Two complementary truths. This article affirms the sometimes understated second truth.

The experimental evidence that human reason is adaptable to self-interest strikingly parallels the Christian claim that becoming aware of our sin is like trying to see our own eyeballs. There are self-serving, self-justifying biases in the way we perceive our actions, observes the social psychologist; “No one can see his own errors,” notes the Psalmist. Thus the Pharisee could thank God “that I am not like others.” St. Paul must have had self-righteousness in mind when he admonished the Philippians to “in humility count others better than yourselves.” Paul assumed that our natural tendency is the opposite, just as he assumed self-love when arguing that husbands should love their wives as their own bodies, and just as Jesus assumed self-love when commanding us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. The Bible does not teach self-love, it takes it for granted.

In the biblical view, pride alienates us from God and leads us to disdain one another. It fuels conflict among individuals and nations, each of which sees itself as more moral and deserving than others. The Nazi atrocities were rooted not in self-conscious feelings of German inferiority but in Aryan pride. The conflict between Britain and Argentina involved a small amount of real estate and a large amount of national pride. And so for centuries pride has been considered the fundamental sin, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. If I seem confident about the potency of pride, it is not because I have invented a new idea, but rather because I am simply assembling new data to reaffirm a very old idea.

These researchers seem like kill joys. Where is there an encouraging word?

Are not the greater killjoys those who would lead us to believe that we can accomplish anything? Which means that if we don’t -- if we are unhappily married. poor, unemployed or have rebellious children -- we have but ourselves to blame. Shame, If only we had tried harder, been more disciplined, less stupid.

To know and accept ourselves foibles and all, without pretensions, is not gloomy but liberating. As William James noted, “ “To give up one’s pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified.” Likewise, the biblical understanding of self-affirmation does not downplay our pride and sinfulness. Recall how Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount hints at the paradoxical ways by which comfort, satisfaction, mercy, peace, happiness and visions of God are discovered:

“Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them!”

“Christian religion,” said C. S. Lewis, “is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in [dismay], and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay.” In coming to realize that self-interest and illusion taint our thoughts and actions, we take the first step toward wholeness. The new insights gained from psychological research into vanity and illusion therefore have profoundly Christian implications, for they drive us back to the biblical view of our creatureliness and spiritual poverty, the very view which, in our pride, we are so prone to deny.

Christians furthermore believe that God’s grace is the key to human liberation, liberation from the need to define our self-worth solely in terms of achievements, or prestige or physical and material well-being. Thus, while I can never be worthy or wise enough, I can, with Martin Luther, “throw myself upon God’s grace.” The recognition of one’s pride thus draws one to Christ and to the positive selfesteem that is rooted in grace.

There is indeed tremendous relief in confessing our vanity -- in being known and accepted as we are. Having confessed the worst sin -- playing God -- and having been forgiven, we gain release, a feeling of being given what we were struggling to get: security and acceptance. The feelings one can have in this encounter with God are like those we enjoy in relationship with someone who, even after knowing our inmost thoughts, accepts us unconditionally. This is the delicious experience we enjoy in a good marriage or an intimate friendship, in which we no longer feel the need to justify and explain ourselves or to be on guard, in which we are free to be spontaneous without fear of losing the other’s esteem. Such was the experience of the Psalmist: “Lord, I have given up my pride and turned away from my arrogance. . . . I am content and at peace.”

What, then, is true humility?

First, we must recognize that the true end of humility is not self-contempt (which still leaves people concerned with themselves). To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, humility does not consist in handsome people trying to believe they are ugly and clever people trying to believe they are fools. When Muhammad Ali announced that he was the greatest, there was a sense in which his pronouncement did not violate the spirit of humility. False modesty can actually lead to an ironic pride in one’s better-than-average humility.

True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty. As my colleague Dennis Voskuil writes in his forthcoming book, Mountains into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success (Eerdmans), the refreshing gospel promise is “not that we have been freed by Christ to love ourselves, but that we are free from self-obsession. Not that the cross frees us for the ego trip but that the cross frees us from the ego trip.” This stripping-away leaves people free to esteem their special talents and, with the same honesty, to esteem their neighbor’s. Both the neighbor’s talents and one’s own are recognized as gifts and, like one’s height, are not fit subjects for either inordinate pride or ~e1f-deprecation.

Obviously, true humility is a state not easily attained. C. S. Lewis said, “If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too.” The way to take this first step, continued Lewis, is to glimpse the greatness of God and see oneself in light of it. “He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of [the pretensions which have] made you restless and unhappy all your life” (Mere Christianity [Macmillan, 1960], p.99).

Emphasizing the Congregation: New Directions for Seminaries



Dissatisfaction with curriculum is nothing new to the world of theological education, where “seminary faculty get as passionate about revising curricula as Jesse Helms does about cutting food stamps,” as one seminary trustee has observed. But the discussion has taken on new substance of late with the critique advanced by Edward Farley, professor of theology at Vanderbilt. In articles published in a variety of forums over the past two years, Farley has argued that the current organization of the theological curriculum corresponds to an ecclesial reality that no longer exists. The substitution of career-oriented professional training for the classical notion of theology as a wide-ranging pursuit of the knowledge of God has meant the loss of the unifying subject matter of theological education. This has resulted, according to Farley, “in an educational experience on the part of the student which has the character of an introduction to a fairly large number of types of expertise, but without an apparent paradigm that makes sense of the whole cluster of inquiries. The result is that theological education is experienced as ‘academic’” (Theological Education, Winter 1981).

With the glue gone that once held them together, Farley argues, the traditional disciplines -- Bible, church history, systematic and practical theology  -- of the classic, fourfold curriculum will continue to function in a dispersed state until a new paradigm is located which can organize the pursuit and attainment of theological education. As it happens, that is exactly what James Hopewell thinks he has run across in his work. Eight years of experiment and study as a professor of religion and the church at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology have convinced Hopewell that “the congregation is as central to theological education as the human body is to medical education.”

If Hopewell’s name seems familiar, it’s probably because of his contributions during the ‘60s to the development of theological education in the Third World. A former director of the World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund, Hopewell now serves as director of the Rollins Center for Church Ministries at Candler. He is eloquent on the subject of “the unique religious system present within each congregation,” and speaks with missionary zeal of “the bulky body of symbols and stories and values and beliefs and histories contained therein which lie just beyond the grasp of any of the quantitative tools at our disposal.” Yet he is realistic about the distance which many of his seminary colleagues will have to travel before they will be willing to accept his notion of “the parish as paradigm.”

Hopewell is aware, for example, that “embarrassment about the body is not some remote Victorian quirk; it happens every day in most seminaries. The body that these schools avoid -- modestly averting their eyes and groping toward it only in the dark -- is the body of the local church.” That body is the principal social reality to which the schools are linked by service and support, yet most seminaries he knows show little curiosity and even less delight about its nature. According to Hopewell, “Seminaries seem more comfortable pursuing less tangible objects like God and homiletics. The concrete body of the congregation disconcerts them.”

And lack of understanding about this body disconcerts all too many seminary students at the end of their three years on campus. That much, at least, is clear to Wayne K. Clymer, bishop of the Iowa conference of the United Methodist Church. After 25 years in seminary education, Clymer is particularly well equipped to handle his present responsibilities as chairman of the committee which functions as a liaison between the church’s Council of Bishops and the denomination’s ten seminaries. He is not at all surprised that the greatest time of trauma and confusion for seminary graduates coincides with their transition to “the strange new world of the local parish.”

“Look -- many of these people have been living in academia for 20 years or more,” Clymer says. “They’ve been coping with an academic, institutional mentality since they were five, and by now they think they know what is expected of them. They’ve learned the tricks of their trade -- they know that everything can be done by reading a book, attending a lecture, having a discussion and writing a paper. No wonder they experience culture shock when they move into a local church. Suddenly they find themselves surrounded by people with quite different priorities, who view the world through much different lenses, and who care about different things. This is especially true in small, rural churches, which can provide none of the kinds of support most seminary students have become used to.”

Hopewell acknowledges that some degree of abstraction is inevitable in any program of graduate professional training, but he remains convinced that “we have done it to such an extent in most of theological education that we tend to forget about the local church.” The current arrangement of the theological curriculum makes no more sense, he explains, than if a medical school were to claim that it had to keep students away from patients in order really to teach them about medicine. “What we are trying to do here at Candler is to counter that by reintroducing the body with all of its richness and complexity into the actual process and curriculum of theological education.”



Hopewell’s enthusiasm for strengthening the interplay between seminaries and local congregations comes from firsthand experience. Since 1974, Candler has been offering, under his direction, academic courses in local churches on topics that the churches themselves suggest concerning their own problems in ministry and mission. The Candler program brings together a professor, a pastor and 12 lay-people with 12 senior students to work on that problem for an entire term. The students function as collaborative researchers, people who are themselves attempting to identify and understand the particular facts to be uncovered in this situation, and how ministry is to be undertaken. They are there as part of the team, as are the faculty members who, through their participation, demonstrate the practice of their particular disciplines in application to specific church problems.

The program is based on the “simple notion that students, laypeople, pastors and professors all have a stake in the particular problems of ministry and mission within local congregations, that each has gifts to bring to the understanding of the issues and that they can work together to address those issues.” And after 125 such experiments, Hopewell is ready to acknowledge success; that rather simple notion “works surprisingly well.”

Hopewell is quick to emphasize that these courses, offered through the seminary’s Rollins Center for Church Ministries, are not simply field education by another name. For that very reason, he explained, the institute courses are not treated separately but are located within the particular discipline of the profession involved. “If the course is being taught by a New Testament professor, then it is numbered and treated as part of his discipline. This replicates in a course setting the real dilemmas faced by students upon graduation -- trained in New Testament exegesis, they suddenly find themselves in congregations, facing problems involving family breakdown, or difficulties with adolescents in the church. This kind of contextual approach has a dual impact, because both professors and students are forced to see what these disciplines mean in terms of the types of issues that the students are going to face in the parish, and the ways in which they actually arise.” This is the principal reason, he adds, why participation in such classes is part of the course load required of all Candler faculty.

Taking the congregation this seriously, Hopewell has discovered, results in a radical reordering of academic goals and purposes. “What matters in the last analysis is no longer whether the individual student understands theology or the New Testament, but whether the congregation understands theology or the New Testament. In other words, a New Testament course becomes concerned with how the congregation perceives the exegesis of Matthew, and its relevance to its own particular situation.”

Hopewell reports that student reaction to the courses has been mixed. Seminarians display a certain amount of irritation that in addition to their Sunday field education assignments, they are also required to establish a deep relationship with another congregation. “But there are payoffs, too; some of these courses turn out to be simply brilliant. And in the most successful efforts, we have been able to establish new ways of thinking about theological scholarship and its relationship to actual problems in the church.”

The courses arose out of Hopewell’s hunch that it was important to get seminary and church working together on specific issues arising from the local context. It wasn’t until he had really immersed himself in the study of local congregations, however, that he understood how much he had to learn. Soon after the courses started, he began to realize “that a great deal more was going on in the local congregation than just rational give-and-take among well-intentioned human beings.

“What we discovered was that the local church had a culture of its own and that seminary graduates needed to be prepared to cope with the congregation as a very complex social reality with deep structures and metaphors by which it lives and moves, a social reality which is affected by forces and dynamics of which we know almost nothing.” What they discovered, Hopewell explains, is how appallingly little has been done on the whole question of congregations as subcultures.



Hopewell found himself pushed to this new comprehension by his growing frustration with the simplistic view of the church which he encountered within the congregations themselves. “For many if not most of the people I was coming into contact with in local churches, talking about their congregation meant citing statistics of one sort or another, or details of particular programs.” At a time when his own research and daily experience were alerting him to the rich complexity of congregational life, Hopewell encountered people within the very churches he studied who “had sold out to a mechanistic view of what was going on within their congregations.” It didn’t take him long to realize just how inadequate this view was for understanding congregational life. He found the congregations far more complex than their annual reports and statistics could possibly indicate; their living history was made up of symbols, stories, values and beliefs incomprehensible to the traditional quantitative tools.

Hopewell found neither the abstract teachings of the seminary nor the bottom-line mentality of the church of much value in dealing with the real issues of ministry and mission faced by local congregations. Prompted by his continuing experience with the institute courses, he began a serious research effort, convinced of the need “to find new ways to talk about the congregational body that can provide deeper insight into its nature, and enrich conversation with and among its members.”

One person who agrees with him is Carl Dudley, professor of church and community at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. His own concentrated study of the dynamics of small churches and churches in changing communities has made him increasingly in demand around the country as a perceptive observer of the dynamics of congregational life. Dudley has more than a cursory knowledge of the existing literature about the church, and he finds much of it sadly deficient.

“My impression is that so much of the literature that has really dominated our thinking about the church derives from generalized abstractions about what the church ought to be or about what the evils of the church are by theologians who are at best uncomfortable in trying to apply that to particular congregations. It’s one thing to think along with Tillich when he talks in a general way of correlating the church to culture; you find it’s quite another when you try to apply that to particular congregations -- it gets exceedingly awkward.” For that reason, Dudley explains, it is difficult to find theologians who deal with the congregation. There are many theologians of religion and the whole church, of faith and of culture, but very few who have had much to say about the dynamics of belief within the setting of the local congregation. As a result, Dudley says, students leave seminary with only an idealized view of what the church ought to be.

Nor, in his view, do pastors fare much better in the parish, where they find themselves awash in books detailing the success stories of particular ministers and congregations and in practical how-to-do-it manuals on everything from evangelism to stewardship generated out of programmatic approaches to questions of growth, size and organizational effectiveness. It is quite clear to him that “the way in which we have tried to hear the church has been shaped by patterns of convenience, rather than the much more difficult commitment to ascertain what’s going on through close analysis of congregational life. Taking the temperature of the church through congregations is a messy business, which helps explain why seminaries and churches alike have tended to listen more to theologians than to the congregations themselves.

“Theologians have long been trying to get the churches to think more metaphysically,” according to Dudley. “Well, some of us think it is time theologians were challenged to think more congregationally.” He hopes that the use of multiple disciplines will help theologians listen anew to congregations as valid expressions of where the faith is at any given moment.



Dudley dates his awareness of the need for these new disciplines from the fall of 1979, when he journeyed to Indianapolis as part of a group convened by Robert Lynn, vice-president for religion at the Lilly Endowment, to review an innovative project on congregational research directed by James Hopewell. Hopewell had pursued his fascination with the congregation through a yearlong examination of a local United Methodist and a local Baptist congregation, and arrived in Indiana that fall with a presentation woven of insights about the two churches drawn from fields as diverse as history, economics, statistics and sociology, with particular emphasis on literary analysis, symbolic language, anthropology and mythology.

Dudley was just one of many there who found in Hopewell’s work “an exhilarating lesson in how different disciplines could be used to interpret the work of the local church.” He and Hopewell, together with Jackson Carroll of the Hartford Seminary Foundation, Loren Mead of the Alban Institute, and Barbara Wheeler of Auburn Theological Seminary, were excited enough by the potential demonstrated in Indianapolis to embark upon a concerted effort to discover the state of the art in congregational studies. Supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, the group invited 15 scholars -- sociologists, ethnographers, theologians and experts in organizational development and analysis -- to apply their respective disciplines during the late winter and spring of 1981 to a case study of Wiltshire United Methodist Church (not its real name) prepared especially for this exercise by Alice and Robert Evans of the Hartford Seminary Foundation. A congregation of moderate size located in an upper-middle-class bedroom community in New England, Wiltshire offered the scholars a chance to demonstrate the range of insight that could be gained through the use of their specific disciplines in the service of congregational analysis.

The fruits of their considerable labors were displayed before an audience of more than 300 consultants, church executives, pastors and seminary educators who gathered in Atlanta last March for a three-day conference on “Understanding the Local Church.” The presentation of the scholars’ findings was the occasion for vigorous discussion and debate among conferees, who followed the proceedings of this ecclesiastical Rashomon with a rapt attentiveness, itself a testimony to the originality of this multidisciplinary approach. Conference planners had hoped to get across the notion that the use of more than one disciplinary lens provided a much more mteresting and useful picture of the multiple facets of congregational life -- and by all accounts, they succeeded.

But the Atlanta event taught conference organizers like Barbara Wheeler some unexpected lessons as well, and they came away impressed with how well the congregation held together. “We did a lot to that poor church in subjecting it to analysis, but we never succeeded in explaining Wiltshire away,” Wheeler admits, with obvious admiration for what she calls “the durability of the congregation.” Analysis by multiple methods covered several hundred pages with insights packed like sardines in a tin, yet could not, in the end, fully account for the church.

The president of Auburn Theological Seminary, Wheeler is one of the most keen-eyed observers in theological education. Her experience gained as, successively, consultant to the president of Union Theological Seminary, research associate for the Study Project on the History of Reform in Theological Education, and director of the Women’s Theological Coalition of the Boston Theological Institute, as well as her current work as a consultant for both the Association of Theological Schools and the major foundations active in theological education, give her a wide knowledge of the seminary world. It was Wheeler who was asked to write the closing chapter, assessing the import of congregational studies for the future of the church, of the upcoming book reporting on the findings presented at the Atlanta conference (Building Effective Ministry: Theory and Practice of the Local Church, to be published by Harper & Row in early 1983).



The congregation’s demonstrated integrity, its fullness and wholeness, present a striking contrast with many experiences elsewhere in the church, Wheeler observes: “experiences often described as cleavages, divides, separations, gaps or even gulfs.” She has identified several areas now characterized by division where things might be pulled together around the study of the congregation. High on her list is the division between the seminaries and the churches. “Neither the stereotype that people in seminaries have of local churches nor the stereotypes the churches have of themselves hold up very well if the congregation is really studied carefully and conscientiously,” she says.

One of the things that interests her in the ongoing talk about “the seminaries and the churches” is that when the problem is stated that way, seminaries aren’t seen as part of the church. In her view, a lot of the talk about “the seminary’s failure to address the church” fails to understand that the seminary is an organ of the church, just as the congregation is. Congregational studies, she thinks, could lead to both a deeper understanding of ministry in congregations and a better demonstration of the kind of ministry in which seminaries are engaged. “People in both camps would quickly discover that some long-cherished divisions -- the favorite one, for instance, between the academic and the practical, the reflective and the active, theory and practice -- are confounded when you look with any care at the life of an actual congregation, and see the ways that theory is always in practice, that even the act of theorizing is an act of practice. Things just don’t stay neat once you study a community as rich and dense as the local congregation is.

Wheeler is quick to emphasize that she does not mean that the curriculum should be organized around the function of ministry. That solution, she explains, has only succeeded in making everybody uncomfortable with an image of the minister as a functionary. But she does believe that the serious study of the congregation at all of the levels of its life -- theological, ethical, historical, cultural, socioeconomic and aesthetic -- can provide deep insight into the lived ecclesial reality with which theological education ought to be in intense and constant dialogue.

“I don’t view seminaries as training schools, stamping out exactly what local churches identify as their needs for the next day; that’s not their function at all. But I do think they bear a deep accountability to the congregation understood in depth and at all of the different layers of its life” -- understood, she says, in ways that the congregations themselves don’t yet understand, since they haven’t been engaged in very deep congregational studies either. In her view, congregation al studies are important for seminaries because the seminaries are accountable to the church, and important for congregations because understanding themselves better will enable them to hold up their side of the dialogue with seminaries and other church agencies. “I also think it is valuable for people who are inclined to lay trips on congregations to see for themselves that they are far more complex than most of the ideas that are held about them -- that many of the ideas about what is wrong with them are just too simple.”



Wheeler believes that congregational studies is as promising a discipline as any she has seen. “I don’t know if it is going to become the paradigm for organizing the theological curriculum, but I do know that the congregation is interesting enough, varied enough and goes deep enough, and has the kind of inescapable connection with the living stuff of the church, that it can at least be the source of very interesting conversations. Not everyone feels that strongly, of course. The Vanderbilt faculty, following on Farley, has focused on the theme of ‘the minister as theologian.’”  Yet Wheeler is convinced that “the contributions which congregational studies could make are evident,” and that learning how to understand the intricate workings of congregations has indisputable value for those being trained for pastoral ministry. The implications for form are more subtle but no less significant. “If the congregation is in fact, as we believe we found in preparing our conference, such a rich basic expression of the church in which many elements cohere, then perhaps the study of it from a variety of perspectives can serve to reorient, reorganize and unify what Farley has called ‘the dispersed disciplines’ of theological study.”

Now that people in the mainline denominations are starting to talk unembarrassedly about church growth and evangelism of a fairly conventional sort, Wheeler worries that the potential exists for any emphasis on congregational studies to be misinterpreted as an outgrowth of the spirit of the times -- which views local communities of believers uncritically, as in-arguably good things, and assumes that if there is anything the matter with them it is that they aren’t big enough. In her view, the immediate challenge for congregational study is to make abundantly clear that though it is dissociated from those who write off the congregation, it is also dissociated from those who romanticize it, and whose view of it is “entirely complacent, accepting and benign.”

Proponents of congregational analysis share no single theological position, Wheeler explains. They take the congregation as seriously as they do for quite a range of reasons. For some, valuing the congregation is an outgrowth of their Christian faith; for others, the congregation is simply the most interesting social institution that they’ve ever got their hands on; for still others, the local church body is a microcosm of the human condition. “I think that what we have to say to seminaries is in some ways quite radical precisely because congregational studies don’t have a single position -- the basic issues being fought in Atlanta were really epistemological, and the battle was over how you know the church. That’s what made it so exciting there, and what makes congregational analysis so promising for the reconceptualization of theological education.

“The challenge to congregational studies,” Wheeler continues, “is to keep things as complicated as they got in Atlanta. to make it clear that the congregation is neither automatically damned nor automatically saved simply by being the congregation. Rather, it is a powerful mixture of elements containing in its culture, tradition, structures and practices the seeds of its own and the world’s undoing or salvation.”

A Model for Learned Pastors

It is a common axiom among pastors that we rarely find enough time to study, to keep up with the pastoral and theological literature either for personal satisfaction or for the sake of those whom we serve. The harassed pastor runs from Eucharist to vestry meeting to funeral to counseling appointment, rarely having time even to take care of correspondence. And when there are finally a few quiet moments, he, or she is too fatigued to begin any serious study, either to prepare for the Sunday sermon or to address some current problem in biblical studies.

The closest many pastors come to serious reading may be to peruse a current issue of The Christian Century or Christianity and Crisis, or perhaps the Witness, Christianity Today or the National Catholic Reporter. If the Anglican Theological Review or Worship finds its way into the parish, the pastor may pick it up to see whether a former seminary professor or bookish classmate has an article or review in it. It is a labor to get through even the précis and perhaps the first paragraph of the article.

But pastors may sit up and take notice if, while leafing through the journals, they find articles by parish priests. They will quite likely see that articles by parish-oriented clergy have a different slant on them -- just as scholarly, but perhaps more readable. It is something as yet undefined that stimulates the pastor to keep reading and to investigate further.

Academic Disenchantment

There is growing need for the learned pastor in the parish. Little substantial writing is now being done by those whose work is parish ministry. When I recently visited a seminary in search of information about this problem, the dean told me that the best thing now would be for the learned clergy who are seeking university and seminary positions to return to the parish. Good pastors were needed, he said, but the learned ones tend to leave, gravitating to positions in teaching institutions.

We then discussed, an article by John A. Miles, Jr., a former professor of religion and now a religion editor at Doubleday. Titled "The Return of the Learned Pastor," it was published in the May 1977 issue of the New Review of Books and Religion. Miles argued that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, many young people whose vocation was the ministry chose to become professors of religion. During that period the universities were hungry for talent, and they could afford the kinds of salaries and fringe benefits to attract young people. But today those who have labored through graduate school are finding few openings in the academic world.

Even for people already within the educational institutions, life is not stable. In numerous cases men and women are failing to receive tenure or promotion. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, head of the English department at New Jersey’s William Paterson College, finds that it is all too easy to be pushed off the academic ladder because too many are competing for too few jobs. She remarks: "One of the most depressing aspects of my job as English department chairwoman is to read the hundreds of applications from people who are often more qualified than I was when I entered the profession, and to have no job to offer them."

Though Dr. Mollenkott tries not to give advice to the jobless, she has these words for the job-hunter: "I can only express my hope for those currently in a devastating job market to find peace through an attitude akin to Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Thy will be done, though in my own undoing.’ Often a phoenix rises out of one’s apparent or temporary undoing; we can only pray for that" ("The Dumbfounding of Academic Survival," Christianity and Literature, Spring 1976, pp. 36-37).

Such a situation leads John Miles to suggest that now may well be the time for "a new generation of students to take refuge in the ministry." The parish ministry does have its own difficulties -- too few openings, low salaries, an often harried life. Nonetheless, Dr. Miles speculates that a learned group whose orientation is pastoral may grow up alongside -those other learned groups whose orientation is primarily academic.

In sensing this new shift, Miles does some serious thinking about the possibilities of reflection and writing in the midst of an environment that can be quite harassing: "For serious, students of religion, then, the question becomes a practical one: does the ministry provide more peace and quiet -- and more time -- for reading and thinking and writing than does academe?" Miles thinks the answer is affirmative. After all, it does not matter where one does one’s reflecting, so long as one has the peace and quiet in which to do it.

Different Arenas?

But another seminary dean I consulted did not agree; his comment on Miles’s article was a chuckle. Of course, one always wishes that learning and reflection could take place in the parish, but that does not happen very easily in this day. Perhaps the complexity of our society and its need to compartmentalize knowledge and experience simply demand that scholarly learning be located in one arena while practical and clinical studies, like pastoral ministry, take place in another.

My own pastoral professor, Urban T. Holmes III, now a seminary dean himself, makes the point (in The Future Shape of Ministry [Seabury, 1971]) that the parish priest was once the one person in the community known for his learning. For instance, parish registers, containing the vital information of birth, baptism, marriage and death, were the responsibility of the religious. But these records have all been transferred to the state authorities. Today the parish priest may be as educated as ever, but there are many in the congregation and the community whose education is as good or better. And certainly the pastor’s image and once forceful role in community life and in learning are no longer what they once were (pp. 87, 139).

The problems created by the gravitation of the learned clergy to academic centers is clearly demonstrated in one community that I know well -- that of Japanese Episcopal clergy. Of the approximately 20 active Japanese Episcopal priests, eight hold earned doctorates, and a ninth is working to complete his. All nine of these men have had pastoral experience in the parish, but none is there now. Six are teaching in universities, seminaries or divinity schools. One is chaplain to an Episcopal school. One is a chemist at the National Institutes of Health. The remaining one, however, has returned to the parish. In the main, these individuals fit the picture painted above; learned clergy leave the parish to serve elsewhere.

There has tended to be, at least in this small community of Japanese clergy, a tension between the learned professionals and the parish priests. Several of the latter have told me of their antipathy toward those who went off to schools of higher learning in the period following World War II when the Japanese were leaving the American concentration camps and the clergy were being utilized to help with resettlement difficulties. (The tension here may have been a matter of infighting, as well as an expression of the high regard the Japanese have for learning and education.)

Obstacles to Staying in the Parish

But what of those learned pastors who are already in the parish? One Protestant minister told me of his own struggle to complete his doctorate while doing parish work, of the frustration because he could scarcely fit in even one day a week to work on his dissertation. His project was to apply the principles the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire sets forth in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed to some actual parochial situations and then to write up the experience, but he lacked adequate time to do good work. On top of those pressures, there was resistance in his parish to his spending any time working toward the doctorate.

Another pastor, after completing doctoral studies in Europe, decided to seek a parish position rather than accept a professional appointment in his field. Subsequently, his experience and his doctorate propelled him to a high position in his denomination. He has become an administrator but has not published in any significant way.

I cite these two examples to show that the learned pastor faces some perils in the expectation of doing adequate reflection, reading and writing in the parish.

I came to understand the extent of the migration from parish to teaching institution during my seminary days. I had originally wanted to stay in my home diocese for my training as a priest. Though vocations to ministry can come anywhere and at any time, many individuals receive such calls in situations where they are effective at ministering; i.e., the home parish. Recognition of their gifts is one step toward realizing a sense of vocation to the ordained priesthood. But postulants must leave the milieu in which they first "found" themselves and their vocation -- cut their roots, so to speak -- and pack up and move off to a seminary or divinity school.

In seminary I learned another aspect of this vocational puzzle: the men who dared to teach us Bible, theology, pastoral care, contemporary studies, history and liturgy were all men who had left the parish. Some of them still preached on weekends, but their major occupation was teaching. They had essentially given up the parish as the ground of their basic activity, yet they were our masters, presuming to speak of the parish while giving us the traditional intellectual seminary curriculum. They had somehow grown beyond the parish, yet they were attempting to teach us how to minister in it.

While the divinity school or seminary functions as part of the total complexity called "the church," it is ironic that those who presume to teach seminarians how to become parish priests are no longer parish priests themselves. Many priests in academic positions are not worried about this dichotomy, however; someone has to do the teaching, and someone has to do the parish work.

Presenting a Model

If the context of the parish is significantly different from that of the university, then we would expect the kinds of writing and reflection that come from the parish to differ in tone and attitude from those that emerge from academe. John Miles has such expectations, and goes on to explain: "The new writing might not appear for a few years; there is no way to predict what it will look like. But I, for one, expect it to be good, and as an editor, I intend to be watching for it."

Rather than guess at what directions such writing will take, it would probably be more fitting to the shape of the parish experience to speak about what such writing might consist of. For this task it is to the writing of Simone Weil that I turn. Weil may seem, on first glance, an odd choice for a writing model for learned pastors, for she was not a pastor in any traditional sense, nor was she a Christian in a formal sense. A French Jew from a learned family, she refused to be baptized. She explained this refusal as in part a desire to identify with the oppressed. Had she chosen baptism, it would have been into the Church of Rome.

A second glance, however, shows us that Weil’s writing, especially in her later years as World War II approached, grew more and more distinctively Christian in tone and content. But if one is inclined to put her in the Christian camp, another is certain to point out that her thought, by her own admission, has Gnostic aspects, a strong tendency to regard the Old Testament as a lower type of literature than the New Testament. Weil also explained that she found spiritual inspiration equal to that of the Bible among the Greeks and the Hindus, where traditional-minded Christians seldom look. She even learned Sanskrit in order to read the Upanishads and the Gita.

It is only obliquely for the peculiar Christian focus, which gives a sharp edge to her writing, that I wish to turn to Simone Weil. Two other aspects form the core of the model which I propose. One is her passion for reflection and the other her ability to write topically.

A Passion for Reflection

In Simone Weil: A Life (Pantheon, 1976), Simone Pétrement, a lifelong friend of both Weil and her family, documents this passion for reflection. It encompasses all aspects and arenas of life which Weil touched, and so she wrote on Marxism, the trade unions, her experience of working in a factory, various aspects of French political life. The last gained her Charles de Gaulle’s comment: "She’s out of her mind" (F. C. Ellert in the introduction to Oppression and Liberty, by Simone Weil [University of Massachusetts Press, 1973], xii).

Weil’s was not a sedentary passion. It was, rather, an active one: to investigate and learn, even within certain areas in which she was poorly qualified to begin a search. But that passion to become involved, and then to reflect upon that involvement, became significant in her short life. The driving force to be identified with groups in distress was perhaps a part of her need to draw away from the more comfortable life of her childhood and youth. It was the identification with her own people, during her one stay in England, that eventually brought her short life to an end. She would eat only as much food as those in occupied France had which was not enough to nourish and strengthen her; this, we are told, in large part caused her death.

Such active involvement and passion for reflection are significant for pastors. By the very role they play in the parish, pastors are thrust into involvement and identification, usually with every level of society. They are associated with their parishioners not only in their social state but also in each rite of passage that the family or individual experiences, whether it be birth, adolescence, marriage, trauma, unemployment, or dying and death. This role of identification in pastoral care is a given and is simply one of the roles that parish priests are called to fulfill.

Thus what Simone Weil desired by insistent preoccupation and by her need to be identified with something other than she was, pastors are thrust into by their very role. They cannot escape it. They may not like it -- and in some ways it may be especially repugnant -- but they cannot ignore the involvement. Some aspects of pastoring are what Weil calls "afflication" (malheur) -- a bearing of a burden that one does not particularly desire, but that one bears nonetheless.

Although ordinary pastors engage their parishioners at all these levels and through the rites of passage, they do not necessarily, take the time to reflect on those involvements. For learned pastors, the circumstances are different. Their particular gift would be to reflect seriously on the actions and identifications of their ministry, to discern not only their strengths and weaknesses, but also the particular ways in which one act weaves its way into the whole fabric that makes up the parish community.

This passion for reflection in the pastoral role might be more simply summed up as the gift of theology, for theology is the study of God, and therefore of God’s creation. Thus, theology becomes a reflection on the existence about us: serious at times, passionate usually, but certainly not always with a glum look upon one’s face.

Pastoral reflection is more than a recounting, a verbatim report of what took place between the parishioner and the pastor. That is but a beginning. The pastor deals in small community with what the sociologist, economist and anthropologist deal with in larger and more general terms. The pastoral reflections always center on the particular, on its bitterness, its fruits and joys. In the parish experience, the particularities of death, sickness, birth, joblessness can be handled only by experiencing them wholly or by avoiding them. Of the latter, some of us are guilty.

Out of reflections on the particular, reflections that can be more universally appreciated take shape. For instance, it is reflection on specific aspects of human nature that gives bite to any question of ethics, turning that whole inquiry away from dullness and boredom into one that is exciting of itself. From hearing a particular biblical text expounded. we are able to see how the preacher’s mind works, how he or she grasps the faith, and how firmly.

And negative situations, in which the bitterness of humanity is exposed, can often be heuristic and helpful. For instance, I was once involved in a troublesome matter that would have been very embarrassing to the victimizers had they been publicly exposed; the victimized, however, had undergone far more than just embarrassment. Despite all the complexities involved, other people would have been helped if all the details had become public. As it was, they remained hidden.

Journalist Jim Stentzel has reflected on this kind of dilemma: "The reporter’s instincts are to nail ‘em, the Christian’s instincts are to ‘love and forgive em’" ("The Ethical Dilemmas of Investigative Reporting" [Sojourners, August 1977]). Another suggestion was to use the story technique in this case. Telling the tale in similitude of reality, with the identity of both the victim and victimizer concealed, would serve to provide a projection of reality that was more than a didactic lesson, a way that would lead to criticism, understanding and appreciation.

Topical Writing

To have spoken about passionate reflection on the particular is already to have entered into the second aspect of the model drawn from Simone Weil -- that is, writing topically. For many, indeed, of Weil’s writings are essays on topics. This is a form she learned early from her professor of philosophy, Alain (Emile Chartier), of the Henry IV Lycée. Disdaining presentation of any systematic schema of his thought, he professed, rather, that through his writings on various topics (topos) the reader could grasp how the writer’s mind functioned -- and that was what is important. Explains Simone Pétrement: "He thought a system is a paltry thing and that a thinker’s strength can best be seen in the way he tackles specific problems" (op. cit., p. 30).

Simone Weil was particularly affected by this reasoning, and even after she left the Lycée, she continued to prepare papers for Alain to read. Her essays dealt with those particular topics which fiercely grasped her imagination and in turn compelled her to examine related areas to ascertain their bearing on the topic.

Topical writing in this manner closely parallels what the pastor is already doing in the weekly sermon. Basically, it consists of reflection on a text (usually drawn from Scripture) -- a text expounded in relation to the needs of the listening and waiting congregation. Granted that there are too many boring sermons with little reflection, either on the text or on the people, the same can be said of too many articles that appear in the scholarly journals. Scholarly papers and dissertations occupy space in libraries, whereas sermons can be -- and often are -- forgotten without a moment’s discomfort.

For the pastor, the sermon teaches -- indeed forces -- clear thinking. Pastors cannot assume that their audiences understand and read at a certain level of theological erudition. It is their duty to speak, without condescension, to different levels. C.S. Lewis once proposed, as part of ordination examinations, a section in which the seminarian would be asked to "translate" a selection of theological prose into common-usage English. Lewis felt that this ability was as much a sign of the student’s readiness to minister as anything else. As I remarked, this is not condescension, but rather a sharpening of a particular faculty. Far from being the one individual in whom a deposit of faith lies, the pastor is rather a communicator and an educator whose task is to lead or draw out from the people the manifold gifts and expressions that lie hidden, like seeds ready to germinate.

A Context for Reflection

Pastors need a vision not so much of where the church is going but of where it has been. Since we simply do not know or see enough of where we have been, we are often unable to measure where we are right now. We become too easily frightened by the new half-truth, the latest façade, the contemporary ritual. Ignorant of our beginnings, our roots and our struggles, we are often left stranded and anxious for the morrow. The vision of where we have been frees us to deal with the variant problems of where we are, and though there may be some uncertainty over the next step, there need be no fear. Then we learn that there is indeed room in the pastoral life for the kind of reflection that is necessary if the pastoral art is to continue at its best.

Any reflection has a context -- true indeed for Simone Weil’s topos, which formed the subject matter for the turning of her mind. The context was not always natural to her, for she frequently investigated new areas and various groups of the oppressed. To understand and identify with them, she thrust herself upon them. For instance, in New York, in the year before she died, she attended a Baptist church in Harlem and was the only nonblack there. Had she stayed in the United States, most likely she would willingly have shared the life of the black people.

With the pastor, the context is a given. Although one expounds on a different text each week, the context is more than the particular book out of which the text is taken and the particular tools of language and commentary to which one has reference. It is also the particularities of parish life that are thrust upon the pastor -- sickness and death, marital conflict and infidelity, aging, or something simpler like a leaky roof or a broken window. Unlike Weil, who was intent on sympathizing with different oppressed groups, the pastor does not need to seek out contexts, for they are thrust upon him or her. They are the given, and it is a function of one’s duty to respond to them.

The pastor’s life, for the most part, is not a sedentary one, and in this way it relates to some of the most central aspects of Simone Weil’s life. Wanting passionately to know, for instance, what the life of the factory worker was like, she left her schoolteaching and went to a factory. For her it was an experience of affliction, of learning to bear without complaint. A woman who normally was not given to holding her tongue, especially in the causes with which she sympathized, here she had to. Submission was the common - condition of the worker -- not only to the authorities but also to the machine -- a submission which she found particularly difficult and bitter, if not brutal. For this singular identification meant that she could not protest but must be silent. In addition, she tells us, her burden lay in the fact that she could not stop thinking; yet only by ceasing to think and reflect could she increase her output of piecework, and thus become a more productive worker.

This phenomenon has parallels in the life of the parish minister. Among the professionals -- veterinarians, physicians, teachers, dentists, lawyers and so on, all of whom perform certain knowable and understandable functions -- pastors, with all their education, often seem to fit only in the interstices. They have no significant place unless they become more like the professionals; that is, unless they carry out teaching or other such functions. In which case, becoming more like the other professionals means being less like a parish priest.

A Pivot for Pastoral Activity

But the parish ministry, for all its ambiguity, contains those elements which can be the context for the learned pastor seeking to find himself or herself and to help others find themselves. Certainly reflection is a passionate exercise, one that provides a pivot or an axis upon which so much of the rest of the pastoral activities can turn. The lack of reflection is the sign of a thoughtless uncertainty, of not-knowing the next step to take. But writing that grows out of reflection can be an indication of the reflection’s liveliness and of a desire to communicate the passion.

In Waiting far God (Harper, 1962), Simone Weil speaks of giving one’s loving attention to an object or situation and learning to wait upon it. For example, in her desire to learn to pray, she approached the Lord’s Prayer in this way. The pastor is called on to give this same kind of loving attention to parish life and to many individuals and situations. It is out of such attention on particularities that the learned pastor is able to write.

For the pastor reflects, not necessarily on wide and learned reading, but within the particular context which is the life and shape of one’s parish, over which one is asked to be shepherd. It is out of this energizing life that passionate reflection takes place. A writing emerges that is distinctive because its base is centered not in the university or in seminary politics and the demand to publish, but rather in the impulse to communicate reflections about this ongoing life.

The Ethnic Pastor in a Multicultural Society

“We are an ethnic church.” This is a commonplace used to describe the Anglican Church of Canada as a national Anglo-Saxon parish. It is an old church dominated by English speakers and English culture. It is part of a new land still struggling to find national, political and religious expression. The situation is complicated by the arrival of other ethnic groups, which have displaced the older Anglo-Saxon population in numbers but not necessarily in influence. And the influx of native Canadian Indians into the larger cities from the reservations has further complicated the situation.

The Anglican Church can stand apart from its society’s problems only by adopting a determined attitude of avoidance, neglect, even of obstruction. I therefore propose the following examination: first, the construction of a model of “biblical ethnics”; second, an examination of the role of the non-Anglo-Saxon pastor and congregation; and third, some elements of strategy.

To begin with, when we approach the Scriptures, we may be startled at the parallels they present to our situation. The Jewish people were one ethnic unit living not only within the ancient boundaries of Palestine-Judea but scattered throughout the Roman Empire. The Jewish figure who most interests Christians presents us with a prime example of ethnicity. According to ancient tradition, Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem and made one journey outside his country’s borders early in his life. All of his adulthood was spent inside the perimeters of his tiny country, which was much smaller than the province of Ontario. Preaching, teaching and healing only among his own people, Jesus was bound to this ethnic Jewish subculture not simply by vocation but also by language: he spoke Aramaic, the Hebrew dialect of his area, although he read the ancient liturgical Hebrew. Almost certainly he did not know Koiné Greek, the lingua franca of the time. He even disdained to have anything to do with outsiders, foreigners and the aliens who entered his subculture (John 12:20; Matt. 10:6; 15:24). And while he was yet alive, he sent his disciples only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Compare, then, this ethnic man with the figure who follows him in importance, and who stands in great ethnic contrast. St. Paul was born in the university town of Tarsus, although he was educated under Rabbi Gamaliel at Jerusalem (Acts 22:3). His Hebrew name was Saul; Paul was his Greek name. His Bible was the Greek Septuagint; his education under Rabbi Gamaliel was Hebraic. Unlike Jesus, Paul traveled throughout the known world of his day, probably as far west as Spain (Rom. 15:29), and certainly to Italy, Greece and throughout Asia Minor. In our terms, Paul was multicultural, a citizen of the empire (Acts 23:27; 22:27). He was a marginal man, able to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries with knowledge and sensitivity.

Now when Jesus, the obscure ethnic man, rose from the dead and continued to teach his followers, he left them with one dictum: Matthew 28:19. This baptismal command with the trinitarian formula, given just prior to his ascension, is tied to the other peculiar command, “Go therefore and make all nations my disciples.” At the very end of his earthly ministry, he threw open the shutters of his teaching. Whereas once the disciples were to go to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” they were now sent to “make disciples of all nations.” In the words of Karl Barth, “It is a confession which follows the transition of the message of salvation from Israel to the Gentiles” (Church Dogmatics IV, 4, 100).



This study of Jesus and Paul leads us to examine the role of the pastor and the non-Anglo congregation in the many-cultured society. Already the format has been outlined for us in the preceding discussion of a developing cross-cultural church. The pastor of a non-Anglo congregation in a multinational society functions on three levels: the ethnic, the multicultural and the international.

At the ethnic level, the pastor works within the subculture from which his parish is gathered. The parish tends to be close-knit because it shares a common first language and a culture drawn from a homeland far removed. The parishioners may live across vast stretches of a city, but they gather together for common worship and life. If the pastor belongs to the subculture, he or she needs no introduction at this ethnic level. The pastor knows the gestures, the language, the responses -- all of which, combined with common worship, make up an ethnic liturgy. Like Jesus, who was obscured by his immersion in the Jewish subculture, our pastor and congregation are obscured from the mainstream of society by their subculture.

The pastor within such a subculture needs special ethnic and cultural skills to allow him or her to move freely. It is usually difficult for an outsider to penetrate this layer immediately so as to minister. At this level, the pastor must be community worker, social organizer, immigration-law counselor and advocate, and ethnic promoter, as well as pastor. Often missionaries to the home countries become pastors to these immigrating ethnic units. Precisely because of the specialized nature of pastoral work at this ethnic level, the pastor has peculiar dilemmas. He or she is unable to move to other types of parishes within the larger church, move up the religious hierarchy or to other jobs. Ethnic pastors often remain at their posts for lengthy periods of service. On the other hand, very few people could easily step in and carry on the role of pastor in such a community, nor would they likely want to.

Ethnic congregations that are ecclesiastically independent function completely on the level I have described. But those churches that are tied into synods, presbyteries and conferences and have some mutuality with and responsibility to a larger unit find their lives more complicated. They must engage at the multicultural level. In our first examination of biblical models, we found that St. Paul was our example of the multicultural person, who related to both the ethnic and the multicultural levels. The pastor of an ethnic congregation that belongs to a larger body of parishes must relate at both levels. At the multicultural level, the pastor associates .with colleagues who are in different strata of society, who belong to its larger and major cultural layer.

At this point the pastor must be, or must learn to be, bicultural and bilingual in gesture and tongue. Because the ethnic community is secluded by the subculture from the main workings of the society and from the churches that have power and authority, the pastor must represent the parish to the larger community. The larger church community often knows only the face the ethnic pastor presents. The other face, turned toward the ethnic congregation and community, is hidden. Therefore the larger community must often rely on the pastor’s word for the work he or she is doing.

The pastor is engaged at yet another level of activity: the international one. It includes contacts with congregations, individuals and pastors in the homeland or in other parts of the globe, spread in a sort of diaspora. Again, this is underground activity as far as the multicultural economy is concerned, since the network of contacts is maintained by the subcultural pipeline. Often it is through this network that pastors are called when a vacancy exists and through which problems arising in a particular community are resolved. Because of the vast immigration and refugee movements of this century, this international web of contacts is important in almost every ethnic community.



The pastor of a subcultural congregation, by virtue of his or her representation in the mainstream society, participates at all three levels. Work at the ethnic (local) and international levels is screened from the multicultural or national level. Yet it is often the multicultural level that counts -- that provides financial support, criticism of work, rules and regulations, and expectations for the pastor in the larger society. The multicultural layer is the arena of power. The ethnic pastor and congregation enter that arena as neophytes. Parishes and pastors from the governing economy of the mixed churches possess influence and financial strength. An ethnic parish is often seen as a hindrance, a group to be first feared, rather than accepted and approved.

That is why, for instance, St. Paul did not seek permission from the Jerusalem elders, who held authority in the early Christian church, to do his work. Only when his work among the gentiles was somewhat established did he seek the approval of the Jerusalem elders. It is also important to bear in mind that when he went to Jerusalem the second time, Paul did not seek the authorities’ support as a gentile but rather as a Pharisee and a Nazarene (Acts 21:23, 24, 26; 23:6). He identified himself with the establishment, seeking its approval, not permission, for work already done.

Moreover, when Paul sought approval for his work among the gentiles, the response of the Jerusalem elders was twofold to give approval to Paul’s work among the gentiles (the multicultural society) and simultaneously to bless the ongoing work of the ethnic Petrine mission to the Jews. The elders did not, I believe, want to give outright approval to Paul’s strategy, but they could not approve one without giving their blessing to the other. They were apprehensive about the possibility of future conflict between Paul’s and Peter’s strategies. Already there are strong hints of their nervousness at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:1, 5). The Jerusalem elders were still very much a part of the Jewish establishment. They saw what it would mean to turn their backs on Jewish culture and traditions. And Paul’s advocacy of the gentiles was already leading them in that direction. These fears may well have been borne out by Paul’s rebuke of Peter, when Peter went back on his tentative multicultural convictions out of fear of rebuke from the powerful Jewish establishment (Gal. 2:14).

Discussing the strategies of Paul and Peter leads us to propose some elements of strategy for the present situation. The first priority is the penetration of the ethnic community. This can be done from the international, multicultural or ethnic level. Historically, each of these segments has raised up pastors to penetrate the ethnic community. At the international level, the church in the homeland has sent pastors to follow the emigrations into the new territories or colonies. At the ethnic level, pastors have been raised up from within the parish. At the multicultural level, church authorities are concerned to penetrate the ethnic communities.



In speaking of the Anglican Church, we address the broader culture’s entrance into the subcultures. These kinds of decisions are not as difficult as it may at first seem. Those in the episcopate are looking not only for pastoral solutions but also for evangelistic outreach. We are always interested in penetrating urban communities and repenetrating new urban developments. We buy and set aside property for future use in a developing suburban community. We cling to financially and congregationally marginal inner-city parishes because urban renewal and development look promising. We do so because we have the confidence and expertise to expand in the Anglo-Saxon community.

On the whole, however, when the church governance feels called -- whether by conscience or demand to enter at the ethnic level, there is uncertainty, hesitance and resistance in its response. Authorities at the multicultural level need some leads into the ethnic community. They also need signs of promise, economic stability and communicant growth before they plant themselves firmly behind new directions. The large corporate churches are no longer the instruments but rather the institutions of salvation. Thus, ethnic parishes often must work harder than the usual parish for recognition, sustenance and growth. In any case, inroads into the ethnic communities are often cut by someone (not necessarily the pastor) who is able to shift back and forth at different cultural and linguistic levels.

In its second and third generations, the ethnic community is integrated into the larger multicultural scene, and another important strategy comes to the fore. It becomes important for the parish to take its place on a par with other parishes. It does so by becoming financially self-sufficient, by having its own building (often ethnic parishes remain in lease or rental arrangements for years -- a sign that they have no physical or psychological territory in the larger church) and by providing both lay and clerical leadership in the multicultural society and church structures.

At this point in the parish’s development, its young people will have begun to marry outside the ethnic unit. If these couples remain as parishioners, and if outsiders become members, then an unusual kind of integration takes place. Whereas once the ethnic parish constituted a linguistically and culturally homogeneous whole, now it begins to accept parishioners from outside the ethnic unit. The process of integration usually happens in the opposite way; an Anglo-Saxon parish accepts non-Anglo-Saxon parishioners.

It is a long-held tenet of Anglican culture that it is desirable to send missionaries across cultural boundaries into new territory overseas. Indigenous Anglican churches and provinces may be established. The missionaries are careful to teach the young churches biblical principles of authority and organization.

But that is overseas, or perhaps in the ghettos of our native Indian culture. What happens when immigration or refugee movements bring the young church into the very heart of Anglicanism, forming a new expression of it? The easiest way to cope with this situation is to avoid the new immigrants, to provide them only social services and immigration counsel. By these means we provide help for newcomers but do not invite them into our very heart -- by giving them new churches in which they are comfortable. Rather we ask the newcomer to cross linguistic and cultural barriers to become a white Anglo-Saxon Anglican.

To place Anglican parishes in the heart of the ethnic subculture will certainly mean that Anglicanism will begin to take on new forms and shapes. First, we recognize, as the Jerusalem elders did, that salvation comes not by the yoke of tradition, itself hard enough to bear (Acts 15:10), but through the grace of the Lord Jesus. Second, we see a corollary. Anglican evangelism in the ethnic culture would meld traditions, not extinguish those of the ethnic culture. Third, it refreshes us that as the ethnic congregations take their place within the larger church, their life will provide new strength and vision for the total church.



The model described in the preceding pages is one of crossing barriers in the multicultural society. I have suggested that three layers exist, and that there is work peculiar to each. Already it becomes obvious that the most difficult part of this working model is interaction and crossing over. This model simply reflects the society itself, in which many ethnic layers constantly relate to one another.

When someone explains that the Anglican system demands that we approach the ethnic layer through synod and episcopacy, my response is that it is a bad tactic. The highest authorities in the synodical or episcopal structures are often those furthest removed from the most delicate interactions, those of the ethnic group with the multiculture. Yet because of the hierarchical nature of our ecclesiastical polity and our respect for the episcopal office, we tend to approach those in the church’s high places as supplicants, seeking permission, information and authority before we act.

Yet the authorities of the multiculture are those who are able to frequent the points of interrelation and crossing over. They are authorities by reason of their knowledge, action and experience. Nevertheless, as I have indicated, these actual authorities are those who are most often curtained off by their involvement at the ethnic level. They operate in ethnic obscurity.

Obviously these authorities do not have the respect in the church bureaucracy that they have in their own groups. Yet they are the authorities of the margins. They function as the unheralded eyes and ears of the episcopate in the multicultural and marginal societies. Though they have insight and responsibility, they are largely ignored in the larger policy decisions of the hierarchy. After all, the authorities and the hierarchy recognize first and respond most warmly to their own kind.

I have tried to describe what is happening at three levels on which the church functions, and across those levels. A conscious strategy to establish parishes in the subculture would recognize and support the necessary interrelations and crossings-over, and give official authority to those who already bear it.

Medical Research: Establishing International Guidelines



About ten years ago a neatly dressed man sat in on a session of the Medical Research Review Board of which I was a member. After the agenda items of the day were completed, our chairman requested permission for this man to pose a hypothetical question to us. These were the days, incidentally, before Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were formally established by government regulations, and the medical profession was still in the process of thinking through its responsibilities.

“Would it be all right if we used the native population as patients in order to test a drug which we hope will better treat a particular tropical disease?” he asked. It seemed an innocent enough inquiry, and the usual interrogation followed. We asked whether adequate animal testing of the drug would take place before it was given to humans, whether the subjects would be fully informed about what was going to happen to them and about any possible danger of side effects from the drug prior to giving their consent, whether they were going to be paid for participating in the experiment and, if so, how much. We also wondered whether some patients would be in a “control” group given only the current standard treatment so that a comparison could be made between their progress and the response of the patients who were given the new drug. All the answers regarding the scientific merit and the ethical nature of the proposed research seemed satisfactory. We were about to applaud the enterprise and encourage its spokesman to see that it was carried out when a final question occurred to me. “What will happen if the drug is found to be helpful?” I asked.

“The experiment will be a success, of course, and we will use it,” he answered.

“That’s good. Will the patients themselves continue to be given the drug as long as they need it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Will supplies of the drug be made available on the market for the citizens of the country where we have done this research?”

After a long pause, he answered, “We haven’t thought about that.”

I then objected to the research on the grounds that we would be using people as guinea pigs solely for our own benefit. In conducting such research, we would have a moral obligation not only to complete treatment of the patients involved but also to see to it that supplies of the drug, if it were efficacious, would be made available on the local market. We never did learn whether the research was carried out or not. Upon reflection I presume that its mysterious proponent was employed by the Department of Defense, which was interested in finding a treatment for members of our armed forces should they be exposed to the disease.



Other difficult ethical issues arise when research is funded by or conducted in a foreign country whose medical and moral standards are different from those of the country whence the money or personnel come. There are obvious temptations for financial and human exploitation, and until recently there were no adequate guidelines. The Nüremburg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki and other earlier codes were not sufficiently detailed to deal with many abuses.

The Geneva-based Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS), an institution which works with the World Health Organization (WHO), has been working for some years to develop comprehensive, international guidelines for medical research. In the process Dr. Zbigniew Bankowski, executive secretary of CIOMS, sent out over 100 questionnaires to Third World countries. He discovered that whatever restraints were placed upon research, whether domestically or internationally funded, arose from indigenous ministries of health, university policies and hospital codes and varied greatly in quality. In addition, he learned that the responsibility for both the scientific and ethical approval of approximately 23 per cent of the research was vested in individual medical investigators.

An extreme example of this haphazard dispersion of control was an experiment to test the effects of tetracycline on a rickettsial disease. The subjects of this experiment were to be healthy members of the subordinate staff of a medical institution in a Third World country; they were to be exposed to the disease by the bites of infected insects. Despite being informed that even with the proposed antibiotic treatment, rickettsial infection might be persistent in their bodies -- and that there was “a small risk of death” -- people “volunteered.” It sounded like a form of medical banditry: not “your money or your life” but “your health or your job.”

However, it should be noted that abuses are not restricted to developing countries. They take place even in the United States, our guidelines notwithstanding. The experiment that permitted retarded children to contract hepatitis at the Willowbrook State School in New York state and the injection of live cancer cells into elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in New York City are two illustrations.

An example of unethical behavior involving two developed countries occurred in July 1980 when Dr. Martin J. Cline, a member of the staff of the School of Medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles, conducted the first gene therapy in humans on two terminally ill thalassemia patients in Israel. Criticism of Dr. Cline by American scientists came quickly after the procedure was announced, and it focused on two issues. First, the insertion of combined genes into a patient was not authorized by Dr. Cline’s protocol, nor was it envisaged under the conditions of his grant. Second, the experiment itself was scientifically premature and should have been preceded by more animal studies. In his defense, Dr. Cline at first claimed that his experiment was not really novel, but later (in a letter to the National Institutes of Health) he wrote: “I greatly regret my decision to proceed with the DNA experiment. . . . I exercised poor judgment in failing to halt the study.” Subsequently, most of the government funds for research over which Dr. Cline had responsibility were withdrawn.

One could argue on behalf of Dr. Cline that because national cultures differ, their medical and ethical standards should also. Why should medical research and treatment as practiced in the industrial nations be mirrored in emerging, Third World, agricultural nations? Should Western, Judeo-Christian values be promulgated in non-Western nations? Is this not an example of cultural imperialism? Can one realistically require individual free consent to participation in research when decisions in the tribal community are basically communal and expressed through a single spokesperson? Should a scientist be subject to penalty if he or she conducts research forbidden in his or her own nation in another country? If the benefits from a successful new treatment would be much greater in a country where the disease is prevalent than in another where it is rare, cannot one rightly take more risks in researching that treatment where the disease is prevalent? 

While the need for some form of international guidelines has long been recognized, CIOMS first proposed a draft in October 1980. After amendment by international participants at the numerous CIOMS Roundtable Conferences, the guidelines were finally endorsed in October 1981 by the WHO Advisory Committee on Medical Research. They are consonant with previous international codes and draw quite heavily upon recent American Health, Education and Welfare and Health and Human Services regulations. The new CIOMS international guidelines incorporate the two central aspects of all contemporary national guidelines: the free and informed consent of the participants and the prior scientific and ethical review of the research protocols by an independent body of scientific experts and community representatives.

The central philosophic question of whether differing national cultures should have different medical ethics is not addressed by the CIOMS guidelines, but the answer is implied. The new guidelines -- as did the Nüremberg Code and other declarations before them -- simply assume the basic Western humanist standards, particularly as they place a high value on the welfare of the individual. If the authors of the guidelines were asked to be self-conscious about their assumption, they might offer the following justification: Western medicine has evolved with, and been motivated by, Judeo-Christian and Greek values. Since it is the procedures of Western medical research that are now being adopted throughout the world, the values must go with them. It is doubtful that Western medicine would be effective without the trust these values have elicited in patients. Only a few maverick physicians, or a nation possessed by something as evil as Nazism, would deliberately try to separate the procedures from the values. To this justification, I would add my personal opinion that medical investigators should be expected, wherever they work, to live up to their own personal beliefs and to the spirit of at least their own national standards. Such behavior is not imperialistic; it is just conscientious.

Specifically the guidelines call for research to be conducted by “appropriately qualified and experienced investigators” who will describe their project in protocols outlining its purpose, risks, proposed means of gaining consent, and position on confidentiality. Children are to be included in research only if there can be no substitutes for them. Pregnant women and mentally ill people must be excluded unless the research relates to their particular status. Employees of drug companies or dependent personnel such as medical students should not be recruited if undue influence is involved. In a departure from the recent regulations of most European nations, prisoners are permitted to be subjects.

The guidelines do provide for some flexibility in interpreting their standards according to available domestic resources and social customs. This flexibility constitutes a recognition of the differing cultural and ethical values obtaining between nations, but not an abandonment of central Western standards. Thus, the consent of the subject may in some developing countries be exercised by one or more representatives of the community rather than by the individuals themselves. But such an exception to the rule must be made only by those whose traditional role is to speak for and to protect the welfare of the whole community.

The process of review is to be conducted by one or two independent review boards, depending upon availability of resources. One “multidisciplinary advisory committee operative at the national level” should have responsibility for assessing the safety and quality of all new medicines and devices intended for use in their country. Another recommendation is for an “Ethical Review Committee,” also interdisciplinary and including community representatives, which would be responsible for evaluating all foreign and domestic research protocols. The countries that don’t have many trained medical-research personnel may have only a single board to perform both of the above functions.

The section on the task of ethical review states that “an experiment on human subjects that is scientifically unsound is ipso facto unethical.” In other words, bad science is bad ethics -- something we Americans are still arguing about. Another element which is not yet included in U.S. regulations is the requirement that compensation for injury received as a result of participation in medical research is to be on a no-fault basis. In America one still must go through the difficult process of suing for malpractice before compensation can be gained.

The promulgation of these international guidelines is a major achievement, and Dr. Bankowski, and many others who worked with him, deserve commendation. Although the guidelines obviously have no mandatory power in themselves, they do provide reference points and goals for individual governments to adopt, and they are also standards by which a nation’s performance may be judged. One hopes that the new guidelines will encourage the development of domestic medical review procedures where they are presently inadequate, and that’ their publication will reveal and censure some of the abuses caused by foreign exploitation.

However, there are some technical problems which these guidelines, and indeed current American ones, have not yet resolved. If there is no consensus in an International Review Hoard or Ethical Review Committee, does the minority have any right to appeal, and, if so, to whom? A second problem is the monitoring of the conduct of research after the protocol has been approved. Nobody in the United States does such monitoring on a systematic basis, partly because it is a very time-consuming process and partly because it is unpopular with the investigators, whose pride is hurt, because it implies a lack of confidence in their continuing competence and integrity.

Another unresolved problem is how research whose goal is the relief of diseases which occur primarily in Third World countries is to be encouraged and funded. The poverty of many of these nations precludes the funding of their own research, and drug companies have understandably been reluctant to embark on such ventures because the potential profits are not sufficient to cover the costs of development and marketing. Perhaps all drug companies involved in international research should be assessed dues which, along with donations from WHO, would help in subsidizing such programs. Meanwhile, as an incentive to provide treatment as well, as research, use of people as guinea pigs only should be prohibited.

A related problem is that the CIOMS guidelines do not clarify the issue of whether or not the same standards of risks should obtain in a poorer country where a disease is prevalent as in the funding country where the disease seldom occurs. On page six of the guidelines appears a statement regarding the risks of research on new drugs in developing countries: “Decisions relating to their investigation and subsequent use should be made in the light of local judgment and experience, and directed to practicable options rather than unobtainable ideals.” This recommendation suggests that ethical leeway is intended in the degree of risk which is acceptable in one community or nation as compared to another. However, on page 32, in a section of the guidelines titled “Externally Sponsored Research,” the following statement is also made: “The ethical standards applied should be no less exacting than they would be for research carried out within the initiating country.” In my opinion a risk/benefit analysis should always be made, but where a greater benefit is potentially available, a greater risk can be ethically taken.

Finally, the publication of international guidelines for medical research illuminates the need for similar guidelines in related fields. For instance, there is no internationally accepted minimum standard for the labeling of pharmaceutical drugs. False claims and inadequate warnings of dangers are common for drugs marketed in South America; the result is often tragic. The export of toxic chemicals, particularly pesticides, to developing countries without information regarding their dangers has, long been a problem for them. If domestic, environmental and safety regulations require the closing of an asbestos manufacturing plant in one country, on what moral grounds can the moving of such a plant to another country be justified?

Much has now been achieved in developing standards for medical research around the world; now these standards need to be applied. Much is still left to be done in the matter of international regulation; those remaining tasks must now be addressed.

Bondage in Old Hispaniola: The Haitian Canecutters



Haiti cast a spell over me in 1978. Never had I visited a land where such a tiny minority of people owned so much wealth while the majority, without enough to eat, accepted their portion as though decreed by fate. Their fatalism bewildered me then, but a 1981 visit to Haiti and the Dominican Republic disclosed some of the forces governing the two nations and revealed, a new spirit coming into being among the island’s people.

In December, six of us, two nuns and four priests, went to the Dominican Republic to look at the condition of the Haitian sugar-cane cutters and report on employment practices in the sugar industry, especially in that part of it controlled by the Gulf & Western Corporation. Then two other priests and I went on to Haiti. Most of us were members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility -- a New York-based coalition of religious investors which monitors and encourages responsible business policies. We looked hard at the canecutters and were pained to see men enduring such bitter bondage.

On our arrival in the Dominican Republic, we heard a Jesuit tell of watching paramedics lift into an ambulance two young canecutters who had collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. The young Haitians, aged 18 to 25, who go to the Dominican Republic to cut the ripe sugar cane find that their pay is so low, their 11-hour workdays are so infrequent, and their living expenses so high, that they do not get enough to eat. “Not enough to eat” was a cry we heard over and over again on our trip.

We visited the canecutters’ living quarters, smelled the stench of human waste, watched the prostitutes cavort, stuck our heads into the tiny rooms crowded with bunk beds, and spoke with an old man whose foot had been infected for several years. The parish priest, who was highly respected by the Haitians, was with us as they told us of their miseries. We marveled at their dignity, for poor and powerless though they were, with no future, their smiles nevertheless conveyed toughness, a quiet gentleness and a feeling of self-esteem. We asked if they would prefer to be in Haiti. They answered No, since here, with luck, they could earn cash and save as much as $100 in the six-month harvest season. In Haiti there is no work for them.

Visits to the workers’ quarters of five Dominican plantations were enough to show us that the laborers were tied to the sugar fields as a goat is roped to a stake. The priest explained that the sugar producers draw over 40,000 cutters from Haiti every year, though they cannot employ that many. When the cane ripens, they bring in many extra workers to ensure an efficient harvest and eliminate delays from work stoppages or sickness. This means that the extra cutters will not have work or pay, and must remain at the quarters hoping to be called. A worker is paid $2.33 for each ton of cane he cuts and loads on an oxcart. A healthy man can cut one or one and a half tons on a normal day, but he will need to spend half of what he earns for his daily bread.



Although our guide kept repeating, “The Haitians have no legal rights in the Dominican Republic,” it took us several days to realize what he meant. The Dominican and Haitian governments have an accord for the traffic in canecutters, but the migrants themselves have no legal status -- no passports, no visas, no rights. Viewed as illegal aliens, they have no right to compensation for work injuries, no claim to medicine and no recourse to sue in courts for wages or grievances. When the cane is cut at one plantation, they are herded onto trucks and driven to another. Just before our visit, the Dominican government decided that too many Haitians had come across and ordered the army to round up several thousand for return to Haiti. Among those snatched up were many who had been born and raised in the Dominican Republic, but since Haitians born in the Republic do not receive birth certificates, they could not prove they were citizens. Considered illegals, they were kidnapped, transported to Haiti and forsaken in a land they had never seen.

It is paradoxical that our government is dealing with the Haitian refugees to the United States in the same way that the Dominican government treats the Haitian canecutters: by denying them legal rights and herding them together. When persons have no legal rights, governments have absolute control over them. By allowing our political support for Haiti’s President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier to dictate U.S. immigration policy, we withdraw our traditional welcome for refugees and jeopardize the legal system which protects all of us.

Our trip to the Dominican Republic gave us time with a “colono” -- a private cane grower. He explained Gulf & Western’s sugar network and told us how beneficial it was for him, since the corporation provides cash for weeding his fields, for starting new cane, for cutting it and for transporting it to the Gulf & Western mill. When the sugar is processed, the corporation sells it on the international market and divides the income with the private producer, who receives a bit more than half.

He told us that cane must be cut within a month of ripening and must reach the mill within 72 hours of cutting, or it goes bad. This time line demands a rigorous planting and harvesting schedule so that good cane reaches the mill when ripe and is processed immediately. If more cane arrives than the mill can handle, it goes bad, but if too little arrives, the mill operates under capacity and profits shrink. Hence Gulf & Western has locked its own plantations and those of private owners into a rigid network of schedules for planting and harvesting, credit for wages, and teams of advisers to over- see the work. The availability of the Haitian canecutters is essential to the timing and efficiency on which the company’s profits depend. Without willing cutters the industry collapses, and the Haitians are willing because they are hungry, unorganized and illegal.

Friends had warned us not to visit a Gulf & Western field where Haitians cut cane, as armed private police would descend on us. Nevertheless, our “colono” drove into such a field, where we spoke with the cutters in Spanish and French, and with a cart driver who showed us the tickets given the cutters for receipts and the column where the weights were later marked. When the approach of an armed supervisor made us decide to leave, the cartman’s parting words provided a clue to the mystery of old Hispaniola: “Here there is total control.”

His farewell crystallized our thoughts. Sugar production demands control: control over the canecutters, over the carts, railroads and mill, over the private planters, over the markets and, to a certain extent, over governments. This need for control explains the bondage of the Haitian canecutters.

Both the Dominican Republic and Haiti were once colonies built on slavery. After Columbus’s discovery of the island of Hispaniola, Spaniards settled the eastern two-thirds of it (now the Dominican Republic), enslaving the Indians to work the gold mines and to develop farms and plantations. When the colonists saw the proud Caribs die rather than submit to slavery, they sent their galleons to Africa for black workers. Later, French pirates settled the western third of the island, retaining its Indian name, Haiti. With an economy also based on slavery, it became France’s richest colony. The availability of a strong, mobile work force made sugar production possible and profitable on Hispaniola. In fact, plantation work was so hard, the harvesting schedule so exacting, and the market so demanding that the sugar industry would not have flourished without slaves.



Today slavery is outlawed in the Caribbean, and both the Dominican Republic and Haitian governments deny that they practice it. But the Haitians cutting cane in the Dominican Republic are bound into an economic system that is very like slavery. We learned that an accord exists between the two governments -- that the Haitian government receives $80.00 from the Dominican government for each Haitian it delivers and that the cutters are deliberately kept illegal and hungry so that they will work when needed. The cutters collect an agreed-upon wage, but it is so low that it compares with the subsistence food which slaves received to maintain their health.

In the Dominican Republic, we were greatly impressed with Gulf & Western’s efficiency. The cane ripened when expected, the laborers were on hand to cut it, the network of railroads worked smoothly and the mill thundered day and night. We had a pleasant interview with the managers and expressed our surprise that a company so efficient and successful would pay such low wages and be so negligent in providing the essential human services of housing, latrines and water. We could not believe their excuse: “We wanted to raise wages, but the government refused, as it would destabilize wages throughout the industry.” We learned that, through negotiations, Gulf & Western had convinced the Dominican government to accept pesos rather than dollars for all tax and debt payments -- an agreement that saves the corporation 30 cents on every dollar it pays the government. The corporation has power. Two university professors told us that Gulf & Western operates with a budget larger than the government’s, that it rivals the government in political influence, and that it obtains the labor laws it desires. Yet spokespersons for both industry and government told us nothing can be done about the bondage of the Haitians. “The price of sugar is too weak.” “The whole industry would collapse.” “The growers will turn to mechanization.” “Artificial sweeteners and European sugar beets are killing the sugar market.”

It seems that sugar is so important to American interests and to the United States and Dominican governments that our government reinforces the present arrangement that keeps the Haitians illegal and powerless. At the U.S. Embassy in the Republic we met with two of the staff whose line of thought followed the line we received at Gulf & Western, especially regarding a pay raise.

As we crisscrossed the Dominican Republic, we noticed the large number of soldiers along the roads. Our hosts declared that the Dominican military is very strong and that it is more loyal and more responsive to American generals than to its own government. Informed persons told us that if a revolt were to erupt in Haiti, Washington would send the Dominican army to put it down rather than use American troops, and that the Dominicans are prepared to go. We were also told that one out of four Dominicans depends on food from the United States. The Dominicans’ dependence on us gives our government great control over the Republic’s internal affairs.

An early sign that the Dominican military is tightening the security screws was the deportation last summer of four religious workers who were successfully organizing rural villagers. Military regimes do not like that kind of religious dedication.



When our visit to the Dominican Republic was over, we went on to Haiti for more talks. Church workers told us many grim tales of the Tonton Macoutes and of this legalized Mafia’s hold on the people. We were told that they murder without fear of retribution, extort money, cattle and land from the poor and have so filled the land with spies that everyone fears his or her neighbor; even the canecutters in the Dominican Republic expect their words and deeds to be recorded. We were told that Duvalier is so afraid of revolution that his helicopter is kept ready for instant flight.

One church official told us that the people of a mountain village made him sit and listen while they described how 50 of their children had starved to death within a few weeks. The fathers were cutting cane in the Dominican Republic and had not sent home money for food. As we listened to this horror, through my mind ran the words of Florida District Court Judge James King: “Much of Haiti’s poverty is a result of Duvalier’s efforts to maintain power. It could be said that Duvalier has made his country weak so that he could be strong.”

The religious workers we met in Haiti were surprisingly hopeful about the country’s future. They said that Duvalier had gone too far, that he had made serious mistakes, that the people had courage and a new spirit and that perhaps President-for-Life Duvalier may not have long to go. We learned that even the tilted cupola of the cathedral’s tower in Cap-Haïtien, blown askew by an ill wind, is interpreted by the people as an omen that Duvalier is about to topple.

A missionary asked us, “If Duvalier falls, will the United States replace him with another strongman?” We answered that that was likely, since the bondage of the Haitians, especially the canecutters, seems to be an inherent part of U.S. foreign policy. Because American business benefits from the sugar industry, our government wants a dictator who will maintain stability and keep the profits flowing. To achieve this, our armies have already invaded Hispaniola three times: they overran the Dominican Republic in 1916 and 1965; they conquered Haiti in 1915 and ruled it until 1934.

Our trip was a lesson in Washington’s global power. Though our leaders speak of us as the “defenders of freedom,” we found that others look upon us as ruthless masters, the heirs of the Spanish, French and British empires. To maintain domination some American officials seem willing to bribe the leaders of foreign governments, to seduce their military officers from national loyalties, to make whole nations dependent on our low-cost food, to spy out the deepest political secrets, and to treat other nations like American provinces that we may invade when they become too independent.

But invasions can be costly. Napoleon sent Haiti his best troops to help the colonists put down a revolt of the slaves. Instead the slaves (helped by yellow fever) drove off the troops and created an independent nation. After losing Haiti, the emperor knew he could not maintain the French colonies in Louisiana, and the territory was sold to the United States. The loss of Haiti started the dissolution of the French Empire.

Similarly, we cannot hope to keep ourselves strong by making our neighbors weak. The island of Hispaniola is important to our geographic security, business interests and international markets, but the loyalty of the island’s peoples is evaporating.

The rector of a religious high school in the Dominican Republic said that many Dominican graduates accept scholarships to study in Russia. Then, when they return to the airport in Santo Domingo, the security forces arrest and incarcerate them. The Russians want to disengage the island from American involvement, and they will succeed if America persists in its present rapacious ways.



As Americans, we want to see our nation retain global primacy in both allegiance and strength. The U.S. can do this by promoting its spiritual values among nations without seeking to control them. This means fostering democracies, not dictatorships; dealing fairly with sovereign nations and treating them as friends, not subjects; respecting our neighbors more than our corporate markets; and creating jobs, not food dependencies. We will rightly earn the respect of other nations when we recognize the Dominicans and the Haitians as partners, and ease the Haitians’ forced labor and fight for their freedom. The allegiance of the island’s people will safeguard our interests better than repressive governments can.

With respect from Americans, the Dominican and Haitian governments could answer to their people, representing and serving them instead of taking directions from Washington. It is these governments that must guarantee their citizens legal rights and fair wages, and provide the law’s protection for labor unions. With true political power, honest governments in the Dominican Republic and in Haiti could achieve a fair equilibrium between the dividends of stockholders in corporations such as Gulf & Western, and the wages of those who cut the cane.

Throughout both the Dominican Republic and Haiti, church workers told us that a new spirit is permeating the people. It comes from the events in Central America, from migrants to the States, and from a deepened awareness of personal dignity. This new spirit, a holy spirit, will not be satisfied with food handouts nor intimidated by guns. It demands liberty and justice. The same spirit provoked the American Revolution, overthrew Somoza in Nicaragua and is moving the Polish people. The might of the British Empire could not smother it, nor could Somoza’s helicopters, nor will the armies of Russia extinguish it in Poland. On the island of Hispaniola, this spirit is creating a new people of vision, determination and hope.

Politically Feeble Churches and the Strategic Imperative



In seminary I read certain biblical stories not only for their theological significance but also for their strategic value in political action. I couldn’t resist the temptation to do strategic exegesis; for example, of Nathan’s manipulating David into condemning himself, of St. Paul’s flattering defense before King Agrippa, of Micaiah’s gutsy predictions to King Ahab, and of Jeremiah’s one-man demonstration at the Benjamin gate. Mordecai and Esther, it seemed to me, were at least the equals of Machiavelli, while Moses’ tactical excesses in his confrontations with Pharaoh clearly lacked political subtlety.

My hermeneutical quirks aside, the fact is that some forebears in the faith spent an uncommon amount of time in encounters with political leaders. These biblical figures often devised imaginative strategies to exercise political influence. Their tactics are probably too culture-bound to give much guidance to our time and place; yet, their witness to political theologies by taking strategic actions is a potent goad to this generation of churches and Christians. Today, political activity is too often mistaken for political strategy. Theological-ethical reflections on political issues are surrogates for strategic action. Pronouncements alone are presumed to be effective deeds.

The church is commissioned by Christ to be in and for the world. If we are called to build now social contributions to the ultimate reign of God’s love to come -- a claim that no longer needs much argument anywhere on the ecclesiastical spectrum -- then we are bound by a strategic imperative. That is, we have a duty to maximize our effectiveness in influencing governmental decision-making. What is the nature and character of this mandate? In what directions does it point and pull mainline Protestantism?



Despite our reputation in some circles, especially among those who oppose what they think we’re doing, “liberal” mainline churches in America are seriously deficient in understanding and practicing the arts of political influence. Despite some impressive exceptions, a prominent feature of most liberal Protestantism is its strategic quietism: that is, the lack of political strategy, of a decent respect for political effectiveness. My complaint is not against those brothers and sisters in the faith who are indifferent or hostile to the political mission of the church. Instead, my target is my “own kind,” those who advocate corporate political action as a means to the goal of social transformation.

Although strategic quietism takes many forms, there are two that have predominated in my experience -- and perhaps they are my own personal temptations. They can be described as apolitical activism and political avoidance.

Apolitical activism is a social witness seemingly without political intentions -- without much, if any, concern for political consequences. Adverse effects on politicians or the alienation of public opinion apparently are matters of indifference. Whether apolitical activists are motivated by lofty theological and ethical rationales or by little more than a feeling of rage against poverty, war and injustice, they seem to hold to the same essential features: righteous irrelevance, privatistic protest, and a sectarian or “Christ-against-culture” outlook.

Perhaps the negative effects of these people’s actions are contrary to their intentions -- the unexpected results, for instance, of romantic-utopian illusions about human beings. Nonetheless, I sense that essentially apolitical activism is therapeutic rather than strategic. Personal comfort, satisfaction or “purity” can be found in “confronting the establishment” or “imitating the prophets.”

Apolitical activism is often visible in public demonstrations and tactics of disruption. Of course, not all demonstrations and demonstrators can be judged on the basis of a few; each must be evaluated situationally. As the civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam-war rallies amply testify, such public tactics often have political intentions and profoundly positive effects -- particularly by dramatizing grievances and generating public awareness and sympathy. Demonstrative tactics can be valuable lobbying techniques, either directly on legislators or indirectly on public opinion -- especially in a time when television cameras need visible images.

The virtues of apolitical activists are the strength of their commitments to social justice and the validation of their beliefs by deeds. Their fury and fervor in an age of nuclear madness and corporate banditry are reflections of divine judgment and prods to consciences. Their dismissal of political strategy, however, rarely brings God’s liberation and reconciliation much closer.

Political avoidance, the other prominent form of strategic quietism, is, I believe, the more harmful of the two. Though equally ineffective, it is more common and less fervent. By substituting reflections and rhetoric for actions which confirm and embody the words, it replaces reality with appearances. It gives the illusion of political activity but ducks actual political involvement.

Political strategies frequently are treated like unwanted offspring of political theologies. The kinship is formally acknowledged, as it must be, since the strategic imperative for Christians is parented by and dependent on the nurture of theology and ethics. But in practice the relationship is often denied, with strategy being ignored and neglected. The pursuit of social justice through politics has numerous cheerleaders and pop liberationists in mainline Protestantism, but pathetically few who are strategically active.

Too frequently, we ignore political “trivia,” such as letter-writing to Congress, and instead await opportunities for thrilling crusades to create change. We forget that it is often the accumulation of trivia which, in fact, has launched social transformations -- including regressive ones! The 1981 federal legislation slashing taxes and budget, for example, might not have passed, according to some congressional offices, without the mighty stream of letters supporting the president’s proposals and the corresponding un-Amoslike mere trickle for justice.

One indication of political avoidance is the scarcity of books and articles on political strategy for churches, in contrast to the virtual glut of theological and ethical justifications for political practice. The publishers’ focus continues to be on why rather than on how, perhaps because readers are more interested in pondering than in doing. One of the few solid books on churches and strategy is Methodism and Society: Guidelines for Strategy, by Paul K. Deats and Herbert Stotts (Abingdon) -- and it was published in 1962! On the assumption that supply responds to demand, I will believe that liberal Protestantism is serious about political activity when there are even one-tenth as many manuals on political strategy for churches as there now are on church fund-raising.



Among the various ploys for shunning while appearing to embrace political activism are press coverage and issue-oriented conferences intended as ends in themselves, rather than as means to political ends. And the prime example of political avoidance can be the church resolution.

Someone has justifiably described mainline churches as “resolutionary societies.” Resolutions on social issues are the very heartthrob of many church conferences, and they can indeed have an educational impact on church members, as can a conference debate. But effective ingredients must be included, and the statement should have something of substance to say. Some resolutions are outstanding and effective, but some appear to have been written in a half-hour or less, and produce effects that match the efforts. Resolutions, moreover, serve the critical function of authorizing and legitimizing political action -- and there’s the main rub! Regularly, the passage of a church resolution functions as a surrogate rather than a stimulus. It is mistakenly regarded as being in itself an act of political influence. Prelude becomes finale, and any follow-up is a rarity. Any political effects, therefore, are accidental, since politicians, if rational, remain unmoved. But the resolvers have “done something,” satisfying their yearning to “respond.” The process may be psychologically therapeutic, but it is not politically effective. The resolution cannot be the completion; it is only the beginning of political strategy.

Although I have written a stack of resolutions and still affirm their potential for educational and political efficacy, nonetheless I propose -- only half facetiously -- a moratorium of at least three years on church resolutions. We can then concentrate our energies, so depleted by passing resolutions, on implementing a small percentage of those we have already passed.

Ironically, among the few American religious groups to respond earnestly to liberal Protestant rhetoric about political involvement is the Moral Majority and its ilk. Such groups perceive mainline Protestantism as a politically active influence, and apparently that perception served as the pattern on which their countervailing force was structured. We can condemn the moral exclusions and the tactics practiced by those on the religious right, but we must give grudging applause to their zealous appropriation of the church’s strategic imperative. Our rhetoric helped to teach them. Now, can we, in turn, learn from them?

Should we interpret the emergence of the religious right as God’s judgment on our political flabbiness? Dare we see Jerry Falwell as God’s rod of anger, the staff of fury -- let alone the one anointed like Cyrus? Is the religious right being used as a tool of God to call the rest of us to repentance for our own parochial visions and strategic quietism?

No matter how we evaluate the religious right theologically, irony will be doubled if we are prodded to relearn from its adherents what they learned from us. After all, the most fitting response of liberal Protestantism to the fundamentalist phenomenon is to embrace the strategic imperative warmheartedly -- and give the fundamentalists, if we can, further lessons in doing politics with honesty and humility.



Now let us turn from rejections of the strategic imperative and look at this commission stated positively. If theology is faith seeking understanding, then strategy can be viewed as faith seeking realization. The derivation of the word conveys the critical nature of the task. In classical Greek, strategia denoted the command exercised by a military general in directing overall military movements and operations. The term was a combination of two Greek words meaning literally “to lead an army.”

It is impossible for me to imagine -- let alone desire -- that our incohesive churches could behave like combat units taking orders and acting with coordination. Nonetheless, the origin of the word is a forceful reminder that strategy is serious business, often a matter of life and death. In American politics, where the powers of governments of all kinds -- federal, state and local -- are crucial in determining the common good, and where countless organizations -- most of them with predatory instincts -- are trying to influence decisions, strategy remains a sobering enterprise. Life can hang in the balance. In fact, it would not hurt to read a few military manuals and histories, and then try to transvalue those classical principles of strategy for the sake of our social hopes.

From a church perspective, strategy is the rational process of making our visions visible. It is planning actions to realize goals, the discipline of using means to achieve ends. Political strategy is the effort to influence governmental decision-makers (legislators, executives, bureaucrats) to think and/or act in accord with our will.

Without drawing any ethical lines at this point, we can list certain means of influence: deceptions, bribes (or “honoraria”), seductions, favors, threats, promises, rational persuasion. Influence can be effected by direct action (“buttonholing” a member of Congress) or indirect action (“grass-roots lobbying”). Exercising political influence is by no means synonymous with applying political “pressure,” a mechanical analogy which describes only some forms of influence. On the other hand, political influence usually results from far more than persuasion alone -- even when practiced by church representatives. Thus, political strategy involves not merely speaking truth to power, but also -- and more so -- speaking power to power.

Despite the complexities, political strategies for churches must not become esoterica for elites, practiced only by those duly trained and ordained to its mysteries. Of equal importance, political strategy cannot exist as a casual, undisciplined expression of mere common sense. While very few who have mastered the practical arts of political strategy have ever heard of “games theories,” we can be sure that none has failed to do his or her homework in understanding the governmental process, the provisions and problems of any particular policy or piece of legislation, or the dynamics of human behavior. Strategy is a multidisciplinary phenomenon which depends for its effectiveness on the wisdom from a host of fields: psychology, sociology, political science, ethics.

Like the whole of the moral life, strategy requires reflection and discipline. But these prerequisites are not so intellectually or morally formidable that the formation of political strategy cannot be broadly inclusive. On practical as well as theological grounds, strategic planning for political action by the people of God must be a task both participatory and disciplined.

The motivating power behind political strategy is the desire to be effective, to bring our ethical hopes to fruition. If the church has a duty to influence the decisions of governments, then the church has a concomitant duty to act relevantly by willing the means necessary to achieve its political ends. In this sense, political strategy is the incarnation of liberation. Since Christian ethics is a matter of thinking and doing, of action as much as reflection, then strategy as the implementation of vision is no less important than theology as the clarification of vision.

Political strategies, of course, must operate within the bounds of ethical restraints, especially since reliance on the pragmatic criterion of effectiveness can be so appealing and yet so morally dangerous. Some political, tactics are simply wrong -- if, for example, the means are disproportionate to the ends or otherwise prohibitively costly.

However, my problem with most political strategies by churches is not that the means are morally harmful, but rather that they are politically innocuous. Our tactics are not morally excessive; they are politically -- and morally -- insufficient.



The strategic imperative is not simply a generalized commission. It consists also of particular directions and guidelines, like “middle axioms” in ethics. Four of these guidelines for political strategy are especially relevant for mainline churches. They highlight both our roles and our dilemmas.

First, the strategic imperative on the American scene calls for “prudent prophecy” -- social witness through political adaptation. American-style lobbying is a comparatively conservative process. Radical challenges are not conducive to effective action. To influence political decision-makers, who in general hold their positions because they are not doubters or challengers of the system’s fundamentals, political activists usually must accommodate to the basic practices and premises of the institutions.

Adaptive behavior is evident in both means and goals. In terms of means, most of the basic techniques of influence -- personal visits, letter-writing campaigns, testimonies at public hearings -- are shared by all practitioners of the art. Moral restraints and available resources limit some more than others from using unsavory methods.

In terms of goals, major departures from the value assumptions of the culture are not often rewarded. For example, one can argue for reductions in the military budget or even for disarmament, so long as one does not argue the case on pacifist principles.

Some will claim that “prudent prophecy” is a contradiction in terms. My assumption is that prudence -- as the calculation of consequences -- and prophecy as political witness -- are compatible and essential to one another (at least in the United States and other democratic nations, where procedures of popular election and rights of petition generally provide structured opportunities for political change). Ethical injunctions to seek the best possible, to extend the present bounds of the possible, and to use means relevant to the situation point to the value of prudent prophecy.

A most grievous error, however, is to assume that prudent prophecy is relevant in all circumstances. I doubt its remotest possibility of effectiveness in some parts of Latin America, and there are plenty of situations in the United States where a more confrontational approach to cultural values is essential. The strategic imperative usually implies prudent prophecy in our political context. Other situations demand other prophetic roles.

Second, the strategic imperative requires sustained concentration on a few social concerns, but the nature of sociological church-type institutions places premiums on diffusion and faddism. The advantage of a single-issue organization, such as the National Rifle Association, is that its members join because of their commitment to the specific cause. The organization, therefore, has an inherent mandate to focus its political attention doggedly on its reason for being.

Mainline churches, by contrast, have an inherent dilemma. They have heterogeneous memberships, and their bases of unity are “spiritual” and not political. Thus, at least as denominational bodies, American churches contain multiple cleavages of social opinion and priorities.

The result is great difficulty in concentrating on a limited number of issues for common action. To satisfy the clamor of competing interests -- not to mention the agonizing problem of making choices among the multitude of real injustices -- mainline churches tend to focus on too many issues and for too little time to be effective. Even when a priority is selected, it is often neglected in response to an accumulation of little necessities; for example, emergencies which “just can’t be ignored and won’t take much time.” Or, it may soon be forgotten as a new and more glamorous fad seduces the attention of a mercurial church public and its leadership.

Concentration and persistence -- the will to deploy our energies and resources for whatever time is necessary to achieve an objective -- are keys to political power. Mainline Protestant churches have shown these qualities on occasion, but too often for reasons of self-interest or status; examples are opposition to postal-rate increases and the waging of antibingo campaigns. The civil rights legislation of the ‘60s, however, indicates what can be done.

If we are to meet the demands of the strategic imperative with tolerable consistency, a critical factor will be our success in resolving the dilemma between incohesion and tenacity.



Third, the strategic imperative depends on the disciplined asking and answering of a host of logistical and pragmatic questions. Political strategy floats or sinks with realistic calculations of what can be done and how. Here is a sampling of the numerous questions:

What resources of time, money, leadership and skill are actually or potentially available?

Is the political climate favorable or unfavorable? Is the inevitable opposition strong or weak?

What arguments, pressures or tactics will sway targeted legislators and administrators? Is the intent to convert, coerce, ignore or simply commend particular decision-makers? How can we be opportunistic, acting at the best time in each strategic stage?

Can we really generate action among a politically significant segment of the church constituency? How can a complex and technical issue be translated without distortion into the brief, understandable and “arousing” message necessary for popular involvement?

What process will be used to evaluate successes and failures, in order to avoid errors the next time?

As unexciting and traumatizing as these questions may be, they are the essential “stuff” of strategy. The most serious flaws in political strategies by church bodies are logistical miscalculations; for example, sending a third-class mailing of legislative “alerts” to constituents three days prior to a legislative decision, or assuming that everyone knows the names and telephone numbers of his or her legislators. The errors are often simple -- and costly. Strategic questions, whether simple or complex, are all essential. Our attention to both the details and the general plan will determine whether or not we are “wise as serpents.”

Fourth, the strategic imperative in politics generally demands coalescence, but not necessarily coalitions, with allies. Cooperation with other organizations, either in coalitions or through parallel actions, is usually essential for political success. Multilateral action provides opportunities for joint planning, shared information, mutual counsel and correction, a division of labor, and the potential for greater power.

For churches, cooperation in the political arena generally involves ecumenical structures, either ad hoc or permanent. When a consensus exists on both an issue and the priority status of that issue, ecumenical organizations become an essential means for coordinating and implementing strategic action. No church body today has the power to act in splendid isolation; what strength we have lies in cooperation.

Political cooperation with secular organizations (and perhaps some religious bodies) poses special problems. A coalition between churches and other organizations can symbolize the unity of humanity for which the church is to be a sign. Yet such a coalition might not enhance the churches’ capacities to gain support from their own members or from politicians; for example, some of the coalition partners might have a negative image or might be likely to use unacceptable tactics. My experiences with such “solidarity committees” have more often than not been unfavorable. Conflicting values among the partners can sometimes distort or dilute Christian perspectives. Some secular partners also try to use the churches for the sake of their own political ends. However, whether or not churches should participate in religious/secular coalitions depends on the potential allies and the variables in each case.

Even when formal coalitions are rejected, coalescence through parallel actions -- perhaps by pooling information -- is vital. To be politically effective, churches need plenty of anonymous allies. In the cacophony of American politics, churches can achieve their political goals not when they are soloists, but only when they are part of a total chorus of demands for a particular change. If a conjunction of circumstances is favorable, churches can be a decisive factor in politics, adding that extra margin of influence which tips the balance of power.



Granted, winning isn’t everything. The church is bound by ethical restraints on means and ends which prevent winning at any cost. Yet winning is infinitely better than losing! While such “liberal” causes as arms control, economic justice and civil liberties are taking a battering in this time and place, we cannot blame it on our ethical inhibitions. Rather, one (though only one) of the key reasons is our strategic quietism and political feebleness. If the church’s intention is to go beyond the functions of social education and cultural influence, valuable though these are, and to exercise a direct, corporate witness in the political sphere, then we cannot avoid the demands of the strategic imperative and its emphasis on “playing to win.” Contrary to the popular claim that we are called to be faithful but not successful, fidelity for churches in politics is the strategic effort to succeed.

I know that, penultimately, our social hopes depend on our moral designs and on our will and skill to build on those designs. I am confident that ultimately the coming of God’s Kingdom is in some way related to our sociopolitical achievements. In either case, and especially if Matthew 25 is right that we will be judged with special severity for our sins of omission, we would do well to take a few more lessons in strategic realism from the children of this world, who “are wiser in their own generation than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).