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What to Say About Hell

Hell is talked about cautiously, if at all, in mainline churches. Yet the notion of a divinely ordained place of punishment for the wicked after death is deeply embedded in the Christian imagination. How should we think and talk about hell? Why don't we talk about it? We asked eight theologians to comment.

The doctrine of universal salvation, often simply taken for granted, is being defended afresh on biblical as well as philosophical grounds. This very defense is a testament to the importance of taking hell seriously, and shows a clear recognition that universal salvation cannot be casually assumed as a matter of course for anyone who respects the authority of scripture and the tradition of the church. At the same time, the doctrine of conditional immortality, as an alternative to the traditional doctrine of hell, has gained a number of defenders, particularly on biblical grounds.

It is a noteworthy that much of this debate is occurring in the more evangelical and conservative segments of the church, segments noted for taking a high view of the authority of scripture. All of this is very much as it should be for it is simply impossible to take seriously orthodox Christian doctrine and not have a lively, indeed passionate, interest in the issues of heaven and hell. While there may have been periods in which Christians were preoccupied with the afterlife to the neglect of this life, our age is not one of them. We have been shamed by Freud, Marx and Feuerbach into thinking that concern with the afterlife is a childish fantasy that is not worthy of the attention of mature, responsible persons. And in buying into this shame, we have trivialized both the gospel and our own lives

What is ultimately at stake is the extraordinarily dramatic choice of whether we shall embrace the love, joy and peace that abides forever in the Trinity and is offered to us, or whether, against all reason, we shall reject it in favor of the illusory appeal of sin. One of the things that makes the doctrine of hell incredible to many people, and is at the heart of current defenses of universalism, is the perception that the choice of hell is simply inconceivable. Following the Platonic notion that the choice of evil is simply a misguided choice of good, all prodigals must eventually have their illusions shattered by the stench of the pigpen and return to the Father.

By contrast, the doctrine of hell aligns with Kierkegaard's insistence that it is possible for a person to be decisively shaped by the choice of evil--though whether such a being is still a person in the strict sense may be debatable. We are truly persons only when we relate properly to the trinitarian God and other persons who submit to his love.

How to teach and preach hell is a difficult question. When I am asked this, I usually refer people to C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, which does a masterful job of depicting with remarkable psychological realism the sort of choices that constitute the choice of hell. Ghosts from hell take a bus ride to heaven, but it is not heaven to them because of the current state of their character. The astonishing thing is that most of the ghosts prefer to return to hell rather than embrace the joy offered in heaven.  --Jerry Walls, who teaches at Asbury Theological Seminary

 

Hell is a nonnegotiable item of Christian vocabulary. It has scriptural roots, it is there in the earliest creeds, and it has been a staple of Christian preaching and art since almost the beginning. To speak of hell is to speak primary Christian language: the language of confession, of prayer and of hymnody, a language in which fear, hope, sin and grace are inchoately intertwined.

To abandon this sort of talk, as some Christians recommend and some attempt, is a strange and sad form of self-hatred, like that of those who mutilate themselves in an attempt to see what it would be like to live without arms or legs. The stumps can still be wiggled; there'll be those phantom pains where the lost limbs once were; but once the knife has cut deep enough the body will no longer do what it once could and what the lure of health draws it to. Just so, the fabric of Christian thought without hell is rent, damaged, no longer the seamless white garment with which we Christians have been uncomprehendingly gifted.

It's worth noting that although the Christian tradition has been rich in philosophical and theological speculative specifications of what such talk means, and still richer in poetical elaborations of its connotations, it's been chaste in formulating doctrine about hell. The Catholic Church, for example, in whose passionate embrace I delight, has very little developed hell-doctrine, teaching almost nothing deride about who is in hell, whether anyone is, what it's like to be there and so on. This is a good thing: no developed eschatology's details are such as to command the assent of any Christian. We have, then, the unavoidability of hell-talk, together with the speculations and imaginations it prompts. But about the topic itself we know almost nothing.

Or perhaps we do, even though doctrine about it is rightly undeveloped. One thing I'm sure I know is what hell is like. And I'm sure that you know it too, and that only a half-willed blindness can make you think otherwise. It's this matter--hell's fore-shadowings in this life, its agonizingly dusty taste on the tongue, its melody-destroying disharmonies trailing off into endless silence--to which I'd like to see preachers and teachers pay more attention. Hell, formally speaking, is that despairing condition in which separation from God seems to be final and unending; in it, there is no faith, no hope, no love--only the agony of abandonment, the edgeless desert of dissimilitude to which you know you do not belong but from which you can see no exit other than the attempt at self-destruction.

This you know, and have known since birth. It is the condition of the child separated from the mother and not finding her, and the despair of that hell is real to the child even if it occurs in the warmth of a loving home and does not last long--so much the more if it occurs at the hands of torturers and killers. It is the choking dry-as-death hopelessness of the adult whose idols have failed and who can, whether for now or for ever, see nothing beyond them. It is, in short, the condition natural to humans in this fallen world, a world so broken by sin that the most natural response to it is despair.

It doesn't do to skip lightly over this truth, the truth of hell's obviousness and closeness. If we, as Christians, do that, the gospel of grace is emptied and turned into a lie whose comfort is nugatory, like that of an empty chocolate Easter egg. We have something more important to say than that, but we can say it only if we both recall and talk about the reality of hell.  --Paul Griffiths, who recently joined the faculty of Duke Divinity School

 

Gehenna, the term often translated as hell in the New Testament, refers to the valley of Hinnom (GeHinnom) southeast of the city of Jerusalem. It was the site for the cult of Moloch, an idol represented by a bull, into whose fiery arms little children were thrown to be offered as sacrifice. According to rabbinic tradition, the pagan priests would sound cymbals and beat drums to buffer the screams of the burning children from their mothers and fathers. After Josiah's reformation the cultic place was destroyed, and it became a landfill for disposal of the waste of the city and for the carcasses of animals and executed criminals. Fire was set to burn the waste. The imagery of hell as a lake of fire is associated with the forgotten cries of the innocent and the burning waste of the city. More vividly than the idea of Hades or Sheol, used to describe the underworld where the souls of the dead dwell, Gehenna evokes images of hell of consummate literary quality as in Dante's description of the place in which all hope must be abandoned. Hell is no waiting room.

From the place that it was, hell became a trope to describe a condition of utter despondency where hope is no longer a companion. Condemnation to hell is comparable to an exile from where the departed has no longer the resort to return, has not even recollection of what was home. Even better said is the poignant description of those who descend to Sheol in the book of Job: "their places know them no more" (7:10). That one's place is the subject of knowledge reveals hell as radical forgetfulness even of that which is most familiar, a place of no return, of no re-collection. But this forgetfulness is not the obliteration of memory; instead, memory is frozen, and the deeds of the past are hardened and have no future. All that has gone before are items no longer collectible. From a place of condemnation it becomes a place of closure from where there is neither retrieval nor redressing.

Yet, in a paradoxical way, for the Christian there is a hope against all hope. As it is confessed in the Apostles' Creed: God in Christ descended into hell. That nothing is out of God's reach, even the depths of hell, is what affords hope, the promise of life. All hope has indeed been abandoned. But this hope that defies all hope becomes the gateway to heaven. However, this can be known only if one has been there, in hell, to meet the Christ and hear the promise, the one made to the thief dying by Jesus' side in the horror of Golgotha: "Today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). The promise is elicited by a simple petition: "Remember me." This remembrance unlocked the ultimate gates of the domain of evil and included that criminal in the last petition of the Lord's Prayer: "Deliver us from evil"--the daring, prayerful supplication that evil, the devil and hell be no more.     --Vitor Westhelle, who teaches at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

 

Hell is an integral part of the Good News. If there wasn't something to be saved from, why would we need a Savior? One is saved not only for something good, but also from something bad. Slaves are saved from captivity for liberty. The ill are saved from sickness and death for health and life. Even politicians promise to save us from present difficulties for a better society.

It would be unhealthy nostalgia for someone saved to obsess about the past; one should focus on growing stronger in renewed liberty and health. However, that new life fittingly includes gratitude proportionate to former misery and present joy, which requires consciousness of both.

Hell's gospel character is especially revealed in Christ's descent into hell: after Christ died, his human soul (united to the Word) descended to the souls of the holy men and women who had died before him. As originally professed, hell could refer to any abode of the dead that was not heaven. Since our relation to God in this life determines our fate after death, those who had died loving God prior to Christ's opening of heaven were not in the same condition as those who had not. Thus hell in the original profession is plural. It implies Christ's "preaching" to the dead in their different "prisons": the announcement of freedom to the holy souls and of the truth about God to those who had rejected him. That original plurality suggests why major controversy about the doctrine erupted only in the 16th century, when noncreedal uses of hell were increasingly understood in the singular and to refer only to eternal punishment, as in modern English.

Christ's descent shows how hell is integral to the Good News, because it encapsulates the message of salvation: in virtue of Christ's death on the cross, we may be saved from eternal separation from God and for eternal communion with him. But there are these two, communion and separation, and which will be our ultimate fate depends on our separation from God or communion with him in this life. We may sometimes oscillate between the two as we sin grievously or repent sincerely. Yet Christ's descent reveals the great hope we have in him: that is, similarly to the holy souls who awaited him then, if by his grace we now persevere in believing in him, keeping his commandments and desiring his return, we shall likewise someday see him coming to bring us into his heavenly glory!

Thus Christ's descent reminds us that God truly became man and died a human death, his body going to the tomb and his soul going to the realm of death. It reminds us how he is our Savior, what he saves us from and what he saves us for. Children can easily learn these truths from the vibrant traditional Christian artwork of Christ's descent, while the rest of us can also deepen our appreciation for our moral freedom and the friendship to which Christ invites us.   --Alyssa Pitstick, who teaches at Hope College

 

Do you believe in hell?" Believe it or not, I am sometimes still asked that question. My first temptation is to be flip, answering in corollary profane fashion to what someone answered when asked, "Do you believe in infant baptism? "--he answered, "Believe in it! Hell, I've seen it!" So I am tempted to say, "Do I believe in hell? Hell, I've seen it!" I've seen hell in our world of incessant warfare and killing, in the death of innocent children, in the fire and ice of alienation across generations and in marital breakups, and when seeking souls testify to their experience of the silence or absence of God. Are my questioners satisfied with such a true answer?

My second response is not flip, but it reflects suspicion. Why, given the range of creeds and confessions to which I willingly and consistently subscribe and which I confess, would this one ever be selected as a test of orthodoxy? Longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer nailed this point in The True Believer: "Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith." Is ardent faith, as in "faith in Christ and God's love," the motivator of such a question or is the inquiry spurred by an interest in nailing the person questioned or nailing down the borders of the faithful community?

That aside, I do believe that questions about the status of hell in Christian belief can be in place. Some years ago I gave a lecture titled "Hell Disappeared, No One Noticed: A Civic Argument." Historian Arthur Mann and I long ago threatened to write about the disappearance of hell in the piety of most modern Catholicism (and Protestantism?) as a subtle but epochal event.

The question of hell relates to themes of divine judgment, "the wrath of God," the calling to account and the like. Loading up those themes with this glamorous, colorful, mythosymbolic, ever-changing (also within the canonical scriptures) envisioning, so subject to caricature and so useful for terrifying children, does not advance belief in the God revealed as a God of love. Does it advance morality? I prefer the piety of the St. Bernard tradition. In a vision an angel announces that she is going to torch the pleasures of heaven and quench the fires of hell, so people will start loving God for God's own sake.

I have a test, when pressed. Take the presser to dinner, see to it that a candle is lit, and ask the guest to put his or her finger in the tiny flame for ten seconds. "Are you crazy?" No, just testing. Now picture your whole body in it for ten seconds and then forever. If you still want to press me, I'll say: "If you believe that torment will happen to unreached Hindus and your friendly neighborhood unbeliever or lapsed Catholic, why are you so inhumane, so selfish, that you are spending an extra hour beyond necessity to eat or chat? Get out of here. Pass out tracts. Board planes to reach the heathen. Don't tell me you have dealt with the physical pain of that hell and can keep your sanity."

Hellfire and brimstone preachers can't digest their own message. Those who really want to save souls or spread divine love--even those who use belief in hell as the orthodoxy test--are the ones who teach us to love God for God's own sake.   -- Martin E. Marty, who recently wrote The Mystery of the Child

 

From the gospel we have heard the absolute word of hope. We have heard that Christ conquered death and despoiled hell. We have seen the icons of Christ crushing hell’s jaws; we have heard him call out to Adam, "Sleeper awake, I did not create you to be a prisoner of hell!" Why, then, a student once asked me, do Christians continue to believe in hell? Shouldn't hell be downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm, from Gehenna to Sheol?

My first instinct was to agree. Child of my age, I find hell baffling and repugnant. I'm against capital punishment, against corporal discipline. Every motherly instinct tells me that children should be reared by hugs, not threats. If I held God to the same standard, I'd be a universalist or an annihilationist. Nonetheless, I had to tell my student that far from being abolished by the gospel, hell--eternal hell, with the undying worm and unquenchable fire--is a Christian distinctive.

A look at the world's religions suggests, moreover, that it's a distinctive that makes a difference. Though few religious traditions have devised more nightmarish hells than Buddhism, Buddhist hells are as temporary as Buddhist heavens; one relapses from them into other births, until at last the stain of individuality dissolves. Nor are Buddhist hells like Christian purgatory; for the holy souls in purgatory are already sealed for heaven, experiencing, through their pains, a blessedness from which they cannot fall away.

Hence the Christian distinctive: individuality is for keeps. If there is a blessedness from which one cannot fall away, there is also a cursedness from which the truly depraved, who say no to blessedness with all their being, cannot be forced to depart. Christ has robbed death of its sting and deprived the devil of many a tasty meal, but hell persists, we are told, because freedom of the will requires it and justice demands it. It wasn't just "abandon hope" that Dante saw inscribed over the entrance of hell, but "justice moved my maker on high; divine power made me, wisdom supreme, and primal love."

There's no subject on which I'm more skeptical of my own--and our common--opinion. Of course we'd prefer to think that divine mercy will empty hell and set free every human captive, if not every last demon or imp. Of course we think ourselves well rid of the carking, soul-destroying guilt and judgmentalism that hell once evoked. But are we really serious? Abolish hell, and see how salvation dims down. Strike the "Inferno" from the Divine Comedy, and see how a blandness overtakes even "Purgatory" and "Paradise," turning the cosmic drama of sin and salvation into a spiritualist soap opera of inevitable progress. Abolish hell, and a host of smaller obsessions will fill the gap. For our fears we will always have with us, whether of hell or of comparative trifles. Keep hell in view, and the trifles will fade as the promise of salvation burns bright.   --Carol Zaleski, who teaches at Smith College

 

I have a vivid memory of an evangelistic event I attended as an undergraduate. The slick multimedia presentation of the gospel focused extensively on the torments of hell. At the conclusion, we were urged to trust in Jesus in order to escape this fiery fate. I was appalled. It was emotionally manipulative and designed to scare people into faith. The gospel was presented as little more than an escape from future agonies. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that hell has fallen out of favor with many Christians.

However, in wrestling with this question over the years, I have come to think that in spite of the distortions of hell in some traditions, eradicating references to hell is shortsighted and has troubling consequences for the shape of our witness to the gospel. To be sure, there is much about Christian teaching on hell that is subject to critical scrutiny. But in its most basic form, it serves as a warning concerning the judgment of God against evil, injustice and callousness in the face of human need and brokenness. It is a reminder of the righteousness and justice of a God who stands over against the principalities and powers that are characterized by the oppression of others and indifference to their suffering. It bears witness to the hope that in due course God will put things right and evil will be justly condemned and vanquished.

The resources for recovering these aspects of Christian teaching on hell are close at hand, residing in the Gospels, which repeatedly portray Jesus speaking about judgment and hell. While the presence of these texts should work against the elimination of hell from the lexicon of Christian witness, the pressing question concerns the communication of this idea in the present cultural moment.

I suggest that we appropriate the idea of hell as a witness to the seriousness with which Jesus Christ enters into solidarity with those who are poor and disenfranchised. In the midst of the tournament of narratives that compete for allegiance in our society and in our souls, Jesus calls us to join him in his mission of proclaiming good news to the poor, setting the oppressed free and seeking those who are lost. We participate by providing food for the hungry, water for the thirsty, clothing for the naked, hospitality to the stranger, companionship to the imprisoned and comfort to the sick, and so enter into solidarity with Jesus himself.

Narratives that set themselves against the poor, the helpless, the oppressed and the marginalized are opposed to the mission of God in Jesus Christ. Christian teaching on hell reminds us that at the consummation of all things, when the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, these inhumane narratives will be consigned to the "eternal fire," where they will be banished once and for all. What of those who have chosen to participate in them?    --John R. Franke, who teaches at Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania

 

Julian of Norwich scoffed at the devil. In her received Revelations she spoke of sin becoming naught. And she saw Christ's profligate blood bleeding and blurring together the carefully separated strata of the 14th-century body politic--the blue-blooded English lords and ladies, who by custom received the Eucharist first, were swept up into the tide rushing from the flowing side of Christ. They become mixed, miscegenated, dare I say Irish or Negro. The Evil One, who carefully teaches us, before it's too late, to keep 'em separated (choose your generation's lyrics on the matter), has been caught and shown for what he is. In Julian's vision, the devil is a fraud. Satan is caught hawking the pristine, pricey and paltry markers of which class and which race and which school.

I've taught Julian's Revelations for nearly a decade. Recently I asked students to read her alongside Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Scoff at the devil? Declare that sin is naught? By what possible angle can evil be viewed as vanquished? Morrison names the world as nothing less than hell. Her novel evokes seething anger at the kaleidoscope of slights, slashes and assaults suffered in Lorain, Ohio. As a colleague of mine puts it, in this novel the bluest of eyes, the whitest of pedigrees, the ideal of Dick and Jane and Mother and Father in the very pretty house grind their way down through the African-American characters to crush the body of the girl-child Pecola Breedlove. Pecola becomes for little girls seeking not to be rendered as naught that one child who ensures their beauty and safety. "All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her."

Jennifer Beste's writings on trauma have prompted me to ask a question that demands of Christian ethics a full stop at the matter of hell: What if one of God's own beloved may be so violated as to vitiate her own capacity to opt for God? What if the grinding prism of violence comes so to bear on a body as to render the mind incapable of receiving grace? I must ask another full-stop question: What if one's own legitimacy and beauty and promise have been won through the machinations of the malevolent one?

In her preface to The Bluest Eye, Morrison demands that the reader be not merely touched, but moved. This is my only hope: to be moved by God into that Christ-formed participation that risks such pain, such confession, such rage that it risks coming so close to the devil that laughter may be impossible. Teaching these two texts together, I find myself looking at hell and praying, lamenting, raging that God must hold Pecola, and all our daughters, in God's own pierced palm. --Amy Laura Hall, who teaches at Duke University

Garrison Keillor and Culture Protestantism

In mid-June Garrison Keillor departs his weekly public radio program "A Prairie Home Companion" and heads for Denmark, with the hope of returning to the obscurity necessary for leading the literary life. He’s scarcely leaving too soon for that. His recent career has vividly demonstrated how American culture’s omnivorous appetite for novelty can transform a counterculture product into a mainstream industry. Through his program, and his recent best-selling book, Keillor, the self-styled "shy person," has become a celebrity, and the mythical town of Lake Wobegon, "the town that time forgot," has been handsomely marketed with T-shirts and baseball caps.

One could sense the old Lake Wobegon beginning to slip away in the fall of 1985 when Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days hit the best-seller list. Keillor, who once described himself as a man "in the wrong place at the wrong time" (he was referring to his preference for the medium of radio) , began cropping up in all sorts of magazines and even on "Nightline," where he was expected to offer samples of folk wisdom (something he was not at all happy about, one was glad to see) Meanwhile in St. Paul, the local press was giving Keillor celebrity treatment of another kind, investigating and writing about his personal life. While he feuded with the press in a series of rather nasty and tedious radio sketches, the show, which had already lost regular musicians Butch Thompson and Peter Ostruschko, was losing some of its charm. It’s a wonder he stayed with it as long as he did.

Keillor was never, of course, a simple rural storyteller who happened to be overtaken, despite his best efforts, by commercial success. He began as a highly ambitious writer, and his one foot remains firmly planted in the sophisticated world of New Yorker-style humor. His early pieces for that magazine, collected in Happy to Be Here, reveal his mastery of the New Yorker’s brand of parodic humor, practiced most famously by S. J. Perelman. The point of this largely pointless humor is to string together cliches and banalities, ingeniously demonstrating the emptiness of modern life and speech and the author’s evident superiority to both -- a superiority the reader delights in sharing. Keillor’s attempts in this genre are remarkable mostly for their gentleness: he conveys an unexpected fondness for both the verbal conventions and the people he is mocking.

It is this gentleness and fondness that have flourished in his treatment of Lake Wobegon. Keillor displays a genuine reverence for his material -- material culled largely from his own past. Rather than using his acute grasp of manners and speech to demonstrate their fatuity, he asks us to acknowledge beneath and within the clichés and banalities of small-town life -- including that of the church -- enduring and even noble sentiments. It is the charity behind the satire that makes Keillor’s humor so winning.

Given the wide coverage Keillor has received in the religious press, and the many churchly greetings one hears aired over PHC’s announcement time ("To Pastor Bob in Waukegan: We’ll be home in time for choir practice") , it’s clear that Keillor’s show has had a wide following among churchpeople. Part of that appeal is simply that the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon live within the orbit of the church. Indeed, they live, as hardly anyone lives anymore, in Christendom. Covered-dish suppers, Sunday-school picnics, church-council debates, Pastor Ingqvist’s sermons -- these are staples of life in Lake Wobegon and so, naturally, of Keillor’s humor. In short, Keillor satirizes the church from the inside.

Those within the church know best of all how open to satire it is. The church is, one might say, inherently comic, for it makes divine and universal claims in very human and particular ways -- a discrepancy evident to anyone who cares to look. It matters, however, what one makes of that discrepancy. In Keillor’s case, we sense that he looks at the discrepancy from both sides, appreciating not only how earthen a vessel the church is, but how precious is the treasure it’s trying to hold. The gentleness of Keillor’s voice thus has religious significance: he finds the church humorous precisely because he grants that it is deadly serious. As G. K. Chesterton once put it, the test of a good religion is whether you can joke about it.

One of Keillor’s classic stories about the absurd genuineness and the genuine absurdity of religious life concerns the touring evangelist who brings her "Gospel Birds" show to Lake Wobegon. The show features a reenactment of the Noah’s ark story, in which birds, dressed up as other animals, enter the ark two by two. After this, four parakeets play on tiny bells the hymn "I sing because I’m happy/I sing because I’m free/For His eye is on the sparrow/And I know He watches me." "It was lovely," comments Keillor, "and in two-part harmony." This is a nice spoof of the bizarre and tasteless entertainment that characterizes some religious subcultures. But in Keillor’s account, tastelessness is only part of the story. The evangelist asks the congregation, "with every eye closed and every head bowed, to sit and contemplate God’s great love for us in our lives. And when one of our birds lands on your shoulder, I want you, if you feel that blessing in your heart, to stand up where you are." Keillor goes on:

Well, the Lutherans of Lake Wobegon are kind of a reserved bunch. They have closed their eyes and bowed their heads in church before, but it lent a certain excitement to meditating knowing that in a moment a bird would land on your shoulder, and wondering which one it might be. So they were a little nervous, and some people were peeking. But then they got down to the business of meditating, and their eyes were closed and their heads were bowed, and Yes, as they sat and thought, thoughts did come to mind of divine providence in their lives, of a great love that seemed to abide in the world and that upheld them and supported them as if by invisible hands . . . and more than that, a presence of grace in the world, that lifts all of us up. And as they sat and meditated, one by one each of them felt a slight weight on the shoulder, as if someone tapped them, and then they did feel blessed. And one by one they stood up where they were, until everyone was standing. It was a stunning moment. And they all felt very touched by this, not only touched but filled by this miraculous event.

The most absurd, the most laughable, the most narrow forms of religious culture can nevertheless be -- or so Keillor’s voice is able to convince us -- effective channels of real grace.

Keillor’s theology of culture is eminently comforting. It assures us that the cultural forms with which our faith is bound up, and which our cosmopolitan and critical minds tell us are historically contingent, are adequate -- are rather marvelous in fact. Keillor adopts what we might call a "Christ of Culture" posture; he is an elegiac poet of Culture Protestantism. As those terms remind us, Keillor’s remembrances of Lake Wobegon appeal to a certain complacency in our faith, a nostalgia for the days when religion and culture went hand in hand and did not need to be too closely distinguished. Indeed, one would not have to work very hard to show that the "grace" Keillor refers to is a generic grace, one that come from simply living the common life in Lake Wobegon. That’s why Keillor’s meditations can appeal to those well outside the church, who regard the religious life Keillor describes so intimately as simply one more quaint part of folk culture, to be savored in the same way one enjoys Judy Collins singing "Amazing Grace."

But it is the function of humor, after all, to comfort us, to reconcile us for the moment to the discrepancies with which we must live. Humor depends, in fact, on discrepancies. Chesterton again: only something that is dignified can be undignified. That is why Keillor’s humor has had an authentic religious resonance for Christians who are acutely aware of the tension between faith and culture. We know that the gospel relativizes all cultural forms; yet we also know that faith is always embodied in a particular culture. By embracing both points, Keillor’s humor reconciles us, even encourages us, to live with that tension, confident that if grace can come through the "Gospel Birds," it can come through other mundane efforts as well. In any case, we have a faith serious enough to joke about.

Looking for the Mainline with Roof and McKinney

Book Review: American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future, by Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney (Rutgers University Press, 279 pp.’ $27.00; paperback, $10.00)

The recognition that the term "mainline churches" is something of an anachronism now extends to the funny pages. In the past two decades, while conservative churches have experienced steady growth, mainline denominations have watched their numbers level off and decline. United Methodists have lost 2 million members in the past 20 years, and Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, Lutherans and the United Church of Christ have also incurred significant losses. There are as many members of the Assemblies of God as there are Presbyterians. So where is the mainline?

Commentators on these developments are invariably influenced by where their own train sits in relation to the old mainline. Conservative Protestants are inclined to see the mainline’s decline as the inevitable accompaniment of a palsied faith: having diluted their theology and embraced a worldly agenda, mainline churches no longer offer a vibrant alternative to secular life. Mainliners, for their part, can offer this satisfying explanation: while conservative churches have offered people a simplistic faith. shrewdly aligned with the American ethos of individual success and self-fulfillment, mainline churches have courageously taken unpopular stands, confronting head-on the diversity of American life, the depth of our social problems and the intellectual challenges to belief.

Scenarios of this sort have some plausibility, but mostly to those who construct them. History rarely provides morally unambiguous tales about the rise and fall of any institution, including religious ones. One of the strengths of American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future, by Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney (Rutgers University Press, 279 pp.’ $27.00; paperback, $10.00) is that it shuns such tendentious arguments. Roof, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, and McKinney, professor of religion and society at Hartford Seminary, are interested not in issuing a jeremiad or an apology about the state of American religion, but in ascertaining just how the landscape of American religion is being altered.

To map that landscape, Roof and McKinney divide Americans into eight religious families: liberal Protestants (Presbyterians, Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ) , roughly 9 per cent of the population; moderate Protestants (United Methodists, Lutherans, Disciples, American Baptists, Reformed) , 24 per cent; conservative Protestants (including Southern Baptists, Churches of Christ, Nazarenes, Pentecostal and holiness groups, and evangelicals and fundamentalists) , 16 per cent; black Protestants, 16 per cent; Catholics. 25 per cent; Jews, 2 per cent; those of other faiths (such as Mormons, Christian Scientists, Unitarians) , 8 per cent; and those of "no religious preference," 7 per cent. Though all these groups are treated to some extent by Roof and McKinney, their special concern is with the state of mainline Protestantism.

As the authors present it, the demography of religious change can be rather simply parsed. Churches gain and lose members in two ways: by the natural process of births and deaths, and by luring people from -- or losing them to -- other churches or the ranks of the unchurched.

Age cohorts and fertility rates may not be terribly edifying topics, but as Roof and McKinney show, they are crucial for understanding the plight of the mainline, Liberal and moderate Protestants suffer from an aging population. The mean age of UCC members, for example, is over 50; 41 per cent of Methodists and 42 per cent of Disciples are 55 or over. Though 40 per cent of Americans are in the 18-to-34 category, only 21 per cent of UCC members, and 28 per cent of Methodists, fall into this group. Young adults are far better represented in conservative denominations. The graying of the churches in relation to conservative Protestants means two things, both of them unconducive to growth: more members are dying off and. with fewer members in the childbearing years, fewer new members are being born. The problem is compounded by the fact that conservatives have larger families (conservative women average 2.54 children, moderates 2.27 and liberals 1.97) With fewer people having fewer children, the mainline’s growth potential is weak and can only get weaker.

If this sort of demography is destiny, as Roof and McKinney contend, mainliners must regard it with a certain amount of philosophic detachment. After all, the graying of America is a general phenomenon largely tied to nonreligious factors. Traditionally, as groups in America have risen in social status, become better educated and more urbanized (and in recent years as more women have entered the work force) , their birthrates have gone down. Catholics’ birthrates, for example, have plummeted in the past two decades until they are indistinguishable from those of Protestants -- in this case despite a religious prohibition against contraception. One can at least speculate that similar patterns will affect conservative Protestants in the decades ahead.

The weakness of the liberal position shows up in data on people leaving the church altogether. Liberals pick up 2 per cent of their members from the unchurched but lose 8 per cent to that group, for a net loss of 6 per cent. All religious families lose in their transactions with the secular world ("no religious preference" is by far the biggest winner in the switching game) but liberals lose the most. In light of this fact, and of liberals’ strength in interfamily switching, Roof and McKinney conclude that liberal Protestantism’s real competition is "not the conservatives it has spurned but the secularists it has spawned.’’ Liberal churches have trouble stopping the secular drift of their own members. particularly those younger members who would otherwise be supplying the liberal Protestants of the future.

Adding to liberal woes is what Roof and McKinney discern as the poor "quality" of the members they do attract. Those switching into liberal churches tend to be older people, which adds to the original demographic problem. More significantly, these people tend to be less active churchgoers than the ones switching out. So even in the category where liberals gain members, they end up losing: the members they lose are "better" than the ones they attract. The far-from-impressive picture of liberal churches that emerges from these data is that they are inhabited by aging, not very committed members, many of whom are headed out the church door.

It would seem that Doonesbury exhibited uncanny brilliance in picking as the exemplar of the mainline an aging radical like Scot Sloan (originally modeled on William Sloane Coffin in his days as Yale chaplain) At least as Roof and McKinney see it, the very openness of the mainline churches to the ferment of the ‘60s -- the fact that the ‘60s experience took place inside these churches -- has been an institutional liability. For "the commitment to personal freedom and choice, individual autonomy, and personal quest as well as tolerance of diversity and openness" that characterized the ‘60s cultural revolution tended "to erode loyalty to the religious establishment."

One should pause here to note the irony in Roof and McKinney’s regarding "individualism" and the "pursuit of self-fulfillment" as characteristically liberal temptations, when liberal churches themselves tend to inveigh against individualism and speak glowingly about "community." The authors judge, correctly I reckon, that however individualistic conservatives’ political and theological ideology may be, their churches are apt to function more like authentic communities -- close-knit groups, commitment to which is viewed by their members not as optional but as integral to individual identity. The liberal fondness for talking about community would seem to reflect some effort to compensate rhetorically for the absence of the real thing.

That the ‘60s were a watershed in cultural and religious history is widely assumed. The argument gains a good deal of persuasiveness from the sharp contrast in religiosity between that period and the ‘50s, when liberal and moderate Protestants were not only happily a part of the American way of life but enjoyed a growth curve comparable to that of conservative Protestants. The argument is less persuasive, however, when one expands the historical perspective to note that for liberals, especially, the growth of the ‘50s was more the exception than the norm. From the ‘20s to the ‘50s the churches that Roof and McKinney designate as liberal did not grow at all, and their proportion of the total population was falling. So it is not clear, even with the negative numbers of recent years, that liberals’ current situation is without precedent. The Protestant establishment was also widely seen to be wasting away in the ‘20s, for example -- a period when H. L. Mencken was moved to observe, "Every day another Methodist or Presbyterian church is turned into a garage.

Roof and McKinney are surely right, however, that the critique of authority that pervaded the ‘60s served, often inadvertently, to exacerbate secularizing tendencies inherent in modern culture, particularly the inclination to regard religion as a private affair. Moreover, the period precipitated the deep polarization of the middle classes on social and moral issues that has defined subsequent religious and political debate. For all the theological divisions that separated Protestants from each other in the ‘50s (and separated Protestants, Catholics and Jews) , a fairly firm consensus existed about the substance of personal morality and the soundness of American social and political life. It was that consensus that unraveled in the debates over Vietnam, civil rights, abortion, sexual morality, women’s issues, and the limits of tolerance.

The predictability with which various churches divide across the left-right spectrum on these issues provides Roof and McKinney with one of their chief tools for designating Protestants as liberal, moderate or conservative. For example, 62 per cent of liberal Protestants believe that a married woman who wants no more children should have the right to an abortion, whereas only 46 per cent of the moderates, and 28 per cent of conservatives, agree. On women’s issues in general, liberal Protestants fall well to the left, conservatives well to the right, of the national average. This is not surprising in itself, of course; what Roof and McKinney regard as significant is the fact that religious communities are increasingly distinguished not by theological beliefs but by "contrasting ethical styles and moral views." Underscoring this point, they note that religious switchers adhere even more closely to the dominant moral ethos of their new groups than do people raised in those groups. Much of the religious switching going on, it appears, is prompted by the desire to find the moral ethos into which one fits, to take sides in the Kulturkampf of our time.

The cultural pressure to move left or right is especially hard on those in the "embattled middle," namely moderate Protestants. Moderate Protestants (along with Catholics) tend to ‘lean in a conservative direction on personal life-style issues and in a more liberal direction on matters of social justice." One would think that this stance would make these groups prime candidates for the role of the new mainline. But Roof and McKinney see this middle ground less as a position of strength than of vulnerability: those in the middle are most subject to the forces of polarization. Indeed, moderates, the only white Protestant group to lose more members to other religious families than they gain, appear to be drained from both sides, supplying recruits to both the left and the right. Sensing that the future of American Protestantism is much bound up with how moderates negotiate the current cultural crisis, the authors are solicitous about their future; perhaps, Roof and McKinney speculate, these churches will be able to forge anew the "broadly based synthesis of belief and culture that has been missing in American life since the 1950s." But the authors do not see any signs that this is happening.

Their approach also prevents them from examining different constituencies within the various religious families and denominations that might suggest different ways of mapping the world of religion. Some conservative Protestant groups, for example, especially in leadership circles, contain their own versions of the left-right cultural battle. The triumph of conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention should not obscure the fact that a sizable number of Southern Baptists share classic liberal concerns for women’s rights, racial and social justice and international peace, not to mention the viability of historical-critical method. A number of moderate evangelical groups are also engaged with these issues, sometimes with a passion outstripping that of liberals, for whom these are long-settled topics. As historian William Hutchison has suggested, liberalism may be flourishing in ways that don’t show up in statistics, and in institutions that are not officially regarded as liberal.

Evidence of another sort comes from James Davison Hunter’s recent Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987) , in which he examines student opinions at evangelical colleges and concludes that they have moved significantly to the left on moral and theological issues. Though Hunter’s argument has been challenged, it seems likely that something of what he describes is happening: having become part of mainstream culture and more confidently entered into cultural debates, evangelicalism itself is changing. The center of American Protestantism may have moved toward more conservative denominations, but important parts of those denominations may be less conservative now than they were 20 years ago.

All this is simply to say that one can probe beyond Roof and McKinney’s data to formulate other versions of the current and future state of American Protestantism. Their work remains, however, a very useful clarification of the broad forces shaping the old mainline churches. It accords well, I suspect, with many mainliners’ experience. For many moderates, and liberals, too, denominational and congregational life revolve around internal versions of the left-right conflict. Holding both sides of that struggle together in one church, and subordinating it to the larger claims of the Christian confession, can be exhausting; the temptation, for ministers and members, is to seek a place where the debate has been settled.

Roof and McKinney’s emphasis on liberals’ secular drift aptly calls attention to the perennial liberal problem in propagating the faith and inculcating piety. The crossroads of tradition and modernity can be lively, but it is difficult to build an institution or to raise a family there: too many people are coming and going. I recall attending an adult Sunday school class at one liberal church where the diffusion of Christian identity and the dynamics of secular drift were almost palpable. The class discussed "faith" for some time without ever identifying the object or basis of this faith. When this deficiency was pointed out, some people grew uneasy (had a fundamentalist snuck in?), while others nodded interestedly. But further definition was not offered. Given these people’s wariness in talking about faith, it was hard to see how they could pass that faith -- whatever it was -- on to their children. And hard to see what incentive they had for even meeting together.

Roof and McKinney’s final chapter tentatively recommends, in the neutral language of social science, that liberals counter this secular drift by sharpening their religious identity. "A crucial challenge for liberal Protestantism is to recapture some sense of particularity as a community of memory and not merely as a custodian of generalized cultural values. . . . The liberal churches need their own particular language of faith to communicate with the cultured despisers of the modern world, in a manner that lays claim upon the self and the community."

Calls for liberal Christians to focus more aggressively on what makes them different, not just from conservative Christians but from secularists, have been sounded for some time. The authors adduce remarks on the topic from Yale theologian George Lindbeck’s 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Westminster) A forceful sociological case for the benefits of particularity was made as long ago as 1972 in Dean M. Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Harper & Row) Kelley, observing that churches are in the business of providing meaning, argued that successful churches will be ones that provide the most clearly defined and self-reinforcing packages of meaning. Liberal traits of openness and tolerance, he suggested, are liabilities when it comes to institution-building.

It might be objected here that one cannot leap from sociological reality to ecclesial mission: the church is not called simply to follow sociologists’ recipes for institutional growth. Churches that aren’t growing may still be faithful witnesses to the gospel, maybe even more faithful than others. Nevertheless, it would be strange for members of any institution to be indifferent to the news that it is not attracting or holding committed members. Unless one thinks that one’s church is too good for this world, or that its passing would be no reason to mourn, a bit of soul-searching seems in order.

The challenge in the liberal search for particularity will be to engage in some rigorous theological reflection, not defensive posturing, number-gazing or sociological tinkering. Insofar as a church’s identity is consciously fashioned in response to a sociological imperative, it is not likely to be enduring or persuasive anyway. And it would be a further miscalculation for churches to try to borrow a sense of particularity from the fervor of a particular social or political cause. Works like American Mainline Religion can apprise us of liberalism’s social strengths and weaknesses, and of its demographic constraints. But any genuine recovery of a "particular language of faith" will entail developing and appropriating a theological tradition and embodying that tradition in faithful living -- a project that necessarily requires motivations and insights deriving from a quite different kind of authority than the sociologists possess.

Approach and Avoidance: The Bible as Literature

Book Review: The Literary Guide to the Bible by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Harvard University Press, 678 pp., $29.95.

Why, with editors the caliber of Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, is The Literary Guide to the Bible (Harvard University Press, 678 pp., $29.95) still something of a disappointment?

The moment for such a volume has surely arrived, and no criticism hastened its coming more than Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative and Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy. The moment has been richly prepared for by at least two generations of biblical scholars who have been attentive to the literary properties of everything from the parables to the Davidic court history. Literary scholars as different in approach as Northrop Frye and T. R. Henn have ploughed furrows of their own in biblical studies. Thanks to form criticism, redaction criticism, genre criticism, structuralism, narratology, feminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism and deconstructionism, studies of the literary dimensions of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures during this decade must number in the thousands. Virtually all college and university English departments offer courses in the Bible as literature."

The editors have chosen to work with what is essentially the Protestant Bible, which, unlike the Catholic Bible, the Hebrew Bible or the Bible of Greek Judaism, is the authoritative text of the central anglophone tradition. Yet with the Old Testament they have generally followed the order of the Hebrew Bible rather than the King James and later versions. They provide chapters on most of the major books of both testaments, though not without some interesting conflations: while Leviticus and Numbers each get chapters of their own, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as well as the 12 prophets, have to settle for chapters together, as do the Pauline epistles.

In addition to a helpful glossary and an indispensable index, The Literary Guide features some useful and, in several instances, excellent general essays such as Helen Elsom’s superb treatment of the New Testament and Greco-Roman literature, Gerald L. Bruns’s brilliant study of midrash and allegory, and an interesting essay by Alter on the characteristics of ancient Hebrew poetry. In addition to preparing the essays on the Gospels of Matthew and John, both of them rich with perceptive and unexpected observations, Kermode offers an extremely good introduction to the New Testament, balancing Alter’s equally adroit introduction to the Old -- though why, with scholars of the stature of Robert M. Grant and Harry Gamble available, Kermode took upon himself the task of supplying the chapter on the making of the canon is anybody’s guess. Equally puzzling is the inclusion of Edmund Leach’s essay "Fishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness," which has little to recommend it but the author’s eminence as perhaps the world’s leading structural anthropologist -- who here wishes to demonstrate that structuralism enables a style of biblical exegesis not unlike "the typological style of argument employed by the majority of early Christian writers."

Though the book lists among its contributors a number of distinguished biblical scholars and literary critics, the editors reserved so many essays for themselves and a few others that there are striking omissions. The New Testament section seems oddly empty without the presence of Wayne Meeks or James Barr, and the Old Testament section looks similarly unprovided without an essay on the historical books by someone like John Van Seters or on prophecy by Joseph Blenkinsopp. And why no women contributors, given the new and disturbing questions feminist scholars have put to an essentially male canon and to male interpretations of it?

Nevertheless, the editors have clearly established the right aim for this volume. They want to avoid duplicating the results of traditional biblical scholarship without depriving their readers of its insights, and they seek to exploit some of the more important methods of contemporary criticism without turning The Literary Guide into a forum for debating sectarian theorists. Their target is the general educated reader who seeks to understand "the Bible as a work of great literary force and authority, a work of which it is entirely credible that it should have shaped the minds and lives of intelligent men and women for two millennia or more.

What literary critics and biblical scholars share, according to the editors of The Literary Guide, is not so much an interest in the referential qualities of the biblical texts as an interest in their internal relationships, particularly as these relationships are controlled by language. Thus in his essay on Psalms, Alter raises questions about authorship, dating and the sociological context, but then devotes the bulk of his attention to issues of genre, convention, style, structure, diction, literary allusion and thematic organization. When performed as well as Alter performs it, and particularly in relation to a text like Psalms, this kind of reading can be at once informative and illuminating.

But close attention to the complex interplay of linguistic properties can also beg some of the very questions such interplay is meant to raise. Thus J. P. Fokkelman’s structural analysis of Genesis and Exodus just misses turning into a catalogue or statistical summary, and prevents the reader from ever penetrating beneath the surface of these texts to their complex interior. Robert Polzin’s self-consciously literary treatment of Deuteronomy in terms of voice all but misses the epic note the text intends to strike. Jack Sasson’s workmanlike articles on Ruth and Esther manage to gloss over much of what has lent these slight narratives their haunting. evocative power. Bernard McGinn foregoes literary analysis altogether and simply provides a history of the interpretation of Revelation.

On the other hand, when Joel Rosenberg writes on the two books of Samuel, as well as on Jeremiah and Ezekiel, or James Ackerman on Jonah and even on Numbers, or David Gunn on Joshua and Judges, or John Drury on Mark and Luke, their criticism resists any simplistic reduction to a discussion of properties or elements, literary or otherwise, and engages the claim of the text. And in the very best of this criticism -- such as Rosenberg’s interpretation of the Davidic history and parts of Kermode’s analysis of Matthew. and particularly John -- familiar texts become strange and strangely moving, compelling, almost coercive.

The deep divisions within contemporary literary criticism have much to do with the fact that we now possess a richer, if also more troubling, sense of (sic).

And one of the reasons that the literary has come to seem so much more problematic a critical category than it was 20 years ago is because we have been compelled to take into our notion of it many of the diverse, ill-classified, disruptive kinds of literature contained in the Bible.

Yet of this difficult process of critical assimilation, and what it has done to the categories by which we make sense (as Kermode once put it) of the sense literature makes for us, we hear very little in The Literary Guide to the Bible. Too often the essays treat the categories that define literature, and that enable us to talk about it critically, as though they were given with creation itself, and that all the general reader requires to appreciate the Bible as a literary document is a little (or a lot of) "expert literary appraisal." The editors and their collaborators know better; but only in selected instances have some of them managed to transcend such limited conceptions in behalf of the central purpose of the volume as a whole: to demonstrate how the literary dimensions of these texts do, indeed, make credible the power and authority they have exhibited for more than two millennia in shaping decisively the lives and minds of thoughtful people the world over.

Mary as Role Model (Luke 1:26-38)

What comes to mind at the mention of Mary, Jesus’ mother? Pale blue? Alabaster statues? An unnatural look of chaste perfection? Sneers about front-yard grottoes and dashboard figurines? In Mary in the New Testament (Fortress, 1978) , in which collaborating Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars examine what the churches and the New Testament have said about Mary, the authors confess that neither Catholic nor Protestant tradition and practice have done Mary justiceThe volume chases down a host of unbiblical doctrines, some all the way to the second century. Heresy-prone ascetics used the virgin birth to develop the illegitimate dogma that chastity is a higher calling than marriage. Yet the idea of Mary’s perpetual virginity became so popular that in the late fourth century the faithful greeted with horror two pro-marriage churchmen’s suggestion that it was biblically and historically justifiable to believe that, following Jesus’ birth, Mary had children by her husband just as any other wife would. An outraged Jerome, then the church’s leading biblical scholar, proposed that the brothers and sisters of Jesus mentioned in the Bible were really cousins. The simple, humble woman who gave birth in a barn would come to be hailed by one fifth-century writer as the one from whom came forth the divine power which created heaven and earth. "Mother of God," a title intended to stress Christ’s full humanity and divinity, came to be taken literally. Mary became a mother goddess.

Some years ago a vandal attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer, seriously damaging the face and arm of the figure of Mary. A magazine article suggested that the act was a parable of the violence done Mary by the church -- by Roman Catholics who have idolized her and by Protestants who have ignored her. While Protestants have criticized Catholics for coming close to ascribing to Mary the lead role in God’s salvation drama. Protestants could be accused of making her into a prop. But we can be thankful that Luke’s witness to the annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) stands as a corrective.

Luke s account shows the parallels between the announcement to Mary and the foretelling to Zechariah of John’s birth. In both scenes the angel Gabriel brings word and is greeted with fear. Both Zechariah and Mary are addressed by name, urged not to fear and told they are about to become parents of sons, each under extraordinary circumstances. They are given their children’s names, an interpretation of the names and predictions of the children’s future. When Zechariah and Mary each wonder aloud how such things could happen, each is given a sign that will bear out the prediction. Wondrous, indeed. But similar things have happened before, such as Ishmael’s birth to Hagar in Genesis 16 and Isaac’s birth to Sarah in Genesis 17. Similar details surround the birth of Samson in Judges.

‘The Holy Spirit will come over you," the angels told Mary. Only when discovering a point before salvation history, before time, before anything, does the Bible use similar language.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters [Gen. 1:1-2].

As God’s Spirit moved over the void before it was filled with the heavens and the earth, so the same spirit overshadowed Mary to place within her God’s own Son. As Karl Barth stressed, human initiative (particularly that of the human male) is excluded. It is not conception at all: it is creation.

Although Luke emphasizes God’s initiative, he also records the human response. "I am the handmaid of the Lord," Mary pledged. "let it be to me according to your word." Luke recalls this when relating two other incidents. In chapter 8, when Jesus is told that his mother and brothers await him, he replies that his mother and brothers are those who hear and do God’s word. Then in chapter 11, when a well-meaning woman pronounces blessings on Jesus’ mother, Jesus responds that the blessed are those who hear and do God’s word. These stories by Luke (who is fairest to women of all the evangelists) portray Mary as the first disciple. Indeed, in Luke’s second volume, she is listed among those huddled in the upper room (Acts 1). In Here I Stand, Roland Bainton wrote that Martin Luther saw three miracles in Christ’s nativity: God became human, a virgin conceived and Mary believed. In Luther’s mind, the greatest was the last.

A headline I clipped during Advent several years ago declared, "Mary May Emerge as Significant Model for Today’s Women." That would be tragic. Half of humanity would miss Luke’s point. Luke perceived Mary as a significant role model for all of us. We discover anew each day that we have trusted in people and things that can’t deliver and, like Luke’s original readers, we need direction and hope. Luke points us to Mary. He presents her not as a goddess, nor a stiff statue gathering cobwebs in a musty cathedral, nor a plastic figurine molded with a sweet and innocent countenance to stand lifeless in a coffee-table crèche. Luke’s Mary is a genuine example of faith acted out in discipleship and response to God’s word.

If Mary’s ears had been less keen and her soul less willing, she might not have understood. If her eyes had been able to see only the broad, bold outlines of trial, tragedy, rejection and hardship, she might not have sensed the divine presence or heard God’s word of grace and favor. But she heard and responded, even to such an odd call in such a common hour of life. Her story reminds us that the oddest, most inglorious moments are packed with the annunciation of God’s presence and God’s call to serve.

The Most Uncomfortable Day of the Year (Mk 1:15)

Ash Wednesday is not known in the church as our good humor day. So I was at first puzzled when I reached into my file, untouched since the first day of Lent last year, and found that I had scribbled the following: "On Ash Wednesday, the minister who just had to be different slung a shovelful of palm ash at his horrified congregation. One parishioner was heard to remark in a whispered gasp, ‘This is a terrible imposition."’

What on earth could have evoked such a thought on my part? As I pondered that question, along with my recollections of past Ash Wednesdays, there came to mind an ill-fated communion service which I once led at a confirmation retreat. I was outraged at the irreverent giggling of these junior high-aged youth, unfazed by my stern looks from behind the table. I was even more angry at myself for having attempted such a service. Later I recounted the debacle to my wife, who is a secondary-level English teacher by training. She wasn’t surprised. "They were nervous, uncomfortable," she said.

She continued: "These are seventh- and eighth-graders, right? I’ll bet that if you check, you’ll find out that for most of them your service was the first time they’d ever received communion. The communion liturgy throws a lot of heavy things their way all at once: sacrifice, body, blood, resurrection. They were nervous, uncomfortable. And how do they deal with that? By trying to find something funny in it." I checked out her hunch about the group’s lack of prior experience with communion. She was right. I’m sure she was right about the reason for the giggling, too.

And so now I know how to account for my feeble attempt at Ash Wednesday humor: I was nervous and uncomfortable. This is the ninth successive year that I will be involved in an Ash Wednesday service with my congregation. On the past eight Shrove Tuesdays I have wished that I could weasel out of it somehow. Will it be different this year? I doubt it.

I am convinced that the rest of the church feels much the same. Last year when I visited the Episcopal rector down the street and asked to borrow a cup of ash, I explained that First Church had never used the stuff before and that I was a bit apprehensive about how the imposition of ashes would be received, even if performed in the traditional way. I muttered something about how skeptical some United Methodists are anyway about rites and rituals and special days. He responded by telling me that his church had been observing Ash Wednesday for a long time, and the service has in fact grown.

But there is no getting around the fact that Ash Wednesday is the most uncomfortable day of the church year.

Fixed in my memory is the year I was startled almost speechless when suddenly I found myself drawing an ashen cross on the forehead of our daughter, who was then barely three years old. I choked on the words, "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." Never had my mortality been quite so real to me. Ash Wednesday causes us distress because it rubs our faces in our mortality, or vice versa. Death and sin, sin and death. The real issue is not the death that is part of the biological process, but the death we bring on ourselves because we forget that we were created in God’s image.

Ash Wednesday also forces us to view our capabilities realistically. Left to ourselves, we can no more give up our self-will and our pretending to self-sufficiency than we can avoid death. There are countless moments in my life when I have sucked on the fruit of the forbidden tree, demanded sovereignty where it is God’s prerogative to rule, refused to be who and whose I was created to be, cherished things more than relationships, and failed to love as I have been loved. In all such moments death has already cast its shadow over me and over those whom I have wronged. Ash Wednesday confronts us with our gross inadequacy when left to our own devices and calls us to the discipline of repentance.

Ash Wednesday is no doubt further uncomfortable because the act that is central to it -- repentance -- is usually perceived as a most disquieting proposition. It is easy to overlook the fact that the point of the act, as well as of this day of fasting, is to make us uncomfortable with our sin, not with God. To repent has nothing to do with self-flagellation or with bleeding ourselves of our self-esteem. It simply means to turn around, to turn our backs on death.

In the liturgy for the imposition of the ashes, the words alternate between the so-called "fall" story in Genesis and Mark’s summary of Jesus’ central theme for preaching: "[Remember] you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Gen. 3:19), and "Repent, and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15). When intoned on Ash Wednesday, the sound of these passages is somber, as if made to fall from pursed lips upon faces pained and drawn. Not for a moment would I attempt to banish all the discomfort: "Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins . ." But this stark, penitential day, the first of the 40 days of Lent, is ultimately uncomfortable only if we neglect to place it within the whole of our faith, the whole of the gospel.

A review of the creeds is in order as Lent begins, for in them we declare our faith not in sin but in its forgiveness. We might rediscover that the words of imposition are rea1ly words that call for a response of rejoicing, for they are gracious words. Surely their use was initiated by those not oblivious of their scriptural context. In reading all of Genesis 3 we are reminded that death is the penalty prescribed for seizing from the tree that which is God’s alone. There is no denying that a price must be paid, but the called-for penalty is not exacted. Those whose audacity earns for them only the awareness of their nakedness are given the gift of clothing, and subsequent chapters of Genesis make it clear that the God who drove them out of the garden did not himself tarry there, but followed them out. "This," writes Walter Brueggemann, "is not a simple story of human disobedience and divine displeasure. It is rather the story about the struggle God has in responding to the facts of human life. When the facts warrant death, God insists on life for his creatures" (Genesis, John Knox, 1982). And says Mark: "Repent and believe in the gospel [good news ]." That last word deserves emphasis, too, particularly because it is the last word in the sentence universally seen as the Markan agenda for Jesus’ ministry: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15)

All this time, and not only is God still "responding to the facts of human life," but doing so with unprecedented intensity and resolve in the person of him who cures disease and puts demons to flight and heals the breach between humanity and God: even "Jesus Christ, Son of God" (Mark 1:1)

All we are called to do is to be who we are created to be. We need only be human, a simple matter of being in relationship with God and other human beings. Further, the story that calls us together and forms us is one of a God who is in relentless pursuit of us and of the divine dream that those relationships might grow and thrive and that we might indeed have life. Up to a point Ash Wednesday is supposed to make us uncomfortable, as we contemplate our sinful condition. However, it need be ultimately uncomfortable only inasmuch as we insist on cherishing death and refusing to acknowledge our continuing life in God.

What Do the Palms Say? (A Meditation for Palm Sunday)

One year while serving as pastor of a congregation just outside Indianapolis, I met with a two-member worship committee to plan Holy Week and Easter services. The budget was tight that year. "Is there any way to avoid paying a buck a palm branch?" I was asked. I moved quickly to seize the teaching moment.

"Surely," I said, and explained that only John’s Gospel mentions palms in connection with Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, anyway. Matthew, for example, simply says that people "cut branches from the trees." From what trees or shrubs would the people of Pittsboro cut branches if Jesus were approaching the town limits? we wondered. We also considered the more profound question: what has branches that will be out in early spring? In such fashion was born the idea for what we might have called "Pussy Willow Sunday."

Delighted with our idea, we sat for several moments trading self-satisfied grins. Suddenly the spell was broken when one-half of the committee asked, "What do the palms say?"

My heart was strangely warmed. No question could have brought more delight to a preacher who had spent the previous weeks preaching on the Gospel of John. "When reading John, always be careful to look behind the story for a symbolic message," I had said time and again. One listener had apparently heard me say that seemingly incidental details often point to deeper truths in John. Thus the question: what do the palms say?

What we don’t read but may assume is that the frond flappers of John 12:12-19 who go out to meet Jesus move toward the city gate with the 200-year-old story of Simon Maccabeus vividly in mind. Maccabeus emerged at a time when the brutal and genocidal Antiochus Epiphanes held sway over Palestine. In 167 B.C. Antiochus precipitated a full-scale revolt when, having already forbidden the practice of Judaism on pain of death, he set up in the Jewish temple an altar to Zeus and offered swine’s flesh upon it (which the Book of Daniel refers to as the "abomination of desolation") Antiochus was an apostle of Hellenism and meant to bring his entire realm under the influence of Greek ways. The Book of First Maccabees in the Old Testament Apocrypha witnesses to his resolve: ‘They put to death the women who had their children circumcised, and their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers’ necks" (1:60-61)

Stinging from this outrage, Mattathias, an old man of priestly stock, rounded up his five sons and all the weapons he could find. A guerrilla campaign was launched against Antiochus’s soldiers. Though Mattathias died early on, his son Judas, called Maccabeus (hammer) , was able within three years to cleanse and to rededicate the besmirched temple with no small thanks to a turn of events that drained the occupier’s army. But the fighting wasn’t over. A full 20 years later, after Judas and a successor brother, Jonathan, had died in battle, a third brother, Simon, took over, and through his diplomacy achieved Judean independence, establishing what would become a full century of Jewish sovereignty. Of course there was great celebration. "On the twenty-third day of the second month, in the one hundred and seventy-first year, the Jews entered Jerusalem with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs, because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel" (I Macc. 13:51)

Knowing First Maccabees allows us to read the minds of those who are waving their own palm branches. They are going out to meet Jesus in hopes that he is coming to crush and remove from Israel another great enemy, this time Rome. What do the palms say? They say: We are tired of being kicked around, hungry to be Number One again, ready to strut our stuff once more. Here’s our agenda, and you look like just the man we need. Welcome, warrior king! Hail, conquering hero! The "great crowd" of Palm Sunday is reminiscent of another multitude in John’s Gospel. That mob, 5,000 strong, was miraculously fed by Jesus. Because they had gotten their bellies filled, their expectations were high, like those of the Jerusalem crowd. But "perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, Jesus withdrew . . . (John 6:15) Likewise, on Palm Sunday, amid the clamor of the crowds, "Jesus found a young ass and sat upon it."

Like that of the prophets of old, this was an overt act designed to drive home the truth of the whole matter: a king bent on war rode a horse, but one seeking peace rode an ass. John’s crowd was remembering another triumphal entry, one that Simon had decreed would be marked annually as a Jewish independence day. Jesus’ mind, however, was on something else:

Rejoice greatly, 0 daughter of Zion!

Shout aloud, 0 daughter of Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on an ass,

on a colt the foal of an ass [Zech. 9:9].

The palm wavers rightly see triumph in Jesus, but they don’t understand it. Jesus has come to conquer not Rome but the world. He comes to the holy city not to deal death or to sidestep death, but to meet death head-on. He will conquer the world and death itself by dying. Just after his triumphal entry, according to John, Jesus makes it clear how he will win: "Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (12:31-32) His being lifted up to glory is at once his being lifted up on the cross.

We confess our misunderstanding. We, too, come to the city gate, agendas in hand, amid crowds lined up as though Santa Claus were coming to town. In a world that routinely places ultimate value on less than ultimate things, even the faithful are tempted to come with their want lists. Our nationalistic or consumeristic religions preach that to keep the rest of the world scared or guessing while satisfying our seemingly endless material desires is to be not far from the Kingdom of heaven.

The palms or pussy willows say that such an approach has been taken before, but has been found wanting. Glory worthy of the name, the glory that is promised, will not be found in a new hero, system or political movement. "My kingship is not of this world," says the Johannine Jesus (18:36) -- who also says of his followers, "they are not of the world" (17:14) Jesus’ glorification comes through an act of self-sacrificing love. Life of eternal dimensions is the here-and-now gift to those who believe that this self-sacrificial One is the Son of God. The waving branches say that we misunderstand as did his disciples. Our hopes and dreams are too much occupied by the ultimately doomed and dead. And as in the case of the disciples, only Jesus’ death and resurrection will clear up our misunderstanding.

The Theater of Revelation: Art and the Grace-Fullness of Form

Because our religious tradition finds the heart of divine revelation in the Holy taking human form, Christians have a powerful theological basis for understanding and learning from the arts. Unfortunately, Protestants have historically had an uneasy relationship with the arts because we have mistrusted form and physicality. Our inheritance of Reformation iconoclasm is usually put forward as the traditional reason for our discomfort; and in the mainline churches our commitment to social justice and our resulting decisions about stewardship are cited as contemporary explanation and justification. While both of these factors -- an inherited distrust of physical form, and a current focus on monetary economies -- clearly shape our feelings and actions in relation to art, the equivocal nature of the Protestant relationship to the arts becomes ever clearer if we look at what lies behind the question of iconoclasm. Why should we mistrust images? Is anyone in our image-flooded culture in serious danger of confusing a painting or a sculpture of Jesus with Jesus himself? The issue is not idolatry.

Theological mistrust of images grows out of beliefs and feelings about the relationship of divine grace to the physical world. When the Reformers rejected images, they were condemning the medieval Carolingian use of relics. Under the French Catholic Carolingian ruler, the church decided to use art as packaging and promotion for relics, which were, almost literally, a foundation of both government and religion. Both spiritual and temporal rulers had these bones and possessions of the saints built into their thrones and altars, and wore them in their crowns and around their necks. Providing a slender bridge between the beneficent unseen world and the malevolent world of everyday, the relics promised a measure of safety, order and power.

By the time of the Reformation, many people felt that no fruitful relationship between the church and the visual arts, at least, was possible. Although even the iconoclasts of the early church had believed that divine power could operate for the good of human beings through some specially blessed material objects, the Reformers were reluctant to affirm that God’s grace was mediated through the physical world. Seeing that both art and nature can be evil, how, they asked, can either be relied on as a channel of revelation? For them, revelation was to be found only in the Christ of the Scriptures.

For the artist, the problem with all of these positions is their apprehension about the created world here and now. Any artist, Christian or otherwise, who is unable to trust the physical world is crippled as a creator. Not that the artist sees the world of form as an Eden; far from it. Creation, like the life of the incarnate Christ, is as full of pain and ambiguity as of clarity and joy. Nevertheless, the productive artist must turn to nature -- that is. to matter -- as a potential source of blessing.

Art is always the result of determined wrestling with matter. The artist refuses to let that material "angel" go. until it turns and blesses artistic vision with physical form. However, a central difficulty in the relationship of the church with the arts is the church’s tendency to ignore form in favor of content. Though the modern church generally professes to have grown beyond its earlier nervousness about the arts, the overriding issue. for example when an artist is commissioned to create or present a work, is very often "message."

For the artist, however, form is not a vehicle for a message, not a "package" for content, not a lesser or expedient means to a somehow "higher" end. An authentic artwork is an indissoluble union of line, color, movement, sound, rhythm, idea. The oneness of being that the early Christian writers tried to communicate when they described Christ, fully human. and fully divine, is not unlike the oneness of form and content achieved in a successful dance, symphony, sculpture, play or novel.

The perfection of Christ’s union of humanity and divinity was so important to understand that two heresies were like warning signs for those straying too far in either direction. We must remember, the early church fathers warned, that this union is not a confusion of divine and human. But at the same time we must also avoid drawing false distinctions between the divine and the human in Christ. The union of humanity and divinity in the incarnation of Christ, and the union of form and content in a successful artwork, are neither a confusion of unlike elements nor a hard and fast distinction between unlike elements. Both relationships are much more suggestive of a marriage.

Every painting of the annunciation and the nativity announces clearly that what is being revealed and celebrated is the tangible presence of the Holy. Whatever we believe about the virginity of Mary, Jesus was knit together in his mother’s womb -- like all the rest of us. Form-giving is a talent humans have, and whether we are Mary pregnant with the Christ, or a painter of the most modest talent creating a watercolor, we create form only by means of matter. Form-giving is part of grace: the establishment of relationship and order, sometimes permanently, most often more briefly -- even momentarily. Form-giving is what allowed the Word to dwell among us, full of grace and the truth of our relationship with God.

The incarnation that the artist effects is, like all other births, a blossoming of the physical world. For the artist, the physical world may not be the only reality, but it is the theater of revelation, just as it is in the story of Christ’s incarnation. And if the physical world is the theater of revelation, then it is not only translucent to grace, but is itself, as the physical source of form, a source of grace.

As every child with a skinned knee knows, the physical world is a place of bane and blessing equally. Such relentless ambiguity in creation has proved too much for some Christians, and they have succumbed to the temptation. to find grace only beyond physicality. The resistant stance resulting from this temptation runs through Protestantism and Roman Catholicism alike. In the late 17th century, for example, Angelique Arnauld, head of the Port Royal convent in Paris. forbade the growing of flowers on convent property. She said, "I love all that is ugly; art is nothing but lies and vanity. Whosoever gives to the senses takes away from God" (Germaine Bazin, Baroque and Rococo Art [Oxford University Press, 19641, p. 36) Mother Angelique was a Jansenist Catholic, whose understanding of grace and the physical world was much closer to that of some Protestants than to that of many of her fellow Catholics. The Jesuit educators and missionaries of her time found means of grace in beauty, the arts, humor -- whatever, as they put it, seemed innocent in and of itself. They understood all of these sources as actual and potential channels of God’s communication to humankind. The attitude toward the operation of divine grace in the physical world seems to be a clue to the Christian’s attitude toward art; these attitudes cut across even the most distinct denominational lines.

Grace, in its more mundane meanings, can be a pleasing quality or attractiveness; favor or goodwill; gratitude or thanks. All of these meanings can be seen as lights coming from different directions to illumine the concept of grace in its theological sense. The first of the three meanings suggests something to which we respond by wanting to approach it, get closer to it. The graceful mover draws our attention and admiration. The second meaning describes a relationship established when someone invites trust and offers what we need. The old form of address to a dignitary, "Your Grace," assumes, rightly or wrongly, that the person so addressed is positively disposed toward us -- a source of help and nurture. The third meaning describes a relationship between us and that to which or whom we are grateful. Before or after eating, we say "thank you" because our needs for food and comfort (and also, often, for companionship and beauty) have been met.

The most striking feature of these three meanings of the word grace is that they all refer to physical expression or relatedness. Grace is a quality of movement and a physical attraction, grace is a relationship out of which our needs are met, grace is an expression of gratitude. The word also carries the sense of social harmony and order. We say approvingly that someone accepts defeat "with good grace," or extracts herself from a difficult situation "gracefully." That is to say, the working relationship among the diverse elements of the situation was not disturbed.

There is a cosmic dimension to this meaning of grace: a small creation, a tiny cosmos of people, feelings and events has been preserved in good working order, and we are glad. Grace, then, is what holds the whole together on the physical and practical level of day-to-day functioning -- not from outside, as in the Carolingians’ understanding, but as a potential for order within the physical world itself. The potential, of course, is often not realized; but this analysis does address the problem of good, which needs to be addressed at least as much as the problem of evil. It is this potential which finally yields the artist’s blessing of form.

It is not that grace is typically "pretty." Occasionally it is, but most often its dominant characteristic is strength. The dancer’s grace, or beauty of movement, is the result of an entirely disciplined body and a set of muscles like steel springs, the price of which has been years of painstaking physical work. This type of grace, just as in the case of God’s grace, is not free" in the sense that it might be had for the wishing. It comes from a submission to the laws of the created world, and operates through them, not outside them. On several occasions, people with no dance training have assured me that God has "given them the gift of dance," and that therefore they do not need to study the art form; but their performances have not borne out their claims. Grace seems to be given only in the terms of the creation; in the case of dance, the terms are usually about ten years of intensive training. Grace in all its senses comes through immersion in physical realities and necessities.

In the incarnation, Christians have been directed to physicality and form as the locations of God’s presence. The physicality of the incarnation is not, as we are so tempted in our hearts to believe, a temporary inconvenience to divinity. Perhaps it is difficult to believe otherwise because physicality can be such an inconvenience to us. We are clumsy, we get sick, we grow old, we die. Being embodied is often uncomfortable and embarrassing. And so, discovering that we can’t escape the oppressive grace-fullness of our bodies, we do what we can to ensure that God, at least, shall escape our pains and frustrations. In how many Christian imaginations and theologies, private and public, does Jesus the Christ swoop through the 33 years of his life, dipping briefly into the world of matter before soaring off toward the real point, the resurrection? Of course, there is his appalling death. But do we not tend, more often than we care to admit, to see his death as the necessary event that makes the resurrection work?

Theologians have always told us that this sort of theology is a mistake. The Christ, they have patiently and impatiently repeated, was both fully human and fully divine. No compromises or glosses on either side -- which means that he served the necessities of the form he was given just as we do, and just as every artwork does.

The theologians have told us this, but it is the artists who can make us see it. Twenty minutes with the late-15th-century Isenheim altarpiece by Mathias, called Grünewald, will remind us. This work incorporates scenes of the annunciation, the nativity, the crucifixion and the resurrection. All of them proclaim that divine revelation, and the grace it brings, are as much the result of wrestling with the ambiguity of the physical world as artistic creation is. In the annunciation, Mary scrutinizes the angel out of the corners of her eyes; she is not ecstatic or shy, but distinctly suspicious. In the nativity, she is entirely absorbed in her squirming baby, and at her feet are his chamber pot, towels and tub. The crucifixion is a clinical portrayal of torture -- as obscene as torture is and almost too painful to look at. The resurrection painting restates the issue for us, in case we have missed it. A glory of light surrounds the Christ’s upper body and face, which is as serene as a Buddha’s; the knees, in plain earthlight, are ugly and knobby, and the big feet have crooked toes. This Christ, even in resurrection, is fully divine and fully human, both at once.

The message is that the elements of faith -- revelation, grace and sacrament -- have no meaning, do not work, apart from the physical world and the human talent for form-giving. They are physical events in the ongoing drama in the theater of revelation. They extend, we believe, beyond the physical world into the mystery of God. One can, they tell us, get there from here. But if one doesn’t start here, revel in the here, wrestle with the here, one won’t get there.

Our here is where we have to start, but it is also often a place that is hard to love, a painful place, embarrassing, polluted, threatening. And it is a place that will one day kill us. But unless we decide to throw in our lot with Mother Angelique and hate the gifts while loving the Giver, our assignment is to love the here in the same way in which Jacob loved the angel. Sweaty and panting, frightened and exhilarated, we are to wrestle with the here until it turns and blesses us. To commit ourselves to this encounter is to see grace operating in and through physicality: engaging us in relationships with the created world, blessing us, stirring our excitement and response.

If physicality itself is the theater of revelation and therefore a means of grace, then as long as the world lasts, the drama in that theater will not end. That being so, form, which is physicality communicating itself, is the focus of that drama. And artists are those wrestling most consciously to embody form. Out of their struggles with shape, movement, color, sound and rhythm come revelations for all of us. Indeed, we can apply what we learn from their wrestlings to struggles in other arenas.

The revelations that artists share with us can take startling forms. Just as no one expected, or wanted, a crucified carpenter for a Messiah, the point of the church’s relation to the arts should not be to obtain "religious" art, as that category is often defined: art which inoffensively restates the old stories and reaffirms what we already know and like.

In a sense, we in the church are still in the same benighted state with respect to the arts as was one bewildered 18th-century Englishman with respect to nature. After a trip through Switzerland, he reported that he would have liked the Alps very well, thank you, if it had not been for the mountains. In his opinion, what could not be tamed, cultivated and made to fit within the current definition of "the edifying" and "the agreeable" was useless, and therefore both disturbing and unworthy of his attention. This gentleman and his contemporaries did not admire untamed nature, and the church still does not admire "untamed" art. Coming to terms with the relationship between the form of an artwork and its content is a recurrent problem for the church. We are always tempted to protect ourselves from the unaccountability and exuberance of art by approaching it as another tool, something to be used in the service of an agenda.

Understanding form itself as a means of grace challenges us to take another look at the sometimes forbidding wildness of the arts, to open the doors of our churches not only to obviously useful and "religious" art, but to unpredictable forms, forms that exist apart from any question of usefulness. The truth is that art, at least apparently and in the short run, is not very useful. It does not feed the hungry or provide shelter or end wars. This is a hard truth, for 20th-century churches are caught up in a passion for usefulness.

But so much in the Bible -- both the Old and New Testaments -- is not apparently useful. Jacob’s all-night wrestling match with a mysterious stranger was strenuous, frightening and revelatory; sleeping soundly in preparation for the next day’s work would have been useful. Jesus’ death on a cross was horrifying and, ultimately, revelatory; a royal progress through the world would have been more immediately useful.

Theologically and socially speaking, ours is an age of urgent and desperate foreboding, and we value utility and practicality because we think we do not have the time for anything else. However, just the opposite may actually be the case. As the modern church grapples with the world, hoping for new blessing, we may find it in places where the church has seldom looked. We need a new incarnation -- a new indication of God’s presence among us here and now. Struggling to bless vision with form, artists may be the new prophets of grace. Though they may sometimes seem to speak in strange languages, we have, in our ancient assertion that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth," the key to understanding.

Pastoral Counseling Comes of Age

There is increasing evidence that the pastoral counseling movement has come of age. By "pastoral counseling movement," I mean the several thousand clergy with extensive training in counseling and psychotherapy who practice this function as a major dimension of their ministry. The maturity of the movement may be understood developmentally in terms of the familiar principle that at certain points in life a maturing person must get away from home and family to avoid being stifled in growth. At a later point, the need for separation and differentiation is less strong, and the individual can appropriately move back to a closer relationship to the family of origin.

The pastoral counseling movement’s family of origin is the church -- that is, the ecclesiastical bodies in the United States and Canada to which these clergy are accountable through their ordination. The movement is mostly Protestant, but it includes an increasing number of Roman Catholics.

Perhaps I find myself thinking this way because just last year my older son turned 21 and I turned 50. Whatever the symbolic meaning of those two numbers, there does seem to be a good deal more relaxation and satisfaction in our communication these days. We are listening to each other with some interest. To my surprise and his, we have discovered that the blues chords he plays on his guitar are the same ones I played on my clarinet back in the ‘40s. On occasion, despite our very different tastes in music, we have even played together.

As this family analogy implies, a young person s coming of age can be facilitated by a similar move on the part of the parent. The church of 1980 seems less threatened by clergy attrition than in former days. Uniformity and accountability are not always viewed as identical. Some denominations, in fact, seem appreciative enough of specialized pastoral-care ministry that they are developing cooperative arrangements that delegate to the appropriate professional organization the certifying of competence and make denominational endorsement conditional upon that certification. Despite their differences in age and point of view, the church and the pastoral counseling movement are beginning to "play together."

An Identifiable Witness

Pastoral counseling’s coming of age may be seen at three important points: (1) the emergence of an identifiably pastoral way of thinking and functioning; (2) the development of an appropriate norm for pastoral counseling; and (3) the clearer definition of specialized pastoral counseling as a community-based ministry.

First, let me examine what appears to be an identifiably pastoral way of thinking and functioning. To be sure, chaplains and pastoral counselors have learned the language of the health sciences in order to work effectively in that world. They have learned to provide "good patient care" in hospitals and pastoral counseling centers. Less and less, however, are they "cheap psychiatrists," serving those who cannot afford a better-trained practitioner.

On the contrary, there is probably not a pastoral counseling center in the country where there are not some persons who pay more to see a pastoral counselor than they would have to pay to see a psychiatrist, whose fee would be largely covered by health insurance. More and more people are realizing that there are better ways to get help in a life crisis than by saying, "I’m sick." Pastoral counselors and counselees are rediscovering that understanding oneself as a sinner rather than as a sick person may be the essential element in moving toward health. Incidentally, we are also discovering that pastoral counseling is a better value for the health-care dollar than psychotherapy provided by comparably trained practitioners of other disciplines.

It can be argued convincingly that the distinctive thing about specialized pastoral ministries is the way that their -practitioners think about them -- the way they think Christianly about what they do. Without saying that it is particular religious acts or practices, such as prayer or the use of Scripture for guidance, that make one’s function pastoral, I believe that a case can be made for an identifiable pastoral function as well as a pastoral way of thinking about that function.

It is important here to point out the difference between identifiable pastoral function and unique pastoral function in the practice of pastoral counseling. The administration of the sacraments, for example, is a function in most Christian traditions which is unique to ordained persons, something they do that others do not do. There is not, in my judgment, any comparably unique function in pastoral care which the pastoral counselor performs and the secular psychotherapist does not. Thus there is no territory belonging exclusively to the pastoral counselor.

But Christian ministry, as performed by ordained persons, must be a visible ministry. Part of the pastoral counselor’s calling is to remind the counselee and the community of the religious dimension in life -- that there is more to health than symptom relief. The goal of pastoral counseling is never simply unimpaired function, but function for something, for one’s commitments and meanings. The pastoral counselor is not the only health practitioner who has this understanding of healing. He or she is, however, the only one whose role and identity, as well as function, represent this understanding. The pastoral counselor offers an identifiable witness to Christian meanings and commitments and their relevance for health care.

Relational Humanness

A second important element in pastoral counseling’s coming of age is the development of an appropriate norm. Although there is no generally accepted methodology for pastoral counseling, on the basis of the work of the professional associations in the field a theological norm is beginning to be formulated. Such a norm can enable the pastoral practitioner, whether generalist or specialist, to evaluate the various counseling methodologies. My own description of that norm:

Relational humanness has revealed God’s humanness for us in Jesus Christ. God’s relation to the world through a person strongly suggests that the clue for development of personal meaning in life rests in the quality of relationships and the character of humanness revealed therein [Journal of Pastoral Care, December 1976, p. 218].

Pastoral counseling, then, must consistently reveal the humanness of the counselor in a relational way, as well as something of his or her commitment to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

What does this mean in the practice of pastoral counseling? How does one identify this "relational humanness"? Without adopting my particular terminology for that phenomenon, the American Association of Pastoral Counselors attempts, I believe, to identify this quality in its evaluation of membership applicants. Although the regional committees that evaluate prospective pastoral counseling specialists do not function uniformly, there is remarkable agreement among them in what they are looking for in their clinical evaluations.

I have participated on these committees for more than ten years and have found them consistently asking certain questions as they interview candidates and listen to recordings of their work: Is this candidate present, alive and available to his or her counselee and to the committee? Is the counselor able to use the counseling relationship as a means for learning and growth? Has the counseling moved from talking about problems "out there somewhere" to experiencing them "between us"?

These questions are experiential ways of talking about the theological norm for pastoral counseling, "relational humanness." They are, I believe, derivative from and in dialogue with the ministry of Christ, as are (or should be) all ministry functions.

An Extension of the Church

The third element in pastoral counseling’s coming of age may be seen in the clearer definition of specialized pastoral counseling as a community-based ministry. One dimension of this development is the increased dialogue between the pastoral counseling movement and the denominations, centering on the issues of accountability and competence. The professional associations in the pastoral-care specialties have helped the denominations take pastoral competence seriously and become more critical about who has it and who does not.

Likewise, these associations have begun to recognize that no matter how good a counselor one may be, it is the ordaining body that must determine one’s legitimacy as a minister of that church in a particular setting. Authority as a pastoral counselor has become more clearly seen as something based on both competency in pastoral function and active involvement in the ordaining community. Counselors who operate in a genuinely "private" practice are not pastoral because they are not accountable; their ministry is not an extension of the Christian community of which they are a part.

There is another way in which pastoral counseling may be understood as a community-based ministry. Specialized pastoral counseling has been included by the United Methodist Church in a category called "extension ministries." It is an extension of the Christian community into a particular area of life to respond to the needs of persons. Traditionally, the church has extended itself to those not sufficiently motivated to come to the church, and the pastoral counseling center is an excellent example of such an extension. Thousands of persons who go to pastoral counseling centers would not go near a parish church. For thousands of others the pastoral counseling center is an intermediate church structure that can be used as an entryway to a more traditional form of Christian community.

Obviously, I am not identifying a pastoral counseling center as a church. I am saying, however, that pastoral counseling centers are increasingly more like churches than they are like mental-health clinics. They are extensions of a central function of the church -- the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments.

Persons may come to pastoral counseling centers because they are depressed. What they receive, however, is not primarily a treatment for depression but a significant relationship and an interpretation of life that are intended to break through their limited way of perceiving the human situation. This is the same thing that the traditional church structures attempt to do through a gathered community of believers that meets to celebrate with Word and sacrament the Christian way of understanding and experiencing life. In its efforts to break through more limited visions, the pastoral counseling center simply uses methods designed more to meet the needs of the one, rather than most of the 90 and nine.

Tolerating Doubt

Through the two major services offered by a pastoral counseling center, relationship and interpretation, persons often experience healing comparable to that which takes place in community clinics and the private offices of health practitioners. As a dimension of their ministry, pastoral counselors who have received the training necessary for certification by the American Association of Pastoral Counselors do good psychotherapy. Such a counselor’s primary identity, however, is not as psychotherapist but as minister of the church, one who offers the type of relationship called for by the Christian gospel and who interprets the predicaments and possibilities of life Christianly.

In order to understand the pastoral counseling center s role in facilitating Christian community, it is important to see it as an extension of the church that can allow the expression and exploration of doubt. Many churches and groups within the traditional church structure perform this function well. Too often, however, there is in the church an expected conformity of belief that limits exploration of the relationship between doubt and faith. Too much doubt is a threat that many believers and churches cannot tolerate. Though it may be theologically designated as a community of sinners, the church many times is a community that connives to deny its own sin. Doubt, therefore, can often best be explored in a community identified with and related to the traditional church structures, but not so closely as to inhibit the expression of lostness and uncertainty.

An analogy may be found in recalling the time when churches would allow certain forms of recreation but only if they took place a respectable distance from the church sanctuary. The pastoral counseling center is an extension of the church -- a respectable distance from its sanctuary.

Finally, the pastoral counseling center is not only significantly related to the Christian community as an extension of its ministry; it is a community itself. Pastoral counseling is not a private practice of anything. It is a community of ministers, both ordained and lay, who work together in order to correct and learn from each other’s theory and practice of the faith.

As one of my colleagues in our pastoral counseling center is fond of saying, "I need someone to check up on my heresies." I need someone to look both at what I am doing in my counseling and at how I am thinking about it. One of the tasks of a pastoral counseling center is to encourage a continuing dialogue among those who practice their ministry there. When such dialogue is taking place effectively, it is not only the individual counselor who ministers to those who come for help; it is also the community that offers ministry.

The pastoral counseling movement has come of age and is living closer to home. I believe that the church can be enriched by that closer relationship.

Caring for Our Generations

As a specialist in pastoral counseling, I am concerned that the family often celebrated by the church is different from the family I see in my clinical practice. I see many single persons, persons separated and divorced, persons in second marriages, and families with children from two different marriages. In contrast, much of what is said in sermons and written in Christian literature seems designed to maintain a particular structure of the family rather than strengthen people’s ability to function in the families they have. This emphasis tends to venerate something in the past rather than help people deal with what is happening now.

Within most Christian communions, for example -- even those which do not view marriage as a sacrament -- there remains an idealism about marriage and a feeling that second marriages are never quite as good as first ones. Thus the church is far better at grieving over the failure of first marriages, and at trying to locate the reasons for their failure, than in caring for persons preparing for or struggling with second marriages.

Regardless of why the picture of the ideal family -- father, mother and two perfectly behaved children sitting quietly at worship in the second pew -- has been so important to the church, it is important now to develop a positive or normative way of talking about the family life of Christians whose families are different from that model. We need a theological norm for family living that emphasizes family function rather than family form. For those who have never married, who are separated, divorced or widowed can also have a family life.

I suggest we understand Christian family living to mean relating seriously and caringly to persons in the generation of one’s parents, to those in one’s own generation and to the generations of children and grandchildren which carry the family into the future. The quality of care for family members in one’s own generation and in the generations before and after is more important than the form or structure of one’s household. In fact, this norm of caring for the generations can apply to persons who are single, divorced, in single-parent or blended families and, to paraphrase one of the historic prayers, "to all sorts and conditions of human beings."

The primary biblical foundation for understanding family living as caring for the generations is in God’s call to human beings in the first chapter of Genesis "to exercise care over the earth and hold it in its proper place." That is the way Joseph Sittler, in his last published book, Gravity & Grace: Reflections and Provocations (Augsburg, 1986) , insisted that Genesis 1:28 should be translated -- although the Hebrew word Sittler translates as ‘care" has usually been rendered "have dominion over." The recurrent biblical phrase "these are the generations of. . ." emphasizes humankind’s place and responsibility within the sequence of history. It is a powerAil expression of what it means to be God’s creature. Isaac honors Abraham and Sarah; he blesses Jacob and Esau. To be human is to affirm one’s likeness with one’s parents, one’s brothers and sisters and one’s children.

As generational beings we recognize that our own generation is not the only one. Because our time is limited, we will not see all of our generations, only those nearest to us, and most of us can have significant influence only upon those generations immediately before and after us. As human beings we should be appropriately anxious to take advantage of the opportunities for care that are offered us, and the limitation of our time greatly enhances the importance of how we use it.

Perhaps the most important feature of caring for the generations is to make sure that we emphasize all three of our generations -- the one before us, our own and the one that comes after us. Attending to one generation to the exclusion of the others distorts our ability to care for any of them. For example, the husband and wife who cut themselves off from, or who overinvolve themselves in, the prior generation (i.e., their own parents) , suffer in their ability to care for and to commit themselves to each other.

Appropriate care for the previous generation involves, among other things, what family therapist Murray Bowen has called "differentiation of the self from the family of origin" (see Family Therapy and Clinical Practice [Aronson, 19781) Those who work professionally with families have found that people experiencing marital or other family pain frequently have an unfinished agenda with the prior generation. Jeannette R. Kramer in Family Interfaces: Transgenerarional Patterns (Bruner/Mazel, 1985) offers some useful ways to address these agendas. She suggests, first, that one become an astute observer of one’s own family, learning about its traumas, myths, patterns and rules, and about their effect on one.

She suggests, further, making a plan to contact family members individually to try to break the negative pattern of the "way you relate to that person when you are together in the family group." One of the most useful ways of doing this is by what psychotherapists call taking an "I" position -- "making clear statements about your own thoughts, feelings, and actions without using others to explain the way you are." It is important to be in as much control of your emotional reactions as possible, using matter-of-factness or humor to defuse tense situations.

Maintaining one-to-one communication even when with more than one person is important. Taking sides or listening to one person blaming another for family circumstances is not helpful, but finding ways to communicate clearly and openly about matters which are barely or never referred to is helpful. In doing this, one should use one’s own feelings of anxiety, hurt or anger as signals that one is getting sucked into old patterns, and that something must be done to maintain the new way of relating. The point in all of this is that expressing one’s separateness as another adult is an important part of what honoring one’s father and mother may mean today.

The most important caring that takes place within one’s own generation usually involves the significant other with whom one lives intimately -- usually a marriage partner. Lyman and Adele Wynne define intimacy as a relation in which the core components are trusting self-disclosure and communicated empathy ("The Quest for Intimacy," Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, vol. 12, no. 4) Following Martin Buber, they point to the limits of intimacy as a norm for personal relationships, emphasizing that it "cannot be willfully induced or long sustained."

Intimacy, the Wynnes say, involves four subprocesses which unfold sequentially. First, there is the process of attachment/caregiving or complementary affectional bonding, the prototype for which is the parent-child relationship. Then arises a communicating process in which there is a common focus of attention and the exchange of meanings and messages. Joint problem-solving and the sharing of everyday tasks is the next relational process. And, finally, comes mutuality, understood as the integration of the preceding processes in an enduring pattern of relatedness. Although these processes unfold sequentially, they are also circular and reoccurring. Even after mutuality has been attained, "relatedness usefully returns to focus upon earlier processes for various periods of time." And, most important, "until attachment/ care-giving is incorporated into a relationship system, the relationship is not likely to become enduring and reliable." Thus, in spite of the centrality Western culture gives to "being intimate," the Wynnes view intimacy as a supplementary, not an essential, process "for strengthening the bonding that has been crucial for the survival of the human species throughout the ages." It is the expression of care which is essential in one’s relationship to significant others within one’s own generation.

People need not give birth to children to be in touch with them. When they decide they are not going to have children, or when their children are grown, they ought not to cut themselves off from children altogether" ("Caring for Children. Caring for the Earth," Christianity and Crisis, March 31, 1980).

It is not old-fashioned to think about parenting and concern for children as among the central ethical issues of life, says Bateson. "If we do not remain related somehow with the fundamental biological orientation to the future brought reproduction, we run the risk that our other choices will become more concerned with gratification and exploitation and comfort than with responsibility." It is not enough, she says, to be brothers and sisters in his world. That only acknowledges our common origin. We must also say that we will be parents, offering guidance and care to the generations that come after us.

Caring for our generations is an important part of our ‘ailing to care for the earth, but it is only a part. The Christian tradition itself guards against idolizing family structure or family function. A pointed reminder of this is the incident recorded in Matthew 12:46-50:

While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother."

Jesus’ response is not a clear-cut choice of religious duty over family obligation but an expression of the tension of human living in covenant with God. Some of the more important of these tensions and choices are those between the love relationships of the family and the work relationships of one’s more public vocation: between kinship and friendship relations; and between care for oneself and care for others.

In any case, more important than preserving a particular type of family structure is the realistic expression of care for persons of all generations. Christian family living does not refer to the form of the family in which one lives but to caring for the generations: the generation before, one’s own generation, and the generations that follow. This norm applies to all sorts and conditions of human beings who seek to care for others in response to God’s care for them.