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Let’s Liberate the Sunday School

There are signs that the Sunday school, which once seemed dead or dying in many mainline churches, is on the verge of new life. At least one denomination, the United Methodist Church, reports that the downward trend in attendance has been baited and that recovery, though slight, has begun. If this is evidence of a resurgence of congregational vitality, the only response must be one of rejoicing. But if the new respectability enjoyed by the Sunday school only reflects a national desire to retreat to comfortable forms that were part of a less risky past, then we are called to espouse a new cause -- the liberation of the Sunday school.

Creative use of the Sunday school hour has been thwarted by the assumption that past patterns must and do exist in the present, and must inevitably continue into the future. A revived Sunday school may temporarily find favorable growing conditions in the present conservative national climate, but for its continued health and growth it must be freed from five stereotypes.

Stereotype 1: The Sunday school is an organism with a life of its own that cannot be changed. It is true that the Sunday school has been a powerful movement in our midst for 200 years. It has been one of the major carriers of Christian traditions. In its strength it has at times competed for loyalty and status with the church itself. It has seemed to defy efforts to change it: until the 1960s, it just kept rolling along. But the decline of the past two decades has shown that the Sunday school is not impervious to outside influences. There has been a loss of Sunday school fervor; the reluctance of volunteers to “teach forever” results in an ever-changing corps of teachers; there is an influx of new church members who have not experienced the Sunday school of old. The consequent break between past and present realities provides a significant opportunity to change the way in which the Sunday school is viewed.

In our technological society, ruled by the ability to break our lives into hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds, time has been carved out for religious education. This time slot stands as a symbol of the church’s desire to aid and encourage continued growth in the Christian faith. The form this time will take is not fixed but can be molded and shaped in the light of the church’s present understanding of its mission.

Stereotype 2: “School,” and therefore “Sunday school,” is only for children.

This stereotype persists even in the face of the historical fact that it was the enthusiasm of huge adult Bible classes of the 19th and early 20th centuries that perpetuated the movement. The concept of the person as a “lifelong learner” has general acceptance in the secular community today and has spawned widespread adult education programs in the public schools, the “Elderhostel” phenomenon on college campuses for older adults, and mandatory continuing education for most professional persons, including the clergy. Nonetheless, the “children only” notion of Sunday school persists, probably because most adult Christians do not take advantage of the adult learning opportunities that are available. Long before adult education was so named, Paul understood that a child’s way of thinking was not adequate for a mature person (I Cor. 13:11). A renewed interest in Sunday school for “children only” will not serve the church because it suggests by its very existence that “reasoning [about the Christian faith] as a child” is all that is required.

Stereotype 3: The intellectual level of Sunday school content is superficial. When ministers characterize banal music as “Sunday school songs,” and simplistic ideas as “Sunday school theology,’ the meaning is clear to all who hear -- Sunday school equals shallowness, sentimentality, and a lack of scholarly foundations. To the degree that this has been true, the leadership of the Sunday school must bow in contrition. However, this kind of comment also reflects a lack of understanding about stages of development and their implications for religious education: see James Fowler’s Stages of Faith (Harper & Row, 1981) and Mary Wilcox’s Developmental Journey (Abingdon, 1979). Although the mature Paul reported that he had put away “childish reasoning,” he did not suggest that as a child he should have thought like a man. On the contrary, he recommended “milk for the babes” and “solid food” for adults (Heb. 5:12-14).

The Sunday school deserves to be liberated from the unexamined assumption that it is in the nature of Sunday school to be superficial. To expose persons to options and to help them learn to make choices is not to be wishy-washy. To teach with the knowledge that persons learn affectively as well as cognitively is not to be sentimental. To save exegesis and formal study of doctrine for adolescent and adult years is not to ignore scholarly foundations. To teach with simplicity may be the most profound way. Without liberation from the stereotype of superficiality, a renewed interest in Sunday school is no real renewal at all.

Stereotype 4: The Sunday school is characterized by the use of mindless methodology. The derisive term most often employed is “cut-and-paste.” But this is not the only methodology that has felt the critics’ scorn. Dividing a class into small groups for the sharing of ideas suggests that “it doesn’t matter what you believe, just so you believe something.” Learning centers for children and simulations for youth prompt such comments as, “All they do in Sunday school is play.” Field trips and audiovisual resources are seen as easy ways to fill up time. Exercises that enable persons to articulate their feelings as well as their thoughts are dubbed “touchy-feely” -- and the standard teacher-led discussion is labeled “a pooling of ignorances.” Even the lecture is criticized as an attempt to pour in knowledge.

The underlying misconception in all of this is that there is some kind of inherent value in a method. The question should not be “What are some good teaching methods for Sunday school?” but rather “What is the best method for achieving the purpose of this lesson with this particular group of persons at this particular time?” A return to the use of transmissive teaching exclusively, on the one hand, or to dependence on a bag-of-tricks approach on the other, will only perpetuate the perceived separation between content and method.

A revived Sunday school needs a sound theory of instruction which takes into account the learner, the content, the teacher, the aim, the context, and finally both teaching and learning styles.

Stereotype 5: The purpose of the Sunday school is to teach the Bible. There is an almost universal expectation that “teaching the Bible” is something that happens at Sunday school. When the statement is understood to mean, “The only purpose of Sunday school is to teach the Bible” or “The purpose of the Sunday school is to teach only the Bible,” then it becomes yet another stereotype. As important as the Scriptures are, the study life of the church draws on much more. From the past comes the rich heritage of history, traditions, creeds, myths and symbols, as well as the Bible. But from the past and from the future comes the call to glimpse what our present life can be, and so Christians must discover how to address the issues of life, both as individuals and as a gathered faith community. (This idea is suggested by Thomas H. Groome in Christian Religious Education [Harper & Row, 1980].) The Bible, yes. Only the Bible, no.

The church does not need a “revived” Sunday school that lives up to the common misperceptions of its mission, but instead one that has discarded the stereotypical shackles that have limited its effectiveness in the modern world. If the Sunday School is coming back, let it return as a liberated and liberating arm of the church.

Holy Fire in Jerusalem

This past year I observed an Easter ritual in Jerusalem that will be repeated soon, unchanged, exactly as it has been performed each year for centuries -- the Miracle of Holy Fire. It is celebrated at midday on Easter Eve in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the site that church tradition holds to be Christ’s burial place. The event consists of the sending down of fire by God, the bursting forth of flame at the sacred tomb and the lighting of the candle held in the hand of the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem. Upon receiving the miraculous flame, symbol of Christ’s resurrection, he passes it to his followers who are throughout the church.

No one was more joyous at the sight of the Holy Fire than the old Cypriot women who gathered by the hundreds around the tomb and filled the courtyard leading to the entrance of the church. They were short, square-bodied women, with round faces. All were dressed in widow’s black, village women come on pilgrimage to the Places sanctified by Christ’s birth, life and death.

An hour before the ceremony began, one of the Muslims who guard the church entered the tomb to extinguish the 43 silver lamps hanging over the crypt. (Greeks, Armenians and Catholics each possess 13 lamps; the Copts have 4.) When the guard came out, the door was shut behind him and sealed with wax.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a disappointment to those who enter it for the first time. The place where Christ was buried ought to look no less grand than St. Peter’s in Rome. What few know is that this building owes less to the final scene of Christ’s agony than to the tormented history of Christian Jerusalem.

In the early fourth century, Empress Helena journeyed to Palestine and, guided by the Holy Spirit, discovered the sites of the true cross and the tomb of Christ. Afterwards her son Constantine began construction of what turned out to be a splendid Byzantine basilica, a powerful symbol of the adoption of Christian faith by the Roman Imperium. In order that the church could be built, a pagan temple dedicated to Aphrodite was first destroyed. Legend states that the pagans (who continued in number and strength long after Constantine embraced Christianity) had deliberately built their temple over Christ’s tomb to cover any trace of the false god. The Byzantine church, then named in Greek Anastasis (“Resurrection”), was dedicated in 335.

The original Constantinian building was severely damaged in the Persian invasion of 614 and completely destroyed in 1009 by the mad Egyptian Caliph al-Hakim, who, it is said, was angered by the fraudulent Holy Fire ceremony of the Christians. In 1048 the great rotunda that frames the tomb was rebuilt, and 100 years later the Crusaders added their own Romanesque-Gothic church to what the Byzantines had left them, renaming the place “Holy Sepulchre.”

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today as a rude confusion of black and gray stone; a damp, airless sanctuary into which little light enters. On the floor of the Catholic chapel near the tomb, the navel of the world is located -- the point from which God’s justice and love radiate throughout the creation. The church also happens to be the focus of rivalry, where for centuries Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Catholics, Copts and Ethiopians have battled each other for control of every pillar, altar and lamp.

Normally, whatever the weather outside, one shivers in the church; on this eve of Easter, the press of bodies made faces sweat. Earlier that morning priests had walked about the rotunda incensing away demonic spirits. Patches of sweet-smelling gray smoke still hung in the air, producing a mild feeling of suffocation. One could well imagine something bad happening here. In the past, fainting, fist fights and trampled bodies were common. In 1834, during the Turkish period, local Muslim police on Easter Sunday collected bodies stacked five feet high at the church entrance, near the spot where the Virgin stood during the crucifixion. The apprehension of danger deepened the mystery of the place for me, whetting my appetite for the strange event about to unfold.

Outside in the courtyard it was a hot, cloudless day. On such days the Jerusalem sun is to be feared. The hot, dry chamsin, starting from the Arabian desert, had blown across the Judean waste, baking the stones of the city. The air was filled with yellow dust. The ever-resourceful Cypriot women in the courtyard were sitting on canvas stools, fanning themselves with special “Easter Holy Land” fans and swigging occasionally from plastic Evian bottles. The few old men around took shelter in the shade beside the massive stone foundations of the church. Above them on the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, teen-age Israeli soldiers dangled their legs, staring down vacantly.

The Greek clergy love to stage this spectacle each year. It breaks the tedium of their lives, which consist largely of dusting and polishing the holy places. It also reminds them of a time when they -- the proud descendants of Byzantium -- ruled Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

Promptly at 1:00 P.M., two columns of Greek Orthodox priests, flanking their patriarch, marched 200 yards from the adjacent monastery to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; they were accompanied by Muslim cavasses in the red military dress of the Ottoman Empire. With their long metal canes striking loudly on the stone pavement, the guards announced the solemn procession and cleared a path through the narrow streets crowded with worshipers. Everyone moved rapidly lest a pilgrim numbed by the long night’s vigil, dehydrated by the day’s heat, succumb to ecstatic confusion and reach out to embrace one of the holy fathers. In the past it was a rare procession that reached the church without causing panic.

In three or four minutes the priests passed the great iron door of the church and proceeded to the rotunda where the rose-colored marble edicule that houses the tomb of Christ stands. Soft chanting began as the priests in their green and gold robes commenced the first of three (for the Holy Trinity) circumambulations about the edicule.

In about a quarter-hour the, ritual processions ended, along with the prayerful murmurings of the pilgrims. Every light was put out. The television cameramen were instructed to douse their arc lights; even the tiny red signal lights on the cameras were covered by hand. Darkness thickened the silence. It seemed hard to breathe.

The moment had come. The Greek patriarch stood before the edicule, a massive, bearded man. The gold crown on his head, studded with emeralds and rubies, sparkled in the darkness. Directly above him was the last station of the cross: Golgotha.

Slowly, carefully, priest-attendants removed the crown and stripped away the outer satin robes. Quietly an Armenian bishop slipped up behind the patriarch. The Armenian was a Monophysite, despised by the Greeks for holding the heretical view that Christ was essentially of one (divine) nature. When the patriarch noticed the Armenian, he scowled. Earlier in the day the patriarch had wanted to deny the Armenian the right to accompany him

into the tomb. Bishops from both sides argued heatedly with Israeli government officials, who consulted ancient traditions and upheld the right of the Armenians. Bishops representing the Coptic and Syrian Jacobite churches also have the right to go into the tomb to receive the Holy Fire, but only after the Greek and Armenian have exited. They were standing there at the entrance of the tomb, unsmiling, stolid -- the Copt swarthy, with a round black hat, and the Jacobite looking emaciated, tubercular.

A Franciscan, representing the multitude of Catholic communities in Jerusalem, was also present. He is not allowed to go into the tomb during the ceremony: a punishment, one supposes, for the cruelties practiced by the Crusaders against their Eastern brethren. The 12th century Armenian historian Matthew of Edessa tells us that in 1102 the Holy Fire refused to descend after the Franks had seized the holy places from the local priests and kicked the Greeks out of their monasteries. The newcomers got the point and restored the properties; the fire appeared, a day late.

The seal was broken, the door opened and the patriarch, followed by the Armenian, entered the edicule. After a few minutes of breathless silence a hand appeared from a hole on one side of the edicule holding a torch. The Holy Fire had descended. First a village priest reached forth with his own bundle of white candles (33 in a bundle, to symbolize the years of Christ’s life on earth) to receive the flame. After him an elder of the local Arab Orthodox community took the flame from the patriarch’s torch. In a few seconds another hand and torch stretched from a second hole on the opposite side of the edicule. It was the Armenian’s turn to start the sacred conflagration for his own community. Instantly the flame was passed to Copt and Jacobite, then to the Franciscan. The Arabs and the Cypriot women were busy lighting up the church. Singing began.

The Holy Fire spread rapidly to the entrance door. The bells of the church rang out triumphantly. A young Arab boy, bare-chested, was hoisted on the shoulders of his fellows, and conveyed the flame to worshipers in the courtyard. One candle lit another. Whole sections of the courtyard suddenly came ablaze. The fire rolled in waves across the courtyard. The intense heat, the open fire and the excitement of the crowd forced the soldiers to their feet. They were all standing, mouths open, looking about nervously, not knowing what to do. Everyone had a torch. A few were pressing the flame close to their faces, murmuring prayers, purifying themselves of sin.

In the midst of the crowd I saw a young man without a torch wearing a powder-blue knitted yarmulke. He was standing there, looking on intently. Did he know that one of the hymns formerly sung during the Holy Fire contrasted it with the Jews’ “feast of devils”? But the times have changed. The hymn is no longer sung, and the “sorrowful Jews” have become Israeli state authorities delighted to attend a ceremony they have spent the better part of a month organizing.

The crowd began to move slowly out of the courtyard. The peasant women shielded the flame from bursts of wind. Some took balls of white cotton and scorched them with Holy Fire to rub on arthritic limbs or the foreheads of newborn babies. One woman couldn’t get the burning cotton off her fingertips until a man shook it from her hands. She bent down and scooped the waxy mess into her purse. Others carried tiny lanterns to transfer the precious fire from its source to the village church in Cyprus. They imitate the Russian pilgrims of the past century, who made elaborate preparations to convey the Holy Fire to every corner of their country. On this day the patriarch’s Cadillac limousine was waiting to take the Holy Fire to Bethlehem, where Arab Christians awaited it in the Church of the Nativity.

The ritual of the Holy Fire lasted about an hour. As we made our way through the soul of the Old City to Jaffa Gate, my companion, a super-Sabra who studied mathematics and philosophy at Hebrew University, asked me the inevitable question.

“How do they do it?”

“How do they do what?” I replied.

“How do the Greeks make the fire?”

“The Greeks don’t make it; God does.”

She paused. “You mean the Greeks believe that

God sends the fire?”

“Right.”

“But who really produces the fire? How is it done?”

“I don’t know.”

Exasperated, she pressed me. Don’t give me that. You teach theology. You know how it’s done.”

Another long pause and then I replied, “The patriarch does it with a cigarette lighter.”

She glanced at me with a mildly derisive smile on her face, and said, “You think the people know this?”

“I doubt it. But if they did, it wouldn’t matter to them.”

“Really? Then the miracle is not the lire but their faith.”

“You got it.”

Not wanting to drop what is, after all, a legitimate question, later that night I read to Lea a passage from the 11th century Christian writer Abelfaragius. With mixed feelings, Abelfaragius quoted a Muslim detractor of the Easter Eve ritual:

. . . When the Christians assembled in their Temple at Jerusalem to celebrate Easter, the chaplains of the Church, making use of a pious fraud, greased the chain of iron that held the lamp over the Tomb with oil of balsam; and . . . when the Arab officer sealed up the door which led to the Tomb, they applied a match, and the fire descended immediately to the wick of the lamp and lighted it. Then the worshipers burst into tears and cried out Kyrie Eleison, supposing it was fire which fell from heaven upon the Tomb; and they were strengthened in their faith.

Alone I returned to the church the next day. I am drawn to the ghostly presence which fills a building after the crowd has left it, tempted to search for traces of meaning that remain. I was disappointed. The church was not empty. This church is never empty. There is always too much activity inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Too many tourists, too much talking, milling about. No place to sit down, to think. The ghost must have fled this church years ago.

The Cypriot women were still there. Had they gone another night without sleep? Several were kneeling at the Stone of Unction, a flat, brown slab of marble just inside the entrance of the church. Here Christ’s body was anointed with oil after it was taken down from the cross. For the week’s doings the casing upholding the stone had been filled with specially blessed water. The women were washing themselves with water. One was filling an empty Maccabee Beer bottle, scooping up holy water with her cupped hand and deftly pouring it into the bottle. She handed the half-filled bottle to her friend, who plugged it with cotton and dropped it into an airline bag.

Years ago in divinity school I learned that piety should not be confused with spirituality, inwardness, reflection -- the stuff of which theology is made. Piety is direct and sensuous: seeing fire, kissing stones, touching water. Pilgrimage is born of this piety. For the Cypriot women this was the last journey, the truly sacred journey. Only old people go on pilgrimage -- as a preparation for death. The Russian women who came to Jerusalem in the thousands around 1890 carried long white shrouds with them. They would wear them to bathe in the Jordan; the white shrouds looked to English traveler Stephen Graham “like the awakened dead on the final Resurrection Morning.” From the Jordan the Russians would walk to Jerusalem and, upon receiving the Holy Fire at Saturday noon, would extinguish it with caps that they planned to wear in their coffins.

The Cypriot women I saw were not carrying white shrouds. A few had cheap imitations bought from the merchants on Christian Quarter Road, swatches of cloth with printed Halloween scenes on them. But they were strengthened in faith.

Notes on Sacred Space

Most buildings that are architectural prize-winners when new go unnoticed 25 years later. But some continue to be admired. A few years ago the American Institute of Architecture began to give one award each year to a 25-year-old structure, and in 1976 the choice for this award was Christ Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, the last work of Eliel Saarinen. When the church was new, it attracted wide attention because it seemed so daring a departure from the conventional Gothic or Georgian style. By 1976 the fame of the architect’s name had dimmed, the novelty of the architecture had paled, the technical and the liturgical sophistication were passe. Is it possible that the great remaining virtue that the jury recognized in the Christ Lutheran building could be something called “sacredness”?

The quality that people think of as “sacredness” sometimes accrues to places because they have been the sites of particularly important historical events. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca are called “holy cities.” And to the faithful of any congregation, their own church buildings are commonly thought of as “sacred.” Even the most commonplace church building can become venerable in someone’s mind, so “holy” that its destruction, or even changes made in it, are seen as sacrilege.

It’s probably fruitless to analyze the attribution of holiness in this way. In any case, an architect has no control over the kind of sacredness that a place acquires after the design is finished. If he or she wants to make what can be called a sacred space, the problem has nothing to do with age or with personal or social events. And yet it is clear that a place of worship ought to supply spaces that invite people into the presence of the Other, and are thus consonant with acts of worship. But are there architectural qualities that evoke an intuition of holiness? If so, what might they be?

For part of what follows, I owe a debt to Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1958). Otto was, as were many people when he was writing, a devotee of Gothic architecture, and paid homage to it in his book. In his analysis of religion, Otto identifies three universal and elemental aspects: the devotion to truth or reality, the commitment to an ethical position and the awareness of the Mysterium Tremendum.

The last is the most memorable perception. Religion attempts to deal with the ineffable, unknowable, transcendent Other, which we perceive not through reason, but through intuition. Religion focuses on the mystery that is at once awesome, transcendent and fascinating as well as immanent. If we are to deal with this mystery, we must find a symbol for it. And I think that we have only one symbol available in human experience: namely, beauty.

Not a particular beauty, not just the beauty of the “dim religious light,” but all beauty. For beauty is also a mystery -- ineffable, unknowable but perceivable, remote but fascinating. We sense it, we do not deduce it. It is an experience, not a rational conclusion. The beautiful thing invites us into a state of wonder or awe, and if we are receptive, this lesser mystery can point, as symbols point, to the greater mystery, the Mysterium Tremendum. Otto’s volume -- like most of theology -- although it deals with the idea of the holy, cannot evoke in us the sense of the holy. Nor do other treatises on the subject. But beauty can. And I suppose this is the reason that priest and artist are found to be companions in every religion.

If an architect wishes to make a particular environment a symbol of the holy, it is absolutely required that the place be one of beauty. People who have undertaken to build temples or shrines or church buildings have always held this to be true. If we assume that the symbol of the holy is not a particular beauty, but beauty of any sort, then it is not surprising that we can love equally places as diverse as Chartres and Vierzehnheiligen, the Old Ship Meeting House and Christ Lutheran Church. And it is not surprising that Christians could adopt the Parthenon and the Pantheon for use as places of worship, and that Muslims could turn the Church of Santa Sophia into a mosque. Those buildings were not ideal for the uses of the religious groups that adopted them, and they certainly had no acquired sacredness for those groups. But the beauty of the places was convincing.

Nor is it surprising that religious groups have found places of exceptional natural beauty congenial to religious activity. Sometimes such places have been chosen for temple and church building sites -- as, for instance, the oldest Japanese shrine, Ise; or Mont St. Michel in France; or Delphi in Greece. Even the pastor who takes the youth group on a retreat into the country looks for a place of beauty -- a park, mountaintop or seashore.

In the art and artifacts associated with the sacred, we search for beauty, too. And again it is immensely diverse, not of a particular style. Gregorian chant and Isaac Watts and the Salve Regina are all associated with the holy. Visually, the span is similarly broad, ranging from the sweetness of Donatello to African masks to “the beauty that verges on terror,” in Rilke’s phrase.

One of the byways into which designers have frequently strayed is what might be called “mystification.” In the urgent sense that they must somehow deal with mystery, in their intention to speak the unspeakable, architects have introduced devices and details into their church buildings that they would not use in “secular” projects. Hidden light sources, twilight darkness, exceptional opulence (like gold Mexican reredos) or capricious structures (like the “Freeway Church” in Florence or the work of Antonio Gaudí in Barcelona) are used. Occasionally these things contribute convincingly to the beauty of a project. But the merely mysterious can be resolved like the mystery of a detective story; darkness is penetrable; the merely exotic can become tiresome. The really beautiful thing, on the other hand, is like the Mysterium Tremendum: its mystery grows: as we contemplate it.

The affectations of “mystification,” because affectations are short on candor, are also inconsistent with another of the essential qualities of religion that Otto identifies: the search for the real and true. The devotion to truth or reality is not the exclusive domain of the religious person; the philosopher or metaphysician is also concerned with truth. The religionist is usually willing to accept the witness of the intuition as well as reason in his or her search for truth; and every religion proposes to deal with the authentic, to avoid illusion, the artificial and the superficial, to go beyond appearances to the real.

If an architect is to be faithful to this objective, to provide an environment that encourages the serious search for truth and is a symbol of that search, the direction of one’s work is not difficult to prescribe, though it may be hard to accomplish. He or she needs to avoid the artificial, the illusory and the idiosyncratic. The quality that architects call “honesty” has been one of the touchstones of the modern movement in architecture in its reaction against the artifices of the 19th century. And one does find it superbly exemplified in the work of some leaders of the movement. But most of the architecture of recent generations is less “real” by far than is the heritage of earlier centuries. Among the historical church buildings, the early Romanesque, the Cistercian monasteries and the early New England meetinghouses express this “submission to what is real” most convincingly. Christ Lutheran joins that group.

One of the attractions of so-called “vernacular” architecture -- such as grain silos, factories and barns -- is its ingenuousness. It’s possible that engineers do better nowadays than architects; they try for craft instead of art and don’t get trapped into artiness. Suspension bridges are superior examples. They use materials forthrightly, but they also deal with a subtler aspect of truth; the catenary curve of the cable line is a near-perfect reflection of the way gravity really acts on weight. So our intuitive admiration of the form is a mixture of respect for the grandeur or size and a response to the faithful reflection of physical fact. The complexities of technical logic are matched with a kind of primitive perception, and the combination is awesome. The same factors exist in the medieval use of masonry, and doubtless supply a part of our delight in the cathedrals.

Anybody who supposes it is easy to be “honest” is mistaken. The world of building materials and building methods is full of deceits -- low-cost things imitating the appearance of authentic ones and conventions that make virtues of illusion, for instance. The tension between desire and cost seduces us. Let me give one or two examples. An opening in a wall that we call a window used to be filled with transparent or translucent materials that were a screen clearly dividing the interior from the exterior. Then rolled glass and polished glass became available in large sheets, and the often-stated intent now is to make the screen invisible -- a kind of pretense that there is no difference between the interior and the exterior.

Mies van der Rohe was once asked to design a church. He refused the commission because the bishop asked him to set the place of worship on the second story. Mies, whose sensibilities were refined and in a way puritanical, believed that a serious enterprise like worship should be physically grounded. His fidelity to principle is renowned. Few architects or building committees are as firm or perceptive.

The designer who tries faithfully to make a proper symbol of Otto’s third element of religion accepts a similarly difficult role, unsupported by much of church building tradition and current practice.

All religions take ethical positions. The range of those positions is as broad as the distance between the Confucian ethic of propriety and the Christian ethic of love. If we take historical church buildings as symbols of the Christian ethic, we cannot always read from them a commitment to love. For instance, there has probably been no structure more symbolic of authority than St. Peter’s in Rome. Hundreds or thousands of other prestigious monuments, beautiful as they may be, provide similar images.

If church buildings are to be symbols of love, they should be quite different. Buildings can be described in the same terms as people can: they can be noble, trivial, awkward, vigorous, charming; they can be domineering, imposing, boring, peremptory. A church building that seeks consciously to induce what used to be called the “mood of worship” is suspect because it seeks to manipulate. If a building is to be an image of love, the words that might be used to describe it would be words like gracious, companionable, generous, strong, gentle and hospitable. There are buildings of this sort, but not many of them appear in our cities or among the structures that attract the attention of the professional and public press. The current scene projects the image not of love but of self-indulgence, or self-assertion; not a little of it is simply dull without being either humble or gentle.

If we look for examples of the architecture of love, we will doubtless find them most readily in domestic structures. This is not surprising; most people try very hard to make their homes images of hospitality. Frederick Debuyst, the Belgian Benedictine who has been one of the most perceptive voices for and critics of the new currents in church-building, has often used the word “domestic” in pointing to the virtues of the new buildings he admires. He is proposing not that they look just like houses but that their scale, their rhythms, their details suggest habitation instead of monument. Spaces need not be small to be humane, but it takes great care to make them so. Architects sometimes use the word “haptic” to describe architecture that seems to invite the presence of people and supplies a kind of continual conversation with its inhabitants (rather than addressing them oratorically). It is probable that the fondness now so general for the buildings of a hundred years ago stems in part from the fact that, whatever their faults, there is much of the haptic -- the touchable -- in them.

Just as it is a privilege simply to be in the presence of a really good person, so one finds both comfort and stimulation in simply being in the presence of a good building, whether one has anything to do there or not. One way of defining good architecture is to ask oneself whether a building is a good place to be when one has nothing to do.

This kind of understanding presents some interesting corollaries. If beauty -- not a particular beauty, but any beautiful thing -- is a metaphor of the sacred, then there is no such thing as a uniquely “religious” or ecclesiastical idiom in architecture or in the other arts. We are not then surprised that the Messiah is not a generically different sort of music from one of Handel’s “secular” oratorios. We are not surprised that Rembrandt’s landscapes and portraits differ only in subject matter from his work on biblical themes. And it is clear that places other than dedicated church buildings can be perceived as good places to assemble for worship. The early Christians recognized this fact when they were content to worship in homes, and later, when they adopted the secular basilica as the place of worship. The Puritan meetinghouses very consciously dissolved the barrier between sacred and secular, and demonstrated for us that it is beauty, authenticity and hospitality, not a particular style, that are the metaphors of the sacred.

And are beautiful “secular” buildings appropriate for religious services, the occasions when people by intention open themselves to the consciousness of God? I think so. I can well imagine Christians gathering with complete joy in places as diverse as the Great Hall at Elsinore Castle, or the Imperial Audience Hall at Kyoto, or the central dining room at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Another issue develops from the perception of the sacred potentials of the secular: the responsibility of the Christian with respect to noncultic architecture. If a Christian takes the position that ugliness, inhumanity and artificiality are wrong in the place of worship, they are also wrong elsewhere. The burden Christians must undertake is to make not only church buildings into metaphors of the holy, but all architecture for which they have responsibility. If it is true that secular buildings can be vehicles of grace, then they ought to be. Anything less is a denial of the faith. In addition to our church buildings, our factories and stores and workplaces, our cities in general ought to be portals of transcendence.

America’s Other Religion

Those who rush to other gods bring

many troubles on themselves.

I will not take part in their sacrifices;

I will not worship other gods.

[Ps. 16:4 (TEV)]

Recently I graded the final exams for a Christian ethics course. On a question about premarital sexual intercourse, I found that I was generally giving higher grades to students who took the position that for Christians sexual intimacy is to be entered upon only after marriage. Concerned that I might be grading according to my own ethical values, not according to classroom standards of analysis, use of resources, and the like, I reread a number of papers.

After examining the essays afresh, I was satisfied that most of the students who argued the traditional position had, indeed, been more analytic and had struggled more intelligently with the issue. Those who had argued in favor of premarital sexual relationships -- many of them Christians -- had tended to make assumptions about human relationships which allowed them to avoid analysis and struggle. Why? Because, I think, they simply accepted our consumption-based society’s basic assumption: all needs require instant gratification.

My students are products of a culture that does not question that constantly repeated theme. Neil Postman, professor of “media ecology” at New York University, estimated recently that children in America see 750,000 TV commercials during the formative period of their lives from six to 18. Is it any wonder that immediate gratification is built into our perceptions? It is an idea taught 15 times an hour, six hours a day, seven days a week.

What we see in our country today is a perfectly good economic process -- the mechanisms for producing and consuming goods -- made into a religion. Production is good: How could humans live without producing food, clothing, housing? Consumption is good: How could we live without consuming food, wearing clothes, living in dwellings? The means by which we produce such abundance are good: Who would argue against making human toil easier by means of machines? But taken together, they constitute America’s other religion. The struggle between consumer religion and the Christian faith is a battle at least as old as that of the prophets against Baalism or the early church against the divinized Roman Empire.

Indeed, we have only to look at the change in Rome from the year 58 or so, when St. Paul wrote Romans, to about 85 when John wrote Revelation, to see a good thing become bad by assuming an aura of divinity. In Romans 13 Paul calls the empire’s officials “ministers [deacons] of God to do his will.” Twenty-five years later in Revelation 13, Rome has become “the beast,” the creation of the devil, with an accompanying beast that stands for the religion of the empire: “He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed” (Rev. 13:15 [NIV]). From the reign of Domitian onward for over 200 years, Christians were killed for refusing to offer a pinch of incense to the religion of the empire. Like our modern “beast,” a good thing had arrogated to itself divine powers and had to be resisted.

For the modern Christian who does not want to worship God and Mammon, the difficult thing is to recognize that our system has gradually taken on divinity. Note that it fits these characteristics of a religion:

1. A religion responds to basic human anxieties, such as feelings of guilt. Christians once called gluttony a sin, something to be guilty about. But our system of instant production, consumption and disposal makes us feel guilty if we do not consume. “I owe it to myself,” we are taught to say about vacationing in the south in winter or owning the latest gadgets, the right auto, the proper food supplements. It makes a difference to a young person whether her jeans have “J. C. Penney” or “Calvin Klein” imprinted on the rear. “Ring around the collar” is shameful. Our new religion defines guilt and sells the products that will purge the soul.

2. A religion brooks no rivals, but destroys or converts or lives in uneasy tension with different ways of understanding human life and destiny. It rewards faithfulness and punishes the slacker. One has only to look at those who cannot produce or consume in quantity to see that punishment at work. Children produce nothing and consume little; we have moved from the youth-regarding society of the 1950s to the youth-denying society of today. Fewer people want children; no one wants very many. When America reached a state of zero population growth a few years ago, the cheers were heard from all sides. For this society has made it all but impossible for a young couple to have children and yet maintain the requisite pace of consumption. Both spouses must work, unless one of them has an exceptionally large income. Luxuries are beyond the means of a one-income family. The successful family -- the one rewarded in our new religion -- works hard at two jobs, postpones childbearing and plans for a one-child family. Even that child will be raised mostly outside the home. What to women’s rights advocates is the right to a meaningful career is, seen from another angle, simply worship of the Baal of consumption.

The new religion destroys the symbols of the old. A good example is the holy day. If Christmas has become a purely pagan spectacle, look what has become of national holy days. Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving -- all are simply occasions for travel, consumption and waste. Before the advent of televised football on Thanksgiving, that day remained the “purest” mixture of civic and religious celebration in the land. Now, it is a day for a hurried meal and hours in front of the TV screen, watching football and absorbing the urgings to buy. (Football, with its long moments of inaction -- plenty of time for commercials -- could almost have been invented as a part of America’s other religion.)

Indeed, a religion seeps into all human activities. For instance, the religion I refer to permeates athletics so totally that it is almost impossible to separate the two. That is why college athletics has become so professional, and why only losers seem to follow the NCAA rules for recruiting players.

It is not facetious to call our system of technologically stimulated production and consumption a religion. An economic process defines for millions of Americans what it is to be truly human, what the meaning of life is, how to avoid guilt. This system punishes the unworthy -- consider the situation of many older Americans who neither produce nor consume, and are cast away as unnecessary.

As often happens, this religion has formed a syncretistic bond with a strong rival, in order to destroy the enemy from within. The rival is evangelical Christianity. The high priests of consumerism, who are bona fide Christians, confuse us about their ultimate loyalties. A “born-again” entertainer or athlete hawks gasoline or cosmetics or beverages. Jesus is portrayed as approving of our opulence and waste. People whose books declare their allegiance to Christ reveal, by their televised salesmanship, the true identity of their God. Evangelical Christianity’s many converts and sudden success may disguise a virulent and unsuspected idolatry.

It would be simple to fight this homegrown religion if we could figure out whom to blame. But we can’t. Each person is partly responsible. One makes a product, or part of one. Another transports it. Another advertises it. Another sells it. Another buys it. All of those “anothers” are ourselves. As we see the devastation this religion is working upon our lives, America tries to find scapegoats. But we are reluctant to blame the system itself. So we blame the Arab oil barons, Ronald Reagan, or American companies growing rich from scarcity. We turn with relief to a real enemy -- Iranians holding Americans hostage or the government in Poland, for example. Political aspirants blame present political leaders for unemployment, inflation, social breakdown. None of them sees that the whole lifestyle of consumerism is that of diseased religion. It is no wonder Americans complain that the political parties give us no real choices in office-seekers. For all worship the beast, some more fervently than others. Dorothy L. Sayers, who saw this time coming, probably placed the blame where it really belongs: we are to blame, she wrote, because we have succumbed to the deadly sins of avarice, greed, the desire for many things.

Even our course of action is unclear. Like the early Christians who had no way of removing themselves from the Roman Empire, we have no way of removing ourselves from the system. As Rome, “the beast,” protected its citizens from barbarity and total social collapse, so our system feeds, clothes and houses us. Were it to be destroyed overnight, who would provide the minimal necessities for life in a society far removed from the soil or the sea, where basic human needs are met? Helpless to grow our own food -- mechanization has destroyed the family farm, and we live mostly uprooted in cities and suburbs we are dependent upon the religion that threatens our faith. In this respect we are again like the early Christians. Rome threatened to destroy the faith; Christian books were seized and destroyed and Christian leaders put to death; still, all Christians were at the same time Romans. So it is with us.

What we can do, of course, is refuse to worship the beast. We can live in this world but “seek another city.” We can turn off the bread-and-circuses of television. We can make ecologically wise decisions -- to insulate our homes, drive less, return to the Christian simplicity of our forebears. We can share our appliances and develop community approaches to social problems. In doing these things, however, we shall be prone to the legalism that always haunts movements away from idolatry and false worship. We must avoid regarding our neighbor as unchristian because he or she has a large auto, or keeps the air-conditioning going, or travels to Florida each winter -- or whatever concession we have determined not to make. We shall be tempted to find that gnat in our brother’s or sister’s eye while ignoring the log in our own.

Finally, we can hope. It must have looked to the early Christians as if the death of Rome would be the death of civilization. It turned out not to be so. It looks to us as if the death of our false religion of production/consumption will be the end of global life as we know it. That need not be so either. Rome remained intact in its religious harlotry for about 200 years. We and our children can wait that long, if we know what we are doing.

We are deceived if we place our trust in the current enthusiasm for human rights. Serious commitment to human rights will always be a minority obsession. Government policy may at times implement that commitment but cannot sustain it. After Vietnam and Watergate, many Americans are understandably euphoric about the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights. The advancement of human rights and what President Carter has termed the "new "agenda for democracy" (Paris, January 4, 1978) appear to offer a moral rationale for the exercise of American power that has been sorely lacking in recent years.

In the 1930s the Italian writer Carlo Levi noted that in many poor peasant homes a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt was hung alongside that of the pope. "Why FDR?" Levi asked a woman in one of the poorest sections of southern Italy. "Because," she answered, simply, "he’s on our side." Today in numerous villages, prisons and torture chambers around the world victims of oppression give voice to the hope that the president and people of the United States are once again on their side. It would be churlish of us not to celebrate this turn of events, but it would be foolish to trust it. The warning of the psalmist applies: "Put not your trust in princes. . .When his breath departs he returns to his earth on that very day his plans perish" (Ps. 146:3-4) when his breath departs, or his priorities are changed, or his mandate is withdrawn.

Grasping the Horror

Such skepticism has less to do with the personality of Jimmy Carter than with the vagaries of political power. Skepticism is not cynicism. Cynicism corrodes our commitment; skepticism compels us to seek a more sure foundation for a commitment that can survive the eclipse of political fashions. When political styles, slogans and sentiments give way to their successors -- as they certainly will -- the cause of human rights must be sustained.

We are deceived if we think that the passion for human rights is the inevitable wave of the future or that it will be carried by the spirit of the times. The Zeitgeist of our century is more accurately seen as one of horror and barbarity. Hitler, Stalin, Amin and the butchers of Cambodia leave no room for sentimentality or optimism. The only devotion to human rights that can be trusted is a long-distance devotion that has pondered the bloody face of our age. Like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it has cried, "The horror! The horror!" The human rights cause is a hope posited against that horror. Only those who have grasped the horror can help more firmly to ground the hope.

In addressing the question of what we mean by human rights -- and why -- I am less concerned with cataloguing than with conceptualizing. It is important to list those rights that must be protected; it is more important to understand the moral foundations of rights as such. If the "what" of human rights is to be grounded in American public policy, the "why" must be grounded in the religious beliefs of the American people. If the minority obsession for human rights is to enjoy sustained popular support, it must speak the moral language of the American people. For the great majority of Americans, moral discourse -- beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil -- is shaped and carried by the biblical tradition. That tradition is premised upon the understanding that we live in a "fallen" creation that is far from the best of all possible worlds.

A Transcendent Promise

In this understanding, human rights are not founded upon a myth about a "natural state of innocence." Nor are they achieved through the evolution or revolutions of an "inevitable historical process." Nor are they exhaustively defined in positive law. Nor are they limited by the actual behavior of societies. Far from being "natural," respect for human rights represents human victory over the apparent laws of nature.

In the biblical view, one is surprised not by the violation of human persons but, by the habits and institutions that secure a measure of decency. As to history, small comfort can be elicited from withered theories about inevitable progress or from revolutionary promises of brave new worlds. As to positive law, it is a weak but necessary need. Law and social conduct may reflect but do not establish or limit understanding of human rights. That understanding is grounded in a transcendent promise to which all laws and all societies are accountable, whether they know it or not.

That promise has not yet been consummated in history. Believing Christians and Jews still await the Messianic age. Therefore, unlike others, we know that our commitment to human rights does not depend on the consistency with which that commitment can be implemented. We have no illusions that governmental policy can ever perfectly embody any ideal or moral imperative. If a good policy, such as the advancement of human rights, is inconsistently applied or even betrayed, that fact does not make the policy less good. It does say something about the limitations of government short of the Messianic age, and it may say something about the moral default of those in power.

The rightness of a policy is not established by its observance. Against positivists of all stripes, we must insist that practice and law do not establish duty. Duty is prior to law and practice and is, at best, recognized by them. In a society where everyone lied, and there was no law against lying, it would still be wrong to lie. In a world where most regimes torture their subjects and do so under the guise of law, it is still wrong to torture. Our commitment to human rights, if it is to be sustained, must depend not on practice, law, or the passing policies of governments (though we must be earnestly concerned about all of these), but rather on a promise that bestows dignity upon every person and demands of every person a respect -- no, a reverence -- for the dignity of all others. This demanding promise is the "why" of our concern for human rights.

Rights and Needs

Today there is heated debate about the what and why of human rights. Those who think that human rights is a "motherhood issue" around which all rational people can unite have not given the question much thought. What I have said about the "why" of human rights is disputed in many quarters. But even if we could agree on the "why," it comes up against the hard wall of the "‘what." How do we define rights? And which rights have priority? There are civil and political rights; there are economic, social and cultural rights. Are all rights of a piece? Is it possible to establish a hierarchy of rights? And who is to decide which rights are most important to whom? Maybe we should ask the people most immediately involved. But how can we ask or how can they say, unless there is freedom of information and expression? Who shall speak for whom? And is it possible that, if rights are universal, some people might not know which rights are most important?

As though all this were not complicated enough, it is argued that rights are really equivalent to needs -- and needs are infinitely expandable. For example, it is argued that there is a need for an adequate diet; therefore, everyone has a right to an adequate diet. Others have argued the need for, and therefore the right to, a psychologically secure childhood. Others contend that equality is both a need and a right.

One suspects that those who advocate a long and infinitely expandable list of "rights" are in fact the enemies of any serious consideration of human rights. As with almost any purpose, the intent can be stretched to absurdity and made complex to the point of paralysis. We should not be deceived or intimidated by those who would fix our attention on the inscrutable and impossible so as to distract our energies from the obvious and imperative.

A Short List

It is not always true that less is more. In some areas of life, more is more. But the axiom does apply to the advancement of human rights. Long lists of human rights, while they may sometimes be well intended, only obfuscate the question and distract us from the work at hand. We should rather cultivate a bias toward the short and specific. Nor should we be dismayed that such a "short list" is predominantly negative -- specifying things that should not be done. Those who have seen the horror know that the positive struggle for human rights will, for the foreseeable future, have more than enough to do in resisting unqualified evil. Prescinding from the conventional debate over the relative importance of civil and political rights on the one hand, and economic and social rights on the other, we ought to be able to agree on those elementary rights that have priority over any political or economic program, regardless of that program’s ideological label.

Others may phrase it differently, but such a short list is suggested by Cyrus Vance’s April 1977 speech in Athens, Georgia: "First, there is the right to be free from governmental violation of the integrity of the person. Such violations include torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; and arbitrary arrest or imprisonment. And they include denial of fair public trial, and invasion of the home." These rights regarding "the integrity of the person" are universal, and the violation of them is always an evil to be protested. It is to be feared that those who disagree with that proposition do not really care about human rights at all. To be sure, in sincere love for humanity they may care about advancing a program that they believe will enhance the economic and social well-being of people. But they do not care about human rights that are prior to and superior to any program of putative social improvement.

Today most regimes in the world systematically violate these elementary rights. They do so in the name of maintaining national security, defending Christian civilization, advancing the revolution of the proletariat. Our kind of world makes necessary the most robust skepticism toward all ideological labels. Whether a repressive regime describes itself as socialist or capitalist, as revolutionary or traditional, the salient characteristics are the same. People are not allowed to leave the country. The secret police are not restrained by law, and there is no appeal from police power. Persons are not permitted to protest government actions, and there is no provision for popular participation in the transfer of governmental power.

Today we witness police states and military dictatorships that justify their actions by appealing to the necessities of "socialist revolution," "national security," or both. The ideological labels are subterfuges designed to deceive the unwary. We have been warned about "the principalities and powers" of the present time. Those who know the tendency of power to corrupt people, and of people to corrupt power, will not be taken in. The salient characteristic of all these regimes, whether they call themselves leftist or rightist, is that they recognize no transcendent point of reference to which they are accountable and by which they are restrained. More specifically, they refuse to acknowledge the transcendent value embodied in every person.

A word must nonetheless be said about the old debate that posits political and civil rights against economic and social rights. First, there is little or no evidence that regimes that have denied civil and political rights have done a better job of advancing economic and social rights, or that there is a causal connection between the denial of one and the advancement of the other. The fact is that Mussolini did not, in any economically significant sense, "make the trains run on time." To the contrary, there is considerable evidence, also in the Third World, that countries more respectful of civil and political rights have done a better job economically and socially.

Second, those who give economic rights priority over other rights tend to forget that every repressive regime in the world, whether "left" as’ "right," shares their viewpoint. That is, one could hardly find a regime that does not justify its repressive actions on the basis of advancing social and economic rights. Brazil no less than Cuba, South Korea no less than Mozambique, claims to be pursuing programs of economic and social betterment. Whether the rhetoric is "building the revolution" or "creating an economic miracle," the reality is the violation of personal, civil and political rights in the name of a worthy social purpose.

To put the matter as sharply as possible: if one excuses torture in Brazil while condemning it in Cuba, one does not really care about human rights. Likewise, if one is silent about political prisoners in Vietnam while protesting such prisoners in South Korea, one does not really care about human rights. In saying that such a person does not really care about human rights, I do not mean that he or she is necessarily hypocritical or insincere. Such individuals may be deeply sincere, but it is not about human rights that they are sincere. They are sincere about favoring one form of political and social organization over another, and for the sake of advancing their favored program they are prepared to see human rights sacrificed, or at least severely compromised.

Food and the Free Press

I have argued that all who care about human rights should be able to agree on a short list of prior and superior rights regarding the integrity of the person. In determining the "core rights" that constitute the heart of our human rights agenda, it is important to consider the way we use language. We variously speak of a right as something to be "respected," or to be "met," or to be "fulfilled." In our ordinary use of language, needs are to be met and desires are to be fulfilled. Rights, properly speaking, have, as it were, an ontological status, and their existence is simply to be respected. Only with great care should we call needs and desires "rights." Yet at times we may do just that. For example, the Bread for the World organization successfully lobbied Congress to adopt a bill declaring the "right to food." That is, in view of the fact that it is possible for everyone on earth to have at least a subsistence diet, everyone therefore has a right to have this elementary need met. I suspect that most of us would agree on including a subsistence diet on our short list of human rights.

But would we agree on putting freedom of expression there? It is commonly dismissed as an esoteric and elitist concern. After all, it is said, a free press is not a high priority for a hungry person. Many people profess to be concerned about the right to a subsistence diet. They are prepared to go along with a regime that promises to deliver that, even if it denies free access to and dissemination of information. I would suggest that such people not really concerned even about the right to a subsistence diet. If we are concerned about whether people have enough to eat, we want to know whether they have enough to eat. And the simple fact is that there is no way of knowing unless information is freely available, disseminated and subject to critical examination.

To say that one is concerned about the right to food but not about the right to know is self-deception sentimentality. The right to know -- to seek, question and share information -- may be called a "supporting" or "facilitating" right. But far from being an elitist preoccupation, it is an essential component of genuine concern for such elementary rights as the right to food or the right not to be tortured.

Nations Under Judgment

To be sure, there are people who say they care but do not need to know. That is because they trust the information issuing from the regime of their choice. They believe what they are told by the military junta about economic progress in Argentina or, alternatively, what they are told by the party leadership in Peking about conditions in China. One cannot put it too baldly: such people have, for whatever reasons, made a faith commitment that excludes them from the community of reasonable discourse about human rights. Or, in theological terms, they have, in submitting their reason and conscience to an earthly power, committed the sin of idolatry. In any case, while they may . care about many things, they do not care about human rights.

Every regime claims to advance the well-being of its people, and almost every regime claims to represent the will of its people. Yet the fact remains that every form of government means the rule of some people over the lives of other people. We remember the old question, "What is the difference between capitalism and socialism?" -- to which the answer is, "Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, while, socialism is precisely the opposite." We must resist the claim of any government that it represents some mystical "general will of the people," thus relegating its opponents to the categories of subversive, subhuman or counterrevolutionary. In the age of electronic torture, computers and sophisticated behavioral controls, the Leviathan of the modern state, here and elsewhere, must be resisted.

The resources for such resistance and restraint are essentially religious in nature. That is, only by positing a point of transcendent accountability can the appetite of Leviathan be checked. To say that ours is a nation "under God" is to say that it is a nation under judgment. And so it is with all nations and all governments, whether they acknowledge the reality or not.

The churches must develop a theology and a piety that undergird our commitment to human rights with a transcendent understanding of the dignity of the person. In building long-distance devotion to human rights we need not and should not draw primarily on the secular Enlightenment of the 18th century, which has so often been hostile to the biblical tradition. We are indebted to the Enlightenment for many things, but our charter for human rights is in the prophet’s insight that each person, including the weak and oppressed, is the subject of infinite worth and divine love. Our manifesto for the dignity of the individual is contained in the parables of the one lost coin and the one lost sheep. Our belief in human solidarity is articulated in the words of Matthew 25: "Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me." It is not mere poetry but a most solemn truth-claim of the biblical tradition that "no man is an island." It was not the secular Enlightenment but the Cromwellian revolution of a century earlier that gave birth to the democratic ideal that government is accountable to the Holy Spirit in each person. There it was that Thomas Rainborowe declared, "The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as doth the greatest he."

The poorest he and the poorest she in the whole world have lives to live as do the richest he and the richest she. That is a standard by which we can measure the horror of what is, and define the hope for what might be. That is the belief by which we can sustain a long-distance devotion that will outlast the political fashions of this moment. That is the rule by which we will be judged. That is the what, and that is the why, of human rights.

Archives: Articles

Let’s Liberate the Sunday School

Holy Fire in Jerusalem

Notes on Sacred Space

America’s Other Religion

The Summons to a New Era in World Mission

Bringing the Seminary to the Church

Combating Racism: Touch and Tell

Is There a Right to Peace?

Pannenberg Jousts with the World Council of Churches