Dress Code (Matthew 22:1-14)

If you are ever invited to a gala event where a constitutional monarch is present, you will be told to wear a dark suit or a formal dress. If you do not follow the dress code, you will be denied entry and sent back into the darkness from which you came. We’re talking formal wear here, not the kind of outrageous display of extreme couture exemplified by Jennifer Lopez at the Academy Awards. Formal and discreet -- no pants suits for women, no leisure suits for men. Apparently the poor guy in the parable of the wedding banquet didn’t read the small print on his invitation. He is thrown into outer darkness where there will be gnashing of teeth because, as Jesus concludes, many are called but few are chosen. Jesus doesn’t give us a clue about why this happens. Didn’t the man wear the clothes he was given? Is he protesting the dress code? What is going on here?

As any mother knows, dressing another person can become a contest of wills. Scripture understands this -- in fact, it is a profound theme of scripture from the beginning, when God dresses Adam and Eve in animal skins before they leave Eden, to the end, when we’re all going to be wearing white robes in the new Jerusalem.

God provides these clothes freely to those who need them. Scripture gives us several glimpses of what these clothes will be like. American metaphysical poet Edward Taylor uses the images of Revelation 7 in his poem "Huswifery."

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,

Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory;

My Words and Actions, that their shine may fill

My wayes with glory and thee glorify.

Then mine apparel shall display before yee

That I am Clothed in Holy robes for glory.

Given the pervasiveness of the theme of clothes in scripture, it is not surprising that it appears frequently in Christian song. There is, of course, the Negro spiritual "I Got a Robe" and Bianco da Siena’s "Come Down, O Love Divine," set by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This 15th-century hymn uses clothing in another way: ‘Let holy charity / Mine outward vesture be, / And lowliness become mine inner clothing / True lowliness of heart, / Which takes the humbler part, / And o’er its own shortcoming weeps with loathing." Bianco concludes, "No soul can guess his grace / Till it become the place / Wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling."

While we moderns might suggest that Bianco work on self-esteem issues, the images of an overcoat of charity and innerwear of lowliness of heart -- the heart where the Holy Spirit also dwells -- show how the will has to be changed thoroughly if we are to live in relationship with both neighbor and God. I’m struck by the wisdom of the image -- the inner dress being fundamental, like the heart, while the outer clothing, charity, comes from a heart that knows it needs God in order to do anything good.

We are naked, both literally and metaphorically, before the living God. We need to be dressed, not with the sartorial choices of our own will, but with the grace of God. Scripture tells us that our own righteousness is as filthy rags, so we understand that only God has the appropriate wardrobe for us. Scripture tells us that the washing of the old garments comes from the blood of the Lamb. As Richard Crashaw, the great Baroque poet of England, wrote: "Th’ have left Thee naked, Lord, O that they had; / This garment too I would they had denied. / Thee with Thyself they have too richly clad, / Opening the purple wardrobe of Thy side. / O never could be found garments too good / For Thee to wear, but these, of Thine own blood,"

Christ’s nakedness on the cross is part of his humiliation, but as the source of all good he dresses himself with his purple (royal) blood and defeats the heinous purposes of his murderers. We shudder at the metaphysical conceit about the blood, but we understand the clothing image. Only Christ can dress us up in purples. Naked we came into the world, and naked we go out.

As Shakespeare’s King Lear raves on the heath, he begins to strip off his royal outerwear. "Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume . . . Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more, but such a poor, bare forked animal as thou art," Lear strips all humanity naked with his words of terror and abandonment as he works to discover what it means to be a man, not a king.

In the hymn "The Farmer Takes a Sheaf of Grain," contemporary Swedish hymn writer Ylva Eggehorn gets it right:

The farmer takes a sheaf of grain, his harvest,

And lifts it up in gratitude to God.

So I will lift my daily work and troubles

And leave them, unadorned, before my God.

My faith bears nothing more, I bring no treasures

And come without adornment to your house.

My life is naked longing, flesh and blood.

So dress me in your grace. You are my God.

© Ylva Eggehorn, 1992. Translation, Gracia Grindal, 1997.

Stopping by the Pit Stop

These days one can feel twinges of guilt about insisting -- especially in church, where one’s thoughts are supposed to be on higher things than wanting to throttle the preacher -- that the use of language is important. It sounds dangerously elitist and stuffy. But the fight about language which is raging in the churches right now is a bit more complicated than old against new, Elizabethan versus Nixonian, or fancy against plain. If we fight it in those terms, we will be fighting a silly battle.

Two years ago I wrote an article for The Christian Century on the language of hymns and the new biblical translations which I freely confess was more heat than light (“Lord, Bless This Burning Pit Stop,” January 15, 1975, p. 36). Some 50 readers wrote to approve what I said. Many of them gave me the impression they felt rather guilty about their feelings that the church could get along with good language from the past if it could not find anything in the present that was not ugly. They seemed to feel that their protests against the clumsy new prose pouring out of our church presses and pulpits had gotten them lumped in with the nuts who think that fluoride is a communist plot hatched in the Vatican for the sole purpose of eating away the brain cells of the best minds in Rolla, North Dakota. Such lumping is not fair. On the whole, those who wrote me were kind, literate Christians with a sense of history which made them aware of what happens when a language loses its power to communicate thought and make distinctions.

They knew that when language loses its precision and power, the body politic is in danger. They wanted a language that is vivid and clear and moving. They knew that if we do not have such a language, we could well suffer more catastrophes like the Vietnam war -- a war for which, apparently, no one was responsible, simply because no one in Washington knew how to use an active verb. The great enemy of any community is language that is not clear; the great poverty of any community is language that cannot move. The church is having trouble finding an appropriate language for its worship. There are reasons for this, and there are things we can do to remedy the situation.

It is well to remember that the church was born in an oral culture. Its very confessions speak of that. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also. The early church was a group of people who gathered to hear the stories of salvation. The Word had to be communicated orally. To be sure, there were the technical developments of the alphabet and papyri, but the old customs and the sheer cost of a scroll assured that the church was, in the main, oral. The congregation contained in the living bodies of its members the Word of God. When they gathered, the word was shared and kept alive by repetition. In such a culture it would be impossible for some to say they would rather worship God alone in a boat on Sunday morning. Worship in an oral culture is communal; it cannot be conceived of in any other way. Because much of the energy of the oral culture is spent remembering and passing on the Word through ritual, no one in such a culture would dream of introducing new worship materials every week for the sake of variety. The language of an oral culture must be memorable -- that is to say, full of forms that are repetitive and clustered with images easy to recall. Our liturgies and sermon techniques took shape in such a culture.

We all know, thanks to Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, that Gutenberg’s invention deeply affected the mind of Europe. When the Bible was easily reprinted and available to the masses in the vernacular, people no longer had to gather together to hear God’s Word. They could read it at home. And they were able to read it in language written so that anyone, even, as Tyndale wrote, “the boy who driveth the plow,” could understand it.¹ The Word became, as Ong says, silent.²That silence has had profound influence on the way we think about religious language, but it is well to remember that when those translations into the vernacular were made, they were not written down in the language of print. They were set down in sentences and phrases drenched in oral style.

Those “oral residues,” as Ong calls them, are to be seen in the techniques of syntax and image which abound in Elizabethan prose.³ They are naturally in the King James Version of the Bible -- until this generation the language of worship throughout the English-speaking world. The KJV is a fine monument to what Ian Gordon P The Movement of English Prose calls “great public spoken prose.”⁴It has worked very well over the past 350 years. Now in the electronic age we are struggling to find a new language for worship. We should understand some of the mistakes we have made in replacing an oral prose with book, prose, a public language with a private one not written, to be read aloud.

The language of print is much more concerned with meaning than with sound, as it should be. Few of us would argue that it should be any other way. But language on the page is different from language we hear. It often loses its voice and its sense of audience. In that loss it can become obscure, and its meaning can escape the most attentive reader -- to say nothing of the listener. Listeners often consider their being baffled a sign that the thought is deep and beyond their abilities to grasp, rather than a sign of the speaker’s confused thought. But in either case, the failure to communicate is not it the problem of the audience. It is always the failure of the speaker or writer. anyone who uses language which the listener or reader cannot understand is alienating the audience. Alienation is exactly the opposite of community. The church and its leaders should not by careless or uninformed rises of language cause such alienation.

The church is still very much a creature of the oral culture. But the communication skills most of us have learned have more to do with writing and reading than with speaking and hearing. Most of us have lost the ability to compose for the oral occasion. The quality of sermons steadily declines because our preachers read rather than proclaim the Word. What they say is so governed by the prose of print that most listeners cannot grasp the thought.

There are ironies here. When people are longing for community, we produce a Bible that consciously avoids resonance with the old version. We abandon liturgies that are familiar for those that are up-to-the-minute but not memorable. They are liturgies that do not reinforce the corporate nature of worship because they do not arise from the shared syntax of communal life which most Christians have deeply etched in them, waiting to be evoked each time they gather. The church has lost some of its power to hold people in that peculiar bond of fellowship which is forged by communal repetition. Those bonds are not forged by machines that make it possible to produce a new liturgy for every Sunday. Such liturgies have to be read silently and cognitively understood and thought about before they can be shared.

All of what I have just said is in no way to be taken as anti-intellectual. I am trying to unify the intellectual and emotional more than they seem to have been these past few years. As a writer and English teacher perhaps I can share some information about how we can improve upon the language we use in churches so that everyone can understand it and be moved by it. If some tinhead out there still thinks that I am an elitist who yearns to live only in the glories of Tudor prose, I will personally flail him or her with pages of hymn revisions and translations and worship materials Mother Church has forced me to do for her these past five years. The only payment I foresee is the chance to be tarred and feathered by the crazies when the new Lutheran book finally comes out. Of such is the Kingdom of heaven.

What follows are some hot tips on writing for worship, from hymns to liturgies to sermons. I will try to use current examples. The failures of the past are long buried. May they rest in peace and soon be joined by these.

III

Anyone trained in rhetoric -- that is to say, anyone educated in the Western world from 400 B.C. to 1750 A.D. -- learned at great pain to manipulate syntax into patterns, or “balances,” that make thought memorable: patterns of nouns and verbs or other parts of speech that are repeated. The most famous one must be I came, I saw, I conquered. The Bible and our memorized theologies are full of such formulaic statements. The world, the flesh, the devil. One of the most spectacular is, as Augustine shows us in Book IV of his Christian Doctrine, the breathless passage in II Corinthians 11:21-33. The effect of it on the reader is as emotionally satisfying as it is intellectually satisfying.

Though we do not learn to use those forms consciously these days, we do use them because so many great and memorable speeches use them. Most of us remember a good part of John Kennedy’s inaugural address simply because it was composed of balanced sentences. The most famous one -- Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country -- would have escaped notice if it had been: Do not ask what your country can do for you. Try to find out whether or not the nation needs any of your skills or services and then give them.

We know, too, when those forms are violated. We feel it unconsciously, because they have been used so often that we have memorized their patterns. A simple example of such a failure to observe the form is the sign outside Decorah. Iowa, advising us that “Old people need love and yearly spinal exams.” The fact that the sponsor of the billboard is the local chiropractor is not nearly so funny to me as the violation of our expectation that the word “love” is going to be followed by some equally fine word like “care” or “concern.”

The building up of clauses, as in the powerful II Corinthians text, is an effective device for building up the interest and the emotions of an audience. Any speaker with an ear for that effect will use it liberally. Nearly illiterate evangelists pick it up quickly if they are frequent readers of the KJV. But if they read the new versions, they do not. Most of the failures in the New English Bible are failures of this kind; the NEB quite often takes the punch out of deeply moving texts long familiar to us. One of the best examples of this loss is the simple removal of the “though” at the beginning of the great I Corinthians 13 text. The change may not seem significant, but the failure to use that subordinate conjunction takes away the suspense in the build-up of those clauses. The failure results in some disconnection between thought and feeling.

It may strike readers as rather odd to be so cognitive about how one affects the emotions of people, but it is such knowledge writers spend years gaining. Good writers want to control all of their readers’ emotions. They want to know as much as possible about how that is done. One of the first things they learn is how to use verbs instead of nouns. Those who look carefully at our language have observed that we are using more nouns and noun phrases than formerly. Clearly, our language describes more than it moves. The best illustration of what happens when language is changed from verb to noun is once again to be seen in the two translations of I Corinthians 13. The strong verbs “spake,” “thought” and “understood” become nouns: “speech,” “thought” and “outlook.”

Besides using too many nouns, we are also using too many adjectives. People who aspire to the Famous Writers’ School often give themselves away as rank amateurs by their adjectives. It is not clear that “very, very good” is twice as good as “good.” The shading of meaning should be in the verb or noun, not in the prepositional phrase or adjective. There is a great difference in effect between these two ways of saying the same thing: Did not our hearts burn within us? and Did we not feel our hearts on fire? Burn is more economical and effective. It means quite the same as the second statement and sounds as modern as the second.

The greatest failures of writers these days are failures of tone. Tone is an odd word English teachers have used to describe the attitude of a writer toward his or her audience. It comes through regardless of what the words say, and it may be a divisive element in the church today. One can tell from tone much more than what a writer may intend to say. In, with, under, around and through our words, attitudes come across as clearly as does our meaning. But because it is such an elusive thing, it is one of the hardest elements for writers to control. If they do not control it, they get into all kinds of trouble.

There is a prayer in a recent hymnbook which goes something like this: Lord, bless all those who live in rural areas; help them to appreciate the goodness of nature and be open to those different from themselves. It takes very little sensitivity to guess what the writer of that prayer feels about the people who happen to live in rural areas. It sounds more like an anathema than a prayer. In fact, one might be able to explain much of the polarization of the church by looking at the tone of some of our worship materials. The church presses seem to be pouring forth prayers that curse people for being Republicans. Though the thought or sentiment behind such prayers is not a mystery to me who am no Republican. I find it somehow dismaying to use the confessional as a way to curse my relatives.

If one is sensitive to tone, reading many of the hip prayer books of the past ten years is disturbing. The prayers, while appearing to be frank and naked discussions with God, are more often frank and naked praisings of oneself for being so frank and naked with God. They are fairly clear messages to God that the suppliant is awfully keen on himself or herself as a sufferer. Writing reveals more of one’s character than one might suppose.

There is another kind of failure of tone that is amusing. It happens when speakers or writers mix up languages -- comparing, for example, the forgiveness of sins to the washing of a dirty diaper My favorite example of this failure tone crossed my desk not long ago. It is in what I call the trash-can school of theology, whose exponents endlessly remind us that Jesus was killed like a common crook on a garbage dump outside Jerusalem. They maintain that the language we use to describe that event must be as offensive as the event. But that is not how language works. Poorly written language calls attention to itself and to its author and seldom to its message. The hymn goes something like this:

Open our eyes to visions girt

With beauty and with wonder lit,

But let us ne’er forget the dirt

And those who spawn and die in it.

Aside from the obvious fact that the writer could not handle the form, this fervent prayer is a tonal disaster. Old-fashioned inversions like “visions girt” are in a realm of discourse centuries removed from the word “dirt.” There is no way “dirt” can follow “visions girt.” That it does is very funny. One’s grim expectation that “girt” is going to have to rhyme with something is so deliciously satisfied that we are in the world of Ogden Nash -- certainly not that of John Newton. No hymnwriter wants his or her audience to burst out laughing at the text. But this thought is so poorly expressed, the manner so dislocated from the matter, that the distance, in and of itself, is funny. The writer has lost control and calls attention not to the subject but to the poor writing.

Our pastors especially should learn the effective use of images and stories, techniques from the oral culture which can make their sermons more memorable and more compelling. When people do not have texts before them to read, they must have images to visualize while thinking about what the preacher is doing with the text for the Sunday. The best way for them to do this is to hear images, hooks to hang the meaning on. Jonathan Edwards’s success as a preacher was as much due to his brilliant use of images as it was to his brilliant thought. It takes careful thinking to come up with images that can help illuminate a text. Not every image is as effective as another. And two images ignorantly used together can create meanings not foreseen by their creator. My favorite example of mixed metaphors in church is the one in which the pastor, after a laborious explanation of what a modern interpretation of girding one’s loins might be and why, shouted that we all, needed to lift up our skirts and let Jesus go all the way.

Jesus was a master at the use of images, as all teachers in oral cultures must be. “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .” When he gives the image, the audience waits to hear more about it, but with their senses they have perceived much already. The meanings of an image (and a good image always has several) must be carefully examined. It could be that an image works on one level but on another is perfectly ridiculous. The pit stop again. The image of the pit stop might easily work for church services if one could think only of the gassing up and servicing a car gets at the race track and say that the Christian needs to come every Sunday to get gassed up and serviced -- but already we are in deep trouble. It is not possible to think in the same tones about all the possible meanings those words have and be serious. The disconnection between thought and feeling once again is disturbing.

Along with images, preachers must learn how to use stories better. Jesus told parables. Liturgical churches always use the Gospel stories as the text for the Sunday sermon. Pastors must know how to exegete a text. If they would learn how to read literature better, they could read the Bible and speak of it more effectively. As a teacher, Jesus knew that people learn to think abstractly much later in life than they learn how to remember stories. Members of a congregation can more easily model their lives after the Good Samaritan than they can remember the Golden Rule. Preachers should remember that the words they say about the stories are never as important as the words that say the stories. What the preacher has to do is to make sure the congregation experiences the story as fully as possible -- by giving the context of the story. by showing where it is in the story of Jesus and how it relates to our experiences in contemporary life.

Illustrations are ways to show people the truths of the Bible in a new setting, or to show people living out the truths of the Bible in a new age. Illustrations can be as out of whack with the text as an image. Often I have wondered what on earth the illustration that has everybody spellbound has to do with the text of the day. The relationship must be obvious or it must be clearly pointed out by the pastor. All of the abstractions in the sermon must be about the text. In the same way that a poor use of the balances or tone reveals unflattering things about one’s mind and character; so does the poor use of an illustration reveal the poverties of a mind.

The best preachers, I have observed, are those who can see stories in everyday life and can tell them in sermons, carefully linking up the contemporary story with the biblical text. It is for that reason that the preacher has to have a keen sense of the text. And he or she must also have a keen sense of the congregation. He or she must know exactly what the worshipers need to hear, what they can grasp and what they cannot. The Word must be heard before it has any life. It is for that reason that an old sermon or a sermon read from a book for an entirely different occasion is a particular offense to the oral culture. The oral event occurs in time with particular people with particular needs, and any failure of the preacher to speak to that moment is in my book almost a moral failure.

Preachers need to cultivate their sense of a story. The best way to do that is to read literature -- something I suspect many of our pastors do not do. Reading literature teaches them stories they can use as it also teaches them to see stories in everyday life. The audience needs all the help it can get to understand the stories of Jesus.

There is a problem that has begun to plague us more and more in the church these days because we are not as careful about our language as we should be. As I have said, the images and illustrations preachers use should illuminate the text. All the words in the sermon should connect with each other and the text. Abstract thought is not always easy to understand, but it can be understood if it refers to concrete detail. Problems develop when fuzzy thinkers use abstractions with no reference to concrete detail. That is what is wrong with too much abstraction and particularly what Is wrong with jargon -- it never makes any reference to concrete detail.

Jargon by its very nature alienates people because not everyone can understand it. Though it is defined as the language that experts use to communicate with each other, it also tells those on the outside that they are outsiders. Such a language in a heterogeneous group such as the church hinders community. Though I have no desire to deprive experts of their pleasures and I do understand the joys of fluency in a another tongue, in terms of expediting interpersonal contactual points in time, the aspects of which appear on first examination to be of a nature so non-effective as to be thought hardly worth facilitating, hopefully, the sum of these co-optations, possibility-wise, are thought to be so negligible, that while on the surface appearing deep, in terms of clarity what I have said is not. Dead language. Too many of our church leaders are using it. If congregations seem not to understand such jargon, it is not their fault. It is always the speaker’s fault. Always. Our church leaders have to learn, again, to speak the language of the people -- as should our church presses. Some years ago I was supposed to teach an eighth-grade Bible school class what a dysfunctional group is and why it is spelled with a “y.’’ I’m not sure if it was before that explanation or after that we were supposed to make pizza together, but what we had while we were working through the etymology of “dys” was not exactly group enthusiasm. A classic example of being able to describe community without being able to create one.

Church services should be times in which one’s entire person is ministered to. It is not enough for the service to have all the right thoughts; it has to move us as well. Liturgists cannot force us to be happy simply by telling us to be happy. Somehow, through the shape of the liturgy, through the working out of its form, that can happen without anyone telling us to change mood. It happens because form works on us emotionally as well as intellectually. Nothing irritates me more than a preacher who is constantly interrupting the worship experience with comments on how significant what we are now doing is. That strongly reinforces the split between thought and feeling. Well-wrought liturgies, hymns and sermons can help us to think and feel at the same time.

In the church, worship should gather us together; the experience should be as fully corporate as possible. All the elements at our disposal should come together in the best possible way. Worship is very much like theater. In the theater, because of the unities of time, place, character and language, the theatergoer experiences a catharsis. Something happens. And it happens because of the shape of the words as well as the action. There are no great tragedies without words. Gesture is not enough; we need words to involve our heads with our hearts. Language is, as Kenneth Burke says, symbolic action.⁵The church should be asking its artists to create worship experiences that work. Too often the church goes to the social scientists who can describe communities and who may be very helpful to Christians as they think about society but who, because of their analytic language, cannot create or reinforce community.

VII

The language of the church can be contemporary. We cannot return to an oral culture, but we can understand how to use language in the oral milieu of the congregation. It is silly to be writing up all of our worship materials and Bibles and sermons in the language of print and deluding ourselves that it is up-to-the-minute stuff. This is the age of electronic communication, an age more oral than we yet realize, and we should adapt to it.

It is no argument against what I am saying to say that people have always protested change. We should he changing our 350-year-old language with more wit than that. We need to learn how to use the language we now have with greater skill. We need to learn how to move people with thoughts and feelings worth thinking and feeling. People are sitting in many of our mainline churches waiting to he moved by something. They will leave us, soon, if they are not moved. They might like to hear some good words again, words used with intellectual and emotional integrity.

Some may still object to my overemphasis on style, as though, it is nasty to think about style. The trash-can school again. But this time I’ll use it. The incarnation as an idea might be a good one, but it is the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, his real agony and suffering and death and resurrection, that made us know that idea. We speak much these days of the importance of the physical elements in Jesus’ life. That is style. Any good writer knows that good writing -- style -- intensifies meaning. And if any people should be concerned about intensifying meaning, it should be the people of God.

Notes

1. The Movement of English Prose, by Ian Gordon (Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 97.

2. The Presence of the Word, by Walter Ong (Simon & Schuster. 1967), p. 288.

3. Rhetoric, Romance and Technology, by Walter Oug (Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 25

4. Gordon, p. 99.

5. Language as Symbolic Action, by Kenneth Burke (University of California Press, 1966).

Who’s Catering the Theological Smorgasbord

The bewildering proliferation of theologies in the last quarter of the 20th century contrasts sharply with the blends of liberal, existential and neo-orthodox theologies outlined by H. R. Mackintosh in his Types of Modern Theology in the second quarter of this century. One is bewildered not only by the sheer multiplicity of theologies but by the precariousness of theology itself occasioned by this variety. What factor do all these theologies have in common that justifies their inclusion under the label of theology? Has theology, like religion, been spread so thin that it defies definition? The issue was clearly focused at the three-quarter mark of the century by such developments as The Christian Century’s series on “New Turns in Religious Thought” and an issue of Christianity and Crisis which asked, “Whatever Happened to Theology?”

Theology is not alone in experiencing the demands of specialization, but that is of little consolation to one whose responsibility it is to introduce students to the issues of contemporary theology. If one is to transcend the initial impression that theology is a smorgasbord from which one may pick and choose as a matter of taste, with some question as to whether one must partake at all, it is necessary to identify some nutritional requirements which theology is designed to meet.

We shall take the basic theological proteins, carbohydrates and fats (analogies are not to be pressed too far) to be represented by the doctrines of God, salvation and the church. This may seem no less arbitrary than choosing from the smorgasbord itself, but it will at least provide a means for organizing the menu; and a consideration of how these themes are treated in recent theology will reveal basic issues of appetite and nutrition underlying the current malaise in theology.

Debating About God

The debate about God that has dominated recent theology may be understood as a clash between two points of view: Santa Claus theology and Christmas Spirit theology. Santa Claus theology is exercised over Virginia’s question: “Is there a Santa Claus?” This outlook has represented a prominent strand in theology from the Hellenistic influence apparent in Hebrews 11:6 (“Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him”), through the medieval Anselmic and Thomistic arguments for the existence of God, reaching a climax in the 18th century deistic arguments for a Great Designer evidenced by the intricacy and harmony of the universe.

Despite the increasing suspicion of such proofs in the modern period, following the challenges of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, the outlook is still very much in evidence in popular polls which calibrate religion in terms of the question, “Do you believe in God?” The issue for Santa Claus theology is whether one believes in the existence of a divine being.

The problem with Santa Claus theology is that the same polls which show a high percentage of the population to be believers also show that this belief has no significant influence on the values and practices of daily life. But there is another type of theology which starts with consideration of the values and commitments affirmed, irrespective of the beliefs articulated. For some, this approach avoids the hypocrisy of the child who no longer believes in Santa Claus but continues the pretense for the benefit of parents and younger brothers or sisters. Others claim this approach to be a return to the biblical perspective which sees not the existence but the nature and will of God as the issue. In any case, from the viewpoint of Christmas Spirit theology, Santa Claus theology is at best an heirloom of Greek metaphysics, and at worst a hypocritical avoidance of the theological dimension of life as it is experienced today. What is experienced, Christmas Spirit theology alleges, is not the intervention of a supernatural being slipping down the chimney on Christmas Eve, but a mysterious universe whose origin and destiny remain hidden yet which encompasses moments of communion and compassion such as touch even the most cynical at Christmastime.

Long after the myth of Santa Claus is shattered, the spirit of Christmas maintains its vitality. But then Christmas is not basically dependent on Santa Claus anyway. Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christ. But what is the Christ when belief in God is relegated to the status of a nonissue? Here Santa Claus theology and Christmas Spirit theology meet. The problem of Santa Claus theology is that it emphasizes belief for belief’s sake, or affirms a belief which no longer accords with contemporary experience. The problem with Christmas Spirit theology is that it endorses a virtually exclusive Christian allegiance without any wider basis for articulating and legitimizing that allegiance.

Thus contemporary theology is stalemated between a longstanding affirmation which does not touch the lives of many, and an appreciation of the needs and aspirations of contemporary experience which has great difficulty in being theological. The outstanding exception to this dilemma is the varied movement known as process theology. In line with Santa Claus theology, it is concerned with the reality of God -- not as a being, however, but as the source of direction” for the whole process of reality, which source in turn is affected by that process, thus aligning with Christmas Spirit theology’s concern to take contemporary experience seriously. Although process thought has been around for some time, it is only now receiving general theological consideration, and while it can hardly be expected to provide a panacea for the perennial problems of delineating the meaning of God, it does offer a way of avoiding the stalemate of Santa Claus and Christmas Spirit theologies.

A Cure for Life’s Ills

If the mushrooming of theologies constitutes a source of bewilderment for the student and teacher of theology, how much more devastating must the situation be for practicing clergy? Not only is the meaning of God in question, but what significance an answer to the question would have is by no means clear. One view suggests that no such answer can be forthcoming, because the question of God is addressed to the individual; therefore, the only authentic answer is an existential one. Another prominent perspective prefers to bypass the question in the interests of seeking to approximate more closely the Kingdom of God in society. Behind these two approaches lie different concepts of salvation and, consequently, different ideas of what ministry should involve. We may identify these approaches as Family Doctor theology and Public Health theology.

Family Doctor theology sees salvation and ministry in terms of the snatching of brands from the fire. The fire is the universal epidemic of sin. Beneath the competitions and confrontations of life there lies the universal egotism of the human creature who would be God. The child’s earliest demands for attention echo the rebellion of Eden: “You shall be as gods.” It has been suggested that the immediate result of the Fall, as portrayed in Genesis 3 -- “And they knew that they were naked” -- should be rendered “And they became self-conscious.” Rather than live as creatures who acknowledge the Creator, humanity has chosen to place the self at the center of life. Thus life is fragmented into a multiplicity of competing selves, alienated from their Creator, from one another, and themselves.

According to Family Doctor theology, this is the fundamental condition of life from which humanity must be rescued. But while the condition is universal, the cure is individual. The family doctor does not treat humanity. He or she deals with patients one by one. Disease demands individual treatment of the persons afflicted. Because sin has to do primarily with the individual’s orientation in his or her life stance, it can be dealt with only by challenging the individual in extremely personal terms. Thus whether in the person of the professional evangelist or in the informal witness of the individual Christian, Family Doctor theology prescribes individual conversion as the primary cure for the ills of life. If this aim is achieved, all other things will be added. If the basic orientation of life is corrected, the competitions and confrontations will be transformed in due course. Healthy individuals constitute a healthy society.

Although the apparent dominance of self-interest in contemporary society makes the Family Doctor diagnosis plausible, there is another type of theology which finds the cause of the malady elsewhere. Public Health theology argues that beyond the individual egotism which threatens to reduce humanity to a mass of gladiatorial combatants, there are dynamics in society itself which even the most saintly will not change by their saintliness. An epidemic is not halted merely by treating the individuals affected, but by getting to the source of the disease. Testing of water supplies, isolation of virus strains, and identification of carriers are the types of measures undertaken by public health officials.

Similarly, Public Health theology takes to heart Reinhold Niebuhr’s warning that it takes more than moral man to transform immoral society. Society is more than the sum of the individuals who constitute it. The battle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. The most humane individual may participate, whether boldly or unwittingly, in the most inhumane social structures. Thus the liberation theologies -- black, feminist, Third World -- attempt to challenge the social machinery which legitimizes and perpetuates racism, sexism and imperialism. As long as the virus flourishes, society is not safe, no matter flow many individuals have been cured or immunized. What is required, according to Public health theology, is not the individual cure of conversion, but structural change in the political, economic and social systems that provide breeding grounds for the dehumanizing viruses.

Thus contemporary theology is stalemated between Family Doctor theology, with its concern for the eternal destiny of the individual, and Public Health theology, which challenges the institutions and systems that prevent wholeness of life in the present. But here too there is a striking exception. The theology of hope combines concern for the aspirations of the individual with visions of the coming Kingdom which will transform life for all. Again, the point is not that the theology of hope adequately reconciles these disparate tendencies, but rather that it does not succumb to either approach, and offers the most promising prospect for avoiding the stalemate between Family Doctor and Public Health theologies.

Concepts of the Church

Though the doctrine of God has occupied a prominent place in recent theology, and though concepts of salvation are implied in many of the positions articulated, the doctrine of the church generally has not been accorded even this implicit status. One of the dominant motifs of the secular ‘60s was the insistence that Christian faith is not a matter of churchiness. As a result, much energy was expanded on delineating the implications of Christian faith in life generally, without regard to the historic locus of faith in the life of the Christian community. Thus while we can identify a concept of the church against which a dominant strand in recent theology has reacted, we can make only a hypothetical construction of what might have resulted had historical questions of institutional continuity been pursued. On this assumption, once again we are confronted with two competing strands of thought: Service Club theology and Fraternal Lodge theology.

Service Club theology is directed to the needs of the wider community. As service clubs promote certain projects for the betterment of the citizenry at large, this type of theology takes on the causes of the neglected and the wronged. In this aspect it is close to Public Health theology. Indeed, it is Public Health theology practiced on an ad hoc basis. The service club is essentially an interest group consisting of a loose association of individuals whose basic unity is the cause at hand.

If Service Club theology eludes definition, the conception of the church against which it reacts is more manageable. Fraternal Lodge theology may also take on causes, and concern itself with expressing Christian values in the wider community, but its primary orientation is internal. The fellowship, offices and ritual of lodges characterize Fraternal Lodge theology. While it stands accused of introversion and complacency by the Service Club approach, it represents the conviction that service is doomed to be fragmentary and inconsistent unless it is grounded in a firm motivating and sustaining base.

The conflict between Service Club theology and Fraternal Lodge theology is somewhat different from the other stalemates we have identified. The problem here is that there is only sporadic confrontation, the usual procedure being an avoidance of the issue of the nature and function of Christian community. While the other theologies may often fail to communicate, here it is the fundamental basis of communication which is lacking. Service Club theology puts such a premium on service that it regards any consideration of club or lodge as a distraction from its mission. Part of the reason for this attitude is that the church is subject to the widespread suspicion of institutions. While there is good reason for this skepticism, it is ironic that a theology so geared to public issues should neglect the most public expression of Christian faith. This tendency suggests that the fundamental reason for the neglect of the church in recent theology lies elsewhere -- namely, in the change in locus of theology itself from church to university.

Moving the Game to a New Ball Park

Although the university provided the setting for some of the most enduring theology of the medieval and Reformation eras, and though the philosophy of religion in the modern period emerged under similar auspices, the recent development of departments of religious studies in secular universities represents a unique phenomenon that has profound implications for theology. For most of its long history theology lacked the self-conscious concern with its own identity which has accompanied the emergence of religious studies. If that concern had been present, it would generally have received the Anselmic answer, recovered in this century by Karl Barth, which regards theology as originating in, and issuing in, doxology.

Whatever doctrine happened to be at stake at any given time, theology’s role as practitioner of the intellectual love of God was generally taken for granted. This was the assumed function of theology as a servant of the church. It is not accidental that Barth’s recovery of Anselm precipitated the change in his program from “Christian Dogmatics” to “Church Dogmatics.” When theology, whether under that label or designated as religious studies, flourishes under the auspices of the humanities and social sciences, not only has the game moved to a different ball park, but the rules and umpires are also changed. Rather than owing a primary allegiance to the worship and service of God, theology is embroiled in the conflict between humanities and social-science orientations.

Here there seem to be three options: to continue the pursuit of theology as though this change had not taken place, to engage in introspective analysis of theology’s role amid the academic disciplines, or to identify theology with some social cause. Of the three pairs of theology identified, Santa Claus, Family Doctor and Fraternal Lodge theologies tend to take the first option. Christmas Spirit theology tends to be preoccupied with the second, and Public Health and Service Club theologies generally pursue the third route. In this situation, it is hardly accidental that current theology gives the appearance of a colorful, but perhaps not overly nutritious, smorgasbord.

Our attempts to organize the available nutrients have suggested a general lack of the traditional staple represented by the doctrine of the church. This absence should not be surprising, given the change of venue represented by the addition of religious studies departments to secular university curricula. But one should also consider the impact of this shift on the treatment of other doctrines. When religious studies departments are the caterers, the smorgasbord will boast different delicacies, in different proportions, than those provided by a theological banquet or a church-sponsored potluck supper.

But more important, the change of menu suggests changing appetites to which the religious studies caterers respond, and which they in turn define and promote. As we become aware of the artificial appetites created by our consumption-compulsive society, it will be well to ask who is catering the theological smorgasbord now laid before us, and what appetites we who partake are attempting to satisfy. There’s a world of difference between one who is “hungering and thirsting after righteousness” and one who is merely seeking an intellectual snack.

Are There Things a Novelist Shouldn’t Joke About?: An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., first gained a following on American college campuses as a cult figure for young readers who identified with his comic and pessimistic view of the world. In recent years a wider audience has come to know his books -- Player Piano; Cat’s Cradle; Slaughterhouse-Five; Sirens of Titan; Mother Night; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Breakfast of Champions; and others. His latest novel, Slapstick, was released by Delacorte Press in October.

Vonnegut was an American delegate to the last International P.E.N. Congress when that association of writers met in Vienna, Austria. He addressed the meeting, as did Harry James Cargas, an author and member of the English Department at Webster College in St. Louis. At the close of the weeklong session, Dr. Cargas interviewed Vonnegut.

Cargas: Let me begin by rather brazenly asking if, in your opinion, everything is a fit subject for humor.

Vonnegut: I try to he careful. When I’m being funny, I try not to offend. I don’t think much of what I’ve done has been in really ghastly taste. The only shocks I use are occasional obscene words. I don’t think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them by what I’ve said other than by the impact of certain obscene words that soldiers use.

Cargas: What I mean, though, is do you think that there are some subjects per se that are not fit for humor?

Vonnegut: Yes. I can’t imagine a humorous book or skit or whatever about Auschwitz, for instance. Otherwise I can’t think of any subject that I would steer away from, that I could do nothing with. Total catastrophes are terribly amusing, as Voltaire demonstrated. You know, the Lisbon earthquake is funny.

Cargas: Well, is it funny one year after the Lisbon earthquake or do we have to wait 200 years? The slaughterings of Genghis Khan, I imagine, could be made somewhat amusing because they don’t affect anybody right now. Will Auschwitz become a subject for humor 500 years for now?

Vonnegut: Well, of course, humor is an almost physiological response to fears, as I understand it. What Freud said about humor was that it is a response to frustration -- one of several. A dog, he said, when he can’t get out a gate, will scratch and start digging and making meaningless gestures -- perhaps growling or whatever to deal with frustration or surprise or fear. I saw the destruction of Dresden. I mean I saw it before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterwards, and certainly one response is laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief. So yes, I suppose any subject is subject to laughter and I suppose there was laughter of a very ghastly kind by victims in Auschwitz.

Cargas: I’ve heard this laughter described as defiance to God, in the sense of Isaac’s laughter. But then there would be a distinction between laughter and humor.

Vonnegut: Yes. A great deal of laughter is induced by fear. We were working on a funny television series years ago -- we were trying to put one together -- and we had as a basic principle that death had to be mentioned in every show. And this ingredient would make any laughter deeper without the audience’s realizing how we were inducing belly laughs -- we hoped. We intended to do it with the mention of death.

There is a superficial sort of laughter. I don’t consider Bob Hope a humorist, really. He’s a comedian. It’s very thin stuff; nothing troubling is mentioned. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy and could still do it now. And there’s terrible tragedy there somehow, as these people are too sweet to survive in this world and they are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed.

Cargas: I’ve heard you speak about technology in contemporary fiction as a parallel to the situation of sex in Victorian fiction. Would you say a word about that?

Vonnegut: It was what I came across when I became a so-called science fiction writer, or when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I’d offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology and most American fine writers know nothing about technology. I’m a contemporary of Truman Capote, for instance; he very quickly gained a reputation as a literary person, and I very quickly gained a reputation as a hack.

I think one reason was that critics felt that a person could not be a serious artist and also have had a technical education -- which I had. I know that English departments in universities, customarily without knowing what they’re doing, teach dread of the engineering department, the physics department and the chemistry department. And this fear, I think, is carried over into criticism. Most of our critics are products of English departments and are very suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in technology. I have an interest in technology because my father told me I could go to college only if I studied something serious.

Cargas: You mean practical?

Vonnegut: Yes, something practical. I am from a family of artists. Here I am making a living in the arts, and it has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station. My ancestors were all in the arts, so I’m simply making my living in the customary family way. But my father, who was a painter and an architect, was so hurt by the Depression, unable to make a living as an artist, that he thought I should having nothing to do with the arts. He warned me away from the arts because he had found them so useless as a way of producing money.

Cargas: Just to get back to that original question for a moment: You were saying that technology is absent from our novels in the same way that sex was absent from the Victorian novel.

Vonnegut: Well, I said that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Cargas: Previously you referred to the distinction that somebody else is obviously making between science fiction and serious literature. Do you make that distinction?

Vonnegut: There was a time when I would, and I can understand why people would make that distinction. Science fiction was very badly paid -- There were many outlets for it. But it was customary to pay a penny a word, half a cent a word, and so science fiction writers, in order to make a living, had to go extremely fast. Therefore almost all science fiction stories were, and continue to be, first drafts simply because of the amount of money involved. They are not done well, usually. I would say that one science fiction story in 200 is a really good story. That one story is usually extraordinarily good -- it’s as fine as anything that’s being written in the United States.

Cargas: That percentage may even apply to non-science fiction, mightn’t it?

Vonnegut: No. I think the so-called mainstream writers tend to work harder on their stories. A science fiction writer is not careful with language, usually uses quite simple language. And science fiction stories are not subtle. A mainstream writer, chances are, is more of a writer, is more obsessed with the language and will work over his material more.

Cargas: How do you classify yourself?

Vonnegut: I consider myself a mainstream writer, and I think I always was. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers and physicists and chemists and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.

Cargas: A commentary on the critics?

Vonnegut: Yes.

Cargas: How do you regard the critics and their reception of your work? Are you being understood by them?

Vonnegut: Well, I am a critic, too. Criticism in the United States is commonly done by persons like myself. We have very few professional critics. I can really think only of those who work on the New York Times. There are a few others -- Digby Diehl on the west coast. But I have reviewed perhaps a hundred books since I have been in the writing business, and on occasion I have done a very bad job. So I’m not entitled to complain if someone as shallow as I am reviews my books.

Do the critics understand me? I don’t know. There are some critics who are completely humorless. There’s a man on Newsweek who has reviewed every damn one of my books and he never sees anything funny in them. He does not understand that I am being ironical sometimes. He misses all my jokes. And I wrote him a letter and told him: really, you shouldn’t review books with jokes in them. The same man has now attacked my son’s book. So it goes on generation after generation.

The reason I have written so little is that it’s so damn hard to make jokes work. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can’t really misfire with a tragic scene. It’s bound to be moving if the right elements are all present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

Cargas: Can you tell when your own stuff snaps?

Vonnegut: Yeah, I can tell when a joke works. As a kid I was a jokemaker. I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older than I was, and my parents were both talkers. So at the dinner table when I was very young. I was boring to all those other people. They did not want to hear about the dumb childish news of my days. They wanted to talk about really important stuff that happened in high school or maybe in college or at work. So the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny. I think I must have done it accidently at first, just accidently made a pun that stopped the conversation -- something of that sort. And then I found out that a joke was a way to break into an adult conversation.

I grew up at a time when comedy in this country was superb -- it was the Great Depression. There were large numbers of absolutely top comedians on radio. And without intending to, I really studied them. I would listen to comedy at least an hour a night all through my youth and got very interested in how jokes worked, and what they were.

Cargas: How about now? Do you intentionally stay away from comedy because it might affect your style, or do you cultivate attention to it still?

Vonnegut: I still listen to comedy. There’s not much of that sort of comedy around. The closest thing is the reruns of Groucho Marx’s quiz show. I’ve known writers who were funny who stopped being funny, who became serious persons and could no longer make jokes. I’m thinking of Michael Frayne, the British author who wrote The Ten Men. He became a very serious person. Something happened in his head.

This may happen to me; I really don’t know what I’m going to become from now on. I’m simply along for the ride to see what happens to this body and this brain of mine. It may be that I am no longer able to joke -- if that is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny and some are not. I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not any more. There may have been so many shocks and disappointments that the defense of humor no longer works. You asked whether there are things we can’t joke about. Yes, I realize now that it’s not possible for me to make a joke about the death of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. It may he as I mature, as I become a middle-aged man and then an old man, that I will become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter.

Cargas: But the way you say that -- you are observing what you’re doing -- you don’t seem to have a fear of losing that ability to be funny.

Vonnegut: No. I’m simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming. I’m startled that I became a writer.

Cargas: We’ve been talking about humor and you as a humorist, and yet you have been labeled by some a prophet of doom. How do you react to that?

Vonnegut: Well, anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. President Ford is optimistic, and he would hear me prophesying doom and he would say "Nonsense." He’s an optimist, but he’s a lawyer. He will argue that our atmosphere will not become poisoned, that our water will not become poisoned, that human beings are very durable animals. He will simply argue this. Meanwhile, our atmosphere is deteriorating in measurable ways. Scientists are sending up balloons at the time to sample. They’re sampling our rivers and our seas. The bad news that they find can’t be argued with, but it is in fact ignored by our President.

We haven’t had a really active science adviser for years now. JFK had a science adviser, but every subsequent President has virtually done without one -- probably because a scientist brings nothing but bad news and has information that would slow the President down in his optimism. [President Ford has appointed a science adviser since this interview took place. -- ED.]

Cargas: In the context of this discussion, that’s the humanist’s joke, isn’t it, in the sense of defense mechanism -- that he doesn’t want to face this truth?

Vonnegut: Yeah. The biggest truth to face now -- what is probably making me unfunny now for the remaining one-third of my life -- is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

When I went to grade school in Indianapolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit -- ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation. There’s very little of that going on now. I don’t think children do it. And I meet very few grown-ups who care about the future and get excited about it. Carl Sagan the astronomer does talk about his great-grandchildren’s world and does speculate about that. Charles Eames, the designer who designed the Eames chair, will talk about such things. I can’t think of anyone else who does it.

III

Cargas: Let me switch topics. What authors do you read?

Vonnegut: I have so many friends who are writers that I read only friends’ books. I don’t have any systematic reading program. I’ll read anything that comes to hand. As far as research goes, usually the Encyclopaedia Britannica is more than adequate for what I want to know. When I wrote The Sirens of Titan, I found out everything I wanted to know about the solar system from a children’s book. I think it was probably written for an eight-year-old. It showed all the planets and described them very nicely and told me about their moons and told me about the moon of Saturn called Titan. My research has not been profound.

Cargas: Is it satisfying for you to be a writer?

Vonnegut: It used to be. It’s not particularly satisfying now. I think I accomplished so much more than I ever thought I would that I’m astonished to look back and see that I wrote as many books as I did. I’m not a prolific writer, but I’m quite content with what I have done. I’m sort of looking around for something else to do.

I think most careers last about so years. I think that physicians are excited about being physicians for about 20 years. My father was excited about being an architect for about 20 years. Writers my age, I think, most of them, are looking around for something else to do. They would like to get off this particular merry-go-round. John O’Hara had a sort of anger that kept him going until the very end. I don’t have anger to draw on for energy.

To Be Accurate and Blunt: The Activist as Writer

PHILIP BERRIGAN, former priest of the Josephite Order, and a member of the group of draft-record-burners known as the Catonsville Nine, now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Having served a number of prison sentences, Berrigan, with his wife, the former Sister Elizabeth McAllister, has formed a small community of eight adults (and the two Berrigan children) living in Jonah House in what might be described as a ghetto area of the city. A part of their involvement includes the daily distribution of vegetables to neighbors through an arrangement with produce firms.

The Jonah House community is a voluntary association of persons who have no time commitment to each other and who own all of their property in common. The three primary goals of the group, according to Berrigan, are taking speaking engagements on the topic of nonviolence, working with other small communities to explore the meaning of nonviolence, and engaging in overt resistance. In explaining these efforts, Berrigan said that “some of the U.S. military’s first-strike weapons are now being tested. . . . We understand now that we are struggling for survival as a race. Mathematically, chances of our avoiding some big nuclear crunch by the turn of the century are very, very slim indeed.”

Philip Berrigan has written four books and numerous articles. His brother Daniel, also one of the Catonsville Nine, has received much attention for his writings, including poetry, theology, drama and war-resistance essays. Critic Harry James Cargas of Webster College, St. Louis, Missouri, author of Daniel Berrigan and Contemporary Protest Poetry, here talks with Philip Berrigan about his work as an author.

Cargas: Why do you write?

Berrigan: I write because I think it’s a very serious obligation to share an experience one believes in; one that stems from conviction, one with certain universal overtones that might be applicable or helpful to other lives. So particularly from jeopardy it’s necessary to write. Maybe the best theology or the most solid social reflection is done from jeopardy with the government. Some of Dan’s best poetry has been written in prison -- that is, from the suffering of prison.

And then too, when one is in social jeopardy, it adds an entirely different dimension and perspective. One sees things differently. I remember the last time I was in jail: it was an easy matter for me to identify with political prisoners that I was hearing about all over the world. This isn’t to say that I was stressing the fact of being a political prisoner, but I was in a better position to comprehend their sufferings. I think it’s important to record that, to get that down so possibly others might be helped by it.

Cargas: But your first book was written prior to the more political experiences you’ve had. In the introduction to No More Strangers Thomas Merton wrote that you were following a tradition of Rahner, Mounier and Teilhard. Do you see what you are doing now as an extension of that?

Berrigan: No, I would say that there’s quite a different cast to things now. About the time No More Strangers came out, I was busily exploring. I remember Dan and I went to a party in connection with the book in New York city, and I was on my way to Baltimore the next day -- I’d been kicked out of my teaching assignment at our seminary in Newburgh because of antiwar activity and because we’d been organizing against U.S. involvement in Indochina. But that was about the first taste I’d had of official reprisal for what I was doing. The book had been written before I experienced any of that.

Now it’s a different thing. I’m trying to, number one, clarify for folks what resistance is and the necessity for that as just a means to living a sane life; and number two, I’m trying to share with them the various directions that resistance might take in their lives. It’s this constant reflection upon what is happening here, in the light of nuclear arms, saying something to folks about the utter urgency of this resistance. That’s quite a bit different than it was in 1965.

Cargas: You mentioned two things that I’d like to ask about. You mentioned writing to clarify. Does your writing also help to clarify things for you?

Berrigan: Oh it does. It forces me to think, to ponder, to meditate. I don’t have that much discipline to be a good writer; I have to sweat things through -- I kind of bleed at a typewriter. I’ve never liked writing well enough nor have I considered it of primary enough importance really to work at it. As you say, I’ve always been more or less the activist. I would write only when I was at a position of leisure, whether that be in jail or in slack time -- or when I was forced to write because I was hitting the road to give a talk somewhere, at some campus. But I don’t consider myself primarily a writer.

Cargas: A second point you made earlier was one of sharing. Is writing somehow an extension of community?

Berrigan: I see your point, and it’s a good one. Yes, it’s an extension of community. I guess it’s a way of paying debts to the wider community that one has profited so much from in one’s formation. There are a countless number of people whose good books you and I have read and from which we benefited so very heavily -- to pay debts back on that and to say, well, this might be of some use to someone, somewhere. And so it’s an expression of hope, I would say, toward a wider community. Possibly these few ideas or this experience might provide a basis for them or an assistance to them in building community themselves.

Cargas: Your writing frequently takes the form of letters, particularly your pieces in Commonweal, Christian Century, Christianity and Crisis. Is that form forced upon you by the nature of experience? Letters from jail and so on

Berrigan: Well, I was perhaps borrowing a vehicle that Martin Luther King used with a great deal of effectiveness when he was jailed down in Birmiugham. And then too, it’s a means whereby a more general slice of the public might be addressed. You can’t write them all individually, and so you write to them collectively.

Cargas: You also wrote (and published) a letter to a bishop. But that was at his request, wasn’t it?

Berrigan: Yes. I suppose I just watch my chance and I adopt some means, some vehicle, some format that I think might fit the substance of what I’m going to say. I don’t think there’s any penchant for letters rather than just writing a short essay or piece.

III

Cargas: Elie Wiesel says “some words are deeds.” Do you feel that writing is an extension of your activism?

Berrigan: Very much so. It’s a point about which I feel very strongly. When one is activist over convictions, then that’s a way of not only testing the convictions but even defending them. During the Catonsville trial we got into a long dialogue in court with the judge that I’ll never forget. The question came up, either from the judge or the prosecutor, as to what right we had to do what we did. Somebody pointed out very mildly, and yet very forcefully, that we were doing no more than testing our truth in doing what we did. And then the national community would place some stamp of indifference, disapproval, approval on our actions. But it’s a way of sifting out one’s truth and purifying it, in probably the best way. In a sense, when you’re writing, you’re doing that too -- in a much less abrupt way, of course, but you’re doing it nonetheless.

Cargas: In No More Strangers you say that “we need accurately blunt statements from our leaders.” 1 would suppose that your whole life is an attempt to be an accurately blunt statement.

Berrigan: Yes. One goes through a period of time where -- and here I’m not trying to be pessimistic or jaundiced -- where one thinks it is actually possible for leaders of superpower status like ours are to offer accurately blunt statements, and then one realizes that it is very unlikely that they ever will. They are too compromised not only by their position, the fearful ambiguity which is connected with their ambition, but also by the ambiguities of the system itself which they represent. And the murderousness of it -- I think that needs to be emphasized. After all, the memories of a genocidal experience in Indochina are very close, and our leaders had a good deal to do with that experience. And what that system does to the truth is a very mysterious thing. I think we can fairly say that it subverts the truth and in some cases it even makes the truth impossible to express.

I went through a period when I was fresh from being something of a Kennedy admirer when I wrote that book. I still thought that it might be possible for people to be honorable, officially. And yet, without trying to appear jaundiced or anything like that, I no longer think that it will ever be likely as long as the United States is number one, as long as we’re exploiting the world to the degree that we are.

Cargas: Are you working on anything now?

Berrigan: I dabble, Harry. I have a pile of essays downstairs, I suppose 15 or 18, which are more or less talks I’ve prepared around the country on all sorts of subjects, but mostly reflections on Indochina and also the nuclear arms race -- sometimes from the scriptural viewpoint, sometimes from a purely political one. I’m working them up now.

I don’t know if Dan had a chance to share this with you, but both of us are having trouble with the major publishing houses and some of the major magazines. The magazines that we counted on in the past for communicating our stuff are no longer responsive. So we have to find new sources. Dan recently had one of the best books he’s ever written rejected by Maryknoll. He finally had to farm it out to Germany. It’s a series of parables on the Old Testament -- superb writing, in my humble opinion; very radical stuff, it’s true. Increasingly we’re running into that problem.

Then, too, my last publisher, Simon and Schuster, has been assimilated by Gulf and Western, and consequently I don’t think I’d even approach them. They lost quite a bit of money on my last book, so I don’t think they’d consider me seriously anyway. So it goes. A couple of our movement friends are dabbling with printing houses and small publishing efforts. There are a couple in the midwest -- the Catholic Worker in Grand Rapids and one in the Chicago area. I think I’ll go with one of them this time. I’ll rework this stuff and get it out. But I’m working on something all the time and when I must speak, then I’ll be doing more work on the writing.

Cargas: Your most recent book, Widen the Prison Gates, makes an obvious kind of reference, but one that needs to be made for us, about the relationship between war and racism. In a sense your work is coming full circle from racism to war back to racism.

Berrigan: Somebody was pointing this out to me the other day, that it’s very hard to dissociate one from the other more clearly because they’re so intermingled. And Indochina, of course, which is the salient expression of racist warmaking, combined the two issues in an unprecedented way. A lot of our so-called colonialist wars in the past have been racist -- not to the degree, perhaps, that this one was.

Then too, this connection opens up avenues of . . . the way we make objects of racism out of people who are in ideological differences with us. For example, the status of the Russians in the American mentality, in effect, is not much different from, say, the status of the American black or the Chinese or other colored peoples in the world. This is sort of an interesting facet of American racism that has always preoccupied me to an extent. But as you say, you’re always coming in and out of these circles which are so often concentric.

Cargas: You mention in A Punishment for Peace the same thing that Berdyaev says: if we treat people as things, all of this that has happened will follow. That’s just what you’re saying again, isn’t it?

Berrigan: Yes. I’m finally getting into a little of The Technological Society. I’ve read a lot of Ellul’s books. I began reading him seriously in prison.

Cargas: Dan has read a lot of Ellul.

Berrigan: Dan has read more of him than I have, but I think he has helped both of us. He’s not without his imperfections, and sometimes he reminds me of Solzhenitsyn in some of the political judgments that he makes, but he’s pretty good and he’s a solid biblical scholar. But in The Technological Society he was dwelling upon the obsession with technique and how it screws up ends and means -- so much so that everything we are doing is for people, and yet the means are so preoccupying that they become ends in themselves and more important than the people they are done for. It certainly illustrates what we’re into. Bill Stringfellow has been doing some work on this just recently, too.

Cargas: What has it meant to you to be a writer?

Berrigan: Well at one point you made a reference to the clarifying aspects of writing, and for me, that’s the most rewarding side of it. That and a sense of achievement when I put something down that, well, might be fairly good, might possibly be fairly helpful to others. But the discipline of writing itself does so much for thinking and expression. It is a discipline that should be suggested to everybody.

I remember when we were in jail Dan and I were always at the guys to write, these guys within the resistance community that we knew so well. Sit down and write. Just keep a diary, but write. Tone up your vocabulary, get your grammar straight, perfect your spelling. And when you’re writing, think about the way you talk and try to make the connection between the two. Try to improve your speech so that you’re more lucid and more disciplined. Some of them did. Some of them really became pretty good. Writing is hard for me for a variety of reasons, but it’s always very rewarding.

No Miracles from the Media

The old-time street-corner evangelist hardly ever shows up in the mass media anymore. If he does, it’s as a figure of ridicule. And that’s unfortunate, because he symbolizes both what the media most desperately try to accomplish and how they most dismally fail -- especially in evangelism.

When I first started working at a radio station in Vancouver, there was an old man who haunted the corner of Granville and Smythe streets. As people passed by, he would pounce on them, grab them by their lapels, and hiss into their faces, “Brother, are you saved?”

It didn’t seem to matter what answer anyone gave, or how often one gave it. He had a message to deliver, and he was not going to be diverted from it. His victims escaped only when he released their lapels to open his Bible or dig out a tract.

Normally, I passed his corner once a week on my way to deposit my paycheck in the bank. When it appeared that my only jacket would suffer permanently crumpled lapels, I learned to go all the way around the block to avoid him.

I wish I had learned some media lessons from him instead. For that street-corner evangelist had precisely what the mass media do not have -- an immediate and direct contact with his audience.

I

I have since made use of that man’s character in role-playing at a variety of communication workshops. We choose one person to act as the evangelist. The rest are passers-by. The “evangelist” can reach out, stop and hold any of the others, can demand “Are you saved?” and hurl other such questions. Almost without exception, the victim feels compelled to respond. Almost without exception, the evangelist finds the experience exhilarating.

Then we change the situation. This time the “evangelist” is blindfolded, with hands tied behind back; the passers-by have been instructed not to let the role-player make any contact -- physical or verbal. The passers-by may or may not feel involved. But the “evangelist” has always felt frustrated because he or she can’t know whether anyone is listening or being reached.

That is precisely the situation in which mass media workers find themselves.

For example, I have no way of knowing (as I write this article) who you are (as you read it). Months -- perhaps years -- may have passed between the time I type the manuscript and the time you pick up the magazine. I don’t know what you’re doing, or where you are, or what else is competing for your interest. Are you merely flipping pages during TV commercials? Did your daughter promise to be home two hours ago? Are you excited about your church? Fed up with committees? Promoted? Fired? Celebrating? Grieving?

All these factors will influence what you choose to read, and how you react to my message. No matter how hard I try to anticipate your mood, your reactions and choices are your own. By the time you see this article, it’s too late for me to change even a comma.

II

I’m often amazed that any message at all gets through the mass media. Consider a television appeal for, say, donations to an interchurch earthquake relief fund. The author’s words will be spoken by an unknown announcer, who will be filmed by an anonymous camera operator, who is directed by another stranger. The resulting message will be broadcast over someone else’s transmitters, after a commercial for laundry detergent and before another for chewing gum, all in the middle of an Archie Bunker tirade against Jews and Arabs -- provided, of course, that the football game doesn’t run overtime and cancel everything else.

What a difference from the evangelist who grabs you by your lapels! Yet the mass media, with all the skills and all the millions they can muster, actually try to re-create the face-to-face encounter. They use every possible means -- pictures, headlines, catchy words, color, sound, movement and, of course, sex -- to make their message so compelling that you feel you have to pay attention. They want to reach out from the page or the picture tube and grab you by your emotional lapels.

The key word is ‘emotional” -- because your emotions are the only things the mass media can count on.

Before I write anything, I try to determine who my audience is. I try to see my topic through their eyes, their concerns. I’ll talk money to economists, science to scientists, and religion to church people. But in fact, I don’t know that my writing will be read only by scientists. Maybe their spouses or children will also look at it. Maybe the magazine will end up in a doctor’s office five years later, or the article will be reprinted in Reader’s Digest. Or maybe at the moment my scientist picks up the article, he or she is more interested in fly-tying or motorcycles.

The only thing that I know my reader -- any reader -- has for sure is emotions. He has love for his daughter or his dog. She knows joy in water-skiing or growing roses. If somehow I can touch those emotions, I have reached my reader.

Of course, there are negative emotions too: pride, envy, fear, hate. They too are shared by all readers. They too are used by the mass media -- especially in commercials -- to establish contact.

III

Sometimes church people are offended when their denominational publications print articles that dwell on people’s prejudices or weaknesses. They think a church paper should deal only with “higher” matters. But until the Kingdom comes, people will be less than perfect. I have to reach those people before I can hope to change them, and I have to reach them where they are, not where I would like them to be.

That street-corner evangelist snared people with one of the strongest emotional hooks of all -- survival -- when he asked, “Brother, are you saved?” So why wasn’t he successful more often? Why did people want to squirm away from his clutches? For the same reason that the mass media will never evangelize the world. He wasn’t vulnerable.

He was willing to risk being disliked, resented, ignored or laughed at. Now and then, he may have risked a punch in the nose. But he never risked his faith. It lay deep-frozen, locked away in a glass case, to be displayed but never touched. You were supposed to learn from him; never would he learn anything from you. If God had anything more to reveal to him, it certainly was not going to come from unsaved passers-by.

Yet we know, or should know, that God has far more ways of revealing himself to us than we can ever imagine. And even while we try to present God to others, God may be using them to speak to us. That’s the essence of real face-to-face evangelism. As missionaries all over the world have discovered, to proclaim the gospel they have to be secure enough in their own faith to risk having it shaken.

Jesus was vulnerable. He dealt with people face-to-face, every day. He left himself open to the attacks of the Pharisees and the high priests, to the jeers of the mobs, to rejection by his own villagers and by his own disciples.

But Jesus would have been safe as a TV star -- protected by public relations staffs, the technology of bright lights and zoom lenses, and audiences that applaud on cue. When his popularity eventually waned, he would have been sentenced not to the cross but to quiet oblivion, spending his final years living on income from investments and reruns, forgotten by the public. Christianity would have died, rather than Christ.

Fortunately, that’s not what happened. Christ loved us enough to die for us -- and that love has left its mark on the world for 20 centuries.

People, you see, can be vulnerable. But the mass media can only pretend to be. In print, the New Journalism indulges in a lot of first-person narrative, as I have done in this article -- as if I were really laying myself open to your criticisms. But I’m not. By the time you can respond, I will have gone on to something entirely different.

TV networks claim that they schedule and cancel programs on the basis of ratings, which are the viewers’ way of talking back. But if you have to resort to turning off your TV set to communicate with the programmers, that’s hardly communication. It’s the exact opposite: the deliberate canceling of communication.

You can write a response to a newspaper. But some faceless editor decides how much of your letter to print, if any at all. And even if it is printed, it’s too late to change anything. The message has already gone out.

IV

For all these reasons, I’m forced to the conclusion that the mass media as we now know them cannot really create religious disciples. The media have too many built-in handicaps -- from trying to talk to someone who isn’t there, to being unable to listen until it’s too late,

I say this despite the apparent success of some religious publishing and broadcasting: magazines such as Plain Truth or Decision, Sunday morning radio programs reflecting every hue of the theological spectrum, and television shows of the “Oral Roberts” and “PTL Club” variety or, in Canada, “100 Huntley Street.”

Please, I’m not attacking such programs. If they fill a need, more power to them. But as I watch them, read the publications, listen to the announcements of the people who have been healed or have sent donations, or who want to be prayed for, I’m convinced that the media are not bringing in any new disciples. They’re bringing back people who were once introduced to Christianity but slipped away, or who find that their present church associations fail to meet their needs. But style, format and language -- especially in television -- tend to eliminate all except those people already predisposed toward a particular kind of religious experience.

These programs and publications may provide nurture and encouragement for their audiences. They may, indeed, influence the atmosphere of society enough for individual Christians to witness to their faith more freely. But if evangelism does occur, if new converts do come to Christ, it will have happened because of the witnessing of those individual Christians. Hardly ever can the mass media claim direct credit.

Unfortunately, few people today recognize this fact. The man-in-the-street, the pew-sitter, the average layperson, shrinks in awe before the professional communicators who can reach millions through typewriter or tube. Too many people today worship the mass media as omnipotent and omnipresent, instead of doing their own communicating of the gospel.

I recall a meeting at my home church. The committee chairman stood in the middle of the empty room. Half a dozen people had shown up, all of them committee members or friends who had been spoken to personally.

“I can’t understand it,” said the chairman, shaking his head. “We had a really good notice in the newsletter.” Like most people, he expected miracles from the media. But they can’t supply miracles.

Sometimes I hear people saying wistfully, “If only Jesus had been able to use television. Think of how many more people he could have reached,”

I take the opposite view. I think that if Jesus had had TV, if Paul had had a printing press, Christianity might never have survived. The early Christians would have been tempted to leave the job of evangelism to the communications experts.

More people might have known about Christianity. But far fewer would have been converted. The media may be able to prepare the ground by influencing attitudes and values, by making people aware. In a few rare cases, they may even be able to plant a seed or two. But the media’s built-in limitations make it almost impossible to nurture those individual seeds into flower. That kind of phenomenon happens only when someone clutches your lapels with urgency, or is present to put an arm around your shoulder in support, or cares enough to express sympathy.

Fortunately, the early Christians had no choice. They had to witness personally to their faith, even at the risk of persecution and death. And the church grew.

But the mass media don't have that personal contact, and they can't convert the world. Only people can.

The phenomenon of divorce has long been an embarrassment to the Christian church. At best it has been regarded as a reluctant concession to human sin and frailty, a painful reminder of our failure to fulfill the exalted standards which God holds for marriage.

Circumstances in our own time, however, force us to a fresh examination of the question of divorce. Is it ever, for the Christian, justified? What are the basic biblical and theological issues involved in a contemporary understanding of marriage? And how do these apply to divorce?

A Biblical View of Divorce

The traditional attitude toward divorce, especially as it was interpreted in earlier generations by the American religious community in general and by mainline Protestantism in particular, was simple and clear: since marriage is sacred -- even sacramental -- it must be honored and defended. Whatever erodes the sanctity or jeopardizes the stability of marriage and the family must be combated. Prime among these enemies is divorce. Therefore divorce must be inhibited by all means available, including moral teaching, social pressure and legal constraint. This conviction was reinforced for Christians by the clear teaching attributed to Jesus himself:

And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” [Mark 10:11-12, RSV].

Matthew quotes Jesus as allowing an exception in the case of unchastity (Matt. 5:32); but the discouragement of divorce as a violation of God’s will is stated in unmistakably emphatic terms. Elsewhere Matthew quotes Jesus further on the topic of divorce:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and -- marries another, commits adultery” [Matt. 19:3-9, RSV].

The question of biblical and religious attitudes toward divorce evoked little debate within the church. Divorce must be discouraged in the most forceful terms possible; should it occur, remarriage must be made difficult if not impossible. This position came to be embodied in the church’s teaching -- and, to a remarkable extent, in civil law as well.

In more recent times new questions have been raised on biblical and theological grounds. The key Old Testament teachings take a substantially more open attitude toward the dissolution of marriages than the position attributed to Jesus:

When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favor in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house [Deut. 24:1,KJV].

Though written from the bias of a patriarchal society, this passage clearly sanctions acts of divorce, leaving the question of grounds to the elusive justification that the wife possesses “some uncleanness” or that “she find no favor in his eyes.” The act of divorce itself was relatively simple; it evidently carried no stigma and involved no litigation.

With divorces so easily available to men, abuses were bound to occur; a woman’s position was exceedingly vulnerable. A wife might be summarily stripped of both status and security through an arbitrary decree delivered by her husband. The rigor of Jesus’ opposition to divorce can be interpreted as arising from his desire to defend women against the ravages of such dehumanizing treatment. His resistance to divorce may have been directed more at its shabby abuse than against the principle itself.

The church’s inflexible opposition to divorce is being re-examined with the emergence of a fresh theological perspective. The older ethical position of code morality has been challenged by the values of situation ethics. The situationist approach was developed by Joseph Fletcher in his volume Situation Ethics (Westminster, 1966). Code morality finds its behavioral imperatives in the developed codification of laws and mandates. Christian situation ethics, while accepting such laws and rules as important, refuses to affirm them as absolute and binding for all occasions. The only absolute is the Great Commandment of Jesus (Matt. 22:37-40). Practically speaking, this commandment calls the Christian to strive toward the most loving action possible within the context of any given situation. Usually this approach will entail following the inherited code, but at times it may require acting contrary to the code in order that the commandment to love might be honored.

A Situationist Approach

Situationists contend that a legalistic rendering of ancient laws is not theologically adequate. Rote obedience to law may actually do violence to God’s will in a particular situation. This situationist or contextual approach is based upon an interpretation of Jesus’ fundamental attitude toward the decisions of life, contending that at heart he was very much a situationist. Jesus’ voicing of the Great Commandment clearly revealed his theological priority:

. . . You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets [Matt. 22:37-40, RSV].

Partisans of a situationist approach interpret Jesus’ use of the Great Commandment as meaning that love must always take precedence. If laws, no matter how hallowed by use and tradition, collide with the fulfillment of this love, then such laws must for the moment be set aside. Jesus’ actions, such as healing (Mark 3:1-6) and gleaning (Mark 2:23-8) on the Sabbath, embody his working out of this conviction. Rather than being legalistically inflexible, Jesus approach was adaptive; he sought always to honor the Great Commandment in the midst of the changing circumstances in which he continually found himself.

Thus advocates of situation ethics quote Jesus against himself when it comes to divorce. Jesus’ own words put him on record as vigorously opposing a termination of the God-intended, lifelong union of husband and wife through the instrumentality of divorce. Since his fundamental ethical approach, however, was that of a situationist, he should be willing to allow for occasions when divorce might be the most loving act possible. In such situations the permission of divorce would be the most responsible way of honoring the Great Commandment.

It is therefore possible to draw more than one interpretation from Jesus’ recorded teachings on the subject of divorce and remarriage. Nelson Manfred Blake offers a veritable cafeteria of options:

1. Christ taught the indissolubility of marriage and forbade all divorce.

2. He allowed divorce, but only to the husband, and only for one cause, adultery.

3. He allowed divorce for adultery to both husband and wife.

4. Neither party to a divorce may marry again while his [or her] former mate is still

alive. To do so is adultery.

5. The innocent party may remarry, but not the guilty.

6. Both parties may remarry, after sincere repentance.

7. Adultery means only one thing, the sexual intercourse of a married person with

someone other than the husband or wife.

8. Adultery is a symbolic word, standing for any sin that violates the marriage contract [The Road to Reno (Macmillan, 1962), p. 1].

If the position of code morality is embraced in conjunction with a literal acceptance of Jesus’ recorded words on divorce and remarriage, then the Christian stance is clear and uncomplicated. Divorce is not to be allowed (or is to be accepted only on the condition of unchastity), and remarriage is to be forbidden as long as one’s former mate is living.

If a situationist approach is employed, however, the allowance for divorce within a Christian context is considerably expanded. If Jesus allowed for breaking the honored Sabbath laws so as to provide for healing or gleaning, though the ancient laws forbade these on the sacred day, would he not also allow for a suspension of the proscription against divorce if such were to liberate a person from the bondage of an intolerable marriage? If the Sabbath was “made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27), does it not follow that marriage was made for humanity, rather than humanity for marriage? If the institution, important as it is, does violence to the individual, then shouldn’t the institution be amended in order that the individual might flourish?

Responsible Decisions

My own theological position has moved toward a situationist’s view of ethics; I am persuaded that this is the foundation upon which Jesus himself firmly stood. With him it can be affirmed that marriage is intended by God to be sacramental and lifelong, and that divorce is both a tragedy and an evil resulting from sin. In Matthew 19 Jesus affirms the ideal for marriage as that of two persons becoming indissolubly one; but he also acknowledges Moses’ allowance for human failure. Interpreted from a contemporary perspective, divorce is a manifestation of evil -- the breaking of a primary human relationship that is intended to form the deepest and most intimate tie that can be experienced by two persons.

Some divorces are clearly acts of sin, growing from the selfish decisions and actions of one or both partners. Such motives and deeds stand under a divine judgment which calls for repentance. But other divorces, though resulting from evil and causing much pain, are not acts of sin. They are responsible decisions reached in the context of tragic and limited circumstances. Such actions are not to be repented (though one may feel deep sorrow that they were necessary), but affirmed as thoroughly justified if destructive relationships are to be escaped and the possibilities of new growth achieved.

In the passages quoted above, Jesus addresses himself to the principle of marriage, calling into question the motives of those who would take its significance lightly. Seeing him in a situationist context, I have difficulty imagining that he would rule out the option of divorce and remarriage in every case. Is divorce an evidence of evil? Yes. Is it unforgivable? No!

For the situationist, the issue is never settled by simply answering the question, “Is it a sin?” The choice is one among complex, imperfect options. The question must be more properly put: “Which -- among the choices realistically available -- is the least evil?” or “What is the best alternative at hand?” The issue is not whether divorce is hurtful or a result of sin. It is usually both. The focal question is this: among the available options (desertion; separation, divorce, homicide, suicide, continuation of the marriage), which is the best and most humane solution? The situationist recognizes that divorce, painful as it is, may well be the least harmful option in some situations, and thus it may best fulfill the Great Commandment.

Obedience and Fulfillment

The traditional approach to such issues as divorce has been grounded in what can be termed “a theology of obedience.” The law has been divinely ordained, and humanity is obliged to obey that law if the pain of judgment is to be avoided and the rewards of salvation appropriated. Humanity fulfills its destiny by being responsibly obedient to what God has commanded. Such a theology can easily become distorted into a grim and dutiful legalism, shaping its followers into resolute “true believers” who respond to God more out of fear and dread than from gratitude and joy.

More recently a contrasting emphasis has arisen that can be described as “a theology of fulfillment,” finding as its text Jesus’ words, “I came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10: 10, KJV). Christian interpretations of the human potential movement are in comfortable accord with such a point of view.

My own theological position has grown to encompass both emphases, seeing them as complementary. Each alone is inadequate and incomplete. Obedience can degenerate into a pharisaical compliance, and the quest for fulfillment can become a rationale for selfish indulgence. God is still a God of lawfulness and orderliness, and we cut against the grain of that reality at our own peril. God’s orderliness, however, is not intended as a straitjacket. It is designed for our salvation and fulfillment, in order that we might experience the full abundance that is the divine intention for our lives.

Applying this divine order to divorce and marriage, we come to realize that faithfulness to the intention of marriage is the best pathway to human fulfillment and joy. The goal that marriage be lifelong is to be taken with full seriousness; for only as couples commit themselves to this process and discipline can they hope to create the fidelity and mutuality out of which the highest joys of marriage can issue. Those who look to divorce as an easy escape when signs of disappointment and conflict arise will undermine the very possibilities for the happiness which they claim to be seeking. If at all possible, divorce is to be avoided, with both the intentions and principles of marriage being faithfully followed.

God desires such faithfulness, however, not for its own sake, but out of an intention for our fulfillment. This understanding must always inform our ethical response to the laws of God. Therefore, if marriage has become distorted or demonic, if it has become more destructive than fulfilling, then alternatives must be explored. If a marriage cannot be healed or moved toward satisfying fulfillment -- either because of the recalcitrance of one of the partners, or because of the inability of the couple despite their earnest efforts -- then other courses may be searched out. Prime among these options is divorce.

Humankind was not made for the laws of marriage, but the laws of marriage were fashioned for humankind. Whenever marriage serves to crush what is genuinely human, then it must yield to the higher principle of the Great Commandment. Granted, there will still be many divorces brought about by the flawed decisions of individuals, giving witness to the continuing ingenuity of human sin, and creating a painful legacy of injury and evil.

There are occasions, however -- the frequency of which will still be the subject of lively debate -- when divorce is a responsible act. When continuation in an unfulfilling or destructive marriage thwarts and crushes human lives, then provision must be made for ending that marriage. Sometimes divorce may be little other than an escape from the intolerable. On other occasions it may be a clear and creative movement toward fulfillment through which persons recognize that their present relationship no longer gives hope to the growing potentialities of either partner.

In either case divorce may be a justifiable and responsible act. It is an expression of sin in the sense that the partners have failed to attain the ideal, but it is not an unforgivable act. In such a context divorce may be a creative, positive and affirmative response, ethically justified as that option which best approximates fulfilling the Great Commandment in the midst of limited alternatives.

Archives: Articles

Dress Code (Matthew 22:1-14)

Stopping by the Pit Stop

Notes

Who’s Catering the Theological Smorgasbord

Are There Things a Novelist Shouldn’t Joke About?: An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut

To Be Accurate and Blunt: The Activist as Writer

No Miracles from the Media

I

II

III

IV

Violence: Media’s Desperate Remedy

Progeny of Programmers: Evangelical Religion and the Television Age

A Theology of Divorce

Sin, Guilt and Mental Health: Confession and Restitution as Means of Therapy