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Woody Allen, Theologian

Kant was right. The mind imposes order. It also tells you how much to tip.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

God is silent. Now if we can only get man to shut up.

Quickly now, who penned those mortal lines? Nineteenth century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard writing on a stale Danish to amuse his friends?. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in an earlier career as itinerant ghostwriter for Aimee Semple McPherson? Billy Graham in his diary for April (entries presumably followed by, “Only foolin’, Lord, only foolin’ ”)?

None of the above. The thoughts are those of the troubled agnostic religiophilosopher Woody Allen -- the same Brooklyn-born thinker who long ago changed his name from Allen S. Konigsberg to avoid being mistaken for just another German theologian. Allen devotees are familiar with the God talk and death obsession in two books of his collected works -- Getting Even (Random House, 1971) and Without Feathers (Random House, 1975). In his movies, Woody frequently uses priests and ministers, rabbis and nuns as comic ploys. His Love and Death was practically a complete theological statement on the screen -- despite distracting gags and funny lines.

I

His latest movie is Annie Hall, with Woody in his customary role as writer (in this case, with Marshall Brickman), director and actor [see the review by William Siska, p. 593 -- Ed.]. It is not as saturated with obvious religious references as was Love and Death. (Among scenes struck from the final version was a devil-escorted elevator descent into hell.)

The preferred title until the last moment was Anhedonia, which means the inability to experience pleasure -- a word not listed in your usual Funk & Wagnalls. The semiantobiographical comedy indicates Allen’s real concern with the awful inevitability of death. Woody, as comedian Alvy Singer, presents his new girlfriend, Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), with two books on death as his first gifts to her. “Death is an important issue,” he explains.

Any credit for “discovering” the metaphysical mettle of Woody Allen probably belongs to that Mad magazine of evangelical Protestantism, the Wittenburg Door, published in San Diego. The editors named him “theologian of the year” for 1974 and reprinted one of his articles, “The Scrolls.” (The Allen article suggested, among other things, that Abraham was persuaded into thinking God wanted his son sacrificed because the Lord’s orders came in a “resonant, well-modulated voice.”)

The magazine’s tongue-in-cheek honor was bestowed on Allen after a “survey” of seminary students showed him to be the overwhelming popular choice over runners-up Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann and Pat Boone. Eminent church scene observer Martin Marty commented that if young seminarians could be as interesting about life as Allen is about death, “maybe we’ll have a new generation of theological winners again.” Marty quoted such Allen aphorisms as “Death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down” and “I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.”

For the most part, Allen has avoided direct contact with the world of organized religion. But he did invite Billy Graham to appear on his television special in 1969. Allen came out a poor second in some polite verbal jousting -- most likely a case of an amateur agnostic pitted against a professional religionist.

I would define my position somewhere between atheism and agnosticism. I vacillate between the two positions frequently.l

His creative ambivalence on religious subjects showed up a bit in the movie Sleeper but was woven throughout in the sixth film he directed, Love and Death (1975). Allen admitted that the movie is highly critical of God. “It implies He doesn’t exist, or, if He does, He really can’t be trusted,” Allen wrote in Esquire. “Since coming to this conclusion,” he added, “I have twice been struck by lightning and once forced to engage in a long conversation with a theatrical agent.”

I felt [Love and Death] ran the risk of people saying, “It’s funny, but a little heavy going.” I know I can make a picture that people will laugh at, and that’s the primary thing to do. To make a comedy that has a message but isn’t funny enough, that’s a big mistake. Better if it’s very funny and doesn’t say anything. The ideal thing is to be funny and also say something significant.2

II

Predictably, not everyone appreciates his ideas. Love and Death got a bad review in the National Courier, a tabloid Christian newspaper published in New Jersey. “Woody Allen’s comedy is an expected product of post-Christian society,” wrote Courier reviewer Bob Cleath. “Funny on the surface to many people, it minors the tragedy overtaking our culture. Those who set themselves against God might well remember: ‘He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord scoffs at them. Then he will speak to them in his anger and terrify them in his fury’ (Ps. 2:4-5).” The reviewer might have picked a hellfire verse more to the point: “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Gal. 6:7).

Actually, while Allen does include standard religious solutions as his targets for comedy, he is far from regarding thoughtful religious inquiry as inane.

I don’t approve of any of the major religions because I feel organized religions are social, political and economic organizations in general. But religious beliefs and religious faith -- that does interest me and I have full appreciation for the search for genuine religious faith that people go through.1

A character in Allen’s “Notes from the Overfed,” an essay in Getting Even, observes that some people teach that God is in all creation. The Allenian character draws a calorific conclusion from that teaching. “If God is everywhere, I had concluded, then He is in food,” he said. “Therefore, the more I ate the godlier I would become. Impelled by this new religious fervor, I glutted myself like a fanatic. In six months, I was the holiest of holies, with a heart entirely devoted to my prayers and a stomach that crossed the state line by itself.” To reduce would have been folly -- “even a sin!”

As might be guessed, the Konigsberg kid was submerged in religious imagery in his Brooklyn childhood, which included eight years of Hebrew school. Woody once wrote that he was “raised in the Jewish tradition, taught never to marry a Gentile woman, shave on Saturday, and most especially, never to shave a Gentile woman on Saturday.”

I was raised fairly religiously. . and never took to it very much. It was more or less a forced religious background.1

While he was still a 17-year-old at Midwood High School, he began selling gags to newspaper columnists. He was soon writing for the Peter Lind Hayes radio show, then for the likes of television comedians Sid Caesar and Herb Shriner.

Allen lacks a college degree, and he freely admits that he was ejected from both New York University and New York City College. However, in a classic joke he claims that while a student he was attracted to such abstract philosophy courses as “Introduction to God,” “Death 101” and “Intermediate Truth.” His downfall came when he cheated on his metaphysics final. “I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me,” he explains.

III

Because he is a voracious reader who goes in for heavy reading about ultimate concerns, his humor can be appreciated especially by those familiar with the pretentiousness of some religious and philosophical literature. In a parody on Hassidic tales, Allen concludes one commentary by saying, “Why pork was proscribed by Hebraic law is still unclear, and some scholars believe that the Torah merely suggested not eating pork at certain restaurants.”

Allen finds another foil in numerology. “The Five Books of Moses subtracted from the Ten Commandments leaves five. Minus the brothers Jacob and Esau leaves three. It was reasoning like this that led Rabbi Yitzhok Ben Levi, the great Jewish mystic, to hit the double at Aqueduct 52 days running and still wind up on relief.”

Woody finds laughs in all of life; sex is another fertile field for jokes. But there is no escaping the conclusion that religious-philosophical concerns are the most important. For example, “God” and “Death” are two short plays in his Without Feathers.

I found over the years the things that interested me most were philosophical or religious issues as opposed to social issues or topical things. When I step back, I would agree that there is a preponderance of religious and philosophical themes because, I guess, they are genuine interests or obsessions.1

Just what those concerns are can be traced from an analysis of Allen’s humor. Woody poses basic religious or philosophical questions often ignored by the secularly oriented as “too deep” and skipped over by religionists engrossed in particular issues.

Some Allen gags just prey on the gap between ordinary affairs and immense issues. “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends,” he once wrote. And: “The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind -- a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you’ve just made a down payment on a house.”

The structure of the joke is a psychological reflection of the concern: The juxtaposition of the trivial and the mundane . . . against the background of cosmic, major concerns. We have to reconcile the paradox of it all. The joke mirrors that paradox.’

The absurdities of life stimulate both philosophers and comics. Is it any surprise then that they evoke such interesting commentary from a comic-philosopher? Absurdities -- funny absurdities -- abound in his play God. Near the final curtain a deus ex machina ending is attempted in order to extricate a difficult plot, but this “God” strangles on the machine that was to lower him onto the stage.

God is just really a burlesque in a light vein and a theatrical experience. It’s having some fun with what’s real, who the playwright is . . and how absurd existence is in general.1

Nevertheless, an exchange in that play reveals Allen’s thinking that just possibly there may be an answer obtainable somewhere, sometime.

ACTOR: If there’s no God, who created the universe?

WRITER: I’m not sure yet.

ACTOR: What do you mean, you’re not sure yet!?

 

For all his agnosticism bordering on atheism, in Love and Death also Allen tips off this feeling that answers may yet be forthcoming. Boris Grushenko (Woody) asks Sonya (Diane Keaton), “What if there is no God? What if we’re just a bunch of absurd people who are running around with no rhyme or reason?”

Sonya replies: “But if there is no God, then life has no meaning. Why go on living? Why not just commit suicide?”

Boris, somewhat flustered, says: “Well, let’s not get hysterical. I could be wrong. I’d hate to blow my brains out and then read in the papers they found something.” Later in the movie, Boris, deceased yet delivering an epilogue, observes: “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think he is evil. I think that the worst thing you can say about him is that he is an underachiever.”

Woody Allen, it would seem, also puts into joke form an often unarticulated question: if God really exists, why doesn’t he demonstrate his existence? “If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”

Boris Grushenko yearns throughout Love and Death for a signal from God that he is. If he would speak just once -- If he would just cough!” Another time Boris tells Sonya: “If I could just see a miracle. Just one miracle. If I could see a burning bush or the seas part or my Uncle Sasha pick up a check.”

IV

A point Allen makes repeatedly, under the cover of comedy, is that people do not pay enough attention to the fact of their mortality. Death themes and jokes are more prevalent in his wit than are God jokes. His interest in the existence or nonexistence of God stems from his death obsession. Death is an “issue,” to use contemporary parlance, which should not be so passively accepted, he says.

It’s very important to realize that we’re up against an evil, insidious, hostile universe, a hostile force. It’ll make you ill and age you and kill you. And there’s somebody -- or something -- out there who for some irrational, unexplainable reason is killing us. I’m only interested in dealing with the top man. I’m not interested in dealing with the other stuff because that’s not important -- although that is hard to say because there is hardly an iota of evidence of this.3

In Allen’s play Death, a central character is cajoled into joining a search party for a killer on the loose but never sees any organized method employed and is never sure of his role in the search. The irrational murderer is God.

No one knows what one’s part is; you don’t know what your function is -- you keep thinking that some people more highly placed than you do know, and they don’t. . . . I think it’s the only important question and until more light is shed -- if possible -- all the other questions people are obsessed with can never be fully answered.1

It would be off the mark to characterize Allen’s death humor as a string of ‘sick jokes,” a genre prevalent in the 1960s. One of Woody’s most finely tuned and honed pieces of humor appeared last summer in the New Republic. It begins: “It has been four weeks, and it is still hard for me to believe Sandor Needleman is dead. I was present at the cremation, and at his son’s request, brought the marshmallows, but few of us could think of anything but our pain. Needleman was constantly obsessing over his funeral plans and once told me, ‘I much prefer cremation to burial in the earth, and both to a weekend with Mrs. Needleman.’ ”

 [Death is] absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless. As Camus wrote, it’s not only that he dies or that man dies, but that you struggle to do a work of art that will last and then realize that the universe itself is not going to exist after a period of time. Until those issues are resolved within each person -- religiously or psychologically or existentially -- the social and political issues will never be resolved, except in a slapdash way.4

V

When Woody looks for possible resolutions of the “issues” of existence, death and afterlife, he looks mostly to philosophy. But he does not leave philosophy untouched by parody. In an essay called “My Philosophy,” Woody tells of his introduction to the discipline.

“Scorning chronological order,” he writes, “I began with Kierkegaard and Sartre, then moved quickly to Spinoza, Hume, Kafka and Camus. I was not bored. . . . I remember my reaction to a typically luminous observation of Kierkegaard’s: ‘Such a relation which relates itself to its own self (that is to say, a self) must either have constituted itself or have been constituted by another.” The concept brought tears to my eyes. My word, I thought, to be that clever! . . . True, the passage was totally incomprehensible to me, but what of it as long as Kierkegaard was having fun?”

Philosophical thought of men like, say, Russell and Dewey or even Hegel may be dazzling but it’s sober and uncharismatic. Dostoevski, Camus, Kierkegaard, Berdyaev -- the minds I like -- I consider romantic. I guess I equate dread’ with romance.

My depression is why I’m drawn to philosophy, so acutely interested in Kafka, Dostoevski and [Ingmar] Bergman. I think I have all the symptoms and problems that those people are occupied with: An obsession with death, an obsession with God or the lack of God, the question of why we are here. Answers are what I want . . .3

Woody rejects standard religious solutions: “There’s no religious feeling that can make any thinking person happy.” Or more exactly, it’s not a matter of adopting a belief in something like reincarnation: “I certainly don’t believe in anything. [Reincarnation] is conceivable, but I don’t believe in it.”5 Nor is the answer possible through creating “immortal” works of art: “Art is the artist’s false Catholicism, the fake promise of an afterlife and just as fake as heaven and hell.”4

Psychoanalysis? In Annie Hall Woody tells his new girlfriend matter-of-factly that he’s been going to an analyst for 15 years. “I’m going to give him one more year and then I’m going to Lourdes,” he vows. Actually, that’s about how long Woody has been in analysis.

It has been of some genuine help to me. I’ve been of the belief that the more my personality becomes integrated the more my work would deepen and I could apply myself to topics of deeper interest to human beings. [Without that integration] you may be brilliant, but you become very shrill.1

In the normal things that trouble everybody  -- meeting new people, crowds, shyness, human relationships -- I haven’t made much progress at all.6

Life is divided between the horrible and miserable, says Woody’s hero in Annie Hall. But ex-wife Louise Lasser says the worst thing in the world could happen to Woody and he still could go into the next room and write. Says Woody: “I never get so depressed that it interferes with my work. I’m disciplined.”4

VI

The discipline extends to nondrinking, nonsmoking habits, and the pleasures to Dixieland clarinet playing, Bergman movies, New York Knicks basketball and incognito wandering in New York city, even drifting in and out of revival houses. Woody confesses that he doesn’t know what the meaning of life is, but he feels sure its purpose is not merely hedonistic: “We are not put here to have a good time and that’s what throws most of us, that sense that we all have an inalienable right to a good time.”5

In future films, Woody says, he wants to deal with faith and spiritual values as Ingmar Bergman does -- maybe through a drama but also again through the (more difficult, he feels) serious-comical film. “The line between the kind of solemnity I want and comedy is very, very thin.”4

Literary analysts have noted the blurred line between comedy and tragedy. Annie Hall is obviously a comedy, but its melancholy comments and suggestions are subject to interpretation.

One technique introduced in his latest film seems to confirm his serious-comical tendency. The joke takes the place of a maxim, a Bible text, if you will, or moral of the story.” A theme-setting joke in the beginning is attributed to Groucho Marx: “I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member.” At the end is the familiar story in which someone complains to a psychiatrist about a man who thinks he is a chicken. ‘Why don’t you bring him in for treatment?” the psychiatrist asks. “I would, but we need the eggs.”

 

Notes

1. Devious Approach to Theology,’ by John Dart, Los Angeles Times October 4, 1975.

2.    Hiding Out With Woody Allen,’ by Edwin Miller, Seventeen, November 1975.

3.    On Being Funny, by Eric Lax (Charterhonse, 1975).

4. “Woody Allen Wipes the Smile Off His Face” by Frank Rich, Esquire, May 1977.

5. “A Conversation With the Real Woody Allen (Or Someone Just Like Him)” by Ken Kelley, Rolling Stone, July 1, 1976.

6. “If Life’s a Joke, Then the Punch Line Is Woody Allen,” by Jim Jerome, People, October 4, 1976.

 

 

Debating the Incarnation

Questions directly related to Christian doctrine rarely hit the headlines in Britain these days, and there has been no public theological debate since the furor created by Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God in 1963. But the publication of a volume titled The Myth of God Incarnate earlier this summer sparked off another controversy that is attracting a good deal of attention in the media and creating a certain amount of hysteria in the churches.

The moderator of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly has called for the resignation of the volume’s seven contributors. The Church Times described the book as “a notably unconvincing contribution to the cause of unbelief.” The Greek Orthodox archbishop in London issued a letter accusing the authors of “falling prey to an opposition of a demonic character,” while the archbishops of Canterbury and York managed to prevent an emergency debate in the July session of the Church of England’s General Synod by suggesting that time was needed for the book to be read.

I

The book itself (published in London by the SCM Press and scheduled for publication in the U.S. in September by Westminster Press) consists of ten essays by a group of professional theologians. The editor, John Hick, is professor of theology at Birmingham University and the only non-Anglican in the group. Maurice Wiles is Regius professor of divinity at Oxford University and was until recently chairman of the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission. Dennis Nineham, a former professor of divinity at Cambridge University, is warden of Keble College, Oxford. Don Cupitt is dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Michael Goulder and Frances Young are teaching at Birmingham University, and Leslie Houlden has recently moved from Ripon College, Oxford, to King’s College, London.

The general position of these writers, whose contributions vary considerably in approach and quality, is that Jesus made no claim of divinity for himself and that the doctrine of the incarnation was developed during the early centuries of the Christian era as an attempt to express the uniqueness of Jesus in the mythological language and thought forms of the Greek culture of the time.While recognizing the validity of the patristic theologians’ work, which culminated in the classical christological definitions of Nicea and Chalcedon, the British theologians question whether these definitions are intelligible in the 20th century, and go on to suggest that some concept other than incarnation might better express the divine significance of Jesus today.

Unlike Honest to God, The Myth of God Incarnate is in no sense a popular work intended for the theologically uneducated. On the contrary, it consists mainly of technical theological studies and is unlikely to provide much illumination for the majority of those tempted by the widespread publicity to invest in a copy. Michael Goulder, for example, offers a learned essay on Samaritan Christology; Maurice Wiles contributes a careful study of the place of myth in theology. Dennis Nineham, the radical New Testament scholar, seems to agree with his colleagues’ analysis of the development of incarnational theology but doubts whether the New Testament will provide an adequate basis even for the modest alternatives they themselves have suggested. John Hick, especially concerned with Jesus and the other great world religions, argues:

The Nicene definition of God-the-Son incarnate is only one way of conceptualizing the lordship of Jesus, the way taken by the Graeco-Roman world of which we are the heirs, and in the new age of world ecumenism which we are entering it is proper for Christians to become conscious of both the optional and the mythological character of this traditional language.

II

Much of the outcry against the book is undoubtedly due to the considerable gap that now exists between the world of professional theologians and the world of church leaders and their flocks. There are few surprises in it for anyone who is at all familiar with the work of Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and other European theologians, and it is a measure of the continuing insularity of British theology that the present controversy has been delayed until 1977. The title has also proved highly provocative, for while the writers are using the word “myth” in its various technical senses of something that conveys a deep truth in a nonhistoric form, this word means in everyday speech something that is not true in any sense. Moral theologians might usefully consider the status of a book title which, while faithfully summarizing the contents of a volume and encouraging massive sales, nonetheless conveys a false impression to those who do not get much further than the cover or the garbled newspaper reports.

There is an additional problem inasmuch as the essays are more concerned to demonstrate the inadequacy of the traditional statements about the incarnation than to provide acceptable 20th century alternatives. Hence the somewhat negative stance of the book and the fear that its radical authors are simply seeking to undermine the basis of Christian faith. They themselves recognize this problem but see their work chiefly in terms of clearing the ground: “Our hope is to release talk about God and Jesus from confusions, thereby freeing people to serve God in the Christian path with greater integrity.” It might fairly be added that alternatives to the classical creeds of Christendom are hardly likely to emerge overnight.

Whatever form these alternatives take, they will presumably have to express clearly the Christian belief that Jesus stands in a unique relationship to God and to the human believer. Wherein lies his uniqueness? John Hick suggests:

He is the one in following whom we have found ourselves in God’s presence and have found God’s meaning for our lives. He is our sufficient model of true humanity in a perfect relationship to God. And he is so far above us in the “direction” of God that he stands between ourselves and the Ultimate as a mediator of salvation.

III

Frances Young -- an emerging theologian whose contribution deserves the most careful examination -- offers the following personal testimony:

I find myself able to say: “I see God in Jesus,” and “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” and other such traditional statements without necessarily having to spell it out in terms of a literal incarnation. I find salvation in Christ, because in him God is disclosed to me as a “suffering God.” God is not only disclosed in him, nor is revelation confined to “biblical times”; but Jesus is the supreme disclosure which opens my eyes to God in the present, and while remaining a man who lived in a particular historical situation, he will always be the unique focus of my perception of and response to God.

There seems to be plenty of material here for useful debate, and it is to be hoped that those who are afraid of the authors’ approaches or who disagree with their conclusions will keep their heads sufficiently to enable a constructive discussion to take place. There are few signs of such dialogue at the moment, but a group of conservative theologians is publishing a reply titled the Truth of God Incarnate later this year. All of which seems to suggest a return to christological pluriformity -- for which there is an important precedent in the New Testament itself.

Fourteen Years After ‘Unity in Mid-Career’

In 1963 a book titled Unity in Mid-Career (Macmillan) caused considerable stir in ecumenical circles. On the book’s cover the following sentence was added to the title: “Can the movement toward Christian unity survive as a living force or is it headed for premature senility?” Fourteen church leaders and theologians contributed critical essays on the ecumenical movement and on the World Council of Churches in particular. In the introduction the editors set the tone of the book. “The long road for the WCC, and other ecumenical agencies,” Keith Bridston and Walter Wagoner wrote, “ought to be traversed, not like the Ark of the Covenant in holy untouchability, but as in the rough-and-tumble of our all too human pilgrimage, where sharp criticism and good-humored loyalty rub shoulders.” It was believed that a good dose of “self-criticism in the spirit of candor” had become necessary at that stage of ecumenical development.

I

The symposium dealt with a wide range of issues. On the one hand the dangers of the WCC and other large ecumenical organizations becoming “established and conservative ecclesiastical institutions” were frankly introduced. The development of healthy regionalism was greeted as important and consistent with worldwide ecumenism. Predictions were made that an emerging conciliarism will be the most crucial and baffling of all the long-range ecumenical problems. Alexander Schmemann wrote that the Orthodox churches as a whole only seem to be represented in the WCC and that the failure of full participation may sooner or later lead to a major ecumenical crisis.” The churches in the West were accused of not taking the challenge of Marxism seriously; Eastern Christianity was blamed for its abstract conceptions and for its prejudices against the West. The best way through the East-West barrier, it was counseled, is not by aiming for fellowship as an end in itself but by finding common concerns in common tasks.

Regret was expressed that the real testing point of the ecumenical movement is not to be found at the local level and that the committed parish minister is the movement’s forgotten person. Presumably there can be an “ecumenical theology,” Robert Tobias wrote, “but in terms of a whole system, not until the end of the age.” Ecumenical officialdom was criticized for destroying effective communication from the field by requiring field people to speak its language and to approximate its behavior. Finally, it was noticed that the archaic structures of American seminaries hardly provide room in the curriculum for specialized attention to the ecumenical movement proper.

Unity in Mid-Career enjoyed a mixed reception. Although it was admitted that the essays forthrightly tackled unresolved problems in the ecumenical movement, the symposium was judged unsatisfying and incomplete. Some maintained that the contributors should have worked more closely together, informing each other of their stances and correcting and deepening each other’s insights and criticisms. Others judged the contrast between “movement” and “institution” to be far too labored, and were convinced that the World Council will survive unconstructive resentment and distorted judgment. Still others simply dismissed the book as mischievous and irresponsible.

II

Reviewing the past 14 years of ecumenical development, one wonders whether some of the biased and gloomy forecasts of the Unity in Mid-Career experts have indeed come true. Reading, for instance, a 1975 article by Kilian McDonnell titled “Ecumenism: Made Miserable by Success?” (Worship, vol. 49, no. 2), one is under the impression that not much has changed for better or worse. Father McDonnell reports on a closed invitational gathering of 60 prominent leaders and theologians -- Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant -- at the Benedictine Pontifical Institute of St. Anselm in Rome, November 1974. The meeting evaluated ecumenical trends in the decade since the Second Vatican Council promulgated the Decree on Ecumenism.

Ecumenism, Father McDonnell writes, “has fallen on evil days, and the general opinion is that the crisis is a child of its success. He informs us that only very recently have ecumenical scholars come to see that the Decree on Ecumenism was cautious, reticent and even fearful. It gives no answer to the new question: How can the unity of the church be manifested today? The initially successful Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the WCC is now at an impasse and shuns primordial questions of church unity. The Orthodox churches, ever since joining the World Council in 1961, have positioned themselves between the two chairs of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The quiet celebration of “intercommunion” has led nowhere, as one increasingly realizes that the Eucharist and the Holy Spirit pertain to an ongoing visible community. The ecumenical progress of the past decade has produced a new institutional fear” and now appears as a threat to the identity of the churches and their vested interests. Third World Christians have no more desire to participate in the European-American Reformation controversies.

The theologians gathered together in Rome, Father McDonnell reports, now concentrate on more promising bilateral confessional dialogues. They speak of conciliar fellowship, in which each local church possesses in communion with other churches the fullness of catholicity, and they plead for a “spiritual ecumenism”; they still consider the WCC the place best suited to express the indivisibility of the ecumenical movement, and they advise fellow Christians to be prepared for a larger measure of ecclesiastical spontaneity. They counsel that “patience as an active posture” has to be more consciously practiced everywhere.

Time is now ripe to ask whether searching and honest self-criticism or sober analysis and humble evaluation render the ecumenical movement a better service. Were Unity in Mid-Career and other subsequent faultfinding publications right to disturb the optimism and hope in ecumenical Christianity? Should rather the wisdom and counsel of theological specialists, recorded in many ecumenical documents, have been heeded? Unfortunately, the choice between the two approaches leads today to even more indecision, confusion and disappointment. Both the sharply critical approach to and the objective survey of the international church scene fall short because through neither is the heart of the gospel rediscovered, and consequently the true goal of the ecumenical movement is constantly undervalued.

III

Although quite different in scope and tone, both the book Unity in Mid-Career and the article by Father McDonnell focus entirely on inner ecclesiological complications and domestic ecclesiastical frustrations. The multireligious and secular world is not mentioned and simply does not seem to exist. One cannot but ask the captious and learned ecumenists whether they have forgotten that foreign missions have been the source of all major steps toward unity. Were not Christian diakonia and interchurch-aid activities during and after World War II the most basic elements of the WCC “in process of formation”? Did not all its assemblies from 1948 onward stress, the crucial importance of witness, evangelism and social service? Does not the search for Christian unity that is separated from creative religious impulses always deteriorate into the logic of organizational charts, subsequently leading to either a strong and quasi-courageous rejection of that logic or a noble but weak defense of it?

It could be argued today that the ecumenical movement fortunately does not practice “patience as an active posture” and is after all not “headed for premature senility.” A growing enthusiasm for more direct sociopolitical involvement of the churches in the world has resulted in greater vitality and credibility for the movement. After the World Council’s Fourth Assembly, held at Uppsala in 1968, a whole series of reflection and action programs were initiated for changing structures of oppression, promoting development, combating racism, implementing human rights, struggling for women’s liberation, opposing the arms race and militarism; and improving education for people’s liberation. Such programs have been vigorously carried on with the support of many churches. The Fifth Assembly, at Nairobi in 1975, explicitly stated that there is always a healthy dialectic between confession and commitment, between the vertical dimension of faith and the horizontal dimension of love, between evangelism and humanization, between conversion of the heart and change of social structures. Thus, common tasks in this world are direct expressions of a common witness and lead toward a growing and more visible manifestation of the unity of the world Christian fellowship.

Despite this apparently evangelical and up-to-date ecumenical posture, I do not venture to trust the assurance that the churches now respond more realistically to God and the world. I still have some difficulty in believing that the ecumenical movement has reached a mature stage. I can well imagine a different (and more sophisticated) crowd of Bridstons and Wagoners, accusing the ecumenical movement today of still not taking the world seriously enough. I listen to them criticizing the churches for still not sufficiently discerning the active presence of God across the whole inhabited earth, and for ignoring the authentic indigenous insights, gifts and endeavors of all peoples. I hear them attacking the WCC for being excessively preoccupied with socioeconomic issues and for taking the normativeness of its conduct too much for granted.

I can also imagine other (still more subtle) deliberations at St. Anselm in Rome stressing the sinfulness of all politics and denouncing the self-righteousness of all ideologies (including Christian social systems) which aim for a too radical change of social structures. I can hear participants saying that the optimism and triumphalism in ecumenical social activism can be corrected only by concentrating ever more on the church’s unique unity and distinctive identity and by reconsidering its specific task of costly evangelism. The world needs foremost a true taste of spiritual liberation which is experienced and celebrated in the Christian community of adoration and praise.

IV

Undoubtedly, such new exhortations and criticisms are considerably more relevant than the past and present ecclesiastical “kitchen critique” to which I have referred. These new questionings can shake up the international Christian community and enable it to be frank about its bewilderments, encouraging it to re-evaluate its true resources. Yet the fundamental difficulty of the ecumenical movement is how to move in this world and not be of this world. Claiming far too often that it has achieved just this ideal spiritual positioning, the ecumenical movement has been in fact neither truly beyond nor truly in this world, and consequently it has not responded fully and authentically to God or to his creation.

Certainly it is true that all righteous and successful programs of the WCC and other ecumenical agencies have to be put to the test of whether they originated out of a deep passion about human suffering, injustice and despair as well as out of faith in the utter compassion of God. Certainly new strategies of ecumenical mission and proofs of conciliar fellowship must be checked as to whether they indeed call all men and women back into communion with God, and do not instead merely affirm old battle cries and traditional distinctive identities in that Christian community which oscillates between being with the world and being beyond the world. But surely, too, more is needed than all this; since the gospel calls us to be in the world, God’s precious creation is to be more deeply loved through Christ’s love.

It is not surprising that no official ecumenical report since 1948 has ever attempted to exegete afresh the last judgment of the Son of Man (Matt. 25:31-46). When all nations (not churches, Christians and “non-Christians”) will be summoned before Christ’s throne and separated into two groups, not only many righteous who have confessed his name and belong to his church but also many righteous who are not conscious at all of having served the master will enter the Kingdom. At the last day the Lord will curse many who pretended to have known him and served him, but will acknowledge, as his own, people in all the world who have not known him but who have, without knowing it, served him in the person of their suffering neighbor.

The criteria for separation in this biblical passage are baffling. No mention is made of the fact that the gospel has been proclaimed to all the world. No vow of allegiance to Christ’s One Church guarantees salvation. No Christian involvement in the changing of unjust social structures will directly be rewarded with eternal life. Many religious answers given to burning secular questions will appear hypocritical and false. The truth of ecumenical Christianity will lie in its capacity to have gone outside itself, to have so given itself to the world that a greater life may come to be.

Even more, Christians everywhere anticipating the last judgment already rejoice that by the very spontaneity and unselfconsciousness of their love, and by their perseverance in transforming society, the righteous among all nations will prove themselves to be true sons and daughters of their heavenly creator. It is this perceptible maturity, this utter gratuity and this genuine impartiality which are at stake in the ecumenical movement today and tomorrow. Responding to God in the midst of this world includes public praise and thanksgiving that Christ is served in every place where people are clothed, housed, fed, and enabled to lead more dignified human lives. How eagerly is the day awaited when a statement from a World Council or a National Council of Churches will express the churches’ delight (in more than a single sentence) that God is also intensively at work in antireligious China, Cuba and Mozambique.

Unity in Mid-Career, “Ecumenism: Made Miserable by Success?” and many other published critiques of ecumenical endeavors become finally immature, unproductive, complacent and even carelessly negative because they have not been written in the midst of the “people of the Beatitudes.” These people are mature, alert and full of hope. They do not speak of midcareer or success but know how to hunger and thirst after righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to be peacemakers. These people are not disturbed when ecumenical problems of unity, mission, service and their institutional complications are only partly solved, because they know that these things are as much a part of the structures of this world as a part of the new heaven and earth to come. These people are the core of late 20th century Christianity, fully and joyfully aware that many last ones (“nonreligious”) will be first ones. They also continuously pray that many first ones will join in the praise of God’s own righteousness, fathomable for two millenia in the suffering and dying of his son for every human being.

Therapies Ministers Use

Most clergy think of themselves as counselors; as a physician I have shared many patients with ministers. The seminary bookstores are filled with works on therapy, and these studies of psychology and the helping arts seem to be taken very seriously by most ministers; the books in widespread use are thought to represent the “state of the art.”

Unfortunately, these therapies, although popular, are demonstrably inadequate. The best-selling works of three men who seem to be most influential deserve especially close scrutiny: Carl Rogers’s Becoming Partners (Delacorte, 1972), Fritz Pens’s In and Out of the Garbage Pail (Real People Press, 1969), and Eric Berne’s Games People Play (Grove, 1964). Each of the authors makes clear that his work, although popular, is not a popularization. All three best sellers have certain characteristics which I find extremely disturbing.

Unscientific Methodologists

The most fundamental criticism I offer is that these texts are not really texts as such. They are no more scientific, or validated, than Emile Coué or Dianetics. This is the most basic of problems, for if the theories and presuppositions from which we work will not stand serious examination, our efforts as counselors -- no matter how well meant -- must suffer. We are compelled to ask, how was this material chosen in the first place? The broader question that is continually troubling must also be raised: Is the breakdown between psychology and organized religion really that severe?

All three authors under discussion here are terribly naïve fact-gatherers. Their patient samples are totally unselected; they believe, and don’t seek to substantiate, whatever patients tell them. In fact, no solid evidence exists to prove that their treatments work, except in the sense of healings in the revivalist’s tent. Not one of the three has ever employed controlled trials. For example, in Becoming Partners Carl Rogers states flatly, “I began to interview some couples.” Where did he get them? Why did he choose them? The reader is never told. Failing to check out their information or to follow through with their patients, these therapists rely on unsubstantiated data to construct their theories in isolation.

Consider the way in which Rogers presents the last marriage described in his book: “The partners seem to have acquired a wisdom from which each of us may learn. . . . They are listening to the internal rhythms of their own organisms to determine what their behavior and the relationship will be . . . the core of this continually blossoming security is, to me, marriage at its best.” In point of fact, no evidence whatsoever is offered to prove that this couple was maritally successful in any way; actually a great deal of evidence exists to the contrary. Denise and Eric (the couple) could have been, as the English say, “stark raving bonkers,” held together by massive doses of tranquilizers just to get through their interview with Rogers. We don’t know; Rogers doesn’t know or doesn’t say. He doesn’t see them over a span of time, he doesn’t visit their home, and he doesn’t interview their children or any of the participants in the several affairs they describe. He totally ignores the possibility of two of the oldest effects known to physicians: the placebo effect and the halo effect. (In the first, the fact that I, the healer, say you will be better often makes you better, even in the face of severe organic pain. The halo effect makes you want to say whatever will please the healer.)

Rogers reports, simply on the basis of this one interview, that Denise and Eric display “marriage at its best.” Is this really the case? We are told that Denise has had several mental breakdowns -- for which society is blamed, although the causal connection is not amplified. We are also told that the couple gets into “basic encounter groups . . . grass, LSD . . .  experimenting with relationships with other people outside the marriage.” According to Rogers, “marijuana has changed Eric from a highly rational intellectual sort to one who appreciated his whole self.” In effect, Rogers is claiming that drugs do alter personality, but he offers neither explanation nor proof.

Why are Denise and Eric still together? We are told that “Bioenergetics, Yoga, and Karma” are holding the relationship together. Having spent some time in a Buddhist monastery, I feel qualified to say that any self-respecting Buddhist monk would die laughing over the use of Karma in this book.

Rogers seems especially fond of discussing sex -- in this case the “free interrelationships” which Eric and Denise experience. He claims that “all four people have to be very grown-up before it becomes even possible” to have multiple sexual relationships. The connection between this kind of sex experience and being grown up is obscure, and Rogers does not enlighten us.

Nor does he offer any analysis of the couple’s other actions, which are described as “drinking a lot” and engaging in a “quadruple alliance.” Eric describes himself as, at one point, “drinking heavily . . . crawling under the bed . . . and screaming . . . and clawing at the carpet. . . . I did no work, no responsibility . . .”  Surely some analysis is indicated, but Rogers offers none. Many more examples could be given, but these from Rogers seem to me representative of the unscientific approach of all three of the therapists under scrutiny.

The Grandiose Factor

A second criticism must be made: as a result of naïveté and other factors in their own psychologies, the three authors’ therapies become ego trips for them as therapists. Listen to Dr. Perls in In and Out of the Garbage Pail: “I accomplished the next step after Freud in the history of Psychiatry, and this step spells efficiency. . . . I speedily ‘cured’ every psychogenic asthma I came across . . . in most cases there was . . . a fear of making those wild exhaling noises that go along with orgasm. . . . I have a number of so-called miraculous cures. . . .” As a pediatrician with more than 100 asthmatics in my practice, I wish that Perls had communicated his curative technique to someone before he died. My five-year-old patients in particular, wheezing after family fights, obviously need the more sophisticated grasp of orgasm which Dr. Perls apparently provided to his clients.

Perls continues: “I am used to relying on my often uncanny intuition. . . . [I] am beginning to assume a place in history.” Speaking of therapy sessions, he says: “Each time I succeeded within 10-20 minutes to get to the essence of each person, even to re-integrate some disowned material. This has become routine, child’s play. . . . I believe that I am the best therapist for any type of neurosis in the states, maybe in the world.”

Berne, in his way, is more grandiose than Pens. In Games People Play, he says that one of his games is the cause of schizophrenia: “If the family game . . . is analyzed to demonstrate that the schizophrenic behavior was and is specifically undertaken to counter this game, partial or total remission occurs in a properly prepared patient.” The central problem of all interpretative therapies, however, is that when the therapist analyzes something to demonstrate it, to use Berne’s words, usually nothing changes in the patient’s life. Our mental hospitals are full of schizophrenics, major tranquilizers sell by the trainload, and here we have a cure. Unfortunately, no description of exactly how it was effected was published before Berne died. How one might induce “total remission” through interpretation remains elusive.

Another criticism I would make is that the theories which these three men present are full of obvious inconsistencies and unstated assumptions. The concept of the unconscious is implicit in their work, but it is never explicitly defined by any of the three, nor is it related to any established body of knowledge. For examples of this problem, let’s continue with Berne. He describes his games as a “recurring set of transactions . . . superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation. . . . Every game is basically dishonest.” With this single statement he is already in trouble, for later he states that “raising children is primarily a matter of teaching them what games to play.” Aside from the philosophical implications of the idea that bringing up children is dishonest, this can hardly be taken as a serious view of child-raising and its problems.

Berne, however, is quite serious: “Games . . . form the basic structure for the emotional dynamics of each family. . . . [the child’s] favored games also determine his ultimate destiny, . . the payoffs on his marriage and career, and the circumstances surrounding his death.” And all of this is basically “dishonest.”

If Berne actually means that the unconscious is very powerful, he should say so, and he should document his position. He does not discuss why “dishonest” functions are so powerful. In fact, he doesn’t even define “dishonest” (or most of his other terms, for that matter), and the word is left to bear its popular meaning.

Berne’s view of child-rearing ignores the complexity of most of the real issues and problems. If he is literally correct, and our child-raising methods are basically dishonest, we cannot instill decency, honesty, and love of God, because our efforts are corrupted and based on illusion. The sweeping generality of his statements is worth some serious examination.

Naming Ego-States

Berne’s second major concept is that of ego-states; he says that our behavior patterns, with their associated feelings, are “a limited repertoire . . . which are psychological realities. . . [the products of] the human brain . . . are organized and stored in the form of ego-states.” These he calls Parent, Adult and Child, and they correspond to a modern superego, ego and id, although Freud never bound these mechanistic concepts to specific developmental figures. Berne does: “Parent, Adult, and Child represent real people who now exist or who once existed, who have legal names and civic identities.” The crux here is, what does “represent” mean?

No experimental evidence exists that such a division is, in fact, reality-based. The logic becomes absurd. If the Parent is the whole parent, then “a person is likely to incorporate into his own Parent ego-state his parents’ Parent, Adult, and Child, the babysitter’s Parent, Adult, and Child, and so forth.” The number of ego-state subdivisions required-becomes geometrically ridiculous.

In labeling the Child ego-state, Berne sticks with Rousseau: “In the child reside creativity and spontaneous drive and enjoyment. . . . before, unless, and until they are corrupted, most infants seem to be loving. . . .” Yes, children are certainly spontaneous and loving; they are also selfish and have poor control over their hostilities. Studies of creativity indicate that it is a highly complex function, in no sense childlike as Berne uses the term.

Berne also credits the Child ego-state with “the real living of real intimacy” and maintains that, “after the close intimacy with the mother is over,” the individual is perpetually “striving for continued physical intimacy in the infant style.” Since Berne also says that intimacy -- his goal -- means “the spontaneous candidness of an aware person,” he is thus placing the goals of the personality in the stage of infancy. One could develop the argument that intimacy as Berne describes it is psychic regression; one could also cite Jung: “The failure of liberation from the mother is death.”

Another problem with Berne’s thinking is that the so-called Adult functions have no role to play in our maturation. Berne says that mature people keep their Adult (his definition is literally “data-processor”) in control. To most of us, maturity involves love, care, perhaps self-sacrifice -- concepts not covered by “data processing.” In fact, valid concepts of adult maturation are desperately needed, but Berne provides none.

Society as Villain

I would advance still another criticism: the social-political community is assumed by the three authors to be a constant that requires neither maintenance nor effort; the survival of culture does not concern them, and its forms are generally seen as villainous. Rogers, for example, says: “Marriage and the nuclear family constitute a failing . . . way of life. . . . We need experiments . . . exploration into new approaches.” Perhaps we need an understanding of our failures. Rogers continues, “ In this book we see . . . [that] a vast laboratory in just these problems is being conducted by our young people.” Never have I seen “laboratory” used in this way. Our children are not laboratory subjects; the term implies experimental controls and conscious hypotheses, and none of these is present in the casual experiments of the young.

Society is the villain, according to Rogers, and the agents of society can solve our problems. “We need a changed attitude in teachers. . . . if all [teaching] personnel could simply recognize and accept the fact that they are fallible persons . . . our educational system would be revolutionized overnight. . . Gone would be the steady, unchanging infallible mask which is the most prized possession of every teacher. . . . we could free these parents from . . . the whole crippling and imprisoning bit.”

Do we really think teachers are the cause of the present woes? Are teachers more rigid than doctors or ministers? How much more influential are they?

The fact is that one’s most basic personality structure is formed in the first five years of life and merely modified by later accretions. In most cases parents rear children until age five (although there is certainly a move away from this, to what effect we do not yet know). By saying that if teachers change, we then can change, Rogers is actually saying that we are not finally responsible for what we do. It is the Holocaust game of finding a scapegoat. A little evasion and a little violence make wonderful partners.

Children and Their World

Rogers, Perls and Berne make another assumption which is open to criticism: what you do is not relevant to what you say. Consider the effect of such an approach on our children. A poet said, “Children learn what they live.” No student of human behavior, until now, has ever challenged that. But Rogers says, in speaking of communes: “There are a number of paternal persons, men and women, who take a hand in [the child’s upbringing]. . . . he does not receive consistent treatment, but he lives in a world of real adults, to whose idiosyncracies he must adjust while finding psychological room for himself. . . . young children accept quite readily the fact that their parents may be sleeping with different partners. Children accept their world as it is.”

Rogers is oversimplifying the situation; who the parents are sleeping with hardly covers the psychological spectrum involved in learning to accept the world. More important, children do not “accept their world as it is” -- not without a great deal of trauma and pain. Adjusting to the “idiosyncracies” of “real adults,” as Rogers puts it, is the problem, not the solution.

“Children accept their world as it is.” Ask the Vietnamese children about that. Ask your own. Do they have any choice? Most basically, has anybody checked?

Are these inarticulate and involuntary family members ever considered? Most of the families in Rogers’s practice have children. In this “great social laboratory,” what has become of them? Perls, although he discusses intimate aspects of his marriage and indicates that he has children, never talks about them. Berne, as we have seen, says child-raising is primarily training in dishonesty, but he offers no evidence and does not develop these concepts as they apply to children.

How Did We Get Here?

These three famous and influential therapists claim to represent a major advance in understanding humanity and see themselves as authors of major theoretical and practical systems. Their works have been embraced as such -- this despite the serious inadequacies discussed here. If my charges are correct, how did we become followers of these systems? How did we get where we are? We got there in three ways.

First, the medical profession has failed dismally to communicate to any other discipline what it does know about human behavior. The best minds of the medical profession rarely write popular articles and almost never write nonpopular articles for other professionals such as ministers. It’s too much work for too little pay.

Second, considerable confusion exists as to what fundamental psychological doctrines are and how they are to be stated. This problem will not resolve itself right away, but some theories are generally agreed upon, and these don’t get communicated. Even Freudians and Jungians, for example, agree on certain basics concerning the existence, powers, and general role of the unconscious. The three authors, however, never discuss these ideas; as a result, disciplines whose focus is not medical/psychiatric are being sold a shoddy bit of goods. This advocacy of superficial and transitory treatments continues, then, partly because there is not a hard core of agreed-upon concepts.

Another factor then enters in: when the guidelines aren’t clear, popular beliefs tend to mirror what the popular mind wants. I’ve suggested that what our authors want is acting-out: do it first, think about it later. Perls even says, “You are responsible only for yourself” and remarks that he is “not willing to take full responsibility for my sexual development.” He exults in his “reputation as being both a dirty old man and a guru,” talks about his romantic affairs throughout his book, and does not exclude them from the arena of his professional life. He describes comforting a grief-stricken girl, for example: “The sobbing subsides and she presses closer and the stroking gets out of rhythm and slides over the hips and over the breasts. . . . These attitudes toward responsibility are two-edged: they can bring some liberation, but they can also lead to serious abuses. Perls in particular seemingly cannot distinguish, nor does his system.

Strengthening Ministries

Briefly and tentatively, let me suggest ways to improve the therapeutic tools that ministers use. In the first place, a serious attempt at interdisciplinary communication must be made. This effort will be difficult; the problem is motivation. Few psychiatrists think they need ministers, and most ministers I have met seem to think they do a pretty good job of counseling. (I suspect that they measure their success by the amount of overt gratitude received rather than by more objective means.) Consequently, their failures recede comfortably into the background.

In attempting to generate motivation for better communication, may I suggest that ministers have certain therapeutic advantages? Ministers have access to a fellowship. It may not be moving in the hoped-for directions, but it is there, and it is at least somewhat representative of the community. I would not underestimate this resource; I spend a great deal of time trying to find something comparable for patients of no religious persuasion.

Furthermore (and I am tiptoeing into theology), ministers can offer forgiveness -- and as a genuine commodity at that. As a physician I can’t do this, although I can direct people to the concept.

All of this revolves around a third problem: Who is to do what to whom? Richard Neuhaus, writing in The Christian Century (February 2-9), says, “Many in the seminaries, are training to be counselors, therapists, group facilitators. . . .” Exactly. Furthermore, there are psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers and so on. The problem of defining professional roles will be a lot closer to solution if we can agree on uniform standards of excellence.

I have one final suggestion: let’s work toward less preoccupation with systems and use methods that are simpler and more human -- such as sitting and listening. Some years ago, a group of psychiatrists had a group of medical students do “supportive therapy” in 20-minute sessions. Since the students weren’t specifically trained in therapy, they were simply to sit and listen. No interpretations were offered to the patients. The results, as measured by reasonably careful follow-tip studies, showed that most of the patients made marked improvement. This should give us pause. Sitting and listening is a fundamental service, as old as humankind. There is, to be sure, also a place for interpretation and advice.

I hope that this discussion will provoke further reevaluation of the importance and validity of the psychological systems treated here. I have deliberately left out of the discussion such topics as ethics and the Christian family -- although I have talked about responsibility, both for one’s own adult behavior and for helping one’s children develop the essential emotional equipment with which to face life. In my opinion these are psychological fundamentals. If they are also seen as ethical fundamentals, we may already be in an area where the two disciplines, medicine and the ministry, are on common ground.

Mission and Dialogue: 50 Years After Tambaram

In December 1938 nearly 500 delegates from around the world gathered at Madras Christian College in Tambaram, South India, for the third world conference of the International Missionary Council. To attend, some delegates steamed for two months across seas that were soon to be closed by World War II. The IMC had planned to hold the meeting in China, but changed the venue to British-ruled India when Japan and China went to war, beginning the bloodshed that Europe would quickly join.

Under those heavy shadows, representatives of the Western missionary agencies and the “younger” churches met to ponder a new fact a global Christianity. The largest delegations at Tambaram, and by contemporaries’ accounts the most impressive, were those from China and India. These delegations were no longer made up of missionaries to these nations, but of Christian leaders from them. Tambaram was the first major modern ecumenical international meeting at which Christians from this larger world made up a majority of the delegates.

The lasting popular impression of the Tambaram meeting revolved around the view of one man, the Dutch missiologist Hendrik Kraemer, expressed in a book he wrote as a study document for the conference: The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World. In it, Kraemer addressed what he perceived as the danger of compromising the Christian message in relating to other traditions and ideologies, a danger he saw manifest in some then-current trends in mission thinking and practice. Despite a number of acute observations on the positive significance of other faiths, Kraemer unequivocally asserted the discontinuity of the Christian gospel with all other religions. The terms, if not the answers, that Kraemer provided for the discussion dominated thinking about Christian mission for decades to come.

Kraemer’s views were by no means uncontested at Tambaram. T. C. Chao of Beijing’s Yenchaing University argued that the acts of God in Jesus Christ -- and in the history of Israel -- could not be seen as a uniquely episodic presence of God in history. God’s presence is much more in the nature of a dwelling in God’s creation. Chao affirmed that the Chinese sages were inspired by the same God who is fully revealed in Jesus Christ. More particularly, he suggested that if Christians were to take history with full seriousness in God’s plan of salvation, they would seek to understand the role of all people’s history, including their religious history, in that plan. Other participants stressed the presence of the logos within other religious traditions, claiming that Christ was truly present there.

The disagreements at Tambaram focused to a large extent on the appropriateness of a Christian "promise and fulfillment" approach to other religions. Those who resisted Kraemer did so mostly by arguing that these religious traditions functioned analogously to the history of Israel in the Old Testament -- they provided preparation and expectations for, even prefigurations of, Christ. Kraemer insisted that the Christian gospel was not only fulfillment but denial. For Kraemer, other religions had a more radically independent existence, and he was thus profoundly uncomfortable with the notion that Christian faith stood as their ‘fulfillment." But the disputants agreed that Christ is the full and complete revelation of God, the one beside whom there is no second.

This past January, 50 years after Tambaram, in the same hall where Kraemer and others debated, Christians gathered to commemorate the 1938 meeting and to reflect anew on Christians’ relations to other faiths. In association with the celebration of Tambaram, the World Council of Churches’ subunits on World Mission and Evangelism and on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths sponsored an international seminar on mission and dialogue. It brought together some two dozen participants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, North America and Europe.

The questions of Tambaram 1938 have taken on new form. The fullness of the revelation of God in Christ and the unique decisiveness of that event are themselves matters of debate among Christians. The "promise and fulfillment" scheme by which many opposed Kraemer has come to be viewed by some as itself an unacceptably triumphalist approach. Conversely, the stress Kraemer put upon the unique character of each religious tradition has been adopted by many who disagree with him and who argue that these faiths offer alternate and parallel avenues of God’s saving action. The very notions and practice of Christian "mission" that were the occasion for discussion in 1938 have become suspect or have been significantly reformulated among some branches of the church.

The World Council’s Vancouver Assembly in 1983 included a significant interfaith program. Fifteen distinguished guests from various religious traditions were present, four spoke to the entire assembly, and a full "track" of dialogue events ran alongside the many others offered. However, a sentence in the report "Witness in a Divided World," referring to "God’s creative hand in the life of people of other faiths," was rejected by the delegates and eventually rephrased to refer to "a seeking for God in other faiths."

Increasingly those in the dialogue unit, and many others as well, felt that there were certain theological questions that required a more straightforward response than they had thus far received. Was there a common understanding of Christian witness that united both mission and dialogue, or was the World Council working on two unconnected agendas, each more or less indifferent to the other? These were the concerns on the agenda for the joint seminar at Tambaram, which looked back to the 1938 meeting in order to chart a new course for the future. Both mission and dialogue units wanted to move beyond stereotypes and to wrestle together with the imperatives of witnessing to Christ and being open to the faith of our neighbors.

Lesslie Newbigin, the former missionary and bishop of the Church of South India who had himself attended the ‘38 meeting, opened the discussion with a message at the commemoration service. He hailed the 1938 conference as a crucial turning point, where it was made clear that the goal of Christian mission is not to establish "outposts of Western Christianity scattered throughout the world." Tambaram marked the emergence of a "new Christendom," living in cultures different from those of the old Christendom. Despite some reservations, Newbigin affirmed the fundamental validity of Kraemer’s approach. The Christian confession regarding the incommensurability of the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection with other items in the syllabus of comparative religion must be maintained as part of the very breath of Christian faith. At the same time, Newbigin said, the notion of a unique validity of some Christian doctrine or of Christianity itself as a religion must be rejected as arrogant.

Several other participants were less convinced that Kraemer offered much light for the present. Most felt an imperative need for a radically different approach. Indian theologian Stanley Samartha, the first director of the subunit on dialogue, while agreeing about the need for mission and conversion, called for a much more positive theological appreciation of the role of world religions in God’s mission. Commitment to dialogue sets a proper boundary for mission, he indicated, in that we cannot desire the death of our dialogue partners.

Diana Eck of Harvard University, current moderator of the dialogue unit, reviewed her own extensive experiences in India and their positive impact on her Christian faith. But, she suggested, that faith can involve no statement about what God has not done in other religions. Christians must not confine themselves to the revelation they have received and to their own spiritual experience if they want to know how God is at work in other traditions. Instead they must ask those of other faiths what has been revealed to them, and must take the responses seriously.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith made the same point as bluntly as anyone, asserting that the failure of Christians to affirm the saving action of God not just within other religious traditions but through them is blasphemy. The slowness of Christians to come to this realization, he said, is understandable. What is inexcusable is that they often seem to be slow not because they fear that this insight is not true, but precisely because they feel that it is. To be afraid lest others be saved, he suggested, is surely not a Christian stance.

One participant remarked that in past discussions, from Tambaram on, it was often the case that mission people put the dialogue people on the defensive, accusing them of undercutting evangelism, and compromising New Testament faith. It was time, he said, for the mission people to be put on the defensive. Newbigin acknowledged that when the faith by which he lived, a faith witnessing to what God has done uniquely for the world in Jesus Christ, is called "blasphemy," he was well and truly placed on the defensive.

The exchange illustrated the difficulties even of internal Christian dialogue around these issues. Ironically, Smith and some others who pressed for a pluralistic theological approach sometimes couched their positions in what seemed a strongly exclusivist form. That is, they quite freely condemned a variety of theological approaches in Christianity and in other religions (fundamentalist and conservative ones) , designating them as blasphemy against God: here was the traditional language of light and darkness, now deployed according to different criteria. The certainty with which the faith of many neighbors (including many Christian neighbors) was thus disposed -- by some of the very people championing dialogue -- pressed the discussion beyond vague notions of "respect" for varying forms of faith toward a search for the appropriate criteria for such judgments.

Received understandings of the church’s mission were challenged repeatedly by the observation that a good deal of what Christians see as integral to God’s work with and in the world -- economic justice, peace -- is impossible without the participation of people from other faith traditions. Relationships with those of other faiths should not be items added on to the Christian agenda but ought to be at the heart of much of our mission efforts. This "practical" realization was blocked, some suggested, by a theological outlook that could not grant positive value to other religions.

But an apparently inescapable paradox in this conversation is that positive doctrinal affirmations about other religions require, in their very nature, as definitive a Christian interpretation of that religion as do negative ones. When one speaker demanded Christian recognition of the fact that God is revealed through Buddhism, another asked what kind of a ‘fact" this is supposed to be. It is certainly not one that comes from the self-definition of Buddhism, for it is a thoroughly external construction of Buddhism’s nature. If it is a fact, it is a Christian theological fact -- a definitive judgment made of one religious tradition from within another, on the basis of its own criteria: the kind of judgment that many proponents of dialogue find problematic in principle.

It is also true that a commitment to dialogue and to the view that God is not left anywhere without a witness must share a deep concern for the missionary quality of the faith that carries this commitment. To put it baldly: it will matter little for the life of the world if commitments to dialogue exist only in isolated or elite enclaves, attached to religious faiths that do not spread or reproduce themselves. If mission and dialogue are truly opposites, then the realistic long-term outlook for dialogue is dim. If interreligious dialogue and relationships are to become stronger, they will have to be integrally rooted in dynamic religions that grow -- in the simple, often-derided dimension of numbers as well as in other ways. The participants in the discussion thus found themselves again and again grappling with the same issues, whether approached from the mission side or the dialogue side.

The participants noted that in its theological understanding of other religions, Christian theology tends either to expand Christology (by means of the logos doctrine or "anonymous Christianity," for instance) or to expand pneumatology (dealing with the work of the Holy Spirit in other religions) And yet a trinitarian approach would insist that the two cannot be alternatives or competitors. Emphasis upon an "unbound" Christ already present among people of various religious faiths may sound as though it fits more congenially with traditional mission language; and emphasis upon the saving action of God’s spirit with people of other faiths may sound more congenial to those of the dialogue tradition, who are concerned that the dialogue partners be affirmed in their own right. Real though these emphases may be, from the Christian trinitarian view the reality to which they refer must be the same.

Of course, dialogue in its concrete form is an interchange among persons and not among abstract systems called "religions." But social-cultural-religious systems do interact with each other, with consequences that help shape the context and possibilities within which individuals encounter one another. In our world, a concern for the mystery and wonder of encountering the concrete faith of our neighbor must go hand in hand with a willingness to face up to the reality of conflicting religious and cultural systems.

A look back at Tambaram 1938 cannot solve the tension between mission and dialogue any more than the meeting 50 years later could clearly point the way toward its future resolution. Yet the participants in Tambaram 1988 may have played some part in broadening the discussion of that tension, and in helping the church to understand that mission and dialogue are parts of one issue, not two isolated and alternate or opposing special interests.

Divine Principle and the Second Advent

Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church has captured the transient attention and imagination which we in America devote to the pop culture of religion. Recently denounced by both the American Jewish Committee and the National Council of Churches, the movement has seldom been out of the public eye, whether at its own instance as in the blitz of pro-Nixon demonstrations which effectively introduced the group to the U.S., or as the target of lawsuits, legislative investigations, and parent-employed “deprogrammers.”

Discounting Devotion

For the most part, the charges leveled against the Unification Church focus on “mind control” and “brainwashing.” Such charges serve the dual function of both disparaging the group’s techniques and effectively discounting the dedicated and selfless behavior of its initiates. Whether or not there is substance to these charges beyond what might be the case with, say, a traditional Jesuit seminary or a charismatic community remains to be conclusively demonstrated.

But the vehemence of the charges themselves reflects the threat posed by changed lives and real commitment. There is something wildly ironic about Christians’ protesting that the Unification Church’s demands that members turn over all worldly goods to the church are sinister, and that its members must be unbalanced to comply. Why this compulsive desire to devalue the devotion of “Moonies” as nothing more than the product of manipulation? It is as if we are so convinced of the irrelevance of theology and of “right belief” that we know no other test of religion but its sincerity and fervor. The urgency with which aspersions are cast upon the fact of real conversion and devotion to cults derives partly from the notion that once such devotion is acknowledged as real, then no ground for discrimination remains. What elicits true response must be true.

Surely we should know better. Empirical verification knows less crude forms. The ideologies that have called forth true sacrifice and virtue among their adherents form a vast and anomalous assemblage. The theological question is not what ideas may possibly serve as lightning rods to discharge the longing for commitment in a particular cultural atmosphere, but what formulations support and shape, over time and in full face of the complexity of life, meaningful sacrifice and commitment.

The charge of “mind control” can be prosecuted in concert with secular sensibilities. Everyone can agree that people ought not to be turned into zombies. But this alliance may bring Christians perilously close to hypocrisy and contradiction if in the end it is radical commitment per se which is attacked as pathological.

In Vermont, when a legislative committee proposed to investigate the Unification Church, an official of the state Ecumenical Council finally opposed the effort as a disturbing precedent. The state surely has the right to pursue criminal justice even when illegal activities, are taking place under the cover of a religious organization. And the political philosophy and impact of a group like the Unification Church (or any church) is open to public discussion and censure. But the heart of the movement to investigate this group seems to have been the distaste and alarm expressed by parents and friends at the conversion of a young person. Unless such a commitment has clearly been coerced, it is in itself neither criminal nor pathological. Should Christian churches have been brought before legislative committees for fostering commitments that divided families over the issue of civil rights, over the Vietnam war?

The objection to the Unification Church, for Christians, must be primarily theological. The principal error of Unification belief is not that it is somehow “unreal” belief, but what this belief contains as substance.

Procrustean Symmetry

Divine Principle is the 536-page “Bible” of the Unification Church, consisting of the revelation which Sun Myung Moon has transcribed for his followers and constituting the theological basis of the movement. Despite the bizarre impression which Divine Principle leaves with a Christian reader, its claim to being “based upon Christian beliefs and ideology” is accurate. Indeed, though the editor’s note in the edition I read spoke of the document as “encompassing the profound thought of the orient,” and though the church touts its ideology as the unification of world religions, Divine Principle makes hardly a cursory attempt at syncretism. It offers itself as a variation on Christianity destined to supersede Christianity, or, to put it in traditional though precise terms, as a Christian heresy.

Though it hardly reaches, at least in translation, the plane of inspirational literature, and though it is so jargon-ridden that it often reads like a doctoral dissertation, the Principle is not without its fascination. Like the texts of many other fringe groups, it is based upon a system of procrustean symmetry, ordering history, spiritual life and social relationships in simple schemes. The Principle evinces an alert sense of contemporary intellectual and cultural currents with which it aligns itself superficially, even when these are in contradiction.

Its treatment of the Bible is a case in point. Divine Principle often sounds as though it is expounding a historical-critical approach to the Bible, but its own exegesis alternates between a more-than-strict literalism and an unfettered allegorizing. Its explanation of the Fall expresses a more rabid supernaturalism than biblical literalists would recognize, locating Eve’s sin in her sexual intercourse with an archangel. The fact of Eve’s seduction is verified by noting the acceptance in ancient Jewish literature of the idea that angels could have sexual relations with human beings.

On the other hand, many pages are spent divesting the biblical picture of the Second Coming of any taint of supernaturalism. The supposition that Christ will come again “on clouds” seems especially worrisome to Divine Principle; it is dismissed as belonging to a premodern age, then explained allegorically as signifying that the Lord of the Second Advent will come among his devout followers. The concern is understandable, since the Second Advent is maintained to be entirely earthly in character, and so congruent with Sun Myung Moon’s earthly career. The use of the Bible swings between these two poles: at times veering toward the fundamentalist, not to say occult, and at other times exhibiting a kind of campy “higher criticism.

In the name of further revelation, the Bible is tailored to fit a typology in which two philosophies of life, the “Abel-type” and the “Cain-type,” struggle in cyclical battles throughout history, each struggle building upon the previous success of the Abel-type and so ascending toward a complete restoration of the individual, the family, the nation and the world. The prophets, interestingly enough, are not in evidence in Divine Principle. Its whole scheme of history is built around the concept of “indemnity” -- that is, around humanity’s struggle to fulfill its portion of reparation for the Fall. The debt humanity owes God cannot be paid in full. But if an individual can, through complete devotion, discharge 5 per cent of his or her portion of the debt, God will wipe out the rest.

The Lord of the Second Advent

God’s plan of restoration for fallen humanity centers on the “four-position foundation” of Divine Principle, which has three successive forms or “bases.” This scheme can most easily be grasped as a simple form of Hegelianism. The four positions’ first base consists of an individual’s mind and body which, when their “give and take” are centered on God, produce as the fourth component a perfect individual and thus a stable configuration. At the family level, a man and a woman centered on God produce a child. Finally the perfected individual in “give and take” with creation, centered on God, produces as the fourth component the Kingdom of God on earth. These three bases correspond to the three blessings given to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: be fruitful (unite with God), multiply (unite with each other), and have dominion (unite with creation).

Within each of these positions are three stages of development: formation, growth and perfection. History is the story of steady progress toward completion of the foundation for perfect individuals, perfect families and perfect societies. This clockwork model is further ornamented by the idea that Satan resists this progress by setting up opposite numbers to the “heavenly side” at each level of restoration. These must be defeated in the course of God’s plan. Stalin arose to lead communism as the “symbolic representation of the Lord of the Second Advent on the Satanic side.”

Thus, while the two world wars may appear from a human point of view to have been evil, from the point of view of God’s plan for restoration they were good and necessary. The defeat of the “satanic side” in each case cleared the path for a more nearly complete foundation for the Kingdom of God. These two cataclysmic conflagrations of our century, which broke the back of the liberal Protestant faith in progress, do not appear to trouble the adherents of Divine Principle, by and large members of a generation conveniently undistressed by stark memories of those ‘triumphs” for the heavenly side. This sanguine schematization of the Holocaust has not, understandably, reassured Jewish critics of the movement.

There remains, of course, one final conflict, the resolution of which will provide the worldwide unity upon which the last four-position foundation can be perfected. This is the struggle between “Abeltype” democracy and “Cain-type” communism. Divine Principle is indecisive at this point. It may not be necessary for democracy to destroy communism (the sole bearer, in its view, of a “materialistic” philosophy) by force. It may be accomplished in a battle of ideology. The Unification Church seeks to forge the necessary ideology while at the same time supporting a militarily supreme West, just in case. This final conflict is imminent, for the Lord of the Second Advent has appeared in Sun Myung Moon, and the atheistic communist system is the “Antichrist” of the final days.

This historical scheme is consonant with Divine Principle’s attitude toward Jesus. The church’s interpretation of the Principle makes it clear that the Lord of the Second Advent is not Jesus of Nazareth come again but a new figure who will accomplish what Jesus could not do. Though scrupulously concerned not to attribute Jesus’ “failure” in any way to his own shortcomings, the Principle does not hesitate to blame the Jewish people’s unbelief, John the Baptist’s cowardice, and Judas’ betrayal as the causes of the crucifixion, which was an ignominious setback for God’s plan. Jesus was able to achieve only “spiritual salvation,” and consequently Christians have been limited to spiritual salvation.

This failure is demonstrated in the inability of Christians to produce sinless children. The relevance of the cross for the present life, like the relevance of the prophets, is denied. Worldly triumph is the expectation, and according to the neat diagram of world history which Divine Principle provides, the victory over communism and the subsequent consummation cannot be much further away than the year 2000. Apparently Moon and his second wife are already considered the true parents of the new humanity, fulfilling the prophesied marriage of the lamb in Revelation 19.

The genius of Divine Principle lies not so much in what it teaches as in what it allows. It provides religious legitimization for a multitude of desires in which we fondly wish to be confirmed. It offers a kind of refuge from prophetic religion. We want to love our country above others, and Divine Principle assures us it is the “heavenly side,” the very flagship of restoration. Its enemies, and ours, are satanic. We long to believe in progress, in the goodness of the technology that supports our good life. The Principle teaches that the rise of technology and science is a sign not only of inexorable progress but also of the dawning of the Kingdom.

There are no nasty words here about denial or “less is more.” We want to put our own lives and our families (though not always our parents, with the demands and responsibilities they place on us) first -- and quite properly so, we are told, for the avenue to social change lies in our perfect children. Is there a softness for the occult, the extrasensory? Principle argues for the reality of the spiritual world and of evil spirits. Lest this frighten anyone, we are assured that hell, such as it is, is systematically emptied as these spirits work off their remaining indemnity. There is no judgment one need worry about.

The two unequivocal denials which Divine Principle utters are directed at communism and adultery. In other words, the single striking instance in which it sets itself against prevailing mores and wishes is in the case of sexual liberty -- a case which is perhaps dubious if it is true that a substantial proportion of the generations which have grown up in the sexual revolution may harbor a secret desire for that “No.”

Christianity as Impediment

Despite the Unification Church’s ambiguous self-designation as “Christian” and its desire to unify all religions under a single ideology which it also designates as in some sense Christian, Principle finally sees Christianity itself as an impediment to the work of the Lord of the Second Advent. Christians of today,

who are captives to scriptural words, will surely criticize the words and conduct of the Lord of the Second Advent, according to the limits of what the New Testament words literally state. So it is only too clear that they can be expected to persecute him and brand him a heretic [Divine Principle, p. 535].

Christianity, which has hitherto been treated as the supreme religion, is seen to be the faithless Israel of the latter days, from which God is removing all guidance. The leaders of Christianity, like the chief priests and rabbis of Jesus’ time, are “unfortunately” headed to hell. As is the case in most fringe sects, there is a prosaic clairvoyance which foresees a less-than-enthusiastic response from the church at large.

Indeed, many of the Unification Church’s characteristics and techniques faithfully correspond to those traditional in fringe groups of Christianity -- from the buttonholing solicitors with their repertoire of causes to the authoritarian structure, from the dedicated young people to the financial solvency. Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses and many before them have walked this path. There does not seem yet any reason to regard these features as especially sinister in the Unification Church. In fact Moon’s adherents differ from previous fringe groups in their quite early and expensive pursuit of respectability, as evidenced by the scientific conventions they have sponsored in England and the U.S. and the seminary they have established in Barrytown, New York, whose faculty is composed not of their own group members but rather of respected Christian scholars.

Rabid harassment, which only confirms the movement’s conviction that it is persecuted, is hardly becoming to our own convictions. There is space, however, for the qualifying “yet,” because the suspicion that the movement might in some way be involved in the work of the Korean CIA or Korean agents in the U.S. is a troubling one. In this matter it is perhaps the group’s own secrecy which is its primary liability. There is no doubt of the church’s support of the South Korean government. South Korea is extolled in Divine Principle as a land “close to God’s heart” where many receive revelations of the coming Kingdom. But ironically, in South Korea Christians are jailed for espousing democracy and human rights, apparently without protest from the Unification Church.

Above all, there is no doubt that Divine Principle must be rejected on theological grounds. God’s hand in the world cannot be bound to “democracy” or invoked as heavenly aid in a war, even a war of ideology, for world dominion. For Christians the cross must remain central, not only as a full rather than inadvertent revelation of God’s love and nature but also as a sign of the Christian life. The Christian Christ with his cross calls us to sacrifice not just for those things which serve our ends, but in the service of God’s purpose, which runs far beyond and at times counter to those ends.

Says Who? (Matthew 21:33-46)

Here’s the big question: By whose authority? Who has given Jesus the power to cleanse the temple, heal the sick and forgive Sins? Because it’s hard for us to understand life in Jesus’ time, it’s also hard to understand just how fundamental his attack on the moneysellers is. By forgiving sins, Jesus is blasting away at the religious leaders of the day, members of the priestly class who have made a profitable business out of forgiveness. Should we be surprised that they respond by attacking Jesus? He’s threatening their wealth and privilege. No wonder they are out for him.

It is no different today. Power always protects itself. Those of us in religious leadership are just as venal as any in the world. We speak sanctimoniously of peace and unity and shut out those who challenge our authority. We "tart up" dismissive sobriquets for our rivals, we find ways to make sure our critics don’t succeed, we justify shutting them out with pious cant. As a religious professional, I’ve come to see more clearly over the years why Jesus had to assault the religious leadership as he did. A religious vocation is dangerous for faith. And we should make no mistake -- we are just as culpable as the religious leaders of Jesus day. The Protestant in me sometimes thinks Thomas Jefferson’s recommendation isn’t a bad idea for the church -- there should be a revolution in every generation. Throw the bums out, get a new system, new leadership. Things couldn’t be worse.

In my capacity as a seminary professor, I work with a candidacy committee. Sometimes I wonder how Jesus would have done as a candidate. Would he have made it through the credentialing committees?

Can’t you see the committee’s report? The candidate seems to have trouble with authority and his own authority. We recommend that he be sent to a counselor to work on these issues before he goes any further in the process.

There are repeated instances of this problem in his history. He is known to have been impertinent to his elders as far back as age 12, when he argued fine theological points with them in the temple, without any consideration for the feelings of his parents. It doesn’t appear that he has really dealt with that issue yet. The CPE report also hints at the same problem: he has delusions that he battled, hand to hand, with the devil. His first sermon in his home congregation made outrageous claims for his ministry. We recommend that he take an internship.

Furthermore, he has anger issues with which he needs to learn to deal. It is reported that he entered a church and threw out the people selling souvenirs and candles. . . . Members of his internship committee report that he never answers questions directly, but responds to questions with questions. Worst of all, he has a way of telling jokes that are blasphemous and inappropriate for religious people.

This story is good news for all the sinners I know, but horrible news for me as a member of the religious establishment. Sinners know they need something; I am only defending something. The hard part is seeing that Jesus is against not only the people I’m not very fond of in the religious establishment, but me as well. I’m a part of it. Had I been there during the trial, the tormenting and the crucifixion of Jesus, I would have been the first to hammer in the nails. I’m a defender of the establishment, no matter how rotten I think it is.

In The Educated Imagination Northrop Frye comments that when he hears people wishing they could have been at Bethlehem so they could have seen the star, the angels singing, the shepherds, the babe, he realizes that he wouldn’t have seen it, because he doesn’t see it now. Our piety and prejudices blur our vision.

It is when Jesus gets to the story of the two sons that he twists the knife in deep. It hurts my Lutheran prejudices that it isn’t what we say but what we do that matters. Where is the gospel in this story, my students will ask, trying to stretch every text over the frame of their newly acquired theological paradigm. It is hard to hear from Jesus that the preferred son is the one who does the right thing, not the one who says the right thing. But for Jesus, the faith that doesn’t result in faithful action is mere talk. The truth of your commitment lives in your heart, And what you do is the best measure of what’s in your heart.

In my trade, talk is the coin of the realm. We have to say it just right, get it right or we are accused of not being faithful. And as a wordsmith who cares deeply about words, I value that and respect it. But every now and then it is good to hear Jesus dig his elbow in my ribs and say, Ain’t so. I want your words to speak the truth from your heart, I want you to love me and obey my commands, which are simple: Love your neighbor as yourself. By what authority does he say this? If we don’t hear it in his voice right now, we’ll hear it loud and clear when this Gospel story ends. "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore . . ." (Matt. 28:18).

Missing the Point (Matthew 21:33-46)

Hans Nielsen Hauge, often called the John Wesley of Norway, changed Norway much as Wesley changed England. Hauge was born in 1776 to prosperous peasants in eastern Norway. He was a devout young man whose main sources of study were his Bible, his catechism and his hymnbook, and he read these many times over. On April 5, 1796, while working in a field and singing an old German hymn, "Jesus, I long for thy blessed communion" -- Jesu, Sophia, ich suche und lange -- Hauge was struck and knocked out by a light from heaven. He described it later as "something supernatural, divine and blessed. . . . I had a completely transformed mind, a sorrow over all sins, [and] a burning desire that others should share the same grace.

After months of quiet prayer and thought, Hauge began publishing materials and walking the length and breadth of Norway to tell people what he had learned. While walking, he knit socks and mittens so as not to waste time. The blockade of the Danish kingdom during the Napoleonic Wars had left Norway in penury. People were reduced to baking bread with tree bark. When Hauge arrived in a community, he would suggest that they build sawmills, salt works or breweries -- anything that would help them become self-sufficient. Then, after helping them meet their physical needs, he offered them Bible study and prayer. Later, he stayed connected with them through correspondence.

A revival began sweeping Norway. The powers that be felt threatened by Hauge, and in 1800 the government threw him in jail for breaking the Conventicle law, which forbade laypeople from meeting together for religious purposes. The brutal conditions broke his health almost immediately, but he languished in prison for 14 years. When he was released, Norway was a changed country. Hauge had helped to break the mercantilist economic system and the hierarchical system of church government. Today historians call him the first modern Norwegian. His movement got the peasants "off the sauce" long enough so they could board boats to America, and they came bringing with them Hauge’s emphasis on hard work and his love for the Lord. And did they work! They built lively and vibrant institutions of learning -- St. Olaf, Concordia, Augsburg, Augustana, Luther Seminary -- as well as hospitals, orphanages, old people’s homes and publishing houses.

Some say that if Hauge had lived in a Catholic country, he would have been sainted. Yet he and his movement are still the subject of derision. Theologians are scornful of his lack of theological sophistication and of his admittedly fierce legalism. His list of sins was long -- no dancing, drinking, cards or theater. I was raised on that list of prohibitions, and although I’ve made my share of jokes (Watch out for sex because it leads to dancing. . .), I have few complaints about how my parents raised me. We need some of these regulations. Our children need them.

In telling the parable of the vineyard, Jesus is doing what the opera scene does to its audience -- offering a stick in the eye. When the Augsburg Masterworks Chorale and Orchestra performed the opera in Minneapolis in 1997, the audience (many of them churchgoers) enjoyed the scene immensely. It was musically and dramatically extraordinary, but like most good drama, it was also an attack on the conventional wisdom of the audience.

Hauge is still derided by many who know nothing about him but sense that he is threatening something deep in them. Theological students, for example, have been known to celebrate Hauge’s birthday by carousing in front of his bust and otherwise mocking and deriding his legalism. From the perspective of Jesus’ parable, their behavior reveals that they understand Hauge’s attack on their privilege only too well, but can respond to his challenge only in this primitive way. Likewise, Jesus tells the story of the owner of the vineyard to show that his listeners, members of the religious establishment of his time, have missed the point. The story is breathtakingly clear. Those who "get it" have to do away with him. They mock him, deride him and finally kill him.

Regardless of how this story worked, whether it was what Jesus actually said, whether he ever spoke in allegories or only in parables, it behooves us to get the story right. It is not just about something back then, but about today. In fairy tales, it’s the frog, the rejected little sister or the simple farmer who turns out to be the truth bearer. For Christians, it is the rejected stone that becomes the cornerstone. Listen up!

Your God is Too Nice (Matthew 20:1-16)

Jesus understood his listeners well. This parable, with its setting in the vineyard, describes the life of most of the people who were listening to him. Its emotions are primary -- wanting a fair wage for a fair day’s work. When I was a kid growing up in the Willamette Valley, teenagers and migrant laborers would go out into the strawberry fields every June to help with the harvest. We would rise at 4:30 AM., pack lunches, sleepily wait for trucks or old school buses to drive us out to the fields, then spend eight hours gathering quarts of ripe strawberries in the baking sun. We got from 26 to 35 cents a carrier, which was 12 pints.

No matter how big or small the strawberries, I would never pick more than ten carriers, partly because I much preferred talking to picking. When I arrived home with my three dollars, my mother would cry, "How can you be so slow? Becky [my classmate and fellow Luther Leaguer] picked $12.00 worth!" I was an embarrassment to her at Ladies Aide, where mothers compared the occupational fitness of their children. My mother knew that in the ways of the world, the first would be first and the last would be last, period. While I wouldn’t have minded getting Becky’s pay, she would have hated getting mine. It wouldn’t have been fair!

That is the moral world that Jesus challenges. He uses these assumptions to introduce a new kingdom, one that is drastically different from the kingdom of this world. It is his final question, however, that stumps us: Is not God free? (Matt. 20:15). Abstractly, since we are not the pickers, we might agree that God’s move here is more than fair -- God gives us all the same thing, not what we deserve, or what we’ve worked for. God is being merciful, not fair, and this is what mercy looks like. God is truly love, and wills that all may be saved.

But how does God’s freedom work? God’s freedom is part of the hidden nature, or mystery, of God -- something that we don’t hear much about today. We’ve domesticated God down to the point of genial predictability, a power that wouldn’t do anything a nice person like me wouldn’t do. When something bad happens, and people actually come to us to bear a word from God, we try valiantly to excuse God from any culpability, assuring our people that God feels bad right along with us.

The Sunday after September 11, 2001, people filled the churches of the country to hear where God was in the tragedy. Most received foreign-policy advice instead. Pastors assured the parishioners that God didn’t do any of this and was wringing his hands on the sidelines, and feeling bad for us, like a maiden aunt with the vapors. Then the same pastors suggested that we know what caused the attack and why we deserved it: either we, as a country, had failed to rid the world of poverty or, on the other side of the political ledger, we had tolerated lax moral standards.

I wondered what President Lincoln would have said. His well-known cynicism about preaching would have been a worthy antidote to these palavering attempts to justify the ways of God to humanity. The bland assurance that God’s will was the same as the political cause espoused by a preacher did not go down with him. Bring back J. B. Phillips’s Your God Is Too Small, or maybe a revision: Your God Is Too Nice!

Recently, I heard a preacher loudly declaiming Jonathan Edwards’s sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." His intention was to make fun of Edwards and his picture of God as both supremely angry and merciful, But Edwards came off better than the contemporary preacher. There was urgency in Edwards and a grandeur that gave us listeners pause. In Edwards’s declaiming, the congregation glimpsed a preacher whom they longed to hear again. Although the language might have seemed strange to them, they didn’t laugh. I sat there wishing, as they must have, for Edwards to return.

Over the summer, I’ve been teaching and reading the prophet Habakkuk, whose wisdom seems to be what Jesus is driving at here. God’s ways are not ours. God can use the Chaldeans for his purposes, or not. The tyrants will get their own medicine sooner or later, and the grandeur of God is far beyond us, with dark and light aspects we cannot fathom. God is free to do what is necessary to work out God’s will in our lives, in the history of the world. And regardless of what we see and appear to know, we are to wait upon God. And while doing that, we will praise God, in those marvelous words of Habakkuk: "Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights."

The parable indicates clearly that God intends to be gracious to all, far more than any of us deserve or can imagine. Jesus shows us that the freedom of God is far beyond our understanding and reason -- it is in that awareness that we bow down and worship this one who is in his holy temple. For once, in the spirit of Habakkuk, let all the earth keep silent and let us stop yammering about what God does or does not intend, except the salvation of the world.

New Math (Matthew 18:21-35)

Matthew’s Jesus has been teaching the disciples that the kingdom of heaven works not as the world works, but as a new way to live based in forgiveness. Now for the parable, which illustrates almost every point of the discourse that preceded it. What’s surprising to me is how thoroughly the parable teaches the lesson: the Christian community reckons pardons differently than the world does. The brother wronged, instead of seeking revenge, should go to the one who wronged him and work out the issue in private so that the community will flourish and not be torn apart by bitterness and a desire for revenge. Children should be treated gently, and those who fail in this work deserve to have a millstone put around their necks. And by the way, the lost are of primary value to the Son of man who will do everything to save the straying one. As if to assure them that these things will be possible, Jesus promises that he will be there when they gather in his name and that he will grant them whatever they ask.

Peter always asks the first question, the one we would probably ask. Jesus has just called him "the rock," and then "the devil," so he might have learned to wait a bit, but then he starts again: How much do I have to forgive? Convention had it that three pardons were all you deserved -- or in Peter’s economy, all you needed to give. Peter approaches warily, even upping the ante from three to seven, asking Jesus whether it should be seven -- a nice view into Peter’s growing understanding that Jesus usually will not give the answer they might expect. How much of a surprise Jesus’ view is, this parable illustrates, neatly summing up the fifth petition, the Golden Rule and the day’s discourse.

In it he illustrates point for point what he was saying about the Christian community. The king, wrathful at the man who begs for time to pay him back, relents, is merciful and forgives the debt. The friends of the poorer servant go to the king on his behalf in an exquisite show of Christian concern for the brother. It is interesting to note that they do not go to the scoundrel who did all this; perhaps they have sensibly noted that he will not listen. They go to where they can get what they need, from the Lord who has already shown mercy to the one. As Jesus said, he’ll be wherever two or three are gathered, and wherever two agree about a request, the heavenly Father will give it to them.

But the conclusion of the parable, that we must forgive our brothers and sisters from the heart, is too much for me. What does it mean to do this? I know that Jesus is right to say that without forgiveness the Christian community cannot flourish. But with our psychologizing of guilt and shame this past century, we’ve gotten so messed up on what forgiveness is that I find it difficult to sort this story out. You say you forgive someone, but you keep in your heart a bill of particulars ready to be whipped out at the next infraction -- this is not forgiveness from the heart. The church has quit talking about sin and forgiveness, and "plays" at community without getting to the depths of the heart where the forgiveness must start. The Lord’s Supper I has degenerated -- it cannot be a rite of community without true forgiveness. We should not be taking the cup until we have made things right with our neighbors. Forgiveness is necessary for us to be one in Christ.

Dante taught me that sin is simply the father saying to the sinner, Thy will be done. The unforgiving heart is a proud heart that stands over and against the community, refusing to bow to community and instead casting itself out of the circle. Although this story is terrible news, it is also the truth that will finally make us free.

In my tradition of Lutheran pietism, people used to dread the Lord’s Table when they knew that they harbored sinful thoughts and resentments against their brothers and sisters. They did not feel repentant enough to dare to drink to their own damnation. Something dangerous happened in communion, and they did not dare receive the cup without making amends with the neighbor. Luther even argued that one should not receive communion in a strange place because neither the community nor the pastor would know if there had been amendment of life.

This is strange language to us. We have mainlined grace so cheaply that we no longer understand the disconnect in our own spiritual lives. As Bonhoeffer argued, we have begun to justify sins instead of sinners. We insist on a superficial forgiveness and judge people who are judgmental and unforgiving. Here is where Jesus gets us again. It needs to be from the heart.

I have learned in my life that I do not always have it in my heart to do what is required here. For many of us, the only solution is to get a new heart. English poet Stevie Smith puts it well in her poem, "The Repentance of Lady T":

I look in the glass.

Whose face do I see?

It is the face

of Lady T.

I wish to change.

How can that be?

Oh Lamb of God

Change me, change me.