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Protestant Liberalism Reaffirmed

Something is missing in contemporary theology. Religious journals devote special issues to asking "Whatever Happened to Theology?" and symposia like the Hartford gathering try to assess the problem and prescribe the cure. Indeed, since the early 1960s theologians have lost both their confidence and their sense of direction. They have capitulated to the demands of the secular world, with its implicit assumption that what is relevant is more important than what is true and in the nature of things. Changing one’s mind theologically has become as commonplace as changing horses politically. Martin E. Marty, writing in Context, is quite right in complaining that "the secular theologians of the sixties . . . now chide the rest of us for not being transcendent enough in the seventies."

I do not propose to diagnose the situation and to offer a remedy. However, I am bold enough to suggest that the Protestant liberal tradition has a message that needs to be reaffirmed today. To be sure, this tradition has many faces; yet its essential features can be discerned through the study of such giants of liberalism as Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, Walter Rauschenbusch and Harry Emerson Fosdick. These thinkers, although differing from one another in important aspects, present a united front in the general themes of their religious thinking. Protestant liberals have been caricatured in recent years; I think it important that their cause be given a fair hearing.

The Authority of Experience

What are the motifs of liberal Protestantism? Perhaps the most important one is the priority of firsthand personal experience as the authority for one’s religious beliefs. All doctrines must be extracted from "the inward experience of Christian people," wrote Friedrich Schleiermacher, 19th century progenitor of 20th century Protestant liberalism. To be sure, this view of inward experience or feeling was more narrow and specific than one that today’s liberals would espouse. Experience includes one’s total life: past and present, personal and social, aesthetic and scientific, mystical and moral.

The Bible is an important part of Christian experience since it testifies to the heritage of the community of faith. But the Bible is not the exclusive authority, nor are all of its parts of the same worth (see "Brother, Are You Saved? or How to Handle the Religious Census Taker," by Troy Organ, The Christian Century, October 5, 1975). One should evaluate the Bible as one would evaluate any other book, using historical and documentary criticism. Parts of it are of no value whatsoever; who besides me has ever preached from the book of Obadiah?

Reason is humanity’s attempt to make sense of its manifold experiences. It is the human endeavor to apply the tests of coherence and comprehensiveness in drawing conclusions about the veracity of certain phenomena -- that, for example, axheads do not float on water and the sun does not stand still, that conceptions are not immaculate, that corpses do not rise from graves. Reason applied to religion renders it less a matter of faith and more a matter of fact. It makes intelligent communication possible. It is not infallible and does not pretend to be. Nor is it cold, literal and impersonal, as its critics often claim. Reason is the continuing adventure of the life of the mind, trying to make us more certain rather than less that what we believe is indeed true. It tests all claims to truth, seeking the hypothesis with the fewest loopholes, that which is the most verifiable and which leads to the best consequences. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy and to give it public status and universal right of way to its deliverances, has been reason’s task" (William James).

The Continuum of Existence

Liberals also believe in the continuity of experience. Human existence is a continuum and all of life’s experiences relate to one another. What we learn in the physical sciences must somehow be interpreted along with what happens in our intense personal encounters. We cannot live in compartments; we must develop an overbelief that attempts to integrate the various dimensions of life harmoniously. One cannot arbitrarily accept any one religion, historical document or personal experience as the final authority without first relating it to the rest of life. For example, one cannot affirm dogmatically the historicity of the literal virgin birth of Jesus any more than one can proclaim the authenticity of the golden plates of Joseph Smith or assert the veracity of the mystical experience of St. Theresa.

Similarly for the Protestant liberal, there need be no conflict between science and religion. The scientist must understand the limitations of his or her tools and outlook, and the religionist likewise must welcome the latest insights from the sciences insofar as these contribute to the full meaning of human experience. Liberals never had serious difficulties with the hypothesis of evolution since their concern was not how God created but that God created. Liberals encourage an openness to truth from any source, a tolerance for a variety of viewpoints, and a humility that bases its claims on probabilities rather than certainties. This same attitude determines the liberal Protestant stand with respect to the relationship between Christianity and the other world religions.

Further, liberals believe that there is continuity between one’s own experiences and what one considers to be at the heart of reality. Most liberal Protestants have been in some sense theists, believing that moral life, consciousness, and awareness of purpose and destiny are clues to the nature of the greater Reality which created humanity. Fosdick declared:

If we are to have a profound religion, we may indeed throw away our old, childish, anthropomorphic ideas of God, but we may not throw away God and leave ourselves caught like rats in the trap of an aimless, meaningless, purposeless universe. These is nothing in that philosophy of life to help a man live from a profound depth of being. And while we may throw away our early, ignorant ideas of prayer, we may not throw away prayer, the flowing of internal fountains that keep their freshness when all the superficial cisterns peter out [The Power to See It Through (Harper & Brothers, 1935), p.133].

Even William James, not known for his metaphysical testimony, still affirmed that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves [The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902 (Modern Library), p. 515].

Thus, the God of the Protestant liberal includes a personal depth and embraces both transcendent and immanent dimensions.

Christology and Theology

Protestant liberals find in Christ the highest revelation of God’s will. To be sure, this premise is a reflection of their historical background. Yet more crucial here is what the liberals discover in Christ: a confirmation of the theistic elements in their own experience, the qualities of meaning, hope and love. But liberals do not let their Christology get in the way of their theology. Christ is not the sole source of divine revelation. Christ differs from other persons and prophets in degree rather than in kind. Christ is greater than other persons primarily in terms of the potency of his God-consciousness (Schleiermacher). Liberals have been more interested in Christ’s way of loving and witnessing than in the doctrines concerning his nature and uniqueness. At any rate theology takes precedence over Christology in the same way that universality is a better guide than particularity.

Liberals have further maintained a firm confidence in human beings, in their reason and in their natural abilities. Athens has much to do with Jerusalem! We can through reason learn a great deal about ourselves and our world via analogia entis. We can do much to change our world for the better. Responsible change requires positive action; those who would effect change cannot succumb to impotence or arrogance. Liberals have sought to apply the teachings of Jesus to the social and political arena, insisting that a righteous God demands a righteous society. The "social gospel" of Walter Rauschenbusch was never a naïve and rosy confidence in the ability of humankind to rid the world of all wrongs. "A serious and humble sense of sinfulness," declared Rauschenbusch, "is part of a religious view of life. Our consciousness of sin deepens as our moral insight matures and becomes religious" (A Theology for the Social Gospel [Abingdon, 1917] p. 31). Humanity is not all good, but neither is it all bad.

On the basis of these premises -- experience as the highest authority, the importance of reason, the continuity of all of life’s experiences, God as personal and immanent-transcendent, Christ as the incarnation of God’s love, and confidence in humanity -- I believe that Protestant liberalism can offer an important critique of the dominant theological movements of the past 30 years. Lack of space prohibits the treatment here of such theologians as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose creative and monumental contributions have had great influence on all recent Protestant theology.

The Dualism of Neo-Orthodoxy

From the late 1930s through the 1950s the major Protestant theological influence was neo-orthodoxy. This school of thought protested against what it regarded as liberalism’s overconfidence in humanity and its scientific ways of thinking, and the subsequent loss of the distinctiveness of the Christian faith. Fosdick sensed this weakness in liberalism when he declared in the 1930s: "What Christ does to modern culture is to challenge it." But his protest came too late to still the rising chorus of voices insisting that something was radically different between the claims of Christ and the assumptions of the modern era.

Neo-orthodoxy’s basic affirmation was the need to return to a new kind of orthodoxy, one that would, recognize the importance of historical research while professing a distinctive and particular Christian proclamation: The Bible is the final and unique authority for Christian faith. It is the manifestation of God’s mighty acts in Judeo-Christian history which culminated in the once-for-all revelation of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Human sinfulness prevents persons from acknowledging the lordship of Christ and the transcendence of God. Reason is corrupt and incapable of coming to terms with this revelation; it is a matter of faith in God’s grace. Thus neo-orthodoxy set up a dualism between faith and reason, the supernatural and the natural, Christianity and other religions, God and humanity.

Liberalism’s response to neo-orthodoxy was unequivocal. The Bible is a norm but not the only or final locus of authority, nor even necessarily the primary one. Further, to affirm the utter finality of the revelation of Christ is to deny dogmatically the truth claims of other religions and to put the exclusive Christian revelation in the same category as Baha Ullah and Joseph Smith. Why accept the one uncritically and not the others? Particular historical revelations cannot be the final arbiter, because who then will decide among the conflicting claims? Universality of religious experience, liberals claim, is a better guide than historical particularity. And to overstress the sinfulness of humanity and the need to depend on God’s grace is to open the door to all kinds of nonrational prejudices and to destroy any hope of one’s making sense out of genuine varieties of religious experience. Somehow the affirmations of religion must be consistent with reason and experience, else they will never stand the stress and strain of continued inquiry. Fosdick declared:

As I recall the critical days when my own mind walked the thin edge between new theology and no theology . . . . I desperately needed someone who would talk to me reasonably about religion. Men who would only pound the table, announce God’s revelation as they understood it, and demand that by faith I accept it with a decisive act of will, would have made Christianity impossible for me. Faith does not take reason by the throat and strangle the beast! Faith and reason are not antithetical opposites. They need each other. All the tragic superstitions which have cursed religion throughout its history have been due to faith divorced from reason [The Living of These Days (Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 258].

By the early 1960s the particularistic assumptions and dualistic affirmations of neo-orthodoxy no longer seemed viable in the modern scientific culture. The authority of the church in the secular milieu had greatly diminished, and with it went its unique defense of special revelation. These assertions no longer made sense in a postsupernatural age. They served to shield the faith from the questions and answers posed by the modern world. For better or for worse, people now had less faith in the eternal and permanent, and more confidence in the temporal and transient.

Theologies of the ‘60s and ‘70s

The emerging theology of the 1960s was really a nontheology, a surrender to the secular way of looking at things so pervasive that it eliminated God and all things beyond the here-and-now. Perhaps it was inevitable that the first major departure from neo-orthodoxy was a drastic swing in the opposite direction, an acquiescence to contemporary modes of thought and a denial of transcendence and revelation. Yet curiously the "death of God" non-theology held on to Jesus as though allegiance to him were a sufficient and necessary response to the secular world. But more about that later.

The reaction of Protestant liberalism to this non-theology of the 1960s differed significantly from its reaction to neo-orthodoxy. Confronting neo-orthodoxy, liberals reaffirmed the role of reason, the authority of universal human experience, and the insights of contemporary modes of thinking. In the case of the more recent nontheology, liberalism stressed the "more" quality (James) of human experience and the importance of developing an overview of life that gives reason and experience their due, allowing for a cosmology wider than humanity itself. God is still a reality, along with prayer and worship. There is a God, both personal and transcendent, and it remains our destiny to seek and to respond to God. To quote Fosdick:

Personality, the most valuable thing in the universe, revealing the real nature of the Creative Power and the ultimate meaning of creation, the only eternal element in a world of change, the one thing worth investing in, and in terms of service to which all else must be judged -- that is the essential Christian creed [As I See Religion (Harper & Brothers, 1932), P.44].

The nontheology of the ‘60s threw the baby out with the bath, and that is probably why it remained a major influence for such a short time. "If God is not personal," wrote Fosdick, "he can feel no concern for human life and a God of no concern is of no consequence" (The Meaning of Faith [Association, 1918], p. 64). Hence the "death of God" theology was of no consequence.

Theology in the ‘70s is so faddish that it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest and figure out what is being said and why. Two major innovations are liberation theology and telling-one’s-own-story. Liberation theology comes in various stripes (political, black, feminist, etc.), but its major thrust seems to be that to be saved is to be liberated -- i.e., liberated from all forms of human injustice: economic, social, racial, sexual and so on. And liberation involves not mere personal repentance but, far more important, social revolution, freeing the downtrodden from the oppressive structures of society. True liberation involves a full commitment to Jesus as the True Liberator.

Narrow Perspectives on Liberation

Protestant liberalism has two main comments to make with respect to liberation theology. First, shouldn’t theology by implication be liberating in all dimensions of life? That is, if one believes in a God of justice and love and righteousness, is not-this the very reason why salvation means liberation? The all-encompassing demands of the Christian gospel include the absolute need to free the oppressed and to revolutionize the structures of society that prevent human liberation. Genuine theology does take account of the socioeconomic, racial and sexual dimensions, to name but a few. It cannot function apart from society. Read Rauschenbusch again:

Theology has not given adequate attention to the social idealizations of evil . . . The new thing in the social gospel is the clearness and insistence with which it sets forth the necessity and the possibility of redeeming the historical life of humanity from the social wrongs which now pervade it . . . The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations [op. cit., pp. 78, 95,5-6].

The basic weakness in all forms of so-called liberation theology is their overstress on one aspect of the struggle for justice. Latin Americans seek liberation from the oppression of economic exploitation, blacks from racism, feminists from sexism. One could and indeed should make the same plea for liberation for American Indians, Chicanos, the elderly, the blind, homosexuals, etc. Each group (and why not, to be consistent, each individual?) tends to view the problem of liberation from its own narrow perspective in its own historical struggle.

Protestant liberalism reaffirms the overarching holistic sense of the theological task, that the God of justice and love is present in all dimensions of history and life. It affirms the conviction that there is a universal dimension to humanity that unites us as children of God regardless of our race or sex or economic condition. We are first children of God -- created in God’s image -- and second Jew or Christian, black or red or white, male or female, and so on. Liberalism further points to the need for reason to criticize and clarify the problems and alternative solutions in the various historical particularities of human oppression. Marxism needs to be evaluated for its strengths and weaknesses as does capitalism or any other economic system. And racism of any color is an evil. Furthermore, angry rhetoric -- especially directed these days against human beings who by the accidents of birth happen to be Americans, white and male -- never solves any of the problems. Come, let us reason together!

Jesus Without God

The second critique of liberalism against recent theology: Why this exclusive allegiance to Jesus? Why hold on to Jesus as the True Liberator? Curiously, the uniqueness of Jesus has been maintained ever since neo-orthodoxy. Note the uncritical acceptance of Jesus that continued in the nontheology of the ‘60s. For example, William Hamilton declared that it was no longer possible to believe in God, yet he still accepted Jesus. Why?

Jesus is the one to whom I repair, the one before whom I stand, the one whose way with others is also to be my way because there is something there, in his words, his life, his way with others, his death, that I do not find elsewhere. I am drawn, and I have given my allegiance [The Death of God Controversy, by Thomas Ogletree (Abingdon, 1966), p. 43].

But still, why Jesus? Is this not an arbitrary choice? Hamilton replies:

I think I accept "arbitrary" as an adequate, if partial, description, of the choice. It is arbitrary in that there are no inherent grounds in the object of that choice that compel my response . . . Jesus is in the world in such a way that he readies me for whatever beliefs and actions and forms of self-discipline I may be obliged to take on. Not the "only," not the "best," but the one, nonetheless [On Taking God Out of the Dictionary (McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 18-19].

For the early Paul van Buren there is no place for God, yet he held on to the uniqueness of Jesus, believing that Jesus’ particularity centers

in the fact that Jesus is a free man who set other men free . . . [Christian faith] is a perspective on man, a certain way of viewing the human situation deriving from the "contagious freedom" of Jesus [Ogletree, op. cit., p. 66].

Thomas Altizer puts a different slant on his nontheology, claiming that the death of God occurred in Christ, a kind of mystical orgasm in which transcendence empties into immanence:

The incarnation is only truly and actually real if it effects the death of the original sacred, the death of God himself. . . What is new in the Christian name of Jesus is the epiphany of the totality of the sacred in the contingency of a particular moment of time: in this name the sacred appears and is real only to the extent that it becomes actual and realized in history [The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Westminster, 1966), pp. 54, 57].

In other words, all three of these leading "death of God" thinkers could declare that there is no God and Jesus is his chief prophet. Liberals maintain that belief in Jesus should at the very least include an acceptance of Jesus’ basic affirmations about God. Jesus without God is no Jesus at all!

The Radical Jesus

Recent theologies of liberation have maintained the same kind of exclusiveness with respect to the person of Jesus, and perhaps this is why theology without Christ is of little concern to them. Jesus now becomes the Great Liberator, a revolutionary who fights on the side of the oppressed. Theology becomes a reflection on Christian praxis (a favorite "in" word) in the light of Scripture. Liberation becomes the central perspective, a hermeneutical principle drawn from biblical sources and centering on the radical Jesus. Take, for example, James Cone and his advocacy of black theology and black power. What thinks he of Christ?

Christ is black, baby, with all of the features which are so detestable to white society . . . the black revolution is the work of Christ [Black Theology and Black Power (Seabury, 1969), pp. 68-69].

In a later book in which he espouses A Black Theology of Liberation Cone writes:

In a society where men are oppressed because they are black, Christian theology must become Black Theology. . . . The norm of Black Theology must take seriously two realities, actually two aspects of a single reality: the liberation of black people and the revelation of Jesus Christ. . . . The norm of all God-talk which seeks to be black-talk is the manifestation of Jesus as the Black Christ who provides the necessary soul for black liberation. . . . If Christ is white and not black, he is an oppressor, and we must kill him [Lippincott, 1970, pp. 11, 79-80, 199].

And how does Jesus fit into this situation?

The finality of Jesus lies in the totality of his existence in complete freedom as the "Oppressed One, who reveals through his death and resurrection that God himself is present in all dimensions of human liberation. . . . He is the Liberator par excellence whose very presence makes persons sell all that they have and follow him [ibid., pp. 210, 213].

Granted that Cone is quite loose in his rhetoric, the fact remains that Jesus is still Number One and that he and no one else is the answer to black liberation.

Protestant liberals believe that this is an uncritical and exclusive misuse of Jesus. What about Jews, Muslims and Buddhists: must Jesus also be their True Liberator? In this emerging world community our challenge today is to look around at the other religions of the world and their prophets and to see what insights we can glean from them in the struggle for justice and freedom. After all, Martin Luther King used to say that his faith in nonviolence was deepened through his empathy with Mahatma Gandhi. We de-emphasize the differences between Catholics and Protestants these days because we have so much in common. Should we not do the same with the religions of the world and save Jesus from becoming a stumbling block to non-Christians? Declared Fosdick:

Divinity is love. Here and now it shines through the highest spiritual experiences we know. Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love are -- there is the Divine. And the divinity of Jesus is the divinity of his spiritual life [The Hope of the World (Harper & Brothers, 1933), p. 103].

Once again theology should take precedence over Christology and universality over particularity. When, for example, Cone insists that the norm of God-talk is the manifestation of Jesus as the Black Christ, he blatantly misappropriates Jesus for his own racial purposes.

Reason and Autobiography

Finally, a word needs to be said concerning religion as storytelling. Narrative is an important dimension of religion -- especially within the Judeo-Christian tradition. No one denies that. And one can learn something from telling one’s story to oneself and to certain other people. I always enjoyed my Uncle Carl’s stories. But to equate storytelling with theology and thereby to justify regurgitating one’s own autobiography for public consumption is more often than not an ego trip. Stories can be full of inanities and lies. Protestant liberals insist upon the tools of critical analysis, maintaining that reflection on life’s experiences is not a debilitating venture but a necessary task. Narratives are filled with a variety of experiences that need to be interpreted; this is true of Bible stories as well as personal testimonies.

The role of reason is to attempt to make sense out of autobiographical nonsense, to try to keep us honest. What William James said of feeling can also be said of story: "It is private and dumb, and unable to give us an account of itself." Stories need to be critically analyzed. Which accounts are acceptable? Which should be rejected? Which should be reinterpreted? What about their historicity and truth value? Reason is crucial in trying to sort out fact from fancy and reality from baloney. And stories become theological only when they are concerned with God, not with the human narrator.

Protestantism liberalism, I repeat, is not infallible. It has its weaknesses because human beings are weak. Sometimes it may overstress the potential of persons and their ability to learn about themselves and the world and to rid this world of its wrongs. But what are the main alternatives? They are in recent times to retreat behind a revelation claim (neo-orthodoxy), to deny the reality of God (death of God), to dwell on one important yet narrow aspect of the struggle for justice (liberation), or to recite stories. Protestant liberalism opposes these alternatives. It continues to honor the diverse experiences of persons, using their minds to the fullest, seeking always to learn and to respond to the totality of life’s experiences, including above all the reality, of God. This remains the liberal Protestant spirit and purpose.

Outlining Rice-Roots Theology

Third world liberation theology has grown rapidly in the past decade – a phenomenon which most of us associate with Latin America and the prominent names of Gutiérrez, Segundo, Boff, Miguez Bonino, Miranda and others. We often overlook the fact that Africa and Asia are producing an impressive cadre of liberation theologians who deserve an equally wide hearing as they reflect their own indigenous situation.

I find Asian liberation theology especially provocative, but the least known to Western readers. To be sure, the three continents of South America, Africa and Asia share liberation theology’s public enemy number one: the appalling political, social and economic oppression which has led to extreme human degradation. In the underdeveloped areas of Asia more than 85 per cent of the population lives in abject poverty. While the peoples of all three continents have endured bitter confrontations with European and North American colonialism and are still suffering from the consequences, the religious situation in Asia is unique, with several major living religions augmenting the differences among the indigenous peoples.

Latin America does have native religions that predate Christianity -- a fact which its liberation theologians have yet to take seriously -- but Roman Catholicism is clearly the dominant faith. To their credit, African liberation theologians have been far more aware of the strong native religious roots competing with Islam and Christianity. But in Asia we find Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam and other faiths in their almost infinite diversity. For the most part Christianity is a small minority faith (the Philippines is an important exception); less than 3 per cent of the Asian population is considered Christian.

It is ironic that Christianity, with its roots in the Middle East, has come to be considered by most contemporary Asians as a foreign religion, a product of Western colonial expansion (there are some important exceptions -- the Orthodox churches, for example). In recent decades the growth of anti-Western feeling throughout Asia has meant that Christianity has had to dispose of its Western baggage and leadership, and to develop forms more palatable to an Asian population. U Ba Hmyin of Burma set the future course clearly at the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi in 1961 when he said:

No theology will deserve to be called ecumenical in the coming days which ignores Asian structures. It may use the term “ecumenical,” but it will really be parochial and Western only.

As we list here several contemporary Asian theologians of liberation (there are many more) who are forging theologies unique to their own particular situation, we should remember -- as these individuals keep reminding us -- that Asia is a many-splendored continent and that, despite features common to all liberation theology, each country (and even some regions within a country) must have a theology built to its own cultural specifications.



Let us begin with Kosuke Koyama. Japanese by birth, Koyama has spent most of his ministerial and teaching career in Thailand and later in New Zealand. He has served as dean of the Southeast Asia Graduate School of Theology and at present is professor of ecumenics and world Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The book Waterbuffalo Theology (Orbis, 1974) is Koyama’s explication of theology for Thailand. Its title makes clear the author’s theme:

On my way to the country church, 1 never fail to see a herd of waterbuffaloes grazing in the muddy paddy fields... . It reminds me that the people to whom I am to bring the gospel of Christ spend most of their time with these waterbuffaloes in the rice field. The waterbuffaloes tell me that I must preach to these farmers in the simplest sentence-structure and thought-development. They remind me to discard all abstract ideas. and to use exclusively objects that are immediately tangible. “Sticky-rice,” “banana,” “pepper,” “dog,” cat,” ‘bicycle,” “rainy season” . . . these are meaningful words for them.

Koyama wants to articulate a “rice-roots” theology “from below,” one that comes out of the everyday experience of the farmers of northern Thailand. For these people the style and pace of life are radically different from those of most Westerners, a point which the author develops in Three Mile an Hour God (Orbis, 1980). He distinguishes between kitchen theology and living-room theology, the former an indigenous praxis-oriented way and the latter the typical missionary theoretical approach. For Thais theology takes place

while they squat on the dirt ground. and not while sipping tea with missionary friends in the teak-floored shiny living room. When I peep into the kitchen of their theology, the theological situation I see there is unique.

Koyama also sees a need for Christianity to strive for positive encounters with the other religions of Asia. In Three Mile an Hour God he notes how Christianity has for too long exhibited a “teacher complex,” adding that “one-way-traffic Christianity is an ugly monster.” Christians should learn from the Buddhist Bodhisattva symbolizing compassion and mercy, one who is willing to postpone personal salvation for the sake of others.

Another important Asian theologian is Choan-Seng Song. Educated in Taiwan, England and the United States, Song has served as principal and professor of systematic theology at the Taiwan Theological College and as an executive of the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission in Geneva. In his book Third-Eye Theology (Orbis, 1979) he focuses on the image of the third eye in the teaching of the Japanese Zen master Daisetz Suzuki, who suggests that the aim of Zen Buddhism is to open up a vision of life that is usually clouded by our ignorance, a vision that will enable us to see ourselves as we truly are. Song uses this Image as a way for Christians to see Christ through Asian eyes, a way more intuitive than conceptual, more from the heart than from rationality.

Song also speaks of a “theology of the womb,” a theology of liberation which affirms the new life struggling to be free:

As a mother commits herself totally to bringing into fruition the seed of life within her, so Christians must be committed to the emergence of a new world in which light prevails over darkness, love overcomes hate, and freedom vanquishes oppression.

This “theology of the womb” imagery is effectively portrayed by Marianne Katoppo of Indonesia in her book Compassionate and Free: An Asian Women’s Theology (Orbis, 1980).

In The Compassionate God (1982) Song develops what he calls Chuang-tzu theology. Here he contends that just as Chuang-tzu tried to perceive the nature of reality from the perspective of fish or butterfly, so, too, should Christians seek to transcend the boundaries of history, religion and culture to develop deeper contacts with the mysterious ways in which God operates. “Such a theology,” he writes, “calls for a sensitivity that can respond creatively to vibrations coming from the depth of the human spirit outside the familiar realm of everyday life.”

Another of Song’s hooks, The Tears of Lady Meng (1982), presents a parable for political theology. Lady Meng, in her agony and tears, redeems the brutal death of her husband by denouncing the wicked emperor and sacrificing her own life. Similarly, the Asian oppressed, who also weep, must find in their experience the power that will unite them in their struggle against injustice.



One of South Korea’s foremost liberation theologians is the poet Kim Chi-Ha. In and out of jail for the past decade, he strives to make the figure of Jesus real in a Korean setting. His story “The Gold-Crowned Jesus” portrays Christ as an inert figure of gold imprisoned in concrete by his political and religious oppressors. A leper, the advocate of the oppressed, tries to liberate Jesus by removing the gold crown from his head, and Jesus encourages the leper, pleading:

My power is not enough. People like you must help to liberate me. . . . Only those, though very poor and suffering like yourself . . . can give me life again. . . People like you will be my liberators.

But in the end the forces of oppression from both church and state restore the gold crown to Jesus’ head, making him once again their prisoner.

On a parallel course is the Indonesian theologian Albert Widjaja, lecturer in economics at the Institute Oikoumene, in that country. He makes an important distinction between “theological begging” and “beggarly theology.” The first phrase, typical of most previous Asian theology, suggests the practice of imitating and borrowing from established Western theologies, assuming that they are normative. The second phrase emulates the spirit of the beggar.

The true spirit of the beggar can be discovered when he encounters a garbage container: He faces the garbage with a sense of anticipation. He believes that something will come out as invaluable, even though the garbage as 8 whole is considered junk by the society [Living Theology in Asia. edited by John C. England (Orbis, 1981)1.

Beggarly theology identifies with society’s outcasts. It does not become subservient to established theologies, but seeks its own authenticity in the context of Asian oppression.

Like Widjaja, Jung Young Lee (born in North Korea and educated in the United States) provides an alternative approach to theology. In an article titled “The Yin-Yang Way of Thinking: A Possible Method for Ecumenical Theology,” Lee deplores the usual either/or perspective that is so much a part of Western categories of thought, one which sets up a discontinuity between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Instead, Lee argues, suppose that what is not true may be both true and false. Suppose that Christianity has both a negative and a positive impact on other religions (and also the reverse).

Echoing process theology, Lee asks us to dispense with absolutes altogether and admit the relativity of our judgments. In the I Ching is a cosmology that supports change and growth. The yin and the yang denote different categories of reality, each enriched by the other. It is not necessary to accept some of the ancient biases -- e.g.. yin equals female and passivity, yang equals male and activity -- in order to appreciate the both/and approach. which allows for diversity and richness of experience. In Lee’s words:

We need both the yin-yang and the either/or ways of thinking to carry out successfully the theological task. . . The effective method of theological thinking is possible when both yin-yang and either/or categories complement one another [What Asian Christians Me Thinking, edited by Douglas Elwood (New Day Publishers, 1976)].



In what can be only a brief sampling of Asian liberation theologians, I will mention a few more of the many others well worth reading. One is Tissa Balusuriya of the Centre for Society and Religion in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Author of The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Orbis, 1979), Balusuriya suggests the adoption of an action-oriented liturgy committed to revolutionary struggle -- a liturgy which unabashedly proclaims a dynamic relationship between the material and spiritual. Another is Samuel Rayan, dean and professor at the Vidyajoti Institute in Delhi, India, who stresses the need for a new theological language to give expression to the diverse experiences in the world’s religions -- a language that will evoke harmony in the human community.

A third is Bishop Francisco F. Claver of Bukidnon in the Philippines, whose book The Stones Will Cry Out (Orbis, 1978) consists of a series of poignant meditations addressed to the “Little People,” who must develop a strategy for action which he calls “the violence of the meek.” A fourth is Raymund Fung of Hong Kong, who reminds us in an article titled “Evangelism Today” (Living Theology in Asia) that we should singleout not so much the sinner but rather the one who is “sinned against,” the one who is exploited and oppressed. Compassion and liberation become possible only when we truly perceive the oppressed as the “sinned against.”

Finally, Stanley I. Samartha of India, who is director of the WCC’s program on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies, sums up the new attitude toward other religions by asserting:

There is no reason to claim that the religion developed in the desert around Mount Sinai is superior to the religion developed on the banks of the river Ganga [Christ’s Lordship and Religious Pluralism, edited by Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas Stransky (Orbis, 1981)].

We who live in the West should not, of course, adopt Asian theology wholesale; that would be the begging approach. The Asians’ imagery speaks to their situations; we couldn’t do much with waterbuffaloes and sticky-rice. But that does not mean that we have nothing to learn from them. Indeed, we should forswear forever the imperialistic “ugly monster” of the one-way teacher approach which has so deeply infected the Western attitude toward the Third World. We should formulate a “rice-roots” approach for the poverty and oppression within our own context (megatrend theology? computer theology? multinational theology?); we should develop our own Chuang-tzu sensitivity, our own concern for the “sinned against,” our own Bodhisattvas and Lady Mengs, our own yin-and-yang diversity, our own sensitivity to the mystery of the Other(s).

Perhaps in this way we can become full-fledged participants in an ongoing worldwide struggle for a full humanity -- an effort which will not only mean good news for the “underside of humanity” but will lead to our own liberation as well. And that, after all, is what Christianity is all about.

The Road Ahead in Theology — Revisited

In the early 1960s I published, my first three articles in The Christian Century, suggesting directions that Christianity should take if it were to function significantly in the future. “The Road Ahead in Religion” (May 25, 1960) proposed that Christianity de-emphasize its claims to uniqueness in favor of a vital universalism, advocating a Creative and positive relationship among the religions of the world. That article stimulated a deluge of protesting letters to the editor, and the Century saw fit to editorialize (“A Road with Pitfalls,” June 29, 1960), indicating that such an overwhelming negative response “would suggest a prevalent antipathy still to the sort of universalism championed by Hocking and Toynbee and now by Mr. Ferm,” and that the road ahead appears, “at least to many Century readers, rocky and snare-ridden.” “The Road Ahead for the Church” (November 29, 1961) offered the thesis that the churches should play down their historical creedal affirmations -- the Trinity, number of sacraments, apostolic succession, the deity of Christ and so on -- and work for the abolition of racism, a renewed dedication to human justice and freedom, and greater understanding among the peoples of the world. “The Road Ahead in Theology” (September 19, 1962) declared that theologians ought to become more sensitive to the proper use of religious language and that there is a demand for a natural theology that will eschew dogmatic revelation claims and seek a responsible and reasonable Christian faith able to win its way in the marketplace of ideas. Such a theology should be relational in character since “the priority of the relational” makes the ultimate test of faith one’s life and not one’s label.

Almost 20 years later these predictions which raised so much protest seem mild, and most of them have been realized. We have seen a burgeoning of interest in the religions of the East, and even Harvey Cox has belatedly moved in that direction (Turning East, 1977). To be sure, many of the current manifestations of this Eastern trend have been shallow and cultish, but they have had a powerful influence in calling into question the uniqueness of the Christian faith. Except for a phalanx of conservative rear-guard figures, I know of no mainstream theologians today, Catholic or Protestant, who are brazen advocates of the uniqueness and once-for-allness of the Christian revelation. How different is this situation from that of two decades ago when neo-orthodoxy in the persons of D. T. Niles, Edmund Soper, Hendrik Kraemer and Edmund Perry insisted that Christianity was, is and ever shall be “the one and only.”

As far as adherence to historical creedal affirmations is concerned, one only has to read pre-eminent theologian Hans Küng’s major tome (On Being a Christian, Doubleday, 1976) to realize that religious liberalism is alive and well . . . in Tübingen. He has demythologized every major Christian dogma in the repertoire of the Catholic Church (including papal infallibility and the resurrection), and he has performed this surgery thoroughly in 602 pages. He insists that current differences even between Catholics and Protestants “are not the traditional doctrinal differences”; they are “traditional basic attitudes, which have developed since the Reformation, but which today can be overcome in their one-sided-ness and integrated into true ecumenicity.” And “the priority of the relational” in theology has become so central that Richard Quebedeaux has credited it with having a major impact in loosening up evangelical theology, this trend being spearheaded by Keith Miller, Lloyd Ogilvie, Lyman Coleman and Bruce Larson (cf. The Worldly Evangelicals, Harper & Row, 1978).

Doing One’s Thing

Yet for the most part I am disappointed by the efforts of many theologians of the past 15 years who have seduced theology into well-meaning but largely self-serving purposes. The neo-orthodoxy of the 1940s and ‘50s was bad enough when it tried to hold on to a revealed kerygma that no longer made contact with an increasingly secular world, but at least those theologians took seriously the larger questions of ontology and epistemology and sought for some meaningful overview. This has not been the case with the hop-skip-and-jump fads of recent date.

Take a quick look. The “death of God” theologies so popular in the media of the middle ‘60s insisted on being Christian without God, which is akin to being an individual without being human. How can one even begin to take Jesus seriously without Jesus’ radical affirmation of God? It is no surprise, then, that “death of god” theology has completely expired and surely must bear some share of responsibility for the emergence in the 1970s of a shallow spirituality whose adherents yearn to fill the god-gap. Indeed the leading “death of God” theologians of the ‘60s are no longer taken seriously as theologians, some of them by their own choice. Paul van Buren seems primarily interested in the State of Israel, William Hamilton in Herman Melville and Thomas Altizer in obfuscation. Take a look at the latter’s latest book, The Self-Embodiment of God (1977). Here is a typical sentence: “Voice is the embodiment of a negation of a quiescent silence, and the hither side of that negation is a beginning, a beginning which is the end of innocence, the omnipresence of a plenum or an eternal now.” And Richard Rubenstein? He was not even mentioned in Eugene Borowitz’s recent survey of “Judaism in America Today” (The Christian Century, November 8, 1978).

Most theologies since the late 1960s have been built on variants of the liberation theme, each one doing its own thing for its own purposes. Black theology has made the oppression of black people its overall concern. James Cone claims that his book Black Theology and Black Power (1969) was the first book published on that subject. (What about Martin Luther King, Joseph Washington, Benjamin Maya?) In this book Cone declared that “Christ is black, baby,” that black power means “complete emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary.” Such strident rhetoric does little to win friends and influence people. Since then, black theology has matured considerably and James Cone has mellowed and enlarged his vision. In Atlanta in 1977 he declared:

I think the time has come for black theologians and church people to move beyond a mere reaction to white racism in America and begin to extend our vision of a new socially constructed humanity in the whole inhabited world . . . For humanity is whole, and cannot be isolated into racial and national groups.

Cone has learned that theology has universal implications, that “liberation knows no color bar.” At present the field is in a period of confusion and revaluation as indicated by Cecil Cone’s Identity Crisis in Black Theology (1975), Warner Traynham’s lectures on black theology (1977) and Peter Paris’s Black Leaders in Conflict (1978). Its earlier one-sided approach to theology, however well meaning, could only be divisive and counterproductive in the long run.

The same critique can be made of feminist theology. What began as an important effort to legitimize “women’s rights” in the field of religion has often degenerated into a one-sided, man-hating polemic. The worst perpetrator is, of course, Mary Daly, whose significant work in The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and the even more important Beyond God the Father (1973) has degenerated into her latest effort, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978); about “Spinning and Witches and Great Hags,” it is a book which makes one want either to laugh or cry. I am told that on occasions Daly won’t even take questions from men in the audience. How childish. What’s the point of substituting one half-baked ideology for another? To be sure, more astute feminist theologians, such as Letty Russell, Penelope Washbourn, Sheila Collins and Virginia Mollenkott, have made important strides in relating female concerns to religious claims, but making theology essentially a cause célèbre for women is to distort theology.

South American forms of liberation theology are vulnerable to the same charge. Robert McAfee Brown, one of the most vigorous defenders of this brand of liberation theology (Theology in a New Key, Westminster, 1978), claims that its major concern is to “see the world in the light of the gospel through the eyes of the oppressed,” using Marxism as the chief instrument for social analysis. Actually as Brown himself admits, this “new key” in theology is very similar to the social gospel movement instituted by Walter Rauschenbusch and other Protestant liberals. Affinities, Brown notes, include “the social or communal stress as a safeguard against individualistic Christianity, the stress on praxis, a methodology arising out of the human situation rather than being imposed on it, a passionate commitment to the dispossessed, and a recognition of the systemic nature of evil” (p. 141).

The limitation of liberation theology is its tendency to narrow the interpretation of Christianity to a particular socialist political program and to use rhetoric that seems to encourage violence. (James Cone has noted that “dogmatic Marxists seldom succeed in the black community.”) Liberation theologians who want to appreciate the truly radical ways of Jesus might ponder these words of Hans Küng, who writes in On Being a Christian that Jesus’ revolutionary method means “love of enemies instead of their destruction; unconditional forgiveness instead of retaliation; readiness to suffer instead of using force; blessing for peacemakers instead of hymns of hate and revenge” (p. 191)

For the Future

The point of this article is not, however, to give a full-blown summary and critique of recent theology, but rather to indicate its one-sidedness and to make suggestions for the road still ahead. I have four proposals.

First, the central task of theology is to ask the larger questions about the nature of ultimate reality. Is there a God? What is she like? Is the universe friendly? Does it make sense? Harvey Cox is quite right:

Despite the efforts of some modern theologians to sidestep it, whether God exists or not is a desperately serious issue. All the palavar about the terms existence and being and all the sophisticated in-group bickering about nonobjectifying language cannot obscure the fact that there remains an indissoluble question after all the conceptualizations have been clarified . . . Is man alone in the universe or not? [The Secular City, revised edition, 1978, p. 212].

The ontological, question remains basic for theologians. Are black holes and eternal darkness the fate of the universe? If so, said one eminent scientist recently, “it would make the whole universe meaningless. If that were true, I would quit and spend my life raising roses.” I believe, this question of ultimate meaning looms with greater and greater importance as we delve even deeper into the mysteries of existence, including the theoretical implications of the Big Bang theory (cf. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 1978).

It, is only insofar as we deal responsibly with this “ultimate” question that we can see the implications for all of life. The religious person is the one who comes down on the side of the universe as inherently suffused with eternal light and not darkness. Charles Hartshorne puts the matter succinctly: “He is most religious who is certain of but one thing, the world-embracing love of God. Everything else we take our chance on; everything else, including man’s relative insignificance in the world, is mere probability:” If one believes in the world-embracing love of God, what does this mean for human relationships, for the dignity of women, for the plight of the economically, politically and racially oppressed? The all-encompassing love of God means full liberation and dignity in every area of human existence. Liberation is not an end in itself but a clear implication of the love of God.

Second, in the days ahead we should put less emphasis on the historical Jesus. Since Vatican II, Catholics and Protestants have increasingly stressed their agreements. A similar movement is gaining strength between Christians and Jews, as both Catholics and mainstream Protestants are renouncing efforts to evangelize Jews. We are increasing contact with other. religions of the world, and an insistence on the uniqueness of the historical Jesus can only be a hindrance. Christians should never have made a god out of Jesus. It is just too preposterous to believe that God gave her /his world-embracing love uniquely through Jesus. We Christians may use such phrases as “anonymous Christian” and “the cosmic Christ” in our attempts to universalize. Christianity, but then we should empathize with such terms as “the universal Buddha” or “the plurality of avatars.” The world-embracing love of God cannot be confined to any particular historical person, including Jesus. I stated earlier that in comparison to 20 years ago there is little mention now of the once-for-allness of Jesus. Still it seems as though everybody tries hard to lay claim to the man from Nazareth -- the revolutionary and the pacifist, the Marxist and the capitalist, the evangelical and the liberationist. I suggest that we leave him alone for a while. Just as Jesus said to his disciples, “It is best for you that I depart. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you” (John 16:5) so, too, must we have the courage to say that it is best for Jesus to depart for the sake of the love of God.

Third, we must be more vigorous in resisting the conservative trend in religious circles these days. To accommodate theological thinking to the current evangelical thrust because it is the popular thins to do will in the long run only be a disservice to the responsible theological task. Fundamentalism of any stripe is dangerous and inherently inhuman, for it fails to acknowledge the mystery and ambiguity of life and consequently the inability to espouse simple, clear-cut answers. The wise words of Betty and William Gray about their own Episcopal Church should be heeded by us all:

If the mainline churches fail to enliven and strengthen their membership, what will happen to modern Christians -- to those concerned with evolving creation, biblical criticism and social action? Presently, Episcopal Church leadership seems to be responding to this question by trying to incorporate elements of fundamentalism and evangelical expression, and to embrace charismatics and fundamentalists who have never had currency in Anglicanism [The Christian Century. January 24, 1979, p. 79].

We are only fighting a losing battle if we succumb to the evangelicals.

Faith and Analysis

Finally, we must reaffirm the critical task of theology and the importance of reason in clarifying issues and making plain the alternatives for belief. Reason has taken a beating in recent years as theological trends have caricatured it as a tool of the imperalists or as dealing with a realm of abstract essences devoid of earthly substance. But we all have our ideologies, explicit or hidden, and whether we call reason “critical reflection on praxis” or systematic thinking about ongoing experience, reason remains one’s attempt to make sense out of all dimensions of life’s experiences, including those of the oppressed and oppressor, the poor and rich, white and black, female, and male, and so on. When we abdicate responsibility for the role of reason, we make ourselves vulnerable to the fundamentalists and dogmatists of every type. Critical analysis never leads us to the final act of faith, but it can and should eliminate roadblocks along the way.

In conclusion, I quote with appreciation some helpful words of Hans Küng:

Theological study does not solve any problems of decision. It can only define the scope and the limits within which an answer is possible and appropriate. It can remove impediments, clarify prejudices, bring to a head the crisis of unbelief and superstition. . . It can examine whether an assent is not unreasonable . . . It can help to guide the process of decision-making in a rational way [On Being a Christian, p. 515).

This, I hope, is the road still ahead in theology.

Gun Deaths — Some Real, Dead Cases

Handguns were responsible for the murders of 9,200 persons in the United States in 1976 -- a figure amounting to 49 per cent of all murders committed that year. Over 117,000 people were assaulted with guns of all types; many of these people were blinded, deafened, paralyzed, dismembered or otherwise disabled.

In my city of Birmingham, Alabama, some more recent and exact statistics were assembled with the help of Dr. Donald Rivers, the chief coroner and medical examiner. During the first ten months of 1978, there were 89 homicides in Jefferson County; 75 occurred in Birmingham, 14 in the suburbs. Of those 89 deaths, 64 were brought about by guns.

Of the 64 gun-death victims, 47 were black people; 17 were white. Perhaps this fact tends to explain why so few people with power are concerned about guns. As long as the deaths occur mostly in the city, and mostly among blacks, white suburbanites fail to notice.

Of the 64 gun deaths, 48 involved handguns. Thus, for the period under consideration, 54 per cent of Birmingham’s murders were committed with handguns -- slightly higher than the national average. Twelve homicides were committed with shotguns, and four with rifles.

But these are statistics. And statistics can become meaningless in discussions of human beings. More to the point are stories of the people who make up the numbers. Of course privacy dictates that fictitious names be used, but in all other respects, the case studies are authentic. Most of these are from the Birmingham area, but they could be from anyone’s community.

I

On January 1, 1978, a man whom we’ll call Robert was found dead, lying in a pool of blood in his apartment. He was killed with a .38 caliber pistol, but his assailant is unknown.

On October 16, a man we will call Norman came to the home of a woman we’ll call Denise. He knocked at her door, but no one answered. Most of us would have walked away in such a case. But Norman had a gun. So he took his .38 caliber Smith and Wesson from his pocket and fired through the door into the house. Denise was inside. Five shots hit her -- in the left hand, the stomach and the back.

On May 21, a six-year-old boy was playing on the front porch of his home. An argument broke out between two men in the street. The subject of the argument was a clothesline pole that had been knocked down. Both men had guns, and they began firing at each other. The little boy tried to get out of the way, but he was too late; he was dead on arrival at University Hospital.

On January 15, a man whom we’ll call Charles was arguing with his wife, Pearl. The argument got rather loud. Another man, Harold, heard them and went to help. Harold saw Charles become abusive with Pearl, so he told Charles to stop. Charles went for his .22 caliber pistol; Harold reached for his .82. Harold was faster, and Charles is now dead.

On February 19, Claude was drinking. The more he drank, the angrier he got at his friend Allen. The problem reportedly was some stolen CB radios. So Claude went to see Allen to have it out. He took along his .38 caliber pistol with the two-inch barrel. Sure enough, the two men got into a fight. And fights with guns leave more than black eyes. Claude is now dead from a .38 caliber bullet in his chest.

On March 4, Mary Lou and her husband had been drinking. She went to bed, and demanded that her husband come to bed with her. He refused. She began complaining -- first about no sex, and then about that .38 caliber revolver he kept in the house. He became angry, got the gun, pressed it against her vagina and pulled the trigger. She is now dead.

On January 7, Nancy and John, who lived together, left a party because of an argument. They drove home and began fighting again shortly after they arrived. John was in the bedroom. He got angry and threw a shoe out of the room as a sign of disgust. Nancy was disgusted, too; she took out her duly registered .22 caliber pistol and fired a random shot into the bedroom to scare John. The shot went through the room, as she had planned: It also went through John’s chest, heart, right lung and liver!

On February 27, a boy was playing basketball at a nearby schoolyard with a friend. Suddenly from nowhere a shot rang out, and the boy fell to the ground, hit in the abdomen. One day, 20 hours and 45 minutes later, he died of that single gunshot wound from a .22 caliber revolver -- fired by a disturbed juvenile who never should have been able to get a gun. But then, should anyone?

II

On April 5 Gloria went with her brother to the home of her estranged husband to pick up some furniture. She got into an argument with her husband, as happened often -- but this time was different. She had brought along a .32 caliber revolver. When her husband began to shout, she pulled out her gun. He ran away, and she fired twice, missing. She then gave the gun to her brother. He didn’t miss. The husband is now dead, Would he be, had the weapon not been present?

In the summer a six-year-old boy whom we’ll call Ken had an argument with a playmate of the same age. The playmate decided to get even. He entered his house and went straight to the place where his parents kept their (registered) .357 Magnum. He cocked the gun and gave it to his three-year-old brother, telling the younger boy to “go get Ken.” The three-year-old did as he was told, and Ken is now dead. Guns don’t kill people -- people kill people. Or so we’re told. Would Ken be dead if the other youngsters had not had access to their parents’ gun?

On September 16, Bill was at home with his girlfriend, Carol, and some friends. All were drinking beer. Bill remarked that he was interested in a certain good-looking woman. Carol heard him, and moved to where he was sitting. She hit him. Bill grabbed her arm and told her to go away. She went into the bedroom. It should have ended at this point -- a simple lovers’ quarrel. But in the bedroom, Carol found an Essex .12 gauge shotgun. She fired it once from the doorway, about 12 feet from Bill. He was hit in the head, and not even an emergency craniotomy could save him.

On September 29, Martin was complaining to his father-in-law about the latter’s talking “bad” to Martin’s 11-year-old daughter. He wanted it to stop. A. simple request from a thoughtful parent, right? Wrong. Both men had been drinking. The father-in-law charged at Martin. Martin was ready. He had a .32 caliber revolver, and he used it. The father-in-law became another gun-death statistic!

On September 30, Charlotte came home and found her estranged husband in her house. An argument followed. Charlotte walked out the door toward her car. This should have ended it. But apparently there was a loaded .16 gauge shotgun on the rack. The husband took it and fired in the direction of his wife. She was hit in the back, and is now dead.

On October 1, Albert went to the home of his friend Gary. Albert asked Gary if he wanted to go get some whiskey. Gary said No. Gary then noticed that Albert was looking at Gary’s wife, and he asked why. Albert reminded him that he didn’t have any wife; but if he had one, he’d be happy for Gary to look at her. Under normal circumstances, this situation might have concluded with a laugh, or perhaps a bloody nose. But both men had guns. Gary reached for his .22 caliber stack-barrel pistol. Albert was first with his .38 revolver (duly registered and permit issued). Gary got it in the head, and died shortly thereafter.

Finally, there was the man who bought himself a .44 caliber pistol as protection for his home. That evening while he was loading it, the gun accidentally went off, killing his six-year-old son. Distraught, the man put the gun to his own head, but his wife managed to knock the weapon aside. He then ran outside and threw the gun into the street. Police searched the area later, but the gun had already been picked up -- perhaps to kill again. “Guns don’t kill people  -- people kill people.” Tell that to the father who accidentally killed his own son.

III

There are thousands of case studies like these. Many of the victims are dead because of their own misconduct. Others were innocent of any wrongful act, but ended up dead anyway. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if perhaps the Christian community as a whole could deliberately act to reduce the number of these horror stories? It could happen -- if only we will care enough to do enough.

But why should the church be concerned? Of course the Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill.” But few who have guns really intend to kill anyone, regardless of the actual consequences. And no matter what one says about the paving composition of the “road to hell,” intentions are quite important in Christianity.

In biblical times, a clear distinction between “tool” and “weapon” was impossible. The ax, for example, was used for felling trees, shaping wood, hunting animals and for hand-to-hand combat. The bow and arrow were used for hunting food and for warfare. In contrast, today’s guns, particularly handguns, have little practical value except as a weapon (their sporting use is the only exception).

Of course, we don’t find anything specifically about guns in the Bible; they weren’t invented until the 14th century A.D. Common weapons in biblical times were various types of knives, axes, spears -- and especially the sword. Like handguns, swords were employed for defense, for warfare and for suicide. Yet the biblical writers yearn for a time when people will “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”

The distinction was also made in the Bible between offensive and defensive weapons. Offensive weapons include swords, spears, daggers, javelins, lances and mauls. Defensive devices take in the shield; armor, walled cities and moats. Today we buy guns for defense, but such a step so often leads to a family tragedy -- with no one defended. Perhaps we would be smarter to put our trust in deadbolt locks, floodlights and alarm systems.

In Gethsemane, the guards and priests, led by Judas, came to take Jesus. Peter tried to defend his Master with a sword, and he cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave. Jesus said, “All who take the sword shall perish by the sword.”

IV

Threats breed threats. War breeds war. Revenge breeds revenge. And those who buy handguns for protection are four times more likely to have those guns wind up killing a family member or a close friend than they are to have the guns protect anyone. Only 1 to 2 per cent of burglars are ever shot. But there are some 9,000 gun murders committed every year by law-abiding citizens who might have continued to be law-abiding had they not possessed firearms.

Christ came, among other reasons, to reconcile people with one another -- to bring them together. We come together in proximity in our modern cities. But instead of really coming together, we build fences; we become prisoners in our homes, “safe,” with one or more guns to protect us. Some people refuse to go out on the Street unless they have a gun. Then, at the least provocation, it is there, ready to separate people permanently -- by death. One thing is certain: guns do not bring people together, except for funerals. Guns don’t create love or trust. Guns don’t bring life -- they only take it away. And life is precious -- it is a gift of God.

Christian Ethics and Nuclear Power

Christian ethics has as its frame of reference Jesus’ idea of God. God is creator of heaven and earth, a loving God concerned about human beings -- the children of God who are of infinite worth in his sight. We must reverence all of his creation: humanity as well as the earth. The psalmist sang: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Nearly 500 years ago Martin Luther questioned the distinction between the sacred and the secular: all life is sacred. And long before Luther, the creeds of Christendom spoke of God as “maker of all things visible and invisible.”

From this perspective, Christian ethics has a great deal to say about nuclear power -- its potential to destroy life and to poison the earth. Christians often use the word “stewardship,” but most often in a narrow sense, in connection with the practice of tithing one’s worldly goods. True Christian stewardship embraces the larger meaning found in the ancient creeds: all of life, “the world and they that dwell therein.”

“Christianity,” wrote Anglican Archbishop William Temple (Nature, Man and God, 1935), “is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions”: it is concerned with daily bread as well as things spiritual, for the two are inextricably interrelated. Because of this materialism, Christian ethics must examine nuclear power in broad perspective. From the standpoint of stewardship of life as well as stewardship of the earth.

The Rasmussen Report

Let us consider nuclear power first in its relation to life. What dangers does it pose? Nuclear advocates assure us that the risk of catastrophic accident is negligible. For example, the public-relations department of the Illinois Power Company puts out an attractive brochure which quotes from a government report, the Rasmussen Reactor Safety Study: “Assuming 100 operating reactors . . . the chance of a nuclear accident involving 1,000 fatalities [is] in the same class as that of a meteor striking a U.S. population center, causing the same number of deaths.”

But the Rasmussen report is not the scientific document it purports to be. Henry Kendall of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists, took advantage of the Freedom of Information Act to pry from a reluctant Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) some material heretofore suppressed. His objective review of the Rasmussen document says simply that Americans have been deceived by it. Using the government records to which he finally gained access, Kendall concluded:

•that federal, officials .suppressed the results of an internal review of the “Reactor Safety Study,” made prior to its release, that found major flaws in the study’s methods, assumptions and data base. One reviewer called the study’s concept of accident probability “gibberish”; another reviewer labeled some of its estimates “suspiciously low.”

•  that the “Reactor Safety Study” abandoned its review of certain sensitive safety issues because study officials feared “the facts may not support our predetermined conclusions” and because it was “not known in advance” that the results would “engender confidence” in the reliability of reactor safety systems.

•  that the basic plan of the “Reactor Safety Study” was written by two MIT nuclear engineers; one was a director of the Atomic Industrial Forum, the nuclear industry lobbying group; the other, a nuclear industry consultant, was misrepresented as being a specialist in nuclear reactor safety.

•  that the basic plan of the “Reactor Safety Study” was to produce a report that would have “significant benefit for the nuclear industry.” The study outline also stated: “The report to be useful must have reasonable acceptance by people in the industry.”

•  that, despite the claim that the study was “independent” of the industry, the nuclear industry actually carried out important parts of the actual safety analysis reported in the study.

•  that the government suppressed the report of another special task force of government nuclear safety experts which concluded that “it is difficult to assign a high degree of confidence” to the type of risk estimates being made by the “Reactor Safety Study” [The Risks of Nuclear Power Reactors: A Review of the NRC Reactor Safety Study (Union of Concerned Scientists, 1977)].

Prodded by the work of the Union of Concerned Scientists and by Congressman Morris K. Udall (D., Ariz.), chairman of the House subcommittee on energy and the environment, the NRC finally issued a report on January 19, 1979, repudiating major portions of the Rasmussen document. As the January 20 New York Times reported: “The decision [by the NRC] to reject totally the Rasmussen Study’s summary was based on a finding that the summary ‘is a poor description of the contents of the report. . .’”

But the nuclear industry proceeded to step up its lobbying to counteract the damage. General Electric has ordered its nuclear-division executives to seek out at least one congressperson or administration official on each trip to Washington to spread the pro-nuclear gospel; the company is even considering awarding prizes to those who manage to reach particularly important officials.

Whether such efforts will succeed is anybody’s guess. Udall believes that the fate of nuclear power is “hanging in the balance.” Should Congress decide that no new fission plants may be built until the waste-disposal problem is solved, the future of nuclear power may well be sealed.

Though nuclear advocates contend that reactors are safe, the American insurance industry apparently does not agree. There is not one homeowners’ insurance policy written in America which does not have a nuclear-exclusion clause. Further, no private group of insurance companies would consider writing nuclear-insurance coverage for the civilian nuclear power industry. Congress was forced to pass the Price-Anderson Act, guaranteeing $560 million of government insurance, before the civilian nuclear power program could begin operations.

Unforeseen Risks

While it is true that no catastrophic accidents have yet occurred, such incidents as the major fire at TVA’s Browns Ferry reactor in Alabama in 1975 and the 1966 partial meltdown of the core of the experimental Enrico Fermi breeder reactor near Detroit -- and now the near-calamity of the nuclear mishap at the power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania -- prompt one to ask: Has it not been more the result of good luck than of good management that this has been the case?

Though evidence continues to surface that there have been many more accidents than the nuclear industry likes to admit, let us assume that the chance of catastrophic accident is indeed negligible. Then one still must ask: What threat does low-level radiation from these reactors pose? Two factors must be borne in mind: the civilian nuclear-power industry is relatively young, with its large (600-800 megawatt) reactors having been in service for but a few years. Cancers from low-level radiation do not develop overnight, but take at least 20 to 25 years to appear. Only recently has the nation become alert to the dangers from the uranium tailings used a score of years ago in the foundations of houses. Now owners of such homes find them uninhabitable because of the cancer risks from the low-level radiation emitted by this discarded rock from uranium mines.

Last year the press was full of stories about the shipyard workers who developed leukemia as a result of working on atomic submarines in the 1950s. Side by side with these pieces were the ugly accounts of the navy’s efforts to cover up the truth about the dangers of such exposure. A report from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, grimly indicated that the cancer rate among shipyard workers who built atomic submarines a score of years ago was more than double the rate of the general population. Another news dispatch announced: “Government Pays Low Level Radiation Cancer Claims.”

Within the past year, the National Center for Disease Control, along with committees from both houses of Congress, has become aware of the hazards posed by levels of exposure heretofore deemed safe. Troops and civilian personnel exposed to atomic radiation from test blasts two decades a are only now being followed up to determine how many leukemia victims may be among them.

Indeed, present standards of presumed safe exposure to radiation -- 5 rems per year -- were set a quarter-century ago. (A rem is defined as “the dosage of any ionizing radiation that will cause the same amount of biological injury to human tissue as one roentgen of X-ray or gamma-ray dosage.”) There is mounting evidence to suggest that permissible safe limits of radiation exposure should be cut by a factor of ten. Such a reduction would have a devastating effect on the industry, which up to now has assumed that it was operating with safe, low-level radiation emissions.

My home, though nestled in a seemingly remote Vermont valley, is in fact only 12 miles from one atomic plant to the west, and 20 miles from another to the east. Last summer the one to the east had a two months’ shutdown to repair cracks in its emergency safety cooling system. While it was shut down, we learned, the plant continued to leak radioactive iodine 131 into the atmosphere. The reason the radioactive iodine leaked, said plant officials, was that the off-gas charcoal filter system was not functioning while the plant was closed. Thus gases from leaking fuel assembly rods bypassed the charcoal filter and escaped into the atmosphere. We were assured, however, that there was no danger to nearby residents.

Radioactive Waste Disposal

If low-level radiation poses a greater threat than was thought possible 25 years ago, what of the danger to life and to the earth from high-level radioactive waste? It is generally agreed that high-level waste poses risks. Industry spokespersons say, however, that it can be safely dealt with. Other scientists, including Linus Pauling, predict genetic damage to millions yet unborn. Even a 1 per cent addition to the natural background radiation of the earth, says Dr. Pauling, means thousands of additional defective children born, and thousands more cases of cancer.

The problem of what to do with high-level radio-active waste is the industry’s Achilles’ heel. Such waste is presently being stored on site at the 72 operating reactors across the nation. Germany is experimenting with storage of canisters in salt mines. But salt is corrosive, and the waste is so hot that there is grave danger of explosion. Sweden also reports storage problems; its three operating reactors are temporarily storing their radioactive waste on site under pools of water 20 feet deep.

Last April the Government Operations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives issued a report titled “The Costs of Nuclear Power.” The document is significant because it represents the first instance that any unit of the federal government has acknowledged that there are grave unsolved questions regarding nuclear power. (The government has heavily subsidized the civilian nuclear-power industry since creating the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948.) The committee contends that nuclear power is not cheap. The problem of nuclear waste has not been solved, despite more than 5,000 “studies” by government agencies. High-level waste is dangerous to life for a quarter of a million years. Should the earth survive even a fraction of that time, how will coming generations know where such waste is stored? What right do we have to mortgage the future of the earth in this manner? The committee asks:

If the technology exists and the problem of waste disposal has been solved, why has DOE not yet chosen a permanent federal repository for these wastes? And why has the technology for that disposal not yet been identified? The demonstration of that technology could terminate the controversy which threatens the survival of the nuclear industry.

Committee member Robert Drinan (D., Mass.) sums up the panel’s conclusions in these words:

 [The report] reflects the frustration of the Congress which has invested tens of billions of dollars and almost 30 years in the commercial development of nuclear power -- often at the expense of other energy options -- yet cannot obtain answers to the most elementary questions concerning the “back end” of the nuclear generating cycle.

An Expensive Option

If nuclear power poses a threat to life as well as to planet earth itself, why do we continue to travel down the nuclear road? Prudent economics would indicate, as indeed the Government Operations Committee concludes, that other options are cheaper. And in fact the civilian power industry is beginning to turn its back on nuclear power for economic reasons. Last year the four nuclear-reactor manufacturers in America -- General Electric, Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox and Combustion Engineering -- with a capacity of building 20 reactors a year, received not a single order for a nuclear reactor in the U.S. In the 1960s and early 1970s, orders poured in -- 21 in 1973, 26 in 1974. The Ford administration confidently predicted that by the year 2000, there would be 1,000 civilian reactors churning out limitless electric power for America.

But then, in 1975 and 1976, there were only seven new orders. Indeed, even in 1974 when 26 new orders were placed, nine previous orders were canceled and 91 deferred. From 1975 to June 1977, 20 more were canceled and 90 deferred.

Industry advocates will contend that cancellation and deferral are due to the lessening in demand and lower growth rate for electric power. But the Government Operations Committee found two other, more basic reasons. Because of environmental constraints and safety factors, nuclear plants cost too much to be competitive with other forms of power. In December 1975 the Massachusetts Energy Office issued a study showing that because of the increased capital costs and lower-than-expected capacity of nuclear reactors, coal plants were as cheap as, or cheaper than, nuclear plants in New England.

Over the years, the testimony of the marketplace has shown that the nation’s astute business people no longer consider nuclear power a feasible economic alternative. At this point the capitalist stewardship of money parallels the Christian concern not to waste resources. The Wall Street Journal for December 14, 1977, carried the news that Middle South Utilities was reducing the work force on its Waterford 3 nuclear power plant at Taft, Louisiana. That same issue carried a quarter-page advertisement by the same company which said: “It is too simple to say that the energy problem is over our heads, when the answer [coal] is under our feet.”

Four months later (April 28, 1978) the Wall Street Journal had another story about Middle South Utilities. Regarding a Babcock & Wilcox contract to supply six coal-burning boilers to the company, “Industry observers noted that the big order is the strongest indication yet of a major new move by electric utilities into use of coal as a boiler fuel in their power-generation plants. Currently, all five Middle South operating companies do not have any coal-fired capacity.”

And in the February 8, 1979, Wall Street Journal appeared this front-page headline: “Nuclear Industry Faces Bleak Future as Orders Get Increasingly Scarce.” According to the Journal, the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company opened a $30 million plant in Alabama a few years ago to supply parts for nuclear-power plants. That plant closed over a year ago because there was no business. In 1972, Chicago Bridge and Iron teamed up with General Electric to build nuclear-reactor pressure vessels in a Memphis, Tennessee, facility. But GE has not had a new reactor order since 1974 so this plant is now making hydroelectric generators.

The most thoroughgoing and trenchant economic analysis of nuclear power available is to be found in Saunders Miller’s book The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger, 1976). An investment banker, Miller is also an economist whose field is economic risk analysis. After examining nuclear power solely from the perspective of profit and loss, he concludes that “from an economic standpoint alone, to rely upon nuclear fission as the primary source of our stationary energy supplies will constitute economic lunacy on a scale unparalleled in recorded history, and may lead to the economic Waterloo of the United States.”

One need not be a Marxist to understand that ethical questions are often determined by economic considerations. Slavery was abolished in America, not only because of the aroused Christian conscience against it, but primarily because it was becoming unprofitable. Nuclear-fission power, with its tremendous capital costs and its poor reliability record, has reached its present nadir primarily because it has been weighed in the economic balance and found wanting.    

Mapping the Brain: A Pathway to God

 

     For you created my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb [Ps. 139:13].

These lines are reminiscent of a rather quaint natural theology. But there are rustlings offstage as a cast of scientists discreetly parts the curtains to reveal some stunning new implications for natural theology.

Over the past 40 years neurological researchers (most notably Wilder Penfield, and more recently Harry Whitaker at University at Rochester) have been mapping the functional terrain of the brain. They have isolated areas of the cerebral cortex that control our various sensory perceptions and motor functions. They have also found that each hemisphere (right and left) of the brain specializes for the accomplishment of distinctive types of mental activity.

The work of the left hemisphere is primarily logical thinking, language ability and mathematical functioning. It processes information linearly and sequentially. The right hemisphere is primarily responsible for our orientation in space, for artistic endeavor and holistic mentation. It seems, to process

information in a more diffuse way than does the left hemisphere and is able to integrate scattered bits of seemingly disparate data. “If the left hemisphere can be termed predominantly analytic and sequential in its operation, then the right hemisphere is more holistic and relational, and more simultaneous in its mode of operation” (Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness [Viking, 1973], p. 68).

In everyday life most of us rely heavily on the analytic left hemisphere. Our Western culture, in fact, is primarily “left hemispheric” in its application of rational thinking to almost every facet of human existence: science, economics, politics, education, religion, law (the French word for law, droit, comes from “right hand,” the hand that rules and is controlled by the left hemisphere). The East, on the other hand, has been guided in the main by the right hemisphere, with its nonrational view of life. I have noticed in Israel, for example, that there is no such thing as queuing up at a bus stop or a ticket office -- one often feels fortunate that bus drivers bother taking the same route each time or that tickets are printed at all.

The lateralization of the brain provides a surprising and curiously close analogue to religious experience and expression it suggests an interpretive tool which can with caution be applied to the classical theologians. Neurological research reveals a sophisticated yet sound biological basis for speaking of religious life. And the religious experience of such a writer as the apostle Paul bears naïve yet eloquent personal witness to what we are discovering about the brain.

I

Throughout the history of Christianity theologians have struggled to convey their bimodal perception of religious life. Paul of Tarsus was the first Christian theologian to write autobiographically about his religious experience and to name the power that held together two very diverse sides of that experience.

Paul wrote a strange statement in II Corinthians 5:13: “If we are insane [exestemen], it is for God; if we are sane [spohronoumen], it is for you.” Reinhold Niebuhr once quipped: “It is almost impossible to be sane and a Christian at the same time.” I suppose that all of us contain mixed measures of sanity and insanity, of madness and reason. The passage cited above enticed me to leak more closely at those passages where Paul uses the language of madness (nonrational, right hemispheric) and reason (rational, left hemispheric).

Paul’s “sanity” language clusters around two sections of his Corinthian correspondence: I Corinthians 1-4 and II Corinthians 11-12. In I Corinthians he wrote:

Christ [sent me] . . . to preach the gospel and not with rational wisdom [sophia logou], lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly [moria] to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God [I Cor. 1:17-18].

Paul proceeded to be more specific about how his teachings came across to the Corinthians:

I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with sophisticated arguments or wisdom. Rather I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. For I was with you in much weakness, fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not persuasive words of wisdom, but the demonstration of spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God [I Cor. 2:1-5].

Here he was recalling his own insecurity and inability to communicate the gospel effectively. At least some in the church of Corinth simply dismissed him as an idiot.

In the II Corinthians passage Paul also linked foolishness with this own difficulty in speaking the gospel. This time he was not defending his message but his apostleship.

I wish you would bear with me a little foolishness [aphrosunes]. Do bear with me! . . . I think that I am not in the least inferior to these superlative apostles. Even if I am unskilled [idiotes] in speaking, I am not in knowledge [gnosis]. . . . I repeat, let no one think me foolish; but even if you do, accept me as a fool [aphrona], so that I too may boast a little [II Cor.11:1-16

Again Paul felt on the defensive and forced to flaunt his credentials:

I must boast; there is nothing to be gained by it, but

I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I

know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was

caught up to the third heaven . . . and he heard things

that cannot be told, which man may not utter. On

behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf

I will not boast, except of my weaknesses;. . for when

I am weak, then I am strong [II Cor. 12:1-10).

 

Once more Paul was relating the trouble he had with speaking to his being perceived as a fool; yet on the other hand he “saw” more things than others, he had revelations and visions in abundance, and for him that was the ultimate sanity, a thing to boast about. Abundance of visions and lack of speech, sanity and insanity, weakness and strength -- significant contrasts in the Pauline personality. “I am sane for you, but crazy for God”; rational among people but nonrational through encounter with divinity. “When I am weak, then I am strong.” There is strength in weakness, and weakness in strength.

II

The recent literature about the brain’s hemispheric specialization has led me to some surprising insights about Paul’s complex personality. Physiologically the two hemispheres “communicate” with each other through a bundle of neural fibers called the corpus callosum. We term the integration of the modes of awareness “consciousness,” which involves such aspects as an inward awareness of sensibility (a system of internal perception), an awareness of self, and an awareness of unity (the fusion of internal and external stimuli). This implies that emotion and thought, intuition and cognition are so integrated that the mind works as one entity. The complex brain is able to differentiate, compartmentalize and also relate various diverse pieces of information.

It is clear from his autobiographical statements that Paul was able to move freely from one mode of consciousness to another, from the left hemisphere to, the right, and back again -- from law to grace, from mystical experience to ethical evaluation. And in his bimodal religious experience he discovered an internal unity: “By the grace of God, I am what I am” (I Cor. I:10). The experience of Christ in him, Paul’s Christ-mysticism, put him in touch with his primordial being, his essence, his self. The revelation of Christ had come to him in his mother’s (Gal. 1:15-16). For Paul, Christ was the power of God, the dunamis of being. And he meant “being” not only as a general ontological term but “specifically with reference to himself: “Christ in me, the power of God in me, the dunamis of my being.”

Paul experienced the power of being by the grace of God:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in my weaknesses [the weaker side, the right hemispheric experiences],’ ‘that the power of Christ may dwell in me; . . . for when I am weak, then I am strong [II Cor. 12:9-10]

Paul also experienced an internal unity in Christ; he was more than a Pharisaic Jew, more than a Hellenistic Jew; from his conception he had been “in Christ” and as an adult he realized that being “in Christ” meant having the power of God, the power of Being itself. And nowhere was this power more clearly self-evident to Paul than in his weaknesses, in his inability to verbalize (weak left hemisphere) and, his many visions (strong right hemisphere): “I have seen things that are not utterable” --  the ineffable vision, the mark of the Christ-mystic. In his quest for sanity he had become insane for God.

The Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo suggests that

the relationship between the quests for sanity and enlightenment might be seen as that between the minor and the major mysteries of antiquity. While the former aims at the restoration of “true man,” “original man,” the goal of the latter was the transcendence of the human condition, the acquisition of some degree of freedom from the needs or laws that determine ordinary human life by assimilation to a radically different state of being [The Heating Journey (Pantheon, 1973) p. 17].

Naranjo’s description of the mystic fits Paul rather well. Paul’s mysticism is a quest for both sanity and enlightenment; he recovers for himself the original, primal, true person, and he enters a radically new state of being, the new creation.

Paul can say: “By the grace of God, I am what I am.” For him it is Christ who gives unity to his bimodal, existence. Paul is strong and weak, sane and insane,  foolish and wise, and it is his mystical experience of the risen Christ that allows him to live beyond this bimodality.

There is one final binary aspect to Paul’s Christ-mysticism: ecstasy and ethics. The Corinthians were not yet ready for the full impact of Christ-mysticism; they were not yet “spiritual persons, but babes in Christ.” On one, hand the experience of “being in Christ” was truly esoteric and ecstatic. This aspect of Christ-mysticism the Corinthian Christians knew well. They were making bold claims about their many spiritual gifts -- tongues, prophecy, healing -- all magnificent, all praiseworthy, all useful.

Nonetheless, anyone who settles for the trappings of mysticism is at best “a babe in Christ” For Paul that which completes the experience of being in Christ is love, agape. To possess both the ecstatic experience” and agapeic love renders a person “mature.” The mature Christian, therefore, takes ethics (left hemisphere), as seriously as ecstasy (right hemisphere). Combining the two locates the Christian “in Christ” and makes possible the Imitatio Christi.

III

The post-Pauline patristic literature provides ample variations on the bimodal theme so clearly manifest in Paul’s writings. Toward the end of the second century Tertullian chided: “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy? . . . A plague on Aristotle who taught dialectic!” For Tertullian the regula fidei of itself was sufficient for Christian life. More complicated speculation was deemed useless.

Fortunately, few theologians have heeded this lonely Latin voice, choosing rather to struggle with the complexity of human experience and expression. With no intention to oversimplify the complexity of the theologians I cite, I will briefly state the duality present in their conceptual worlds and how each duality is resolved.

Throughout his life Augustine struggled with “the Inner and the Outer.” God, for Augustine, was totally present as the inside of the inside and at the same time totally present beyond us as wholly other. He is Truth that resides in nature and beyond nature, and this Truth may be reached by two paths: faith and the inner light. Since pure reason is of itself too weak to discover Truth it needs to be aided by the written record of faith. Since eternal wisdom is beyond words, one has a glimmering of wise insight by paradoxically going beyond one’s own soul into the deep and silent realm of interiority. This two-sided searching by means of biblical study and inner quietude is resolved in our personal and collective memories. “The mind is not large enough to contain itself,” says the great bishop, but memory, more encompassing than mind, is the timeless dwelling place of God.

Augustine, undaunted by Tertullian, ushered in the millennial rule of scholasticism. The great king of the realm was, of course, Thomas Aquinas, who used Aristotle’s scepter to tip the theological world away from subjective Neoplatonism as interpreted by Augustine. The “angelic doctor” arrived just as Christian thinkers were choking on a large piece of conceptual roughage called “the twofold truth.” Being astute observers of the world, the sophisticated thinkers could claim a truth in natural phenomena that clearly contradicted a divine truth revealed in Scripture. But then it was necessary to remind oneself that one was, after all, a Christian and accordingly must admit that the revelations of Christianity are also true even if they are nonsense.

It was Aquinas who said there is not simply one convoluted path to Truth, full of logical lacunae and nonsense, but two distinct paths: each beginning with its own premise, each following its own logical progression of thought, each ending in Truth. One can argue on the premise of faith to the God of faith, or one can begin with nature and ultimately arrive at a concept of the God of nature -- and, indeed, they are one and the same God, Being (ens) itself. Natural and revealed theology need not stand as contradictory opposites or be homogenized as a delicate synthetic substance susceptible to breaking down at the least challenge. Aquinas saw that at the end of these two long paths, which came together somewhere near the horizon, was Truth, and in that Truth resided God the prime mover of all thought and faith.

I would suggest that the biological analogue of the brain’s lateral specialization can be a useful hermeneutic tool in understanding the lives and contributions of such complex theologians as Paul, Augustine and Aquinas (not to mention Ignatius of Antioch or Martin Luther). Through the two hemispheres of the human brain, each making distinctive contributions to human activity, a fresh way is provided for comprehending the traditional tension between faith and reason, ecstasy and ethics, eros and agape. In “split-brain” religion, these poles of human experience and expression are neatly compartmentalized, often mutually exclusive, and sometimes demonic and destructive. In the mature person, with the mind of Christ in which there is no divided cognition, the active and the receptive provide for a flowing fullness.

I would not want to confuse biology with divinity. I do not mean to suggest that one group of brain cells mapped out by researchers and excited by electrodes will produce visions of God. But my reading of the classical theologians shows that they share common loci of reason and revelation. Further, these loci bear a striking functional similarity to the specialized tasks of the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. While we cannot take literally the relationship of the brain and belief, the analogy does provide a valuable way to order what we and others have thought and experienced.

The Unitarian Universalists: Style and Substance

For church-watchers, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) provides fascination. Formed in 1961 by a merger of Unitarians and Universalists, this relatively new denomination is small (its membership peaked at slightly above 200,000 during the bulge of the ‘60s); wealthy (43 per cent of its members earn more than $25,000 a year); and highly educated (42 per cent of them have at least a master’s degree).

During the decade of the 60s the UUA suffered a net membership loss of 4.4 per cent as compared to population growth. Much of this loss occurred in New England, where Unitarianism and Universalism had their origin; only in Canada did the growth rate exceed the rate of population increase. UU sermons and pamphlets fondly quote Thomas Jefferson’s expectation that his young contemporaries would all be Unitarians before they died -- a prophecy that was not to be fulfilled. In many ways the pattern of UU membership resembles that of the large mainline denominations. During 1969-74, for instance, giving to local churches increased 28 per cent while allocations by those same churches to the UUA fell by 32 per cent. These fiscal constraints have sharply cut denominational staff and services.

Stylistic Freedom, Homogenous Substance

The most striking fact about the denomination is that nine out of ten of its members are “converts,” having grown up religiously somewhere else. Given the lack of membership growth, it is clear that UUA churches are in some sense “revolving doors.” Most of the newcomers have left some kind of liberal Protestantism behind. What we do not know is where those who leave go next. My guess is that some have simply lost the need for communal support for their values. This surmise is based on reasonably solid data that members moved into their present value-belief orientations before joining the UUA and that their length of time in those churches does not measurably alter beliefs and values. A somewhat parallel explanation is that parents are most active in churches during their children’s school years. Before and after that stage in the life cycle, people apparently feel less need for support groups.

In recent years UU spokespersons have described their movement in such phrases as “the fourth faith,” “America’s real religion” and “religious liberalism.” Along with such sectarian labels, however, they have stressed their diversity. In 1975 then-president Robert Nelson West could say: “Some are theists, some nontheists; some consider themselves Christians, others non-Christians.” E. M. Wilbur’s history of Unitarianism summarizes the movement’s thrust as “freedom, reason, toleration.” More recently, Sidney Mead has written of “faith in democratic method.”

If we are accurately to situate the UUA among America’s religions, however, we must distinguish style from substance. The rhetorics I have cited are an important part of Unitarian and Universalist style, past and present. There is clearly a pride in being creedless, in having open membership. On the international scene, the UUA forms a major component of the International Association for Religious Freedom, along with European “free Christians,” liberal Buddhists and Shintoists from Japan, and liberal Hindus.

We must not assume, however, that religious freedom necessarily generates religious diversity. There is considerable evidence that the UUA’s very real stylistic freedom is presently accompanied by a homogenous substance of beliefs and values. Perceptions of diversity are relative, of course, and members are sensitive to nuances that tend to escape outside observers.

A Consensus of Values

Of this present substance, we can speak with some certainty. I conducted a major survey of UUs in 1966 which was partially replicated in 1976. Robert L. Miller surveyed the value orientations of a sizable sample in 1974, and the denominational newspaper conducted a more limited survey in 1978. Certain benchmarks and trends can be noted. In 1966, only 43 per cent of the UUs described their personal religion as “Christian,” and this segment had dropped to 26 per cent by 1976. If we turn to the question of nonbelief in personal immortality, the consensus becomes more striking. On value matters (sexual privatism, nondiscrimination, censorship), consensus is almost complete.

The 1976 survey identified ministers, directors of religious education and laypersons. Detailed analyses showed that there were almost no significant variations in the responses of these three groups. This consensus could be interpreted to reflect powerful socializing forces within UU churches or to indicate that the same kinds of persons are attracted to the pews, pulpits and classrooms of this denomination. I am satisfied that this latter is the case, since length of membership does not produce significant changes in responses.

The solidarity between members and professional leadership, coupled with the high degree of value homogeneity, points toward minimal conflict in goal. setting and goal-achieving. These factors also suggest that the intensive theological strife of earlier decades is over.

What do these UUs want from their local churches? Since this question was included in three successive surveys, the rank orderings afford some answers:

 

Rankings of emphases                                       1966                1976                1978

______________________________________________________________________

religious education                                            1                      2                      2

personal development                                       2                      3                      3

fellowship among members                               3                      1                      1

social action                                                      4                      5                      4

public worship                                                  5                      4                      5

 

The continuing stress on the religious education of children makes sense: most of the members are new to this church, and to some extent they want their children to have what they, as children, did not have. But as the UU movement shifts “leftward” religiously, its members will more and more become a new “minority group.” Like Quakers or Jews, they will feel strong needs to provide defensive islands for their youngsters.

More striking are the shifting responses regarding personal development, fellowship and social action. While the UUs are obviously part of the larger cultural scene and even to some extent share the ups and downs of the American religious scene, they often appear to march to ‘‘a different drummer.’’ Their support for social action (measured by the percentage viewing it as “very important”) has remained steady. During the ‘60s, when many denominations were moving toward social activism (at a high cost in terms of membership and contributions, as it turned out), the UUs were adding (almost prematurely) an emphasis on “personal development to their activism. As other denominations retreated from activism to a more pietistic inwardness, the UUs were already feeling disenchantment with encounter, sensitivity and human potential movements. Most dramatically, they now seem to be increasing their emphasis on “fellowship,” reflecting a new sort of in-group solidarity.

This kind of descriptive generalization can sometimes conceal as well as reveal. If we are to assess the uniqueness of the UUs, we need to move to more specific data and to an examination of actual experiences.

A Liberal Agenda

Let me try to describe, empirically, the UUA’s social conscience. We can use 1977 evaluations of a number of action areas in order to predict denominational agendas. UUs were asked if each of several issues had, over the past five years, become “more” or “less” important or had remained “the same.” Ranking highest in the survey were ecology, criminal-justice reform, mental health, freedom of expression, and Third World development. An expanded list would include family planning, resistance to totalitarianism, and women’s liberation. This overall agenda would not differ from those of most liberal Protestant or Jewish groups --  except in the high level of consensus, and in the fact that the most important religious goal for UUs is “a community for shared values” (rather than theology or personal growth or social change or experiences of transcendence).

These shared values can have only personal impact until they flow through group channels. The polity of the UUA is intensely congregational. In the phrase of the UUA’s best-known social ethicist, James Luther Adams, these churches and this denomination are “voluntary associations.” Given the absence of family, ethnic and regional ties, the free coming/staying/going of persons becomes even more salient. The central denomination can offer services (religious education and worship materials, the certification of clergy and religious education professionals). But local churches can (and sometimes do) decline the offer. No effective sanctions prevent any local church from calling and ordaining anyone to its ministry.

Denominational power in the most visible sense rests in a well-attended General Assembly that meets annually. The assembly delegates elect a board of trustees, a president (usually a minister), and a moderator (usually a layperson). The assembly can also mandate policies, but actual expenditures must come from the board. This diffusion of powers can and does lead to unusual problems. Some of these will be evident as we turn to the actual business of the UUA in recent years.

Black and Gay Concerns

Black affairs. The Unitarians and Universalists have had a good track record in regard to civil rights (although most of their churches would have to be described as “open” rather than “integrated”). About one-third of all UU clergy went to Selma to march with Martin Luther King. This liberal consensus was sorely tested, however, by the emergence of a black caucus which was then challenged by an integrationist caucus. BAC (the Black Affairs Council) went before the 1968 General Assembly with a “black empowerment” program and a demand for $4 million. BAC termed integration a failure and viewed as “patronizing” any provisions for white representation in the spending of these funds, or any fiscal accountability. BAC was opposed by BAWA (Black and White Action), which also wanted money but wanted an integrated group to spend it for integrating purposes. Here was a classic confrontation that produced the deepest division in decades. Compromise was ruled out by BAG’s refusal to participate in any solution that would also fund BAWA.

The delegates voted exclusive funding for BAG  -- $1 million to be distributed over four years. It remains impossible to assess the relative causal impacts of populism, white guilt, sharp ideological shifts and covert racism in this action. The board voted the first $250,000 to BAG, and those churches that disagreed with the assembly action began reducing their denominational contributions. BAWA, since it was not being funded, was free to make independent solicitations (which BAG could no longer do).

Technically, the long-term commitment was moral rather than binding on future assemblies, and raising and disbursing funds was a board function. Faced with shrinking funds, the board recommended one year later that BAG’s additional funding be spread over a four-year (instead of three-year) period. This proposal only intensified the divisions, leading to a delegate walkout at the 1969 assembly. The board voted $200,000 to BAC (which was now selling bonds as an additional support for its programs). In 1970, BAC quit the UUA, the board dropped BAG from the budget, and the assembly recommended voluntary support.

In 1972, a seemingly feasible solution appeared. A fund controlled by a local church gave the board $250,000 for “racial justice,” and the money was allocated to BAG and BAWA.

The next year, however, a split emerged within BAG (to avoid confusion, we have retained this single designation to describe several actual groups with overlapping memberships). One side feared the emergence of a separate, non-UU, religious movement. The parties went to court, and eventually the funds went into receivership. By this time, $630,000 from the UUA and $250,000 from local churches had been raised. In 1977, a distribution plan for unspent assets (about 60 per cent) was implemented.

One result of this experience was a shift in denominational budgeting. There is now a “basis” budget which supports core staff and services and a “grants” budget for innovative purposes. The former is considerably insulated from assembly mandates. The problem, of course, is that this “rational” solution emerged only in the present inflationary period when any reserve for “grants” becomes highly vulnerable.

Gay concerns. A second area of UU activities relates to gay persons. In some ways this issue resembles that of black affairs. But even “tolerant” persons seem to be only minimally tolerant of their gay neighbors, and UUs are no exception. In 1973 the assembly mandated an Office of Gay Concerns. This action was opposed by the president, and funded by a board vote of only 12-11.

The problem here, we must note, was one of priority rather than of principle. Money problems threatened the UUA’s social-action and responsibility commitments; and an assembly mandate, while hard to resist, would probably transform such a fear into reality. There are gay UUs in ministry and seminary, and the moral-theological-principle issue that plagues other denominations simply could not arise within the UUA. The solution here was quicker and less divisive than that achieved with the black issue. There remains a staff position for gay concerns, now incorporated within an Office of Social Responsibility.

Other Agenda Areas

Sexuality. A 1973 multimedia education unit, About Your Sexuality, probably still represents the most comprehensive religious education contribution in this field. While the anticipated charges of “pornography” have dwindled, the unit is a landmark in helping young people understand and develop their own styles in sexuality. The UUs’ religious marginality lets them view Catholic, Jewish and various Protestant positions as cultural factors rather than as norms; UUs support nonjudgmental terminology (“same-sex” “other-sex”).

Marriage/divorce. Eighty per cent of UUs were married in 1966 but only 63 per cent by 1978. This radical shift suggests a very different set of religious needs and functions. While the number of never-married members has remained steady, the widowed have increased and the divorced have increased dramatically. An occasional “divorce ceremony makes the news, and “singles’ clubs” seem to be a standard UU function, but within the present denominational organization there is no way or place to reassess the meaning of this shift within the membership.

Religious education. Beginning in the 1930s, a flood of new curricular materials was produced by Beacon Press. This premerger cooperative venture of Unitarians and Universalists was guided by Sophia Lyon Fahs. While the philosophical spirit stemmed from John Dewey, the results somehow satisfied theists as well as humanists. Jesus’ birth, for instance, was presented as an ancient “wonder story” along with similar accounts about Buddha and Lao-tse. The Jewish creation stories were set alongside speculations from India, North America and modern astronomy.

Recent expansions of curricular materials, in addition to the sexuality unit, have moved into situational ethics, cultural anthropology, and a very open exploration of biblical materials and works of religious experiences. Unfortunately we do not have long-term evaluations. In the most narrow sense, these materials, however excellent they might be, do not seem to have produced “church loyalty” in the two generations of young people who have grown up with them. But that judgment may be premature. These materials may well have exposed large numbers of children (and their parents) to the ideas and values of religious liberals. And they have clearly pioneered directions for other denominations that share some of the UUs’ pedagogical and ideological goals.

Women. The Universalists hold the honor of having ordained the first U.S. woman minister (1863). Since then both denominations have had a slightly better record than other churches in terms of women clerics and leaders. But this is not saying much, and certainly not saying enough in the current climate of transformed consciousness. The 1977 assembly mandated a Task Force for Women and Religion which may speed matters.

Publishing. The denomination’s Beacon Press has a distinguished record in service to the intellectual community and in controversial publishing (from Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power to The Pentagon Papers). Beacon’s religious, ethical and philosophical nurture has ranged far beyond parochial UU interests. Nevertheless, increasing denominational subsidies have been required, attempts to sell Beacon Press have been made, and its future now seems to depend on a much smaller, more strictly denominational effort.

Hymnody and worship. The definition of worship as “the celebration of life” was coined by Chicago’s UU minister Von Ogden Vogt (who also guided the construction of a Gothic UU church freighted with symbolism but devoid of any traditional Christian symbols beyond the cruciform floor plan!). Universalists and Unitarians have produced numerous hymnals showing that their problem was with words and ideas rather than singing. Kenneth Patton has been the most prolific UU poet/liturgist/ hymnwriter in recent years. In the current UU Hymns for the Celebration of Life, Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” appears with Patton’s words “Man is the earth upright and proud.” This is certainly not an intended parody, but the theological reversal is clear.

Vincent Silliman, reflecting on the 1963 hymnal in which he played a major role, recently described it as the first major liturgical attempt to treat religions as of equal standing and to view freedom as a major religious value. Nevertheless, though a generation has not yet passed, there are moves to update. Some are suggesting a loose-leaf hymnal and book of readings and services which would permit tailoring by local churches.

Laity and Clergy

Fellowships. I have used the term “church” to denote local units, though many of them prefer the less traditional name “society.” In addition -- and this may be a UU innovation -- 40 per cent are called “fellowships,” indicating an absence of professional ministerial leadership. Some of these will grow into churches, some are spin-offs from existing churches, and some, despite large budgets and buildings, have no intention of securing regular ministerial leadership. There can be no doubt that the widespread responsibility of laypersons for the full activity of their local groups leavens the UUA in unique ways. Professional ministers have the burden to legitimate themselves by achievements rather than by an ascribed status.

Lay involvement. In comparing the UUA to other denominations, one is struck by the significant roles, paid as well as volunteer, assumed by the laity. This has been the case in religious education, social action, and even theological education. In part this lay leadership reflects the absence of any fixed tradition to be transmitted and defended by “inside” specialists. Liberal religion owes its real growth to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and the continuers of that movement are found throughout the modern university -- not only in theological seminaries. Precisely because the inspirations of modern religious liberalism now come from all quarters, the person in the pulpit is as likely to quote Erich Fromm as Theodore Parker, and more likely to quote either than Augustine or Aquinas. The educated layperson has at least as ready access to and understanding of these new sources as does the minister. This situation could be called one of shared leadership or of intellectual equality between pulpit and pew. The fact remains that it is a salient aspect of the UUA.

Ministry. UU parish ministers are unusually creative and well trained. At the time of merger, in 1961, the UUA spoke of its five theological schools. In the 1975 directory the ministers’ school backgrounds included Meadville/Lombard (at the University of Chicago), 17 per cent; Harvard, 15 per cent; Tufts, 13 per cent; Starr King (in Berkeley), 10 per cent; and St. Lawrence, 10 per cent. Since then, both Tufts and St. Lawrence have closed. The figures cited indicate that 35 per cent of the UU ministers trained in schools not funded by the UUA (Harvard, to be sure, is also not funded by the UUA, but there are some long-standing historical associations and loyalties). A significant number of this second group not only trained in other schools but transferred from other denominations. Given the perennial waiting list of such would-be transfers and the role of Harvard, the funding of denominational schools has been problematic. Harvard has a better record than the denominational schools in the care and feeding of UU scholars, the other rationale for sectarian seminaries.

The UUA is now considering a controversial report urging the full ordination of a second ministry, the ministry of education. There are many highly competent directors of religious education who feel that their ministry deserves equal recognition and status. Many have not attended seminaries or have taken shorter programs when they did. In the absence of a clear-cut theological tradition, however, it is difficult to argue that this alternate route to ministry is inherently inferior.

Theological Climates and Personalities

The areas just sketched illustrate something of UU substance. At several points I have mentioned the value consensus of these contemporary UUs. To the extent that this theological core can be discovered, the particular items of present and future UUA agendas may reveal more coherence than appears on the surface.

The organizational boundaries of the UUA give some indications of this deep substance. On the “right,” a few ministers have joint fellowship with the United Church of Christ. On the “left,” ministers flow freely back and forth from Ethical Culture. In some cities and states, the UUs are part of Protestant church councils; elsewhere they are not, by a kind of mutual agreement. “UU Christians meet and publish a journal, as do the “religious humanists.” Two generations back, Unitarians and Universalists spoke of ‘‘humanism vs. theism”; in the 19th century it was “free religion’’ and “liberal Christianity,” and before that it was “rational liberalism” vs. “transcendentalism.”

The enduring affirmation, we would suggest, is the postulated linking of “reason” and “ethics.” The problem is with the priorities. No wonder the persons most likely to be quoted from UU pulpits are Alfred North Whitehead, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Buber and Erich Fromm. This dual focus on reason and ethics similarly explains the close attention religious liberals have paid to the sciences -- physics as a source for better cosmologies, and the biological and social sciences as a source for both ethics and philosophies of history.

The present and future theological contribution of the UUA is the legitimation of a post-Christian religious humanism. The current president, Paul Games, embodies this interest. An intellectual with charisma, he has not hesitated to articulate a new religious liberalism.

In a broader sense, the present period reflects the convergence of bureaucratic theology and movement theology. The social forces producing the convergence have been the membership growth and turnover since 1945, increased lay involvement, and (perhaps) the absence of theological giants who could prolong the twilight of waning theological fashions. What we have termed “bureaucratic theology” has dominated much of the UUA’s theological education and political organization until recently, giving outsiders the impression that the movement was simply a very liberal continuation of Protestant impulses. The visibility of this New England -- based faction obscured what was actually emerging.

The most coherent statements of this movement theology were being made by Sophia Fahs (as architect of religious education) and Henry Nelson Wieman (whose recognition by the CUs came largely after his retirement from the University of Chicago). The most sensitive contemporary articulator of this converging theology may turn out to be Joseph L. Fisher. An economist and ecologist, he was UUA moderator for 2 turbulent years (and is now a third-term congressman from Virginia).

A more explicit theologian, with UU identification and salience, is James Luther Adams, who has focused on social ethics and the religious role of voluntary associations. Three UU historians have also made a significant re-examination of the liberal past: Sidney Mead, George Williams and Conrad Wright. Since social activism has been a persisting and widespread UU characteristic, selection of representative figures becomes more difficult. Jack Mendelsohn certainly belongs here, as does Homer Jack. As an innovative theological educator, Robert Kimball must be noted.

Most of the persons of national visibility that we have named are academics, and such a listing runs the very risk of contributing to the bureaucratic historicism we have decried. Movement history, on the other hand, is being shaped by those whose activities are more local or denominational. The creative thrusts in preaching, worship, music, education, social action and organization which will determine the UUA’s future defy brief description or prognostication by their very variety.

What of the future -- if we assume that membership shrinkage has stabilized, that fiscal stringencies have been effected, and that a theological convergence toward a religious humanism has not only occurred but has at last received official recognition? A possible pattern is that of the Quakers -- smallness, integrity and influence. But the Friends’ ethos and ways are difficult and must be learned -- a kind of orthopraxy. A pattern of orthodoxy -- precise beliefs, precisely enforced -- seems even less likely. A third communal pattern could be based on shared values, both explicitly and implicitly religious -- an “axiocentrism.” This model seems to characterize today’s UUs. Many of these shared beliefs and values are by-products of modernity and higher education. To the extent that U.S. culture is now tilting toward conservatism, those who hold such values may come to feel and act like a minority group -- which seeks mutual support, recognizable in-group styles, viable defense patterns.

Two factors suggest that growth might recur along these lines. The 1977-78 Gallup Report showed 37 per cent of the U.S. positive toward UUs and only 10 per cent negative. Not surprisingly, 53 per cent had no opinion. The UUs’ most successful slogan in their most recent growth period was “Are you a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it?” That query, raised afresh, might well induce some of the positive viewers to become active churchpersons. Whatever happens, UU-watching will remain fascinating.

The Black Churches: A New Agenda

As Bishop John Hurst Adams of the African Methodist Episcopal Church observed recently, black churches are operating essentially on the agenda given to them by their founders. The first agenda of early black American congregations and then of emergent denominations included (1) the proclamation of the gospel, (2) benevolences, (3) education and, by the mid-19th century, (4) foreign missions. (Of course, in the antebellum period a concern for the eradication of slavery was also central.) That these items continue to dominate the churches’ mission priorities and stewardship planning may be attributed in part to the continuing marginality and relative powerlessness of blacks in American society. It is due also in part to the fact that religious institutions in black communities have not been sufficiently cognizant of the radical implications which the changing political, economic and social realities have for their life. Bishop Adams’s antidote for this institutional inertia is “zero-based” mission planning -- an imaginative and valid suggestion.

I

Some early black congregations began as benevolent societies, and all of them were concerned for the welfare of the sick, the widowed and the orphaned. Most congregations continue to maintain benevolent funds, but they are no longer accorded high priority. It is obvious in the light of massive need that the churches’ impact in this area can be only palliative. The social welfare programs sponsored by the government and by community and private agencies are far better resourced and programmatically more comprehensive than those that individual churches can sustain. The churches’ task in the area of benevolence has become that of ensuring that persons gain access to the benefits for which they, are eligible.

The churches’ historic concern for education initially focused on efforts to compensate for the exclusion of blacks from access to elementary education. After emancipation, the most pressing concern became that of establishing and supporting secondary schools and colleges. By 1900 The churches had compiled an impressive record: black Baptist associations were supporting some 80 elementary schools and 18 academies and colleges; the African Methodist Episcopal churches were underwriting 32 secondary and collegiate institutions; and the smaller AME Zion denomination was supporting eight. The denomination now named the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, only 30 years old in 1900, had established five schools. Blacks now have broad access to public secondary and higher education, and the need for church-related institutions to fill an educational vacuum has lessened considerably. The question as to whether there is a qualitative difference in the education being offered in church-sponsored colleges as over against state-supported institutions is a matter that has to be debated in the zero-based mission planning that Bishop Adams suggests.

Blacks have traditionally directed their modest foreign mission efforts to the Caribbean islands and to Africa. The institutional forms of these missions have not differed significantly from those of the majority churches; they have focused on church development, health-care institutions and education. (It may be observed that black churches have established hospitals in Africa but none in America.) The need for such missionary services is diminishing and will doubtless decline more rapidly as independent African and Caribbean nations preempt these areas of responsibility for the state.

If the traditional concerns for education, benevolences and foreign missions need to be carefully scrutinized and their priority status evaluated, the first priority. in the life of the churches does not require such rethinking. The raison d’étre of black churches has not differed from that of churches in any age. They have been the bearers of the good news that God cares about, affirms, forgives and redeems human beings to whom he has given life, and that he acts in their history. This message of divine concern has enabled black believers to survive humanely in inhumane circumstances. The communities of faith have been the social matrixes within which individual significance and worth have been given concrete embodiment and a sense of belonging has been conferred. The form in which this message is conveyed may change, but its essential content will remain the same.

Though not a part of the format agenda of the churches, church buildings have been crucial community assets. From the earliest times they were the only assembly halls to which the black community had access. They housed schools, dramatic productions, cultural events, social welfare programs, rallies and benefits of all sorts, and civil and human rights activities. The requirements in these areas are less critical today. But if the need for meeting space has declined, the claims placed on church members by movements for social, political and economic justice have not diminished. W. E. B. DuBois once remarked that the NAACP could not have survived without the support of black churches and their members. This is still the case. Though many social organizations and unions give support to such movements, church members form an indispensable segment of their constituencies, as the recent financial crisis involving the NAACP in Mississippi made clear. The churches continue to have access to the largest audience that can be gathered in black communities.

II

It is important to perceive clearly that there is no “black church” in the conventional understanding of that term. There are denominations, composed of congregations of black persons and under their control, and there are countless free-standing congregations, but there is no one entity that can be called the black church. There are also numerous black congregations in predominantly white denominations; though these are properly covered by the rubric “black churches,” it is not with such congregations that this article is concerned.

Several caveats should be entered. It is virtually impossible to make generalizations to which significant exceptions cannot be cited. Yet there is a sense in which all black congregations and denominations respond to identical external circumstances and share common internal strengths, pressures and tensions.

Unlike their white counterparts, black churches have not developed effective centralized bureaucracies. This lack may be counted as an advantage by some, but historically it has had a negative effect. For example, it is impossible to obtain accurate statistical data on such matters as membership, budgets, numbers of pastors, value of church assets, and the level of training achieved by the clergy. Not only do black churches lack fully developed administrative structures; mission structures within a given denomination often do not engage in joint strategy and program planning designed to ensure maximum effective use of all available resources. Church unity is expressed primarily in annual or quadrennial meetings rather than in integrated mission planning and cooperation.

Failure to develop strong centralized structures can be attributed to polity (particularly among the Baptists), accidents of history, patterns of church growth, migration to the cities by rural blacks and, most critically, lack of money. Religious bodies among Afro-Americans have not devised the means for generating financial surpluses sufficient to enable them to maintain national headquarters staffs. As a consequence, the mission activity of the churches is, with limited exceptions, carried out by regional or local judicatories. Denominational loyalty has rarely been fervent among black Christians. Except among black Methodists in earlier times, churches owe their origins not to the initiative of home missions boards but to concerned laypersons or clergy who undertook “to raise the flag of Zion.” In recent years the national bodies of predominantly white denominations have been experiencing diminishing support from congregations and regional judicatories. Among blacks, local support for denominational programs has rarely been directed to concerns other than foreign missions, theological education, and a college here and there. Local or regional proprietorship and support of church institutions has been the rule.

In addition to inhibiting the growth of national church structures, the generalized economic deprivation of blacks in America has contributed to the continued fragmentation of the Afro-American religious community. It has meant that irrespective of polity, each congregation, with few exceptions, is a “tub resting on its own bottom.” No black denomination has significant building or salary-support funds. Similarly, there are no means other than denominational journals, most of which have limited distribution, through which a consensus may be developed with respect to important moral, religious, social, political and economic questions.

The absence of a “sense of the church” deprives many congregations and their leaders of the information and guidance that are foundational to effective Christian witness. This need is critical in a religious community where an estimated 70 per cent of the clergy lack formal theological education. Black church people receive limited guidance from their national judicatories on such issues as abortion, homosexuality, capital punishment, women’s rights. and the like. The AME Church has recently drafted “working papers” on some of these subjects. The absence of consensus on important public issues means that the power of the churches to influence public policy tends to be proportional to the charisma and prestige of individual church leaders.

The underdevelopment of church structures and limited financial resources have also inhibited the growth of clergy retirement funds. Several denominations have made modest beginnings with pension programs, but most black pastors cannot afford to retire. Consequently, pastorates tend to be marked by long tenure, and access is restricted for younger men and women. The difficulty in finding good placements has diminished the attractiveness of the ministry as a vocation for many promising young persons.

III

Counterbalancing these observations about the weaknesses of the churches corporately is the fact that many local congregations are vibrantly involved in mission in their communities and are growing in membership as a result. Church-sponsored housing projects, some of them congregationally funded, are commonplace in major urban centers. Church buildings house Head Start schools, day-care facilities, senior citizens’ centers, tutorial programs, “Meals on Wheels,” and similar publicly funded projects. Funds are raised to amortize building mortgages -- a common obligation of most black churches. Mission funds are sent to national headquarters or conventions, and church member assessments are paid. Members continue to participate in the  quest for social justice through community organizations and form these groups’ stable center.

The net growth of black churches has not exceeded the rate of growth in the general population. In general, long-established congregations appear to hold their own or to slip a little in terms of total membership, while Pentecostal and charismatic churches seem to have an increasing appeal, particularly for youth. Young people appear to be attracted to churches in which worship is free-form and spontaneous, and in which gospel music has supplanted the hymns of Watts and Wesley.

Like their white counterparts, black churches are commuter churches. They tend to be homogeneous with respect to social class -- except for Pentecostal or charismatic churches, which are no longer the exclusive havens of the disinherited.

As has been suggested above, no one knows the exact membership of the black churches. It is estimated that the total numbers of black Baptists are in excess of 8 million, with the National Baptist Convention, Inc., having approximately 6.3. million members; the Progressive National Baptist Convention, 750,000; and the National Baptist Convention, Unincorporated, 1 million. The total membership of black Methodist bodies is around 2.8 million. The largest Pentecostal body, the Church of God in Christ estimates its total membership at 3 million, and there are uncounted numbers of persons affiliated with less well-known church groupings and thousands of free-standing congregations. According to the conventional wisdom, approximately 61 per cent of blacks are members of Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant. By this standard, a total of 3.4 million Afro-Americans are carried on church rosters, though the active membership must be well below this figure. But if these figures are reasonably accurate, they are an index to the potential of the churches to influence public policy if their strengths can be marshaled.

IV

As we look toward the future, the agenda for black churches is a complex one. The existence of the churches is not in jeopardy; they are and will continue to be for large numbers of persons the only accessible institutions that will meet their need to be affirmed in their identity and sense of belonging in both a human and a divine dimension. What is in jeopardy is the capacity of the churches to attract urban dwellers in large numbers while church programs are geared to a 19th century rural ethos.

The most significant phenomenon to impact black churches in this century has been migration to the cities. Urban churches grew and prospered as a result of that population movement; but the rural ethos continued to be reflected in worship, organization and mission priorities. There are now persons in the pews who were born in the city, who are secular in their outlook, who are keenly aware of the ways in which their lives are shaped by structures which they do not control and who are concerned that their religious  institutions should be active agents of social change. This new constituency requires programs of Christian nurture that address the consciousness, realities and urgencies of contemporary urban life. In this connection the church must become bilingual: it must understand the language of the world and translate the gospel into the idioms and symbols of that language. Christian nurture must also be bifocal. It must keep its eye on heaven, but it must not fail to see the world at hand and seek to enable persons to wrest meaning and significance from their lives in it.

Perhaps the central agenda of the black churches in the years ahead is accurately to assess their corporate potential for impacting the quality of life available to their constituencies. This task will require, as a matter of first priority, careful determination of mission priorities and the mobilization of resources for their implementation. These activities must be carried out in recognition of the fact that many of the problems affecting the lives of individuals in negative ways are systemic, and can be dealt with only at that level. This effort will inevitably involve individual congregations in difficult decisions concerning the allocation of resources formerly committed to the traditional mission agenda. Local autonomy will have to yield to functional ecumenism for the sake of faithfulness in pursuing God’s will and purpose that justice and peace shall prevail among human beings.

Historically, black churches have been clergy-dominated. This situation must change if religious institutions are to continue to attract gifted persons to their company. It is imperative that the talents of church members be increasingly utilized on behalf of the mission of the church. An important by-product of the involvement of laity in mission is that better-trained lay and clergy leadership will be required. Warm evangelicalism will not compensate for naïve understanding of the powers and principalities of the world.

It has frequently been observed that the quality of life in inner-city communities is deteriorating at alarming rates, and that part of this deterioration is attributable to the erosion of moral and humane values. Churches must not ignore these phenomena. They must be concerned that large numbers of young people never come within the sphere of their teaching or influence. While it is widely agreed that the causes for the morbidity of communities in urban centers are traceable to diverse factors, churches cannot be quiescent in the face of them. Family structures must be reinforced, and churches must be active agents and participants in organizations seeking to help communities improve themselves.

Missionary conventions and church boards face an important period of self-examination. They must ask themselves what the increasing, sense of self-identity in the Third World has to say to missionary structures. What does the indigenization of churches mean for black missionaries in black countries? Black church missions early reflected the “redemption of Africa” theme. What does that term connote at a time when cultural Christianity is undergoing rigorous scrutiny? What does it mean to affirm indigenous religion while proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ? In the light of Third World realities, have the terms “missions” and “missionary” become anachronistic?

Another entry that must be prominent on the agenda of black churches is the nature of worship. Is the “old-time religion” good enough for contemporary urbanites? How can churches respond to the desire of individuals for spontaneity in worship so that form is not mistaken for substance? Can churches devise means for accommodating a genuine desire to abandon outmoded forms without derogating from the claims of the gospel and the truth that worship is the service of God? The ability to sing a gospel, song with feeling is not to be equated with transformation of one’s life nor with continued commitment to the One who is Lord.

Black churches must begin to examine the economic realities of their existence, not in the light of their individual or denominational budgets alone, but in view of their tremendous possibilities to effect social change by utilizing the considerable resources that pass through their hands. In a city with 300 churches, it is fair to assume conservatively that the average Sunday offering would amount to $300 per church or nearly $ 100,000 for all churches. If this sum were put in a single bank, considerable leverage policy in regard to urban neighborhoods. Churches need to consider what cooperative buying of goods and services might mean in savings, influence on the employment practices of vendors, and overall economic impact.

It will be noted that an agenda has been suggested for black churches irrespective of their denominational affiliation. I offer no apology for this lack of differentiation since the situation of one black church is, in large measure, the situation of all black churches. All are addressing themselves to the needs of an oppressed people. One might even suggest that the agenda is appropriate for all churches that wish to take seriously the ministry of Christ in the world.

V

While the challenges facing black churches are difficult ones, there are important harbingers that bode well for the future. Modestly increasing numbers of bright young people from all denominations are seeking theological training. They are exerting increasing pressure on educational institutions to equip them to be resources to the communities in which they will serve, as well as competent leaders of religious institutions. There are also evidences that the denominational leadership of the church is becoming more aware of the changed context within which mission must be implemented. Another important sign is that church membership has been holding steady and that middle-class defections have not been as numerous as some had predicted.

At the local level laypersons are increasingly asserting their right to participate in the governance of the churches. Clergy serving churches with congregational polity are finding themselves to be governed by constitutions and by-laws in direct contrast to the monarchical clergy styles of a passing generation. Laypeople are also exerting pressure on their churches to demonstrate an authentic sense of social responsibility.

Another favorable index is the broadening effort to provide basic-training for church leaders who are not formally qualified to pursue graduate theological education. This theological training which is both theoretical and practical will have a significant impact on the churches and their ministries.

But the most significant development in recent years has been an increasing awareness among blacks not affiliated with the churches that religious institutions are as critical to the survival of Afro-Americans in the present as they have been in the past. Thus there is pressure from all quarters for the churches to actualize their potential as agents of social change without derogation of their traditional role as communities of faith. Black churches need not abandon their historic mission agendas but rather should consider them in the light of new realities in the world where mission must be implemented.

A Challenge to the Eco-Doomsters

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.   -- John Donne.

Ever since the publication of his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” ten years ago, Garrett Hardin has been the leading exponent of a population policy that would embrace realism in place of naïveté, pragmatism in place of thoughtless charity, and consideration of long-range benefits in place of in immediate pay-off. Speaking bluntly and uncompromisingly, Hardin -- professor of human ecology at the University or California, Santa Barbara -- has brought such concepts as “social triage,” “lifeboat ethics” and “environmental commons” into our discourse,

Dr. Hardin counsels prudence -- a value not alien to our religious tradition. Jesus told his followers to be as “harmless as doves but as wise as serpents”; he warned them not to begin building a tower if they lacked the resources to complete it. Unlike some breast-beating critics on the far left who are forever placing the blame on America, Hardin holds Third World nations themselves largely responsible for their desperate plight. Some of their leaders, he says, are not convinced that they have a population problem; some are more concerned with “demagoguery than with demography.” The “green revolution” was supposed to buy Third World countries time to put their houses in order, but some of them frittered the time away.

Certainly Hardin is right in insisting that “trade” is to be preferred to “aid.” The former enhances feelings of mutuality, whereas the dole develops dependency on the part of the recipient and an attitude of condescension and noblesse oblige on the part of the giver. A Chinese proverb should be kept in mind: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him the rest of his life.” Nonetheless, Dr. Hardin’s views on the population explosion are inadequate in several respects.

I

1. Hardin ignores the validity of other population strategies. His own position is a “crisis-environmentalist” ideology -- or, in more pejorative terms, an “eco-doomster” stance. Thomas Malthus was that ideology’s “great prophet”; Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin are “sons of the prophet.” Crisis-environmentalists view both disease and cure as simple; our ecosystem is sick, and the cause of the malady is overpopulation. A remedy can be effected only by moving as quickly as possible -- and it may already be too late -- to zero population growth (ZPG). But how is this to be done? Persuasion won’t work; therefore, governmental coercion will have to be applied. We must, after all, preserve our greatest value -- quality of life.

Another population strategy is that of the “family planners,” who aim to achieve ZPG by the elimination of all unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, both within and without marriage. They would provide complete and free access for individuals and families to all available methods of birth control, abortion and sterilization. Family planners stress the value of freedom: families know best, if they are given full information and if governmental coercion is minimized.

But a third position, that of the “developmentalists,” has the most to recommend it, both scientifically and ethically. Like other population ideologies, it seeks to reduce pollution, stabilize population, and to declare the “religion of endless growth” lethal in its effect. At issue are not the ends toward which we strive, but the means. Developmentalists indict crisis-environmentalists for being reductionistic; that is, concerned only about climate, statistics and quantities. In contrast, the developmentalists’ vision is wide-angled, for they see food and population issues as ineluctably moral, economic, social and political. The value they emphasize, then, is distributive justice.

This tradition, which goes back at least as far as Aristotle, says that human beings, in order to have community, must “play fair.” We must strike a balance between our own good fortune and the ill fortune of others, striving toward equity and evenhandedness; for without such goals, we are barbarians, The credo of the developmentalist, then, is “Take care of the people, and the people will take care of themselves.” If the exploited are given their due -- employment, health care, security, education, balanced diets -- and saved from the precarious brink of near extinction, birth rates will decline.

Dr. Hardin argues that “for all animals, good nutrition means greater fertility” -- an opinion that flies in the face of demographic data when applied to human beings. Pervasive insecurity creates high human fertility. Where life is Hobbesian -- “mean, nasty, brutish and short” -- security is sought in producing children. Each additional child increases one’s social and economic insurance against the void. Hardin’s thesis, unsound on its own terms, defies the fact that the best way to lower the birth rate is not to let people drift closer to the abyss but rather to give them a better life. Third World cultures are behaving as many European ones did 200 years ago; by plotting a curve relating birth and death rates according to time, we can see that these countries are right on schedule. They are struggling to get through the “demographic transition” -- the shift from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates. To abandon them now would be not only unjust but counterproductive.

2. Hardin’s metaphor of the “lifeboat” is not only misleading but dangerous. Such imagery is a vestige of the 19th century laissez-faire era, but the values it represents are deeply embedded in our national psyche, as the cowboy ads for Marlboro cigarettes testify. Lifeboat ethics encourages the worst myth-making tendencies, promoting the isolationism and self-absorption that have always been our nemesis.

Perhaps Dr. Hardin should have stayed with his original metaphor, the Commons. It, like some other images -- Kenneth Boulding’s “spaceship earth,” Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” and Teilhard’s “wheat sheaf” -- is holistic and organic. Such figures of speech help us resist the temptation to believe that salvation lies in separation and in “going it alone.” These images are in harmony with human evolution. To be sure, all around we see conflicts and compartments -- racial, religious, ethnic -- but despite these divisions, there are profound movements toward connectedness, reunion and intercommunion. We are now trying to hammer out laws for the mining of the seabed, recognizing that neither the moon, nor the sea, nor the minerals under the sea belong exclusively to any one nation.

Even if we accept the lifeboat metaphor, we must acknowledge that ours is not a self-sufficient vessel. The higher our technology and the greater our consumption, the more vulnerable we become. The brief oil embargo by the OPEC nations a few years ago indicated just how “tipsy” was our craft. We are dependent on other nations not only for oil but also for manganese, cobalt, chromium, titanium, tin, mercury, asbestos and many other minerals. Cartels are being organized by developing nations determined to secure fair prices for their raw materials. National “privatism” is at a dead end; interdependence is the wave of the future.

II

3. Lifeboat ethics stresses survival as the summum bonum, to the neglect of other values. Certainly, survival is an important value, but if it is proclaimed in fear and despair, will it not threaten the search for community, mutuality and reconciliation? Twenty years ago our nation, traumatized by the threat of nuclear holocaust, was on the brink of committing hundreds of billions of dollars to provide fallout shelters in case the ICBMs started dropping. Some individuals constructed elaborate shelters in their backyards and stocked them with food supplies -- and a few even suggested that to prepare for a nuclear attack, the shelters would need to be equipped with machine guns to keep improvident neighbors away. I resolved then that I would not like to live in a world with people whose only value was survival. Had our nation taken the “shelter-survival” route then, we wouldn’t have SALT agreements now.

We have always seen ourselves as a humanitarian people. Our food, fiber, and technical know-how have aided millions. To be sure, we haven’t always acted from motives of pure altruism. Reinhold Niebuhr taught us that national “will to power” can never be excluded from an analysis of relations between groups. My concern is to keep the dialectic between egoism and altruism, U.S. and U.N., American citizen and Bangladesh peasant intact. To allow the “survivalists” to call the shots would, I believe, have a devastating effect on the American moral consciousness. Norman Cousins, former editor of Saturday Review, has said that “desensitization, not hunger, is the great curse” afflicting the earth. Not long ago a majority of Americans became accustomed to the napalming carried out by U.S. forces in Vietnam; it might not be hard for us to adjust to the knowledge that there were tens of millions of children overseas dying with bloated bellies.

4. Hardin’s views encourage an American tendency toward ethnocentrism in viewing underdeveloped countries. Those countries should be spared condescending references suggesting that they are inept, irresponsible and lacking in wisdom. It is an instinctive human reaction to deny our own guilt for the sufferings of others. We are blind to the devastating effects of colonialism, imperialism and the workings of multinational corporations on powerless people. Because people are poor does not mean that they are without virtue; nor, because they are powerless, are they without dignity. Our Western religious tradition informs us that it is the powerful, well-fed, militaristic nations that are in danger of losing their souls.

Lifeboat ethicists are unaware of ethnocentrism, their cultural bias. When Hardin says, “Every Indian life saved through medical or nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain,” that is a view “from the top.” But “from the bottom,” the moral reality is seen quite differently, though the logic is no less exact: “Every American sustained at the cost of 60 times the resources now required to sustain an Indian diminishes the long-range quality of Indian life.”

It may be that some Third World nations resist our efforts to dictate their population policies because they see a connection between our own policies and the social cancers growing in our body politic. They may say: “Certainly you have solved your population problem, but do we have to accept the rest -- abortion, rampant divorce, delinquency, drug addiction, crime, disrespect of children for parents? Is this what you want for us?” Would that we could see ourselves as others see us.

III

5. An appeal to determinism and necessity should not encourage fatalism. A belief in various forms of determinism -- economic, demographic, social -- gave rise in the past to a “nothing can be done” attitude. For example, Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” theory mysteriously united individual acts of selfishness that in aggregate produced a common good. Karl Marx’s discovery of “scientific socialism” made it seem inevitable that capitalism was doomed. Only 100 years ago, social Darwinians accepted the dogma of the survival of the fittest; nature was “red in tooth and claw.” Extrapolating their theory to the human world, they gave us another new commandment: “Let ill enough alone.” Thus the robber barons were given the green light, social amelioration was said to violate “natural law,” and the poor were regarded as deserving their miserable lot for having been born with deleterious genes and “unfavorable characteristics.”

Dr. Hardin would have another commandment added to the Decalogue: “Thou shalt not transgress against the carrying capacity of the environment.” He speaks of the hubris of those who think that they can fly in the face of nature’s ways. In general, I agree: there are limits -- but we don’t know what those limits are. When I was a boy working on a Minnesota farm, the agronomists of the time were saying that the maximum possible corn production was 60 bushels to the acre. And yet today farmers yields of corn far exceed that figure. Again, I agree that the constraints of nature ought to be respected, but we must admit that they are elastic. Let us not appeal to a new iron law of “carrying capacity” that will engender either fatalism or fanaticism and consign those we could have helped to a future of “benign neglect.”

6. Hardin prefers China over India as the model for the Third World. I find it strange that Hardin can maintain that the 1 billion Chinese are “much better off” than the 600 million Indians. India, the world’s largest democracy, despite significant agricultural and economic gains, is disorderly and inefficient, and people are starving. But people are not attracted to a democracy because of its efficiency because its trains run on time, but because of its values -- because it is an open society that values human dignity and preserves basic freedoms. In The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor speaks to the returned Christ: “In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, Make us your slaves but feed us.” It is remarkable how myopic many academics are when it comes to totalitarian regimes. We admire societies that “have got it together.” In the 1930s we glorified Soviet Russia; now China is seen as the ideal.

IV

7. Lifeboat moralists fail to see the connection between affluence and starvation. In all honesty, we must acknowledge that ours is not a lifeboat but a luxury yacht. We are a throwaway, nonreturnable, planned-obsolescence society. When I was a boy in a family of seven, I carried a small two-and-a-half-foot can of garbage to the curb once a week. Today there are two or three large GI cans at the curb in front of each house in the suburb where I live, though the families are smaller.

The Club of Rome has said that a nation with a diminishing population may nonetheless put increasing pressure on the ecosystem if it doesn’t change “sloppy habit” life styles. To fixate on population is to touch only one aspect of our environmental crisis. It’s easy for us to point the accusing finger at others for not making use of the pill, the IUD, the abortion and the vasectomy. But our worship of such luxuries as the private automobile, air conditioning and marbleized beef indicates that we have done little in the areas of antipollution, recycling, energy reduction and simplification of life styles. Is it any wonder that some writers in other countries have said that “the world can stand only one United States”?

I conclude with a quotation from one who did not moralize or patronize, one who had a reverence for life; one who, by the way he spent his life, put deed and word together -- Albert Schweitzer: “Wherever there is lost the consciousness that every man is an object of concern for us just because he is a man, civilization and morals are shaken, and the advance to fully developed inhumanity is only a question of time.”

The Contemporary Resource of Liberal Theology

Despite the recent evangelical resurgence in American Christianity, contemporary Christians must not delude themselves that the old liberal problems of religion and culture will go away. Certainly, mainline Christianity’s preoccupation with social affairs as a substitute for religious experience has resulted in a general decline of “standard-brand” denominations. And for some, the current evangelical renaissance is a welcome revitalization. Nevertheless, as increasing numbers of born-again Christians find themselves catapulted to positions of managerial responsibility in our society, something more than pious gratitude for divine approval of their accomplishments will be necessary if their decisions are to reflect the substance of Christian faith.

Utilizing the Resources

Contrary to the opinions of some, there are resources within liberal Christian theology that can be brought to bear on the problems facing our age. These can be utilized without a wholesale capitulation of Christianity’s distinctive witness to the assumptions and values of modern society. Indeed, to ignore liberal theology’s resources is to run the double risk of relinquishing any chance for Christian influence on the future direction of our society and of surrendering the uniqueness of the Christian witness itself. All too readily, as anyone who lived through the 1950s can recall, Christianity in America has succumbed to an unwholesome accommodation of “God and country.” But it is precisely this kind of uncritical alliance that obliterates the distinctiveness of Christian faith. The particular resources of contemporary liberal theology that have especial relevance for a Christian approach to our culture’s current difficulties are these: (1) the contemporary historical consciousness, (2) the conclusions of biblical scholars regarding Jesus and the Kingdom of God, and (3) the current “process” understanding of God, Which allows a positive relation (but not a surrender!) of belief in God to the modern world view.

The first of these resources arouses great resistance among evangelical theologians and believers. Indeed, the historical consciousness has apparently been responsible for the undermining of the common believer’s confidence in the Bible as the authoritative locus of the revelation of God’s truth to humanity. But “historical consciousness” has come to mean many things during the past two centuries -- not all of them directly contrary to certain interests of Christian believers. Generally speaking, the term can refer to a widely held set of assumptions or presuppositions, to a particular method of inquiry, or to a speculative philosophy of history.

At the level of assumption, the historical consciousness is the awareness that every event or entity (including persons or religious traditions) possesses its own finite, historical context and can be explained exhaustively in terms of that context. The most important, and apparently the most threatening, aspect of such awareness is that it excludes all consideration of divinity to explain what happens in the world. To understand an event historically is decidedly not to view it as derived from the action of a god.

Of course, the scholarly literature on this subject is technical and vast; to state the matter so crudely hardly does the topic justice. But the common Christian believer may intuit the threat of the historical consciousness in something like this crude way; the perceived threat cannot be conjured away by unsupported exhortations for the believer to accept the modern world view. Rather, he or she must be allowed to see that the threat is actually an occasion for communicating the gospel in our era. I would accept the notion that most persons in our culture, Christian and non-Christian alike, function in their daily lives, perhaps unconsciously, on the basis of the assumed absence of God in history. To those who claim not to operate from that world view, it should be pointed out that an uncritical assumption of divine causality creates obstacles for communicating one’s views to those who embrace the historical consciousness.

The principal advantage of accepting initially the assumptions of the historical consciousness in religious or theological discourse is that one is not committed from the outset to possibly meaningless language regarding some realm of the supernatural. Even those who can claim to have had direct, personal experience of the divine must somehow interact with persons who cannot make or even understand such a claim. The point is that if spirit-filled Christians want to communicate effectively with those who do not share such experiences, then they should heed the assumptions of the secularists, for it is a safe bet that if another person’s deepest presuppositions are ignored, the possibility for meaningful dialogue diminishes rapidly.

Investigating the Christian Tradition

Certainly, it is not only the secularistic implications of the historical consciousness that trouble evangelical Christians. As a method of inquiry in relation to the Bible, the historical approach is distressing to those who to some extent accept the Bible as revelational authority. The problem here is with what Van Harvey (cf. The Historian and the Believer [Macmillan, 1966]) has called the “new morality of knowledge.” The main difficulty which the historical-critical method poses for traditional interpreters of the Bible is the necessity for the historian to interpret past events on the basis of an analogy with his or her own present, critically interpreted experience. Such a principle of historical thinking has led to significant reinterpretation of biblical materials, including the miracle traditions about Jesus, the resurrection, and the ascription of titles of divinity to Jesus. Here, if anywhere, the conservative Christian must surely balk and simply assert the utter contradiction of the Christian faith to modern methods of understanding.

Nevertheless, it is precisely because of what historical inquiry does tell us about Jesus that we should attend to its results. To be sure, there are many things it may never be able to tell us. But to admit this limitation is not to say that we can learn nothing from it. Indeed, what historical inquiry offers is quite relevant and useful as we face the perils of our technological era. Moreover, an acceptance of the methods of historical inquiry renders the investigation of the Christian tradition commensurate with other methods of inquiry and, hence, intelligible to other modern persons. True, historical inquiry may not be able to assure us that Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah, the Word made flesh, or even that he regarded himself as such. But it is able to give us much in the way of insights about Jesus’ proclamation and embodiment of the Kingdom of God.

Here we encounter another of evangelical Christians’ objections to historical thinking. It would seem that, with its reticence about pronouncements regarding the divinity of Jesus and about acceptance of him as the absolute locus of God’s revelation, the historical consciousness as speculative philosophy of history utterly and explicitly contradicts the central claims of the Christian faith. That is, it devolves into a historical relativism which denies the absolute truth of the Christian revelation and, hence, negates any chance of affirming a standard by which people can conduct their affairs with the certainty that they are performing God’s will. If there can be no absolute expression of religious truth and ethical valuation, then must we not conclude that historical thinking sets us adrift precisely when our culture needs firm anchoring?

In reply, one must acknowledge that historical thinking precludes infallible affirmations about the “center of history” or about the “point of convergence” toward which all of history moves. Because of the limited perspective from which every historical interpretation is carried out, no single event can be seen to embody or express the ultimate meaning or direction of history in a way that the historical interpreter can know with finality.

And yet, even this limitation is not without its usefulness, for it can surely lead to the appreciative evaluation of other, non-Western expressions of the meaning and destiny of human existence without thereby relinquishing insights to be gained by attention to Christian history and tradition. In a world shrunk by travel and communications technologies, one which can no longer afford conflict arising from ethnocentric prejudice, the appreciation of other religious and cultural views is necessary for the survival of the human species. Moreover, it is possible to accept this limitation of the historical consciousness without relinquishing the Christian faith’s distinctive insights about the meaning of human existence. Indeed, the limitation imposed by the historical consciousness, which prevents the destructive absolutizing of any religious or cultural standpoint, affords a measure of hope in a pluralistic era to diverse groups of people.

Jesus and the Kingdom of God

The historical research on Jesus and the New Testament during the past 200 years has been complex and highly diverse. And yet, it is possible to point to a loose consensus among biblical scholars of the past few decades concerning what can be known on the basis of rigorous historical inquiry.

Even prescinding from traditional, dogmatic affirmations, historical interpreters do tell us a great deal about Jesus. In a word, the traditions center on Jesus’ proclamation and embodiment of the Kingdom of God. It is perhaps best to speak of the symbol rather than the concept of the Kingdom in the New Testament (here I am following the late Norman Perrin’s Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom [Fortress, 1976]), primarily because a symbol possesses effective power on levels which a concept does not -- i.e., those of action or praxis. Be that as it may, it is clear, according to recent New Testament scholarship, that the symbol of the Kingdom is radically eschatological. Although the temporal parameters of God’s active reign in history are apparently indefinite in the Jesus traditions, it seems clear that the symbol of the Kingdom does not refer only to some supernatural realm or ‘time” at the close of history.

Indeed, in the parables and the sayings about the Kingdom, that symbol includes the unconditional acceptance in love of those who are normally outside the religious and social mainstream. And the consequences of such acceptance are radical: the entire social fabric is shaken. None of the usual ways of demarcating those deemed evil or sinful by the wider society are to be retained in order to exclude outcasts from full participation in their own destiny. On the contrary, the old categories no longer apply; the social structure that depends on the ability to distinguish between the “worthy” and the “unworthy” is challenged.

For example, really to

hear the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-35) in its original first century setting was to be confronted with the possibility of saying what a pious Jew in that context would not have said: “good” plus “Samaritan.” (This interpretation has been suggested by John Dominic Crossan; see his In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus [Harper & Row, 1973].) A contemporary equivalent would equate “good” with a representative of the group one now most despises. This kind of reversal or shattering of social expectations is an interpretation applicable also to other sayings and parables of Jesus.

All this is not to say that the symbol of the Kingdom of God is primarily or only ethical in content. It points to, and itself generates, the reality of a wholly new situation for persons in relation to God, to themselves, and to one another. But it does provide a vision of active being in the world that is clearly relevant to our most pressing problems.

First, the symbol of the Kingdom discloses that our responsibility for ourselves and our world is continually shirked and distorted. In revealing to us the social structures, categories and expectations by which we exclude those most in need of acceptance, it unmasks our pretensions, our unjustified feelings of contentment and self-satisfied smugness in the face of a world characterized by injustice, hunger and depression of the human spirit.

And second, the eschatological symbol reveals that the reality of the Kingdom is always coming. We are not bound in any deterministic fashion to the structures of our past. Our sins are forgiven. To be sure, the past does influence and shape the present, but its social structures and patterns of behavior are not wholly determinative of the future. The eschatological character of the symbol indicates that the future is indeed open and that we are continually presented with possibilities for decision and actualization.

The Kingdom symbol’s positive emphasis is clearly on the surprising character of God’s activity and on concern for other persons -- especially those who are poor, broken, dying, and in despair. Action in behalf of such persons is always possible in our historical situation and is, in fact, called forth by the symbol of the Kingdom. Certainly, the consequences of such action can be highly threatening to the social fabric. And if the example of Jesus can be taken seriously, those who identify with the reality of the Kingdom of God must expect nothing other than the possible loss of their own personal security and that of their group. For those who accept Jesus message, who participate in the reality to which the symbol of the Kingdom points, crucifixion is to be expected, though not sought. The promise of Jesus is that in the loss of our personal security is found our true destiny, the most profound meaning of our existence.

A Contemporary Notion of God

The third major resource of contemporary theology that is relevant to the present situation is the “process” notion of God explicated by several thinkers -- including Charles Hartshorne, Bernard Meland, John Cobb, Schubert Ogden, David Griffin, Langdon Gilkey, David Tracy and Bernard Lee. Much less can be claimed by way of consensus in this area, since not all contemporary theologians are convinced that it is necessary to reconceive the idea of God along process lines (i.e., as suggested by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as well as by thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin). Nevertheless, the process notion of God possesses certain advantages for fostering theological reflection in a technological era.

To begin with the kind of generalization of which biblical scholars are especially wary, the God of the Bible is depicted in process thought as the creator-preserver of the world. The exact character of God’s relationship to the world is not precisely delineated in the Bible -- certainly not in philosophical terms. But the process view affirms God as the final, ultimate reality.

The primary difference between the process concept of God as creator-preserver of the world and that of classical theism is that the former insists God ought not be conceived as aloof to and unaffected by what happens in the world. For process thinkers, this insistence most emphatically does not mean that God is less than perfect, not in control, or totally determined by what happens in the world. Rather, God is still seen, as in the Bible, to be entering into meaningful, loving relationships with all creatures. What happens in the world “makes a difference” to God in that those events influence the quality of the divine experience of the world. But what happens in the world determines neither the fact of God’s existence nor that of the divine perfection. That God is the supremely and enduringly loving one is never in doubt; but that God’s love is fulfilled and returned is, in some degree, dependent on the free decision of the creatures.

Although this idea of God differs from classical notions, two principal advantages should not be overlooked. First, God is not conceived in a manner that conflicts with modern persons experience of change and temporality. Langdon Gilkey, in Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), has made the point that the sense of transience or temporality, the sense that all things are in passage, is a fundamental characteristic of experience. All too frequently, theologians have assumed that temporality, passage and change are to be associated with finitude, imperfection and evil. And indeed, it is possible to experience and interpret change in such a way. Change and temporality can also, however, make possible the realization of justice, of liberation from oppression, of increased experiences of fulfillment and joy. To say that God undergoes change while not relinquishing the perfection of enduring concern for and preservation of the world is to conceive God in a manner that does not deny the modern experience of temporality and yet retains the biblical insight that God is actively involved.

A second advantage: the process notion of God avoids a direct conflict with the modern acceptance of the autonomy of human existence. Ever since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, modern persons have asserted their freedom from the special tutelage of religious authority. In the West, human freedom has not, of course, always been understood in terms of individual autonomy (cf. the thought of St. Augustine and John Calvin on this point); and there is some evidence that the modern individualistic understanding of freedom is fundamentally responsible for some of our present cultural difficulties. Nevertheless, while acknowledging that this notion of freedom in its individualistic extreme cannot remain uncriticized, we must also assert that the sense of personal human dignity is very much a feature of any modern definition of human existence and cannot be facilely discarded. The virtue of the process understanding of God is that it avoids denying altogether the modern conception of personhood while proceeding to alter and shape it in more humane ways.

In short, process thought contends that God does not rule over creatures in tyrannical fashion but rather presents possibilities to humans for actualizing the divine will. Regardless of whether such possibilities are fully actualized, God continually and persistently presents new possibilities. Not that human beings are completely autonomous vis-à-vis the divine will: they must always deal with the possibilities God presents. But it does mean that they are, within limits, free to accept or reject those options. For human beings to enact the divine intention for their existence in this sense is not for them to relinquish their human dignity.

It is now possible to see that process thought conceives God to be actively concerned with our historical destiny. This divine concern, which finds expression for the Christian in the teaching and activity of Jesus, carries the emphasis contained in the symbol of the Kingdom of God. Thus, God’s active concern expresses itself within history but transcends the historical situation in that there is always presented to us the possibility of service in love to the neighbor -- i.e., to the one in need. That such possibilities continue to be offered is a reality that cannot be derived from the historical situation as it now is, since it is that very situation, with all of its divisive and dehumanizing structures, that threatens to close off the alternative of service to the neighbor. But though the possibility of love for the neighbor is not derived from the present situation, it is relevant to that situation. Indeed, it is the presence of that opportunity which holds the current Situation open for the future; without such a possibility, there would be no meaningful future. In light of this consideration, the question remains whether such a possibility will be actualized, whether service in love will be rendered to the neighbor. And in the process view of God, that question clearly is put to us and awaits our decision. (Cf. Langdon Gilkey’s Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History [Seabury, 1976].)

Christian Hope in a Technological Era

Up to this point, our discussion has focused on resources that can underlie a theological approach to the problems of our era. We can mention only briefly some of those problems in order to indicate the relevance of the resources.

It would be no exaggeration to say that persons in the West are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the consequences of their culture. Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (Norton, 1974) is representative of a certain somber mood that emerges when people reflect on the chances for our culture to overcome its myriad difficulties of population growth, of natural resource and environmental limitations, and of what Heilbroner refers to as the perplexing inability of our civilization to satisfy the human spirit. The prospects for conscious control of human biological evolution posed by recombinant DNA research raise directly and sharply certain questions about the future not only of our own culture but also of the human species itself. Christian theology can contribute directly to the discussion of some of these ethical problems (work now being done in the ethics of biological and medical research is especially impressive). But more generally, Christian theology can contribute to the formation of a set of attitudes, of a world view, from which such problems can be addressed.

According to the view of God and human existence in history sketched above, it is clear that human beings are responsible for the condition of the world. Even a decision not to exercise responsibility for the world does not mean that such responsibility can be avoided. The question is not whether to tend our garden, but how. Or, to switch metaphors, in the global village wrought by modern communications technology, the question is not whether we shall adjudicate differences among peoples, but how -- i.e., violently, convulsively, tragically, or peaceably, humanely, imaginatively.

By the same token, to affirm the necessity of exercising human responsibility is not to express a naive confidence in our ability to solve all our problems if we simply put our minds to it. On the contrary, the symbol of the Kingdom of God discloses to us the manifold distortions that have characterized the exercise of our responsibility in the past. Conditions of poverty, racism, sexual discrimination, hunger and political injustice all testify to the way in which, for centuries, social structures, practices and concern for the welfare of one’s own group at the expense of others have denied the full realization of God’s Kingdom. A realistic assessment of our situation -- so the neo-orthodox theologians of this century have taught us -- will not allow us to assume sanguinely that we can generate solutions to these conditions solely from within a situation governed by the conditions themselves. Rather, we must recognize that any solution arises ultimately from beyond the present situation and that we are called to the difficult task of discerning and embodying such a solution. In a word, we are called to discern and to realize -- in all of the marvelous ambiguity of that word -- the Kingdom of God in our midst.

In a world characterized by inequitable distribution of material goods, massive imbalance in the use of the world’s limited resources, and exclusivistic concern for the well-being of one’s own national, ethnic or religious group, we can see that the kind of hope which Christianity fosters is peculiar. The hope generated by the symbol of the Kingdom of God pointing to God’s active reign in history is not confidence that a successful outcome of our difficulties is guaranteed.

Indeed, if the teaching and activity of Jesus are any guide, the symbol of the Kingdom means, among other things, that God’s activity in the world is to be discerned precisely in those forces and events that threaten the established structures of injustice. Insofar as our own culture participates in -- indeed, is founded upon -- structures of systemic evil, a happy outcome of our difficulties, as opposed to other people’s difficulties, ought not be expected in the Christian view. But Christians should not thereby become resigned to increased suffering and evil, especially as these must be endured by the wretched of the earth. Rather, the Christian hope is that God’s reign will be increasingly manifest in history -- or, in less traditional terms, that the possibility for active, loving concern which is ever presented anew to us will be increasingly fulfilled.

The Christian hope, then, is that, regardless of our own security and that of our group, the possibility of active, loving concern for those who are in need is and will always be present. That one can dare to maintain such hope depends on acceptance of the Christian faith’s promise that precisely in the relinquishing of concern for one’s own security, ultimate security and meaning are found. Indeed, one could go further. This peculiar kind of hope itself opens up the possibility of a particular stance in the world: one of concern for others even at the expense of concern for the survival of our way of life. If this kind of hope can be construed as both appropriate to the Christian tradition (especially the biblical traditions about Jesus) and relevant to our cultural situation, then it would seem that the resources of contemporary liberal theology should command more attention than they are presently accorded.

The dangers of conservative religious thought have frequently been noted by liberal theologians to include a kind of individualistic withdrawal from the social realities of the world. But as evangelical Christians increasingly emerge as leaders of our society, they can find in the now somewhat despised and ignored liberal theology important resources for relating the legitimate concerns of Christian faith to the pressing problems of our time.