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Seeking a Theology of the Finite



Members of the theological ensemble who play for one another and for their patrons from the religious establishment regard as eccentric the solos of those who urge us to take with full seriousness the theological significance of the human body. Tom Driver, Arthur McGill, Mary Daly and James Nelson remind us that we are, after all, embodied persons, psychosomatic unities, not discarnate spirits or intellects. But the conventional anthem and the traditional libretto seem to be given over primarily to systematizing the concepts and clarifying the stories of ancient texts and modern communities.

Not enough attention is paid to the concrete actualities of ordinary lived experience. The emphasis has characteristically been on “a theology of the infinite” -- an inquiry into the identity and existence of divine beings, divine activity in history and nature, the purpose and destiny of human life as these are revealed by a being called “God” to others called “persons.” The antidote for such a “theology of the infinite” is one that deals with the finite -- sex, dying, anger, commitment, love, anxiety, rebirth or reshaping of the self.



It is not accidental that the mainstream of Western theological tradition seems to have had so little to say about the empirical human situation. The structure of Christian belief received its normative character in centuries dominated by two intellectual movements that were radically dualistic and distrusted the materiality of humankind. Neo-Platonism held, among other things, that the most perfect being was the least physical, and had the least to do with the physical; that the way of salvation necessarily leads from the body, from the earthly-historical, to a realm of pure spirit.

Plotinus recast the Platonic unease with the material world in a straightforward manner: “The nature of bodies, insofar as it participates in matter, will be an evil” (Enneads, 1.8.4). “For matter masters what is imaged in it and corrupts and destroys it by applying its own nature which is contrary to form” (1.8.8).

The cosmic dualism which Plotinus’s theory of emanation had helped him to avoid appeared clearly in other perspectives of roughly the same period. In the more popular and pervasive gnosticism, the body was forever a barrier to the fulfillment of human life. The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas characterized his disciples, the spiritually enlightened ones, as “children who had settled in a field which is not theirs. When the owners of the field come . . . they will undress in their presence in order to let them have back their field” (Log. 21). In the Manichean Psalter the soul on its way to the realm of the immortals says, “I will cast my body upon the earth from which it was assembled . . . the enemy of the soul” (75:13 ff.). Our problem, said the gnostic, was that our true self has been drugged, intoxicated, imprisoned by the body. We need to extricate ourselves, by careful discipline, from all dependence on the senses.

It is not difficult to understand why, in such an intellectual atmosphere, most Christian theologians of the third through the fifth centuries were unable to hold onto the body-affirming insight of the original Jewish and Christian visions. Without the control provided by the doctrine of creation, they devalued human experience, dismissing it as having no positive religious value. Hence, celibacy and virginity became the official Christian virtues. That consequence continues to haunt Christian consciousness -- officially, in the pronouncements of some churches and those who speak for them, and unofficially, in the unenlightened sentiment of much Christian piety.

What we need is a proper “theology of the finite.” The signal for such a theology is Tom Driver’s reflective getting in touch with his body while sitting in the bathtub, and his happy invitation, in Patterns of Grace: Human Experience as Word of God (Harper & Row, 1977), for us to do the same. The motto for that approach is suggested by the title of Arthur McGill’s small book of theology of a few years back, The Celebration of Flesh.

I think this move -- from the skies to the soil, from the beauty of the sunset to the bulges of the body -- is a necessary and salutary one, and I do not want to subvert it in any way. I would, however, suggest that when we get in touch with our bodies, the messages we receive are both more varied and more ambiguous than Driver, McGill and others suggest. There are two sorts of images, not just one. That became clearer to me when I finished a second extended period of hospitalization in seven months, and embarked on a prolonged period of recuperation and restoration.



In the first place, being in touch with the body will bring us reports of sensuous pleasure, warmth, good feelings -- not to be denied or suppressed; not to be apologized for; not a source of religious embarrassment. It will bring us reports of the self’s becoming a self in essential relation with another -- not peripherally, not optionally, not accidentally, but essentially. The “other” in relation to whom we become ourselves is not an abstract, idealized other, but a particular being-with-body who reaches not just some aspect of our existence, such as the intellect, but ourself as a being-with-body.

If this coming-to-be of the self in relation is something like the abundant life of religious concern, then the Song of Songs emerges as the most religious text in the Jewish and Christian canons. The presence of this lovingly erotic poetry in the Scriptures, in which a man and a woman revel in each other’s physicality, is a testimony to the power of religious intuition. Later rabbis and theologians tried to deal with their embarrassment in working with this literature by the subterfuge of metaphor: the love in this poetry is “really” the love of God for Israel, or of Christ for the church. We should, nonetheless, be everlastingly grateful that this body poetry not only was retained but also was kept in the canon. Its presence there, however mistakenly justified, serves as a continuing corrective particularly to ascetic Christian tendencies, and to an otherworldly view of Scripture and biblical faith in general.

One of the most fascinating episodes in contemporary literature of the healing, life-giving power of touching occurs toward the end of Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island (Harper & Row, 1962). Will Farnaby, a British journalist, is shipwrecked and stumbles upon Pala, an island community in Southeast Asia whose citizens are dedicated to a version of the contemplative or meditative life. Will eventually gives in to the self-indulgence of nourishing his own feelings with the aid of moksha-medicine, and is glad to have civilization and its sickness left behind. But in that self-absorbing, inward-turning mysticism, he moves further and further away from an openness to other people. Near the end of the novel he is nearly lost in the private “high” of his own sense of infinity. Then the woman Susila begins to touch his body.

She moved her hands, and the contact now was no longer with nails but with skin. The fingertips slid down over his brows and, very lightly, came to rest on his closed eyelids. For the first wincing moment he was mortally afraid. Was she preparing to put out his eyes? He sat there, ready at her first move to throw back his head and jump to his feet. But nothing happened. Little by little his fears died away; the awareness of this intimate, unexpected, potentially dangerous contact remained. An awareness so acute and, because the eyes were supremely vulnerable, so absorbing that he had nothing to spare for the inner light or the horrors and vulgarities revealed by it.

The fingertips moved up from his eyelids to his forehead, moved out to the temples, moved down to the cheeks, to the corners of the jaw. An instant later he felt their touch on his own fingers, and she was holding his two hands in hers.

Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha-medicine, found himself looking her squarely in the face [pp. 286-288].

The way of touching is the way back to reality, back to the interpersonal as the characteristic human way of becoming a self and of being in the world.

A “theology of the finite” will regard seriously, in a nondefensive way, the intimations, the signals, the clues our bodies provide -- not simply our bodies as human beings, but as male beings and female beings. That calls for a vaginal theology and a phallic theology, at the very least, which will regard as significant, central and irreducible data for theological reflection the experience of being female or male, including but not confined to genital sexuality. (Contrast again the recommendation of the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas with respect to life in the Kingdom in which all sexual differentiation was to be obliterated:

“When you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female . . . then you will enter [the Kingdom]” [Log. 22].)

But these male and female bodies with which we are concerned are living at this historical moment and in the present sociopolitical context. Consequently, a proper “theology of the finite” will have to incorporate a respect for the ways in which women and men perceive their femaleness and maleness -- however distorted and partial those perceptions may eventually turn out to be. For women, it will surely include, as Mary Daly observed, the absence of the power of self-definition -- a psychological and emotional discrimination which makes heavier the economic and social.

For men, it will surely include the prison of extended immaturity and misogyny, both of which are fed by powerful remnants of the Jewish-Christian tradition in practice. Immaturity: the idealization of women as mothers or virgins keeps men from having to grow up and to relate in an egalitarian way to other sexual beings. The exclusion of women from being theological classmates with men, except perhaps in religious education, has been a powerful factor in accounting for male reluctance to support ordination and deployment of women as priests, and power-sharing with them as clergy colleagues. Misogyny: the sense of male inferiority before an all-powerful God image is compensated for in male hostility toward women -- as the crudest forms of pornography clearly indicate.

To regard the ordinary embodied experience of men and women as theologically significant in a positive way is to receive all these images of physical delight, of beauty and ecstasy, of human growth and nurture, of the contact between human persons that the touching of bodies can make possible.

But there is another set of images or “clues” that we must deal with if we are to attend not just seriously but honestly to the concrete actualities of our embodied existence. We are reminded not just of our strength but of our weakness as well; not just of glory but also of misery; not just of pleasure but also of finitude; not just of warmth and the coming-to-be of the self in relation with others, but also of limitation and isolation; not just marriage but divorce; not just trust but betrayal and desertion; not just good feeling but pain, suffering, daily reminders of mortality, impermanence, the inevitability and the necessity of death.

A body theology must, in short, include, in a non-masochistic way, a theology of pain and suffering, a recognition that time and the healing powers of nature are not always efficacious; indeed, that in the final analysis, they are never more than temporarily successful. Such a way of doing theology must, of course, avoid the suggestion that sacred sorrow is at the center of faith, that self-flagellation by whatever sophisticated technique is to be encouraged. (A metaphysics of process -- dealing with growth, development and decay -- thus may in the long run prove more useful to the theological enterprise than a metaphysics of being; Whitehead and Bergson over Aquinas and Mascall.)

A hideous parody of the painless view of life is exemplified by an advertising brochure for a series of self-help tapes developed by the popular author and lecturer Wayne Dyer. The advertisement arrived on my fourth day home after an extraordinarily uncomfortable ten days in the hospital. I was very conscious of the dark side of human physicality, the fragility of flesh, and was quite unprepared for Dyer’s grotesque invitation: “How to Be a No-Limit Person.” There is, of course, no gainsaying the common-sense psychological wisdom contained in a program to enhance one’s self-image, to develop and utilize our highest potential for creativity, for mental and physical health. No one wants to be a self-defeating neurotic, or even one who just manages to cope. But there is something demonic in promising that “if you choose to, you can be the master of every aspect of your life.” The sickness of this invitation to be a “No-Limit Person,” to be God, in effect, is readily apparent if you have ever been, or have been with, a person hospitalized with a serious illness, or one who lives daily with an irreversible physical handicap.

Some evaluators of the human situation -- for example, H. Richard Niebuhr -- have suggested that the root of the human malaise is our giving in to the idolatrous desire to become just such a “No-Limit Person.” All attempts, Niebuhr reminds us, to regard any of the genuine goods of the world as the bearer of infinite meaning eventually collapse and have their partiality uncovered. In that crisis we discover and recognize that the self is never an adequate god for the self. Faith comes, then, as a gift of the ability to trust in that power which endures in the passing of all the gods we have made as an expression of our delusion of being a “No-Limit Person.” Faith comes as the gift of accepting ourselves as “a person with limits” -- not grudgingly, not spitefully, but gratefully.

So it is that both the dark and the bright sides of our embodied existence must be attended to if we are to regard our finitude as theologically relevant.



There is one further point to be made, however, to bring these remarks into relation with the deepest insights of the Christian tradition in its best moments, and into relation with the convictions of the wisest men and women -- past and present, in our own family, of our own acquaintance or within our own awareness and observation.

I have argued that a fully developed “theology of the finite” must accept and affirm both the pleasure and the pain of human physicality, since we are not free-floating spirits or intellects but embodied persons.

We are not who we are without our bodies. But our bodies do not define or exhaust who we are. The body is the locus of meaning for us, but being or becoming a full, self-expressive person is independent of the limits of the body in some way. The body gives meaning, but it is a limited gift, for the meaning it gives cannot be complete or final. Who is there among us that does not know and love those whose sense of self is caring and giving although

* their alcoholism goes unchecked, or

* their metabolism makes weight control a near-impossible  task, or

* their deformities or birth defects reduce their mobility, or

* their blindness or deafness shuts them off from much of the world. or

* their beauty leads others to regard them as empty-headed, or

* their plainness turns others away.

We are not who we are apart from our bodies, but the final meaning of our life does not depend on our body’s delights and limitations. This mystery of human selfhood, with its connection to but also its freedom from the body, is the best evidence I know for the presence of transcendence in our world. Reinhold Niebuhr used to speak of the freedom of the self as the capacity for self-transcendence. A “theology of the finite” thus has a special openness to the in-finite, not to another realm of beings divine or other-wise, but to another dimension of human meaning.

I know no more eloquent testimony to that openness, to that transcendence, than these words written a few days before her death by a close friend of a faculty colleague: “When the time of our particular sunset comes, our thing, our accomplishment won’t really matter a great deal. But the clarity and care with which we have loved others will speak with vitality of the great gift of life we have been for each other” (Clare McCarthy, S.C., July 5, 1980).

The Messianic Jewish Congregational Movement



When I began research on the new Messianic Jewish congregational movement over four years ago, I soon learned that both Christians and Jews were experiencing a great deal of frustration. For mainline denominations; the Messianics’ claim to be “Jewish” believers of Jesus was regarded as deceitful. The Jewish community viewed them as a cult. One angry Jewish Defense League member I met in Toronto in 1980 clenched his fist and screamed: “These Messianics are the Nazis -- the spiritual Nazis! They pretend to be Jews and use traditional Jewish symbols to trap children and the unsuspecting.”

To my surprise, even most evangelicals opposed the Messianic Jews, accusing them of rebuilding the wall of partition between Jewish and gentile Christians and, in fact, of going back under the Law. A well-known Hebrew Christian whom I interviewed, a leader in missionary outreach to the Jewish community, shook his head and quietly explained:

To these “Messianic Jews” Jewishness means Judaism . . . a rabbinic Judaism of the Ashkenazic flavor. . . . They neither have a real knowledge of Jewish history or of Jewish-Christian history, nor do they possess a good handle on biblical exegesis. . . . Like the Ebionites of old they will finally blend into Judaism and deny the Messiah.

This evangelical attitude came as a shock, for initially I had thought that the movement was simply a “Jews for Jesus” extension of previous Hebrew Christian evangelistic organizations that also had been opposed by both Christians and Jews.

Whatever one’s stand on the issue, it is important to gain some understanding of this movement. Although many regard the concept as unthinkable, the movement is growing and is gaining gentile supporters. The number of Messianic congregations (“synagogues”) continues to rise, and there is a fervent commitment on the part of these Messianics to “discover their Jewishness.”

However, Messianic Jews themselves were of little help to me in tracing the historic roots of the movement. As I interviewed their leaders across the United States, I found a prevalent belief that they had coined the term “Messianic Judaism.” Others thought that the term had originated within the past ten or 20 years. Most of their opponents also agreed that this was so.

In fact, both the term “Messianic Judaism” and the frustration with the movement go back to the 19th century. During 1895 Our Hope magazine, which became a bulwark in the fundamentalist-evangelical movement under the editorship of Arno C. Gaebelein, carried the subtitle “A Monthly Devoted to the Study of Prophecy and to Messianic Judaism.” An organ of the Hope of Israel movement in New York City, the magazine maintained that Jewish converts should not sever themselves from their people and their Jewish practices. It castigated the gentile Christian church for teaching that Jewish believers must refrain from observances proclaimed in the Mosaic Law.

This approach did not escape unscathed; other Jewish missionary enterprises labeled Our Hope’s “Messianic Judaism” as outright “Judaizing,” declaring that such theology was “unscriptural, mischievous and dangerous.” Even the coeditors, Gaebelein and Ernst F. Stroeter, a former professor at Denver University, later split over the issue. Gaebelein switched his position regarding Messianic Judaism; Stroeter maintained its validity to the end of his life. This was very important in Gaebelein’s case: he might not have been accepted as a leader within fundamentalist evangelicalism, nor become a famous Bible and prophecy conference speaker, if he had not changed his view.

For the scholar who seeks to unravel this tangled history, there are many surprises. It is fascinating that the movement would arise in the American branch of the Hebrew Christian Alliance (HCAA), an organization that has consistently assuaged the fears of fundamentalist Christians by emphasizing that it is not a separate denomination but only an evangelistic arm of the evangelical church. The organization’s Quarterly, however, reveals that the tension between the Messianic Jewish movement and the Hebrew Christian movement had always been present. After the inception of the HCAA in 1915, the first major controversy was over an “old” heresy -- and the “heretical” dogma that was being proposed was Messianic Judaism. The controversy could have split the organization asunder during that period but for a strong united effort against Messianic Judaism. The outcome was a statement explaining that “history and experience proved [Messianic Judaism’s] doomed failure” and emphasizing, “We will have none of it!” The statement concluded:

We are filled with deep gratitude to God, for the guidance of His Holy Spirit in enabling the Conference to so effectively banish [Messianic Judaism] from our midst, and now the Hebrew Christian Alliance has put herself on record to be absolutely free from it, now and forever.



Well, not quite. The Hebrew Christian Alliance of America was forced by popular vote nearly 60 years later, in 1975, to change its name to the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America. At the annual conference in Dunedin, Florida, in 1973, the politics involved in replacing the “old guard” with the “new guard” resembled a novel about life in Washington, D.C. The impetus for the change came from younger members within the HCAA, whose ranks were nearly nonexistent before the 1960s. By the final ballot they were joined by some older members as well. In 1981, at the association’s conference, Martin (Moishe) Rosen, the leader of the controversial “Jews for Jesus,” was not even nominated for the executive committee position he had previously held.

Rosen is an enigma with regard to Messianic Judaism, and perhaps his organization engenders both gentile and Jewish confusion over Messianics. The slogan “Jews for Jesus” caught on in the 1970s and catapulted Rosen’s little band of missionaries into national prominence. Subsequently, enterprises ranging from overt Jewish missionary efforts to orthodox Messianic congregations have been called “Jews for Jesus.” The label is unfortunate, because it blurs the two distinct threads within Jewish Christianity that have historically run side by side. At one end of the spectrum is the Hebrew Christian movement, made up of missionary societies and individual missionaries who regard themselves primarily as an evangelistic arm of the evangelical church to the Jewish community. At the other end of the spectrum are the most orthodox of the Messianic congregations and individual adherents who regard themselves primarily as Jewish -- Jews who believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Between the ends of this spectrum fall an array of congregations and individuals. And, to complicate the matter, some Hebrew Christians now call themselves Messianic Jews.

Another reason why the all-encompassing label “Jews for Jesus” is unfortunate is that Rosen’s organization uses confrontation tactics which many Messianic Jews (and some evangelical Christians) cannot condone. In practice, the principle of confrontation holds that making the Jewish community angry or stirring up controversy equates with “publicity,” no matter whether a Jew is converted or not. Sensitivity is sacrificed for confrontation. Understanding is sacrificed for getting the message out.

This point was not clear to me when I began my research, but Moishe Rosen soon set me straight. He told me that an article I had written for a Jewish publication, in which I had briefly mentioned him, was “sugarcoated” with respect to Jews for Jesus. It was a mistake I never made again. Once I understood the concept of confrontation and had documented its effect, pieces of the “Jews for Jesus” puzzle began to fall into place.

Evangelical Christians are to be found on both sides of the confrontation issue. A professor at an evangelical liberal arts college explained to me that he liked the intense confrontation, saying: “My money goes to Jews for Jesus, because you can see they are doing something. Jews are ready to kill them for their boldness -- yes, for their antagonism!” Quite a few Christians agree with him; Rosen’s organization grossed nearly $2.5 million last year. However, Messianic Jews and other Christians (evangelicals among them) are not so sure. Even Billy Graham has come out against evangelistic enterprises aimed solely at Jews. These people believe that the confrontation tactic only increases the historic antipathy felt between Christians and Jews -- antipathy that has expanded into crusades and pogroms. The effectiveness of the message of Christ is thus lost.

Currently, I find many Messianic Jews dissociating themselves from the label “Jews for Jesus,” explaining that the organization is “just a small group of 100 or so Hebrew Christians in a west coast missionary enterprise that is very vocal and widely publicized.” For the messianic congregation that is seriously attempting to foster a first century, Jewish-Christian worship experience, repeatedly defending Rosen’s actions exacts too high a price for them to pay.

For example, there has been intense reaction to the Jews for Jesus program, “What Evangelical Christians Should Know About Jews for Jesus.” Carrying the subtitle “A Confidential Report: Not to be Distributed to Non-Christians,” a printed outline explained “confrontation tactics” and seemed to espouse “Jewishness” only as a plot for bringing Jews into the evangelical church. This material has led to charges by both Christians and Jews that Messianic congregations were “Jews for Jesus” and thus were fakes. While most Messianic leaders maintain cordial relations with Rosen, to many he is an expendable commodity. The program of the Messianic congregation is quite different from his.

On the other hand, Rosen has seen the effectiveness of the Messianic congregations. A pragmatic individual, he voted for the HCAA’s change of name in 1975 and has just organized his own Messianic congregation in New York City. Jews for Jesus may be expanding to a two-pronged ministry; i.e., confrontation-oriented evangelistic teams, plus lower-key, stable congregations. This current development will cause controversy and may further confuse what is distinctively Messianic -- the expanding congregational movement. One minister from the west coast has stated: “I have a regular Christian congregation with some Jewish converts in it, but if these fanatics who call themselves ‘Messianic Jews’ want to play their little congregational game, we can play it too.”



Such statements are disheartening to Daniel Juster, a key figure in the Messianic Jewish congregational movement today. An ordained United Presbyterian minister, Juster progressively “evolved” toward Messianic Judaism while pastoring the First Hebrew Christian Church in Chicago (now called Adat Ha Tikvah) from 1972 to 1977. He is a graduate of Wheaton College (B.A., philosophy) and McCormick Seminary (M.Div.). Currently the spiritual leader of Beth Messiah Congregation in Rockville, Maryland, he is president of the Union of Messianic Congregations, a new federation of 24 congregations (there are over 30 in the United States and Canada). One of the Messianic movement’s leading theologians, he has just completed a manuscript titled Foundations of Messianic Judaism: A Biblical Survey.

Among his many activities, Juster serves on the board of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, holds extensive discussions with rabbis in the Washington, D.C., area, and was invited as a participant in the 1980 dialogue between evangelicals and Jews. He is an open and eloquent individual who strives for complete honesty in Messianic Judaism, and so does his wife, Patti. She once received a phone call scoring the Messianic congregation for being deceptive, because Jews could not believe in Jesus. Since the caller had identified himself as being from Conservative Judaism, she suggested that he talk to the “nice rabbi” at the Conservative congregation down the street. There was silence on the other end of the line. Finally, the caller said: “I don’t know quite how to tell you this, but I’m the rabbi of that congregation.”

This bizarre episode led to a dinner invitation and dialogue, but the rabbi still feels that there are awesome dangers in the Messianic movement. In light of the history of Jewish Christianity, one cannot blame the Jewish community for being suspicious. In his study The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (1934), James Parkes concluded: “In the whole of this account it is significant that no honorable part has been played by converted Jews, as interpreters of their old faith to the new.” Nonetheless, Messianic Jews are now determined to reverse that stigma. A training institute has been established in Chicago, and some congregations have begun religious schools for their children.

The annual conference, which used to struggle to reach an attendance of 150, now draws nearly 1,000 participants for its weeklong session. The schedule has been dominated by topics such as rabbinic theology, the Holocaust, modern anti-Semitism, gentilization of Messianic Judaism, Messianic congregations, Messianic communities, and Messianic Jewish history.

For some, however, much more is needed. In my travels throughout the United States and Canada, I met scores of Messianic Jews for whom most of their congregations are too “liberal” with regard to traditional (or Orthodox) Jewish practice. Many of these people are on the periphery of the movement, watching its progress but choosing to worship in regular Orthodox or Conservative Jewish synagogues.

Those few modern Messianic congregations which have tried to institute Orthodox worship have invariably met with disaster. When the Los Angeles congregation was judged to have become “too Jewish,” the Assemblies of God took their building away from them (Phil Goble, author of a book titled Everything You Need to Grow a Messianic Congregation, had attended that group). In Pittsburgh, because of internal friction, the Orthodox Messianic congregation has dissolved.

Yet traditional Messianic Jews do exist and share a great concern that the Messianic congregations should at least progress toward traditionalism in their liturgy and institutions. As Andy Pilant, a traditional Messianic worshiper from Pittsburgh, told me:

The only thing I knew is that if we were going to be Jewish, we had to be honest about it. . . Jewishness was something that was more than laying teffilin, more than just singing Jewish songs. It was thinking Jewish, it was smelling Jewish, it was taking Judaism and putting it out to the ends of your fingertips -- so that everything that you come in contact with would have a Jewish touch to it.



The Messianic Jewish congregational movement is at a crossroads. It is not a wealthy movement, but because of its theological stance it cannot command the evangelical monetary support that Rosen’s organization enjoys. On the other hand, if such financial support should be forthcoming, the movement’s complexion and goals could be totally changed. It also contends with a gentile membership of 40 to 60 per cent that is capable of upsetting the delicate experiment in Jewish identity. And finally, it faces intense opposition from all sides -- an opposition that may drive members into a fortress mentality. Nonetheless, the movement continues to grow and may well be one of the most important religious phenomena of the decade.

Daniel Juster has said: “Why are they so mad at us? It is as though they have kept a well-guarded secret that Judaism and Christianity are not incompatible, and we have exposed their little game!” That statement continues to gnaw at my historical consciousness.

Colombian Coal Mines: The Pits of Exploitation



In the past few years some huge cracks have developed in the façade of democracy and respect for human rights which the Colombian government has sought to create. Although Colombia is nominally under a civilian regime, the military forces are really in command -- not only lurking behind the civilian president and congress, but recently emerging into the open with the “militarization” of vast regions of the country. Aerial bombings of areas suspected of supporting the guerrilla movements have become common.

For many years Colombia has been under a state of siege, and in 1978 an additional “security statute” augmented the powers of police and troops. Amnesty International has added its voice to the growing demand within Colombia for an end to mass arrests, torture of political prisoners, repression of labor organizations and other violations of human rights. But even during the Carter administration, the U.S. paid little heed to such criticisms, lauding Colombia as a showcase of democracy. The Reagan administration sends more military aid to Colombia than to most other Latin American countries (El Salvador and Honduras are also among the top three).

There is little danger of military interference in Colombian elections, however, since the Liberal and Conservative parties control the entire process, and neither represents any significant change of the system. In the recent presidential election the Conservative Party was the victor. (Outgoing President Julio Turbay announced the lifting of both the state of siege and the security statute, but it remains to be seen whether this action will result in any real reduction of repression.)

Some left-of-center parties are working hard to gain more popular support and to build unity among themselves. The “M- 19” organization is well known for its urban guerrilla actions, and several other guerrilla forces operate in various regions of the country. Like most Latin American nations, Colombia is plagued by the socioeconomic and political conditions which make revolutionary change a real possibility: vast unemployment, runaway inflation, a high degree of infant mortality, large-scale malnutrition.



Such poverty and repression do not deter investment by multinational corporations. Exxon has reported to its shareholders that “what may become the world’s largest coal mine is being developed in Colombia and a new oil discovery is the biggest there in 18 years.” Exxon claims that Colombia is “fortunate” in that the oil giant is a participant in both projects. Many Colombians, however, have denounced the easy terms of the coal contract between the Turbay government and Exxon, complaining that the multinational corporation will seize the lion’s share of the profits.

In its magazine the Lamp, Exxon reports that “at least 15 million tons a year will be produced for 23 years” at the El Cerrejon coal mine, “after which the mine and all its facilities will revert to the Colombian government.” Colombian critics charge that during these years of intense production the country will reap meager benefits and that after 23 years of digging the coal may be completely depleted.

A multinational’s view of “development” is evident in the Exxon publication, which features a picture of the luxurious lobby of a new Hilton Hotel facing a picture of a fruit vendor carrying a large basket of bananas and grapes on her head. For Exxon, this contrast symbolizes “a nation in which ties with the past are preserved even as modern development proceeds apace.” Others paint the contrast in images of modern luxury and wealth vs. modern misery and exploitation, emphasizing the causal connection between the two. Colombia’s small upper class may enjoy the new Hilton, but the majority of its people eke out a bare subsistence through hard labor, while the nation loses resources and profits to foreign interests. And official repression ensures, at least temporarily, that coveted “safe climate for investment.”

Colombians who are employed in any way consider themselves lucky to have a job, and many look on the miners as the better-paid members of the working class. While it is true that a miner’s income is slightly higher than that of a poor peasant, the work is extremely dehumanizing and takes its toll physically and psychologically.



The conditions in the mines are horrible. I spent an hour in a medium-sized mine located about 20 miles from Medellin. To enter the mine, I had to squeeze into a tiny wagon which was lowered on a rail held by a cable attached to an engine, on an incline of about 60 degrees. Perched outside the wagon, I held on for dear life, clutching my camera and ducking down when we disappeared into the dark hole.

At the bottom of the shaft I waded through some coal-black puddles, hitting my head occasionally on the low ceiling, breathing in coal dust and hot air, and sweating profusely. It was the worst physical experience I had had since spending some time in Chicago’s Cook County Jail for antiwar activity!

The mine was hellish. Men and boys work in such conditions eight to ten hours a day, six days a week, for about $5.00 a day, with no prospect of future deliverance. Some mines are so small that the workers hack away at the coal while lying down. Youths pack the coal into sacks and carry it out of the mine on their backs, or to a small cable car for the trip upward. In most mines, pay is based on the quantity of coal extracted.

On July 14, 1977, 86 of the coal miners were killed in an explosion. A few days before the disaster, a group of miners had gone to the engineer to report dangerous conditions -- especially an unusually high level of noxious gas in the air. He threw them out of his office (a response which, according to the workers, was in keeping with his personality and past performance). When this engineer arrived at the scene of the explosion, his first question was about his machinery, not about the men killed, one of the widows said. A month later he was assassinated in Medellin, apparently by members of the Army of National Liberation.

Accidents are frequent and disease rampant in the mining regions. The hard physical labor and the unhealthy conditions lead many miners to spend their paychecks on liquor and drugs for escape. Houses around the mines cave in as the steady digging causes the ground to settle. The homeowner receives no compensation from the company.



The local church in the nearby town has been very critical of the mining companies and of the government’s failure to look out for the safety and health of the workers and residents. A young priest showed me the façade of a church that had been destroyed by the mining. He suggested that it was symbolic of the present relationship between rapacious Colombian and foreign corporations, and the body of Christ which is the people. The undermining of the church building reveals more about reality than does the official “concordat” between the Colombian government and the Vatican.

A thick veneer of religion, like the façade of “democracy,” covers most aspects of Colombian life. Images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (to which the Colombian government solemnly dedicates the nation every year) are abundant, and a large statue of Mary stands just outside the pay office of the mining company. One priest in the area, preaching about the explosion, declared that it was the “will of God” and a punishment for the loose morality (alcoholism, gambling, prostitution) of the people.

My priest friend attacked him publicly for preaching such religious “opium” and stated that the catastrophe was not an accident at all, much less the will of God, but rather the result of an exploitative system that puts profits ahead of human lives and well-being. Many priests and parishioners in the region joined my friend in publishing a statement denouncing the company and the government for the explosion.

The weekend of my visit the town politiqueros (bosses of the political machine) threw a “miners’ fiesta,” which included much oratory, drinking and a beauty contest. The young priest condemned the event as an insult to the dead miners and a cheap distraction from the injustices of the mines.

This is only one sad vignette of the human exploitation, degradation and death which are rampant in Colombia and throughout Latin America. But the forces of change are gathering steadily, and they seek the help of friends in the U.S. in their struggle against governmental and corporate policies that prop up the present structures of oppression.          

C. Towers.

How Baptists Assessed Hitler



On August 4, 1934, thousands of delegates to the Baptist World Alliance congress in Berlin filed into the Tagungshalle, where Adolf Hitler had recently addressed as many as 15,000 Germans. John W. Bradbury, delegate and Boston pastor, wrote of his journey into the Fatherland:

Crossing the border was a dreaded experience. After all I had read in American and foreign newspapers I was prepared for a tense atmosphere. The impression lingered around me that police would be everywhere; spies would be listening to our talk; danger lurked around the corner; and many similar kinds of bogies. Then, besides, it was the day following the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna. Really I dreaded a repetition of August 1914 [Watchman. Examiner XXII 34 (August 23, 1934)].

As he entered the hall, Bradbury saw a huge painting of historic Baptist figures William Carey, J. G. Oncken and Charles H. Spurgeon standing at the foot of a cross. Alongside this trinity hung an equally imposing flag of the Third Reich -- a vivid reminder of the bloody June purge of many of Hitler’s former friends and the repression of the Jews.

Most delegates, like Bradbury, entered Berlin with a spirit of opposition and a feeling of apprehension. Despite their fears, most Baptists in Berlin spoke boldly against the racism, nationalism and militarism so prevalent in the Germany of 1934. Louis D. Newton of Atlanta moved that the Alliance accept strongly worded commission reports against nationalism and anti-Semitism. George W. Truett of Texas introduced a hotly debated peace resolution which urged governments to surrender whatever national sovereignty necessary to establish an international authority for peace in the world. The Baptist World Alliance also passed a strong resolution on the separation of church and state. Some delegates empathized with the plight of the German Baptists. John R. Sampey, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, wrote:

While everywhere the Baptists from other lands were treated with marked courtesy, some of us felt that our German Baptist brethren were uncertain and disturbed concerning their future. They talked little, but the atmosphere seemed to some of us charged with uneasiness and fear. . . . Our Baptist brethren in Germany face a very grave crisis. They will find it difficult to be loyal both to Hitler and the Lord Jesus [Western Recorder CVIII 34 (September 6, 1934)].

Unfortunately, not all Baptist delegates to Berlin interpreted the tragedy of the German situation as perceptively as Sampey did. Some responded favorably to Hitler’s fascism. “Quite a number of correspondents of our Southern Baptist papers writing about the BWA seemed to have a kindly feeling and a good word for Hitler and his regime,” Wrote R. H. Pitt in Religious Herald, singling out one variety of Baptists who seemed particularly vulnerable to German propaganda. Victor I. Masters of the Western Recorder went even further, writing, “Most of the testimony we have from our brethren who went to the Baptist World Alliance in Berlin has seemed with great spontaneity and readiness to accept the opinion that all is well in Germany -- especially in regard to religious liberty.” Even Dr. Bradbury, the Boston pastor who dreaded crossing the German border, changed his mind about the Nazis.

Why the about-face? Knowing now the depth of the violence which was beginning to grip Berlin in 1934, we wonder why some Baptists, particularly Americans, were susceptible to Hitler’s propaganda. What in their appraisal of foreign affairs allowed them to be seduced by Nazism? How could they support a regime so incompatible with peace and justice?

For one thing, Baptist delegates tended to assess larger social issues through the narrow gauge of a simplistic personal ethic. The Alliance noted, “It is reported that Chancellor Adolf Hitler gives to the temperance movement the prestige of his personal example since he neither uses intoxicants nor smokes” (Official Report of the Fifth Baptist World Congress). Even Dr. Sampey, wary of the Nazis, cautioned against too-hasty judgment of a leader who had stopped German women from smoking cigarettes and wearing red lipstick in public. After being so afraid to enter Germany, Dr. Bradbury, once there, found himself delighted with the forced morality of the fascists. He wrote:

It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold; where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown. The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries (Watchman-Examiner XXII 37 (September 13, 1934).

Surely a leader who does not smoke or drink, who wants women to be modest, and who is against pornography cannot be all bad, or so the reasoning went. As M. E. Aubrey of England observed in the Baptist Times, Hitler had “brought almost a new Puritanism, which makes its appeal to our Baptist friends, and for the sake of which they can overlook much that cuts across their natural desires.” Baptists from the United States ignored the fact that interpreters were barred from even rendering the word “democracy” in Aubrey’s speech. Priority was placed on personal habits, to the detriment of larger, more vital issues.

One broad issue that interested many Baptists was an otherworldly evangelism. F. M. McConnell, editor of the Baptist Standard in Texas, complained:

The Alliance in Berlin had a program in which too much attention was designated to economic and social and political matters. . . . While it was exceedingly important that Europe, especially Germany, Austria, France and Italy, should get the Baptist viewpoint of social relations and the functions, powers and limitations of governments, it was far more important that the people of those countries should get our reasons for world-wide evangelism [Baptist Standard XLVI 34 (August 23, 1934)].

What he meant was that evangelism has little or nothing to do with the larger fabric of the economic, social and political scene. Charles F. Leek, a delegate from Montgomery, said it more plainly:

Evangelical Christianity transcends all political and social systems and finds its own manner of expression regardless. Without compromising precepts and principles it may accommodate its means and methods to shifting conditions [Alabama Baptist XCIX 36 (September 6, 1934)].

Some Baptists believed that evangelism and the world order existed on separate planes that never intersected, and that the church belonged only on the evangelistic plane. As long as governments like Hitler’s did not interfere with soul-saving, they could be tolerated.

Such a separation of spheres of reality opened the way for a militaristic and racist nationalism. Beginning with the statement “The order of redemption is effective in the Church, but does not shape the world as a whole,” Paul Schmidt, editor of the German Baptist paper Wahrheitszeuge, argued (as reported in the Official Report of the congress) that vigorous races overcoming weaker ones by force is an expression of natural law. Stating that “we must recognize the facts,” he urged the congress to stop expecting “developments that the Church cannot affect and that Jesus clearly would not bring about.” These arguments, based on an anti-Semitic motive, must have sounded familiar to Baptists of the American South. They used some of the same rationalizations to justify discrimination against blacks.

Racial pride was a strong factor. While on page three of the Alabama Baptist the editor was praising an association for having “the purest Nordic blood among a larger proportion of its people than in any other county in the state,” on page six of the same issue M. E. Dodd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, was giving a lengthy defense of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. While Jews “were not to be blamed for the intelligence and strength, so characteristic of their race, which put them forward,” Dodd said that they were using influential positions gained by these characteristics “for self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people.” Baptists of America, North and South, might well identify with talk of restraining a race that was “‘destructive by nature,” according to a German Baptist quoted by Charles Clayton Morrison in The Christian Century (August 22, 1934).

A final reason for Baptist vulnerability to Hitler’s 1934 policies was a single-issue criterion for appraising foreign governments: anticommunism. In 1934, if a government was anticommunist, it deserved recognition and support. Dr. Leek wrote:

Our observation is, that while Hitlerism is doubtless not the ultimate end, for Germany directly or Europe indirectly, it is for Germany a safe step in the right direction. Nazism has at least been a bar to the universal boast of Bolshevism [Alabama Baptist XCIX 36 (September 6, 1934)].

Dr. Dodd used the “outside agitator” cliché to defend Nazi persecution of the Jews; even in 1934, communism was considered the root of all evil. Dr. Dodd explained Jewish persecution by noting, “Since the war some 200,000 Jews from Russia and other Eastern places had come into Germany. Most of these were Communist agitators against the government” (Alabama Baptist). Hitler was not perfect, but at least he was anticommunist. That one factor was sufficient to gain him support from some Baptists in America.



These characteristics of their appraisal of foreign affairs led some U.S. Baptists to write sympathetically of Hitler’s Germany in 1934: an emphasis on personal piety, an evangelism based on a bifurcated doctrine of salvation (which therefore had no ability to criticize national policy), and an anybody-but-the-communists criterion for judging foreign governments. The religious right today, in its overemphasis on issues like evolution and prayer in the schoolroom, arguments for accepting the nuclear arms race because peace will not come to earth until Jesus returns, unquestioning loyalty to the flag, and anticommunist fervor, is reminiscent of some 1934 Baptists. Indeed, some Baptists today claim these issues as the core of the Baptist heritage.

Fortunately, most Baptists in 1934 took a different route, supporting soul liberty, the kinship of all persons and the separation of church and state. Still, all Christians today need to remember which paths in 1934 led some to embarrassing dead ends. Contemporary Baptists have in their midst groups supporting peace, such as the publishers of the Baptist Peacemaker at Deer Park Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and groups confronting the vital issue of world hunger, such as the publishers of Seeds at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

Will Baptists choose to follow these traditional Baptist principles of peace and justice or pluck the bitter fruit of violence, whose seeds were planted by a minority 48 years ago? The numbers, wealth and fervor of Baptists in America make an answer to this question important to all Christians.

The Hispanics Next Door



During 1980-81, Protestant denominations in the United States focused their mission study programs on Latin America -- that is, on the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations south of the border, and the Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean (Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico). But with more than 20 million Hispanics living in the United States, Latin America cannot be defined solely in geographic terms; many Hispanics have been born and reared within U.S. borders. In fact, some come from families that have been here longer than many Anglos; this is particularly the case in the southwest.

Despite their geographic home, the overwhelming majority of U.S.-born Hispanics have cultural roots in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Hence, in reflecting on Latin America, North American denominations cannot exclude those who represent that world inside the U.S.; U.S. Hispanics constitute the fourth largest Spanish-speaking population pocket in the hemisphere.

When we look at the contemporary Latin American world, we see an oppressed people bearing an affliction as painful as that of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. God has raised many prophets among them who have dared to denounce their oppression and have announced the coming of a more equitable and peace-loving society. At certain points in Latin American history, these prophets have been catalytic agents in mobilizing those who have accomplished intermediate goals in building that new society.

But what about the Hispanics who live next door? Do we not hear their cry? Of course we do, but the mass media, our cultural institutions and the government make sure that we don’t hear it too often: all one needs to do is to read any major newspaper over a monthlong period to see how stingy the U.S. print media are in coverage of Latin America. Once in a while one of the TV networks will broadcast a documentary on Latin America, especially if a revolution has taken place. Occasionally Latin America makes it to the headline of a major daily newspaper or the 6 o’clock national newscast -- as during the recent Falklands crisis. Churches, mission boards and ecumenical organizations try, intermittently, to interpret Latin American developments. And so in one way or another the news gets through.

The question remains, what are we going to do about it? Let me offer several concrete suggestions.

First, we should seek to understand the content of our neighbor’s cry. In this society we are conditioned by the media to hear and see suffering without probing deeply into its content.

Our neighbor’s call is above all for justice and liberation. For the past 150 years Latin America has been controlled by economic oligarchies and military forces. Externally, it has put itself at the mercy of international capitalism, becoming a dependent region with an industry, a labor force and an agriculture developed as a function of the North American and (to a lesser extent) the western European metropolis. Internally, Latin America has been dominated by the culture of consumerism. Its language, literature, music, visual arts, educational institutions and mass media are, with a few noble exceptions, either a reflex of the U.S. consumer society or a protest against it and its local economic and political subsidiaries. Therefore, the entreaty of Latin America is for liberation from cultural domination, economic exploitation, military regression, social marginalization and political imperialism; it is an appeal for fairness in international trade and the establishment of a social order that promotes human dignity, respects democratic institutions and guarantees an equitable distribution of wealth.

The cry of our neighbors is likewise raised for truth -- social, personal and theological. The facts of Latin America’s social condition have been largely hidden from the eyes of the world by Western social scientists. Their departments in the major universities of North America and Europe have failed, for the most part, to elucidate the concrete social situation behind the economic and political statistics.

The distress of our neighbors is both social and personal. The religious world of the West has largely assumed that Latin America has already been evangelized. The fact is that the majority of Latin Americans have not had the opportunity to consider the gospel. Their evangelization is still to be completed, and the first church to recognize that reality has been the Catholic Church. At most, 20 per cent of Latin Americans are practicing Roman Catholics. Latin America is a continent of mission. Its people are on a quest for personal meaning that in the perspective of Christian faith can be solved only with a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Latin America also wants theological truth. The Word of God has been hidden in the barrels of imported theologies from Europe and North America. These imports have until recently given the churches little opportunity to develop their own theological ideas. Latin Americans’ beginning indigenous reflections have called down an avalanche of reaction from the halls of Western academia. Latin American Christians demand the right to think through the faith in the light of their own situation, to set their own theological agenda and work out their own responses to the questions of the region.



Second, we should respond by acknowledging our share of responsibility. We need to recognize that our neighbors’ hardship has been created, in part, by the U.S.

The U.S. is responsible economically for the poverty of Latin America. Soon after the wars of independence, the economy of Latin America began to be shaped as part of its northern neighbor’s. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) was the mechanism created to protect U.S. interests in the region. Latin America became the provider of raw materials and cheap labor and a market in exchange for North American technology and capital.

In the past two decades, parts of Latin America and the Caribbean have become new financial zones. Panama and Puerto Rico, in addition to the Bahamas and Grand Cayman, have become banking centers -- tax havens. U.S. bank investments in the region have been extraordinary. By 1975, 61 per cent of U.S. bank subsidiaries were concentrated in Latin America. While banks inside the U.S. could pay dividends of only 5.75 per cent and up to 10 or 11 per cent on long-term savings, their subsidiaries in Latin America have been paying 15, 20 and in some places as much as 30 per cent interest.

Latin America has become the most profitable market for the U.S. For every dollar that U.S. companies invest in the region, three dollars come back in profit. Miami, Florida, has become the region’s financial capital. Thanks to a high inflation rate and the commercial genius of Cuban exiles, Miami is now getting the business of the Latin American middle classes.

U.S.-controlled agencies such as the International Monetary Fund set the financial policy, which must be strictly adhered to by countries that wish to receive its low-interest loans. A few years ago Peru was forced to hike prices by 80 per cent overnight, a move that inflicted a tremendous social wound on an already impoverished land. Jamaica was practically destabilized as a result of IMF policies. In consequence, its socialist-democratic government was not re-elected. Today Jamaica has a conservative government developing a fiscal policy corresponding to the demands of the IMF.

The U.S. government is also politically responsible for the misery of our neighbors. This country’s foreign policy has been run by corporations that have a history of intervening in the political processes of Latin America.

In 1954 United Fruit Company managed to enlist the collaboration of then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, then chief of the CIA, to mastermind a plot to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. The Dulles brothers had been company lawyers for United Fruit. The same company has intervened in Honduras. International Telephone and Telegraph is known for its intervention in Chile, and Gulf & Western, in the Dominican Republic.

The economic aid that came with the Alliance for Progress was made conditional on the purchase of U.S. goods. As author Penny Lernoux has noted: “When the Alliance for Progress was finally buried at the end of the 1960s, about the only thing that the Latin American countries had to show for it was an enormous foreign debt: 19.3 billion dollars compared to 8.8 billion in 1961 when the program was launched” (Cry of the People [Doubleday], p. 211).

The withdrawal of aid has also been used as a weapon against countries whose politics do not respond to U.S. interests. Economic censure was wielded in Chile against Allende, in Guatemala against Arbenz and, more recently, in Nicaragua against the Sandinista government.

U.S. policy toward Latin America has fluctuated between open support of dictatorships and hostility toward movements of liberation, and advocacy of a “restricted democracy,” in which a limited amount of political space is allowed so long as it does not rock the boat too much internally and in the hemisphere. This was the (unsuccessful) model proposed for Nicaragua in the last days of Somoza, and it is the rationale behind the current support of the military-civilian junta in El Salvador.

The U.S. is militarily responsible for the travail of Latin America. There is a history of direct and indirect U.S. military involvement in its internal affairs. Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua and Mexico have undergone armed intrusion. The entire region has seen more subtle forms of indirect intervention. Since 1947, when Latin and North American nations signed the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, the U.S. has had a Military Assistance Program (MAP). One of its fundamental objectives has been the influence of the region’s future military leaders in order to maintain a favorable climate for the network of U.S.-oriented military officers who in recent years have become the political bosses of Latin America. As Lemoux states, “Between 1950 and 1975 the U.S. trained 71,651 Latin American military personnel, including eight of the region’s current dictators, and in addition supplied 2.5 billion dollars worth of armaments” (Cry, p. 56).

Iberian-rooted culture has also been a victim of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. The Spanish and Portuguese languages have been looked down upon by the largely monolingual English-speaking world. One of the goals of Manifest Destiny was to demonstrate the superiority of the English language over Spanish. Portuguese and French in the Americas and to establish its dominance in the hemisphere.

From 1900 to 1930, English was imposed in the Puerto Rican school system. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico remained a Spanish-speaking island. In the southwest, Spanish was banned in the educational system. In Dade County, Florida, Spanish was officially recognized several years ago as a second language, a factor that is generally agreed to have brought the area enormous economic advantages. But Spanish has now lost its legal status as a result of an Anglo backlash.

The most influential offensive against Hispanic languages and culture in the hemisphere has been U.S. consumerism. U.S. products, from hot dogs to movies, have effected fundamental changes in the language and way of life of Latin Americans.

Dominant Anglo sectors remain resistant to adopting Spanish as a second language. Such an attitude not only reflects an unwillingness to recognize that Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people share with English speakers a legitimate partnership in the Americas; it also demonstrates a cultural intolerance that militates against peaceful coexistence inside the U.S. As white racism has created a state of hostility between the dominant Caucasian population and the color minorities, so English monolingualism and Anglo-Saxon cultural chauvinism threaten to impair relations further between the growing Hispanic minority and the Anglo majority.

Latin America has also been a market for North American religious movements. Approximately 50 per cent of the missionary force of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. and Canada is concentrated in Latin America. More than one-third of the missionary force of U.S. and Canadian Protestant churches is in Latin America, though less than 10 per cent of the world’s population lives there.

Two factors may account for this phenomenon. First, Latin, America has been able to absorb a lot of the troubled missionary market’s surplus workers from other parts of the world. After China closed its doors to foreign missionaries, a great number were redeployed to Latin America. Second, the region attracts missionaries because it offers instant numerical success. Anything grows in Latin America: Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, eastern religions or independent Protestant groups. It is much easier to be a missionary in a region where people are open to religious change. Hence Latin America has become the most popular mission field in the past 50 years. One can be grateful for the missionaries who made a significant, sacrificial contribution to the gospel during this period, but the fact that Latin America has become a market of missionary consumerism is upsetting. Indeed, it represents a denial of the Christian mission, insofar as it makes the desire to be “successful” missionaries central motivation. Such a phenomenon represents an evasion of the tough challenges of a religiously pluralistic world and further increases domination over a weak neighbor.

Something similar has occurred in theology. Latin American theological reflection was until recently largely dependent on European and North American thought. Protestant publishing houses have done a remarkable job of disseminating and popularizing North American theology, especially its conservative brands. Schools have been shaped in the image of Bible institutes, colleges and seminaries in North America. To the extent that they remain faithful to the thinking of their North American supporters and their Latin American constituency (which has been theologically conditioned by North American mentors), these publishing houses and institutions continued existence is guaranteed. But let one of them depart from “the script” and begin to theologize, write and publish on issues of the Latin American reality and pressures, criticisms and open opposition begin to emerge. Latin American Protestant seminaries, theologians and publishing houses have a relatively limited space in which to move, work and think -- in part because of the financial and ideological pressures of North American Christian churches, mission boards and societies.

In the past 15 years Latin America has given the world church much creative theological thought. After an initial fling with some of the better-known expressions of this thought, First World academicians dismissed it . -- on the ground that it was faddish and not academically serious. North American publishers other than Orbis, Fortress and Eerdmans are showing little interest in the avalanche of theological literature that has been produced in Latin America -- because it has a limited market. Mainstream theologians have failed to take Latin American theologies seriously because the new work does not fit standard criteria of theological inquiry. Accordingly, few rank-and-file First World theologians engage in dialogue with Latin American colleagues.



To respond with integrity to the claims of Latin America, we need to acknowledge our share of responsibility in its suffering and oppression. That done, the next step is to begin paying our debts. I do not mean that we should now start paying reparations for all the damage done to Latin America during the past 150 years. That would be politically and economically unrealistic.

The New Testament, however, speaks of an “evangelical” debt. The apostle Paul considered himself under obligation to Greeks and barbarians, the wise and the foolish, to preach the gospel (Rom. 1:14 ff.). As Christians, we owe Latin America the gospel: the good news of liberation from the power of sin and death, a message that has meaning only in the context of justice. To proclaim the gospel is to declare in words and deeds that in Jesus Christ God has declared himself to be forever on the side of the destitute of the earth, setting women and men free from selfishness and greed and calling them to the obedience of faith. To believe in the gospel is to commit oneself to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly before God (Micah 6:8) in the power of the Spirit of the risen Christ.

To say that we as Christians owe Latin America the gospel is to affirm our responsibility to work for the liberation of this region of poverty and oppression. Concretely, it means responding with actions commensurate with what our neighbors desire and with our share of responsibility for it.

Economically, we owe Latin America advocacy of fair trade. Latin America does not need favors; it needs just treatment of its products. That means support of the quest for a new international economic order and willingness to share generously the tremendous profit the U.S. has been getting out of the region -- sharing through substantial financial aid for public works, food, education and housing projects.

Politically, we owe Latin America support for the right of its people to organize their society in whatever way they consider correct. Relations with Latin America should not be based on what is politically expedient for the U.S. As Christians, we should lobby for international and public morality. The Carter administration came into office with high moral standards in foreign relations. It became a strong advocate for Latin American human rights. But when the crunch came in Nicaragua and El Salvador, the administration assumed a contradictory stance, falling into the temptation of political expediency -- for fear that doing what was right might contribute to a form of political organization that would not please the U.S.

Now the Reagan administration has begun to back any government so long as it protects U.S. interests. It does not matter whether a government represents a brutal dictatorship that opposes American political and judicial principles and constitutes a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights. What matters is the protection of U.S. business and political interests. Hence the renewed friendships with repressive governments like that of Chile, the blanket endorsement of the unpopular former military-civilian junta of El Salvador and the quiet support of the current right-wing government, and the cutting off of all economic aid to Nicaragua. We should challenge such a policy by every democratic means at our disposal.

Militarily, we need to help accomplish the disarmament of Latin America. Arms buildup and the business deals that go along with it are responsible for the destruction of our neighbors rather than their protection from “the menace of international communism.” A case in point is that of military aid to El Salvador. This small country is caught up in a massive wave of terrorism, much of it conducted by government security forces and by organizations with ties to the government. By giving it military aid, the U.S. is enabling the Salvadoran regime to sponsor more indiscriminate killing.

We further owe Latin America advocacy for cultural pluralism in the Americas. This implies a close scrutiny of North American cultural networks and endeavors. It demands the empowerment of ethnic minorities, the promotion of Spanish and Portuguese as major hemispheric languages and the support of institutions dedicated to the stimulation and defense of Latin American cultural values. It means supporting international agencies like UNESCO in their efforts to promote more equitable cultural development.

On the religious side, we owe Latin America cooperation for ecclesial indigeneity, partnership in mission and contextual evangelization. We must let the church become itself rather than forcing it to be a carbon copy of something else, as has happened to many churches that are the product of Protestant mission work. Partnership in mission implies a willingness to collaborate with Latin American churches in the fulfillment of the mission God has given them rather than doing things for them, as Protestant mission boards have too often done. Contextual evangelization means letting the evangelistic approach be decided upon in the light of the actual situation and not simply according to the perceptions that U.S. churches have of it -- or worse yet, in terms of the North American situation.



In order for our actions to be credible, we need to start with our nearest neighbor. It is usually easier to respond to the far rather than to the near. We are challenged to start with those countries that are psychologically and geographically closest to us: Central America, the “hot spot” of the hour and the backyard of the U.S.

El Salvador has been designated by the Reagan administration as the place to draw the line in the struggle against international communism. We are in danger of making El Salvador a new Vietnam. We should strongly lobby for cutting off all military aid, all military advisers and all foreign-military-sales credits to the Salvadoran junta, and insist on a political settlement -- with the participation of all sectors of society.

We should also lobby against any form of military assistance to Guatemala and Honduras, given the systematic violation of human rights being committed by security forces in both countries. By the same token, we should demand the resumption of economic aid (without political strings) to Nicaragua and increased economic assistance to Costa Rica. Those two countries, each in its own way, constitute the most hopeful signs for a peaceful Central America: Costa Rica in its democratic sophistication, and Nicaragua in its efforts to bring about a revolutionary process with a human face.

In addition to Central America, we should give priority to Puerto Rico. This small Caribbean island has been a territory of the U.S. since the Spanish-American war. After almost ten years of North American maneuvering, the U.N. Committee on Decolonization declared the island a colonial territory (over the protest of the U.S. and most of the island’s population -- who argued that in 1953, when Puerto Rico became a so-called “commonwealth” as a result of a popular election, it ceased to be a colony and became instead a “free associated state”). There is no question that Puerto Rico today is a political hot potato. Not only are its people more polarized than ever over Puerto Rico’s status question -- whether to become a sovereign nation, become a state of the U.S. or stay as it is; it is the most impoverished North American territory, with an external debt of over $7 billion, an unemployment rate of more than 20 per cent, 65 per cent of its people on federal food stamps and 38 per cent who have an income below the poverty line. Thirty years ago mainland corporations were offered economic incentives to establish textile industries and oil refineries in Puerto Rico. This industrialization has backfired, resulting in air and water pollution, almost total destruction of the island’s agriculture and a host of social ills -- such as crime and drug addiction -- typical of industrial societies. Vieques, an adjacent island-municipality, is practically in the hands of the U.S. armed forces. Its fishing industry, the sole livelihood of the majority of the population, has been nearly driven Out of existence by the U.S. Navy.

It is a fact, nevertheless, that most North Americans know only what the media tell them about Puerto Rico: it is the place many Hispanics in the northeast come from and a beautiful winter paradise easily accessible by air, with wonderful beaches and luxury hotels.

Most mainline Protestant churches in Puerto Rico, with the exception of the recently autonomous Puerto Rican Episcopal Church, are institutionally attached to their parent bodies, functioning as if Puerto Rico were already a state. U.S. Christians and churches should reflect critically on the Puerto Rican situation. They should inquire into the ideological role that churches and mission boards have played in the enculturation of the island. Above all, churches, denominational agencies and individual Christians should demand the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. Navy from Vieques and monitor the way dissenting Puerto Ricans are being treated by the Department of Justice and the federal court system.



Responding to our nearest neighbor also implies dealing with the Hispanic community living inside the continental U.S. There are those who express concern for Latin America while callously neglecting the Hispanic minority on their own turf. They follow the example of those who express concern for Africa and the Afro-Caribbean community but fail to demonstrate a similar concern for their black brothers and sisters in this country. This selectivity can no longer be tolerated. Our credibility in Latin America must be judged by the way we deal with the North American Hispanic and black communities.

Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority in the continental U.S. Their numbers have officially increased nationwide by 61 per cent in the past decade, and the unofficial count by probably twice that amount. In the next decade Hispanics will be the largest minority in the country.

Hispanics are not only numerically significant; they are also one of the most economically depressed minorities in the nation. A “windshield” survey of such areas as New York City; Jersey City and Camden, New Jersey; Chester and Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Chicago; Detroit; East Los Angeles; New Mexico; and South Texas immediately reveals a socially marginated people. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics have been condemned, along with the majority of blacks, to be the permanent underclass of North American society. In the case of Hispanics, the harsh social and economic picture is further aggravated by their lack of communication skills in the dominant language -- and the illegal status of an impressive number.

Hispanics, like blacks, are a very religious people. Indeed, their churches constitute one of the few institutions in society in which they can be persons. Nonetheless, the Hispanic church does not surface in North American religious consciousness. Hispanics can be Catholic or Pentecostal, mainline Protestants or conservative evangelicals. But they do not seem to count very much when it comes to the interpretation of North American religious experience, church attendance, theological education and missionary commitment.

If the dominant North American Christian community is really interested in responding to the cry of Latin America, it should start taking notice of brothers and sisters in the ghettos of our cities and the ranchos of our rural communities. Christians should begin to lobby for the legalized status of the more than 8 million undocumented migrants, the majority of whom are Hispanics. Churches should advocate educational programs that will enable Hispanics to study in the language they know best, thus strengthening their access to professions heretofore closed to them. Christians should work for social programs that will improve housing conditions for Hispanics and their participation in industry, labor and the arts. Above all, churches should ask for justice from religious institutions that continue to ignore Hispanics’ existence: monocultural denominational and ecumenical agencies; theological institutions that refuse to hire Hispanic professors (and even discourage Spanish-speaking students from working toward doctorates); religious journals and magazines that fail to publish materials dealing with the life and faith of Hispanic churches; and mainline churches that do not make an all-out commitment to ministry among Hispanics.

The petition of our oppressed neighbors is loud and clear. If we but look around us we can easily detect means that are available for response. Only through concerted church, agency and individual leadership can that response be effective.

Answering our neighbor’s hunger and thirst is not a take-it-or-leave-it affair. We are our neighbor’s keeper. Therefore the cry of the Latin American world puts at stake the integrity of our U.S. Christian profession of faith.

The Fall and Rise of Creationism

Creationist bills demanding equal time for a "creation model" of origins have been submitted to legislatures in more than 30 states. State boards of education, among them those in Texas and California. have been pressured to mandate as acceptable textbooks that include creationist materials. Local boards of education have also been targeted by creationists for grass-roots action as a means of achieving their goals regardless of legislatures and state boards.

Publishers of science textbooks have come under similar pressure. Fearful of having their books omitted from lists of "acceptable" texts, a number of publishers have acquiesced to creationist demands in various ways: by considerably reducing the space given to discussion of evolution, by referring to evolution as "only a theory," by including creationist materials, or by placing references to evolution in a final chapter which the teacher could conveniently Omit. A recent report from People for the American Way, Norman Lear’s liberal public-interest group, notes that three new biology texts (from Scott Foresman, Silver Burdett and Holt, Rinehart & Winston) have managed to avoid the word "evolution" altogether.

While mainline publishers of religious books and church-school curricula have been virtually silent on the subject, there are currently in print more than 350 books challenging evolutionary science and advocating a "creation science" based on six 24-hour days of creation, a "young-earth" dating, and a worldwide "flood geology." A considerable, well-financed effort has been made to inundate the Christian bookstore and mail-order markets with similar literature.

There are now nearly 50 creationist organizations in the United States, another dozen in Canada and more in other countries from England to Australia and from Germany to India and Brazil. Many have their own newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, tracts, study programs, graded materials, Cassettes, films and books, as well as field workers and speakers’ bureaus. The combined circulation of creationist periodical literature is in the millions, while other fundamentalist magazines also frequently contain creationist essays, such as Herbert W. Armstrong’s The Plain Truth, with its 7-million monthly circulation.

There is, further, a growing network of fundamentalist private schools dedicated to an antievolutionist and biblically literalistic creationist position. The American Association of Christian Schools, with more than 1,000 member institutions, makes as a condition of affiliation acceptance of the statement, "We believe in creation, not evolution." Simple as that. This position is not only taught in the AACS science textbooks but in texts for history, geography, social science and literature. "Equal time" is given to evolutionary materials only in the sense that evolution is repeatedly dismissed as evil. There are essentially no alternatives given, not even any alternative approaches to biblical interpretation. Literal creationism is right; all other positions are wrong. So much for fair play and free inquiry and the rest of the Christian community.

An example from a text on Old World History and Geography, by Laurel Elizabeth Hicks of Beka Publications (Pensacola, Florida, 1981, p. 37). reads:

In our modern world there are many people who make up imaginary stories about early man. They teach that man is a production of evolution. Evolution is the false idea that man began as an animal and slowly changed (evolved) into man. Evolutionists scoff at the truth that God created the earth and man. But the more man tries to disprove the Bible, the more proof he finds that the Bible is true. . . . There is no scientific evidence that man evolved from animals, and all the evidence we have shows that the idea of evolution is not true.

Some people have found fossil bones of what they thought were "ape men", but these were later found to be hoaxes or mistakes. . . . Adam and Even did not look like apes. Adam at his creation was undoubtedly the most handsome man who has ever lived, and Eve the most beautiful woman, for they were the direct product of God’s handiwork.

This attitude has also been held among scientists until recently, when the creationist pressures on public education and policy became so threatening that some scientists founded a new journal, Creation/Evolution, a "Committee of Correspondence" and a Creation/Evolution News letter, aimed at defending evolutionary science and dismantling creationist arguments. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Education Association, lawyers, legislators and judges have been similarly forced to deal with the issue because of the numerous bills and civil suits demanding equal time for creationism.

One drawback of these developments is that they have tended to be confrontational, with punch-and-counterpunch tactics on both sides, each dedicated to defeating the opponent rather than to exploring the possibility of rapprochement. The result is an ever-widening and hardening polarization of the extremes of "scientific naturalism" and "scientific creationism." The worst fears of both sides are constantly being realized and illustrated, while neither extreme seriously looks for or imagines a mediating position. It is a classic confrontation of tragic antagonists bent on mutual destruction and loath to see an accommodation with the other as anything but an act of disloyalty to the cause.

The average church member, who is usually a layperson in both science and religion, finds the situation confounding. Most have only a Sunday school knowledge of the Bible and perhaps a high school equivalency in science. While members of fundamentalist churches are very clear about their approach to such issues -- namely, a simplistic, militant either/or mind-set -- most members of nonfundamentalist churches are unsure how to respond to creationist challenges and evolutionist counter-challenges. This uncertainty is borne out by polls, which show that as many as 75 per cent of those surveyed thought it only fair to give class time to the biblical accounts of creation, or a "creation model" derived from them -- as if they were of the same order as contemporary scientific accounts ("Division on Creation," Events and People, September 29, 1982, Century).

The creationists have pointed to genuine problems in the teaching of science which the scientific community would do well to acknowledge: (1) Evolution has been presented by various leading evolutionists in an anti-theistic, secular, humanistic system of thought, suggesting that these are scientific conclusions rather than a credo attached to evolutionary readings of the data. (2) Evolution has often been taught with the implication that it was a rejection of the biblical creation account, by ignoring or dismissing the creation stories as prescientific myths surpassed by superior modern versions. (3) Evolutionary scenarios share in the naturalistic bias of science (as the investigation of natural processes), which tends to weight evolution in the direction of a philosophical naturalism. (4) Descriptions of evolutionary mechanisms also share in the mechanistic and materialistic biases of science -- which easily becomes translated into materialism as a world view. (5) Evolutionary theory is similarly influenced by the reductionistic bias of science, with its tendency to try to understand phenomena in terms of the simplest explanation (the law of parsimony) and to do so by always explaining higher orders of things in terms of lower orders -- as if nothing significant were being omitted. (6) Evolutionary schemas present a dramatic ascent from an elementary formlessness to the highest of forms, as though the movement from raw energy and the simplest atoms to highly intelligent life were fully comprehensible internally. (7) Evolutionary constructions, like scientific constructions in general, ignore questions of first and final causes -- which omission easily gets read as the elimination of such questions from meaningful consideration, while terms such as chance and accident are substituted instead. (8) Evolutionary discussion often betrays a positivistic bias which sees scientific truth as the "real" truth about things, with other forms of truth, including religious truth, relegated to providing only an emotive, valuational and relativistic set of preferences about things. (9) The researching and teaching of evolution has had a secular bias as well, since science has been carried on largely in a secular context as a secular enterprise, in relation to which religious affirmations (such as creation) are seen as quaint and superfluous.

So far the creationists have done a service in calling to the tendencies in science and evolutionary theory to transform methodologically self-limited statements into all-encompassing metaphysical judgments. The problem, however, is that instead of forcefully challenging all these conclusions -- which do not directly and necessarily follow from science or from evolutionary theory -- the scientific creationists encourage them. They accept the either/or of evolution and creation, and they not only accept but insist on the thesis that evolutionary teaching logically and necessarily leads to naturalism, materialism, reductionism, positivism, secularism, atheism and humanism.

Thus, instead of pointing out that no ideology or world view automatically follows from scientific data and theory, but represents a leap to another level of discourse, the creationists invite scientists to draw the very conclusions that creationists claim to deplore. Rather than carefully distinguishing between evolution and evolutionism, and between science and scientism, the creationists concede everything from the start. "If you accept evolution, even a well-meaning, theistic evolution, this will eventually become pantheistic evolution, which in turn will become atheistic evolution" -- as if this were a series of logical steps to inevitable conclusions. No position could have been better calculated to support and strengthen the case for secular humanism.

The scientific creationists also give further aid and comfort to the philosophies they so vehemently protest by proposing to offer instead a ‘‘scientific’’ interpretation of creation. This then places the biblical affirmations of creation, or supposed "scientific models" derived from them, on the same level as modern scientific theory and natural history, inviting their evaluation and rejection in the very same terms. Most of the 350-plus books written by "creation scientists" consist in large part of discussions of the supposed errors of evolutionary teaching, reviewing vast amounts of technical scientific data and theory, challenging this or that piece of evidence, method of dating or use of data, while producing evidences and counterarguments of their own in favor of a young earth, recent humanity, worldwide flood, etc. Little attention is devoted to a correspondingly careful study of the specific type of biblical literature being interpreted, or the ways this literature is different from scientific literature. Neither is time spent on the original issues that the creation texts were addressing and the original meanings of the words for those first using them.

"Scientific creationism" is hardly identical with biblical creationism. The creation texts represent a very different type of literature and concern from modern scientific discourse. To rush biblical statements into this arena, as though they were of the same order as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species or Stephen Jay Gould’s The Panda’s Thumb, or as though scientific conclusions could be drawn from them, is to be very confused about what it is the Genesis materials are teaching. One also plays directly into the hands of those who would dismiss them as quasi-scientific explanations of things for which we now have more sophisticated explanations.

Neither those who would set aside Genesis as primitive science nor those who would try to defend it as the true science of origins seem to grasp the differences between modern scientific and ancient cosmological literatures. What is more critical is that neither side seems to comprehend the relationship between biblical and other ancient cosmologies. The biblical teaching, after all, was not aimed at one or another of the various theories developed in the history of modern science but at the cosmological understandings of origins found among surrounding peoples. The question, then, is: In what senses was the Bible critiquing and rejecting these pagan cosmologies with which it had so immediately to do?

Ancient cosmologies were developed on the basis of phenomenal observations of the world -- that is, things as they appeared to everyday observation. In this respect their descriptions of natural occurrences were similar to our own expressions, such as ‘‘sunrise" and "sunset." Early cosmologies also pictured the cosmos relative to the human observer, as we continue to do when we speak of sending a rocket "upward" into space or refer to Australians as living "down under." The ancients imaged the universe in terms of four directions or quarters horizontally, laid out relative to the society doing the mapping, with the center of the world located in the holy city and/or capital of each nation in turn. There were also three major zones vertically (heavens above, earth at the center, underworld and abyss beneath), with their subdivisions. We thus find the typical ancient picture of a domed canopy over the sky, supported by pillars, with a flat earth below floating on a watery abyss, with sun, moon and stars moving in the heavens relative to the earth, and with the world axis intersecting the sacred center of one’s nation.

These representations of the cosmos were not being questioned in the Bible or even discussed. They were not the point of contention between Jewish cosmology and the cosmologies of Egypt, Canaan, Assyria, Babylonia, Greece or Rome. The Bible simply uses the same general cosmological patterns and expressions familiar to all within and without Israel. Offering a superior cosmology in a physical sense was not a matter of theological concern, nor would it have made any particular religious difference. A few pre-Socratic Greeks in the sixth century BC. were beginning to speculate about the physical nature and arrangements of the natural order, but in Israel these were not issues. In fact, to have made an issue of physical cosmology would have detracted from, if not subverted, the religious message.

In the biblical texts the concern was to affirm the radical difference between a polytheistic and a monotheistic cosmology. All the surrounding cosmologies identified the major regions of the cosmos with their various gods and goddesses. Genesis, over against this viewpoint, affirms (1) that there is only one God; (2) that this God is not identified with or contained by any region of nature; (3) that the pagan gods and goddesses are not divinities at all but creatures, creations of the one true God; and (4) that the worship of any of these false divinities is idolatry. This is what is being taught and celebrated by the creation texts, not any particular cosmological picture that may then be placed in contention with existing or subsequent physical pictures of the cosmos.

What is often ignored in all this, however, is that the temporal as well as the spatial aspects of ancient cosmology were employed in the Bible: the physical progression from chaos to cosmos. This progression and its sequence were not a point of contention either. Most of the cosmologies in the ancient world began with a cosmic ocean, darkness and a generalized formlessness -- just as Genesis does: "And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep’’ (1:2). Elements are introduced which give shape to the shapeless: light into darkness; a domed sky (firmament) dividing waters above from waters below; the earth with its vegetation separated from the waters; the sun, moon and stars to regulate the days, months and seasons. The specific order may vary, depending on which chaotic problem is resolved first, but the general pattern and progression is the same. It is a perfectly logical way of proceeding, though it is hardly identical with what we have come to call science or natural history. Its logic is cosmological, not geological or biological or astronomical.

The fundamental difference between the Genesis progression from chaos to cosmos and that of pagan cosmologies lies along the physical plane not in its chronological order but rather in its theological order. Here too the issue is religious: a radical contrast is made between a monotheistic creation and a polytheistic cosmogony ("birth of the cosmos"). The pagan myths commonly depicted the origins of natural phenomena in terms of the marriages and births of various gods and goddesses. In Babylonian myth the saltwater goddess (Tiamat) mated with the freshwater god (Apsu) and begat the gods and goddesses of silt and the horizon, which in turn begat heaven (Anu), who begat the earth (Enki). Genesis, on the other hand, portrays the One God who has created all that which surrounding people worship as the divinities of nature. The theological order, therefore, is a genealogy not of the gods (theogony) but of creator and creature: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The true opposite of creation, thus, cannot be any scientific model of origins, evolutionary or otherwise, but is this procreation model of polytheistic myth.

The creation accounts were not attempting to present a more cosmologically, let alone scientifically, correct way of representing physical relationships in space or time. Genesis is not offering or supporting a "creation model" that can be placed in competition with other physical models, any more than it is offering a "flat earth model" in competition with geological models or a "geocentric model" in competition with astronomical models. To put Genesis on the level of a physical discussion of the natural order is to secularize it -- while complaining loudly about secularism in modern culture!

If Christians, school boards and God must be eternally committed to preserving the temporal side of biblical cosmology, then to be consistent there should be a return to preserving the spatial side as well. Both form a whole cloth. Some creationists have tried to avoid such consistency by arguing that the temporal aspects are of a different order than the spatial. Spatial relations within the universe are presently observable, whereas temporal relations in the matter of origins are not. So we are forced to take the spatial references poetically, but there is not enough evidence to force us to take the temporal references as anything but literal statements of simple historical truth. It is clear from such a dodge that the principles of biblical interpretation derive from modern scientific issues rather than from the issues which led the biblical writers to use this particular cosmological form.

The creationists think of themselves as staunch conservatives, engaged in a loyal defense of biblical teaching. To some extent they are, inasmuch as they are seeking to preserve a doctrine of creation vis-à-vis secularism and scientism. In other respects, however, they are themselves very influenced by secularism and scientism. They confuse what is being taught theologically with the cosmological garb in which the teaching is being presented. They are conserving the right things in the wrong ways. In so doing most of the attention gets focused on the physical issues of modern science -- which were not issues at all in the Bible. Endless forays must be made on all scientific fronts -- geology, biology, paleontology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, meteorology, genetics, sedimentology, radiometry and the like -- either to try to discredit evolution or to defend creation.

The terminology favored by the movement is itself indicative of the degree to which modern scientific questions and secular modes of thought dominate the discussion of creation: Bible science, creation science, scientific creationism, creation research, origins research. These terms not only dramatize the confusion between biblical theology and matters of physical cosmology, but their use becomes a species of secularism and modernism in itself. Many of the leaders of the movement are scientists and engineers, not theologians and biblical scholars. It seems almost unthinkable, apparently, to such people that these ancient Hebrew texts could have been written without a passionate interest in the physical relationships of space and time.

It also seems unthinkable that divine revelation would not be concerned with the kinds of issues that preoccupy modern minds. Surely God would not stoop to employ the lowly earthbound categories of ancient cosmologies or descend to the language of common appearances!

Perhaps John Bunyan is still the safer guide in such matters of form and content:

Come, truth, although in swaddling clothes I find . . .

Art thou offended? Does thou wish I had

put forth my matter in another dress?

Or that I had in things been more express?

[The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Recovery of Simplicity: Notes from the Land of Birds and Frogs

How wondrous this, how marvelous!

I carry fuel, I draw water!

So said a wise old bird named P’ang in eighth century China. It is possible, of course, that Master P’ang had suffered a severe blow on the head the week before, and ever since had been confusing categories like marvelous and ordinary, wondrous and commonplace. But it is also possible that he had touched on the delicate inner secret of carrying fuel and drawing water, a secret that is the special wisdom of small children and great sages, and also of clowns and fools.

It is a secret that an age like ours -- an age of great sophistication, vast achievement and jaded sensibilities -- has some difficulty in grasping. We search after the wondrous and marvelous everywhere but in the simple acts of carrying fuel and drawing water. For us the ecstatic moment, toward which in so many ways we so earnestly strive, is to be found where the term itself literally suggests it is to be found: in ecstasis, standing outside, going beyond, being beside oneself.

Ecstasy has become the overpowering Quest of our time, the "Holy Grail" of both our sublimest aspiration and our most subliminal abandon. That which is Real, that which makes life worth living or at least endurable, is to be found up there or down there, back there or out there, on some far perimeter of existence, beyond the dull, trivial, boring, repetitive commonplaces of life, like carrying fuel and drawing water. Herbert Read’s description of one of the impulses of fantasy in modern art is thus more a restatement of our problem than a solution: "The inner world of the imagination becomes more and more significant, as if to compensate for the poverty and drabness of everyday life" (Art Now [Pitman, 1960]).

In a sense, it makes little difference whether this quest for the magical-mystical-mysterious-monstrous is imaged in terms of soaring flight (Eagles and Seagulls) or subterranean descent (Serpents and Frogs). And it makes little difference whether the imagined goal is structured in terms of scientific discovery, space adventures and technological wonders, or of market coups, military victories and sexual exploits, or of revolutionary utopias, otherworldly mysticisms and psychedelic fancies. The myth and spirit and expectation are much the same. Vitality, Completeness, Fulfillment -- these are not to be found among the immediate commonplaces of life, but in transcending them, or escaping from them, or in that peculiar form of excess: exceeding them. And the end result is also much the same: instead of being revitalized, the world of the commonplace is rendered even more commonplace.

Between Sacred and Profane

Just as disturbingly, our understanding of the sacred has tended to match our understanding of the ecstatic. That which is sacred is that which is "set apart," which exceeds or transcends or stands over against the profane sphere. It is that which "confronts," "breaks into" and "intersects" an otherwise secular space and time which are lacking in meaning, value and mystery. Mircea Eliade, in volume after volume, has reiterated that "the first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane." The sacred is the "manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world" (The Sacred and the Profane [Harcourt, Brace, 1968]).

But if the distinction between sacred and profane is the first principle of religion, there is also a second principle. And it is the reverse, or reversing, of the first: the overcoming of the distinction between sacred and profane, the return to the "ordinary" world in renewed fascination with simple things and commonplace events. This countermovement brings with it a perception of the ambiguity of the sacred. For while the sacred may be seen as that which gives meaning and value to the profane sphere, at the same time it may by its separateness and elevation tend to empty the profane sphere of significance and worth. We are confronted by the paradox that the sacred creates the profane. Offering itself as the ultimate basis of reality and salvation, the sacred may either arouse a defiant emptying of the heavens and a repudiation of all sacrality in favor of secularity in a death of the gods, or become the place of evasion and retreat, a refuge from life rather than a response to it.

There is, therefore, a twofold rhythm in the history of religion: ecstasis and enstasis -- the moments in which we stand outside, are called outside or thrown outside, of the realm of everyday experience; and the moments in which we stand more deeply within, and are called to reaffirm and reappreciate the realm of everyday experience itself. Thus, to take a Buddhist example, when the Japanese master Bankei was challenged by a zealous Shinshu priest to authenticate his teaching by performing the kind of miracle attributed to the founder of the Shin (True) sect, Bankei replied simply: "Perhaps your fox can perform that trick; but that is not the manner of Zen. My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink!" What could be more wondrous and marvelous than this -- except that our sensitivities have been dulled to the mystery?

Child, Sage and Clown

It is in this "re-ecstasizing" of the commonplace that the peculiar coincidence of the wisdom of the child, the sage and the clown comes into play. For the child is one who exists in that realm which is prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, sublime and ordinary, significant and trivial. The sage is one who has gone beyond the distinction. And the clown is one who mediates between the two by garbling the distinction, or in the form of the fool by being unable to make the proper distinction. The clown performs the unusual religious function of profaning holy things in order that the holiness of profane things may be revealed. The precious jewel is treated like a common pebble, while the common pebble is fondled like a priceless gem.

Harvey Cox has argued, in his Feast of Fools (Harper & Row. 1971), that the clown is the appropriate religious symbol for our time, as "the personification of festivity and fantasy." And as the essential ingredients of this feast of fools Cox has identified "conscious excess," "celebrative affirmation"’ and "juxtaposition" (i.e., of that which is "noticeably different from ‘everyday life’ "). But though the clown in his frivolity and garish attire is certainly a party to, and even an officiant in, festivity and fantasy, one must be careful to note the special character of his revelry and celebration. For the clown is a most ambiguous figure, and in his very ambiguity a most appropriate symbol for the ambiguity of the sacred and for the double-rhythm which this ambiguity requires. The clown not only stands outside and over against the sphere of ordinary existence; he revalues it and refreshes it by standing at the same time most deeply within it. His is not just what Tolkien calls a "Secondary World" of fantasy.

It is the clown, in fact, who juxtaposes the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the commonplace, as a mock prelude to collapsing the distinction. Thus Chaplin wore the top hat, vest and coat of gentility, but the baggy pants and shabby shoes of the tramp. In his person, the exalted was humbled and the humble exalted; and all devaluing discriminations were symbolically transcended. Chaplin debunked both the lofty and the base by parodying the excesses of both order and chaos, as in the hilarious Apollonian and Dionysian extremes of Easy Street. He mediated between the potential insanities on either side. He reaffirmed the joy and wonder of the simplest of things by devoutly dissecting beans as though they were filet mignon (The Immigrant). And he restored to the most timid kiss the thrill which the grossest sensualism was incapable of achieving (City Lights). Chaplin’s very extraordinariness of behavior and dress was a radical defense of the ordinary.

Europe’s master clown Grock, in his autobiography Life’s a Lark (Blom, 1931), says that the special genius of his occupation is that of "transforming the little, everyday annoyances, not only overcoming, but actually transforming them into something strange and terrific." The clown is able "to extract mirth for millions out of nothing and less than nothing: a wig, a stick of grease paint, a child’s fiddle, a chair without a seat." And this is the special power and genius that is most needed in our time. For that ecstatic moment for which we, in our several ways, so avidly search -- or having once gained, try constantly to recapture -- is in fact to be found in the simplest, most ordinary and "trivial" events and objects of our everyday lives. The clown’s capacity for effecting this realization presupposes that in the most insignificant situations and taken-for-granted moments there is already something strange and terrific which we, for all our sophistication, have missed.

In this perception lies an ancient wisdom -- a wisdom of fools -- that reasserts itself again and again in the odyssey of man. Thus, alongside the lofty and otherworldly flights of Indian mysticism, stands the Zen emphasis upon "nothing special" and "everyday-mindedness" and "just being ordinary," as in Yun-men’s spiritual path described as "pulling a plough in the morning, and carrying a rake home in the evening," or in Pao-fu’s response to the question, "What is the language of the Buddha?": "Come, let us have a cup of tea!" Similarly, alongside the supernaturalism of various forms of Western piety stands Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s "every common bush afire with God," or Walt Whitman’s "Miracles":

. . . I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses

toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach

just in the edge of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods .

This counterpoint has not been without its instances on today’s scene. It is apparent in an art which is capable of turning even Campbell soup-cans into objects of artistic representation (Warhol), or in a music which discovers aesthetic value in common noises and in listening to silence (Cage), or in a photography which captures the beauty of doorknobs and cracked walls, driftwood and wrinkled faces. It is apparent in those recent secular gospels and death-of-god theologies which insist on reaffirming the integrity of the "profane." And it is apparent in the recurrent themes of returning to the natural, to the soil, to simpler forms of life, and to the elemental experiences of common people, that manifest themselves in folk music, communes, handicrafting, and classes in organic gardening. But the movement is scattered, indecisive, and often inconsistent. And its expressions are frequently involved in a surfacing of the problem at some other point. A clear sense of the rhythm of ecstasis and enstasis is missing.

Beyond Apollo and Dionysius

David L. Miller, recently reviewing my book The Chickadees in The Christian Century (May 22), has suggested that, as in ancient Greece, "there are two paths in our time, alternative mythologies for a period of crisis: up and out (the rational, heroic, masculine way), and down and in (the mad, mystical, feminine way)." As a report on the fantasies and ecstasies of the day, his statement is certainly correct. It can hardly be disputed that the extraordinary, in whatever form, is the great preoccupation of our time.

We have been spirited away by high-flying birds, low-flying pornography, occult phenomena, charismatic intoxication, ideological fervor, and pharmaceutical rhapsodies -- not to mention yogic powers and divine light and the mesmerism of incessant chantings. We have been accosted by sorcerers apprentices, demons needing an exorcist, witchcraft revivals, flying ghosts and flying saucers, chariots from the gods, whirling astronauts and other visitants from outer space. We have been spurred on by dreams of greatness and number-oneness, new frontiers, new worlds to conquer, and the sundry ladders of success; while visions of supermen, superstars and supersalesmen have danced before us.

But the truly heroic person in our midst is no longer the hero. We have been bombarded by the most incredible variety of heroes and counterheroes imaginable. We have been stampeded back and forth between the "up and out" and the "down and in," as if herded into the to-and-fro of an accelerated Hegelian dialectic. The real hero of our time is the nonhero, the common man, the little Charlie Chaplin, the Dustin Hoffman, who may be buffeted and bewildered and often caught in the struggle between Eagles and Serpents, Seagulls and Frogs, but who somehow through it all manages to remain relatively sane, simple, ordinary and human. Or he is the comic hero, like Ferdinand the Bull, who is content to sit under his cork tree and sniff flowers. Though he may be stimulated by the sting of some bumblebee to heroic display and frenzied abandon, he will return to the simple wonder of sniffing daisies under his marvelous cork tree.

The truth is that both the boisterous abandon of Dionysius and the Apollonian passion for order and perfection are the forms of our ecstasis, not just the wild, mad surfacings of subterranean excess. The elaboration of ritual and the intricacies of ceremonial pomp, the compulsion of the meticulous man, the relentless drive for possession, the ambition of comprehending or conquering the world, the restless quest for progress, the perennial fabrication of new utopias -- all this is also ecstasis, the excess of constantly exceeding and succeeding. It is the ecstasis and excess of the "up and out."

This is not to dismiss either form of ecstasy. We need our visions, our fantasies, our grand imaginings, our impossible dreams, our revelries and our moments of escape. These are a part of both the greatness and the foolishness of our existence. But their function is not simply to carry us outside ourselves, and in that act to devalue or empty the present moment and our common life of intrinsic power and mystery, but to revitalize and revalue the Here and the Now. We stand outside in order to stand more deeply within.

Even heroes must spend most of their time, like the rest of us, in the valley that lies between mountain heights and ocean depths. The essential human problem is to come to terms with that valley, with its own marvels and miracles, not just to invent more and more ingenious methods of escape. Learning the true wonder of "carrying fuel and drawing water" is the first and last principle of our being.

The Middle Way

Yes, we have run frantically back and forth between the gods of the "up and out" and the "down and in," like Hagar searching desperately for water among the hills of Mecca, even as the infant Ishmael’s kicking heels opened the clear-flowing spring of Zamzam in the sands of the valley. But there is a third way, a middle way. It is a way that is symbolized neither by Eagles and Seagulls nor by Serpents and Frogs, but by the playful, darting form of Chickadees and other low-flying birds. Its path is close to the earth, yet not subterranean; it is a way, of utter simplicity, of ordinary pleasures and commonplace delights. It is the way of the child, the clown and the sage.

Such a path is not reached by suppression or repression of either side of our being, but by rediscovering the light touch of the child within us, and recapturing the clown’s, sense of humor and perspective about ourselves. For we are all children and clowns and fools, even in our most serious, sublime and frenzied moments -- perhaps especially then -- and most certainly when we pretend that we are not. The major task of the comic hero, therefore, as Nathan Scott insists, "is to remind us of how deeply rooted we are in all the tangible things of this world. . . . The motions of comedy, to be sure, finally lead to joy; but it is a joy that we win only after we have consented to journey through this familiar, actual world of earth which is our home" (The Broken Center [Yale University Press, 1966]).

In this journey lies a renewal of the wonder and sanctity of everyday experience, a recovery of that miraculous, uncommon commonplaceness of things, and a return to the simple basics of life. Such is the peculiar salvation which the comic hero brings. For it is he who "grapples with the thickness and the density of the concrete world of human experience, delighting in all its smells, sounds, sights, and tactilities. The comedian is not generally an aviator: he does not journey away from this familiar world of earth; he refuses the experiment of angelism; he will not forget that we are made out of dust" (Scott).

Above may be the Apollonian heights, and below the Dionysian deeps. And there we wander now and then in our fantasies, our festivities, and our foolishness. But our real home, the true center of our being, is not to be found in either place. It is here, now, everywhere before us at all times -- "a condition of complete simplicity" (T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets).

The Nativity as Divine Comedy (Luke 1:51-52, RSV)

He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts;

He has put down the mighty from their thrones,

and exalted those of low degree. [Luke 1:51-52, RSV]

There is something peculiarly biblical in these words from the Magnificat of Mary. And though the immediate Christian inclination has been to interpret them in terms of a drama of sin and salvation, their peculiarity is more fully appreciated in terms of the genre of comedy. There is -- as the imagery itself might indicate -- a remarkable affinity between the biblical tradition and the comic tradition which has too often been neglected because of misgivings over drawing upon such associations. Still, the themes of ‘scattering the proud" and ‘putting down" the mighty, while elevating the lowly in their stead, are an important part of the symbolism of comedy, and of the ancient repertoire of clowns and fools.

To be sure, the powerful sweep of these words at first suggests the grand images of conquest that belong to the mythology of the noble hero. But considering that they are attributed to an unknown peasant girl in an inconsequential village of Roman-occupied Israel, there is at the same time a certain "sweet madness" about them that belongs to the comic and the nonheroic. The juxtaposition of utterance and utterer -- and the disparity between the two -- is so radical, so incredible, as to suggest the same response that Abraham gave to the news that his aged wife Sarah was to bear him a son, and hence give birth to Israel: Isaac, that is, "laughter."

Theologians and biblical scholars have customarily approached such passages under the rubrics of "Salvation History," "Drama of Redemption," and the like. And by and large this Heilsgeschichte has been dealt with in much the same grave and ponderous style as the term itself. That sense of marvelous absurdity and incredulous, wide-eyed wonder that attaches itself to great surprises, sudden amazements and comic twists, seems to get lost in the prosaic thickness of theological pedantry. And the resultant "salvation" lacks some of the very gaiety and delight represented by the birth of an infant. It is as if the prophecy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis instead had come true: that in the last age children would be born as old men with gray hair and wrinkled faces!

Furthermore, as we know too well from experience, this business of "scattering the proud" and "putting down the mighty" can become rather vengeful and vicious without the mellowing of the comic perspective. The proud are replaced by the proud, and vanquished inhumanities beget new inhumanities. But the prerequisites for entering this kingdom and its salvation are, in fact, the very opposite of those qualities seen in the triumphal entry of conquering heroes: childlikeness, meekness, humility, tenderness and compassion.

Out of Nazareth?

Something of the significance of these comic and nonheroic elements becomes clearer if one contrasts Christian and Buddhist nativity stories. For the Buddhist nativity is classically dramatic, heroic, and richly embroidered with myth. In the Buddhacarita the Buddha is depicted as being born to the "unconquerable" Shakya clan, of a beautiful queen "like the goddess Shachi," and to a life of princely luxury and advantage. Having performed the marvelous deeds of 500 previous incarnations, he had now come to his final and most glorious birth, and had entered the womb of the graceful Maya in the form of a white elephant. As the queen’s time drew near, she had retired to a pleasure-grove, attended by a retinue of thousands of maids-in-waiting. The garden was laden with a paradisal profusion of flowers, fruits and nuts. And while the queen stood beneath the branches of the greatest of the Sal trees in the grove, she gave birth, without pain or discomfort, to a radiant son whose skin shone like lustrous gold. The child was delivered into a golden net carried by angels, his birth surrounded by many signs and wonders. The infant Buddha thereupon arose, looked in each of the four directions, and declared: "I am born to gain enlightenment for the benefit of all the world. This is my final birth."

The form and pageantry of the Christian nativity is strikingly different. Rather than aristocratic images of noble birth, we are presented with a laborer’s wife, from a poor village, the status of which -- even among Jews -- is suggested by the phrase, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" The birth takes place unattended, in a donkey shed, behind a crowded inn in which there is no room. The only witnesses are the animals in whose feeding trough the infant is laid, and a small band of simple sheepherders from the nearby hills. There is no cosmic tree or golden net or paradisal abundance, but a bed of straw, swaddling cloth and the smell of ordure. Though later wise men from the East come to Herod’s palace to pay homage to the newborn "king," they find him in the only place consistent with the rest of the biblical tradition: among the lowest of the low. And the result of their visit is that Mary and Joseph are forced to flee with the child Jesus into Egypt to escape Herod’s threatened slaughter of young male children.

Though there are certain similarities between these two nativities, the Buddhist account is essentially heroic and hierarchical; the Christian is non-heroic and nonhierarchical. The one is grandly dramatic, the other quaintly comic. By comparison the Gospel accounts are surprisingly down-to-earth, realistic and, one is inclined to say, proletarian.

This is not to argue the superiority of the Christian nativity. Nor is it to suggest that the Buddhist tradition contains no comparable elements. For the Buddha comes to renounce his royal station for the life of a casteless, begging monk. And the later Zen sect in particular introduces a startling variety of nonhierarchical and blatantly comic elements into Buddhism. There are nevertheless important differences that give the Christian nativity a more immediate affinity with the spirit and structure of comedy. In order for Zen to get to the same point, it must radically debunk the heroic heights of its own nativity story, as in Master Yun-men’s remark after recounting the birth of the Buddha to his monks: "If I had seen him at the time, I would have cut him down with my staff, and given his flesh to dogs to eat, so that peace could prevail over all the world!"

Though both Matthew and Luke make a special effort to demonstrate Jesus’ Messianic legitimacy by placing him in the royal line of David, no effort at all is made to "dress up" the obscurity and lowly estate of his birth. If anything, these elements are emphasized as part of the inner plot and meaning of his nativity. They are the "point of the joke," so to speak, the form of the divine folly. Jesus was both "low-caste" and a Nazarene. And, indeed, the circumstances of his birth, and the later Christian interpretation of his life and death, suggest an outcaste. Jesus is the re-enactment of the "root out of dry ground" of Isaiah 53 who has "no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him" -- who is "despised and rejected by men."

Anyone who has sat tearfully and joyfully through Charlie Chaplin’s comic film masterpiece, City Lights, will immediately sense the profound relationship between these biblical themes and those of the tradition of comedy and clowning. Chaplin plays the tramp, the outcaste of society, the vagabond with "nowhere to lay his head." who becomes the strange vehicle of salvation for a poor blind girl, and for a rich man bent on drowning himself. The reward for his "heroism" is that he is befriended by the rich man (when the latter is drunk) and thrice rejected by him (when the man is sober). Finally the little tramp is accused of the theft of money which the rich man in his drunken generosity had given him. Fleeing the police, he manages to get the money to the blind girl for an operation to restore her sight, but is then apprehended and imprisoned.

After serving his sentence he emerges from prison, shabbier and lonelier than ever. And the girl, who all along had imagined the little tramp to be a handsome young man of means, does not even recognize him. As he happens to trudge forlornly by the window of her new floral shop, he is ridiculed by the very one whose sight the "stolen" money had restored, and for whom he had gone to prison. Only in the final scene does she discover that this pitiful, disheveled tramp was her benefactor, when she touches his arm and face once again, as in her blindness, and in that moment of revelation whispers, "You!"

Human Wisdom and Divine Foolishness

It is something of a truism that Western civilization has long been preoccupied with power, greatness and national prestige. Our culture heroes are those who have battled to the top of the competitive pile, and our controlling values have wheeled "onward and upward" on the wings of an ideology of progress and limitless expansion. We have identified ourselves so completely with majestic eagles soaring off into the sun and the "wild blue yonder" that it has not been easy to admit a finiteness -- relative to the infinities that surround us -- in which we are really more like chickadees, or dull gray sparrows.

Yet this obsession with greatness and number-one-ness, whether of individuals, nations or civilizations, has always stood in a rather awkward relationship to the biblical tradition -- however much Christendom has failed to sense the awkwardness. Measured by worldly criteria of importance and success, the entire Bible is a patchwork collection of anecdotes, genealogies and histories of a motley people who were the "nobodies" of the ancient world. So much is this so that the Apostle Paul, using words of the same order as the Magnificat, can exclaim: "Has not God made, foolish the wisdom of this world?"

For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. [I Cor. 1:26-29, RSV]

Here, in fact, is the basic theme of this "salvation comedy." For who, after all, are the people that march in the biblical parade? Certainly not -- except on the periphery -- those who were the center of attention in the ancient world. Not the kings and noblemen of Babylon and Persia, nor the Pharaohs and architects of Egypt, nor the poets and philosophers of Greece, nor the emperors and generals and engineers of Rome. It is a parade of children, shepherds, gypsies, slaves and refugees; a parade of the maimed, the blind and the halt; a parade of nobodies and the prophets of nobodies. The "chosen" of God are clearly not chosen on the basis of having the most to offer, but rather on the basis of having nothing to offer but themselves. And the "reward" of this chosenness is often that of being the clown, the scapegoat, the butt of the joke, the "fool for Christ’s sake."

While there are biblical heroes, they are a curious lot indeed; the terms "nonhero" and "comic hero" are really more appropriate. We meet Abraham, an obscure Mesopotamian peasant who migrated to the territory that was to become, the doormat of surrounding superpowers. We meet Moses, rescued son of slaves, leading a nation of slaves out of Egypt. We meet Saul, chosen king "from the least of the tribes of Israel" and from "the humblest of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin" (I Sam. 9, RSV), and who responded to his election by hiding among the baggage. We meet David, a mere shepherd boy who brings down the mighty Goliath with a single pebble, and who later rules over a petty kingdom the size of Yellowstone National Park. Even Solomon "in all his glory" was hardly arrayed like the great kings and Pharaohs of the day; and that glory became his downfall, and the downfall of Israel.

The portraits in the Gospels are little different, Jesus is heralded by the strange figure of John the Baptizer, crying in the wilderness, dressed in camel’s skin and eating locusts and wild honey. Jesus’ own disciples were hardly selected from the Who’s Who of the Roman Empire, or even the Palestinian social register. And Jesus as "Son of David," "Prince of Peace," and "Lord of Lords" is an odd instance of royalty indeed, from his birth to a carpenter’s wife in an animal shelter, to his vagabond ministry among peasants, publicans and sinners, to his "triumphal entry" upon a burro, to his death as a mock king with thorns for a crown and a cross for a throne. What divine foolishness is this?

The World Turned Upside Down

When Friedrich Nietzsche, in his several tirades against Christianity, points to these elements as of the essence of the biblical tradition, he is certainly correct -- though not in the dark conclusions he draws from the observation,

The Christian conception of God -- God as God of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit -- is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth; perhaps it even represents the low-water mark in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Holingdale, Penguin Books]

But Nietzsche has missed the fundamental comedy in the structure of all biblical scenarios. This comic structure is precisely that of a radical descent to the low-water mark; the embrace of even the sick, the weak and the useless; the sudden revaluation of the "meanest creature and flower." Far from a "contradiction of life," this is an encompassing of the whole of life, a "transfiguration" of all limiting and restricting calculations of worth and importance, an eternal Yes to all peoples and places. Nietzsche, like some of his latter-day disciples, has simply failed to get the point of the joke!

It may well be that the church has also missed the point, and in that failure has opened itself up to the many distortions and evils to which Nietzsche and others have addressed themselves. But to suggest that biblical faith fosters a religion of sickness, weakness, mediocrity, cowardice and slavery, or that it debases life and individual worth, is like saying that the clown is a corrupter of morals, the jester an anarchist, and the fool a destroyer of reason! The subtle ambiguities and transformations of the biblical comedy are lost.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar."

[Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar"]

In the world of the Bible everything is turned upside down. The whole hierarchy of human values and the ladders of human greatness and self-importance are inverted or collapsed. All normal expectations, and the clever stratagems of the prudent, are baffled. Servants appear in the stead of their masters; riffraff are admitted to the royal banquet table; the nobodies stand up and are counted; peasants are crowned king for a day; and the meek inherit the earth. It is a world in which beggars are more at home than the wealthy, sinners more than the righteous, children more than their parents, and clowns and fools more than priests and scribes.

This is not, however, a simple exchange of top for bottom, of reason for irrationality, of knowledge for ignorance. Rather, everything becomes topsy-turvy so that everything may be righted. Reason is mocked so that what reason misses or suppresses may be included. All human orders are challenged, for no order is complete and final. The clown takes the place of the lowest of the low, and the fool mistakes dried peas for pearls, so that the integrity and worth of every person, thing and moment -- however lowly -- may be defended and become the object of special wonder and delight.

Biblical Commonplaceness

When Dante entitled his 14th century classic Commedia -- not "divine" comedy; the divine part was added by later divines -- he meant that it was written in the vernacular ("lax and humble" rather than lofty and stately language) and that it moved from "misery to felicity" (from hell to paradise). Biblical materials certainly form a commedia in both senses. But perhaps the most peculiar characteristic of nearly all biblical narratives is their "vernacular" nature. They belong to the common people; and they share, without awkwardness or embarrassment, in the commonplaces of everyday life. The amount of lofty spiritual instruction and edifying discourse is proportionately quite sparse. The reader is deluged with tedious genealogies, military roll calls, "nuts and bolts" inventories of tabernacles and temples, meticulous ceremonial codes, lists of petty kings, and an array of trifling events and curious tales. Unlike the more "spiritual" and heroic religious literatures of the world, the Bible gives attention to a host of ordinary people, doing rather ordinary things.

So much is this so that a modern reader, accustomed to focusing only upon the most noteworthy individuals and events, is likely to become irritated at the burdensome mass of seemingly trivial detail and the myriad of insignificant names and stories. It may well seem to anyone of discriminating taste, and with a sense of what is and is not of historical value, that the Bible is a poorly edited conglomeration of important and unimportant materials which could have been reduced to more sensible proportions by eliminating all these inconsequential people and incidents and concentrating on exceptional people and crucial events. Then, instead of reading like the "Around Home" section or the obituary column of a small-town newspaper, it could have provided a more worthy document of the life and times of the ancient world, a register of the designs and deeds of the truly great men and nations of the ancient Near East.

The fact that the biblical writers and editors do not do this, however, does not necessarily suggest an inability to distinguish between the significant and the trivial. Rather, a divine parenthesis, as it were, has been placed around all human classifications and gradations, giving all distinctions between great and small a comic pathos.

The Comic Parenthesis

This is the consistent double-theme that runs through the Bible: in relation to God all human greatness is as nothing; and yet because of this nothingness before God, even the lowliest is of immeasurable value. What is taken away with one hand is given back with the other -- fully, graciously and to all. In the words of Samuel Miller’s description of the double-miracle wrought by the clown: "It is a world of such magic and mystery that everybody becomes nobody, and the nobodies everybody."

Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,

and are accounted as the dust on the scales . . .

All the nations are as nothing before him,

they are accounted by him as less than nothing and

emptiness . . .

Who brings princes to nought,

and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing . . .

He gives power to the faint,

and to him who has no might he increases strength.

[Isa. 40: 15-29, RSV]

Such is the nature of that divine foolishness which destroys the wisdom of the wise and brings to nothing the understanding of the prudent; the divine weakness in which the mighty are put down from their thrones and those of low degree are exalted; the divine comedy in which the hungry are filled and the rich are sent away empty.

Some comic theorists have argued that comedy and clowning have no transforming possibilities, but rather are a conservative force, reinforcing the status quo in the act of providing temporary relief from it. Yet it is this divine comedy that has been the continuing source and inspiration of much of our concern for equality, freedom and justice for all, our compassion for the disinherited, our defense of the weak and the poor. For all of our social pyramids, our collective wisdoms, and our discriminations according to rank and power are set by this divine foolishness within the brackets of the comic perspective. Our hierarchies are taken with only a limited and provisional seriousness, not an ultimate and absolute seriousness. They stand within that infinite, transcendent context which radically qualifies everything, and in which all human distinctions are finally annulled. In Isaiah’s imagery, "It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers." The differences among grasshoppers presumably are only of tentative importance in the small world of grasshoppers.

In this divine comedy a poor woman’s farthing cast inconspicuously in the temple chest may be worth more than all the benefactions of the rich. Sinners, unworthy to set foot in holy places, may be justified over those faithful and comfortable in their righteousness. Children may be closer to the kingdom of God than the learned and pious. Illiterates and fools may see what scribes and philosophers do not. And the most godforsaken places may be precisely where God is to be found: Emmanuel, God with us.

. . . We have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash-can

And through all sounds of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

[Hart Crane, "Chaplinesque"]

Farewell to the Clown: A Tribute to Charlie

I am always aware that Charlie is playing with Death. He plays with it, mocks it. thumbs his nose at it, but it’s always there. He is aware of death at every moment of his existence, and he is terribly aware of being alive. . . . And he is bringing more life. That is his only excuse, his only purpose [Charlie Chaplin, as quoted in The Great God Pan, by Robert Payne (Hermitage House, 1952), p. 20.

On Christmas Sunday, Charles Chaplin died at the age of 88. Many eulogies to Chaplin’s artistry and genius have been given by playwrights, critics, comedians and journalists. But a religious eulogy may also be in order. For Chaplin, like all great clowns, was in a peculiar way a religious figure. Though he denied having much knowledge of religious doctrines and affairs, he nevertheless displayed a deeply human sensitivity that made of his comic artistry something considerably more than an occasional tickle on the periphery of our existence. Charlie revealed to us in the clown’s inimitable way certain truths about ourselves; he poked fun at our pride and pretension and reconciled us to one another and to a common humanity.

Once seen, he was unforgettable: Charlie the Tramp with his clipped moustache and soulful eyes set against a pallid face, his shabby but once-elegant clothes, his jaunty penguin gait, his dusty dignity. Charlie the Vagabond didn’t seem to belong anywhere or to anyone: he had nowhere to call home and nothing to call his own, yet he seemed to fit in everywhere. For several decades, Charlie was probably the most widely known and beloved figure in the world -- not only because he was a master clown communicating through the universal language of pantomime, but because he grappled comically with universal human problems. He touched the heart of the human condition in a way that was as profoundly religious as it was profoundly humorous. And we could identify with him. He was vicariously human in a way that few clowns have ever been. In all those little rituals played out again and again on the silent screen he stood for us, represented us.

I

Halos, however, are not becoming to clowns. Clowns are too iconoclastic and blatantly human for that. Even Chaplin’s recently bestowed knighthood -- however much deserved and belatedly granted -- sat rather awkwardly on a figure whose greatness lay in his portrayal of a tough but tender little tramp who stood at the bottom of the social order, if not quite outside of it, and who in real life had come from the slums of London. Sir Charlie had appeared before us in dust and rags -- a knight of sorts perhaps, but a knight without armor come to battle without sword and disarm us all.

Chaplin’s parents had also been performers -- though they were separated from the time he was a year old. As an actress, his mother was at first able to provide for Charles and his older step brother. But gradually she lost her voice by performing during bouts of laryngitis and was no longer able to find employment. Charles, at the age of four, substituted for her when her voice gave out during a performance. The tiny child’s ability to mimic his mother’s gestures and to recall every word delighted the audience. It was his first stage appearance: but it was also her last. His father, whom he had seen but once and who drank heavily on the theater circuit, was summoned to provide meager -- though sporadic -- support. His mother was reduced to sewing for pennies, with Charles and his brother selling newspapers and doing odd jobs.

But as their situation continued to decline, she found no alternative to committing herself and her children to the workhouse. Charles and his brother were separated from her and sent to an orphanage. And when Charles was only seven, they received the stunning news that his mother had suffered a mental breakdown and had been taken to an asylum -- the first of two such committals.

Chaplin knew what it meant to be poor. And he knew what it meant to be a nobody. He knew what it meant to wear cast-off and mismatched clothing, to eat cheap herbs and stale bread and doubtful eggs, to walk slum streets, to live in one room, to have creditors come to carry off whatever few possessions one had. And he never forgot this experience in his films. Even though in his 20s he enjoyed meteoric success, and was to become the highest-paid actor in the world, he remembered what it meant to be hungry and cold, jobless and penniless and alone. Most of his films (1915-1940) started from that premise.

Charlie was never the clown who simply enters the arena in the midst of gala celebration, to bring laughter to tables already sumptuously laden with holiday feasts, where everyone is already singing and dancing in the finest of attire. Charlie entered the world of his films in the lowest and darkest hour, where there was poverty and suffering, where despair was easy, hope hard, and joy almost impossible. It was here that he came to bring a little light and love and laughter.

II

In City Lights he is homeless and jobless, sleeping where he can. In Life he is in a flophouse. In Police he is an ex-convict, with nowhere to go. In The Vagabond he is a wanderer. In The Circus he is left alone in a littered field when the circus has moved on. In The Kid he rescues a boy who is being taken away to an orphanage; in Modern Times he eludes the law with an orphan girl. In The Gold Rush he is so hungry that he boils his old leather shoe for dinner. In The Champion he shares his last sausage with a bulldog. In TheImmigrant he is just off the boat and penniless, longingly pressing his face against the window of a fine restaurant, watching a fat man gorge himself. In Easy Street he helps distribute food in an orphanage -- as if he were distributing birdseed to pigeons, which is how charity must have impressed him as a child.

But in the midst of all this poverty and misery the little clown came, with his antics and his human tenderness and his magical transformations. He came with a plucky spirit that refused to be dismissed or ignored. He came with a sense of individual worth and personal pride for the lowliest of the low -- for who could be lower than Charlie? He came with a measure of hope that might give in to tears, but would not give in to despair. He didn’t philosophize. He didn’t stand there waiting for Godot. And we saw in him what stout and resilient people we were, or could be. As Chaplin said of the Charlie he had created:

Here is a man like himself, only more pathetic and miserable, with ludicrously impossible clothes -- in every sense a social misfit and failure. . . . [Yet] he has a protective air of mock dignity, takes the most outrageous liberties with people, and wears adversity as though it was a bouquet. In emergencies he even triumphs over those imposing characters whom the average man has always visualized with so much awe [ibid., pp. 21-22].

III

Chaplin first arrived at the tramp-figure in 1914 -- not entirely by happenstance. The tramp was like a character out of the London slums of Dickens’s Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol; yet he was miraculously transformed into a figure as comic as he was pathetic. True, his creation had started with the playful donning of Fatty Arbuckle’s huge trousers and a contrasting tight-fitting coat. To these were added shoes too large and a hat too small, and the shuffling, laborious walk of an old cabman Chaplin had once seen hobbling along in London. And there was the pale face accented by darkened eyes and a chopped moustache, and a flexible cane that was itself a contradiction. But in the process of putting the tramp together, he was also putting himself together. Chaplin the now-successful and monied actor and Chaplin the shabby, undernourished, lonely little boy were being reunited.

It was more than a personal symbol, however. Touching as that might be, the resulting figure also had universal currency and validity. For in putting himself together, he was also putting his world together. What Chaplin had done was to combine the fastidious bowler hat, dress coat, starched shirt, black tie and walking cane of an English gentleman with the baggy pants and floppy, well-worn shoes of the gutter bum. The paradoxical unities which such combinations made possible were so many and profound that, even to Chaplin, the tramp was a mysterious, fully formed being that seemed to have been revealed to him, a character that he would have to spend much of the rest of his career exploring. As Chaplin recalled his first interpretation of the character to Mack Sennett:

This fellow is manysided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy [My Autobiography, by Charles Chaplin (Simon & Schuster, 1964), p. 144].

In the little tramp the top and the bottom of the social order had suddenly been thrown together in one person who was henceforth both gentleman and tramp, and neither gentleman nor tramp. This was the secret of his being and success. In Charlie the alienating oppositions of rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged, powerful and powerless, were poignantly contained and united in one slender individual, stumbling and dancing before us. He was, as Robert Payne said. "the whole human comedy wrapped in a single, frail envelope of flesh."

As the tramp per se, he was very close to the level of sheer animal survival much of the time, where elegance is irrelevant, and where one easily disposes of most of the niceties and artifices of "polite society." Yet even at the extremity of the social order, he gave a sense of renewed importance and individuality to the most forlorn insignificance. In his very tatters and tumbles he was still endearing and very human.

This was his strange and oft-repeated ritual of redemption for the human race. In Charlie those who had exalted themselves were humbled, and those who had been humbled were exalted. There was something instinctively Christian about his contempt for the high and mighty, and his identification with the poor and disinherited. In film after film the proud aristocrat in his fine clothes and suave sophistication was revealed as being something of a bum underneath. And the bum, despite his crumpled appearance and ill manners, was revealed as having a certain dignity and grace. And in their mock union a common humanity was affirmed which lay beneath all those distinctions to which we ordinarily give such importance.

IV

Chaplin’s comic ritual was played out in many ways. In City Lights a rich man, who in his drunken state has decided that life is not worth living, is rescued from suicide by the tramp who presumably should be the one committing suicide, and who ironically lectures him on hope. The rich man then insists on taking Charlie home with him to his mansion. In his drunkenness all the distances and barriers between them are broken down, and they celebrate life and friendship together. But when the rich man sobers up the next morning, and returns to the world of social distinctions, he no longer recognizes Charlie, and has him thrown out on the street.

In The Pilgrim Charlie is an escaped convict who, disguised as a clergyman, is mistaken for the eagerly awaited pastor of a small southwestern church. Charlie makes a valiant effort at preaching and otherwise playing the role. But he has certain bad habits, such as lighting up a cigar during the service. And once the convict/clergyman’s double-identity is discovered, we are introduced to a further conflict between law and lawlessness, order and freedom. Rather than face a return to prison, Charlie is escorted by the town sheriff to the Mexican border to freedom/exile. Yet no sooner does he cross the border than he finds himself caught between Mexican bandits in a shootout. The film ends with Charlie running along the border, hopping back and forth from one side to the other, waddling off with one foot in Mexican "lawlessness" and the other in American ‘‘law and order," trying his best to mediate between the two.

In The Great Dictator, an anti-Nazi parody, Chaplin split himself into the ruthless, mad dictator and the defenseless Jewish barber, "united" by virtue of being lookalikes. Through mistaken identity, the barber, fleeing with fellow ghetto Jews, is thought to be Der Führer on his way to a Nazi rally. There he delivers an impassioned oration against hatred, greed and war. Though Chaplin later said that, had he known the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, he could not have made the film, the truth and hope of the film were no less important or authentic. The rituals of comedy deal with more than the superficial arenas of human conflict. Comedy at its best arises out of the central struggles of our existence, as was always the case with Chaplin at his best.

These were not the only oppositions with which Chaplin grappled. Part of Charlie’s genius was his embodiment of so many of the tensions and contradictions of our lives. This, no doubt, is one of the reasons why Charlie had such universal appeal. He was such a nobody, yet everybody all at once. There was a handsome, polished and graceful side to the tramp, no matter how disheveled and uncouth he might be. But he was not the noble hero or the tall, handsome film idol. In him were juxtaposed beauty and ugliness, grace and clumsiness, courage and cowardice. He could put on airs and order people about, and become terribly self-important as occasion might permit. But in a twinkling he was knocked back into the dust again, if he did not leap there himself. Now and then he made some heroic attempt at saving maidens in distress, but defending maidens was usually mixed with hiding behind them. His heroism involved a strong aversion to pain and a distinct preference for running. It was always abundantly clear that he participated in the total human condition.

V

In Life, Charlie, finding himself in a flophouse, puts fellow tramps to sleep in the most direct manner by striking them on the head with a wooden mallet, then dutifully and maternally kissing them good-night. Or he carefully disposes of his cigar ash in the open mouth of a snoring drunk in preparation for kneeling beside his cot to pray. In The Tramp he thoughtfully helps another farmhand off with his boots; but when one boot does not slip off easily, he kicks the fellow in the face to help dislodge it. Or he "helps" his partner carry feedsacks by letting him do the carrying, and prodding him in the rear end with a pitchfork, as if it were a cattle prod.

"Self-contradiction," as W. M. Zucker has argued. "is the clown’s most significant feature. Whatever predicate we use to describe him, the opposite can also be said, and with equal right" (Holy Laughter, edited by Conrad Hyers [Seabury, 1969], p. 77). Yet the self-contradictions and incongruities which the clown incarnates are held together in a single, mysteriously particularized human being. The clown displays our individual and collective schizophrenias. Yet he is doing more than simply coming apart. At the same time, he seems awkwardly unified. He expresses what we all are: meticulous and sloppy, polite and crude, clever and foolish, rational and irrational, bully and coward, clothed and naked. But he does so in a way that does not leave us broken apart.

In an episode in City Lights Charlie drives a Rolls Royce convertible owned by the rich man who momentarily has befriended him. For a time Charlie’s trampishness gives way to the opposite which is already prefigured in his top hat, coattails, vest and cane: aristocratic snobbishness. He drives the Rolls about the city with his head cocked back in a look of haughty superiority, and with all the marshaled dignity of a nobleman -- or at least the chauffeur of a nobleman. But as he turns a corner, he spies a cigar butt on the sidewalk. He sees it in fact at the same time that another tramp, busily patrolling the gutters, has spotted in. Charlie’s other self makes no hesitation in returning. He brings the Rolls to an abrupt stop, leaps out, and just as the gutter bum is leaning over to pick up the cigar butt, Charlie kicks him aside, grabs the prize, jumps back into the limousine, and speeds off to the utter astonishment and bewilderment of the hapless and incredulous bum.

The clown insists on putting side by side many of those things that we spend considerable time in keeping in separate drawers of the mind -- altruism and selfishness, reason and impulse, religion and sex, Rolls Royces and cigar butts. The clown identifies our tensions and ambivalences. Then he suddenly puts us back together in the most straightforward manner by slapping opposites together. This is his peculiar form of salvation. In this odd figure the complexities of our being and the cross-purposes of our lives are patched and pinned loosely and playfully together. We are judged and accepted, chastised and healed, divided and united, all in hilarious slambang fashion.

VI

Sir Charlie? It was the final, crowning contradiction. It was, in fact, the very contradiction that gave birth to the little tramp some 60 years before. And it was that contradiction that he acted and reenacted in an ingenious multitude of variations: Sir Charlie, tipping his bowler hat, not only to portly mayors and rich tycoons and society ladies, but to children and dogs and trees and milk cows.

Charlie was more than an iconoclast or a satirist. He did more than invade sacred precincts and puncture high-flying balloons and kick pompous asses. There was also an element of celebration of this common humanity of ours, a fundamental acceptance and enjoyment of the curious business of being mortal creatures of this earth. Being "all too human" was not seen as necessarily a great weight that drags us down, or a curse that has been placed upon us, but as something potentially delightful. For those who are proud and pretentious it may not be so delightful. But for those who are not pretenders to thrones that are not theirs, or to a divinity that they have not yet attained, the clown enables us to embrace ourselves and each other as the luminous lumps that we are.

The concluding words of The Great Dictator are as revealing as anything of the real Charlie and his comic brotherhood. The refugee Jewish barber, mistaken for the dictator and taken before the waiting crowd at a Nazi rally, hesitantly begins:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone -- if possible -- Jew, Gentile; black men, white.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness -- not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone [Chaplin, op. cit., p. 399].

The film was conceived in 1937, produced during 1938 and 1939, and released in 1940 -- despite the opposition of pro-Nazis, anticommunists, and certain overzealous officials in the Hays Office. The New York Daily News accused Chaplin of being a communist sympathizer and of preaching communism -- a charge that haunted him after the war, and contributed to his being refused re-entry into the United States in 1952.

It was Chaplin’s first sermon. It was a long sermon, and one quite out of character for Charlie. Perhaps it was not the best of sermons, nor -- from the standpoint of filmmaking -- the best of endings. But it was Charlie, who up to this point had been silent in his films. It was Charlie, trying haltingly to put into words what, for 25 years, he had been saying in one way or another in pantomime.

VII

Still, it is the concrete figure of Charlie that will always be remembered and loved, along with the little clown rituals and fool’s feasts which he celebrated. It is here that we see, as Nathan Scott once wrote, "a richly particularized and wonderfully eccentric human being living out his life -- a little hobo whose every gesture somehow manages to redeem the human image . . . Here is the real human thing itself -- clothed not in the unearthly magnificence of tragic heroism, but in the awkward innocence of essential humanity" (The Broken Center, by Nathan Scott, Jr. Yale University Press, 1966], p. 186).

It is a fitting epitaph to a rags-to-riches clown who, in his films, always seemed to start over again in the difficult world of a small boy from Kennington, with his poverty and playfulness, his simplicity and his dreams and, above all, his rock-bottom humanity.

Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance

Woe to him who strives with his Maker,

     an earthen vessel with the potter!

Does the clay say to him who fashions it,

     ‘What are you making?’

     or ‘Your work has no handles?’ [Isa. 45:9].

 



With all the decades of scientific research and biblical scholarship that have intervened since the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925, one might have thought that the issues were by now passé. Yet the recent wave of school-board hearings, legislative bills and court cases suggests that literalism is a persistent phenomenon. Indeed, we may be seeing only the top of the turnip.

The literalist mentality does not manifest itself only in conservative churches, private-school enclaves, television programs of the evangelical right, and a considerable amount of Christian bookstore material; one often finds a literalist understanding of Bible and faith being assumed by those who have no religious inclinations, or who are avowedly antireligious in sentiment. Even in educated circles the possibility of more sophisticated theologies of creation is easily obscured by burning straw effigies of biblical literalism.

But the problem is even more deep-rooted. A literalist imagination -- or lack of imagination -- pervades contemporary culture. One of the more dubious successes of modern science -- and of its attendant spirits technology, historiography and mathematics -- is the suffusion of intellectual life with a prosaic and pedantic mind-set. One may observe this feature in almost any college classroom, not only in religious studies, but within the humanities in general. Students have difficulty in thinking, feeling and expressing themselves symbolically.

The problem is, no doubt, further amplified by the obviousness and banality of most of the television programming on which the present generation has been weaned and reared. Not only is imagination a strain; even to imagine what a symbolic world is like is difficult. Poetry is turned into prose, truth into statistics, understanding into facts, education into note-taking, art into criticism, symbols into signs, faith into beliefs. That which cannot be listed, out-lined, dated, keypunched, reduced to a formula, fed into a computer, or sold through commercials cannot be thought or experienced.



Our situation calls to mind a backstage interview with Anna Pavlova, the dancer. Following an illustrious and moving performance, she was asked the meaning of the dance. She replied, “If I could say it, do you think I should have danced it?” To give dance a literal meaning would be to reduce dancing to something else. It would lose its capacity to involve the whole person. And one would miss all the subtle nuances and delicate shadings and rich polyvalences of the dance itself.

The remark has its parallel in religion. The early ethnologist R. R. Marett is noted for his dictum that “religion is not so much thought out as danced out.” But even when thought out, religion is focused in the verbal equivalent of the dance: myth, symbol and metaphor. To insist on assigning to it a literal, one-dimensional meaning is to shrink and stifle and distort the significance. In the words of E. H. W. Meyer- stein, “Myth is my tongue, which means not that I cheat, but stagger in a light too great to bear.” Religious expression trembles with a sense of inexpressible mystery, a mystery which nevertheless addresses us in the totality of our being.

The literal imagination is univocal. Words mean one thing, and one thing only. They don’t bristle with meanings and possibilities; they are bald, clean-shaven. Literal clarity and simplicity, to be sure, offer a kind of security in a world (or Bible) where otherwise issues seem incorrigibly complex, ambiguous and muddy. But it is a false security, a temporary bastion, maintained by dogmatism and misguided loyalty. Literalism pays a high price for the hope of having firm and unbreakable handles attached to reality. The result is to move in the opposite direction from religious symbolism, emptying symbols of their amplitude of meaning and power, reducing the cosmic dance to a calibrated discussion.



One of the ironies of biblical literalism is that it shares so largely in the reductionist and literalist spirit of the age. It is not nearly as conservative as it supposes. It is modernistic, and it sells its symbolic birthright for a mess of tangible pottage. Biblical materials and affirmations -- in this case the symbolism of Creator and creation – are treated as though of the same order and the same literary genre as scientific and historical writing. “I believe in God the Father Almighty” becomes a chronological issue, and “Maker of heaven and earth” a technological problem.

To suggest that the first chapters of Genesis ought to be read in the classroom as an alternative to evolutionary theories presupposes that these chapters are yielding something comparable to scientific theories and historical reconstructions of empirical data. Interpreting the Genesis accounts faithfully, and believing in their reliability and significance as divine revelation, is understood to mean taking them literally as history, as chronology, as scientific truth. In the words of Henry Morris, a leading “scientific creationist”: “The Biblical record, accepted in its natural and literal sense, gives the only scientific and satisfying account of the origins of things. . . . The creation account is clear, definite, sequential and matter-of-fact, giving every appearance of straightforward historical narrative” (The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth [Bethany, 1978], pp. iv, 84).

Two further ironies result from such literalism. The biblical understanding of creation is not being pitted against evolutionary theories, as is supposed; rather, evolutionary theories are being juxtaposed with literalist theories of biblical interpretation. Doing this is not even like comparing oranges and apples; it is more like trying to compare oranges and orangutans. Even if evolution is only a scientific theory of interpretation posing as scientific fact, as the creationists argue, creationism is only a religious theory of biblical interpretation posing as biblical fact. And to compound the confusions, these biblical ‘facts” are then treated as belonging to the same level of discourse and family of concerns as scientific facts, and therefore supportable by scientific data, properly interpreted. Yet if one is unable to follow all these intertwinings, let alone bow the knee, a veritable Pandora’s box of dire fates awaits:

Belief in evolution is a necessary component of atheism, pantheism, and all other systems that reject the sovereign authority of an omnipotent personal God. [It] has historically been used by their leaders to justify a long succession of evil systems -- including fascism, communism, anarchism, nazism, occultism, and many others. [It] leads normally to selfishness, aggressiveness, and fighting between groups, as well as animal is-tic attitudes and behavior by individuals [ibid., vii].

But the greatest irony is that the symbolic richness and power -- the religious meaning -- of creation are largely lost in the cloud of geological and paleontological dust stirred up in the confusion. If one were to speak of a hermeneutical fall, it would have to be the fall into literalism. Literalism diverts attention from, as well as flattening out, the symbolic depth and multidimensionality of the biblical texts. The literalist, instead of opening up the treasurehouse of symbolic imagination, digresses into more and more ingenious and fantastic attempts at defending literalism itself. Again and again the real issue turns out to be not belief in divine creativity but belief in a particular theory of Scripture, not faith but security. The divine word and work ought to have better handles!



Even among interpreters who do not identify with the literalism of the creationists, one often finds a sense of relief expressed in noting that the sequence of days in Genesis 1, if viewed as eons, offers a rough approximation to modern reconstructions of the evolution of matter and life. It is a very rough approximation, considering such difficulties as that the sun, moon and stars were not created until the fourth “eon,” following the earth and vegetation in the third. And even if all rough correlations could be made smooth by convoluted arguments about cloud covers and the like, the two Genesis accounts themselves, taken as chronologies, do not agree. In Genesis 2, for example, Adam is created before plants and animals, and Eve after. Still, no matter how close the approximations, the entire line of argument is a lapse into literalism and its assumption that this account is in some way comparable to a scientific, historical one.

A case in point is the supposition that the numbering of days in Genesis is to be understood in an arithmetical sense. The use of numbers in ancient religious texts was usually numerological rather than numerical; that is, their symbolic value was more important than their secular value as counters. To deal with numbers in a religious context as an actual numbering of days, or eons, is an instance of the way in which a literal reading loses the symbolic richness of the text.

While the conversion of numerology to arithmetic was essential for the rise of modern science, historiography and mathematics, in which numbers had to be neutralized and emptied of any symbolic suggestion in order to be utilized, the result is that numerological symbols are reduced to signs. The principal surviving exception is the number 13, which still holds a strange power over Fridays, and over the listing of floors in hotels and high rises.

Biblical literalism, in its treatment of the days of creation, substitutes a modern arithmetical reading for the original symbolic one. Not only does the completion of creation in six days correlate with and support the religious calendar and Sabbath observance (if the Hebrews had had a five-day work week, the account would have read differently), but also the seventh day of rest employs to the full the symbolic meaning of the number seven as wholeness, plenitude, completion.

The religious meaning of the number seven is derived in part from the numerological combination of the three zones of the cosmos (heaven, earth, underworld) seen vertically, and the four directions, or zones, of the cosmos seen horizontally. Thus seven (adding three and four) and twelve (multiplying them) are recurrent biblical symbols of totality and perfection. The liturgically repeated phrase “And God saw that it was good,” and the final capping phrase “And behold it was very good,” are paralleled and underlined by being placed in a structure climaxed by a seventh day.

A parallelism of two sets of three days is also being employed, with the second set of days populating the first: light and darkness (day one) are populated by the greater and lesser lights (four); firmament and waters (two) by birds and fish (five); earth and vegetation (three) by land animals and humans (six). Two sets of three days, each with two types of created phenomena, equaling 12, thus permitted the additional association with the corresponding numerological symbol of wholeness and fulfillment. The totality of nature is created by God, and is to be affirmed in a hymn of celebration and praise for its “very goodness.”



While it is true that the biblical view of creation sanctifies time and nature as created by God -- and therefore good -- it does not follow that the creation accounts as such are to be understood chronologically or as natural history. And while it is true that history is seen as the context and vehicle of divine activity, it does not follow that the creation accounts are to be interpreted as history, or even prehistory. One of the symbolic functions of the creation accounts themselves is to give positive value to time and to provide the staging for history. They are no more historical than the set and scenery of a play are part of the narrative of the drama, or than the order in which an artist fills in the pigment and detail of a painting is part of the significance of the painting.

The symbolic function of creation in valuing time and history becomes clearer when the Genesis accounts are compared with myths whose purpose is to legitimate cyclical time (as in the Babylonian myth of the primeval conquest of Tiamat by Marduk, alluded to in Genesis 1:2), or to those in which time itself is a negative aspect of a fallen order (as in Plato’s myth of the fall of the soul, or similar myths favored by Hindu and Buddhist mysticism).

When one looks at the myths of surrounding cultures, in fact, one senses that the current debate over creationism would have seemed very strange, if not unintelligible, to the writers and readers of Genesis. Scientific and historical issues in their modern form were not issues at all. Science and natural history as we know them simply did not exist, even though they owe a debt to the positive value given to space, time, matter and history by the biblical affirmation of creation.

What did exist -- what very much existed -- and what pressed on Jewish faith from all sides, and even from within, were the religious problems of idolatry and syncretism. The critical question in the creation account of Genesis 1 was polytheism versus monotheism. That was the burning issue of the day, not some issue which certain Americans 2,500 years later in the midst of a scientific age might imagine that it was. And one of the reasons for its being such a burning issue was that Jewish monotheism was such a unique and hard-won faith. The temptations of idolatry and syncretism were everywhere. Every nation surrounding Israel, both great and small, was polytheistic; and many Jews themselves held -- as they always had -- similar inclinations. Hence the frequent prophetic diatribes against altars in high places, the Canaanite cult of Baal, and “whoring after other gods.”



Read through the eyes of the people who wrote it, Genesis 1 would seem very different from the way most people today would tend to read it -- including both evolutionists who may dismiss it as a prescientific account of origins, and creationists who may try to defend it as the true science and literal history of origins. For most peoples in the ancient world the various regions of nature were divine. Sun, moon and stars were gods. There were sky gods and earth gods and water gods. There were gods of light and darkness, rivers and vegetation, animals and fertility. Though for us nature has been “demythologized” and “naturalized” -- in large part because of this very passage of Scripture -- for ancient Jewish faith a divinized nature posed a fundamental religious problem.

In addition, pharaohs, kings and heroes were often seen as sons of gods, or at least as special mediators between the divine and human spheres. The greatness and vaunted power and glory of the successive waves of empires that impinged on or conquered Israel (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia) posed an analogous problem of idolatry in the human sphere.

In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-à-vis polytheism, syncretism and idolatry. Each day of creation takes on two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day, and declares that these are not gods at all, but creatures -- creations of the one true God who is the only one, without a second or third. Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order.

On the first day the gods of light and darkness are dismissed. On the second day, the gods of sky and sea. On the third day, earth gods and gods of vegetation. On the fourth day, sun, moon and star gods. The fifth and sixth days take away any associations with divinity from the animal kingdom. And finally human existence, too, is emptied of any intrinsic divinity -- while at the same time all human beings, from the greatest to the least, and not just pharaohs, kings and heroes, are granted a divine likeness and mediation.

On each day of creation another set of idols is smashed. These, O Israel, are no gods at all -- even the great gods and rulers of conquering superpowers. They are the creations of that transcendent One who is not to be confused with any piece of the furniture of the universe of creaturely habitation. The creation is good, it is very good, but it is not divine.

We are then given a further clue concerning the polemical design of the passage when the final verse (2:4a) concludes: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” Why the word “generations,” especially if what is being offered is a chronology of days of creation? Now to polytheist and monotheist alike the word “generations” at this point would immediately call one thing to mind. If we should ask how these various divinities were related to one another in the pantheons of the day, the most common answer would be that they were related as members of a family tree. We would be given a genealogy, as in Hesiod’s Theogony, where the great tangle of Greek gods and goddesses were sorted out by generations. Ouranos begat Kronos; Kronos begat Zeus; Zeus begat Prometheus.

The Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians all had their “generations of the gods.” Thus the priestly account, which had begun with the majestic words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” now concludes -- over against all the impressive and colorful pantheons with their divine pedigrees -- “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” It was a final pun on the concept of the divine family tree.

The fundamental question at stake, then, could not have been the scientific question of how things achieved their present form and by what processes, nor even the historical question about time periods and chronological order. The issue was idolatry, not science; syncretism, not natural history; theology, not chronology; affirmation of faith in one transcendent God, not creationist or evolutionist theories of origin. Attempting to be loyal to the Bible by turning the creation accounts into a kind of science or history is like trying to be loyal to the teachings of Jesus by arguing that the parables are actual historical events, and only reliable and trustworthy when taken literally as such.

If one really wishes to appreciate more fully the religious meaning of creation in Genesis 1, one should read not creationist or anticreationist diatribes but Isaiah 40. For the theology of Genesis 1 is essentially the same as the theology of Deutero-Isaiah. They are also both from the same time period, and therefore part of the same interpretive context. It was a time that had been marked, first, by the conquest of most of Palestine -- save Jerusalem -- by the Assyrians under Sennacherib (ca. 701 B.C.). And a century later the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar had in turn conquered the Middle East, Palestine and even Jerusalem.

The last vestige of Jewish autonomy and Promised Land had been overrun. The Holy City had been invaded, the temple of Solomon destroyed, the city burned, and many of the people carried off into exile, leaving “the poorest of the land to be vine-dressers and plowmen” (II Kings 25:12). Those taken into Babylonian captivity, as well as those left behind, now had even greater temptations placed before them to abandon faith in their God, and to turn after other gods who were clearly more powerful and victorious.

Given the awesome might and splendor and triumphs of Assyria and then Babylon, was it not obvious that the shepherd-god of Israel was but a local spirit, a petty tribal god who was hardly a match for the likes of Marduk, god of Babylon? Where was this god, or the people of his hand, or the land of his promise? Faith was hard and idolatry easy. And now a new and greater power, Persia, loomed on the horizon. Yet despite the littleness and powerlessness of a conquered people before the might and majesty of the great empires of the day, a prophet dared to stand forth and declare what Genesis 1 in its own way also declares:

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his

     hand,

and marked off the heavens with a span,

enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure

and weighed the mountains in scales in a balance?

Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord,

or as his counselor has instructed him? [Isa. 40:12,13].

 

Here too is a poetic affirmation which no literalism can reduce to its own scales and balances, and no symbolism or imagery exhaust.

To whom then will you liken God,

or what likeness compare with him? ...

Have you riot known? Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you from the beginning?

Have you not understood from the foundations

     of the earth?

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,

and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;

who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,

and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

who brings princes to nought,

and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing

     [Isa. 40:21-23].

 

Had there been a controversy in the Babylonian public schools of the day -- and had there been Babylonian public schools -- these would have been the issues in debate.