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Apocalypse and Beyond: The Novels of J. M. Coetzee

All who write for publication in South Africa, both black and white, run the risk of being censored, banned, exiled or worse. Blacks, of course, have been much more harshly treated than whites. Steve Biko, political activist and budding poet, paid the ultimate price: when banning and imprisonment proved insufficient to silence him, he was beaten to death while in police "detention." Novelist Alex LaGuma and poet Dennis Brutus were each imprisoned on Robben Island because of their work. Brutus now lives and. writes in permanent exile in the United States. Even Mark Mathabane, the mild-mannered tennis player turned writer who is author of the best-selling autobiography Kaffir Boy, offended the government with the simple, powerful story of his boyhood, and he, too, now lives in the U.S.

Even the white-skinned giants of South African literature, such as Nadine Gordimer and the late Alan Paton, have had works banned from time to time. Playwright Athol Fugard manages to write and produce his plays in South Africa as well as in London and New York, but he claims that he must use caution. "There are several ideas I have for plays which I just know would not. be allowed to reach the stage, or, if they did, would be shut down very soon after opening" (Three Port Elizabeth Plays 1 19741, p. xxv) Fugard need not add that he personally could be at grave risk if he pursued those ideas. Donald Woods, a prominent newspaper columnist and an early friend and supporter of Steve Biko, has been expelled from the country, and novelist Breyten Breytenbach is among a number of white writers who have gone to prison. Breytenbach, imprisoned for seven years, two of these in solitary confinement, now lives in Paris.

Given this record, it is remarkable that a new and leading literary talent has emerged in South Africa who powerfully condemns the apartheid government but who has not, so far at least, been jailed, banned or beaten. To the contrary, he has received some of South Africa’s and the world’s most prestigious awards for his writing (including South Africa’s CNA Prize and the Booker Prize in Great Britain) This writer is J. M. Coetzee. In 1976 Gordimer called Coetzee "one of the most interesting newcomers. Today he is no longer a newcomer but an established writer with five novels to his credit.

If one asks how Coetzee has avoided problems with the government, no complete answer emerges. Several factors may have helped. Not least is that South Africa is trying to present a less dictatorial face to the outside world. It has probably also helped that Coetzee, 47, is professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town, for university affiliation provides a modest source of protection. And it may be in Coetzee’s favor, as far as the South African regime is concerned, that he is of unimpeachable Afrikaner stock.

Perhaps what has most kept him from harm, however, is what has also given his work such powerful. universal appeal: Coetzee’s work, though it can give no comfort to the apartheid government, is not explicitly confrontational. He has fashioned a method of storytelling that is closer to classical myth than to modern realism. Some critics have compared him to Franz Kafka, and the comparison is apt. Like Kafka, Coetzee often sets his work in unspecified or unnamed locations, or else in the distant past or not-too-distant future. Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin, 1980) , for example, is about a mythical regime, called "the Empire." and its main character is known only as "the Magistrate." The Magistrate is a petty official of the Empire who has run the government outpost for years and who finally concludes that the Empire well deserves to fall to the Barbarians. Foe, Coetzee’s most recent work, a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe tale (hence the title’s allusion to Daniel DeFoe), is set on a desert island. And Life and Times of Michael K (Viking, 1984), Coetzee’s most fully realized work and one of his few stories set in South Africa. involves not the present but the future, at a time during and following a great race war. Despite this oblique approach, however, it is clear that the central question which fascinates Coetzee is how to end, and finally to transcend, the master-slave relationship which defines the races in South Africa.

Coetzee’s main resource in fashioning his myths, aside from his South African upbringing, is the great wellspring of biblical motifs. Though he does not explicitly allude to Scripture, again and again the central themes of Scripture inform and shape his works. Coetzee simply assumes, for example, an apocalypse. All his tales start from the premise that the old order -- of government, law, religion -- is falling apart or has completely disappeared. We are on a desert island, in a town at the edge of a crumbling empire, at an obscure farm in the remote heart of the country, or in the middle of a war. Coetzee apparently believes that this is what the future holds, at least for South Africa, and perhaps for the rest of the world.

Those characters who resist this apocalypse, this ending of the old order, do so cynically, half-heartedly, hopelessly. The Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians realizes that the only way the Empire can survive is to start over -- which means first of all eliminating the Barbarians. Otherwise there is no hope. Yet he cannot bring himself to approve this course. "That will not be my way. The new Men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why I thought it was worth the trouble." But the story is soon finished, and the Magistrate concludes that the Empire was never worth the trouble.

It is a mistake to see Coetzee’s works as messages of despair, however. Indeed, his vision further mirrors the biblical motif in regarding apocalypse not as mere punishment but as transformation, a sign of hope that points toward reconciliation. But Coetzee’s hope is not a revolutionary one -- that is, it does not rest on the destruction and reorganization of the state under a new, more just order. He distrusts such political or military resolutions. The hope he offers is based on what he sees as a natural, inherent possibility for the healing of individuals and relationships. And the locus of that healing is in the land -- just as, in the Bible, the wilderness is the site of healing, renewal, recommitment and restoration.

For Coetzee, it is almost as though the land has a power and sense of its own, even a power to do justice. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate, who has begun to sympathize with the Barbarians, tells us that they will win because they will outlast the Empire. And even the land and the water of the nearby lake, which gets saltier each year because of the Empire’s pollution, will assist this victory. "Every year the lake-water grows a little more salty. There is a simple explanation -- never mind what it is. The Barbarians know this fact. At this very moment they are saying to themselves, ‘Be patient, one of these days their crops will start to wither from the salt, they will not be able to feed themselves, they will have to go.’ That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast us."

But the land not only punishes; it can also heal and restore. Life and Times of Michael K is the story of a young black man who has been labeled retarded by the white authorities. As a race war engulfs Cape Town, where Michael lives with his aging and critically ill mother, he makes plans, as best he can, to return her to her ancestral home so that she can die among her people. But she does not survive the trip, and against Michael’s wishes her body is cremated by the authorities. Determined to keep his promise to her even in her death, Michael returns his mother’s ashes to the ancestral home and in the process begins a healing relationship with the land itself.

Unable to dig a deep hole for burial because of an underlying ledge, Michael turns over the topsoil and scatters his mother’s remains. Then, because he does not want to return to Cape Town, and because he wishes to live apart from the world of history and war, he plants a few pumpkin and melon seeds, found in an abandoned farmhouse, and so begins his life as a cultivator.

The earth gives back to Michael generously. He is pleased by the great silence of the land and by its bounty. When struck with dysentery, he nurses himself through the fever and relies for healing on his crop of melons and pumpkins. "When food comes out of this earth . . . I will recover my appetite, for it will have savor." And it is finally the land and his cultivation of it that give him a new and healing vision of who he is, and place him, at least temporarily, beyond the apocalypse -- the war going on all around him.

One night a group of black guerrillas camp near Michael’s garden and help themselves to his pumpkins and melons. Michael hides out of sight, listening to the proud laughter and tales of battle. He is at first entranced, and even thinks that in the morning he will come out of hiding and ask to join the warriors. But a moment’s reflection reminds him of his new and sacred vocation, one which he cannot abandon "because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening: because once the cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children." The land has exercised its power: Michael is not a soldier, or a retarded boy, an orphan or a refugee, but a gardener.

Though peace comes outside history, the vision of peace which Coetzee’s protagonists reach is not without consequences within history. Coetzee’s heroes are signs and symbols for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. They represent the possibility of another way of living in relationship to history and to people, a way beyond the master-slave relationship. Michael K’s simplicity and courage become such a sign to one of the white authorities he encounters. At the end of his story, when he has again grown ill and has been found by the military, he is turned over to the care of a certain medical officer. In treating Michael the man comes to see his remarkable and peaceful strength, and he seeks Michael’s guidance.

I am not asking you to take care of me, for example by feeding me. My need is a very simple one. Though this is a large country, so large that you would think there would be space for everyone, what I have learned of life tells me that it is hard to keep out of the camps. Yet I am convinced that there are areas that lie between the camps and belong to no camps . . . certain mountaintops, for example, certain islands in the middle of swamps, certain arid strips where human beings may not find it worth their while to live. I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to guide me. Therefore I have chosen you to show me the way.

Coetzee’s several improbable heroes serve to show the way, to point to the reconciliation, hope and freedom that lies on the other side of apocalypse. In that new place freedom is not brought about by guns nor is it assured by institutions of government. It is an inherent freedom, the natural right of human beings, a right that emerges almost spontaneously when people live in right relationship with one another. It is this minimal but profound and irreducible freedom to which Michael K aspires and which he finally achieves, the freedom to be who one pleases and to stand on one’s own. "Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. Perhaps that is enough of an achievement, for the time being. How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?" Coetzee holds out the small, fragile, but very potent hope that beyond the apocalypse we will no longer have to divide ourselves into those who are locked up and those who stand guard.

John XXIII: His Council and Achievement Remembered



Twenty years have passed since that October 11, 1962, when Pope John XXIII looked across the transept of the Basilica of St. Peter and saw, to his immense satisfaction, the living sign of the Catholic Church’s break with the unholy tradition of ecclesial exclusivism. The 39 human components of this sign were the separated brethren of Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican churches, who, mirabile dictu, had been invited to the Second Vatican Council as observers. If, in the currently popular colloquial style, we should call them “the Vatican 39,” we would do so in sober realization that they symbolized the breach in a dogmatic wall which for centuries past had kept Roman Catholics alienated from their hundreds of millions of sisters and brothers in Christ. So far as Catholics are concerned, the era of ecumenical openness began on that day. Pope John was personally and primarily responsible.

Celebrations of the centennial of the “good” pope’s birth have been held recently in many places. Now they all culminate in the “ventennial” of his historically unprecedented ecumenical achievement. A generation of young men and women has now come to maturity without having known either that time of Catholic exclusivism or the personality of the pope who strove to end it.

Contrary to what millions of people learned in the 1960s, Pope John did not invent ecumenism. The real pioneer and patriarch of the ecumenical movement was another man named John: the American layman John R. Mott, of whom Pope John probably knew little. When Mott convened the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, Father Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, as Pope John was known then, was only 28 years old. However, though the pope did not invent ecumenism, had his fellow cardinals in 1958 not sent up the white smoke to announce his election, some of us might still be having meetings with our Catholic friends in an atmosphere of uneasy secrecy: like some of those sub rosa sessions in Geneva, Lyon, Mainz and Evanston with such Catholic proto-ecumenists as Fathers Weigel, Lortz, Congar, Dumont, Villain, Willebrands and Tavard. By convening his council, Pope John vindicated their foresight and courage; he brought them to the light of recognition and approval. Pope John’s words and actions were, in effect, saying nihil obstat to ecumenism. That nothing stands in the way of ecumenism was also the formal declaration of the Vatican Council. All that hinders unity now is the indifference, sloth, misunderstanding and prejudice of some Christian people. The pope’s example demonstrates to all the world how deplorable and inexcusable these remaining impediments are.



As we look back on the 100 years since this man joined the human race, we can only be amazed. How does it happen that one person can rise to such prominence as to redirect the course of history? Pope John’s biographies tell much about the first 77 years of his life which made possible the remaining four years of his pivotal papacy. But no biography can really explain him. In the last analysis we must simply repeat the familiar words of St. John’s Gospel: “There was a man sent from God whose name was Giovanni.”

There was neither sentimentality nor purple pomposity in the commemorative words of Cardinal Leo Suenens when he eulogized the late pope before the second session of the Vatican Council on October 27, 1963:

John XXIII was a man singularly natural and supernatural at the same time. Nature and grace formed a single whole in a living unity full of charm and unforeseen variety. . . . He breathed his faith, as he breathed physical and moral health, with open lungs. . . He lived in the presence of God with the simplicity of one who strolls along the streets in his native city.

That city was Bergamo, and one of its small borgi, or suburbs, Sotto il Monte (Below the Mountain), north of Milan. He was born there, one of 13 brothers and sisters, to impoverished sharecroppers. Italian peasants were not like the happy, colorful contadini singing and dancing on the stage of La Scala. They were, instead, like the longsuffering, barely paid laborers of Olmi’s great film Tree of Wooden Clogs. Like the child in the film, the boy Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli walked barefoot to school, carrying his shoes to save the precious leather.

Roncalli’s life was a contrast to that of Bergamo’s other famous son, Bartolomeo Colleoni, the great mercenary general, or condottiere, of Venice in the 15th century. The two local heroes symbolize contrasting concepts of greatness. One can see Colleoni today astride his horse in Venice, in Verocchio’s greatest of all equestrian statues. He considered himself the genetic descendant of Hercules, and the superior military descendant of Julius Caesar. In Bergamo, which for four centuries was ruled by Venice, Colleoni planned a gorgeous monument to himself, his own mausoleum, smaller yet grander by far than Napoleon’s tomb in Paris.

Angelo Roncalli’s life witnesses to a different kind of greatness. In a local church, young Angelo found the motto Oboedientia et Pax. It was branded into his mind as the guiding concept of his life. He chose it as his episcopal motto, and was a bit disappointed to learn that tradition would not allow its being added to his papal coat of arms.

Hercules, Caesar, Colleoni: there is symbolized brute strength, military power, political power, economic power, the power to enslave and destroy; the power of international arms sales, nuclear stockpiles, oil cartels and transnational corporations; the spiritual power of imposed belief and religious triumphalism demanding obedience and maintaining an uncertain peace by the balance of terror, whether by threats of hell or atomic apocalypse. Roncalli chose obedience to a master whose new commandment was “to love one another.” And he strove for a peace which is “not as the world gives.”

His Master asked, “If you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” (Matt. 5:46). To love the people you like: that is easy. To love fellow Catholics, yes.

To love so-called schismatics, Orthodox and Protestant, or to love Jews and persons of other faiths  -- that is harder for a Catholic bishop, cardinal and pope. To love those of no religion, to love even communists: what a strain on oboedientia to Jesus’s mandate!

Yet Angelo Roncalli loved them all. For ten years as the Vatican’s vicar apostolic in Sofia, he learned to know, admire and love the Orthodox Christians of the Patriarchate of Bulgaria. Even though the presence of the Uniate Catholics was a thorn in the Orthodox flesh, they responded in kind to Roncalli’s manifest openness and affection. During the next decade (1934-44) in Istanbul, his capacity for love was tested not only among the Greek-speaking Orthodox of the Ecumenical Patriarchate but among Turkish Muslims. Archbishop Roncalli came to care for these people most genuinely, and they for him. He had received from God the charisma to love both humanity in general and individual human beings.

When, as pope, he spoke so conversationally with the non-Catholic delegates/observers to the first session of the council, it was the experiences in Sofia, Istanbul and Athens which he recollected as his ecumenical formation. But he made no mention then -- and modestly seldom mentioned -- how, during the war years of Nazi occupation, he had endangered himself by arranging for Jewish refugee children to escape by providing baptismal certificates and passage on ships.



Angelo Roncalli was named papal nuncio to France in 1944. There, at the request of Pope Pius XII, and following an old tradition of the heads of French government, the cardinal’s red biretta was placed on Roncalli’s massive head by Vincent Auriol -- first president of the French republic after World War II and a non-Catholic Christian.

How do love for humanity and yearning for world peace find effective institutional expression? The postwar answer was the formation of the United Nations in San Francisco and of UNESCO in Paris. Cardinal Nuncio Roncalli did not hesitate to press for the Catholic Christian influence upon these instruments of international order and peace. From the start, thanks to him, the Catholic Church has had close and official connection with the UN, UNESCO and related agencies. Sean MacBride, a Nobel laureate for peace, has recently reminded us that Roncalli contributed vigorously to the conceiving and drafting of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His concern for human rights and freedoms reappeared with papal authority in his crowning encyclical, Pacem in Terris in April 1963, which complemented his witness to human justice in Mater et Magistra.

Richard J. Gushing, the late archbishop of Boston, once told about a conversation he had had with Pope John. The pope had asked him if he were a theologian.

“Your Holiness, the only theology I remember is in Catechism No. 2. All my priesthood has been spent in helping others,” Gushing answered.

“Shake hands, you will never have any problems,” the pope replied.

But although Roncalli, unlike the present Pope John Paul II, had little interest in the nuances of philosophy and theology, during his time in France in the ‘40s he learned to appreciate what the new progressive theologians were saying about the meaning of historic Christian faith for men and women in the present epoch of culture and civilization. He also learned to know the forward-looking leaders of the French and Belgian hierarchies: Saliège, Liénart and Suenens, as well as the venerable, heroic Gerlier of Lyon. And in Paris was the Centre Istina, devoted to studying ecumenical relations with Orthodoxy and with the newly organized World Council of Churches. Istina became a training camp for Catholic ecumenists who were led by Dominican Père Dumont.

In Lyon lived the modest little “apostle of unity” through prayer, l’Abbé Paul Couturier. His vocation was to promote the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, in the belief that God alone knows the time and the form of the full unity of the church on Earth. Was it not significant that Pope John later had his inspiration for a Vatican Council during the Week of Prayer 1959, and announced it on the closing day of that period of intercession?

But in 1952 no one could have foreseen such an event. Then Cardinal Roncalli, 71 years old and having accomplished a magnificent service to Christ and the church in constant oboedientia, was given the opportunity to enjoy the pax of a quiet old age. Next to the dazzling beauty of San Marco Cathedral, with tourists and pigeons swarming over the overripe vestiges of the Most Serene Republic, he could relax as a patriarch of Venice. Here Roncalli could smile and wave to the Condottiere Colleoni on his Verocchian horse, and remember Bergamo with a sigh, as old men are expected to do.



A curious book of facts, published in Philadelphia in 1795, advises the reader that Thomas Jefferson, having served his new country well through the Revolution and inauguration, was now retired in Virginia. The writer was excusably unaware that Jefferson’s greatest political work would be done in the coming 30 years! Like Jefferson, Roncalli still had his most important work to do. The story of Patriarch Roncalli’s journey to Rome in 1958 is now a legend of ecclesiastical folklore.

When it became apparent that the conclave was going to elect him pope, he spent the night, weeping, in his cell. “Horrefactus sum!” he exclaimed. “I am horrified!” Nevertheless, when the words “Habemus Papam” announced his election to the thousands compressed into the vast Piazza San Pietro, there he was: fresh, jovial and apparently full of energy.

Here was the Vatican’s greatest surprise of the century. The cardinals thought that they had elected a caretaker, a pope pro tempore, un papa di passagio. It was never reported what the Curia said when it saw what this old, new pope was actually doing to change everything. Perhaps the members cried in chorus, “Horrefacti sumus!”

For his papal name, Angelo Giuseppe looked to the Bible. Other modern popes wanted to be known as Pius, or Benedict, or Leo. But two biblical witnesses to Jesus Christ gave Roncalli his new name: John the Baptist, the pro-dromos, forerunner of the Messiah; and John the beloved disciple of Jesus. This choice, he said, was quite deliberate.

The stories about his first months in the Vatican are numerous and wonderful. An unpublished one was told by Cardinal Suenens ten years ago in Louvain, Belgium. In one well-known joke about the sede gestatoria, John had said that being carried aloft by a team of lackeys made him seasick. Cardinal Suenens told about the time when John leaned down and said to the men, as they began the procession, “My predecessor was not so heavy as I am -- but I’ll pay you more.”

Cardinal Bea told this one: A certain bishop complained about all the troubles in his diocese. The pope said to him gently, “Excellency, I too have a diocese, and sometimes I too have difficulties. At such times I go to my chapel. And once it seemed to me that Jesus said to me, ‘Now, Johnny, don’t take things too hard. There’s me, too, still in my church.’”

Despite his warmth and humor, responsible leaders of the Orthodox and Protestant ecumenical movement in 1958 saw little reason to rejoice over the accession of this aged pope. The general reaction was one of skepticism. A Baptist editor, doubting the possibility of any change taking place in the Catholic Church under Pope John, summed up the feeling in 1958. He wrote: “Only the ashes of vision remain in a man of 76 years.” In fact, this gloomy editorial appeared the week of Pope John’s 77th birthday. No one yet knew what live coals burned under those external ashes. What pneumatic power made the coals become a flame? God’s Holy Spirit blows as he alone directs.

That moment of ignition was recorded in the pope’s journal. The day was January 20, 1959, and the place was his private apartment. As the pope and his cardinal secretary of state, Tardini, conversed, suddenly, unexpectedly Pope John exclaimed, “Un concilio!”

“Si! Si! Un concilio!” answered Tardini.

“A flash of heavenly light,” the pope called it in his opening address to the council.

Francis X. Murphy, the erudite Redemptorist also known as “Xavier Rynne,” wrote in his widely read journal of the council that it was the pope’s desire “to give the world an example of peace and concord.” Methodist theologian Albert Outler has proposed a much different reason: when Pope John realized how thoroughly the Roman Curia controlled the papal office, this “shock of recognition” made him think of a council. Perhaps Murphy and Outler are both correct, if their remarks are understood in light of the pope’s triple purpose. Pope John’s conciliar purpose applied to three concentric circles: human unity and peace, the broadest circle; the unity of all Christians, with Special hope for the reunion of Orthodox and Catholics, the ecumenical circle; renewal and reform of the Church of Rome, beginning with the Curia itself, the inner circle.

Five days after the idea of holding a council came to Pope John, on January 25, the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul and the culmination of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, he announced his inspiration to an assembled group of 18 cardinals. Near the traditional site of the decapitation of St. Paul, this successor to another martyr, St. Peter, said:

“Venerable Brethren and beloved sons: Trembling a little with emotion, but with humble firmness of purpose, we now tell you of a twofold celebration. We propose to call a Diocesan Synod for Rome, and an Ecumenical Council for the Universal Church.” It is reported that none of the 18 cardinals could think of a single word in response.

Osservatore Romano, delaying until a second day’s edition, reported the announcement not of two, but of three, events in this order: “a Diocesan Synod for the city, an Ecumenical Council for the universal Church, and a bringing up to date of the Code of Canon Law.” And then the paper added in some surprise: “In the thought of the Holy Father, the Council does not have for its goal only the spiritual good of the Christian people but he also wants it to be an invitation to separated communities to seek unity.”

At that time, in early 1959, even Pope John was a bit unclear about Christian unity. His first encyclical, Ad Petri Cathedram, invited schismatic Christians to come home to Rome. With unbounded optimism, he prophesied that the council would bring the church to “all her splendor, without spot or wrinkle” (Eph. 5:27). Then the church will be able to say “to all those who are separated from us, Orthodox, Protestants and the rest: Look, Brothers, this is the Church of Christ. . . . Come: here the way lies open for meeting and for homecoming: come, take or resume that place which is yours, which for many of you was your father’s place.” No wonder that ecumenists, reading this encyclical, could agree with John Courtney Murray’s provisional judgment of the pope. Said this famous American Jesuit: “The symbol of him might well be the question mark -- surely a unique symbol for a pope.” At the end of that summer of 1959, still unpredictable, Pope John publicly announced his unprecedented, revolutionary idea: delegated observers from Orthodox and Protestant churches would be invited to the council sessions. Certainly, the pope gave members of the Curia something to discuss over supper that August evening.



Even the words of the supreme pontiff do not automatically assume flesh and dwell among us. In order to turn his words and ideas into acts, Pope John needed to find someone to be his ecumenical broker, enabler and change agent. If for nothing else, the events of this papacy should be of highest interest to gerontologists, for the pope, now near his 79th birthday, chose Augustin Bea, S.J., as his ecumenical executive officer; Bea had been born in Germany in 1881, the same year as the pope. Again we can only marvel over the ways of God and the mystery of the kairos. In retrospect it is easy to see that Pope John’s summoning of this Old Testament scholar from the Pontifical Biblical Institute on Piazza della Pilotta to an office across the Tiber was a crucial act. A shrunken little man with a constant glint of humor in his eyes, Bea had for many years been a slowly rising leaven of biblical and ecumenical theology in the Roman loaf. He would serve Pope John well.

I inject a personal memoir to illuminate the practical theology of Cardinal Bea. In June 1961 I had a two-hour talk with him. Along with matters of Christian church unity, we discussed unity in mission throughout the world. “Can Catholic missions work with, rather than against, Protestant missions?” I asked.

With that waspish smile, he replied in German:

“Theologisch ist das unmöglich, praktisch ist es notwendig” (“That is theologically impossible, but practically necessary”). With Pope John and the cardinal, practical ecumenism began to override the theologically impossible.

On the day of Pentecost 1960, Pope John announced the creation of Cardinal Bea’s vehicle for ecumenical implementation: the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. Again, it was kairos for a Dutch ecumenist to be named secretary: Jan Willebrands (today, primate of the Netherlands and president of the secretariat). Willebrands was already a veteran ecumenist. He and W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches, had been friends for years. As a result, the chief executive of this formidable ecumenical organization became a confidential consultant to the new secretariat in the Vatican.

Cardinal Bea picked his members of the secretariat according to a hierarchy, placing Archbishop Lorenz Jaeger of Paderborn at the top. No Italians were selected. His theologian consultors were Fathers Dumont, Gustave Weigel, George Tavard, Gregory Baum, John Oesterreicher and Jerôme Hamer. They, among others, became the authors of the great Decree on Ecumenism, adopted by the council in November 1964.

With Pope John’s encouragement, and against strong curial opposition, the secretariat sent five Catholic observers to New Delhi in 1961 for the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches. This act set up the needed reciprocity for inviting the World Council to send observers to the Vatican Council. And then came invitations to various Orthodox churches and to the world organizations of Protestants, as well as to the Old Catholic Church, nearly all of whom responded by sending official observers. When the Second Vatican Council opened, there they were -- the 39 non-Catholic observers. They agreed with Cardinal Bea’s exclamation, “It is a miracle!” When Yves Congar, theological mentor to the council, saw them he wrote in his diary the simple words: “ils sont la! Dieu soit loué!” (“They are there! God be praised!”)

Pope John told them two days later, in special audience: “Every now and then my eyes turned to all my sons and brothers. And when my glance fell on your group, on each one of you, I found that your presence gave me joy.”

The wall of division, built up during 1,000 years, had been breached. The jolly old caretaker had done it, and for reasons which were transparently in accord with the purpose declared in the New Testament. As Cardinal Bea explained, “There is no desire for power, no earthly interest, no mere activism, no routine, but the true spirit of Christ.” The New Testament speaks of “the wall of hostility” between people, which Jesus Christ’s life and death have broken down. Christ’s act of atonement is the mandate for all Christians, in oboedientia et pax, to strive for reconciliation and unity. Angelo Roncalli lived in obedience to that mandate.

The Bread of Life for the Life of the World

"Catholics believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist," said the Philadelphia TV newscaster, "but Protestants say he is only symbolically present. The half-minute notice on the August 5 evening news thus distorted and dismissed the significance of a unique theological symposium at the International Eucharistic Congress. Some 200 theologians of many denominations demonstrated how the divisive stereotypes of the past can no longer have meaning or effect. Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox believe that Christ’s presence is real. They also agree that the basis of Holy Communion is the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ for human salvation; that the act of remembering joins that unique sacrifice of the past to our present self-giving in worship and service; that the Holy Spirit, invoked by prayer, makes effectual the sacramental grace conveyed in bread and wine to the assembled community.

I

Participants invited to this symposium were responsible, though unofficial, representatives of their churches. They found that issues which once caused deep rifts between churches have been largely resolved. The indicators of coming unity are irrefutable. For the first time in a fully ecumenical setting, the fruits of a decade of study and dialogue were examined in concert. The bilateral conversations of Roman Catholics with Anglicans, Disciples, Lutherans, Reformed and Orthodox; the Lutheran-Reformed agreements; the World Council of Churches’ near-consensus statement on Eucharist; numerous studies and talks of lesser scope -- all these were ingredients which pointed to converging lines of theological interpretation.

A lucid synopsis was presented by John Hotchkin, leading ecumenical officer for American Catholics. Responses, both positive and critical, came from Presbyterian Lewis Mudge, Greek Orthodox Maximos Agniorgoussis and Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles. Edward J. Kilmartin, also a Jesuit and a leading sacramental scholar, gave a historical critique. William Lazareth, a Lutheran, spoke on living out the Eucharist in society, thus echoing the sentiments of Cardinal Jan Willebrands, who had addressed the opening session. The famous Dutch cardinal, prime ecumenist of his church, was most sanguine about present unitive trends -- but no more so than Protestants in attendance.

The event so ineptly epitomized on television should, in fact, be widely noted. It was set in the context of the great congress, attended by more than a million persons, with the theme of Jesus the Bread of Life for a hungering world. While all kinds of hungers were considered in meetings large and larger, only the theological symposium was small enough and sufficiently sustained to concentrate on the meaning of the eucharistic liturgy and its bearing upon the authenticity of life.

II

More and more, Christians are impressed by one significant aspect of the Holy Communion: as a means of grace it is also a means of life. Jesus Christ is the veritable Bread of Life, by whom lives are nourished and sustained. This is not a figure of speech only. Jesus Christ is not called, for example, "the fountain of youth." He is the Bread of Life. He is the Resurrection and the Life. And this is the most basic reality of human existence. God the Creator is the source of all life together, and he is the Father of every particular human life, whether so recognized or not. Likewise, God is the Redeemer of all life; for in all the dangers and tragedies of temporal existence, God preserves men and women from total death and annihilation.

People talk today about the "celebration of life." What do they mean? Generally they want to celebrate the natural life given by God. Even if they do not acknowledge God in faith, the sense of living and joyfulness inheres in the life they have received from God. When Christians celebrate the Holy Communion as thanksgiving to God the Father, through and with and in Jesus Christ, and by the Holy Spirit, it is a fulfilled life of divine character for which they are glad.

Yet there are countless people today who are neither inclined nor equipped to celebrate God’s gift of life. For them, by contrast, the present day is a time for honoring death. They have a being-toward-death. They sense a fascination with the process of dying and the mysterious state of death. Books and television, lecturers and college seminars give assurance that, after all, death is not so bad. It is inevitable. It is final. But it is also awesome and in some instances even merciful and welcome. There is more public interest today in discussing euthanasia than Eucharistia. Even within the churches, people are saying that the only life worth living is a life of "quality" -- but "quality" is usually defined by the natural standards of health, usefulness, comforts and happiness.

III

All informed Christians would maintain and believe that the Eucharist is truly the celebration of life. It is the presentation of the gospel which is at once audible, visible, tangible, edible, potable, laudable. This gospel is the good news for dying people that life is given and renewed by Jesus Christ. The risen and living Christ is one with the source of all life, even God of all. "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself" (John 5:26). Because of this cosmic patrimony, "the Son gives life to whom he will" (John 5:21).

Christians participating in the Lord’s Supper do not try to shut out death by ignoring it or pretending it has no power to threaten. Indeed, we even emphasize a death -- the death of Jesus. We reflect upon the awful event of his crucifixion, even to the point of sometimes becoming unduly preoccupied with the morbid aspects of the liturgy. In their simplest sacramental significance, the bread and the wine are present signs of his dying on the cross.

We remember this death vividly by the effect of verbal and visual images. But remembrance, as is often noted, is more than a corporate memory of Jesus. It is the Greek anámnêsis: the remembrance of his death becoming an authentic experience of the present, by which we are enabled to participate in the past sacrifice of our Lord, which indeed constitutes our future. The once-for-all death of Jesus in the first century now, by faith and the Holy Spirit, becomes truly and intensively present to us in 1976.

In the simple, familiar act of eating and drinking, therefore, we not only remember but we "proclaim the Lord’s death" (I Cor. 11:26). What does St. Paul mean by this? Two things, and both are needed. First, the sacramental action itself, in whatever cultic or liturgical form, is a dramatized proclamation of the life-giving death of Jesus. But also, the words of preaching in this context are the vehicles of the gospel, which is the hopeful message of new meaning and power for life. Because the human need for this vivifying message is never satisfied, the church must in all times and places continue the proclamation by word and sacrament, as long as human history endures -- "until he comes."

The death of Jesus, which we proclaim, is not a warrant for any death-wish or despairing abandonment of life. On the contrary, because of Jesus’ resurrection, "his death means our life." As the ancient Easter hymn of the Orthodox Church testifies: "By death he has trampled down death."

Now some might ask, in a tone of exasperation, "What is all this talk of life and death in the context of the sacrament of Holy Communion?" Do the words mean the same to all people? Obviously, no. Is it not unwise and fatuous for us Christians to think and speak as though those who are not Christians can understand, apart from an informed faith, what we mean by life and death? We deny that we are thinking in occult or mystogogical ways. We have no obscure gnosis to conceal from the uninitiated. For we too are citizens of a modern science-based civilization. We too can live in the universities. But "as we believe, so we speak." Lest we seem to be both unfaithful and dishonest, however, we need to grasp and articulate this one commanding truth: that Jesus Christ, in his life and death and resurrection, is the guarantor and enabler of our living today.

This is real life, the whole of life’s dimensions. Many Christians, by spiritualizing, have diluted and dissipated the gospel’s synoptic concern for the worth and integrity of human life. They need, as all need, some of the blunt realism of the prayer of the Gallican Liturgy before the eighth century. In thanks to God it goes: "Your hands made from clay a more excellent likeness, which a holy fire quickened within, and a lively soul brought to life throughout its idle parts. . . .You snatched us from perpetual death and the last darkness of hell, and gave mortal matter, put together from the liquid mud, to your Son and to eternity."

IV

The overarching theme of the congress made participants take a closer look at the sixth chapter of the Gospel According to John. This is a thoroughly eucharistic presentation of Christ "for the life of the world" (6:33).

Here is the fourth account in the New Testament of Jesus’ feeding a multitude miraculously. Are statistics so important? Was not Christ feeding the multitudes in Philadelphia by the million? In all the churches of the world by the hundreds of millions? Is he not capable of feeding in this way the world’s 3 billion human beings, who live by bread but "not by bread alone"? Where is the miracle to be located here? St. John sets this story at the time of the Passover, suggesting that the ancient Jewish feast was to be both continued and changed. Jesus as the Messiah himself becomes our Pascha, our Passover. "Behold, the Lamb of God!"

So many hungering people! And with what could they be fed? With barley loaves: the simplest of all coarse breads -- like chappatis in India, cassava in Africa, common beans, black bread, hardtack, millet. The minimum low-calorie diet! For this Jesus "gave thanks." He gave eucharistia. As all Jews recited the berukáh for God’s blessing, here on the hillside he did exactly what the Synoptic evangelists and St. Paul record at the Last Supper. Taking the most common elements of food and drink in his hands -- hands soon to be pierced by nails -- he gave God thanks and distributed them. And this was the momentary action which changed the world. It was, wrote John, a "sign" of who Jesus was and what his mission was to accomplish. An earlier "sign" of his identity and work was at Cana, where he changed water into wine (2:11).

Similarly, in conversation with the Samaritan woman (4:14) Jesus promised to give the "living water" to everyone who thirsts after life. By such water and the Spirit one is baptized into the new community of eternal life -- now! It is the announced Kingdom of God already breaking into history: the future life of God already coming toward us and opening to us.

Water. Bread. Wine. Jesus’ words. Jesus’ sacrificed life. The new life in the Spirit. All these are offered as God’s preeminent gifts for salvation. But not in the past era of Caesar and Herod, nor in the distant eons of the ages of ages to come, but right now in faith -- now in the preaching, baptism, eucharist and faithful life in the community of the Spirit.

In presence of such offer, what did the people want of Jesus? Bread, but not the Bread of Life. Just plain bread to chew and swallow (6:26). Though Jesus had given them the decisive "sign," they still asked for another one. They wanted a miracle comparable to Yahweh’s raining down manna upon the desert-wandering Israelites (6:31).

As manna came down from heaven, the Son as the Bread of God came to give life to this world God loves (3:16; 6:33). The Israelites who lived on manna finally died the physical death (6:50), but those who eat the Bread of heaven will not die to eternal death. This means eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man. Except for this, "you have no life in you," said Jesus (6:53). The Jews of Capernaum were understandably horrified. To consume blood was totally forbidden. To eat human flesh was cannibalism! And as usual even today, to be an absolute literalist is to miss the main point.

Christ’s presence is real presence. This must be reiterated, because an unreal presence is no presence at all. "For Christ is our life" (Col. 3:4). Even as Jesus Christ is "really present" in us, and especially in the context of the sacrament, so we are "really present" in him. How is this known? By Jesus’ words of eternal life, and by the Holy Spirit who is "the Lord, the giver of life" (John 6:63, 68).

To Jesus’ disciples, this was a "hard saying" (6:6i). It is still hard, unintelligible and unacceptable to many men and women: to many sophisticated intellectuals, to culturally conditioned skeptics, to those secure in their own religious dogmas and cults, and to literalists who demand a sign and then do not believe what they see. Some disciples then deserted Jesus and went away. The Twelve remained with him -- at least until the time of his betrayal and arrest, when not only Judas but "they all forsook him and fled" (Mark 14:50).

V

Is not this the way it has been for centuries and even today? Have we been able to stand by Jesus Christ with his "hard sayings" and to be with him in his vicarious service to all persons in his suffering and death? Have we stayed with him in fidelity, living in constant communion with him? How do the churches and how do persons lay hold of the obvious opportunities which God is giving in this time of ecumenical awakening and openness?

Some speaking for churches, and many for themselves, have expressed regret and contrition for the neglect or misunderstanding of the Lord’s eucharistic gift of life. Believing that the church is right, they thus think that their theologies, if congruent to the doctrine, are right. Still they realize that members of other Christian churches challenge the sufficiency, or even the rectitude, of their teaching and practice. Frequent exposure to the experiences of ecumenical conferences is an antidote to dogmatism.

Clearly made public now are options which are demanding as well as promising. They are the provisional harvest of unprecedented ecumenical dialogues, based upon expanded, open-minded scholarship in Scripture, tradition, history and theology. Not only the data, but also the new mood of willingness to hear and accept others, account for the advances.

The symposium revealed a number of these matters on which Christians can speak with varying degrees of unanimity. But questions persist:

1. The liturgical use of Jesus’ words of institution is based on the accounts of Paul and Luke: "Do this in remembrance of me." As to the meaning of anámnêsis, much was said. But what about the "Do this"? How do we do it? How often do we do it? How carefully and faithfully do members of congregations and parishes respond to Jesus’ invitation? Can the congregation honestly be called "the eucharistic community"?

2. If sacrifice of Jesus Christ once-for-all on Calvary for the sins of the whole world is a dominant motif of Holy Communion, do we really proclaim the Lord’s death by word and action in ways which communicate this redemptive event to all who see and hear? And how, in truth, do we present our "bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God"? (Rom. 12:1).

3. The New Covenant with God in Christ is the covenant "written upon the hearts" (Jer. 31:33), binding the people to God and, by implication, to one another. God is always faithful and just to keep his covenant. Do we keep it with sufficient fidelity?

4. As there is one loaf of bread, there is one body made up of many members (I Cor. 10:17). Is that biblical rhetoric, or reality? How do we divide the loaf and the body? Or, in our situation of fragmentation and division, do we fail culpably to "discern" the body? (I Cor.11:29).

5. The broken bread and the blessed cup are "participation" or koinonia in the Body and Blood of Christ (I Cor. 10:16). This is the language of sacramental realism. Is it used and apprehended with commensurate sincerity and sobriety?

6. The Lord’s Supper is a fellowship meal, wherein the life, death and resurrection of the Lord are remembered, prayers are offered to God, and the members strengthened in love by common participation in the gifts and presence of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:42). Does the invocation (epiklêsis) of the Spirit apply to the full dimension of the eucharistic celebration as befits this community?

7. In most church traditions the sacraments are designated "means of grace" and the words are taken seriously. How does such grace serve to dissolve, or prevail over, the church-dividing vestiges of old prejudices, misunderstandings and hostilities? If that question seems easy to answer today, how do we perceive sacramental grace penetrating the walls of sincerely held doctrine and belief? And, humanly speaking, is there a limit to what the means of grace can do to further Christian unity?

8. Jesus Christ is our great High Priest, who has once and for all fulfilled the function of sacrificial priesthood and mediated the New Covenant for God’s people, who are themselves the "royal priesthood" (Heb. 9:11-17; I Pet. 2:9). If all share in the general ministry for which Christ commissions them, there are yet special, ordained ministries authorized for altar and pulpit. What remains for ecumenical convergence on theology of the ministry to satisfy requirements of canon and conscience for mutually recognized celebration of the Eucharist?

9. In Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" (Gal. 3:27). Such an apostolic statement commands the assent of virtually all Christians. Is it just lip service? Wherever there is apparent discrimination against one category of person who is "in Christ," is the church as a whole not responsible to show that it is not really such discrimination, or failing that, to rectify the condition? Otherwise, as it has been charged, do we make a "mockery" of the sacrament? Can the exchange of the "kiss of peace" as the sign of reconciliation (Matt. 5:23) be sincerely enacted in each church?

10. "Until he comes!" (I Cor. 11:26). In a culture and time in which people are taught to live for the moment, to put history behind them and not presume to hope for the future, the eschatological idea and faith seem out of place. But contrariwise, this very vacuum is filled by many apocalyptic and millennial schemes and prophecies. Christians need to understand the sense of history’s purpose and the hope which is lodged in the promise of Jesus Christ. Is the Eucharist, then, regarded as the repository of the eschatological hope and the foretaste of its fulfillment?

Beyond this summary of agreements and challenges other questions remain. But for a two-day conference, these suffice to show how far Christian thinkers have come in just a few years. Could this not be called a eucharistic renewal in our time?

Genetics and Theology: A Complementarity?

A handful of theologians were among the thousands of attendants at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Boston. There leading geneticists from the National Academy of Science’s research council promoted a federal project known as "mapping the human genome.

The subject matter of that project is less than microscopic, but the task is colossal. It means mobilizing hundreds of researchers over a five-year period to chart the exact location of nearly 100,000 genes on the 23 pairs of human chromosomes. So far, 4,300 genes have been identified and just over 1,000 mapped. When the other 99,000 are mapped the huge job of sequencing can begin. This task involves analyzing no less than 3 billion pairs of nucleic acids. The chemical data derived from this analysis could fill 500 books of 1,000 pages each. Such information, scientists predict, will provide a vastly expanded understanding of all physiological processes and diseases. As Victor A. McKusick of the Johns Hopkins University said, a wholly new human physiology is being developed. Since Vesalius made anatomical drawings in the 16th century we have known how the parts of the body appear to the eye. Now we are learning about the essential inner reality of the body and discovering the physical-chemical powers that make it function.

Religious thinkers concerned with protecting the well being of persons must take account of these unprecedented scientific developments, particularly as they pave the way for further experiments in the modification of DNA molecules. This concern led the World Council of Churches to sponsor a world conference of scientists and theologians at MIT in 1979. Christian and Jewish leaders addressed issues of genetic research during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, promoting a report called Splicing Life, issued by the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research. In 1986 the National Council of Churches adopted an extensive policy statement on "Genetic Science for Human Benefit." The Roman Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II have explicitly addressed the issue of genetic engineering.

What have these religious voices been saying? A general summary was provided by ethics experts who testified before then-Congressman Albert Gore’s Committee on Science and Technology in 1982: (1) Though risks in experimentation are inevitable, a strong bias toward the sacredness of human life requires the highest regard for the patient or subject. (2) Programs of positive eugenics are dubious and dangerous, even though the effort to eliminate genetic diseases is laudable. (3) The allocation of human, economic and scientific resources is of ethical import to those with a religious commitment to equity and justice. (4) While a faith-based "reverence for life" can raise exaggerated fears about modifying human beings, some sense of human inviolability is deeply rooted in our national and religious traditions.

Religious thinkers hold these general positions with differing degrees of intensity and emphasis in defining their positions regarding the genetic modification of cells and the new reproductive technologies that seek eugenic solutions to procreative problems. The hard-liners of both Roman Catholicism and Protestant biblicism believe that ethical rules can be deduced logically from divinely revealed truths. They regard any manipulation or modification of the body and its natural functions as sinful. For some, this means no blood transfusions or surgical interventions; for others, no deviation from normal conjugal intercourse for procreation, no contraception, no modification of genes in human tissues.

The opposite of these hard-liners are the prudential utilitarians or consequentialist thinkers. They accept any application of genetic and medical technology so long as desires are fulfilled and the benefit outweighs the harm to individuals, classes or society as a whole. For some this stance can allow external methods of fertilization; for others experimentation with embryos and still-living aborted fetuses; for others, euthanasia for genetically disabled infants, the comatose or senile; and voluntary suicide. The hard-liners practice a deontological ethics -- stressing deon, or duty. The soft-liners practice libertarianism.

The middle course between these two options is one of correlation -- not a correlation by deduction from a divine edict but a correlation between religious teaching and the empirical data; for example, between books on genetics and the Book of Genesis.

Theistic faith includes a belief in God’s original and continuing creativity ordering the cosmos. The empirical correlate of the creativity is what we know of the structure of atoms, the generating of electrical charges, the chemistry of proteins, the latent potencies of DNA molecules, and the mind-boggling harmonies of enzymes, temperatures, pressure and timing that catalyze gene expression and organic growth. Judaism and Christianity also affirm that God desires the enhancement and fulfillment of each human life and the integrity of families and the wider human community. These values correlate with advances in science and technology that preserve life -- whether by electronic diagnosis, prenatal and neonatal therapy, nutrition, pharmacology or organ transplants.

Biblical religion also teaches that we are God’s stewards for our own lives and for the environment. Scientific data, both medical and ecological, warn us of the limited resources we have for supporting the human race. It is up to us to ensure that our technology helps to preserve life and the environment rather than destroy them.

According to the biblical model of the person, which has prevailed for many centuries and is still largely normative for Western culture, a person consists of a physical organism, including a brain of unique proportions and capabilities. The brain is obviously the locus of the mind, but the mind transcends the physico-chemical limitations of the brain. This transcendence is palpably demonstrated by the voluntary exercise of the will in making decisions and directing the body’s actions. Beyond the mind is the unique soul of each individual, wherein the deepest attributes of selfhood are found. The soul is also the living link to metaphysical reality and intelligent power. which in theistic terms is called God the Creator.

This model, in which all components of the person constitute an integrated whole, is far more complex than the common dualistic model of "the ghost in the machine," which was unfortunately bequeathed to Christianity and Western culture by ancient Greek and Hindu philosophy. It is also more congenial to modern medicine precisely because of the way it affirms the unity of mind and body -- unlike a reductionist theory of mechanistic materialism or a pure spiritualism that denies the body’s value.

Do the findings of molecular biologists threaten to replace biblical anthropology with the idea that human behavior is entirely genetically determined? Some genetic researchers do posit genetic causality not only for psychopathic illnesses such as manic depression and schizophrenia but for morally disapproved behavior such as stealing. If the latter sort of behavior is ultimately caused by specific genes, then both free will and moral responsibility are canceled.

It is apparent, however, that there are many phenomena in the realms of intelligence, affection, aesthetics, psychology and religion that defy and deny the materialistic explanation. It is also questionable whether congenital diseases are explicable only genetically. Testing on the genetic link for cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy and other diseases indicates that environmental influences, especially the health and habits of the mother, determine to some extent the form and severity of an offspring’s disease.

It is possible, then, to maintain a biblical view of human freedom and responsibility while acknowledging the power and significance of genetic coding.

When scientists announce that the chemistry of DNA is so certain, universal and uniform that all forms of life on earth are essentially the same, a credulous public jumps to the conclusion that traditional claims for the uniqueness of the human species have been nullified. But the discovery of genetic identities between human cells and those of most other organisms does not negate the distinctiveness of human beings. Rather, it shows how the infinite creative power has used these marvelous mechanisms to fashion us as we are. Such knowledge also shows, to our sorrow, how dysfunctions, diseases and physical malformations occur within the scheme of life that the Creator intends as good.

The genomes of individuals and of the species are infinitely complex. Human genes have been replicating and mutating for millions of years. It is astonishing to reflect that only in the past 35 years have we begun to understand them. Though some religious people may believe that theology and genetics are contradictory, that belief is neither "necessary" nor true. We must recognize instead that genetics and theology provide different kinds of data, in different dimensions of cognition, which are ultimately complementary. Genetic science is opening new vistas for understanding, but it will remain insufficient without the insights of faith and theology.

Murdoch’ s Magic: The Consolations of Fiction

Murdoch’s books are not modest either, in scope or in size. The Book and the Brotherhood, for instance runs to more than 600 pages; it has at least eight major characters; and its themes include love and the failures of love, death, belief and disbelief in God, friendship, Marxism, and the social condition of contemporary Britain. Murdoch is an exuberant storyteller. At a time when many writers of fiction appear content to spin out tales concocted by marketing firms, or else lose themselves in worlds of arch and arcane wordplay, Murdoch is extravagant, enthusiastic and earnest. While reading The Book, I had an experience like those referred to in histories of Victorian culture: I had to set the novel aside for several days because of how audaciously Murdoch had treated one of her characters.

For a number of reasons, Murdoch’s fiction is of particular interest to the Christian observer of culture. Consider, for example, the issues at stake in her understanding of the place of art in post-Christian culture. At the conclusion of one of her books of philosophy, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Murdoch summarizes her view of the artist’s role in modern life: "To present the idea of God at all, even as a myth, is a consolation." For centuries the Christian church provided compelling consolation through its stories, images and rituals. The modern world, however, has seen the collapse of the power of Christian belief to order the lives of individuals and societies. Because of the inability of Christian theology to provide consolation in a believable and convincing way, the work of the modern artist has become both more difficult and more important.

Art will mediate and adorn, and develop magical structures to conceal the absence of God or his distance. We live now amid the collapse of many such structures, and as religion and metaphysics in the West withdraw from the embraces, we are it might seem being forced to become mystics through the lack of any imagery which could satisfy the mind Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 881.

Murdoch’s religious concerns are deeply rooted in the theology, philosophy and fiction of the 19th century. Her work as an academic philosopher has dealt extensively with the figures and issues of that period, and in her discussions of fiction she has expressed particular admiration for the great novelists of that century, including Jane Austen, George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy. In addition to these stated interests, we can detect the pervasive presence of 19th-century themes in the content of her novels and in the manner in which she tells them.

Like many of the writers she admires, Murdoch seeks to salvage the aesthetic riches of the Christian tradition and to do so through the glorious ambiguities of art. Her concern to sustain certain benefits of Christian belief without preserving the foundational commitments of that belief links Murdoch to that great tradition of Romantic theologians and poets -- figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, William Blake and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In choosing fiction as her means to that end, Murdoch shows her allegiance to some of the great novelists of the late 19th century. And in her expansive and ambitious storytelling and in her preoccupation with grand themes, Murdoch joins herself to a tradition of fiction that regards the writing and reading of novels as an irreplaceable means of clarifying moral choices and sustaining spiritual life.

We may gain an idea of the moral and spiritual dilemmas of Murdoch’s fiction by considering the opening passages of her three most recent novels, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) , The Good Apprentice (1985) and The Book and the Brotherhood. In the opening pages of The Philosopher’s Pupil we come upon a middle-aged man who is attempting to kill his wife by pushing her car into a canal. The Good Apprentice opens with Edward Baltram feeding a hallucinogenic drug in a sandwich to his unsuspecting friend. While the friend sleeps, Edward slips out to visit a young woman in a neighboring apartment. He makes love to her and returns to his apartment in little more than half an hour, only to discover that his hallucinating friend has leaped to his death through an open window. The Book and the Brotherhood opens with a character exclaiming, "David Crimond is here in a kilt!" The "here" of this sentence is a midsummer ball at an Oxford college. Before the evening is over, Crimond, a tempestuous Marxist working on a grand intellectual synthesis, will have thrown into the river the man with whose wife he has had a well-known affair.

Why do so many of Murdoch’s novels begin in such a jarring manner -- a manner so unlike the stately and measured openings of her 19th-century predecessors? The key to these abrupt beginnings, and to the handling of conflict throughout her fiction, is to be found in Murdoch’s apprehension of evil. In 1961 she wrote:

We live in [an] age in which the dogmas, images, and precepts of religion have lost much of their power. We are also heirs of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Liberal tradition. These are the elements of our dilemma: whose chief feature, in my view, is that we have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality ["Against Dryness," Encounter, January 1961, p. 16].

Standing between Murdoch and the world of most 19th-century fiction, then, are the brutal realities of 20th-century history and the sobering accounts of human nature offered by the great thinkers of the late 19th century. The confidence that Matthew Arnold or George Eliot had in human nature is not available to Murdoch. The work of thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud -- whom Paul Ricoeur calls the great "masters of suspicion’ ‘ -- has made that optimism untenable. According to Murdoch, the thoughtful modern person can no longer conceive of men and women as rational creatures who are slowly expunging evil from their midst; instead, it is necessary to think of human beings as "benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy."

A minor character in The Book and the Brotherhood, Professor Levquist, puts this matter succinctly at the beginning of the novel. "You are rotted by Christianity," he tells his former student Gerard Hernshaw. "Your ‘moral ambition’ or whatever you call your selfish optimism, is just the old life of Christian salvation, that you can shed your old self and become good simply by thinking about it . . . and so you are happy in your lie" (p. 27)

Many of the characters in The Book and the Brotherhood are torn between their attraction to the moral legacy of Christianity and their guilty sense that they have no right to cling to that heritage. They wonder whether by renouncing the theological commitments of Christian belief they have destroyed the foundations of Christian moral practice. Nevertheless, Murdoch and her central characters wish to see if it is possible to resuscitate the moral heritage of the classical and Christian West. The size and number of Murdoch’s novels point to the difficulty of this project and to her earnest willingness to undertake it.

Crimond is a Marxist, a bruising and condescending one. When his friends become restless about the views to be espoused in the book they have commissioned, he becomes indignant about their meddling and their petit-bourgeois values. The members of the committee -- Gerard Hernshaw, Jenkin Riderhood, Rose Curtland and Gulliver Ashe -- have all tried to find a middle ground on the contemporary moral battlefield. They want to affirm more than does the cynical Professor Levquist, and less than does the utopian Crimond. Much like Murdoch herself, they wish to retain the liberal tradition’s belief in the worth of individual moral action, yet find it difficult to do so in an age in which the enlightened individual is threatened on one side by cynical despair and on the other by the totalitarian excesses of political hope.

The members of Crimond’s committee have learned that he condones terrorism and might welcome the demise of parliamentary democracy. When Gerard probes him on these matters, Crimond admits that "of course I think

this society, our so-called free society, is rotten to the core -- it’s oppressive and corrupt and unjust, it’s materialistic and ruthless and immoral and soft, rotted with pornography and kitsch." According to Crimond, the only hope for humanity is in the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist world of bourgeois individualism. Gerard and his friends in the "Brotherhood" respond to these charges by reaffirming the value of individual moral struggle and the need for tolerance and sympathy in a fragmented, pluralistic world. "All right," Gerard tells Crimond, "the present is imperfect and the future looks grim, but we must just hold onto what’s good, hold onto our values and try to weather the storm."

To weather the storm, however, individuals must have roofs to put over their heads or ships to sail in over troubled seas. Murdoch realizes that until recently, ethical values in the West have been grounded in religious beliefs. The now-common wisdom of intellectual life is that such beliefs are unavailable to the heirs of the Enlightenment. For the enlightened seeker of shelter, Murdoch argues, Christian faith and practice cannot provide security in the storm.

Only art, with its spell of magic, can conjure up a world to shelter the good we desperately seek to hold on to. Mystery and magic abound in Murdoch’s fiction, and their presence is especially to be felt in her three most recent novels. It is as though characters who have slipped over the brink of ruin need a web of words, a net of stunning illusions, to break their fall. Murdoch is very willing to spin such webs.

One of the many subplots in The Book and the Brotherhood involves the trials of Tamar Hernshaw, Gerard’s niece. Tamar is a highly intelligent young woman whose childhood has been one of torment and confusion. One night she goes to console Duncan Cambus, after Cambus’s wife has once again left him for Crimond. Tamar goes to bed with Duncan, becomes pregnant by him, and eventually aborts the child. In addition to feeling a crushing guilt over the abortion, Tamar also comes to believe that she is mysteriously responsible for the sudden death of Jenkin Riderhood. Seeking peace, forgiveness and reassurance, Tamar submits to the care of Father McAlister, an Anglican priest.

"Father McAlister specialized in desperate cases, Murdoch writes. "He had by now ceased to believe in God or in the divinity of Christ, but he believed in prayer." Probing for every discernible weak spot in Tamar, McAlister is able to lead -- or perhaps drive -- her to Christ. But though McAlister speaks of an "irreversible change" in Tamar after she has been baptized and confirmed, she herself is "not so sure." Is "this religious magic or merely psychological magic?" she wants to know. The answer seems to come only after the bliss of her conversion wears off. Tamar is left with nothing more, and nothing less, than the evidence of a decisive change in her psychological makeup. ‘She had been permanently changed, but what had happened? Was it simply that she had broken free from her mother, was that what her cunning psyche had, under the guise of other things, always been after?"

Considering Murdoch’s explicit denials of Christian belief and the presence of many lapsed Christians in her fiction, it is perhaps not surprising that she depicts psychological magic as the only plausible enchantment for modern women and men. We can only conjure up consolation and transformation, her stories argue. Such things are not realities of the world we live in; they are what we want to be the case, not what is the case. However, the task of psychology, the task of conjuring consolation, is made difficult by the fact that psychology does not itself possess the. resources needed to "cast the spell." Religion and art -- the great purveyors of magic -- must do this work.

Through the mysterious resources of language, that is, religion, and art acquire a special power to cast enchanting spells over disenchanted persons. But once the magical, religious symbols have done their work, Murdoch’s stories suggest, they may be discarded. In fact, the enlightened person must discard them as an act of intellectual honesty. Father McAlister is one who has not been able to bring himself to this point. "I don’t believe in God or the Divinity of Christ or the Life Everlasting, but I continually say so, I have to. Why? In order to carry on with the life which I have chosen and which I love."

"To carry on with the life which I have chosen and which I love" -- as an apology for a confession of faith, such a statement reduces religious belief to a form of therapy. And this is precisely what fiction and belief are to Murdoch. Fiction is to her the most respectable contemporary means we have of maintaining the motivating energies and integrating powers of historic Christianity. Religion provides the symbols and rituals, but fiction brings these things to life. "Art will mediate and adorn, and develop magical structures to conceal the absence of God or his distance." This is art in the service of the soul.

Intriguing similarities exist between Murdoch’s fictional use of religious symbols and Reinhold Niebuhr’s understanding of the Christian faith. For example, in several of his works Niebuhr accords a central place to the doctrine of the resurrection. The wisdom of the resurrection, he wrote to Scottish philosopher Norman Kemp Smith in 1940, was "the idea that the fulfillment of life does not mean the negation and destruction of historical reality (which is a unity of body-soul, freedom-necessity, time-eternity) but the completion of this unity." But fearing that Kemp Smith might take him to be a supernaturalist, Niebuhr added: "I have not the slightest interest in the empty tomb or physical resurrection." In other words, the word "resurrection" is a potent symbol for Niebuhr, but the word points to nothing more than the human desire to believe in the meaningfulness of life.

Both Niebuhr and Murdoch are the intellectual descendants of Schleiermacher, seeking to defend religion before its "cultured despisers." Their desire to accommodate Christian symbols to the reigning paradigms of knowledge is so great that questions about the descriptive power of those symbols are often dismissed as fruitless or irrelevant. If naturalism makes the possibility of a resurrected Christ seem an absurdity, then one must reinterpret the symbol -- -season it, so to speak, to make it appeal to the tastes of the modern intellectual palate. If we must abandon belief in the empty tomb in order to maintain the magical power of all that the word "resurrection" conjures up, so be it.

Murdoch made a similar point in a speech to a group of French academicians more than a decade ago:

It is equally interesting that after a period of irreligion or relative atheism there have been signs of a kind of perceptible religious renewal in certain changes in theology.. . . In England one is experiencing a demythologization. . . of theology which recognizes that many things normally or originally taken as dogmas must now be considered as myths. In this there is something which might have a profound impact on the future which, for the ordinary person, might return religion to the realm of the believable.

T. S. Eliot said that Christianity has always adapted itself in order to be believable. Thus, if one defines art in religious terms, I believe its vocabulary is not outmoded and that one might even be able to establish a connection between the work of theology and that of art in their actual form [quoted in Peter S. Hawkins, The Language of Grace (Cowley, 1983) , pp. 134-35].

Granted, there is always in the Christian life a tension between the Scriptures in themselves and the need to apply them to the demands and patterns of present reality. But for Niebuhr to a large extent, and for Murdoch almost completely, all is application. The Bible and Christian tradition, in this line of thought, may console our spirits and help to organize the categories of our thought, but they have lost the power to reveal, to speak to us with a binding address. When all dogmas become myths, it is only a matter of time before all myths become fictions. And when all knowledge becomes application, eventually there is nothing left to apply.

In Murdoch’s world, women and men need spiritual solace, but solace is grounded in nothing more than fantasy and desire. According to Murdoch, we have no evidence that there is any ultimate consoling truth about human experience. Indeed, all we know for sure, according to her fiction, is that language and ritual have a magic of their own and that the enchantment they provide may be a source of healing for desperate people.

But the goal of that enchantment, and the balance struck when its spell wears off, is not clear. What is the good for which we strive through all our cycles of enchantment and disenchantment? At the very end of The Good Apprentice, three of the central characters gather for a toast. One of them, Edward Baltram, has carried through the novel the guilt of his best friend’s death. He has also undergone a bizarre reunion with his father, from whom he has been estranged for years, and an unnerving stay at his father’s home. With his stepbrother Stuart and his stepfather Harry, Edward seeks to celebrate the good that has emerged from the experience of suffering and evil:

‘Oh well, there are good things in the world,’ said Edward. ‘Are there? Let’s drink to them, Edward, Stuart -- ’ ‘But which things are they?’ said Edward. ‘We might all mean different ones. ‘Never mind, drink to them. Come.’ They raised their glasses.

As captivating as this image of celebration may be, it is difficult not to hear in the toast a note of great sadness. The characters sense that somewhere, in the lost past or the unknowable future, live compelling conceptions of a redemptive and glorious good. In their poverty, however, they can do nothing at present but salute the absent good. It might be too much to say that they are awaiting the coming of this good, for they do not know its definition. They do not even know its name.

Male Sexuality: Moving Beyond the Myths

When I began teaching Christian ethics in the late 1960s, I found Helmut Thielicke’s The Ethics of Sex particularly helpful. It explained to my students the logic, if not the validity, of the traditional "double standard" in sexual morality. Accepting Thielicke’s "orders of creation" argument, I taught that women invest more of themselves in sexual relationships than do men. The sex organs are so designed that women receive something into themselves whereas men are relieved of something, and these physiological differences, Thielicke suggested, help us understand why men have polygamous tendencies while women tend to be monogamous.

Today I not only think that Thielicke’s interpretation was based on a simplistic, physicalist notion of natural law, but that it evidenced a masculinist bias. The feminist and gay liberation movements have challenged me to consider how much Thielicke’s -- and my earlier -- views reflected the experience and biases of white, middle-class, heterosexual males. Feminist and gay scholarship has helped make us aware of the ways in which the traditional "double standard" view has distorted our interpretation of female sexuality.

So far, however, gay and feminist scholarship has not had a comparable impact in helping us appreciate the complexity of male sexuality. As Bernie Zilbergeld suggested in a pioneering study a decade ago, we now believe that "female sexuality is complex, mysterious and full of problems, while male sexuality is simple, straightforward, and problem free" (Male Sexuality [Bantam, 1978], p. 1) The essential myth about male sexuality that Zilbergeld identified was genitally focused, and can be summed up in the title of his third chapter: "It’s Two-Feet Long, Hard As Steel, and Can Go All Night: The Fantasy Model of Sex." Accompanying this fantasy model about the size, potency and durability of male genitalia are, according to Zilbergeld, nine subordinate male myths that focus on physical rather than relational and emotional dimensions of sexuality, emphasizing performance, intercourse and orgasms (such as " A man always wants and is always ready to have sex"; or "All physical contact must led to sex")

Of course, when real men compare themselves with this model they discover they don’t measure up. Male sexuality is at least as "complex, mysterious, and full of problems" as female sexuality. At one time or another most men experience premature ejaculation, impotence or trouble reaching orgasm. The popularity of workshops on sexual issues at men’s conferences and of self-help books on male sexuality, such as Michael Castleman’s Sexual Solutions: An informative Guide (Simon & Schuster, 1983) , indicates that many men are aware of and want to do something about their sexual problems.

Zilbergeld listed a tenth myth of male sexuality that he called a more recent development inspired by the sexual revolution: we believe that the other myths no longer have any influence on us. In fact, the small amount of literature on male sexuality is focused almost entirely on problems related to those myths. Very few studies go beyond a concern with genital activity to deal with the difficulties men have sustaining intimacy, men’s love/hate feelings about machismo, sexual images in films and popular culture, sexuality in the workplace, men’s violence toward women, men’s attraction to pornography or men’s attitudes about fatherhood.

I do not want to discount the importance of sex as a biological need. Men in our culture tend to have too limited a conception of sexuality, thinking of it almost exclusively in terms of coitus, but the church must not therefore shy away from discussing genital sex in frank and specific terms. In the discussion that follows, therefore, I will move back and forth between focusing on sex in its narrower meaning and on sexuality in the broader sense that includes psychological, religious, symbolic and cultural dimensions.

As we consider how Christian theology and ethics can help us illuminate male sexuality and guide behavior, our ultimate point of reference is the person of Jesus Christ. We do not have a detailed account of his sexual life, but as the church has always affirmed his full humanity, we must assume that he was aware of and accepted his sexuality as a good gift of God. And from what we know about his life and teachings we can assume that his responses to particular issues of sexual expression would have been based on whether they built up or destroyed the human community in its relationship to God. The New Testament gives us a portrait of a man who accepted himself, overcame alienation from God, was open to the world, and developed close relationships with women and men in what we would now call androgynous responses, combining gentleness and strength, intuition and logic, love and justice.

Our ethical framework for understanding sexuality, then, must emphasize social justice and the common good, while also being responsive to the diversity of individual needs in the complex human community. Our most basic obligation is to work out an understanding of male sexuality that satisfies the requirements of social justice. The Christian faith requires us to stress equality, equal regard for all persons, and treatment of people in ways that meet their most basic needs. Social justice construed in this manner has a number of implications for how we develop and support relationships, of which I will mention two major ones, each of which has some subdivisions.

First, we need to develop an understanding of human sexuality that affirms egalitarian rather than hierarchical patterns of relationships. Traditional understandings of male sexuality assumed that men were superior and women were inferior, and at least some of the roots of this view can be traced to the Christian tradition. In much of Christian thought women have been defined as subordinate to men, as human beings who lack the fullness of the image of God.

In addition, our tradition has valued "masculine" attributes more than "feminine" ones -- thinking more than feeling, abstraction more than concreteness. Men have been conditioned to treat their bodies as instruments to be manipulated, the bearers of an irrationality which must be controlled. Those "masculine" feelings that are expressed -- particularly aggression and sexual desire -- provide a very limited basis for men to establish the shared goals and trust necessary for developing and maintaining intimate relationships.

Perhaps because they do not really regard women as equals, many men do not respond positively in sexual activity to women’s preference for a wide range of sensual play over the whole body. In any case, men tend to focus more narrowly on genital contact. Our language betrays a masculinist bias: holding, cuddling, hugging, kissing, caressing and all other forms of expressing physical affection before coitus are described as "foreplay"-- before the main event. Men have been conditioned to distrust and repress the "irrational," "frivolous," sensuous aspects of sexual play that can open up an experience of sexuality that is diffused throughout the body.

Children can also benefit from a redefinition of parental roles: they get to see justice implemented into the structures of family life -- justice understood as fairness, mutual accountability, appropriate responses to specific needs, and respect for differences. Children can learn that neither parent’s work is more important than the other’s, that the amount of money earned is not what makes work valuable, and that no household tasks are gender-specific.

Churches, too, need to emphasize egalitarian rather than hierarchical patterns of leadership. They need to resurrect those traditions of collaborative leadership, in which women shared responsibilities with men, that were present in the early Christian community. As Matthew Fox has playfully suggested, churches need to make community life more like dancing in Sarah’s circle than climbing Jacob’s ladder (A Spirituality Named Compassion and the Healing of the Global Village, Humpty Dumpty and Us [Winston, 1979])

A second aspect of justice as it relates to sexuality is the rejection of all interpretations of relationships based on stereotypes -- gender, sexual preference, race, age or class. Male sexuality has been especially conditioned by prejudices against people of other races and against homosexuals. The intertwining of sexism and racism has created such stereotypes as the impotent white man, the virile black man, the sacred white woman and the animalistic black woman.

It is the latter image that, perhaps more than any other, illustrates the depersonalization and injustice that we white males have internalized into our sexuality. Two decades ago, Calvin C. Hernton examined each of these stereotypes, and his description of man’s inhumanity to woman comes through most powerfully in his observations about the experience of black women: ". . . after nearly four centuries of oppression, having been raped, murdered, lynched, spit upon, pushed through back doors, denied human respect, thought of and treated as sluts and mammies and Negresses, fit only to breed and suckle babies, to wash and cook and scrub and sweat, after having been sexually depersonalized and taken bodily for the having, the Negro women of the modern era are just beginning to be recognized as human beings, as sexual creatures clothed in their own personal skins. . ." (Sex and Racism in America [Grove Press, 1965], p. 166)

In White Hero Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity (Pluto, 1979) , Paul Hoch argues that the relationship between sexism and racism must be understood in order to comprehend white men’s tendency to oppress women as well as members of other cultures they regard as inferior. Hoch delineates the conflict between "hero" and "beast" in our culture as a struggle between two different understandings of manhood, in which civilization is identified with whiteness and barbarism with blackness. This dynamic of sexism and racism is present in our churches at every level.

Homophobia, the irrational fear of same-sex attraction, has had a crippling effect on the development of heterosexual men’s personalities, to say nothing of the devastating effect it has had on gay men and lesbian women. Homophobia undergirds men’s tendency to reject behaviors that are passive and gentle and to "prove" their masculinity through aggressive and violent behavior. It makes it difficult for men to develop intimate friendships with other men, and it complicates men’s relationships with their sons and their fathers. With the AIDS crisis and the heightened awareness of discrimination against homosexuals that it has fostered, churches have an unprecedented opportunity to fight homophobia and bring about reconciliation. We need to interpret sexuality in such a way that women as well as men -- without discrimination based on race, age, social class or sexual preference -- are recognized as people who have the capacity for independence and choice, who have the right to say No and to say Yes to expressions of affection.

Finally, we need to understand sexuality in the light of the common good, for sexuality is both deeply personal and profoundly public. Strategies for dealing with such issues as pornography or sexual violence in the family, for example, must be concerned with both the needs and rights of the individuals involved and with the common good of the community.

We have a long way to go in rethinking our theology and ethics in relation to male sexuality. One source from which we might derive some clues is in the so-called men’s liberation movement. One group in the movement is the National Organization for Changing Men, which supports the continuing struggle of women for full equality and affirms the social changes that feminism has brought about for men as well as for women. NOCM has opposed economic and legal discrimination against women, rape, domestic violence, pornography and sexual harassment. It has also fought homophobia, which it believes has not only caused injustices to gay, lesbian and bisexual persons but has had a debilitating effect on heterosexual men. It opposes discrimination based on sexual orientation, and attempts to work against oppression based on race, class, religion and physical condition, all of which it believes have connections to sexism. Through its conferences and standing task groups, NOCM provides opportunities for men and women to be educated and to work for social change.

NOCM, whose national membership office is located in Los Angeles, will hold its "Thirteenth National Conference on Men and Masculinity" at Seattle University this coming July. Its other activities include sponsoring speakers and workshops, leafletting campaigns and protest marches, debates, films and slide shows, dances and receptions that do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation. The organization publishes annotated bibliographies and topical newsletters, in addition to Brother, its house organ, and Changing Men, a journal exploring the various issues with which the group is concerned.

Perhaps NOCM’s goals and activities can serve as a model for churches and for theologians as we men attempt to disengage from the myths that have kept us imprisoned and to move forward to a true affirmation of both men and women as sexual beings in God’s good creation.

Terrorism And ‘Just War’

Moral Challenges

By Martin L. Cook

Martin L. Cook is professor of military studies and ethics at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.



The United States is said to be "at war." There is no question that it has been viciously attacked on its own soil; there is no question that it is now engaged in sustained and large-scale military operations beyond its borders. From the perspective of the just war tradition, however, the nature of this war raises intellectual and practical moral challenges.

Throughout its modern history, just war has been premised on the concept that war is a conflict among states; yet in this "war" the primary conflict (at least initially) is with al-Qaeda, a nonstate actor. Concepts of victory and reasonable hope of success are usually conceived of in terms of conflict with a state possessing authority capable of surrender, of negotiating terms, and of exercising effective authority over its surrendered forces to ensure respect for cease-fires and surrenders. All these elements are conspicuously lacking, at least at this stage in the current conflict. These, and many other distinctive elements of this conflict, pose challenges to existing moral frameworks for assessing the use of military force.

Although space will not permit exploration of the point here, it is important to note that Christian thought about just war predated the rise of the modern state system in the 17th century, and rests on fundamental moral principles not essentially tied to that system. Instead, it was concerned only to locate the competent authority to redress wrong and repel violence. Neither a presumption against war nor the existence of sovereign states is fundamental to the just war tradition throughout its long history; use of force to repel evil is. It is worthwhile to recall that the first exercise of U.S. military power well beyond its borders was the repression of piracy by the Barbary Pirates on the high seas -- not an interstate conflict at all. Instead, the U.S. used force for what in modern parlance one might call "international order" considerations.

With these qualifications, we come to the central question: In what senses, then, are "war" and the ethical standards attached to it transferable to the present conflict?

First, while the just cause for the use of military force in this instance is not interstate aggression, there can be no question that violence of the scale of the September 11 events justifies use of military force in response and in order to eliminate if possible the agents’ capability to launch similar attacks in the future.

The fundamental moral concern to protect innocent human life is not, however, overridden, even in the face of such violence. This means that any morally appropriate military response must still address just war issues such as "reasonable hope of success" and proportionality. The practical implications of these points are clear, even if somewhat unpalatable for those not accustomed to thinking in practical terms about military matters.

First, the ability to use military force with due respect to such considerations is absolutely contingent on the quality and quantity of the intelligence information available. Those concerned with the moral dimensions of this "war" wish above all for very, very good spies. Only that capability will make it possible to locate with precision the targets of legitimate attack.

Second, while use of the military instrument of national power is clearly justified in this circumstance, a prudent policy will recognize that military force is only one arrow in a fairly well-stocked quiver of coercive instruments. Another critical element is intergovernmental cooperation to choke off the terrorists’ money supplies. This will involve taking or freezing assets directly when they can be identified, but also destroying drug crops and blocking the transfers of funding to al-Qaeda and the religious "education" institutions that provide its recruiting base. Such efforts must be systematic and consistent, even if they target states that claim to be our friends -- including some in possession of natural resources vital to our prosperity and power (a fact which, to put it mildly, greatly complicates matters).

The "right intention" element of just war has important implications in this conflict as well. Mere revenge is not a worthy or morally acceptable motive for our military efforts. Classically, the legitimate end of war is a restoration of the status quo ante, the situation as it existed before the conflict commenced. What would that standard mean in a war such as this? Unlike conventional war, it obviously does not mean that the other nation’s tanks are back on their side of the border. Even in that conventional case, there is broad permission not only to restore the literal location of forces, but also to build in security guarantees that make it unlikely they will commit aggression again.

Similar considerations should guide our thinking in this case. It will not be enough merely to eliminate the particular bad actors responsible for these particular acts of terror. To the greatest extent possible, the U.S., in cooperation with other nations, must attempt to build an environment which enables the securities and comfortable routines of the pre-September 11 environment to return to American life. At a minimum, this means increased international cooperation to share intelligence on terrorist groups, to starve them of funding and "safe harbor" from other states, and the will to repress and eliminate them preemptively whenever intelligence is sufficient to warrant such actions.

Space does not permit exploration of the many additional important issues to be considered as we proceed with our "war." The intellectual and practical challenge, however, is clear: to retain the core moral elements of the just war tradition, even as we acknowledge that they must be rethought, adapted and extended to cover our genuinely novel strategic situation.

Hearts and Minds

by Glen Stassen

Glen Stassen teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is author of Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace and editor of Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War.

Two principles of just war theory are reasonable hope of success and that there be a proportionality of means to ends. If the U.S. bombs Afghanistan until or even during Ramadan and winter snows, it will drive success and proportionality far beyond reach. If the aim is to curtail terrorism, then the means must remedy the causes of terrorism, not exacerbate them.

I have been engaged in developing another paradigm for the ethics of peace and war besides that of pacifism and just war theory -- just peacemaking. Just peacemaking theory names practices that prevent war and terrorism. It says we need to ask not only whether the war on Afghanistan is just. We need also to ask what practices of prevention can dissuade people from becoming terrorists.

One practice of just peacemaking -- independent initiatives -- is designed especially for contexts in which distrust and hostility block peacemaking. One side takes a series of visible initiatives to decrease the threat to the other side while not making itself defenseless, and invites reciprocation. The initiatives are announced in advance, and must be carried out on schedule so that they have a chance to decrease distrust. For example, President George W. Bush’s father took the independent initiative to remove nuclear-armed missiles from all U.S. surface ships. Mikhail Gorbachev reciprocated, and additional initiatives yielded dramatic reductions of the nuclear threat. Independent initiatives are needed now if the campaign against terrorism is to succeed.

Afghanistan, already a desperately poor country, has had a four-year drought. It has no food reserves. The bombing and the Taliban response have caused distributors of food aid to leave the country. About 320 tons of food are needed each month to keep millions from starving. The food drops by bombers are mere drops in the bucket. By November 17, when Ramadan begins, snows will block roads and access to the people who are starving.

The first independent initiative required is an immediate bombing pause so food can be trucked in and delivered to the people. We need the initiative of a cease-fire so millions of Afghans can get food before the winter snows come. The second initiative is to continue the bombing pause during the month of Ramadan out of respect for Muslims. The third initiative is for Christians and churches to organize their own fasts during Ramadan, to identify with the hungry of the world, and to pray for peace and initiatives to alleviate the causes of terrorism. The fourth is to encourage Muslims also to meditate on initiatives they can take to persuade people not to become terrorists. These initiatives can begin to elicit a context for antiterrorism rather than more terrorism,

Others will fear that during the cease-fire the Taliban will arrange for the departure of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan, and will promise not to be a haven for such terrorism. Then international support for bombing will fade, and peace might break out without removing the Taliban. Would that outcome be so disastrous as to outweigh the cost of the deaths of Afghans from starvation and war, the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and the turning of millions of Muslims against the campaign to curtail terrorism? Is the aim to vanquish the Taliban, or is it to end terrorism?

We need yet one more set of independent initiatives: Israeli initiatives toward justice for Palestinians. Said Cairo professor Emad Shahin: "Arabs are much more connected -- historically, culturally, emotionally -- to what’s going on in Palestine right now. Afghanistan is a question of harming people we feel are innocent, and there’s much concern about that. But Palestine -- this is totally different. As the situation gets out of control, we can’t take our minds off it" (Los Angeles Times, October 21).

In 1957, Israel, France and Great Britain were mobilizing to attack Egypt and take over the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower had the personal strength to say firmly: Stop. If you make war, the U.S. will stop supplying the oil your economies need. His firmness prevented a tragic conflict, and Israel is now safer because it has peace with Egypt.

President Bush rightly criticized the occupation of Palestinian cities by the Israeli army and urged the creation of a Palestinian state. Will he have the strength to say to Israel: take a series of initiatives to allow a viable, integrally united Palestinian state free of Israel’s troops, or the U.S. will stop supplying military aid to Israel? That initiative could reduce injustice for Palestinians, curtail Palestinian and Israeli violence, make Israel safer, and greatly increase Muslim and Arab support for the campaign against terrorism.

Seeking Justice

by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her books include Augustine and the Limits of Politics. This article is adapted from remarks she made in Washington, D.C., in early October at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. For the full discussion, see www.pewforum. org..

Americans are evoking the language of justice to characterize the U.S. response to the despicable deeds perpetrated against innocent men, women and children on September 11. When they do this, they are tapping into the complex just war tradition. The origins of this tradition are usually traced to Augustine, who grappled in the fourth century with the undeniable fact that Christian teaching challenges any resort to violence. Augustine concluded that wars of aggression and aggrandizement are never acceptable, but that there are occasion when the resort to force may be tragically necessary -- never a normative good, but a tragic necessity

What makes the use of force justifiable? For Augustine, the most potent justification for using force is to protect the innocent. If one has compelling evidence that harm will come to persons unless coercive force is used, the requirement of neighborly love may entail a resort to arms.

Self-defense is a trickier issue for Christians. According to Augustine, it is better for Christians to suffer harm than to inflict it. But are we permitted to make that commitment to non-self-defense on behalf of others? I would say no.

One of the upshots of just war thinking is the rule of noncombatant immunity or discrimination, meaning that noncombatants must not be the intended targets of violence.

A further implication is that a deliberate action of terror against noncombatants is an injury that demands a response, demands punishment. The response should not be to inflict grievous harm on noncombatants, but to prevent further harm from taking place. To respond in such a way, abiding by certain limits, affirms a world of moral responsibility and justice. Not to respond to the attacks of September 11 would be to flee from the responsibility of government.

The Christian tradition tells us that government is instituted by God. This does not mean that every government is godly, but that every government is responsible to God for the common good of its people. As I said to a friend soon after September 11, "We are now reminded of what governments are for." None of the goods humans cherish, including the free exercise of religion, can flourish without a measure of civic peace and security If evil is permitted to grow, good goes into hiding.

What good do I have in mind? The simple but profound good of moms and dads raising their children, of citizens going to work on streets and subways, of ordinary people buying airplane tickets to visit their kids or to transact business, of faithful people being able to attend churches, synagogues and mosques without fear.

This quotidian idea -- tranquilitas ordinis, it’s called in the Christian tradition -- is a great good. It is not, of course, the peace of the kingdom promised in scripture. That peace awaits the end time. But ordinary peace is a good to be cherished. It is a good we charge our public officials with maintaining.

Though the just war tradition permits a limited resort to arms, it rejects an "anything goes" approach to violence. Responding justly to injustice is a tall order. It means risking the lives of one’s own combatants and not intentionally killing noncombatants. Just war means that we do not threaten to kill 5,000 civilians as revenge for the number of our citizens murdered. We put soldiers into combat rather than unleash terrorists.

Many of the rules of just war have been incorporated in various international agreements. During and after a conflict we assess the conduct of soldiers. Did they rape and pillage? Did they operate under rules of engagement? Did they make every attempt to limit civilian casualties?

The course charted thus far by the U.S. has been complex, nuanced, restrained. The use of military force is one part of an overall strategy. The president has repeatedly said that the U.S. response is not aimed at a nation or a way of life, but at those who drag their own people into harm’s way, defame their religion, and perpetrate an ideology that has as its end the deaths of innocent people.

If it abides by just war constraints, the U.S. will put its combatants in harm’s way to punish and interdict those who have put our noncombatants in harm’s way. This is responsible action.

 

Authority And Intention

by James Turner Johnson

This question of "right authority" in the just war tradition seems to me especially important in considering the phenomenon of terrorism. In recent years, most discussions of just war have focused first on the issue of "just cause." This is true, for example in the work of the U.S. Catholic bishops during the 1950s and 1990s as they considered nuclear war. It was true of my own thinking in this period. The reason for this emphasis, I think, was that the notion of "right authority" seemed relatively clear: the right authority was the nation state as recognized by other nation states.

But as Augustine and his medieval and early modern successors knew well, the question of "proper authority" remains a central issue in thinking about a just war, for it is the proper authority -- the government or the leaders -- that has the responsibility of serving the public good. Those who have this authority and responsibility must first determine whether the use of force would satisfy the primary moral requirements of just cause and right intention and the purpose of restoring peace. They then must use prudential reasoning to decide whether even a justified use of force would produce more good than harm, would have a reasonable hope of success, and would be the only course likely to be effective in achieving the justified ends.

In this respect, we need to think harder about what we mean by "right intention." In recent debate, it has usually meant something like "an intention in line with a just cause." But Augustine had something different in mind. When he gives examples of wrong intentions, he mentions things like the lust to dominate, the lust for power, the lust for cruel revenge -- these are the kinds of intentions or mind-sets that we don’t want to have when thinking about restoring justice. But these are precisely the kind of intentions that animated the terrorist attacks of September 11.

As we talk about the just war tradition that developed in the West, we should recognize that it overlaps in important ways with the jihad tradition. The jihad tradition also requires that force be used by the right authority. Historically, for the Muslim community to act, the leader of that community -- the caliph for the Sunnis, the imam for the Shi’ites -- had to authorize the action. Individuals had a responsibility to respond to an attack on Islamic society, but there were stringent restraints on such action. In this context, Osama bin Laden’s issuing of a fatwa (or edict) against the West in 1998 and styling himself a sheikh went against the tradition of the defensive jihad.

The jihad tradition also sets limits on whom one may fight against in a just war. A number of traditions or hadiths associated with Muhammad prohibit killing women and children. Some of these traditions also rule out killing the aged, the infirm and the mentally incompetent. These are exactly the kinds of discriminations we find in the just war tradition and in contemporary international law.

So there is no fundamental clash of cultures here. From both the standpoint of Islam and the standpoint of the just war tradition in the West, the attacks of September 11 were evil and unjust, and there is a justified reason for authorities to respond to them on behalf of the public good.

Rethinking the Death of Jesus: Cross Purposes

Books Reviewed:

Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us. By Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker Beacon, 288 pp.

The Nonviolent Atonement. By Denny J. Weaver Eerdmans, 246 pp.

The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical & Practical Perspectives. Edited by Roger R. Nicole, Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James. InterVarsity, 500 pp.

Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience. By JoAnne Marie Terrell. Orbis, 187 pp.

King, Priest and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement. By Robert Sherman. T&T Clark, 304 pp.

Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus. By Stephen J. Patterson. Fortress, 161 pp.

Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition. By Hans Boersma. Baker, 288 pp.

Is the story of Jesus mainly about his death and a life that leads to it, or is the story of Jesus mainly about his life and a death that flows from it? On one view, it hardly matters: these are just two ways of looking at the same thing. On a more combative view, the difference is as great as night and day. Does the cross belong on the sleeves (and hearts) of Christians, as the glorious core of their faith, or does it belong in the repair shop, in need of drastic repairs, the primary Christian embarrassment for believers and an offense to outsiders?

The disagreement is not over Jesus’ death as a fact. Both sides largely agree about the reality and circumstances of the crucifixion and, for that matter, of the resurrection. At least, the disagreement within one side on these issues is as great as the disagreement between the sides.

No, the conflict revolves around a theology of the cross, a theology that says Jesus’ death is the supreme saving act, and that the equation of guilt, punishment and grace worked out through the execution of the innocent, divine victim in place of a rightly condemned humanity provides the essential sum of Christianity itself.

This theology is composed of many elements in scripture and tradition -- references to Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, ideas of redemptive suffering, and a deep tradition of eucharistic remembrance that Jesus died "for us." These elements appear in all branches and eras of Christian tradition. But the organization of them into a complete substitutionary view of the atonement is much less universal, Such a view has never been prominent in the Eastern Christian church, and it was not the dominant view in the Western church for the first half of its history.

Many think the rise of atonement theology represented a terrible wrong turn, plunging Christian spirituality into a toxic brew of idealized masochism, authorized violence and social domination. In Proverbs of Ashes, two feminist theologians make this case. They make it not with heated rhetoric but through a narrative intertwining their searing personal histories of abuse, depression, ministry and loss with reflections on where Christian beliefs have abetted the destructive forces in their lives and where they have been part of the healing.

Unlike many first-person approaches to controversial issues, the book’s net effect is neither bitter nor dogmatic. The authors’ honesty and vulnerability invite a genuine dialogue. Anyone who thinks there isn’t a problem should start here.

If Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker make a case against atonement in experience, Denny Weaver complements it with a case drawn from history. The Nonviolent Atonement is a full-scale attack on St. Anselm’s and others substitution theologies of the cross, and it also spells out an alternative, which he calls "narrative Christus Victor." The saving work of Jesus is his struggle against and victory over the structural evil powers of this world. Weaver adds "narrative" to the phrase Christus Victor because some might focus this battle entirely on Jesus’ death. Weaver’s point is that the saving work is one continuous story, in which the cross is just one moment.

A Mennonite, Weaver associates the elevation of the cross with the fall of the church. The rise of a theology of God’s redemptive use of punishment goes hand in hand with a church that learns to endorse the military force of a Christian state. His book also includes an impressive review of recent treatments of this topic by feminist, womanist and African-American theologians, perspectives that he weaves effectively into his argument.

If these two books call for a root-and-branch excision of atonement, The Glory of the Atonement is a collection whose writers bring a "don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater" caution. The former writers see the idea of atonement itself as an error. The latter collection see destructive effects sometimes flowing from faulty theological expressions. On the doctrine itself, the introduction quotes Emil Brunner: it is "the Christian religion itself; it is the main point; it is not something alongside of the center; it is the substance and kernel, not the husk."

The essays are careful studies of scriptural texts that bear on the topic and of major theologians who have developed it. The book is a handy way to engage the truly monumental tradition of substitutionary interpretation and a summary of the arguments for its prominence.

Robert Sherman and JoAnne Marie Terrell work carefully in the tangled ground between these two parties. Since criticism of atonement is often made in the name of the oppressed or marginalized, the African-American experience is of particular importance. In Power in the Blood? Terrell patiently works through the place of the cross in the history and faith of the black church.

This is an ambiguous story, for the theology of atonement was at times deployed with an intent or effect of inducing complacency among those in bondage. But at the same time slaves and their descendents passionately appropriated the story of the unjustly crucified Jesus as their story too. Many of them found in it the power they needed to survive, a power that "affirmed their innocence, refuted the claims of white supremacists, sanctified their own suffering and situated them within the cosmic drama as victims-becoming-victors."

If Terrell demonstrates that reality often gives a more complicated verdict than "guilty" or "not guilty" regarding the doctrine of the atonement, Sherman reminds us that from a systematic theological perspective, the doctrine was never meant to stand alone. King, Priest, and Prophet reviews the substitutionary approach to Christ’s death along with other major historical options -- those that see it as an exemplary illustration of God’s love, those that see it as a victory over evil powers. He concludes that the faults of any one are addressed when they are coordinated together, and an explicitly trinitarian theology is the framework necessary to do this. Theology, liturgy or devotion narrowed to the resources or images from only one of these approaches will necessarily be distorted. Someone who wants a map of the entire landscape would do well to start with Sherman’s book and then go on to some of the others listed.

Stepping onto this well-muddied field of discussion is Stephen Patterson. Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and L4fe of Jesus definitely belongs to the atonement-was-a-wrong-turn school. His very thoughtful and readable book contends that the real meaning of Jesus’ death, for the first Christians and for us, is the challenge to live as he lived and taught. He would he happy to summarize that teaching and example in terms of Weaver’s "victory over the powers" -- the powers being understood very concretely as the Roman Empire, with the oppressive social-religious conventions of that time, and the American Empire, with the oppressive social-religious conventions of our time. Jesus pointed a way to an alternative empire of God and demonstrated in his own life that you could live as though you already belonged to it. His death showed that you could follow that path through, without retreat, to the very end. Knowing Jesus had done it, his disciples had hope that they could too.

Patterson is a New Testament scholar. Though the touch of that learning is pleasantly light, he scatters many historical insights along the way. Using three categories (victim, martyr and sacrifice), he marshals early Christian materials under each heading to support his argument, which points followers of Jesus "back to his life -- to his words, his deeds and his fate -- as a life to be embraced as the life, and a fate to call one’s own."

To take just one example, Patterson deftly interprets the treatment of sacrifice in the letter to the Hebrews in the context of practices in the surrounding Roman world. He demonstrates in the process how Christians’ affirmation of Christ’s death as the sole sacrifice amounted to a powerful political statement, since in that culture sacrifice was understood as the very glue that held together the existing social structures. To attach such a view to Jesus’ death was really to confirm the revolutionary practice of Jesus’ life.

The book’s theological reflection on Christ’s death is set in the context of the John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg strand of New Testament scholarship (on which Patterson plays his own variations). If we ask which life of Jesus the death points back toward, it is the life of one who practices open table fellowship, who has a message of divine favor for the least and the outcast, and who gives the Romans and their puppets good reason to suspect that a peasant-worker awakening is under way.

Patterson points out that belief in resurrection or translation into heaven was not uncommon in the hellenistic world, but the expectation was associated with emperors and the like. Jesus was a nobody, a visionary martyred for a cause. His followers believed in him and his cause. Since his cause was just, they believed a righteous God ought to raise him if he fell to his enemies. He deserved to be on the same plane with the Caesars (or higher). The scandalous thing about claiming resurrection for him was not that such a thing should happen at all, but that it should happen to this nobodies’ somebody. The point was not that sins had been removed or that a dead person was alive: it was that Jesus message was right. "This is why, when at last he was killed, they proclaimed his resurrection. They could have done this on the day he died, and probably did."

I don’t know too many New Testament scholars who think the disciples probably proclaimed the resurrection the day Jesus died. One of Patterson’s prime objections to traditional doctrine is that it does not fit with the historical facts as he reconstructs them. But at points his theological proposal seems linked to historical assumptions that are as problematic as any made by traditional theories.

Though most of the book coheres smoothly with the other anti-atonement works noted, Patterson diverges somewhat at the point of Jesus as model. He unequivocally affirms that Christians should embrace Jesus’ fate -- his life and suffering death -- as their own. Some critics regard this response as one of the most destructive features of traditional theology, especially as an ideal propounded to the weak, and take special pains not to commend imitation of Jesus’ fate. In some ways the substitutionary teaching, that Christ has done once and for all what no other need or can do, is less liable to this application than a teaching that puts its weight on Jesus’ example for us.

In contemporary discussions of the cross, the topic of violence is never far from the surface. Patterson is clear that Jesus’ death is the work of an evil empire and that God had nothing to do with it. One of the most consistent criticisms of atonement theologies is that they portray a God who endorses violence (affirms penal suffering as the remedy for guilt) and practices it (God orchestrates Jesus’ killers in the grand salvation plan). Such criticisms typically take it as self-evident that we need to entirely dissociate God from violence. In Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, Hans Boersma boldly questions that assumption.

Boersma views Jesus’ work as an act of recapitulation, in which the incarnate God retraces the path by which our humanity has gone astray and heals and transforms it from the inside. Boersma covers the Christian tradition with the same easy erudition that Patterson covers the biblical context. With the recapitulation theme he draws together the prophetic, priestly and royal dimensions of Jesus’ work in a unity much like that outlined in Sherman’s book. Traditional atonement doctrine is very much a part of that unity for Boersma.

He says that the vision of unrestricted hospitality and total nonviolence is appropriate to our eschatological hope, but is misleading if applied to the historical struggle against sin. The dogmatic rejection of a God in any way soiled by contact with violence is akin to the complaint of a drowning man who insists his rescuer should not get wet.

What is most helpful about Boersma’s book is his insistence that we think carefully about these categories. Any use of force or coercion (physical or nonphysical) that brings some harm or injury to another is violence, he suggests. He notes that Weaver, for one, insists that many non-physical acts of resistance that undeniably bring harm (like economic sanctions or strikes) do not count as violence, while other nonphysical acts that might bring harm (tax policies or cuts in education funding) can be violence. Conversely, some physical coercion that may harm someone (pulling to the ground a child who was about to run in front of a car or forcibly intervening in an attempted suicide) is not counted as violence. Weaver, and others, are particularly concerned to emphasize that nonviolence does not rule out effective and active forms of resistance to evil.

Does this simply ‘amount to excluding anything on our personal list of ‘good force" from violence by definition? Would it be more honest to admit that there is such a thing as redemptive violence, employed at times by faithful people and even by a loving God?

Boersma frames this issue in terms of hospitality. God’s nature and eschatological design both point toward universal hospitality. Indeed, the incarnation is an act of such hospitality, in which God invites and receives all people and their broken nature into the divine life itself. But under the conditions of time and sin, hospitality has an intrinsic dimension of exclusion. It is conditional hospitality

Is the God of the cross the same as the father of the prodigal son? Boersma says yes -- but we have to imagine the shape of hospitality when it goes beyond receiving the already repentant returning child with open arms. What if God had gone to the flu country to find the unrepentant child rather than waiting at home? What kind of hospitality would that be?

At the risk of skewing Boersma’s very dense discussion, I would explain it this way: God’s arms are still open, but much of our current way of life, much that we may even think of as part of ourselves, does not fit within those arms. God loves us as we are, but invites us to be different. At the very least this is the coercion of the parent who says to a grown child: Our house is yours but your drugs and drug-dealing are not welcome here, If you cannot separate yourself from them, you will be separating yourself from us and cannot stay. Such punishment is restorative. It serves the purpose of a fuller hospitality. Not only God’s justice but also God’s mercy requires it. God’s coercion, if we may put it that way, is God’s refusal to be hospitable to our sin.

Yet the unfathomable further step is that if this conditional hospitality results in punishment or exile, God then acts to share that same condition with the child. The cross is not just a concrete illustration of this constant truth. It is also a moment in the historical covenant of God’s relationship with humanity, a moment when judgment is actually rendered on evil, and the pain of that judgment (which includes a separation from God, a nonhospitality) is borne by the incarnate Word.

In a final section of the book, Boersma draws out the implications of his view for the Christian life. He rejects an absolutist form of nonviolence, and argues that short of the eschatological fulfillment Christians themselves must practice a conditional hospitality. This requires a prophetic witness against injustice but also a sober one, which can rule out neither the use of violence nor the expectation of a suffering like that of Jesus.

Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross offers a fresh and independent perspective. But the work is somewhat marred by a rather elliptical pattern of argument. This gives a good deal of texture, but it often leaves the reader groping for clarity on major points. Nowhere is there a full and clear answer given to the problem implicit in the entire project: how exactly is God exercising violence in the crucifixion of Jesus and how (and why) is God exercising it against Jesus? The argument is highly suggestive, but a good deal of that suggestion seems to evaporate when the book’s cover is closed, for want of a firm summary to contain it.

Patterson and Boersma have written two very different but very fine books, the one plainly hoping to replace atonement and the other trying to retrieve it. In that sense they represent the two broad parties to the discussion. Each has its special setting -- Patterson in the Crossan-Borg vein of New Testament criticism, Boersma in the broad tradition of Reformed theology. Beyond the Passion is the easier of the two to pick up cold, while Violence is more demanding of the reader. If one wants to be of two minds about the cross, one could do with both.

Wobegon Poets: A Prairie Poem Companion

GARRISON KEILLOR’S latest book is a collection of poems selected from the ones he has read on his daily five-minute show "The Writer’s Almanac," which airs Ofl public radio. These are poems, he says, that can make people "stop chewing their toasted muffins and turn up the radio,’ The range extends from classics (Shakespeare, Auden, Yeats) to a host of delightful discoveries among contemporary writers such as Hayden Carruth, Raymond Carver, Lisel Mueller and Donald Hall. Keillor is a powerful reciter of varied kinds of poetry, as we discovered when we heard him give a reading in Chicago as part of a recent book tour. That event also gave us the chance to ask him some questions.

What kind of poetry do they read in Lake Wobegon?

Inspirational poems, the sort of poems they tape to the refrigerator door or Mrs. Bunsen uses to fill space in the Lutheran church bulletin. "If I have just this day to live, let it be filled with ecstasy." "Walking toward my death, I give thanks my heavenly God to Thee." That sort of poem. The sort that seems to give a little thrill to the older and devout and that makes the young sophisticates grind their molars.

In school, all the grand old masters of literature are brought out for the children to study and to struggle with, with those dorky Questions for Class Discussion: What rhetorical device does the writer employ when he refers to "poems they tape to the refrigerator door"? In what other ways do poems remind you of food? Did you have breakfast this morning? What sorts of thoughts or feelings do you associate with refrigerators?

Clumsily, with good intentions, the teachers thrust poetry at the children -- Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson. Frost. And, just as in gym class, some children endure it in misery and others get excited.

Do high schoolers in Lake Wobegon really respond to Shakespeare?

My gosh, yes. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments" is a teenage anthem.

"When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes" is a poem that any 16-year-old can understand in a heartbeat. Disgrace is part of the daily life of a high school kid.

Dignity is everything, and pitfalls lie everywhere: you could have a had hair day; your skin could break out in vicious red blemishes, like a leper; your outfit that was so cool yesterday could feel totally wrong today; you could be called on in class to solve a math problem or discuss the Gadsden Purchase or tell the name of Hester’s boyfriend and draw a blank; you could be caught in a lie; you could flirt with someone and be brutally put down.

And in this moment of horror and shame, your thought of a loved one could pull you back from the brink, exactly as Shakespeare says. And he says it with such spiky grandeur and gorgeous language and such a fine poetic arc, the lines rising and arching forward. Yes, they respond passionately to this. Being who they are, solemn and extremely cool people, they won’t say so, but they do, they really do.

Do pastors in Lake Wobegon ever quote poetry in their sermons? If so, is that a good thing? What kind of poetry is it?

Pastor Ingqvist frequently quotes from the psalmist. Not so much from the Proverbist or from the Song of Solomon, which is too easily misread. But the Book of Psalms is a staple of sermons.

Is it a good thing? Probably not. Depends on what’s happening in the sermon, of course, but usually the quotation of poetry is a clear sign that the pastor has floundered and is trying to climb out of the soup. He’s grabbed for a few lines of poetry as a dramatic device, like holding up a sign that says "Profundity Ahead."

Maybe he quotes Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s "Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone," or Emily Dickinson’s "Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed" or Frost’s ‘Some say the world will end by fire, some say by ice." He doesn’t quote Cummings’s "Since feeling is first, who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you." No Oscar Wilde, thank you. No, no, no.

It’s all very innocent, the sermon. Very few people are listening because usually there is so little to listen to. So he could quote almost anybody and it wouldn’t matter. The doors of their attention slammed shut after the first humorous anecdote and the first reference to the scripture reading for the day. It’s like reciting poetry to trees: ahead, it can’t hurt them.

Based on the preaching heard in Lake Wobegon, what books do you think pastors are reading?

They are reading good uplifting books, the sorts of books that one feels One Really Ought to Read. I, for example, am the hither of a four-year-old girl, so I feel I really ought to read books about parenting that make you feel you can make a huge difference in your child’s life by doing the right thing and being a good daddy. (I am thinking about writing a book about techniques of parenting, called It Doesn’t Work.)

So Pastor Ingqvist and Father Wilmer are reading books about Islam and the Middle East and the environment and corporate farming, and mining these books for small inspiring anecdotes. I think they ought to read more fiction and forget about uplift, but I’m not them.

Has Lake Wobegon produced any notable poets, or any infamous ones?

It has produced a number of amateur limericists ("There was a young lady named Iris/ Whose bosom could truly inspire us") and many low satirists who enjoyed doing vulgar things with Marlowe’s "Come live with me and be my love" and some writers of Christmas and birthday verse. Margaret Haskins Durber wrote some celebratory odes years ago that were published in the paper and now I forget what they were about, but I’m sure they were perfectly OK.

But there have been no poets who anybody would tape to the refrigerator.

Does it have a "Christian bookstore" yet?

Lake Wobegon has no bookstore, neither a Christian one nor a pagan one. The ladies of the Lutheran church have a little bookrack in the fellowship room where you can purchase pamphlets of an inspirational nature, but it doesn’t do much business.

The first section of Good Poems is titled "O Lord." They are poems, mostly, of gratitude for sheer existence. Does gratitude seem like the fundamental religious dimension of life?

Yes, indeed. Gratitude is where spiritual life begins. Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for these black slacks and this black T-shirt. Thanks for black, and for other colors. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the wherewithal not to fix a half-pound cheeseburger right now and to eat a stalk of celery instead. Thank you for the wonderful son and the amazing little daughter and the smart sexy wife and the grandkids. Thank you that I haven’t had alcohol in lo! these many months and thank you that it isn’t a big struggle to do without, as I had so feared it might be. Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.

I could go on and on and on. One should enumerate one’s blessings and set them before the Lord. Begin everyday with this exercise.

List your blessings and you will walk through those gates of thanksgiving and into the fields of joy. It is to break through the thin membrane of sourness and sullenness -- though we should be thankful for that too, it being the source of so much wit and humor -- and to come into the light and enjoy our essential robustness and good health.

Are there other categories of "religious" poems you might include if you were to put together another volume?

Yes, I’d put in a section of confessional poems. True confession is extremely rare in poetry, as in life. When a poet pretends to confess, usually he does it in a pretty heroic manner; Forgive me, Lord, that I have foolishly bestowed love on these raving idiots. You seldom hear someone cop to the real basic stuff: Forgive me, Lord, for being this self-righteous prick and walking around with a mirror held up in front of my face. Believe me, Lord, of this stupid self-consciousness, this absolutely insufferable ego. God, it is making me miserable. I lust after recognition, I am desperate to win all the little merit badges and trinkets of my profession, and I am of less real use in this world than any good cleaning lady. I have written reams of high-falutin nonsense and it is nothing but fishwrap and a dog’s biffy. You don’t get this kind of honesty often from writers, and of course it ought to be encouraged.

Scripture tells us to confess our sins to each other, and I wish that the poets I know would do this more often. They could use a little more humility, frankly. We humorists can’t do the whole job alone.

A Joking Matter: And Jesus Laughed

Book Reviews:

Jokes Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, by Ted Cohen. University of Chicago Press, 99 pp.

Two Jews on a Train: Stories from the Old Country and the New, By Adam Biro. University of Chicago Press, 128 pp.

Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, by M. A Screech, Penguin, 328 pp.

The only subjects worth joking about, said G. K. Chesterton, are serious subjects -- like being married or being hanged. On that score, religion should be a rich source of jokes -- provided you take it seriously. Chesterton’s theory helps explain why so many of the jokes and cartoons that cross our desks at the CENTURY are not amusing: they don’t take religion seriously enough. Most seem to regard the church as the venue of juvenile cuteness and the home of long-winded, money-hungry buffoons. If that’s the assumption, then there’s nothing to joke about. Humor arises only in the tension between the sublime and the ridiculous, the serious and the profane.

Shared assumptions are crucial to all jokes. As Ted Cohen points out in his "philosophical thoughts on joking matters," Jokes begin "with an implicit acknowledgment of a shared background," and this commonality sets up the satisfactions of a shared response.

Consider the assumption in this old minister-goes-golfing Joke:

A minister woke up on a beautiful Sunday morning and decided to squeeze in a round of golf before services. St. Peter observed the man headed for the golf course and gave God a nudge. ‘He should be punished for this." God said, "OK, just watch."

The minister proceeded to play the best golf of his life. His club selection was precise, and he hit every shot perfectly He was shooting par for the first time. "I thought you were going to punish him," said St. Peter. "Just watch," said God.

The minister continued to play flawless golf and on the 18th hole he shot a hole-in-one. "What kind of punishment is this complained St. Peter." "Just think about it," said God. "Whom can he tell?"

I recall this joke as very successful, but I suspect it no longer works as well as it did because the assumptions don’t hold. The joke assumes that it is scandalous for a minister to play golf on Sunday morning, and that he would naturally want to conceal his activity. But reverence for the Sabbath and expectations of pastoral piety have waned. Now the minister’s preservice outing is rather unremarkable, and might be regarded as a healthy bit of stress management. Whom couldn’t he tell?

When we laugh at the same thing, Cohen says, it confirms that we share not only the same assumptions but the same feelings about the world. Laughing together satisfies a deep human longing for intimacy.

The intimacy-fostering element of jokes explains why many public speakers, including preachers, like to begin with a few jokes. Their aim is not so much to loosen up the crowd as to establish a connection with the audience. The tactic can backfire, however, if the jokes are so bad or so generic as to reveal that the speaker and listener do not share a particular set of assumptions.

The implied intimacy of jokes also explains why jokes can be deeply alienating. If one finds the assumptions of a joke offensive -- sexist or racist, for example, or simply ignorant -- then one is abruptly thrust out of the community that the joke is attempting to establish.

Perhaps the most important distinction in jokes is between those in which the jokester pokes fun at other people and those in which he pokes fun at himself (or his own group). To put it another way, some jokes establish intimacy at the expense of others, while other jokes do so at one’s own expense.

How many Presbyterians does It take to change a light bulb? Ten. One to change it, and nine to say how much better the old one was.

This Joke can be told among Presbyterians as a way of ruefully acknowledging a shared experience. (Of course, it works just as well with Baptists, Lutherans or virtually any group -- organizational resistance to change being universal -- so on that score the joke is lame.)

How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? Ten. Eight to form the light bulb committee and two to count the votes.

This joke is better insofar as it identifies something more peculiar to the Presbyterian ethos: it relies on a more specific kind of shared knowledge. In any case, when people laugh together at something absurd in their own group, it can be a way of affirming that they belong to it. (As denominational distinctives disappear jokes like these seem to function as away of asserting an otherwise vanishing identity.)

How many United Methodists does it take to change alight bulb?

United Methodists do not have a policy on changing light bulbs, but if you feel called to change a light bulb they will provide resources and support in your journey

This joke has more critical bite; one imagines it being told (by an alienated conservative, say) as a way of poking fun at others, not oneself. That’s even more likely with this one:

How many Christian Scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one. He prays for the light bulb to come back on.

The capacity to include oneself and one’s group in the circle of laughter is a prominent feature of Jewish humor. Jewish jokes are often exquisite exercises in self-critique and rueful self-knowledge. Consider, for example, the one-line classics of Henny Youngman: Why are Jewish divorces so expensive?

Jewish jokes have other distinguishing traits. They tend to be verbally sophisticated (reflecting a highly literate, text-based culture) and they draw on Jews’ experience of being outsiders, often an oppressed minority. Cohen, who devotes a chapter to the topic, suggests that Jewish jokes also replicate patterns of rabbinic debate: stories are used to illustrate a point, and moral inferences are logically drawn from examples. In the jokes, the logic of debate takes a crazy turn:

A man is lying asleep in bed with his wife. She wakes him and says, "Close the window. It’s cold outside," He grunts and turns over.

His wife nudges him again, ‘Close the window. It’s cold outside."

At last he gets up and bangs the window shut, "So now it’s warm outside?"

What’s interesting theologically is the way Jewish jokes tackle evil and suffering -- the most terrifying absurdities of life. Adam Biro, in the preface to his collection of Jewish stories, observes that Jewish Jokes have a way of embracing "all the world’s pain" and "all the world’s wisdom." They exhibit "bottomless despair, joy of living, unspeakable misfortune of being, and also, the pride of being Jewish." The stories he tells bear him out. Here’s one in abridged form:

Moshe was dying. He was old, very old. He had seen much suffering in his life. Golda, his wife, was seated on the edge of the bed wiping his brow. They had lived more that 70 years together.

"Tell me, Golda, do you remember the horrible pogrom in our village in 1905?

"Of course I remember. I was with you through all that."

"Do you remember when the Bolsheviks beat me up in 1918? Were you with me then?

Of course I was with you then, my love."

Were you with me in the Lemberg ghetto?"

Of course, my love, I’ve always been with you, always.

Moshe was silent for a moment, then he looked at his loving wife. "You see, Golda, I think you were bad luck."

Absurd egotism, marital discontent and the ghastly horrors of Jewish history are all part of this joke. But beneath it all, improbably is "joy of living"

Perhaps the best-known Jewish theological joke is this one:

A traveler arrived in a village in the middle of winter to find an old man shivering in the cold outside the synagogue. "What are you doing here?" asked the traveler.

"I’m waiting for the coming of the messiah,"

"That must be an important job," said the traveler. "The community must pay you a lot of money."

"No, not at all. They just let me sit here on this bench. Once in a while someone gives me a little food."

"That must be hard. But even if they don’t pay you, they must honor you for doing this important work."

"No, not at all, they think I’m crazy."

"I don’t understand. They don’t pay you, they don’t respect you. You sit in the cold, shivering and hungry What kind of Job is this?"

"Well, It’s steady work."

This Joke manages both to satirize the community and its beliefs and to affirm them -- through laughter.

The peculiar capacity of jokes to absorb absurdity is theologically significant, Cohen suggests. To laugh at the world’s absurdities implies an "acceptance of incomprehensibility," and this acceptance is a kind of religious affirmation, Such jokes offer a way of being reconciled to the creation and the Creator even as one expresses anger or despair at God’s world.

Cohen finds such laughter in the passage in Genesis where Abraham and Sarah laugh upon learning that Sarah at age 90 will bear a child (to be named Isaac, "he laughs"). If the patriarch and matriarch of the faith can laugh at God’s incomprehensible ways, argues Cohen, then surely such laughter has a theological warrant.

That is not the traditional interpretation of the Isaac story, however. Sarah’s laughter has been generally thought to signify her lack of faith, not her embrace of an unfathomable God. She is scoffing at God’s promises. Genesis 18:13 supports that reading: God seems upset by the laughter, and Sarah denies that she ever laughed.

M. A. Screech, in Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, suggests that the author of Luke’s Gospel had this negative view of Sarah’s laughter in mind when he penned his contrasting account of the annunciation to Mary. Unlike Sarah, Mary greets the news of her unlikely pregnancy with humble acceptance: "Let it be to me according to your word."

Screech reports that the early and medieval church generally took a dim view of jokes and laughter; they seemed inappropriate to the godly life. Church leaders took seriously Paul’s warning in Ephesians 5:4 about engaging in "silly" talk (which the King James Version translates as "jesting"). St. Bernard argued that Paul’s directive ruled out not only lewd or extravagant jokes but jesting of any kind.

In light of the church’s unease with laughter and jokes, Screech is drawn to the way two towering figures of the Renaissance, Erasmus and Rabelais, defended and employed humor. These humanists believed that God’s enemies deserve to be ridiculed, and that humor offers an effective way of pointing out error and showing the truth by contrast. If you can make people laugh at falsehood, they are on their way to rejecting it. A typical target was illiterate priests -- like the one who thought the rubric Salta per ter (‘skip three pages") in the baptismal service meant "Jump thrice over the stone" and proceeded to jump around the church.

Screech’s book is more a set of research notes than a sustained reflection on Christian humor. He shows no interest in the various ways jokes can function in communities, and ho doesn’t comment on the limited range of Erasmus’s and Rabelais’s humor. They are relentlessly didactic: they poke fun at others’ absurdities, but not at their own. Their humor lacks, therefore, the humility and deep humanity one finds in the Jewish Jokes recounted by Cohen and Biro. One might conclude, on the basis of Screech’s book, that Christian humor has been rather humorless.

Screech also ignores the theological issues raised by his provocative title. How have Christian approaches to jokes and humor been defined by the figure of Christ, the definitive model of the godly life? The Christian joke teller, unlike his Jewish counterpart, cannot escape the questions, What would Jesus joke about? Would Jesus employ the scoffing humor of Erasmus? Would he joke at all?

The Gospels are no help on this matter. They do record Jesus’ neat pun on Peter’s name ("and on this petra I will build my church"), and his parables (like the one about a camel going through the eye of a needle) might be said to have a comic dimension, but these are hardly break-up-laughing kinds of jokes.

Questions about whether Jesus laughed and joked have had a subterranean life in the church. Inevitably, they lead to imponderable christological questions. The issues are neatly laid out in an argument between two monks in Umberto Eco’s mystery novel The Name of the Rose:

"John Chrysostom said that Christ never laughed."

"Nothing in human nature forebade it," William remarked, "because laughter, as the theologians teach, is proper to man,

"The son of man could laugh, but it is not written that he did so," Jorge said.

Calling upon Aristotle and theological tradition, Brother William argues that if Jesus was fully human, as the creed claims, then surely he laughed (and joked?). But what incongruities in life would the God-man find to laugh at or joke about? Would he have engaged in witty banter or sardonic asides with his disciples? Would he have laughed at the odd habits of the gentiles? What kind of laughing and joking is worthy of the Messiah? The more one ponders that question, the more theologically shrewd Brother Jorge’s reply appears: Christ was fully capable of laughing, but he didn’t do so.

Some modern supporters of Brother William’s view can be found at the "Jesus laughing" Web site (www. Jesuslaughing.com), which promotes a portrait of a heartily laughing Jesus, available on notecards and T-shirts. The site includes testimonials from people who have been edified by this image of a laughing rather than sorrowful Christ. The apparent aim of the portrait (and the organization) is to celebrate Jesus’ earthy humanity and his joy in living, an aspect of Jesus otherwise obscured by tradition.

But the theological difficulties of this effort surface quickly. The scripture verse at the top of the Web site is Psalm 2:4, "He who sits in the heavens laughs." The "Jesus laughing" people seem unaware that this psalm refers to a very particular kind of laughter -- God’s derisive laughter at human pretensions (the next line is "the Lord has them in derision"). Such divine laughter at humans expresses precisely the opposite of the earthy humanity the "Jesus laughing" folk have in mind. After all, they want to underscore Jesus’ solidarity with humankind, not his distance from it.

As the Jewish Jokes so wonderfully illustrate, it is in their solidarity with human failures and absurdities that jokes reach their profoundest dimension. The church has always maintained, on the basis of scripture, that Christ’s solidarity with humankind was complete -- that he knew thirst, loneliness, despair and death. It is not too much to say that Jesus encountered on the cross the incomprehensibilty of the world.

So the question arises: Could Jesus have responded to his destiny with laughter? Could he have met the absurdities of life not only with prayers and tears, faith and obedience, but with a joke -- a joke filled with all the world’s pain and all the world’s wisdom? Could Jesus have laughed with the Father at the unlikeliness of the Son’s mission? Or engaged in some gallows humor with the disciples? (Something ripe for a Marx Brothers routine: Do you believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.) The idea may verge on blasphemy, but the doctrine of the incarnation prevents us from ruling it out.