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Teen-age Sexuality and Public Morality

We are a sexually active society, and teen-agers are no exception. The Moral Right may have won some battles at the ballot box, but there is little evidence that those victories have led to more restrictive sexual behavior. Evidence suggests that even the rise of AIDS has not resulted in a major shift in sexual habits. Rather than reinforcing a moral emphasis upon abstinence, AIDS has shifted concern to what is called "safe sex": increased care in choosing sexual partners, along with the habitual use of condoms. Most teen-agers are not yet preoccupied with AIDS, but the public discussion of it has brought talk of sexuality and contraceptives out in the open.

What is often overlooked in discussions of teen-age sexuality is that the young are not the creators of the sexual revolution. Rather, they are the recipients of a sexual heritage that actually dates to the turn of the century. As the Kinsey studies demonstrated (1948 and 1953) , the sexual revolution in fact began with the generation born after 1900 (with the most far-reaching changes occurring among women). It was the great-grandmothers of today’s teen-agers who ushered in more liberal views of sexuality.

Sexual practices can never be examined and understood independently of other social factors. Moralists often do not recognize the complex ways in which sexual behavior is intertwined with issues of education, economics, politics, national security and employment. For example, the mothers of the vast majority of the children born out of wedlock are racial minority teen-agers who come from broken families living below the poverty level. Most of these teen-age mothers were themselves children of unmarried mothers. To take another example, women’s greater sexual freedom is in part due to improved birth-control methods, which have given women the ability to separate their sexual desires from reproduction. The sexual liberation of women can also be correlated with their struggle for political freedom and social equality.

There are, however, particular ethical issues related to teen-age sexuality that need to be addressed. Teenagers are not morally ready to make decisions about sexual intercourse. They generally are not emotionally ready to make judgments about the quality of intimate relationships, and they have not reached a level of maturity to take responsibility for their actions. The sociological evidence on abandonment, furthermore, makes it clear that teen-agers are not prepared to take social and economic responsibility for the birth of a baby.

Young people today are socially pressured to be sexually active long before they have been prepared educationally and psychologically to cope with the deeply personal and highly charged nature of sexuality. The mass media are filled with romantic images of male-female relationships, and the myth prevails that "to be carried away" by one’s sexual urges is a sure sign of love, which justifies sexual interaction. Just as serious is the way our society’s images of being male and being female demean the larger moral significance of sexuality. A teen-age boy faces the social pressure to "score" and, in so doing, he reduces his partner to a sexual object. And a teenage girl absorbs the idea that a woman is someone who is sexually desirable to a man; her worth lies in her value as a sexual commodity and her ability to control the male with the sexual favors she provides.

Sexual morality in our time must address these factors underlying teen-age behavior. Sexual morality needs to offer a clear articulation of the meaning of interpersonal love and the need for justice in all aspects of human life. Youth need to know that sex does not need to be the determinant force in human life. The church’s particular challenge in this context is to articulate the view that sexual intercourse is not a casual venture but a special form of intimacy that calls for an ongoing relationship and concern for one another as well as for the new life that might emerge.

These findings do not suggest that white and middle-class teens are not sexually active, but that birth-control and family-planning services are generally more available to them. While it is true that 80 to 90 per cent of all births out of wedlock are to black teen-agers, and that half of all black children live in female-headed families, it is also the case that black males form the largest unemployed group in the total population, and are the lowest-paid of employed males. The cycle of single motherhood within black communities is related to the ways in which minorities continue to be marginalized in our society, and continue to live at the poverty level. White teenagers, especially of the middle class, more often have available to them the social resources by which the consequences of their sexual activity can be minimized, either through abortion or adoption. (We should note that black children born out of wedlock are seldom adopted. In some communities there are 40 times more black children than white children available for adoption.)

The "profamily" policies of the current administration are designed to take away public support from those who are most in need of social and medical services. The programs adhere to the middle-class ideology which sees each family as sufficient for meeting its own needs. What is missing from this view is a sense of a larger community in which the welfare of all persons is a shared responsibility. Repeated efforts are made to regulate sexual behavior by punitive measures, such as the "squeal" regulation that would require a medical facility to inform parents when an underage girl seeks medical help if she is pregnant or if she wants to obtain contraceptives. A similar invasion of civil rights is implicit in the initiative to require doctors to report to the Department of Health persons infected with the AIDS virus, and in the proposed restrictions that would prohibit any family planning institution receiving federal funds from informing clients of the availability of abortion services.

These legal efforts are not designed to help people develop positive attitudes about sexuality or to take more responsibility for their sexual behavior. Instead they impose punishment by withdrawing human services that could help people to cope more effectively with problems arising from their sexuality.

Policies based on negatives are irresponsible, particularly in an age in which we have so much knowledge and understanding of human sexuality. One aspect of these restrictive policies is the belief that sex is inherently wrong and that individuals should be left with the consequences of their "mistake." Such a basis for public policy is not consistent with either a humanitarian tradition or a Christian view, nor does it acknowledge the diversity of beliefs that exist concerning the role of sex in human life.

The policies of the profamily program are based on the idea that the problems arising from teen-age sexual activity are moral rather than social. The approach that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is taking toward teen pregnancy is that premarital sex is morally wrong and that the best prevention is sexual abstinence. Title XX -- the "chastity" law -- passed by Congress in 1981 provides funds to groups, including certain church groups, that support programs of sexual abstinence among youth.

A growing coalition of conservative political leaders, religious groups and government officials is leading the attack against publicly supported programs of sex education, school-based health centers, guidance programs in family planning, and other activities designed to address the sexual needs of youth from both a social and a health perspective. Operating under the myth that sexual involvement is always delayed until marriage and that the family is the only normal setting for child-rearing, this coalition opposes programs of "optional parenthood" in which having a child is a matter of choice rather than of chance. The coalition is also unwilling to recognize the extent to which young people are engaged in sexual activity and the need they have for more accurate information and guidance in making sexual decisions. Gary Bauer, undersecretary of education and chairman of a White House task force on the American family, has been quoted as saying that his group’s goal is "to tell children [that premarital sex] is wrong and explain why it’s bad for them -- not to teach them so much about sex that they can engage in it in early adolescence."

The issue is not that sexual abstinence should not be recommended but, as sex-researchers Masters and Johnson have pointed out, that the recommendation is not always practical for all teen-agers. Not all teen-agers respond positively to moral absolutes, especially at a time when they are seeking to establish their independence. Most teens already know the traditional moral attitudes toward sex. What they do not understand as yet is the true nature of sexual desire and how to give direction to that desire, which at their age is normal and natural. What is sometimes assumed by the profamily policies is that sex education and frank and open discussions of the facts of sexuality will contribute to increased teenage sexual activity. In fact, the contrary is true.

A Canadian study of pregnant teen-agers found that these girls were so fearful of sex that they had avoided learning about sexual behavior and family planning. In fact, most of them never expected to have sexual intercourse. They were not without morals; but sex was something they could not really talk about or face honestly. One may conclude from this study that moral prohibitions do not ensure sexual abstinence and may only reinforce teen-agers’ urge to act out their sexual desires.

The belief that young people will learn from their mistakes seems also to be a myth. Several studies of young unmarried mothers have found that between 20 and 25 per cent became pregnant again within two years (with the rate going much higher among certain minority groups) The repeat of pregnancy appears to be related to a lack of knowledge about the risks of sexual intercourse, limited opportunity for further education, boredom with homelife, and the unavailability of a strong female support group.

Although peer pressures are especially great at this age, youth generally act out what they perceive to be adult values. Studies have found that young people’s values are more continuous with those held by the important adults in their lives than is generally believed. To be effective, moral programs of education need to be consistent with the actual practices and attitudes of the larger society, and to be constant with the behavior of the adults that young people emulate. Adults are sometimes more conservative about sexual values in their adulthood than they were in their youth. Many parents and other adults expect from young people behavior that they themselves rejected during their own teen years. Partly because some adults are threatened by the sexual energy of youth, and partly because the behavior of teens can give rise to unresolved guilt, adults can be very oppressive and unrealistic in their expectations.

At a time when there is growing controversy over sex education, and when attempts are under way to curb family planning and the options for abortions, mainline churches have become intimidated by the Religious Right. They have found it increasingly difficult to talk openly and honestly about sexual issues, and seem to have become virtually powerless to provide leadership in matters of sexuality. A decade ago many mainline churches were engaged in articulating the virtues of the sexual revolution, formulating significant and far-reaching theological pronouncements on the central issues of sexuality, and experimenting with some new and imaginative programs of sex education. The churches seem to have lost their prophetic nerve in matters of sexual morality and have forgotten how to affirm the mystery and goodness of sex. Teen-agers (especially those who are most marginal to the church) need the church to be with them in their sexuality.

The church must play a role in helping youth find constructive solutions to the ambiguities and confusions of sex. Particular attention should be paid to their pastoral care, but churches also need to advocate revisions in sex-education programs, with special focus on how to make sexual decisions. Past programs all too often assumed answers and did not allow young people the opportunity to practice making their own decisions within a safe climate. The church needs to make teen-agers more aware that sexual activities are not exclusively private affairs, but that they have social and ethical consequences.

The problems of teen-age sexuality and the fact that conservative political and religious groups have put these problems on their agendas suggest that it is urgent for mainline denominations and liberal churches to recover a credible voice in matters of human sexuality -- both the ethical and the practical. Churches need to become more active in the shaping of public policies having to do with sex. Programs are needed that will go beyond a negative reinforcement of the moral code to address the total human needs of young people. Our country’s experience (as well as that of other progressive nations) has taught us that social solutions can be found to serve the health and welfare needs of people, enabling them to live better lives. For such programs to work we must be willing to pay the financial cost and to live with the ambiguity that we will never have perfect solutions.

The sexual ethics of young people today is a paradigm of how difficult it is to make moral judgments or to find ready answers to complicated moral questions. Christian social ethics goes beyond prescriptive behavior of what is essentially right or essentially wrong. It has to do with public standards that allow for all persons to participate in a just social order and in a community in which the promises of a good life may be a realized hope for all. The issue of chastity is only one aspect of the larger sexual conundrum that confronts teens. The other side is the kind of ethical norms that the church and society can articulate that will support those, including teens, who may, for whatever reason, deviate from "acceptable moral behavior" and engage in sexual relations prior to marriage.

What Max Weber calls an ethic of responsibility includes the challenge to find just and helpful social policies in order that a society can be responsive to the hurts and needs of people in a practical and realistic way. Christian social ethics therefore requires a view of human fulfillment and hope that will support young people in concrete ways in the sexual crisis that has engulfed them and the society of which they are a part.

Medjugorje’s Miracles: Faith and Profit

For too long now, many thoughtful American Christians have dismissed the phenomenon at Medjugorje as a curious but ultimately trivial interruption of the church’s confident march into modernity. The fact is that in the past few years, between 7 and 8 million Christians have climbed to the top of this rugged mountain in Yugoslavia where Mary supposedly appeared, the first time in 1981, to five children who live in the vicinity. Though this event is in many ways a "sign of contradiction," it is also a major sign of the times, and as such deserves our attention.

Medjugorje is an inauspicious and impoverished village in the central Yugoslavian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is now experiencing what must be its first economic boom. Franciscans run the church there, as they do all the churches in the diocese of Mostar. This church is almost always overflowing with pilgrims praying the rosary in a multitude of languages. Long lines of penitents wait patiently at the confessionals. Beside the church a bazaar brims with religious paraphernalia of every imaginable sort, and American pilgrims, quickly accustoming themselves to Mediterranean ways, participate enthusiastically in the loud bartering.

On the other side of the church stands the rectory, where in a basement room the five children gather every evening at 7:30 to pray the rosary and listen for the Blessed Mother’s voice (the local bishop won’t let them use the church for these vigils). Around the window of this tiny room throngs of pilgrims crowd -- some kneeling, some weeping, some saying the rosary, but all in deep devotion and fervent expectation.

But the real focal point of this phenomenon -- the true sacred place -- lies about a mile away: the mountain where the first apparition occurred. While dozens of tour buses wait, thousands of pilgrims of every description -- the maimed, the blind, the infirm, the elderly, middle-aged American housewives, professionals, students and even a few yuppies in designer jogging suits -- walk or crawl up the mountain. Many people who crawl up the hill suffer physical or mental disease or handicaps. Others are experiencing emotional anguish. For this pain, people here cry to Mary for help.

The path leading to the summit is extremely rough and the ascent is not easy. The summit itself is a small level area where a large cross marks the location of the first appearance. Strewn about are other, smaller crosses, planted by groups of pilgrims. Here and along the way one sees innumerable messages to Mary, some painted on the rocks and some written on bits of paper attached to the crosses. In one way or another, and in multitudes of languages, most say the same thing: "Mary, help us." Candles, flowers, bits of clothing, fragments of colored glass and so on have been carefully placed beneath many of the crosses.

As they gain the summit, the pilgrims also reach a pinnacle of religious fervor -- which sometimes becomes hysteria -- expressed through prayer and ecstasy, a great many tears, quiet moaning or cries to Mary for assistance. People claim that as a result of their visit they have been healed, had demons cast out, and the like. Some profess to have witnessed other supernatural events and miracles, such as the visage of Mary appearing in the sun, or the sacred heart pulsating in the sun -- and that their lengthy staring at the sun does not damage their eyes. People hear various messages from Mary, rosary beads turn to gold, the sun spins in the sky. These apparent manifestations of the sacred draw people to Medjugorje.

After talking to various church and government officials in Yugoslavia, I began to understand why Medjugorje has attracted so many people. Yugoslavian political theologian Marko Orsolic, O.F.M., a professor at the Theological Faculty in Sarajevo and general secretary for the Council of Priests and Religions in Yugoslavia, told me that the country’s bishops have prohibited all Yugoslavian priests from leading pilgrims to Medjugorje. He claims to know of only one priest -- the local pastor -- who believes the apparition to be authentic. One of the five children who first claimed to see the vision studied under Orsolic for three years, and consequently Orsolic knows him well. Orsolic speculates that the children first spoke of the apparition as a joke, but when the tour buses quickly started arriving they were psychologically trapped. The pastor at Medjugorje then began to supervise their reported messages from Mary and to teach them theological language in which to express the messages. Though the vast majority of Franciscans believe the apparition’s to be inauthentic, they continue to serve in Medjugorje because, Orsolic said, "it is our duty to meet the profound needs of the millions of lost and anguished souls who come here."

Tomislav Pervan, the Medjugorje pastor, has for years been under enormous pressure from the press, tour groups and church officials. He now grants no interviews, and it was only through the good offices of Orsolic that I was allowed to ask him a few questions. Pervan told me that the religious flea market beside the church embarrasses him and the church. He claims to believe firmly in the children’s apparitions, but seems skeptical about the numerous daily miracles occurring on the hill. He will not speculate on the event’s political implications. To him the phenomenon is not a conservative but a progressive movement, the beginning of a church renewal and a continuation of the spirit of Vatican II. And he is convinced that ultimately this movement will profoundly transform the universal church.

To investigate Medjugorje, the bishops of Yugoslavia appointed a 15-member commission, including two psychiatrists and one representative from each of the ten Yugoslav theological faculties. The commission met for two years and aimed to leave no stone unturned. The psychiatrists found the children to be normal. But the commission concluded unanimously that the apparitions were not real.

One of the commission members is Peter Krasic, O.F.M., a professor of theology and vice-provincial of the Franciscans in Herzegovina, Medjugorje’s jurisdiction. He said that one of the major reasons for the commission’s decision was that Mary’s messages to the children sometimes conflicted with the New Testament. Krasic added that the final report had been submitted to the bishops of Yugoslavia, but that they had refused to make it public. Their reason, he asserted, was that business interests in Mostar and the surrounding area have prevailed on the bishops not to release the report.

Another member of the commission, Ljubo Lucic, O.F.M., a professor on the theological faculty in Sarajevo, confirmed Krasic’s remarks. He also cited a few of the children’s strange stories including Mary’s alleged predictions of the world’s end. He said that there were "obvious contradictions" among the different children’s versions of Mary’s messages and that the commission had documented 13 clear cases in which the children were "deliberately and consciously lying." Lucic added that it was not only local Yugoslavian business interests that wanted to suppress the commission’s report, but that a large Italian tourist agency had pleaded with Vatican officials, who hold a copy of the report, not to release it because they might thereby bankrupt the company. These business interests convinced the Vatican to appoint a new commission to begin a new investigation. Their report is not expected for several years.

According to Filip Simic, deputy minister for religious affairs in Bosnia Herzegovina, the state does not oppose the event at Medjugorje. These apparitions’ authenticity is not a matter of public concern, he said; that is up to the private judgment of the individual. But what is of public concern is Yugoslavian society’s clear failure to meet the needs of Medjugorje’s Yugoslavian pilgrims. The state does not fear that this interest will become a reactionary political movement, Simic said, adding that "the previous era’s Stalinist hostility to religion is on the wane in Yugoslavia, thank God."

Reflecting on these opinions, I see no reasonable alternative to accepting the findings of the bishops’ commission. But I also would criticize the commission for limiting its concern to the positivistic determination of whether the apparitions are true. The far more interesting and important issue is the meaning of this entire event. What crisis of modernity precipitates such new religious movements? What deep religious need seeks fulfillment on this hill in Yugoslavia? What have 7 or 8 million Christians searched for here? Because he fastened on these questions. I think that cabinet minister Simic was more perceptive than the bishops’ commission.

Obviously, different Christians come to Medjugorje for vastly different reasons. Certainly one is the endless human longing for religious certitude. To live in the absence of such confirmation -- that is, to live by faith -- is difficult. Seeing with our own eyes the sun swirling around in the sky or hearing Mary’s voice vindicates our long-held religious beliefs and makes our deepest doubts disappear.

Ironically, it is deep doubt, not deep faith, that drives people to Medjugorje. We need to remember that the Gospels represent Jesus as very critical of those who continually longed for signs and wonders. "Unless you see signs and wonders," he said, "you will not believe" (John 4:48). And after the disciple Thomas was finally given "proof," Jesus said to him, "You have believed because you have seen, but blessed are those who have not seen and have believed" (John 20:29) We all want to see, and we all want proof. But the traditional Christian understanding is that this need will go unfulfilled until, as St. Paul says, "we see him face to face."

Second, I think that part of the crisis of modernity is that we in the West live in a one-dimensional world. In our secular societies human experience is largely reduced to its physical, material and technological dimensions. Going to Medjugorje is a protest against this state of affairs. People yearn profoundly to encounter another dimension -- the spiritual, the transcendental, the supernatural. Visiting a place such as Medjugorje is an attempt to fulfill this largely unfulfilled need. When 7 or 8 million Christians make such a pilgrimage, the churches need to ask themselves why they are failing to fulfill believers’ needs.

There are also economic and political dimensions to the Medjugorje phenomenon. Many of Medjugorje’s American visitors come from the affluent upper-middle class. One of the results is that travel agents get rich from this religious event, while churches face financial crises. In Medjugorje I met the owner of an American travel agency. This was her 11th trip to the hill; her agency had already led 8,000 people there. She allowed as how God had worked in a marvelous way, influencing ABC network executives to broadcast nationally its New Orleans affiliate station’s report on Medjugorje. For after that, her business grew enormously, with no end in sight.

But more important, for American visitors Mary’s message at Medjugorje is a comfortable one: she affirms that God exists, and she instructs them to pray devoutly. Many of these affluent Americans leave with the conviction that Mary has now come to save the world from socialism -- thus sanctioning the economic system which has allowed them to accumulate their wealth, and leaving undisturbed their pleasant way of life.

I do not know whether healing takes place on this hill. But I wonder what kind of God would heal the aches and pains of rich Americans while turning a deaf ear to the cries of starving children elsewhere in the world. I share with all those who visit Medjugorje the devout wish that there would be help for us there. I, too, know people who are sick and dying, who suffer the anguish of mental illness, who are filled with fear and doubt, who long for a spark of warmth in a cold and heartless world, who search for an intimation of immortality. But in the final analysis, I am afraid that for these things there is little help in Medjugorje. Real hope, I think, lies elsewhere, at another cross on another hill.

Saving the Soul of Higher Education

The eclipse of liberal education, as Allan Bloom recounts it in The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 392 pp., $18.95) , occurred at Cornell University in 1969. Bloom witnessed it as a professor there, and his vivid recollections provide a recurring theme in this book. Although viewing the eclipse with unshielded eyes seared his retinas, leaving images of the dark days at Cornell on all that he has observed since, his sense of the condition of colleges and universities is often right and his judgments command attention.

Appearing also at this time are several other books on related topics, whose authors’ judgments are also worthy of attention. Ernest Boyer, drawing upon the reports of observers who visited 29 campuses across the country, as well as upon a survey of the attitudes and opinions of 5,000 faculty and 4,500 undergraduates in a representative sample of institutions, writes more analytically and less passionately than Bloom. His College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (Harper & Row, 328 pp., $19.95), a report sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, describes the dusky condition of liberal education in recent years, but he writes with the hope of a sunrise in mind.

Derek Bok’s Higher Learning (Harvard University Press, 206 pp., $15.00) also offers some hopeful judgments. From his vantage point as president of Harvard, Bok analyzes the dilemmas of liberal education, showing how its coexistence with the demands of professional schools in times of change and uncertainty requires its advocates to set it on a sound course. Just what that course should be is less certain.

The conclusions drawn by Bruce A. Kimball in Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (Teachers College Press, 292 pp., $19.95) are of a different kind. Liberal education is in trouble today, he contends, because its proponents do not know its past and do not understand the historical tensions that could be exploited to give it new life. By demonstrating how accommodations have been reached between contrasting traditions in liberal education, Kimball compels his readers to rethink their understandings.

It is a pleasure to wrestle with the ideas advanced by Bloom, Boyer, Bok and Kimball, today’s college professors will tell you, but if teaching is a process of building on what students already know, how can they be expected to teach students who don’t know anything -- the culturally illiterate? E. D. Hirsch argues in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Muffin, 251 pp., $16.95) that schools are obliged to help students accumulate shared symbols and the knowledge they represent -- that is to say, to teach students cultural literacy, so that they can learn to communicate in our national community.

Bloom’s book (subtitled How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students) is an attention-grabber, mainly because the author, who now teaches philosophy and political science at the University of Chicago, is a polemicist with an obvious scorn for understatement. At the heart of his polemic is his frustration with students’ belief that truth is relative and that the highest moral virtue is openness. This belief, Bloom claims, is a consequence of the failure of colleges and universities to cultivate among their students a sense of shared goals and a common vision of the public good. With the prevailing attitude being that anything goes -- that one opinion is as good as another -- the social contract by which we live may not long endure.

Not by chance have we come to this pass. Intellectual movements of various descriptions have long pointed us in this direction. One of these is historicism, "the view that all thought is essentially related to and cannot transcend its own time" (p. 40) Another is pragmatism, fostered by John Dewey and others, which permits analysis of the present without regard to the past. Marxist debunking of claims of superiority for American principles or heroes (with Charles Beard cited as a representative debunker) is a third. Southern writers whose assessments of the Civil War defamed the North and idealized the South, share in the blame, as do radicals in the civil rights movement who promoted the notion that American principles are racist.

Contemporary conditions make the situation worse. Bloom frets eloquently about the disappearance of religion’s influence and the decline of the family in American life. It is not the unhappy family or the broken home that he finds most disturbing; rather, it is the family devoid of spiritual and intellectual coherence and interaction. "People sup together, play together, travel together," he says, "but they do not think together" (p. 58).

The influence of classic texts has diminished too -- partly because they have been attacked by feminist thinkers (throughout the book, incidentally, Bloom’s language seems calculated to offend those who are sensitive to the usefulness of modifying gender references in ways that draw women into the story of civilization and culture). And classical music has been driven out by rock music, whose explicit sexual themes lead to rebellion against parental authority and to ruin of the youthful imagination, making "it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education" (p. 79).

The result? The young are self-centered, their concerns for egalitarianism are misguided, their understandings of racial problems are wrong, their sexual experiences are passionless and their lives are without love.

If things were different in the past, what explains the change? For Bloom, the answer lies in the perversion by German philosophers, principally Nietzsche, of the human quest for values rooted in the Greek tradition. This development is reflected in the popular reverence for the inner-directedness described by David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd; such inner-directedness, in which self-understanding is what matters most, is shaped without benefit of the knowledge of classical traditions.

The creativity we currently foster, Bloom suggests, is misdirected. Culture,

with its many meanings, is misunderstood. "‘Life-style’ justifies any way of life, as does ‘value’ any opinion" (p. 235) Attempts by Freud and Marx and their followers to reshape our understandings are not only wrong, Bloom claims, but boring.

In these circumstances, the first task of the university is "always to maintain the permanent questions front and center" (p. 252) The tiny band of academics who participate fully in the way of life "Plato saw in Parmenides, Aristotle in Plato, Bacon in Aristotle, Descartes in Bacon, Locke in Descartes and Newton," are the soul of the university (p. 271) But that is the soul darkened by the eclipse at Cornell (and elsewhere) in 1969. Although Bloom’s Cornell experiences are not recounted in detail until a diatribe in the penultimate chapter, bitterness over them, and resentments toward colleagues who failed to sustain his ideals, are apparent throughout the book.

Bloom’s view of what the college years can be is admirable, if romantic: "These are the charmed years when [the student can, if he chooses, become anything he wishes and when he has the opportunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by careers, but those available to him as a human being. . . . They are civilization’s only chance to get him" (p. 336).

Whether the Great Books curriculum Bloom advocates is the answer to students’ needs, however, is another matter. Another matter, too, is Bloom’s analysis of the condition of the disciplines. On most campuses, the natural sciences are neither so self-sufticient nor so isolated as he claims, nor are the humanities and the social sciences everywhere in so hopeless a condition as he describes.

For all the brilliance of Bloom’s polemic, it completely misses the point in several critical respects. Most strikingly, it faults colleges and universities for the kinds of students they enroll, shaped as they have been by the forces of the larger cultures from which they come, while paying no attention to the kinds they graduate. While higher education is obliged to resist the corrosive forces of the larger society, to expect it to be immune to their pervasive effects is unrealistic.

Bloom also ignores the failure of higher education’s potential allies in government and industry, particularly its communications and entertainment segments, to advance the cause or spirit in which he believes. Why, one wonders, should higher education be alone in the quest for the good? Finally, The Closing of the American Mind says nothing about how colleges and universities should get from where they are to where its author thinks they should be. Men and women in the campus trenches may find delight and provocation in the work (currently number 1 on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list) , but there isn’t much in it to help them in practicable ways.

Acknowledging that the American system of advanced learning, with its openness, diversity, freedom from suffocating ideology and unmatched vitality, is the envy of the world, Boyer, through extensive research, nevertheless confirms what every informed observer already knows: "the undergraduate college, the very heart of higher learning, is a troubled institution" (p. 2) One’s first thought is, Here comes ammunition for the next barrage by William Bennett! Those who merely read about College, without studying the careful manner in which that judgment is supported, may indeed fear that it provides a foundation for the blustery attacks on higher education by the secretary of education. But while Bennett and Boyer share concerns about the troubled condition of higher education, in this book and in his record as chancellor of the State University of New York, as commissioner of education in the 1970s and as president of the Carnegie Foundation, Boyer is sensitive to the circumstances that create the deplorable conditions as well as to those conditions themselves.

Boyer and his research associates specify the problems they see. There is discontinuity between earlier education and colleges and a mismatch between faculty expectations and the academic preparation of entering students. Undergraduate colleges lack a clear sense of mission, being caught between careerism and the liberal arts. Faculty members are torn by divided loyalties and competing career concerns. Classrooms are beset by the tension between conformity and creativity. There is a great gulf, if not a total separation, between academic life and campus social life. Governance issues gnaw at institutional vitality. How the academic gains of college students should be assessed remains an open question. Finally, there is "a disturbing gap between the college and the larger world . . . a parochialism . . . an intellectual and social isolation that reduces the effectiveness of the college and limits the vision of the student" (p. 6).

Some of Boyer’s responses to these problems seem obvious. For example, in addressing the issue of creativity in the classroom he tells us, "Good teaching is at the heart of the undergraduate experience. All members of the faculty should work continually to improve the content of their courses and their methods of instruction" (p. 159). But there are many campuses where this principle is not a given. Some of his other admonitions are similarly needed: that the freshman year should offer experiences that entice students to appreciate minds at work; that the faculty should be engaged in activities beyond the classroom that demonstrate their work as scholars; that academic majors should broaden rather than restrict the perspective of students, and so on. The checklist in the concluding chapter, with more than a dozen points describing a good college, will help every institution identify matters requiring attention.

Although Bok shares the widespread skepticism of "competency-based learning" as it is practiced in some institutions, he credits the apparent success of this approach to the clarity of the objectives its practitioners have established. A logical first step in improving the quality and quantity of learning in any institution, he concludes, would be to define a set of shared goals around which to orient teaching and learning throughout the four undergraduate years. Other specific steps would follow, focusing on communicating to students the ways and means of achieving the set of defined goals. While many of Bok’s prescriptions in this area, too, seem obvious, engaging faculties in efforts along these lines, given their divided loyalties and diverse commitments, is not always easy to accomplish.

Kimball’s Orators and Philosophers traces two distinct traditions in liberal education. In the tradition of the philosophers, the pursuit of knowledge is the highest good. This is the line, Joseph Featherstone notes in the foreword, "from Socrates and Plato and Aristotle to Boethius, the brilliant schoolmen of medieval Paris, the philosophies of the Enlightenment, T. H. Huxley, modern science, and the great research universities of the present. Its glory is the freedom of the intellect; its puzzle, as an educational philosophy, is what else to teach besides this freedom" (ix).

The tradition of the orators, on the other hand,

emphasizes the public expression of what is known, the crucial importance of language, texts, and tradition -- linking to and building up a community of learning and knowledge. This is the line of Isocrates, Cicero, Isidore, the artes liberales of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance humanists, the vision of Matthew Arnold, of some teachers of the liberal arts today, especially humanities teachers and, of course, many religious colleges. The glory of the orators’ line is its links with the texts of the past and its focus on recreating learning communities as the central business of education; its problem, as an educational philosophy, is its dogmatic and anti-intellectual idolatry of the past and its frequent assumption that virtue resides in the texts, not in what we the living make of them (x).

It is a strange fact, Featherstone observes, that most of today’s neoconservatives defending great books and tradition -- the curriculum of the orators -- are really closet philosophers. "Instead of defending the texts on the old complex grounds of the oratorical tradition, they are for the most part preaching the classics today in the name of the Socratic or scientific ideal of the free-swinging intellect" (xi)

Kimball, whose research seems to have taken him into every debate on liberal education through more than two millennia, draws his vast findings together in two contrasting models. In one are seven artes liberales characteristics of the orators’ tradition: "(1) Training citizen-orators to lead society (2) requires identifying true virtues, (3) the commitment to which (4) will elevate the student and (5) the source for which is great texts, whose authority lies in (6) the dogmatic premise that they relate the true virtues, (7) which are embraced for their own sake." It is built on the foundation of classical texts and letters.

In the other model are seven "liberal-free" characteristics in the philosophers’ tradition, which Kimball summarizes thus: " (1) Epistemological skepticism underlies (2) the free and (3) intellectual search for truth, which is forever elusive, and so all possible views must be (4) tolerated and given (5) equal hearing (6) with the final decision left to each individual, (7) who pursues truth for its own sake. Its appeal is to mathematics, sciences, and ‘modern’ subjects" (p. 228).

Through the years, the traditions have reached accommodations with one another. Where the tilt is toward the artes liberales tradition, neohumanism prevails, whereas the tilt toward the liberal-free tradition results in meritocratic research specialization. Read and ponder this book. It is a far-reaching, complicated, provocative study. Were Kimball’s analysis to inform every discussion of the goals and strategies of liberal education, the ideas and goals advanced by Boyer and Bok, and possibly even those by Bloom, would more readily be fulfilled.

Provided, of course, that colleges and universities enroll students who are ready and able to deal with what they have to offer. Here’s where Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy is most relevant. His generally persuasive case is built on the indisputable claims that the more one knows, the easier it is to know still more, and that precise knowledge is not always required for cultural literacy. What matters, he says, is the ability "to grasp the general shape of what we are reading and tie it to what we already know."

Drawing on research revealing that in learning to read, children actively bring "past schemata" to bear on what they are reading, and that it is such culturally shared schemata that make communication possible, Hirsch lays the groundwork for his larger contention. That contention is that literacy is a function of a national culture -- a point he seeks to demonstrate by citing relationships between foreign languages and the cultures they serve.

For a national culture to exist, Hirsch argues, schools are obliged to promote it intentionally, for only within the educational system can it be learned. Unfortunately, he claims, schools fail to do this, for they try to teach developmental skills apart from the context of the culture in which the children live. And this situation is a departure from the days when schools made children shareholders in a common culture.

By resting much of his case on the unproven assumption that schools in the past played the role he wishes they would play today, Hirsch detracts from his generally plausible argument that more could be done today to help children know and understand their culture. Sensing, perhaps, that his arguments align him too closely with neoconservatives like Secretary of Education Bennett (and Allan Bloom, for that matter) , for whom attacks on the schools and calls for a return to a commonly held culture are recurring themes, he retreats a bit. And to win the support of educators who do not share the neoconservative commitment to educational reform rooted largely, if not exclusively, in Western traditions, he argues that in pluralistic America, if schools do their job there can indeed be one cultural vocabulary. Moreover, he asserts, that vocabulary need not be either elitist or exclusive. What schools need is a two-part curriculum: an "extensive" part devoted to studies common to all children, and an "intensive" part ensuring that an arbitrary core curriculum will not be imposed.

Hirsch may be right in claiming that literate culture is far less exclusive than ethnic culture or pop culture or youth culture, but these do not require the mastery of such comprehensive vocabularies as does the national culture he seeks to promote. In any case, even if we acknowledge that the nation’s cultural vocabulary does not have to be elitist and that schools could do a better job of drawing more children into a literate national culture, it is fair to ask who should determine that national cultural vocabulary.

Hirsch, an authority on writing and a professor of English at the University of Virginia, assumes that responsibility himself, aided by his Virginia colleagues historian Joseph Kett and physicist James Trefil. Their listing of "What Literate Americans Know" includes more than 4,500 terms and runs to 64 pages. It is tempting to scrutinize the list for ideological tendencies and biases, to point to curious inclusions and omissions, and to have some fun with it by testing one’s own cultural literacy.

Whatever one’s quibbles with the list, few would disagree that teaching students who would be at home with the vocabulary would be an unlikely pleasure in today’s world. Bloom, Boyer, Bok, and maybe even Kimball, would have much cheerier things to write about if the cultural literacy Hirsch advocates were to become a reality.

Making a Real Return to Church Possible

"The time for the great reversal is at hand," conclude Hartford Seminary sociologists David Roozen and William McKinney, whose recent study indicates that 42 per cent of the baby-boom generation are returning to church (reported in the January 21, 1987, issue of the Lutheran) Many people between the ages of 18 and 35 who attended church only occasionally before 1970 are now attending regularly, their survey shows. The number of older people attending church has stayed about the same since1970. If 42 per cent are returning, 58 per cent are not, and are growing further away from the church with every passing year. And those "returning" are not generally singles, nor are they individuals more open to social concerns. In some congregations young married couples show up primarily to have infants baptized; once again, a little child is leading them. The problem remains that not much about churches has changed since young people abandoned them during the ‘60s. Studies reveal that the worship format turned them off then, and it hasn’t changed in either "liturgical" or "nonliturgical" churches. How long are those who have "returned" going to remain if what they didn’t like about the church 20 years ago hasn’t changed? And what about people of other ages who are still not participating in mainline churches? Can their absence be blamed on other reasons?

Ironically, the time for a "great reversal" may be at hand, though not in the way Roozen and McKinney conclude. The baby-boomers’ reasons for leaving the church suggest an opportunity for worship renewal in both "high" and "low" churches. Young adults return not as prodigals who rebelled against authority, but as persons with a message for those of us who never left. Moreover, they also bring insights they share with their single (often more liberal) colleagues. Thus, there is a living bridge from the traditional church to the baby-boom church, if we will but consider young adults’ opinions. They can help form a truly new church.

In 1981 the Lutheran Church in America’s parish research department sampled the thinking of 600 young adults between the ages of 18 and 35. Several questions asked about worship. From a list of 14 worship components, "vestments and processions" received the lowest rating in terms of importance. Ecclesiastical "emperors" may love to march in solemn assembly, but to most younger church members today’s vestments suggest ostentation -- which they have difficulty associating with Jesus. Seven out of ten respondents preferred a simple, informal, spontaneous worship style over tradition, liturgical precision and clergy prominence.

The questionnaire also revealed young Lutherans’ attitudes toward the LCA’s emphasis on weekly communion. As might be expected, those who preferred simplicity and informality would celebrate the sacrament only once a month -- but with an abbreviated liturgy. As might not be expected, only 1 per cent of those who prefer liturgical tradition considered "holy communion with full liturgy" to be "very important." These respondents appreciate the moments of silent meditation on the bread and wine, but consider to be superfluous the reading or singing of the same words from a book each time in preparation for these moments.

Another intriguing revelation was that the majority of older adult Lutherans harbor the thoughts of their offspring. This fact first came to light in 1978 when 2,000 laypersons and over 700 clergy volunteered their views in a project called "The Lutheran Listening Post." At one point, participants jotted down "what major comment about worship [they would] like to make." Although they were not asked specifically about worship experiences, most focused on them. Seventy-four per cent of the clergy and 68 per cent of the laity described Lutheran worship services as rigid, boring, too formal, repetitious and bound by tradition.

While the laypeople’s reaction might have reflected their opinion of the worship leader or the way the liturgy is read, that could hardly be true of the clergy, who for the most part are the leaders and readers. Clergy must have been responding to the printed text they read. In general, the respondents preferred contemporary language, lay participation, and simplicity in style and clergy attire, which many claimed would enable people to receive the service’s message more deeply into their lives and thereby draw closer to God.

These data will come as news to many Lutherans now merged in the new Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for these findings were never shared with the LCA constituency. Instead, the report was stamped with those words that ring the death knell for research data: "Not for distribution." The new Lutheran church will inherit a number of studies that contain clues for worship renewal. However, the chance of the reports’ ever seeing the light of day is remote. Such data are anathema to liturgical authorities. When they do seek feedback from the flock, they ask about such matters as how often the Eucharist is offered and what training is provided the laity who read or assist at the altar. What is learned is limited by the question. They never ask why many persons are not attending services, or what is the experience of those who do.

Indeed, the Lutheran Book of Worship itself would not have been published, at least in its present form, had the original field-test data been accepted. For several years prior to 1978, when it was published, a host of LCA congregations had the opportunity to try out parts of the new liturgy. The majority were less than receptive to the new liturgical forms; they wanted less formal, more meaningful, realistic language. However, the LCA’s president in 1976-77 did not share this view. Therefore, he ordered a new sample, composed of congregations known from the prior sample to favor the new liturgy. Not surprisingly, when their supportive views were reported, the LBW was published.

Having served for four years as the liaison between the research department and the LCA worship coordinating committee, I understand why this happened. People preferring "high" liturgy assume that a liturgical language’s validity is like a poodle’s pedigree -- the further back in time it can be traced, the better.

An effect of this assumption is that to data that criticize their emphasis, liturgical authorities respond with calls for "intelligent worship" and liturgical education. They think that those who criticize the liturgy only misunderstand what we do or why we do it. Supporting this confusion is a bewildering lexicon of liturgical language, including such terms as alb, chasuble, cope, cincture, cotta, burse, ciborium, flagon, lavabo and fraction.

The esoteric nature of such terms preserves the clergy’s teaching authority -- a second value held by traditionalists. When the LCA began allowing some laypersons to read the "lessons" (another term that presumes lay ignorance) and assist with communion, the pastor’s role was described as "chief liturgical officer" or "president of the Eucharist." To these worship authorities, worship is not just the church’s main event, it is the only event -- or as the LCA’s worship coordinating committee chairperson stated in his 1978 report "Projections and Perceptions," "a congregation is never the church as much as when it worships." However, worship is but one of five functions that the LCA characterized as church activity. The other four are learning, witness, service and support. The denomination’s staff people who administer these other functions are open to suggestion; they seek input from others, even outsiders. But those who care solely about worship see their views on liturgy as the only correct ones. They offer no dialogue, only direction. They dismiss others’ thoughts and experiences as strictly amateur, despite the fact that more people have something to say about worship than about the other four areas combined. This implies that worship authorities believe that relating liturgy to where people are is tantamount to "making liturgical policy in the street" or "catering" to their needs.

There is a basic flaw in the fabric of this authoritarian attitude: it misunderstands the part that meaning plays in worship. If one has to be educated in the meaning of worship words before worshiping, then meaning comes through and is experienced in the process of education, not during the worship hour itself. If the real encounter with the meaning occurs outside the scheduled worship period, or in a printed commentary, then in order to worship consciously with that meaning in mind, one must constantly exercise his or her memory. Unfortunately, the corporate recitation of words by a group does not provoke the memory, especially when the words are the same -- or overly familiar -- every week. Then the memory is not even needed, the mind is quite capable of focusing on other matters while the words emerge as if one is on automatic pilot.

The idea that the more familiar people are with the words, the more free they are to worship, sounds strange to the majority who find that they must labor mentally just to keep their minds on the subject. Little wonder that the term "liturgy" means "the work of the people." Having to work hard to worship for one hour does not speak well for the One being worshiped or for those worshiping.

Several years ago I interviewed a congregation in Virginia to obtain their evaluation of worship. Tasked groups of adults and youth how much of the church worship hour they spend consciously reflecting on God. While they said they had never thought about this before, only one out of 30 declared that it was a difficult question to answer. The youths’ responses ranged from five to ten minutes, whereas for the adults it was but a little longer. Nonetheless, all were surprised by the admissions -- for they acknowledged that the whole hour is called "worship."

This information indicates that many people may feel disillusioned with church worship services, especially when our worship words say one thing but our experience says something else. Perhaps this is what many of today’s youth and young adults are telling us when they sleep in on Sunday morning, or say, "Mom and Dad, I’m just not motivated. There’s nothing there for me."

It should be noted here that we are not referring to one of those highly chorerographed opening worship services at a church convention or large youth gathering where the music sends chills along the spine and the speaker is "out of this world." We are in touch here with the average Sunday "back home" -- the only service in which most members take part.

One successful practice is the use of silence, which was the Lutheran young adults’ preferred worship component. After all, words are more meaningful when there is time to reflect on them. A good example is provided by Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, which had a weekday evening service that began with a hymn and a prayer. There was no liturgy or sermon. Instead, with the lights dimmed, students sat in silence until they were individually ready to go to the altar railing to receive communion from the chaplain. The chapel was usually filled, and to the surprise of the more "religious" students, the service seemed to draw students never seen at the regular Sunday worship hour.

Again, language used in liturgy might communicate more effectively if it is in the vernacular. In response to the Lutheran survey, one pastor wrote: "The language needs to grow out of the weekday experience of the members of the congregation. It must be based on their own Christian faith, hope and love, not the predispositions of liturgical experts." A layperson observed: "Keep it easy to understand. Why force the congregation to think in order to receive the meaning? We will think just as much if its meaning is more direct."

Such language relates to what worshipers already know. It would also make it easier for visitors to participate in their first service. The connection between worship and witness would be genuine and ongoing, and it would not require a special conference to explain it.

Two congregations on the West Coast intentionally use clear, vernacular language in liturgy. At St. Stephen’s of the Valley Lutheran Church in Palmdale, California, a layperson on the staff writes the liturgy for each Sunday. It elaborates on a contemporary event or the Scripture theme for the day, or both. The pastor told me that "the effect is to help people see and hear their own lives in every part of the worship." (Even the creed is paraphrased with this goal in mind.) Some services are repeated, but months later. Those who want the same words every Sunday attend a traditional service. However, over half of the congregation participates in the new service. Copies of these liturgies are now available on a subscription basis.

Further north, at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fircrest, Washington, all members have a chance to plan the worship for one month per year. Each group, containing various ages, meets a month in advance over supper to begin planning. The pastor is a resource person, but the group makes the decisions. The percentage of members who attend Sunday worship at this church has been one of the highest in the LCA.

A biblical and Reformation dynamic, one that led Martin Luther to translate the Scripture into the vernacular, informs the lay participation approach. Communicating the gospel in commonly used terms aims not to lift people out of their skulls with a sense of God’s presence, but to enter their minds and give them understanding. Jesus spent 30 years getting to know people in order to relate his teaching to their experience. And Paul encouraged everyone who so desired to speak during worship, provided that they were not talking in tongues. Pastors today follow this dynamic when as part of their sermon preparation they talk with laypeople about the text, or engage them in spontaneous dialogue during the worship service. The Word comes alive when preparation and delivery take laypeople’s input into account.

The future of worship in the new Lutheran church and in other mainline churches is like the relationship of students to Latin. Even though Latin can teach us much about the etymology of English, few students are interested. School administrators could change the textbook’s cover or format, or replace the teacher, but unless the students are interested, none of these actions will accomplish much. However, there are several possible approaches, which may also be applicable to liturgy planning.

One option is to do nothing different. Latin has been around for a long time, and carries a tradition. Anybody who knows Latin is drawn to it. It would be a sin to offer an alternative; it would compromise our standards and betray our heritage. It’s either Latin or nothing.

Another option would be to do a better job of promotion. Kindle interest early. Teach children when they are young. Begin giving them little doses of Latin in first grade and continue as they grow. Tease their palates to want more, and they may grow to like it. Some may hate it, but there may be more who like it if we can just expose them to it early enough.

A third option is to legitimate the language in which students think. Study it and investigate from where and when it surfaces (the context). Join them in exploring its syntax and meaning. Apply the tools of learning normally reserved for studying a foreign language to this vernacular form of expression, and make this study a recognized, sanctioned part of the curriculum.

In 1983 a Lutheran bishop wrote that a century ago, we lost many Lutherans as we went through the pain of discarding our mother tongues for English. There were those who fought to retain worship in the Lutheran languages of Northern Europe. They hurt the church. Today, the new Lutheran church needs a different kind of "tradition." Not from German to English, or Swedish to English, but a translation to current idiom and music.

It is difficult to guess where the church would be today had it not translated worship language into English for use here in America. One wonders where we will be ten years from now if we do not take the next step. Those in both high and low places have everything to gain and nothing to lose by taking that step.

Pornography: An Agenda for the Churches

But opinions about porn have not spread so wide or so fast as has porn itself. The past 20 years have seen a dramatic explosion of porn products and outlets. Cable television offers sexually explicit movies, and corner drugstores and newsstands feature glossy porn magazines. Dial-a-porn phone numbers rake in calls and cash from coast to coast. Adult theaters are waning, but only because home video equipment has cut into the market. By one estimate, as many as 40 per cent of VCR owners consume porn in their homes (a figure thought to represent 9 per cent of all American households) It is estimated that the porn business involves some $8 to 10 billion annually.

In this changed social landscape, discussing porn is both risky and urgent -- perhaps especially so in the churches. Whatever we say about porn may reveal things about us we would rather keep concealed. In some circles, for a woman even to look at pornography, let alone to observe and analyze it, raises suspicions about her morality. Though I see the need to confront pornography as a Christian, I fear touching off a backlash against sexuality and against women in the churches. I often feel tongue-tied in the face of these issues. (Andrea Dworkin, a noted antiporn activist, has suggested that one function of pornography may be precisely to silence women.) Yet we must deal with porn in all its complications.

Pornography and the Laws. Even defining pornography is complicated. The word itself comes from the Greek words for "writing" (graphein) and "whores" (porne), and it once meant precisely that -- writing about whores. The difficulty in defining pornography is a problem not only for ordinary discussions about it but for the courts as well. In a landmark 1957 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court asserted that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. In doing so, it defined obscenity, not pornography. The justices said, "A thing is obscene if, considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient interest, i.e., a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex or excretion, and if it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters."

As any citizen might do, the court appealed to Webster’s to define "prurient": "having a tendency to excite lustful thoughts; uneasy with desire or longing; having itching, morbid or lascivious longings," etc. Later the justices referred to "sexual responses over and beyond those that would be characterized as normal," emphasizing that they did not intend to include "material that provoked only normal, healthy sexual desires." At other times the court has affirmed that obscenity applies to material depicting sexual matter "in a patently offensive way." Other qualifications have been made by the court. To be judged obscene, sexual materials must be "utterly without redeeming social value," lack any "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value," and portray sexual conduct "for its own sake and for the ensuing commercial gains." As is well known, the court leaves many such judgments to the "average individual" and local community standards. On the other hand, judgments of redeeming social value are subject to national standards, not to local ones.

The effect of these broad judgments has been to limit obscenity prosecutions to hard-core porn. The best description of hard-core porn may still be Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 comment -- that he wouldn’t attempt to define it but he knew it when he saw it. Evasive as that may sound, after nine years of investigating porn, I have a similar response. What is obscene or pornographic can be dramatically relative. For instance, an acquaintance of mine on the national staff of a Protestant denomination was deeply disturbed when an evangelical conference on porn used a photo of a woman’s naked breast among its examples -- hardly a case of the material available in porn shops. On the other side of the spectrum, feminists object to the portrayal of rape scenes in classic films and to the portrayal of violence against or exploitation of women in advertisements that don’t feature nudity. A new genre of ads (both print and film) , many with an "Old West" theme, features cowboys "roping" women or a group of menacing-looking men approaching a woman who has fallen from a horse (these ads are usually for blue jeans).

For me, pornography is problematic not because it is sexually explicit, but because it portrays violence and domination in a sexual context. I have no desire to return to Victorian prudery, to the earlier condemnations of sex as a special source of sin, or even to the lesser silences about sex in our own century. But because I cherish my whole sensual self and believe that good theology calls us to celebrate healthy human sexuality, I find pornography abhorrent.

As a feminist theologian, the greatest concerns I have about porn are not easily addressed by government regulation or prosecution. I am as concerned with the great pool of public sentiment out of which the laws arise and are applied -- the "ethos" of the people that is the subject of "ethics" -- as I am with the legal issues. Whether or not we favor stepped-up prosecution of obscene materials, those of us in religious communities have a special interest in the formation of character and dispositions -- in the moral atmosphere of our society and in a whole range of symbolic concerns. In the nature of the case, these do not bear directly on the legality of acts. The law provides a floor, a minimal standard below which acts of the community are not allowed to fall. Without de-emphasizing the crucial nature of the nation s laws in social-justice matters, we must recall that our theological heritage calls us to far more than the law can pursue.

Pornography and the churches. Churches have shown a new activism and concern about pornography. For example, the American Lutheran Church has updated its 1974 statement on pornography. The United Church of Canada has also created a new statement, responding largely to concerns about sexual violence. Ecumenical leaders in states such as Pennsylvania have joined to oppose porn. Evangelical groups, such as the National Coalition Against Pornography, claim a burgeoning membership and make use of activist tactics. The newer Religious Alliance Against Pornography, composed of both liberals and conservatives, sponsored a White House Conference last fall and has begun organizing local groups around the country. A 1985 report on "Violence and Sexual Violence in Film, Television, Cable and Home Video" by the National Council of Churches of Christ suggested that the churches give "priority attention" to the "glut of violence and sexual violence" in the media.

The NCCC report led to a 1986 Policy Statement by the General Board of the National Council which "affirms . . . adherence to the principles of an open marketplace of ideas and the guarantees of the First Amendment to freedom of speech, of the press and of religion," but which also called on the communication and entertainment media to regulate themselves before censorship returned. In its statement the NCCC called for greater involvement by the Federal Communications Commission in guarding the public airwaves. It also urged churches to assist their members in becoming more sensitive to the impact of media violence on families.

Certainly the portrayal of rape as something women desire proceeds out of and reinforces rapist perspectives. Some sex offenders do speak about their use of porn. Many porn scenarios are strikingly similar to the motives and concerns of the assailants we know as "power rapists." The chosen woman/victim says "No, no, no" but ends up begging to be conquered. The basic plot of many kinds of porn is the overcoming of a woman’s resistance so thoroughly that she is gratefully orgasmic. Other plots more directly assert that people derive sexual pleasure from being hurt or hurting others.

Some studies indicate that those exposed to sexually violent depictions are more likely to accept rape myths, the "need" for violence between men and women, and "adversarial" views about sex. Under laboratory conditions, the viewing of scenes of sexual violence correlates with increased aggression toward women. This effect appears to hold true especially when subjects are previously incited to anger at women. (A second large category of rapists is motivated by anger.) And after viewing depictions of sexual violence, subjects in simulated court cases are more likely to blame victims and less likely to convict offenders. These findings have extremely serious implications about the effects of porn on the health and safety of women.

Many observers of porn believe that its overtly violent content has increased significantly in recent years. Anyone who looks at porn wares will be struck by the frequent theme of "bondage" or "discipline." Certainly I will never forget some images: the black woman chained astraddle a stepladder with an apple in her mouth; the needle-nosed pliers coming toward a woman’s nipple; whips used and sexual organs wielded like punishing tools, to "teach a lesson." And violence lurks on the edges of pornographic material which is not explicitly violent. It is only a short step from systematically degrading people to harming them (as we have learned from our nation’s racist violence at home and abroad).

We in the churches need to concentrate especially upon disentangling sex and sexual violence from each other. Our theological tradition is less than helpful here. Classic theologians regularly confused sexuality with sexual violence, often mistaking rape for adultery. In condemning the sex, they barely noticed the violence. (For spectacular examples of the systematic confusions between sex and rape, see chapters 17-30 of Book I of Augustine’s City of God or Luther’s commentary on the rape laws of Deuteronomy 28.) Some of us may be learning for the first time about the devastations of sexual abuse by learning about pornography, and that is necessary. Nonetheless, the ready acceptance of concern about porn in many conservative churches raises serious suspicions that pornography has been singled out for action because it is sexual, not because it is violent or actively degrading to women -- especially since many conservative Christians have criticized battered women’s shelters, sex education and planned parenthood centers. Sexual violence, sexism and sexuality all come together in porn. Disentangling them is a difficult but necessary task.

My conclusion from my work with sexual and domestic violence is that porn is a serious danger to public safety, akin to shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater; but given legal rules of evidence, there may be little hope of convincing courts of this analogy. At the same time, the safety of women and children must be secured by a broad range of prevention and treatment measures. With money for social programs scarce, my own priority is to put cash into more direct actions on sexual and domestic violence rather than into prosecuting obscenity. Pornography does contribute to the multiple forces giving rise to sexual and domestic violence, but we cannot afford to be mesmerized by porn as the single issue. Complex judgments are necessary.

If the churches are to deal responsibly with porn, they must also affirm and celebrate healthy human sexuality. While many people may agree that depictions of sexual violence in porn are harmful (half to two-thirds of respondents did so in polls last summer) , whether all sexually explicit material is harmful is a matter of heated debate. Answers to this question involve the broadest evaluations of sexuality and sexual ethics: What is healthy or unhealthy sexuality? What belongs in public and what in private? What is legitimate education about sexuality? What differences are there between sexuality itself and depictions of it in film or print media? These questions are deeply relevant to porn, and many judgments on them are embedded in the Supreme Court’s decisions about obscenity. For instance, what is "healthy" and what is "morbid" sex may be strongly debated. What exactly goes "beyond the limits of customary candor"? Could that mean sexual contact between two unmarried persons, or between two persons of the same gender?

If we look to the Christian tradition for guidance, the answers are disquieting. Any sexuality uninterested in the "procreative end" of the acts, any sexual conduct focused on sexual joy for its own sake, has historically been condemned. To use contraception in marriage was called criminal, flagitious and debauched; to Augustine it represented "cruel lust or lustful cruelty" (to take but one classic example). In the Middle Ages, masturbation and "unnatural positions" were considered more severe offenses against the ordinances of God than were rape or incest.

These distorted views of sex were not limited to the time before the Reformation (as though Protestants have gotten our theology about sexuality straight). In the mid-19th century, the heyday of Protestant power in the U.S., women were condemned not for being too lusty, as in earlier centuries; rather, Victorians proclaimed women’s pure, high and spiritual -- i.e., nonsexual -- nature. "Purity" was extolled to the extent that women were thought to lack sexual feelings altogether. (Only in the 1970s did we learn that sexual anesthesia is a frequent consequence of sexual abuse.)

Many current pornographic scenarios build on these old mistakes about women’s sexuality. Plots often turn on a woman/victim who at first appears to be "good" (nonsexual) , but is later revealed, on the flimsiest of pretexts, as a sexually demanding, ultra-lustful creature. These scenarios are often a rebellious comment on Victorian prudishness. Frequently they echo the sexist dualisms that split women into either Madonnas or whores. Whatever we think about the legal questions, we have a responsibility to set straight these extremely damaging patriarchal notions about sexuality. The Protestants who propagated these notions helped create the early laws and ethos that gave rise to our present confusing obscenity standards.

Finally, unless churches take the economic issues of pornography seriously, we have little hope of being effective in the efforts against it. Christians who may agree that the symbolic dimensions of porn are a serious concern may be wary about tackling its financial side. We often ignore the "material" realities: how much things cost, what the profit is, where the money comes from and goes. We act as though the spiritual and the material were mutually exclusive -- itself one of the sexist dualisms of the tradition. But the production and profits of porn are part of its meaning. We have not truly grasped this subject until we see into the shady and exploitative finances of porn.

Some economic dimensions are easier to learn than others. For example, the prices of porn picture magazines and video cassettes are exorbitant. Picture magazines run between $20 to $40. (In areas where video competition is keen, "sales" are common.) These prices are not due to the high costs of producing porn, which is well known for its sleazy pay scales. In March of 1986 a Newsweek reporter provided some specific figures. A porn movie was made on $120,000 in five days, with a 27-page script, no rehearsals and 18 crew members. If this film attracted an average audience, it would sell about 10,000 video cassettes at $70.00 each; it would also make larger profits from foreign sales and a simultaneous "softer" version peddled to cable television. It was not the "stars" of this porn flick, however, who raked in cash. The male lead earned $750 per day, the female lead $1,500 per day (top money for the industry) -- a pittance in the whole financial deal. But those sums represent big money in comparison to the average woman worker’s earnings, and the money often looks good to women with few financial options. This example is among the most benign (see Linda Marchiano’s descriptions of the filming of Deep Throat for worse) Many porn products are made in "cottage industry" conditions by small-time operators who do not hesitate to use force, violence, blackmail and drugs on the "actors." Porn producers speak of themselves as a legitimate entertainment industry, but their practices are far from legitimate.

Who produces and distributes such work and who pockets the very big bucks are harder questions. Sham corporations, fictitious names and false records are common. In my home state, Minnesota, the finances of the local porn king came to light only after the Internal Revenue Service filed charges of tax evasion against him. Concern over porn’s connections with organized crime has been around for many years. The Meese report’s conclusions, based on information from law enforcement agencies (who presumably know) , tell us that it is too simple to see organized crime (in the sense of the Mafia) at the heart of porn, though there may indeed be payoffs, protection and other such connections involved. But no matter who are its ultimate producers, the processes of making and distributing porn are as saturated with exploitation as are its products. To plumb the multiple meanings of pornography, we must pay as much attention to its economics as to its images.

Observing and analyzing porn. It is extremely important for us in the churches not to avert our eyes from porn. Before taking a stand, look at it. (This is not a recommendation that you become a user or consumer of porn.) Some groups, such as New York City’s Women Against Pornography, sponsor tours of porn districts and shops. Many other groups (such as Minneapolis’s Organizing Against Pornography, state chapters of Women Against Violence Against Women, and local rape centers) have slide shows available for study groups. Observe the titles, the pictures and the prices. Go into the "adults only" corner of your local home video store. Watch for racism, bondage and titles that appeal to the theme of child abuse. Be respectful in your information-gathering phase. Don’t buttonhole customers or workers; if you are female, they may be very defensive about your presence. Look at drugstore racks and newsstands as well. Don’t fail to note the true crime magazines, thought by some to be seriously implicated in sexual offenses. Look at advertising. Think about the differences and similarities in what you see in these different settings and media. Talk to people in churches situated near porn shops about the quality of life in the neighborhood.

The testimony of persons claiming direct harm from porn has been crucial in forging new views about pornography. The women whose bodies are pictured describe coercion. Women sexually abused as children describe the use of pornography in their victimization. Others, often victims of battering or marital rape, tell of partners insisting on trying some practice discovered in porn wares (10 per cent of such victims in one study) These women report suicide attempts, nightmares, fears, anxieties, shame and guilt -- reactions which resemble rape trauma syndrome.

Anyone listening seriously to this testimony will be as changed by it as those who have listened to battered women or rape victims. I will never be able to see another item of pornography without being flooded by questions about the women pictured: Was this one an incest victim? Was that one coerced into this by violence or poverty? What was it like for her to be filmed chained, smiling, with a knife at her genitals? What was her pay? What percentage of the profit was that? Does she have colitis as a result of the nervous stress? When I go into a porn shop to investigate, the questions multiply. Who are the men in this shop? Why do they look so furtive? Why do they scamper away from me and my companions? (After being in a few porn shops, I find it very difficult to believe the argument put forth by some that porn frees people from hang-ups.) Who is buying this material and what are they doing with it? Are they showing it to children, saying, "See, it’s ok because it’s published in magazines?" Are they asking a lover or wife to participate in bondage? Are they using it to "educate" teenage runaways into prostitution?

It may be stressful for many people to look at this material. Frankly, it gives me nightmares, often for weeks afterwards. Go with somebody you trust, and process your responses together; this is an appropriate project for a church group. Be as honest as you can. Some people find porn frightening and/or boring; others do not. Some people are turned on by porn; they need the chance to say so and to explore what that means. There is a diverse range of responses. Don’t define some as politically incorrect or unChristian. Let yourself have time to experience your feelings, to let them percolate, to let your insights emerge. Take care of yourself.

We all need to pay serious attention to the multiple layers of meaning in pornography, and to the connection it has to the rest of life. We need to guard against reawakening some of the most unsavory chapters in Christian history such as those I have mentioned above. The only way to cope with the many problems porn presents is by going through them, not by evading them or averting our eyes.

Though its primary harms may be to women and children, pornography affects all of us, for it makes serious statements about our world and human life. It asserts that some people are legitimate victims and others legitimate victimizers; it reinforces the worst of our society’s hierarchies of inequality and injustice. It asserts that sexual pleasure comes from demeaning, exploiting, objectifying and degrading our partners in the most intimate ways, rather than from an eager and passionate cherishing of the wholeness of that partner. I believe that good theology can be helpful in clarifying what is at stake in porn. It may be due to the limits of my imagination or my theology, but I believe that no one who celebrates healthy sexuality among the many goods of God’s creation can affirm pornography.

A Matter of Being, and a Matter of Being Right

In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge (included in Letters and Papers from Prison) , theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks why he is instinctively drawn more to religionless people than to the religious -- an affinity he feels in his language, in the naming of God before these two groups of people. He does not, in the letter, answer his own question, but rather describes the differences: when he is among the religionless the name of God emerges easily in his speech, but among the religious the name tastes plastic, feels forced, and induces in him a sense of dishonesty. What Bonhoeffer describes seems sadly to persist today. It corresponds to my own experience, especially where the public forum is concerned.

I don’t know whether Bonhoeffer assumed the "why" of this linguistic! nominal difference to lie within himself or in the differences between the two societies -- the religious and the religion-less -- as each placed upon him different requirements for acceptable dialogue and communication. I think, in fact, that the cause is a combination of both, since I feel myself to be different in the contexts of different communities. But in what follows I’d like both to assess the differences as I’ve experienced them and to suggest one cause. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll restrict my thoughts about that cause to the variant expectations of the two communities.

The secular world is not, in fact, my family -- not in the most intimate sense. Nevertheless, when in formal, public speech before that world I name God, that name comes from my lips naturally, spontaneously, and full of substance. When I speak of God, God is -- because the secular world permits me to use God’s name in what may be called a signifying way, according to an apt expression from the black ghetto community. I need do no more, I can in good faith do no less, than signify.

The Christian community, on the other hand, is my family intimately and spiritually -- people whom I need. We confess one God. Yet when I name that God formally before that community, I often find myself checking the names before speaking them. I "watch my mouth," as it were. I objectify the speech itself in order first to analyze it -- so that when I speak of God it is the speech, the words, the names, which exist most prominently between us -- not God. God, rather, is discussed.

In the Christian community I sense a requirement which the religionless do not impose (because, of course, the religious care so much for the God they already know) : I must use the name of God in a qualifying way -- to explain, to define the deity. This qualifying of the deity becomes a sort of running catechetics: formal, public speaking tends to be, among us, theologizing. But (and here’s the rub) catechetics puts the catechumen under examination The focus subtly shifts from the subject of the names of God to the speaker of the names of God. A tight, self-conscious, self-defining society needs means to identify its own -- who does and who does not belong -- and thus its most consecrated language becomes species-specific (however universal it declares its truths to be) , becomes a standard for judgment. And the names of God become a kind of shibboleth, either admitting or dismissing the speaker.

Among the religionless, this is possible: that the naming of God is a matter of being.

Among the religious, this is possible: that the naming of God is a matter of being right.

Signifyin’ (also called "playin’ the dozens" and "sellin’ wolf tickets," or plain "woofin"’) is an intense, dramatic street speech, a poetry with precise purposes. The young man who uses it talks rapidly in liquid rhythms -- sometimes sweet and sometimes fiercely belligerent. He falls into rhyme so that the focus is on the talk itself and therefore on the talker himself. His language flashes with an astonishing use of imagery, with assonance and alliteration: such are the prosodic rules he adheres to, for he is creating something. His speech is a thing, das Ding an sich: it is a name.

And in order to make it his thing, his own peculiar name, he adorns it with figures, phrases and metaphors which are fresh and arresting; that is, they are his own or his group’s invention, but they are memorable, repeatable enough to be carried from his mouth out into the world. Here, then, our English finds its newness and its generation. From this street person comes the vivid language we use when we want to be most verbally effective: for example, the expressions "I’ll knock you to a dusty curve" and "I’ll slap that taste outa yo mouth." The expression "cool," meaning self-possessed, emotionally indifferent, superior, was in ghetto speech intensified to "cold"; "cold," more recently, has become "cold-gettin’-numb," which has entered public parlance (as much signifyin’ does) through the entertainment industry in the phrase "cold-gettin’ dumb"

Consider the perfectly accurate force of this chill imagery for the Olympian rooster who uses it -- awesome, admirable in his indifference to the attacks of a chancy, careless world. "I am," it says, "untouchable." Consider also that these expressions of coolness sprang from the street long before outsiders seized upon them. Then consider how high some ghetto poet rose on the wing of his own word. "I’ll put you out on front street," he says to threaten his antagonist with public embarrassment. To sing his own beauty, he declares, "I’m comm’ pretty -- three-piece and roped down." And then, to describe a deserved afternoon nap, he murmurs with insouciance: "I be cockin’ a righteous nod under a shady tree."

Initially, the substance of signifyin’ is often a series of taunts against another (as though, by means of language itself, to clear a space around the speaker) Those taunts are followed by bold boasts, breathtaking descriptions of his talents and the feats to be performed (as though, with his own being, to fill the space that he has cleared) The speaking of these feats is their performance -- that’s what signifyin’ is. The youth is battling the oppressive insignificance of the ghetto. He lives and swells in the very language of his own pretty mouth. The language is a sort of angelic praise, which more than admits his being. It exalts his being, right there on the street. He is. He is a force to be reckoned with. He is baaaaaaaad, man!

Signifyin’ -- the talk itself -- signs the speaker’s existence. It is more than a sign of his life, more than a referent or a symbol. It is more like a signature written with personal authority on a contract: it is his name, and it contains him. The etymology of the word is exactly correct.

Signifyin’ -- when it is well done -- impresses that existence upon the audience, which laughs and stomps and applauds the display, this crowing of the rooster. The audience, like a living mirror, reflects the speaker’s existence, delighting in his talk. (Incidentally, when it is poorly done, signifyin’ degenerates into "jive talk." losing its audience’s respect and jeopardizing its speaker’s existence thereby, tarnishing his name. On the other hand, lately it has been elevated to the heavens of financial reward as "rappin" -- as in rap music.)

Signifyin’ -- within the killing city -- is no less than being. The poet becomes his poetry. To speak thus -- to sign one’s self. and in this manner to name one’s self -- is to be.

The religionless, you see, attend to my speech primarily as an art form, not as theologizing or teaching (doctrina) -- and I am content with that. Art has strict rules as to form, but as to substance it is willing to honor anything.

All that the religionless require of my speech is that it be skilled, engaging, delightful, moving, that it interest and satisfy them as spoken language. This single human element -- talk -- creates community between us. And as long as it builds upon experience familiar to the religionless., it is enough. What Bonhoeffer calls "evangelizing" would be too much for them: the demand that they more than admit a communal likeness to me, that they be me. But they are very willing to allow me to be, to be what I am, and to name that being before them. And that is fully enough for me, because it invites signifyin’. What am I? Why, I am one in relationship with God. Whom do I choose to signify, then? God.

Under these conditions, when I name the names of God I do an extraordinary thing: I invoke the presence of God as well. I sign God’s existence. The names coming from my mouth are more than referents, more than symbols; they have the personal authority of a signature: the names contain my God.

Moreover, the names impress God’s existence, upon the audience, which laughs or weeps, applauds or in some manner responds. These people are not threatened by the names (nor am I threatened by how they might receive them) , because they have prepared themselves for art by making, in artistic terms, "a willing suspension of disbelief," This is a fine irony for their suspension of disbelief gives considerable room to my own beliefs, and in that theater my words become their experience and their truth. I signify: I name God’s being. God, in the naming, is.

In the context of the religionless, then, the names of God are very powerful: they are existential, a matter of being. They emerge easily and feel very satisfying, being in perfect harmony with my own being.

In fact, what I have just described does occur within the Christian community, and with twice the sweetness, double the communal strength -- for the whole community with one voice becomes the poet and is bound the more tightly together therefore. All sing one song, naming and signifying one God, who is graciously present in the naming. This communal song, when it is purely performed among us -- no single person standing separate from the others to signify, no group of people suspending disbelief to listen -- is art and more than art: It is worship. Worship is the existential (i.e., invocational) naming of God. Like any fast and sassin’ street kid, we signify -- we perform an extraordinary service when we mouth the awe-full names.

But much, much of the God-talk of our community is not worship -- and that which is not has commanded so much of our attention and energies that it pervades and compromises even that which is.

It is not wrong to be concerned -- as we are -- for doctrinal truth. Such concern does, however, exact a different use of the names of God. The names become definitional and require interpretation. They are referents, after all -- and not for the deity wholly, but for the deity’s characteristics, which must be parsed with refined accuracy. To speak the names is not to invite God’s is-ness among us, but rather to define what God is.

Note that the same names perform these different functions in different contexts. God Almighty! In the signifyin’ context -- whether worshipful or religionless, in the context of art -- that is simply a cry, explosive, and needful. But in the doctrinal context -- the context of a self-defining community -- it is a proposition or a thesis. It isn’t complete until it is understood. Likewise, the titles "Lord," "Son. of God," "Father," "Savior" and, through millennia of use, "Jesus": in the former context, these raise nothing but relationship. But in the latter context these same names raise quizzical eyebrows and calls for explanation and exhaustive discussions. "What," demanded the Christian community of the Monophysite, "do you really mean when you say ‘Jesus’?" Even the angels, when they were not worshiping but rather declaring to the community the acts of God, used the names as qualifiers, defining the deity thereby. "Jesus," said the angel, "for he will save his people from their sins."

My point is twofold, since there are two kinds of qualifying which the church accomplishes by the names of God.

1. Qualifying God: Commonly the religious community requires of my language that it define God; it listens to my use of the divine names in order to understand our God the better. This clearly is not signifyin’, nor is it worship. My audience is learning, and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to teach. But teaching seems rather to overwhelm art in our Protestant circles, and it seems to be given a place superior to pure signifyin’; also, educational naming objectifies both the deity and the divine relationship to us. I feel faintly lonelier when I interpret God by the names than when I invoke God by the names -- slightly more plastic in the pronunciation -- and thus my experience creeps close to Bonhoeffer’s.

2. Qualifying the speaker: Once the deity behind the names has been objectified, and once the Christian community has systematized the truths referred to by those names, the question put to the Monophysite takes on a whole new import. "What do you mean when you say ‘Jesus’?" becomes: "Do you mean what we mean?," which in turn becomes, "Are you right or wrong?"-- which is as much as to say, "Are you with us or not?"

There was a time when nations defined themselves by the gods they worshiped. Now I find, as I travel from one religious subgroup to another, that each defines not only its God but also its own identity by the name with which it refers to God. One group says, "Jeeeeeee-sus. Another restricts itself to a clipped and chilly "Christ." Another uses the trinitarian formula "Father-Son-and Holy-Spirit" as though it were a single word, while still another rejects the formula altogether, and so on. The speaker who uses God’s name before any one of these groups will qualify or else disqualify himself or herself by the name. If, before a critical audience, she uses the divine name in a form foreign to that audience, in a form rejected by it, she will be adjudged unqualified, someone to be excluded. This reaction, from one’s own community -- the people one needs -- is a very heavy threat. It cancels worship altogether, and another atmosphere pervades the place.

With this in mind, I continually find myself feeling like a confirmand; with Bonhoeffer, I find myself "reluctant to mention God by name to religious people" for fear that I may get it wrong. I expend energy to discover what, in the particular religious subgroup which I am to address, is the "right" name of God. I do this in order that I may be heard, that my message will not be dismissed because I used unacceptable terms. But when I do this, when I qualify myself by the subgroup’s approved deific title, I am re-enacting Bonhoeffer’ s experience precisely: "That name somehow seems to me not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest."

Among the religionless I use all the names of God that the Scripture has bequeathed to me. I also use names which the holy peoples of the world have lifted unto reverence. I say "Wakan Tanka" with Black Elk in exultant freedom. It is a matter of being.

Among the religious, I grow careful and wary -- precisely because I love them and hunger for their community. Until I am assured a worshipful freedom, I learn circumlocutions. Until I am catechized, I pinch my speech. Until then, it is a matter of being right.

Justice and Liberation in the Eucharist

Suppose you are given the freedom of an ancient European city. In a public ceremony, the mayor presents you with a silver key and an illuminated scroll. You are honored and recognized. But the key opens no doors, and the freedoms listed in the scroll no longer give tangible rewards. You will get as many traffic fines, and pay as much in local taxes, as before. Yet the mayor and corporation solemnly insist that the ceremony must give you real benefits -- because the scroll says so. The symbolism has become detached from reality.

Something similar has happened to the Eucharist, whether we call it a sacrament or an ordinance, use wafers or bread and receive it standing, kneeling or sitting. It is not that the rite gives no real freedom, or that affirmations about it should be denied. Rather, the problem is that the actual practice of the Eucharist has become so ritualized, privatized and abstracted from its historical basis and communal beginnings that we are like the deluded mayor and corporation.

We get the words right, and take, bless, break and share, don’t we? So all must be well. Or is it? "Do this in remembrance of me." What is the "this" we are asked to do?

I believe that the "this" is four-dimensional. A two-dimensional communion service has the right words and actions -- bread and wine are shared and eaten. A four-dimensional Eucharist includes a sharing community moving toward justice. The extra dimensions are not optional, but lie at the heart of the original rite. Examining the original practice may help us recover these two missing dimensions.

The Last Supper was a real meal, not ritualized worship. There was the smell of roast lamb and herbs, the clatter of dishes, the splashing of wine poured into a cup, and table talk -- whispering, laughter and questioning. There were scraps of bread and meat left in the dish -- the debris of a meal.

The eucharistic "breaking of bread" in the context of a real meal where the most basic human needs are met was taken for granted in the early church.

It should be a major concern that our observance of communion has reached the point of "trying to have a meal without having a meal," in what seems to be "an unconscious attempt by the church to protect itself from the radical, communal, transforming power of the rite" (William H. Willimon, The Service of God [Abingdon, 1983, p. 132) Having the Eucharist as part of a real meal -- whether with ten, 50 or 200 people -- helps one discover what has been so grievously lost.

Our various theologies say, in effect, You can’t come because you don’t believe, because you don’t belong, because you belong to the wrong church, because you haven’t joined us, because you’re not old enough. Is it any wonder that many of the invited stay away because they feel unworthy? A Eucharist

in the spirit of Jesus’ scandalous table fellowship will be open to all -- including nonmembers and nonbelievers.

The Last Supper was a Passover meal. The synoptics describe a Passover meal in which a group of Jews gathered and reminded themselves that they were slaves in Egypt, but God delivered them from oppression. This memory is not poetic fancy, but personal identification.

The whole people is present in the slavery of the ancestors, and it remembers the whip lashes, forced labor, hardship and cruelty. The whole people is present in the slaves’ longing for freedom and in their joyous experience of liberation. The whole people remembers that little cluster of tribes, trekking out from the superpower embrace of Pharaoh’s Egypt to be God’s covenanted confederation. It is all very earthy and material -- a matter of politics, flesh and blood. It is also all very Godfilled, Spiritized.

Jesus chose to share bread and wine in the context of that foundational memory. There is more to be said about the Eucharist than a longing for political and economic liberation, but never less.

In the Eucharist, we follow Passover precedents by telling the story of God’s liberating acts. But our story must move from the safe, uncontroversial past to give thanks for what the Spirit of God seeks to do now. The liberating power of the Eucharist would become more visible if we continued the story beyond exodus, cross and resurrection.

What, then, are our stories of the Spirit moving through history? What are the different, conflicting stories that call us to join confession with thanksgiving as we break bread? There are the stories of prairie pioneers -- and Native American suffering and resistance. There is the story of world mission seen from the white West -- and from Third World Christians, whose cultures were on the receiving end. There is the story of God’s Spirit making one interdependent world -- even though it has been constructed and persists as a flawed interdependence of domination and dependence.

Jesus took bread and a cup on the night when he would be betrayed. Much imaginative ink has been spilled about the man by whom Jesus was betrayed. The quest for the historical Judas goes on -- only mildly inconvenienced by the near-complete silence of the sources.

Rather less attention is focused on recalling to whom Jesus was betrayed, though the evidence here is unambiguous. He was betrayed to his people’s religious-political authorities and to a colonial power ruling an occupied country. His impact on those authorities was the reason for his betrayal. His entry into Jerusalem was a public challenge, and his cleansing of the temple was an attack on the ruling families’ economic power -- not a reformist critique of the local stock exchange.

Though not reducible to a political program, the announcement of the impending Kingdom of God challenges and criticizes the structures of society. To celebrate the Eucharist is to remember to whom Jesus was betrayed, why he was betrayed and executed, and why following him will bring us into conflict with today’s corrupted political, economic and, yes, religious powers and authorities.

The Last Supper included an acted sign in the Hebrew prophetic tradition. Just as Jeremiah publicly smashed a clay jar to announce, dramatize and explain the impending destruction of Jerusalem (Jer. 19) , 50 Jesus took bread and a wine cup. His action was neither magic nor mere symbolism, but declared what would happen, dramatized its reality, and interpreted its significance. A prophetic sign announces what God is about.

First he took bread: "This is my flesh" (Aramaic), he said, meaning his whole person, and then he announced that he would be handed over ("to the authorities" is unstated but implied). Next he took the wine cup. In Hebrew thought a person’s life is in their blood. So Jesus said that his lifeblood would be shed. His disciples are to remember this handing-over and execution with the full sense of remembering that is brought to the Passover liberation. Thus, by his words and actions, Jesus declared that God was at work in this betrayal and execution, which will therefore -- somehow -- be liberating.

Foundational to the Eucharist is faith that this same Jesus is resurrected and presides at the meal. "This is my body" becomes present tense.

Though this understanding reaches to the heart of each individual, it cannot be a private transaction devoid of political significance. For the one who lifted up the outcasts and was executed by the world’s powers is declared to be alive. God overturns those powers’ verdict, judges their injustice and demonstrates the power of love against the worst that they can do.

Demonic powers and flawed authorities still rule (it is fanciful to say that they have been defeated) , but they have lost their legitimacy and charisma. Today in many places

The suffering churches sing his grace

and pray that we may hear and live

the gospel that they long to give.

Beset by hunger, fear and death

their hopes miraculously thrive:

they know that Jesus is alive.

And all the powers that wreck and rule

must lose their glamour, strength and skill

to dazzle minds, or crush the will.

The waking hopes of God’s oppressed

will not be beaten, bowed and awed:

they tell the world that Christ is Lord

["In Great Calcutta Christ Is Known," hymn text by Brian Wren, © 1986, Hope. Reprinted by permission].

To confront death is to witness to and collaborate with the love that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. A four-dimensional Eucharist is celebrated when the eucharistic community critiques abuses of political power, resists the powers of death in our world, and stands by the oppressed in their struggles for liberation. It draws hope and encouragement from its founding events, and knows that "the resurrection is the ultimate basis for rebellion" (Rafael Avila, Worship and Politics [Orbis, 1981], p. 47)

The Eucharist is a sharing community s meal. From the beginning, celebrating the Eucharist involved sharing goods and possessions. It used to be fashionable to decry the early church’s "primitive communism" as naïve and unsustainable. Yet the unity of breaking the bread and sharing the goods is a continuing strand of thought and practice throughout the church’s first four centuries.

St. John Chrysostom tells us to feed the hungry, and then decorate the table. The temple of our afflicted neighbor’s body, he admonished, "is more holy than the altar of stone on which you celebrate the holy sacrifice. You are able to contemplate this altar everywhere, in the street and in the open squares." Defending the Christians before the Emperor Hadrian, the non-Christian Aristides said: "If one of them is poor and there isn’t enough food to go round, they fast several days to give him the food he .... .. This is really a new kind of person. There is something divine in them" (Tissa Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human liberation (SCM, 19791, pp. 26-27)

"Communion" is not merely in the words with bread and wine duly shared, but in these together with an open sharing of goods and income. Difficult though it undoubtedly is to recover this communal sharing in an individualized enterprise culture, such a perspective is at the heart of the Lord’s Supper.

Again, how we celebrate the Eucharist makes a difference. I suspect that the further we get from the real meal shared by a relatively small group, the more difficult it becomes to regain the openness and commitment that make eucharistic sharing of time, goods and money both gracious and glad. And I suspect that it is also the small group that can most deeply sense the global implications of its eucharistic sharing.

Bread and wine are the products of human labor, which Christ takes, blesses and shares out equally. Whether leavened or unleavened, bread signifies the "daily bread" of the Lord’s Prayer. It is significant that Christ used food produced by human labor, not berries plucked from trees. Someone has sown, reaped, milled, kneaded, baked and marketed the bread that the Lord blesses. We bring to the risen Lord a symbol of all the basic food produced in our society. Our systems of production do not distribute food equally, but Christ takes food from us and ensures that all are fed.

Thus, the Eucharist is God’s witness against grain mountains hoarded while people starve, against food aid as a weapon, against frontiers drawn to keep the world’s poor from the grainlands, against every act that takes land and food from the poor. It is a witness to the hope and vision of a good society where all eat their fill.

Similarly, someone has pruned, plucked, pressed, racked, refined, bottled, labeled, advertised, transported, promoted and sold the fruit of the vine. Wine is a symbol of joy and celebration -- intended for all. Yet we live in a world in which some are deprived of enjoyment by the process that delivers it to others.

What wages did the vinedresser or itinerant grapepicker receive? Did the laborer who toiled in the fields for our daily bread get a fair return for the labor? To ask these questions is not to politicize the Eucharist but to face its intrinsic meanings. The eucharistic celebration is not the occasion to study and debate the causes of poverty and the mechanisms of unequal distribution. But a church that sees the implications of the Eucharist will not just talk of the "fruit of the earth and of human labour"; it will meditate -- at the Eucharist -- on how food is produced and sold. Before bringing bread and wine to the table, it will confess the scandal of starvation amid plenty. And it will take time elsewhere to reflect, understand and act for economic justice as part of its eucharistic memorial.

Though bread and wine are shared equally, this is not the equality of strict parity. Our passion for equal-sized wafers or bits of bread, or an equal thimbleful or lip-sip of wine is unwarranted. None should go hungry or have too much to drink (I Cor. 11:21) The food and drink are for eating and drinking -- to nibble slowly or bite off in chunks, according to need. A freed community will gladly pass round any remainder, for the Eucharist is not for minimal justice -- here-a-little, there-a-little -- but for the enjoyment of God’s generosity.

We are now the body that is to be broken. The risen Christ now calls us his body. For whom are we to be betrayed and "broken" if not for the powerless, excluded ones whom Christ loves? The proper posture for the Body of Christ is not static wholeness but bruised brokenness. Brokenness is the opposite of division. Where there is division, there is competition -- a scrambling for the different bits of what was once a whole, that has been broken. In contrast, brokenness implies one body that has been broken, offered in unity of purpose. When one part is bruised, the whole body aches.

In the Eucharist, all receive equally. Christ draws all to himself, and loves each one equally, yet uniquely. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, master nor servant, director nor employee. At every Eucharist, our president is the servant without servitude, washing our feet and speaking ironically of the powerful who lord it over others and then claim the title of benefactor. "It shall not be so among you," he says, in giving us his body and blood.

The Eucharist is an unambiguous reminder that the church is called to build itself on relationships of love and mutuality, not power and domination -- not for its own self-satisfaction, but as a political witness, as a harbinger of the Kingdom of God.

We celebrate the Eucharist "till he comes". The Eucharist looks forward to a society in God, a city for all the nations, in which the last are first, the humble lifted high, and the powerful repentant, as grace and peace forgive and unite all humanity.

If this is our hope, the supper should be celebrated not as an anaesthetic against the world’s injustices but as a shout of joyful defiance and rebellion -- a provocation and inspiration to make that rebellion real in love and a song of reinvigorating hope that the future can break through into the present.

Back to Baccalaureate

Last spring, after a lapse of some 15 years, a baccalaureate service was held at Cornell University, and almost all 2,000 seats in Bailey Hall were filled. Across the continent in southern California, participation in a similar service at the Claremont Colleges has more than doubled in the past three years. In response to a survey conducted last summer, chaplains at institutions large and small -- mostly private, but not necessarily church-related -- reported renewed interest in this traditional religious observance associated with graduation from college.

Robert Dewey, dean of Stetson Chapel at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, pointed out that about ten years ago many seniors registered their preference not to have the service. Faculty and administration resisted the abandonment of the tradition, and the service limped along for several years in a quasi-religious vein. But a half-dozen years ago the occasion was reasserted as “unapologetically a service of worship,” and attendance has been strong. “It is not required,” the dean says, “but it is always packed.”

From all around the country -- from Brown and Yale in the east to Occidental and Puget Sound on the opposite coast -- come reports of full houses at baccalaureate. At Emory, in Atlanta, invitations were limited to undergraduate seniors and their families for the first time last spring, and the 1,200-seat campus church was filled to capacity. And in places where the traditional event has not re-emerged, kindred observances are being spawned. Reservations for a commencement-week prayer breakfast at Howard University were cut off, at 500. A “Senior Sunday” at Alma College in Michigan has filled the regular chapel service to capacity for the past two years.

The informal survey of college and university chaplains does not suggest that this phenomenon is merely one more manifestation of the national turn toward more traditional values, although that factor is certainly involved. It is doubtful whether any society can remain healthy for long following the loss of all its rituals, however irrelevant they may appear at particular moments in history. Important points of transition, both collective and individual, somehow need to be acknowledged and accentuated by special acts and symbols; graduation from college continues to be such an event, and the widespread impersonal character of diploma presentations does not satisfy the need for marking the time in a special way. Perhaps, as Kalamazoo’s Dewey asserts, “the baccalaureate service can speak of the mystery, wonder and beauty of it all in a way no other event does.”

The revulsion against established rituals was a part of the era of student disillusionment with the role of institutions. Baccalaureate programs in many places withered and died in that environment, but some were taken over and transformed by students into events more to their liking. So what we have in today’s resurgence is what has evolved from experiments in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, along with the more traditional forms that survived more or less intact. Of particular interest is the way in which the religiously pluralistic character of student bodies, including those of many denominationally affiliated schools, is being addressed.

At the far extreme of innovation is the baccalaureate service which is such in name only. At Grinnell College, for example, the annual event has remained, but it has lost all the overt trappings of a religious ceremony. Gone are the hymns, prayers, litanies and anthems. The president of the Student Government Association serves as “master of ceremonies,” the president of the college makes comments, and there are two faculty and two student speakers, who are as likely to offer reflections on the year just ending as to address them-selves to questions of value and meaning. Awards are given by the Alumni Association. The affair is well attended, but it suggests what used to be called “Class Day” more than the mainstream of the baccalaureate tradition.

If we are to speak of extremes -- without pejorative intent -- at the other end of the spectrum would be those services planned by administrators (whether presidents, deans or chaplains) which have survived as full-blown Christian liturgies expressing the theological tradition behind the institution’s establishment. Such is the case, for example, at Duke and Southern Methodist, where the baccalaureate services are major events at which the institutions’ ties with the Christian tradition are celebrated in an unselfconscious fashion. One is left to wonder if Jewish faculty and students simply take the character of this service for granted and stay away, having assumed that their decision to affiliate with a church-related institution took their potential exclusion from certain university activities into account.

That some institutions choose to conclude the year with formal Christian worship is not necessarily to be understood as the persistence of traditional forms. Occidental College in Los Angeles experimented with an interfaith service but recently made a conscious decision to return to a thoroughly Christian liturgy, including such elements as confession of sin and declaration of pardon. The college chaplain provides the sermon. Last year, following an annual pattern of growth, there was standing room only in Herrick Memorial Chapel.

More typically, the renewal of baccalaureate services has been accompanied by various attempts to accommodate the pluralism which is common to most campuses. How much accommodation there is varies from the excision of overt references to Christ in hymns and prayers, to the inclusion of representatives of other faiths in the planning process. That the new baccalaureate program at Cornell University would be thoroughly interfaith in character is not surprising, since the Cornell United Religious Work has functioned on an interreligious basis for many years. Indeed, an interfaith service is conducted each Sunday morning of the academic year in Sage Chapel.

At Stanford, the choice of baccalaureate speakers rotates among prominent representatives of Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish traditions, with the choice being made by an inclusive committee of students and campus clergy. At Yale, where by longstanding custom the president of the university provides the address, Jewish and Roman Catholic chaplains have recently been asked to participate by reading Scripture lessons. At Emory, another school whose president speaks at baccalaureate, care is taken to plan the service in a broadly inclusive manner even though the school’s church-relatedness is currently being reaffirmed in various ways. Being in close touch with its Christian roots is not viewed as incompatible with hospitality toward the many Jewish students who attend the Atlanta school.

On the basis of current information from 25 institutions, it appears that a simple liturgical framework (hymn, prayer, lessons, responsively read psalm, anthem, sermon, hymn, benediction), using traditional materials adapted as needed to suit the participation of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, is the most prevalent form. A notable departure has occurred at the Claremont Colleges where, for several years, the three main religious traditions have been expressed in simultaneous “opening exercises” in separate locations, which are then followed by a common interfaith experience, with Jewish, Catholic and Protestant speakers in alternate years. While participation has increased dramatically, there are complaints from some that the format accentuates differences rather than commonality of experience, and the pattern is being carefully reviewed.

There remains another approach worthy of comment. The surge of student assertiveness during the protest years resulted in student-planned baccalaureate services, which tended to be innovative and less formal than the usual pattern. In some places this approach has not only survived but prospered. Until 1973, for example, the baccalaureate service at Illinois Wesleyan was conducted at the near-campus United Methodist church as a special emphasis in an otherwise regular Sunday liturgy. That year members of the senior class obtained permission to plan their own service, and that has been the practice ever since. The service, held outdoors, features contemporary poetry, dance and popular music as well as more traditional hymns and lessons. The change from a traditional to a contemporary idiom occurred at the University of Redlands in the same year with the same result, right down to the inclusion of dance and the student artwork on the program cover.

At Denison University, an attempt is made to plan a service that is “as nonsectarian as possible,” leaning heavily on contemporary forms and student initiative in planning and presentation. The principal difficulty with such a service is that innovation can so dissipate form and substance, particularly when planned by persons with little liturgical experience, that the overall experience loses focus or veers too sharply toward subjectivity. Nevertheless, at a time when traditional ways are “in” again, it is important to note that the spirit of novelty and innovation continues to be quite strong on Baccalaureate Day.

For any who are contemplating the reinstitution of the baccalaureate service, now would seem to be a good time. It is an effective way for institutions committed to educational objectives emphasizing human values to focus on that fact. Such rituals also serve to strengthen the sense of community among faculty and students. Some schools use the occasion to remember those who have died during the year. Most important, graduation from college continues to be a significant achievement for students and their parents. Even if the world holds out a most uncertain future -- or perhaps just because it does so -- the occasion ought to be marked by reflection and thanksgiving.

In Quest of Profound Courtesy: A Chaplain Enters the Anatomy Lab

When the Emory University School of Medicine opened for the fall term, I was in the survey course in human anatomy -- for the seventh time. By the end of the term, I still won’t be able to answer any of the questions on the first quiz. My attention is focused on the human spirit, not the human body, for I am attending not as a medical student but as a campus minister.

My presence in the anatomy course is the result of a promise I made to myself when I became university chaplain in 1979. As a veteran of ministry, I knew that routine chores could quickly fill my time. I was determined to shape my ministry by a process of listening, which would enable me to identify felt needs rather than impose an agenda on others. As it turned out, I did not have to wait long for the listening to begin.

Among the first students to visit me was a beginning medical student who had graduated from seminary the previous spring. He had some important things to say and I listened eagerly. He told me that he and his classmates had begun to dissect human bodies on their first day of medical school and that the experience had produced strong emotions which had no outlet.

It was not just the firsthand encounter with the coldness and finality of death that was unsettling, although that alone could be disturbing enough. Students were also concerned with how they felt about how they felt. "If this experience bothers me so much," some wondered, "should I even be in medical school?" After all the students had achieved and endured to get where they were, such a question is troublesome indeed.

Dissecting the human body is not pleasant work, and it teaches students right away that much of what physicians do in a normal day is not altogether pleasant. Heretofore, perhaps, students have thought only of the glamour, the power, the science, the adventure and the rewards of medicine. But now the students must wonder how they will cope with the seamier side of medical practice, the blood and gore and uncertainty and frustration. And later, after the first few days in the lab, the students may be surprised at how quickly they have adapted to working with cadavers. The question that often arises next is, "Will I also insulate myself from the pain of my patients, and come to see them as so much plumbing and chemistry, not as persons?"

This theologically trained medical student and I were not concerned about medical ethics, as important as they are, but about the personal dimensions of medical education and the long-term personal consequences of that experience. We decided to propose that the first-year medical class plan a completely voluntary liturgy of some sort to be presented at the conclusion of the course. We envisioned the liturgy as providing something like a rite of passage for the students, a kind of leave-taking from an extraordinary experience, a corporate act of closure. The service would be designed to bring to consciousness the feelings it had been necessary to suppress in order to get on with the course. And the controlling theme of the event would be the expression of gratitude to the people who had donated their bodies to medicine.

To be effective, such an event needed the support of the faculty members involved. A meeting was arranged with the chairman and key members of the department, at which we described our concerns and what we wanted to do. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I did not expect the medical school faculty to be quite so open to the concerns that I brought to them as a university chaplain. I realize now that professional reticence was my problem. Before we were finished that day, I had an invitation to speak to the next entering class prior to their encounter with the cadavers. Furthermore, it was agreed that my presence in the labs on a regular basis would be useful and would help us to integrate the planning of the service with the educational process. I would also have the opportunity to get to know every medical student. Suddenly, I was given occasions for ministry that I had never imagined possible.

In the six years since that conversation, more than 600 medical students have participated in "A Service of Reflection and Gratitude’’ at the conclusion of the human anatomy course. The hours I spend with the students, in class and out, continue to teach me important things. I want to draw from this highly specialized experience some insights that are relevant to ministry in general and campus ministry in particular.

My experience with first-year medical students has taught me that what makes a good poet and physician also makes a good minister. My weekly visits to the dissection labs were very difficult the first few years, primarily because my role in the situation was not clearly defined. Eventually, however, I understood that this was more problematic for me than for others. I felt I should be doing something, but for the students my being there was what counted. Now I know that creative ministry must pass through a zone of professional uncertainty where one relies on the most primitive pastoral instincts: watching and listening.

My experience in the anatomy lab has made me reconsider the lampooned notion of "the ministry of presence." Many will remember the time, not so long ago, when campus ministers said they did not need an office, just a place to hang their coats. We were not into program development and poster printing; instead, we would spend our time creatively hanging out in the coffee shops and student centers. We would simply be present. The truth is that the primary motive behind the ministry of presence is essential to campus ministry and probably to all other forms of ministry. By itself, it is not enough of a ministry, but without it, nothing else is enough either.

Many times I am tempted to skip the weekly visit to the labs. There are reports to write, budgets to balance, sermons to prepare, appointments to keep. But then I remember a student saying to me, "It is important just to look up from the dissecting table and see that you are there. It helps." And after those occasions when I have not shown up, a student will say something like, "Welcome back."

Ministers, especially campus ministers, often try to minimize the significance of their ordination, and rightly so. We do not want to be seen as a separate breed, set apart, unapproachable. But the office of ministry is extremely important, perhaps more so to others than to ourselves. Like it or not, we carry what has been called "the burden of the Lord." Whether that burden is easy and its yoke light depends upon how one chooses to carry it, but carry it one must.

Just at that point in the term when the academic pressures seem unbearable, around 20 per cent of the first-year medical students volunteer to plan the service. They are Christians and Jews of several varieties, an occasional Muslim, and religiously unaffiliated and nonreligious persons. They plan a service that is broadly inclusive and that calls for the active participation of faculty and students. Singers, instrumentalists and poets emerge in the process, and their shared gifts are crucial to the experience. When the day finally arrives, virtually everyone associated with the course attends the service: students, faculty, technical staff, secretaries and administrators. When people elect to become body donors, they give the last gift of which they are capable, and they do so for the benefit of persons they will never see. Our collective response of gratitude is a deeply spiritual experience that transcends all humanly contrived barriers among us.

In those high moments, it seems natural to hope that, as their careers develop, these young physicians will discover the true meaning of charity and therefore come to understand what the word "profession" is supposed to signify. Richard Selzer, that most articulate of surgeons, says that such realization comes, if at all, only after one has dressed wounds without number and touched countless sores, ulcers and cavities for the sake of healing:

In the beginning it is barely audible, a whisper, as from many mouths. Slowly it gathers, rises from the streaming flesh until, at last, it is a pure CALLING -- an exclusive sound, like the cry of certain solitary birds -- telling that out of the resonance between the sick man and the one who tends him there may spring that profound courtesy that the religious call Love [Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (Simon & Schuster, 1976) , pp. 47-48].

One may not hear that pure sound in the beginning anatomy course, but it is not too soon to learn how to listen.

My experience in the course suggests that the world is far more ready to receive our ministry than we are to offer it. Ministry is too often diminished by ministers’ reluctance to go where we fear we will not be well received. I know that a lot of doors are closed to campus ministers only because they do not have the audacity to approach them and knock.

Our reluctance betrays an insufficient confidence in the grace of God, mysteriously present in all situations. The key is to put oneself in an unfamiliar environment and muster the courage to wait, watching and listening intently all the while. Once we have mastered the impulse to explain ourselves, someone will help us understand why our presence matters. Then will come the surprise, the gratitude and, eventually, the profound courtesy.

From Time Immemorial? Dwellers in the Holy Land

It is evident to any visitor to the Middle East that Christianity has a peculiar relation to the lands now inhabited by the state of Israel. Christian tourists and pilgrims, practicing an enduring form of piety, enabled by international jet travel, come from all parts of the world to visit the holy places associated with the life of Jesus.

Few realize, however, that Christianity ‘s role in Palestine is not restricted to the time of Jesus and the early church. Christianity has a long history in the land of Israel, a history of indigenous communities whose fortunes have been linked to the many conquerors -- Muslims, Crusaders, Turks and Jews -- and the many national communities -- Armenian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Syrian, Russian and French -- that have made their way to Palestine.

I thought about this history when I read From Time Immemorial, the controversial 1984 Harper & Row book by Joan Peters on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Though a large part of the book is devoted to the history of Palestine, the reader would never learn from Peters that Palestine was once a Christian country or that there has been a continuous Christian presence there since the time of Jesus. In all the debates about Palestine, this history is largely forgotten or ignored.

From Time Immemorial was first hailed as a book that could change the entire Arab-Jewish polemic over Palestine" (New Republic), and an exuberant chorus of America’s leading intellectuals stepped forward to laud its merits. Later, however, it was denounced as misleading, unreliable and tendentious. Last winter, Jehoshua Porath, an Israeli historian, wrote in the New York Review of Books (January 16, 1986): "I am reluctant to bore the reader and myself with further examples of Mrs. Peter’s highly tendentious use -- or neglect -- of the available source material. Much more important is her misunderstanding of basic historical processes and her failure to appreciate the central importance of natural population increase as compared to migratory movements. Readers of her book should be warned not to accept its factual claims without checking their sources."

Nevertheless, the book has been a great success commercially and, judging by the credentials of her reviewers and the fervor of her advocates, many intelligent and thoughtful people have been persuaded by her views. Commentary recently published a lengthy defense of the work, assailing Peters’s critics as leftists and anti-Zionists. Whatever the value of the book’s data and the strength of its arguments, its conclusions have simply been too seductive for many readers to resist.

Peters sets out to destroy the Arab position from "time immemorial" Palestine had been continuously occupied by Arabs and therefore belongs to them by right. What is considered controversial in the book is her "new" demographic evidence that many of the Arabs who lived in Palestine when the state of Israel was established were recent immigrants, not descendants of longtime inhabitants. These Arabs, claims Peters, had come to the area to benefit from the economic opportunities resulting from the influx of Jews. Hence, many of the Arabs who were driven out or fled during and after the several wars, and who are now housed in camps on the West Bank or in Lebanon or who live in Gaza or Jordan, have no more right to the land than do the Jews who came there from Europe, America or the Arab countries.

There is a kernel of truth to this view. Arabs have immigrated to the area during the past 100 years. But the greatest growth in the Arab population has come from natural increase, as experts in demography have observed. What is even more disturbing is Peters’s deep and thoroughgoing misrepresentation of Middle Eastern history, particularly regarding the dhimmi status of Jews in Arab lands. The term refers to "protected people," the people of the book, and applies to Christians as well as to Jews. It also was applied to the Zoroastrians and Hindus. But Peters describes the dhimmi as though it was a social structure that singled out Jews for special mistreatment@@@@@

(even though her sources often say Jew and Christian) And by sprinkling the discussion with Western terms such as "ghetto," she seeks to present Jewish experience in Arab lands in the bleakest terms. This goes against our best historical understanding. Jews experienced greater security under the Muslims than in the West, and they were much more successful at integrating with the majority in Islamic lands than in Christian countries.

Besides being misleading on the demographic question and embarrassingly ignorant in her account of Jewish experience under Islam, Peters also resurrects a tired argument for land ownership based on who was there first and longest. The Jews can lay claim to the land, according to Peters, because they have lived in it continuously "from time immemorial." Since the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., 2,000 years before the Arab invasion of Palestine, there has been a Jewish presence in the land. The first Palestinian refugees, in this reading, were the Jews who were driven from the land after the war with the Romans in 70 C .E. Nevertheless some Jews remained, presumably in parts of Galilee and in Hebron, and their ranks were swelled from time to time by new arrivals from the diaspora. Some communities remained in the same places for thousands of years (p. 147) , she writes, and Jews and "Zionism" never left the holy land. Therefore they cannot be held responsible for displacing Arabs (p. 347)

Anyone, and this includes many Israelis and American Jews, who has looked closely at the history of Palestine realizes the sleight of hand in this presentation. Claims of ownership based on continuous presence in a land are fragile enough (consider the case of western Turkey, which has been inhabited by Greeks until very recently, or the fate of Native Americans) but when one is talking about Palestine they are unusually tenuous. Of course there have been Jews in the land over much of its history. But there have also been many others -- Canaanites, Philistines, Samaritans, Nabataeans, Greeks, Romans, Muslims and, for almost 2,000 years now, Christians. One might, somewhat mischievously, argue that the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem has more rights than anyone because his is the oldest continuous office in the land.

As I pondered Peters’s arguments, I kept wondering whether she had ever read the account of Israel’s conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua. One remarkable feature of biblical history is that the land given by God to Abraham’s descendants had to be won by conquest. Unlike the Egyptians and other ancient peoples, the Jews had not lived on their land "from time immemorial." According to the Bible, Abraham went up to a land that belonged to other people, the Canaanites. The Scriptures never disguise this fact. Indeed, it is not until I Samuel that the phrase "land of Israel" occurs; the original biblical name is the "land of Canaan." Even in later texts the memory of this fact persists. "It was he [the Lord] who smote many nations . . . all the kingdoms of Canaan, and gave their land as a heritage, a heritage to this people Israel" (Ps. 135:12) A somewhat analogous reference in our day would be Menachem Begin’s calling Eretz Israel "Filastin."

The Canaanites, however, are part of ancient history. A more significant distortion in Peters’s account is that she makes no place for Christians in her holy land. There is no place that one can go in Israel without finding remains of two Christian epochs in the history of the land -- the age of the Crusaders and the Byzantine era (the three centuries before the Arab conquest in 640 C.E.)

The memory of the Crusaders may be distasteful to modern Christians (though in the midst of the uncertain motives and greed there was a spark of genuine devotion), but their historical significance is beyond dispute. The Byzantine era is even more significant. For in this case Christians did not take the land by might of arms but by persuasion, and ruled not as foreign conquerors but as inhabitants and natives, harvesting the fruit of earlier centuries during which the bulk of the local population gradually adopted the new religion as its own. Under Byzantine rule, Palestine not only attained spiritual pre-eminence in the Christian world, but also reached a level of material prosperity and population density that was not surpassed until modem times. Historians have estimated that there were four or five times more people living there during the Christian era than in Canaanite or Israelite times. "The Byzantine period," writes Michael Avi-Yonah, an Israeli historian, "represents a very high point of material development attained by this country."

From the middle of the fourth century to the Arab conquest in the middle of the seventh century, the Roman province of Palestine was transformed into a Christian country with Jerusalem its glittering metropolis, a "new Jerusalem built over against the one celebrated of old," as the Christian historian Eusebius described it. Palestine became not only a place for Christians to visit as tourists or pilgrims, but a place to live. Indeed, it was the Christian inhabitants of Palestine who made the term "holy land" acceptable to Christians and gave it general currency.

In the years after the war with the Romans in 70 C .E., the term "holy land" was a kind of code word among Jews to express the messianic hope that the exiles would return to Israel and reestablish a Jewish kingdom. For this reason, Christians at first rejected the term. Tertullian and Origen. for example, argued that the "holy land" could not be the "earthly land of Judaea"; it could only refer to a "pure and good and large land that lies in a pure heaven," a land "flowing with milk and honey." On occasion the phrase was used to refer simply to the land of the Bible -- that is, to the land the Israelites returned to from Egypt -- but in all of Christian literature before the sixth century it occurs less than a dozen times, and usually as a phrase to reject. Only rarely did it refer to the present province of Palestine, and it had had no religious significance for Christians.

During this period the term "holy land" first came to be used self-consciously by Christians to refer to the new Christian country that was being built. For them, the city of Jerusalem -- the actual city, not the heavenly Jerusalem -- was the "mother of the churches," and they spoke of themselves as "inhabitants of this holy land." Indeed, they thought that dwelling in the holy land gave them unique privileges, for it was only there that one could "touch with one’s own hands each day the truth through these holy places. . . ."

Although Muslim occupation destroyed political and territorial ideas among Christians (except for the Crusaders, who revived the notion of the holy land as a territory under a Christian king) , it did not put an end to Christian life in the land. Christians survived the victory of Islam -- another forgotten chapter in the history of Palestine. They did not flee because they were not "foreigners," nor did all convert to the faith of their new masters. They learned to pray in Arabic, they translated the Scriptures into Arabic and eventually produced a whole body of historical, devotional, polemical, theological and hagiographical literature in the language of their conquerors.

I realize all this seems far removed from Joan Peters’s book and the present political situation in Israel. And my purpose in recalling the Christian history of the land of Israel is certainly not to reassert Christian territorial claims. It is important, however, that Westerners recognize the presence of Arab Christians, who are a living link between ourselves and the earliest Christian churches. They are descendants of people who have lived in the land for over 1,500 years, and their perseverance over the centuries deserves our respect and support.

If it should happen that the only Christians to survive in the land were either Westerners or the caretakers of the holy places, something precious would be lost. The relation of Christianity to the land would alter in a fundamental way. The holy places would be turned into museum pieces or archaeological curiosities, as they have been elsewhere in the ancient world, such as Turkey or Tunisia. Without the presence of living Christian communities, the testimony of the holy land can only be equivocal. Those who have gone before, the martyrs and teachers, the bishops and monks, and the faithful who lived in Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem, would no longer be living signs of faith, but simply a distant memory. Only people, not stones and dirt and marble, can bear an authentic and faithful witness.