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Emil Brunner: A Centennial Perspective

During the ten years immediately following the war, which were an exciting period of biblical renewal and theological ferment, American theological students were reading the works of the existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, the Lundensian Lutheran theologians Anders Nygren and Gustaf Aulén, and the so-called dialectical or neo-orthodox Swiss theologians Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. Though the U.S. had its own theological heavyweights, including Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, the latter two had not yet come into their own. Nor did students then read much Barth, because only one volume of his Church Dogmatics was available in English and his great commentary on Romans, though challenging and intriguing, was not suited for classes in systematic theology.

Thus students in most mainline seminaries and university divinity schools read more works of Brunner than of any other single theologian. High on reading lists were Revelation and Reason in prolegomena, Man in Revolt in anthropology, The Mediator in Christology, and The Divine Imperative and Justice and the Social Order in ethics. His seminal work The Divine-Human Encounter (later republished with a new introduction as Truth as

Encounter) and his very popular little work Our Faith (translated into 19 languages) were also widely read. Also available in English in the 1 940s were his Gifford lectures, Christianity and Civilization (two volumes) ; by 1953 the first two volumes of his dogmatics, as well as Eternal Hope and the brief, controversial Misunderstanding of the Church, were available.

My first encounter with Brunner was indirect. In 1948, my sophomore year in college, I read the first volume of Christianity and Civilization in a philosophy of religion class. The first General Assembly of the World Council of Churches was meeting in Amsterdam at the time, and I recall vividly our professor sharing with us reports on Reinhold Niebuhr’s angry response to some of Karl Barth’s pronouncements there. Most of us in the class knew little about either Barth or Niebuhr, but we found Brunner’s approach a happy via media.

Brunner’s approach did not find favor in all theological quarters. Old-time liberals dismissed him along with Barth as being biblicistic and pessimistic, and fundamentalists rejected his alleged neo-orthodoxy as a "new modernism" (so Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Seminary) Even so, self-confessed liberal Wilhelm Pauck and leading conservative evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry found much that was challenging and admirable in Brunner’s theology.

His popularity in English-speaking countries was partially due to style. Unlike many German theologians, Brunner wrote with grace and clarity. This was intentional; Brunner wanted to communicate with a wider audience, not just the theological fraternity. His wife read the first drafts of his various publications, and he rewrote those sections that she found obscure. Brunner was also blessed with gifted translators, principally an English-woman, Olive Wyon, who was also a lay theologian. Two noted British theologians, David Cairns and T. H. L. Parker, translated his later works.

Unlike many of his continental contemporaries, the Zurich theologian also knew and appreciated the U.S. As a student he had spent a year in England (1913-14) , where he made many friends and improved his English. This prepared him for his first visit to the U.S. shortly after World War I. He notes in his "Intellectual Autobiography" (in The Theology of Emil Brunner, edited by Charles W. Kegley) :

This year in America provided the foundation for my particularly fruitful contacts with the English-speaking world for the rest of my life. At the hospitable Union Seminary I was not so much intrigued by the reigning theology. . . but rather by my encounter with the American people.

This fondness for Americans and their nation continued until the end of his life. Later he was invited to be a visiting professor at Princeton Seminary and might well have stayed there had it not been for the threat of World War II. In 1946 he returned for an extensive lecture tour, and in 1954, when he was teaching in Japan, he accepted an invitation to give the Earl Lectures at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley on "Faith, Hope, and Love."

Adapting the existentialism of Kierkegaard, the I-Thou approach of Ebner and Buber and the personalism of Husserl, Brunner sought to overcome the dichotomy of the subject-object split which has plagued theology throughout its history. Although loyally Swiss Reformed (a bust of Zwingli stood just outside the door of his study at home) , his great appreciation for Luther enhanced his incorporation of certain philosophical and biblical insights and resulted in what might be called a theology of encounter. This more than any other aspect of his thought makes his theology distinctive. Looking back on his career, he observed that "above all, the Christian concept of truth, truth as encounter, revelation conceived as God’s self-communication dominates and permeates the treatment of every single theological topic" ("Intellectual Autobiography")

Brunner’s notion of encounter is both simple and complex -- simple insofar as it points to a personal meeting or experience of another person or reality; complex in that "encounter" is Brunner’s way of relating revelation and faith, the Truth and truth, Word as event and Word as doctrine. He provides a helpful definition in Truth as Encounter:

To know God in trustful obedience is not only to know the truth, but through God’s self-communication to be in it, in the truth that as love is at the same time fellowship. The truth about man is founded in the divine humanity of Christ, which we apprehend in faith in Christ, the Word of God. This is truth as encounter. . . . Here truth happens, here we are in the truth, which is not in us but comes to us, which makes us free by restoring to us our true being, our being in the Thou, and our being for the Thou. In this truth as encounter, in which we understand our personal being as being in the love of the Creator and Redeemer -- and not only understand it but have it as a new bestowal of our original being -- to have and to be are one.

Whether Brunner explored this motif as thoroughly as he might have is open to debate. Even some of his sympathetic critics were disappointed that this approach did not always bear fruit in his dogmatics. However, here and there one sees a creative implementation of this principle. For example, in The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, volume two of his Dogmatics, he treats the work of Christ before the person of Christ, thereby following through on the famous dictum of Melanchthon: hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere (to know Christ is to know his benefits).

In the third and last volume of his Dogmatics, The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith and the Consummation, his basic hermeneutic principle is evident in the way he treats faith in the context of the ekklesia, the ekklesia being the presupposition of faith. God’s self-communication through Jesus Christ is not simply to isolated individuals but to a Spirit-created fellowship. Edward Dowey noted that in Brunner’s work, "personness is never to be understood in isolation from community." Brunner’s personalistic understanding of faith determines his understanding of the church and vice versa. Hence the ekklesia bears a double witness to Christ: through the Word and through its life.

Brunner believed that this personalistic, existential notion of truth as encounter was a fruitful -- and biblical -- alternative to the liberalism and subjectivism of Schleiermacher and the intellectualistic objectivism found in traditional Roman Catholicism and orthodox Protestantism. Against the former he posited the once-for-all (einmalige) character of relation as a historical event centering in Jesus Christ. Against the latter he pointed out that revelation is not primarily a doctrine but an act. To use another of his favorite phrases, revelation is a "personal correspondence" between God and humanity. "God does not reveal this and that -- he reveals Himself by communicating Himself" (Christianity and Civilization I)

In his battles on these two fronts Brunner occasionally went too far. Some theologians felt his slashing attack on Schleiermacher in his 1924 work Die Mystik und das Wort was extreme. -Later he turned his guns on Bultmann’s "extreme subjectivism" with similar vigor. More conservative theologians, on the other hand, believed that his constant criticisms of Bibelglaube (faith in the Bible rather than the one to whom the Bible witnesses) , "credo-Credo" (intellectual assent to the tenets of the Creed) and faith as a bloss Fürwahrhalten etner Lehre (a mere holding of certain doctrines to be true) risked throwing the baby out with the bath water. On this front Brunner criticized objectivistic elements in traditional Protestantism and Catholicism and in Barth’s later writing. (On this see the concluding chapter, "Theology Beyond Barth and Bultmann," in the new introduction to the revised edition of Truth as Encounter.)

Despite his insistence on the personal character of revelation and its correlate, faith, Brunner did not deny the importance of doctrine. In a chapter in Truth as Encounter titled "Doctrine As Token and Framework, Indissolubly Connected with the Reality It Represents" he explains:

God, to be sure, does not deliver to us a course of lectures in dogmatic theology or submit a confession of faith to us, but he instructs us authentically about himself. He tells us authentically who he is and what he wills for us and from us. . . . Consequently, we can never abstract the abstract framework from the personal Presence contained in it, although certainly we must differentiate them.

Brunner’s theological contributions extend also to the fields of epistemology, anthropology, Christology, personal and social ethics, eschatology and eristics (Brunner’s preferred approach to apologetics) , as well as helpful treatments of the standard topics in theology. The breadth of his theological concerns was tremendous (as a perusal of the symposium The Theology of Emil Brunner reveals)

The great Zurich theologian had pastoral and missionary interests as well. A lifelong concern was the renewal of the church, about which he wrote a provocative little book, The Misunderstanding of the Church. This was a one-sided argument, based on an idealization of the early church. "Yet," J. Robert Nelson comments in an essay in the forthcoming book of reminiscences, Emil Brunner in der Erinnerung Seiner Schüler, "it must be said that his strong emphasis upon Christology, combined with his perhaps excessive insistence upon the free fellowship (koinonia) of the non-institutional church, have had a beneficial influence upon Christian concepts and experiences of community."

Brunner was no armchair theologian; in an intriguing variety of ways he lived out his apologetic, pastoral and missionary concerns. He was active in local church life, preaching once a month in his home church, the Fraumünster; and after his return to Zurich from Japan in 1955 he became involved in an evangelistic campaign -- "Tell Zurich" -- despite poor health. He supported almost any church renewal movement:

the Oxford Movement, the YMCA, the non church movement in Japan (Mukyokai) and the lay academy movement in Switzerland. One of his proudest accomplishments was helping establish such an academy in Boldern, just outside of Zurich. His participation in some of these movements confused some of his admirers and alienated others, but he was willing to take that risk.

His crowning achievement in this regard was becoming in 1953 the first visiting professor of Christianity and ethics at the recently organized International Christian University in Tokyo. Earlier, in 1949, he had participated in the worldwide work of the YMCA as a theological adviser. This took the Brunners to several countries in the Far East for several months. But the position in Japan was of a more permanent nature ~d required that he resign his position at Zurich University. The two-year stay in Japan was exciting and fruitful, despite the hostility of some ministers and church leaders (due to his support of the Mukybkai) and the reserve of some Barthian theologians. Even so, for the Japanese church in general and for young missionaries like myself who heard many of his lectures, Brunner’s impact was incalculable. The rigors of living in isolation in those difficult postwar years took a toll on the Brunners, but they had no regrets.

I became reacquainted with Brunner between 1958 and 1961 while on extended furlough from missionary service in Japan. At this time he was recovering from a stroke and he recognized that he was no longer one of the brightest lummanes m the theological firmament. However, he continued to take a lively interest in theological discussions as he struggled to complete the third and final volume of his Dogmatics. And he never failed to express an interest in Barth’s thought, even though their relationship had not always been amicable. This long but tenuous relationship came to a dramatic climax in November 1968 when the Brunners had an extended visit with the Barths. This "great historic event," as Barth described it, was to be their last encounter. The last communication Brunner received prior to his death in April 1966 was a brief letter of concern and affirmation from Barth.

It is appropriate that the most elaborate celebrations of Brunner ‘s centennial will take place in Zurich. There the Brunner Foundation, in cooperation with the theological faculty of the university and various church and civic groups, is sponsoring a series of lectures and festivities which began in early November with three public forums, followed by an "Emil Brunner Faculty Day" on November 29. The commemoration concluded with an Emil Brunner-Jubiläumstag on December 9-10.

Will Brunner be remembered merely as one of several dialectical theologians, or as the one who debated Barth about natural theology? Some recent histories of Christian theology have reduced him to that size.

However, even after the market for Brunner’s books in the English-speaking world wanes and his students have passed off the scene, and even when his name is forgotten, Brunner’s impact on American theology is likely to continue for a long time. Key concepts such as the personal nature of revelation and faith, truth as encounter, and the christocentric understanding of the church and ethics have entered our theological consciousness. Albert Winn’s concluding remarks in his review of The Theology of Emil Brunner almost 25 years ago are still apropos: "Though Brunner’s system may never become regnant, the great truths for which he has fought throughout a long lifetime will live on to challenge his successors and to be used by them in the theological constructions of the future."

Raimundo Panikkar: Pluralism Without Relativism

Panikkar understands what pluralism means and what it can offer us -- in his language, he is attuned to the "myth" of pluralism -- without succumbing to it as another "ism." His working proposition is that for modem persons of any persuasion "isolation is no longer possible and unity is not convincing since it destroys one of the parties." The embrace of pluralism "implies that the human condition in its present reality should not be neglected, let alone despised in favor of an ideal (?) situation of human uniformity. On the contrary, it takes our factual situation as real and affirms that in the actual polarities of our human existence we find our real being." This is the problem, so much discussed today, of the other as other, taken here with great seriousness and made the central challenge to human growth, and indeed to human survival.

Each of us represents in his or her uniqueness an irreducible quantum of lived experience. In order to claim this experience fully, however, and to discover the presence of God in that experience, each of us requires the presence of others; to be in Christ through our own experience, each of us needs the other. That statement can sound like just another call to community until one realizes how fundamentally Panikkar means it. Why such a mutual being-present with one another is so necessary, how such a presence can be brought to pass, and what it might mean for a deeper commitment to Christian faith, are questions that have absorbed Panikkar for years. He is convinced that this kind of pluralism constitutes the kairos of our times, a special opportunity given by God. Pluralism is the sociological "blessing" of the late 20th century, a true providential novum in which old forces of domination are collapsing.

Individual commitments, Panikkar realizes, can make people seem intransigent. In Panikkar’s view this happens not so much because they are obtuse or recalcitrant, but because what each has come to believe is grounded in personal experience. You can’t be talked out of that -- and Panikker’s point is that no one should try: our opportunity and obligation is to speak and to listen, so that heart will speak to heart across and by means of our differences.

This focus on experience is central to Panikkar’s thought. The unique aspect of experience is a measure of the concreteness of God for us, and is "irreducible, incomparable, incommensurable to any parameter of understanding"; it is, as Eastern and Western faith traditions all acknowledge, a manifestation of the fact that "religious truth is existential and non-objectifiable." Religious experience is ineffable since God is beyond the power of all symbolic media to express: this is why the religious traditions of the East have a special gift for those of the West, which tend to be heavily verbal and rational. Oriental culture in general can represent for Westerners a call to return to the suprarational, presymbolic, timeless and nonserial spiritual realities.

Panikkar is no obscurantist or anti-intellectualist, however, for he stresses that we must communicate what we experience. Experience must be interpreted, otherwise "myth and faith would perish the moment that the innocence of the ecstatic passes away." In fact, experience is inchoate even to the subject until it is captured first at the level of mythic expression, much of which is nonverbal, then in mythologies which cast myth into the form of narrative, then in fully conceptualized systems. where mythos, to use his term, has become logos.

Given the mythic formulations in which communication is carried on, Panikkar argues, the process must become a critical one. We must critically analyze one another’s mythologies across our cultural and religious differences in order to lay bare their roots in our experience of our differing truth claims. In this kind of dialogue, the parties must maintain their respective commitment, but they must also recognize that the ways in which they express those commitments are something less than, or a distorted picture of, the truth contained in experience itself. With this recognition comes a recovery of the humility about oneself and the veneration for the absolute transcendence of God that pluralism requires.

One assumption Panikkar makes -- one that reveals the Thomistic strain in his thought (he is a Roman Catholic priest, trained in Madrid and Rome) -- is that everyone has an experience of God (even the secularist, especially the secularist) and that everyone seeks God in the form of some absolute. This absolute is embodied in each individual’s experience in some concrete way; indeed, it can be experienced only in that particular embodiment. Thus, Panikkar insists that religious particularities cannot be dispensed with; they can be critiqued, but not discarded. Any attempt to abstract the absolute out of the concreteness of experience is doomed to fail; it is a destruction of experience itself, an intellectualizing destruction that reduces the living God to an object.

This situation sets up both an aniconic dynamic (get away from the embodiment in order to encounter what is embodied) and an incarnating dynamic (embrace God in the symbol or manifestation) In Panikkar’s project these two dynamics take the form of a hermeneutic journey: one is to strip away the mythology in order to discover the deeper myth by pushing a critical-dialectical dialogue as far as it can go -- not in order to discover what is at the center (in fact, the layers of the onion are the onion) but so reason will come up against its own limits. Having made all of our claims for the divine truth contained in this or that experience, we will suddenly discover that we are in the midst of a new experience, which is that of dialogue in the pluralistic setting.

Here, silence commences, silence which is the answer to the question pursued in dialogue. This kind of full or respondent silence is not a state of emptiness or bankruptcy; it is the fruit of a dialogue in which the parties begin to have a fresh awareness of the presence of God in an encounter that sharpens and focuses differences at the same time that it clarifies common goals and common roots in the one God. Differences are not dissolved in a mystical stew but regarded as a mutual good, something necessary to our own re-experiencing in the here-and-now of the absolute claim of the absolute God on our lives.

Hidden in Panikkar’s agenda is a post-Kantian restatement of the ontological argument: God finds us in the myth that contains our absolute aspirations, at the point where our longing is turned toward the infinite. In the pluralist dialogue where myths are critiqued, love will emerge as that absolute, and I will find "that I cannot love [my neighbor] as myself unless I take my place on the one bit of higher ground that will hold us both -- unless I love God. God is the unique locus where my selfhood and my neighbor’s coincide, consequently the one place that enables me to love him as he loves his own self without any attempt at molding him."

Much of Panikkar’s work has been devoted to clarifying the mythic structures contained in modernity (in "secularism") and in the major religious traditions of the East. With advanced degrees in the physical sciences, philosophy and theology, with personal connections to two cultural and religious traditions (one parent was Spanish and Roman Catholic, the other Indian and Hindu) , and with experience living in India, Europe and the U.S. (recently he has been professor of the comparative philosophy of religion and the history of religions at the University of California at Santa Barbara) , Panikkar is accustomed to thinking on a global scale. His books on Eastern religion deeply disciplined in their own resources; there is no slackening here of the call to communal particularity. Indeed, Panikkar thinks that religious dialogue has often been frustrated by an unwillingness to maintain one’s own position in all of its integrity, in all of its claim to absoluteness, while allowing others to do the same. But such a posture does not mean withdrawing behind the lines of a dogmatic stance, or into the confines of a sectarian life. To do that would be to ignore the reality and opportunity of pluralism. Panikkar suggests a way in which we might have our cake and eat it, a way to affirm the activity of the creating and redeeming God in all experience without abandoning the claim that is the foundation for the Christian community’s service to the world -- that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one comes to God except through him.

Hemingway and Faulkner: Tracing Their Resemblances

When someone asked me several years ago why I was offering a seminar in Hemingway and Faulkner, what the two writers had in common, and what it all meant anyway (or such I take to have been the design, of the question). I was at first hard put to think of some straightforward answer that would be critically acceptable. I knew, of course, that it made sense to teach the two writers together, but I hadn’t then thought very much about influences, comparisons and contrasts, affinities, rankings in the literary hierarchy and so on. So all I could muster up by way of reply, at least for that moment, was: "Well, they’re both American writers of novels, they both won the Nobel Prize, and they’re both dead."

I don’t know whether this, retort -- fairly discourteous -- settled anything for my questioner. But I think it may have for me, having been thus put on the spot; because it seemed to me that these reasons were about as good as any that might come along, unless one is prepared to do a lot of spadework. And that of course was the whole purpose of my course anyway -- to get the students to do the spadework.

But perhaps my reasons weren’t altogether frivolous, and perhaps it does mean something that both these American novelists won the greatest of the literary awards and that they’re both dead. Now that they have passed into the Valhalla of the utterly eminent, it’s hard to get at them -- at least for the world we live in. And perhaps these men, who were contemporaries, did share some of the same concerns; write on some of the same situations, become obsessed by some of the same themes -- albeit they seem about as different as two writers can be, from the standpoint of style and geography.

I

But let’s look at them briefly and see what resemblances we can trace out. I would say that both these writers are fundamentally concerned with behavior, deportment, human conduct in the face of formidable, even overwhelming forces. The familiar Hemingway conflict, we are told, deals with grace under pressure -- or rather that’s what the Hemingway hero strives for: he’s the Good Sport and must play the game, not really caring whether he wins or loses but rather what the One Great Scorer (and this is about as close as Hemingway ever gets to the divine or even the cosmic) thinks of the game he’s played. Has he comported himself with dignity and like a man? All the Hemingway heroes, from Jake Barnes down to old Santiago, seem to think that this is the overwhelming question every man, must face. And the worst thing one can be in the Hemingway world is a bad player -- not necessarily, a cheat or a trickster, but a simple mess. That’s really what’s wrong with people like Robert Cohn: they strike attitudes, they complain, they whine, but they don’t do anything.

But the Hemingway hero, whether in the gangster world or the Plaza de Toros or up in the Michigan forests or the Spanish mountains, always behaves; and his life is accordingly a thing of order and symmetry -- the order of the clean, well-lighted place which it’s his whole aim to create, in the midst of the Waste Land, the Great Nada. Death, for Hemingway, isn’t nearly so bad as the Great Nothing, the Great Mess.

II

I think Faulkner holds to this same code. (Notice how quickly one uses such words as "code" in speaking of Hemingway.) Faulkner too is concerned with behavior: how one behaves toward others now and how one behaves to those in the past -- how one behaves toward history. His code may not be so easily discernible at first (he has not the deceptive simplicity of Hemingway); but he too believes in good behavior, I think. And he’s’ especially concerned, as in The Bear and, say. Absalom, Absalom -- both extremely ambitious and difficult works -- with how such behavior is learned. Faulkner’s world is threatened by Nada, too, but his more tangible enemies are gold and greed and the intellect which thinks in terms of them alone. Both Hemingway and Faulkner seem to be pretty anti-intellectual writers, for what that’s worth. Neither knocks the intellect as such: it’s all right in its place, only one mustn’t ever let it get too far above itself, to take over the whole person. And both these men very much believe in the whole person, not the fragmented, even maimed creature of the 20th century, but the individual who can live life fully, completely, joyfully -- despite whatever wounds he or she may have.

Both writers also seem concerned with how we are to behave to the natural world around us. (Were they ecologists ahead of their time?) The earth is good, its fruits are good, and it’s all placed here for our benefit; but we are stewards (a word I inevitably think of in connection with Faulkner) and must not betray our trust. Nature is not another commodity to be used, let alone bought and sold; rather, she is a mother, a goddess, whom one must learn no serve properly and on her own terms (Wordsworth?), or else she will withhold her favors, her blessings. No modern author I can think of can describe the simple pleasures of eating and drinking (and provide accompanying menus) more effectively than Hemingway; no modern writer can more lyrically describe a spring or fall countryside than Faulkner. Yet none of this is by way of travelogue. It’s as though both men were implying that, yes, the earth is good, but you must use it well, be a good steward over it. You must behave toward it.

III

Perhaps my very random remarks jibe with something Robert Penn Warren once observed about Faulkner: he said that the most important word, perhaps the key word, in studying Faulkner is piety; that’s Faulkner’s main concern. And I think the same observation might be hazarded of Hemingway. One might even ponder whether Richard. M. Weaver’s diagnosis of modern humanity’s malaise in Ideas Have Consequences might not be pertinent for both writers. Weaver said that modern people are signally lacking in three forms of piety: (1) piety toward the past, (2) piety toward nature, and (3) piety toward other human beings. Certainly, the past and our relationship to it seem more nearly central concerns in Faulkner, but Hemingway’s, heroes can, on occasion, be very good rememberers too. Faulkner seems more definitely rooted in one place, one geography, than Hemingway: his piety for nature is piety for southern nature. But though Hemingway varies his terrains, it’s always the same spiritual terrain he writes about: the terrain of the torero and of the bull, the Good Sport and the Great Nada.

Where a person’s relations with other human beings are concerned, both writers seem thoroughly initiated: neither believes in Santa Claus, though its not always easy to tell where the displaced belief has resurfaced. Cleanth Brooks implies that Faulkner doesn’t believe in humanity: he believes in God -- if I may strain a point in Mr. Brooks’s interpretation of The Sound and the Fury. Does Hemingway believe in God? It’s hard to say. Maybe the code, as Brett Ashley suggests, is what the initiates have instead of God. Sometimes he speaks of "they," which may be the purblind doomsters of Thomas Hardy or whatever blind chance seems to be running the universe. And it’s usually a pretty hostile "they," if Frederic . Henry’s reflections or those of the narrator of "My Old Man" are anything to go on. Whether there’s an order, a purpose behind the universe, Hemingway, seems in more doubt than Faulkner. His whole code and one’s allegiance to it suggest, however, that somehow, somewhere, human beings have acquired the faculty of imposing meaning on the meaningless; and this imposed order becomes a kind of substitute for an intelligible universe, which may or may not be presided over by a Nature greater than our own. But whence comes this particular human faculty? Hemingway doesn’t say: he plays about as close to the chest as you can get.

Anyhow, neither of these men seems to believe in natural human goodness or perfectibility. The pages of both writers contain some pretty dark accounts of the doings -- or devilment -- of which people are capable. They can treat other persons as things, as commodities, as people to be bought and sold. Or they can respect others as humans like themselves, whether God-created or not, and behave accordingly. Again, the word behave, which in turn suggests considerations of morality, value, significance, all sorts of things. Whether there’s a moral order, inherent in the universe or whether (who knows how?) we impose that order ourselves, such seems the best climate for human being, and their concerns. It is intelligible, and actions, things, whatever, do matter; they do count.

IV

Perhaps further than this we’d better not venture. We don’t want to yoke too many images together by violence, push our resemblances too hard. Stylistically, of course, there’s all the difference in the world’ between these two writers; yet each style seems appropriate -- indeed, inevitable -- for the tales they propose to tell. Their emphasis, their tales are often so different. Yet out of all this there do emerge some similarities which I think it important to note. Perhaps it’s no accident that Faulkner, when notified that he had won the Nobel Prize, said that he thought it should have gone to Hemingway. In like fashion, perhaps Hemingway’s presumed slap at the rhetoric of Faulkner’s acceptance speech when he himself came to win the prize later on ought to be taken for what it’s worth too -- but no more. Suffice it to say that each of these artists was aware of the other, knew him, knew his work, knew they were both there. And for good or for ill, neither of them could ever forget it.

Robert Penn Warren’s Enormous Spider Web

These are familiar themes in the works of Robert Penn Warren who died on September 15, 1989 -- these and the frequently recurring motif that "nothing is ever lost." Or as Jack Burden goes on to say, "There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed." History is real too -- not, as Arnold Toynbee has suggested it can be for the misguided, just something unpleasant that happens to other people; perhaps, as Warren himself once observed, it is also a continual rebuke to the present. And history -- and the world -- does make sense.

These are disturbing propositions for many moderns to contemplate: it would all be so much easier if one could simply shrug one’s shoulders and say, well, you just never know, do you, and who, finally, can tell anyhow’? But Warren never lets us off that easily. In an early poem, "Original Sin: A Short Story," he asserts that, no matter how far from home (in this case, Omaha) we wander, the Old Adam is still with us, even in Harvard Yard. And in "The Ballad of Billie Potts" he implies that we never outrun our "luck," not even when we assert that great American prerogative and go west, where all is "motion," all is "innocence." We’re still inside our own skins, we still have the identifying birthmark under the left tit: ironically. there’s still no place like home.

So time and place -- history and geography -- are sanctified for Warren, a poet. novelist and critic whom Allen Tate called the most gifted person he had ever known. But time and place are strong medicine for many in our world, where, to quote Flannery O’Connor, many people "ain’t frum anywhere," and where a contemporary writer like Warren’s fellow Kentuckian Bobbie Ann Mason finds a sobering story in the lives of many of her characters who can’t think of anything to do with themselves. They can always go from their mobile homes to that modem cathedral the shopping mall, but that’s about it. How indeed to write about such matters for readers who aren’t really at peace -- at home -- with themselves? This was "Red" Warren’s challenge. He wasn’t trying to convert anybody to anything, either -- except perhaps to the truth about ourselves, the truth about the world, which Joseph Conrad said was always the writer’s prime responsibility.

Willie Stark, the protagonist of All the Kings Men, puts his own diagnosis pretty well. He tells Jack Burden, the smart-aleck, wisecracking narrator (to whom the story equally belongs) , that he himself went to an old-fashioned Presbyterian Sunday school where in the old days they still taught some theology. There he learned to believe that "man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud," For every one of us "there is always something" of sin and sorrow, no matter how well concealed -- and that something can always be discovered and ultimately made to stick. (Could St. Paul himself have put it any better?) Furthermore, says Willie, you don’t ever have to frame people: just leave them alone and they’ll do it themselves, "because the truth is always sufficient."

Yet Willie is not all that egregious a villain: he’s the modern man of fact, as contrasted with that modern man of the idea, Adam Stanton, the brilliant, idealistic surgeon whose view of both past and present seems singularly inadequate: he really thinks you can make bricks without straw and that history is all Technicolor and hoop skirts. Neither view alone is good enough, as Jeremiah Beaumont concludes in World Enough and Time, though his terms for the conflict are the world versus idea. We must live, Warren implies, as whole people in time, which comprehends past, present and future; we must live inside our own skins; and we must take responsibility for our actions. We can’t just lay it all on what Jack Burden calls the Great Twitch; even Willie Stark dies believing that "it might have been all different." But the wages of sin is still death. This world is wonderful but flawed and humankind the greatest wonder -- and greatest shame -- of all. Warren never gets very far away from these themes in any of his work.

"Piety" and "connectedness" are words one inevitably thinks of here: they’ve been important for many another Southerner and many another traditionalist confronting the modern world. I think of Warren’s great reverence for the sheer wonder of American geography, nowhere more nobly displayed than in his great poem Audubon: A Vision, where he remembers:

Long ago. in Kentucky, I, a boy,

stood

By a dirt road, in first dark, and

heard

The great geese hoot northward.

Nor could he tell then what the spectacle signified for him: "I did not know what was happening in my heart." But it all comes together at the end, when he asks his listener to tell him a story. "in this century, and moment, of mania." The name of the story will be Time (though you mustn’t say so) -- this story of "deep delight." And Audubon and his vision, composed of love and knowledge, perhaps become one with the speaker and his.

I also think of the often sublime meditative passages of the parenthetical sections of "The Ballad of Billie Potts," in which Warren celebrates the "land between the rivers," the Cumberland and the Tennessee, in western Kentucky where the action is laid, then goes on to hymn the very idea of the American West. (Not for nothing did one critic suggest that Warren was "the most western" of the Vanderbilt Fugitives. In a darker mood, there are the "western" sections of All the King’s Men, where Jack Burden sings much the same song, but in a minor key, during and after his flight westward (on discovering Anne Stanton’s affair with Willie Stark) : he was "drowning in West," he says. But Warren always comes home -- to Kentucky or elsewhere, wherever he or his characters are rooted, connected.

Even at the end of the original (1953) version of Brother to Dragons, the "tale in verse and voices" which dramatizes the brutal murder of a slave by two of Thomas Jefferson’s nephews and constitutes a meditation on sin, guilt, history and much else, the narrator (this time called R. P. W.) replies to his own father, who has inquired whether, having visited the murder site so many years later, his son has now finished with his purpose: "Yes, I’ve finished. Let’s go home." This comes just after he has declared, "I . . . was preparedfl’o go into the world of action and liability." This may remind us of Jack Burden’s concluding words in All the King’s Men: "Soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time." That’s what it always seems to come to in Warren’s world: home, connectedness and all that goes with it -- commitment, accountability.

Warren could be hard on his own: he doesn’t let the South off in either Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South or The Legacy of the Civil War (subtitled Meditations on the Centennial) The latter work, with its concepts of the Great Alibi (Confederate version) and the Treasury of Virtue (Union interpretation) , ranks up there with Shelby Foote’s great three-volume history of the war. There were other acts of piety too: the affecting long essay Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, first published in the New Yorker (as were many of his later poems) , and the memoir, "Portrait of a Father," which first appeared in the Southern Review only two years ago. But it’s all of a piece with the "creative" Warren: you look at the world -- and yourself -- hard and long. You don’t forget where you came from. And you tell the truth about it all, with all the resources your discipline and your art can muster, until finally you make us see (Conrad again) and make us believe.

This is no less true of Warren’s literary criticism, whether in such ambitious works as the famous essay on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ("A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading") , the more modest but nonetheless incisive essays on such writers as Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter, or in the textbooks themselves -- just hardheaded practical sense for anybody who loves literature and believes it is an autonomous discipline and not a substitute for anything else. You can call it the New Criticism or whatever you like, but that’s what it all comes down to in the end.

We must leave him to history now. But we rejoice in his vision and his legacy -- unflinching, honest and beautiful and full of great joy. As he proclaims in the "Colder Fire" section which concludes "To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined Fortress:

For fire flames but in the heart of a colder

fire.

All voice is but echo caught from a sound-

less voice.

Height is not deprivation of valley, nor

defect of desire.

But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in

which all joys should rejoice.

And like everything else Warren ever saw, everything else he ever wrote, it’s all of one piece, all part of that enormous spider web -- always his own and finally now all the world’s.

Stimulating Faith by Way of Contradiction

Theologian Charles Wood, in The Formation of Christian Understanding (Westminster, 1981) , offers a provocative insight regarding the Bible’s multiple perspectives. Far from presenting a mere problem of interpretation, he contends, the differing and even contradictory texts can lead us to a more vigorous, robust kind of faith.

"These disparate elements are not to be ‘harmonized’ into some innocuous consensus," he says. Their function is rather to stimulate more thorough reflection and more honest engagement, and thus to foster a clearer and more lively apprehension of the canonical witness and its implications.

Wood is on to something, as most good teachers will recognize. The goal of teachers is not to make clones of themselves, or robots who blindly follow in the footsteps and habits of their leaders. Rather, teachers aim to help people think and understand and grow. Few methods in teaching encourage thinking better than the encounter with contradiction.

Think, for example, of the teacher of American history who presents a class of seventh graders with two accounts of the battle of Gettysburg, one written in the North and one in the South. Or of two views of the American Revolution, one from the colonies and one from a loyalist in London, both of which are persuasive. Such an exercise captures the students’ interest and prompts a quest for understanding more effectively than does the enforcement of one-dimensional "right answers" to be learned by rote.

I do a fair amount of teaching with case studies. A good case study comes out of an open-ended situation in which a decision is demanded but in which contradictory courses of action seem equally appealing, or in which moral pressures make contradictory claims.

The fundamentalist mind-set, of course, sees little but problems in the multiple sources and viewpoints we have from Genesis to Revelation. It feels a need to explain away the inconsistencies, the several perspectives, the different accounts. But what a richness there is in the contradictions -- in those two different stories of creation, or those four portraits of Jesus, or in the divergent views on faith and works that we find in the book of James and the letters of Paul.

Try starting a class by reading Matthew’s "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and then by reading Luke’s "Blessed are the poor." What a difference, whichever Jesus said. Both sayings have a canonical function in the church, shaping part of our identity and purpose, and we won’t throw out either one, even if scholarship moves us to think Jesus more likely said the one and not the other.

Or try matching Jesus’ approval of Zaccheus’s enthusiastic decision to give half his goods to the poor with Jesus’ demand of the rich young ruler, "Sell all you have." Or put Luke’s Jesus, who forbids all divorce, together with Matthew’s, who allows it in the case of adultery.

We don’t discard James or Jude or the Song of Solomon or Leviticus even if they don’t of themselves present the kernel of the Christian gospel, or anything much like it. We have a richly textured tradition, and varied roots to our religious language, symbolism and reflection. Charles Wood cherishes these inconsistent elements in the Bible. "Their elimination from the canon might diminish its witness or its effectiveness in one way or another, even though they are in no way representative of the canon. There are some among these whose anomalous status may even be the clue to their canonical role: like the friends of Job they provoke to deeper consideration even though -- or just because -- their own proposals are unsatisfactory."

Though high schoolers and college students don’t stage formal debates as much these days as they once did, the debate format is still a highly effective means of motivating and educating people. "Resolved: Nuclear power is not worth the risks to human life. Pro and con." "Resolved: Abortion, for the Christian, is never justified. Pro and Con."

Some years ago in a book on motivating human learning, Leon Festinger observed that we coast along with our routine patterns of thought without much serious reflection until the moment that we meet something strange, some surd. something that doesn’t fit. Then we are forced to struggle and to expand our thinking with new insights. Most scientific revolutions, have come about like that. So does personal growth.

Festinger called his book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. I like the title because I sing, and the great moments in music are often those tense ones when dissonance hangs impatiently in the air, waiting for harmonic resolution. Music without its dissonances would too often be innocuous and insipid -- as the Christian faith would be if we explained away its mysteries. Thank God for the gift of contradiction

Mandate for the Mainline

A fellow pastor tells of the he was sought out for counsel by a student who was about to return to college and join a religious cult. The student had been forced into the pastoral session by his mother.

After counseling with nondirective empathy for about an hour, my friend says, he got absolutely nowhere with the stubborn youth. Exasperated, he finally stood up and passionately lectured. He spoke of his own liberal church’s convictions about Scripture and its critical study, about Jesus and Christology, about God and the ways of naming God, about tolerance and prejudice, learning and science and religious truth, about racism, war, greed and service. "The whole package." The student, he says, shrank back and said, "Wow! I never heard it laid out like that in church before."

The so-called mainline churches share the experience of having a shrinking membership and a declining influence. They are moving to the edge while Catholics and conservative Protestants move toward stage center. Moreover, the demography of birth rates and the "new volunteerism," which weakens institutional loyalties, portend an acceleration of these trends.

This evolution in American Protestantism is hardly startling news to serious-minded observers. Neither should it be seen as unprecedented or unexpected by historians. H. Richard Niebuhr, in The Social Sources of Denominationalism (first published in 1929) , taught us about the rise, especially among the disinherited, of new, generally conservative, sects in the nation that virtually invented the denomination. These sects grow, gradually lose their earlier rigidities and passion, accommodate in one degree or another the dominant culture, and become churches, evolving toward the "mainline."

What is important, however, once sociologists and historians have made their observation, is how mainline church leaders react to this "postliberal" state of affairs. There has been too much fatalistic resignation in face of the statistics, as if they told an evaluative story. What is needed now is something like the conviction and passion that moved my friend, whether he used the best counseling techniques or not.

Herewith, then, are some convictions about the continuing importance and vitality of the mainline churches.

We ought not to be dismayed by the numbers so long as we know our minds. In his Attack upon ‘Christendom’ Soren Kierkegaard suggested that "the illusion of a Christian nation is due . . . to the power which number exercises over the imagination . . . It is said, that [an innkeeper] sold his beer by the bottle for a cent less than he paid for it; and when a certain man said to him, ‘How does that balance the account? That means to spend money,’ he replied, ‘No, my friend, it’s the big number that does it."’

Church growth and community influence are legitimate concerns, but of greater urgency is the message. The congregation that is a healing force for its own member and for the community and whose caring stems from Godward loyalties rehearsed in meaningful worship, will engage its world well enough to survive, be it called mainline or conservative evangelical. Its outreach will be based on a far more legitimate foundation than the concern so frequently heard, "We need a few more members to help us pay the bills." This latter concern may evoke an outreach program named evangelism, but the content will only be the worst kind of public relations, and the gain will be about as durable as the product loyalties that derive from commercial hype. Mainline preoccupation with numbers has sometimes been as questionable as that of boastful revivalists who count souls they have "saved."

Our mainline contribution has integrity, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be the dominant expression of Christian faith. George Lindbeck’s reflections on postliberal theology help us to adjust appreciatively to a pluralistic religious world. Classical liberal theology believed it spoke the truth and that all enlightened Christians should eventually speak the gospel in the same language, the sooner the better. Though less brittle in important ways than fundamentalism, liberalism nonetheless had a latent intolerance, albeit as sincere as anyone’s: it regarded conservative evangelicals and their kin (and, before Vatican II, the Catholics) as naive and perverse.

Lindbeck’s "postliberal" perspective knows that religious language-worlds, even within Christianity, are plural. Far from all of us sharing a common human condition and religious experience and simply expressing that experience in different degrees of adequacy, we are formed differently at a fundamental level. Each language and culture not only shapes persons within it in distinctive ways; it also creates the very "world" we perceive. Communication among various religious perspectives is more difficult than old-style liberals could ever imagine, since people aren’t even experiencing the same world. Lindbeck’s emphasis prepares the way for better understandings across the great divisions among the world religions, but it also helps liberal Christians work with conservative evangelicals, or, if those conservatives aren’t themselves ready for ecumenical cooperation, to live alongside them more fair-mindedly. The outsider can question another tradition’s language as to its inner logic, argues Lindbeck, but to understand the realities being created and affirmed by that language -- both the personal commitment and the worldview -- takes more identification with it than most of us can usually manage.

Within the mainline form of Christian faith, we hold convictions that beg for clear, impassioned witness and interpretation. Our insights are too important to be hid under a bushel, or complacently kept for our own people. Whether our testimony comes from center stage anymore or from the sociological and statistical periphery, it is needed for the sake of the church’s completeness and for the sake of the unchurched. It is also important for the evolving religious life of thousands of persons dissatisfied with the religious traditions or congregations in which they find themselves. ("Religious switching," as Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney call it, goes both ways, but aside from the drift into secularity and out of active church life, the dominant one is from the conservative toward the moderate or liberal side.)

What distinctive mainline contributions are still important once we give up the assumptions that we somehow deserve cultural hegemony because we had it in the past? I would list the following precepts:

1. No Christian body has a corner on religious truth. Ecumenism is founded upon deeper conviction than that, for it believes the will of Christ to be greater Christian unity than we know and show. But at the very least, this conviction is implicit in interchurch cooperation. The mainline approach requires religious humility and the ability to deal with religious paradox in ways that run counter to the fundamentalist quest for certainty in everything sacred and profane. It gives witness to what it has seen, heard, thought and believed, but it can also listen. It does not boast or insist on its own way. "It is not arrogant or rude." It affirms the neighbor, as, it believes, God does. In its better moments, it thinks inclusively in terms of one, holy, catholic church, rather than of "us" against "them."

2. Human reason and culture are God-given parts of creation not to be rejected out of hand. Fallen they may be, but the Christian does more than dismiss them straightway. This mainline conviction is particularly evident in our appreciation for historical-critical method. The Bible mediates to us the word of God, but it is also a human document. Like any traditional or classic text, it overflows with meanings that vary in considerable measure with the interpreter. Monolithic readings diminish and pinch the text. Everything we can learn about the text’s original setting and its subsequent interpretation in the church is legitimate knowledge for serious-minded reflection by the Christian community.

This conviction also allows for the conscious use of social science and contemporary experience to increase our understanding of the faith. I say conscious because no such understanding has ever been purely derived from some primal revelation, even when claims to that effect are made. While this position opens the way for wide differences of theological and moral conviction, we prefer that to the straitjacket of uncontestable dicta from some official interpreter.

3. In Christian understanding the human person is both uniquely individual and a social creation. Therefore the church concerns itself with all manner of affairs that affect persons -- from family life to disarmament, from schooling to Third World debt. We do not think primarily of "saving" people out of the world in sect fashion, corrupt and corrupting as the world may be. We have a lover’s quarrel with the social world, for its sake and for God’s sake. Social engagement is not peculiar to the main-line churches by any means. But, among Protestants, up to the present at least, it is far more theologically necessary and historically typical on the mainline side.

4. The mainline church concerns itself not only with the non-Christian and the merely nominal Christian in the homeland, but also with the non-Christian world abroad. So too do evangelicals, of course. But there is a difference of style and theological conviction in this case as well. Mainline mission statistics have declined in part because we celebrate the partnership that has replaced subservience on the part of the former mission churches. They have achieved their own indigenous integrity, which we want to avoid patronizing. They recruit their own leaders. These churches now have messages for us. This mission style shows respect for other cultures and religions while testifying to our faith.

This brief list is enough to suggest our mandate for making a distinctive contribution to the Christian enterprise. It is, in fact, urgent that this witness be heard and embodied alongside the emphases made by Catholics and conservative Protestants. With both groups, of course, we share a great deal in common -- perspectives and practices more important than the differences I have listed. We worship God in the name of Christ, we read the same Bible, we employ much of the same music, theological language and church polity. We enjoy the same free exercise of religion under the First Amendment and participate, even if from different points of view, in debate on Christian morality and public policy.

The list ought to be supplemented by a similar catalog of what, from our point of view, are the gifts conservative Protestants bring to the church. I will cite two for starters.

Faith calls for passionate choice. It is not a matter for rational detachment. Kierkegaard showed that faith is a far more profound reality than looking at Christ’s way aesthetically, or even morally. It demands an either/or. The gospel texts on choosing for or against need no repetition here. For the conservative evangelical, this choosing is dramatically expressed in an emphasis on a time- and place-specific conversion, a "decision for Christ." The mainline ethos allows for a broader range of experience in coming to God. But we can learn from the conservative’s Christian self-awareness. An articulated decision fosters the sense of Christian identity, something we need to enhance. We need to enhance the sense of our baptism and call. We can do it, let us hope, with a humility that still loves and relates well to the doubters who, for many valid as well as invalid reasons, sit in the back pews or do not even darken the church’s doorway.

Christian identity is a personal component in something that characterizes every Christian tradition at its best -- the sense of tension with the present order. Both mainline and evangelical have sold out to culture in many and various ways. Each usually does better at seeing the speck in the other’s eye than the log in its own. But, as James Cone says in Speaking the Truth, "Inherent in the Christian gospel is the refusal to accept the things that are as the things that ought to be. This ‘great refusal’ is what makes Christianity what it is and thus infuses in its very nature a radicality that can never accept the world as it is."

Another gift that conservatives bring us is a sense of the holy in the Word. The language of the Christian community needs to be formed by its Scripture, even as the community ponders issues raised up by a postbiblical world. Widespread biblical illiteracy undermines mainline strength and witness in an appalling way. Liturgical innovation and church school curricula have often abandoned biblical language and instruction in counterproductive attempts at relevancy.

Hermeneutic style will vary with mainline and evangelical, just as it does with the liberationist, feminist or process theologian, but the biblical underpinnings are essential. Rubbing shoulders with our conservative siblings may actually help us keep that footing.

An awareness of these principles and these gifts from our Christian compatriots ought to undergird our witness in today’s religious marketplace. This kind of thinking and believing is not all that subtle. It can be preached and taught by mainline Christian leaders with both vigor and clarity. Far too often the normal churchgoer, speaking of friends from conservative Christian groups, will say to the pastor, "They know so clearly what they believe. What is our position?" Confronted with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon at the door, he or she quails in confusion, instead of saying, "But you see, I am a Christian already, and my conviction about the matter is different from yours. It goes like this.

The mainline’s contributions are not obscure or befuddled. They can be made just as clear as the announcements of exclusivist Christians who believe biblical truth can be packaged for Federal Express. If taught well, they can ground a new courage of conviction and deepen the spirituality of our people. And they can serve the whole church in indispensable ways.

Has Ministry’s Nerve Been Cut by the Pastoral Counseling Movement?

An exaggerated deference to the most influential model of personal counseling may be undermining the ministry in hundreds of congregations today. We have taken the immensely helpful, nondirective Rogerian pattern and made it gospel, not only for wide areas of secular counseling but also for pastoral care. Further, we have turned pastoral care into the organizing principle for the whole of ministry.

That counseling, pastoral care, and the whole of ministry are not one and the same should be obvious, and a review of some recent writing in pastoral theology will suggest that a more distinctively pastoral vocation is again being vigorously propounded.

In the Movement’s Heyday

In my own ministry I sense a conflict between two inclinations as I serve a parish or counsel seminarians. On the one hand I want to be faithful to all the good teaching I’ve had about listening, about empathy, and about the "unconditional positive regard" with which I am to receive the person seeking counsel. I find genuine satisfaction in those moments when acceptance, so often talked about, is actually experienced. The important process of identifying with the pain and puzzlement and struggle of parishioners and students must not be neglected.

On the other hand, I want as well to share faith and Christian hope with these people, to avoid shutting off genuine interpersonal encounter and my own self-disclosure because of any false allegiance to psychotherapeutic norms -- and I doubt that empathy alone constitutes such a sharing. Other Christian pastors are aware of this dilemma in their work. To say that I simply disregard or "bracket" those larger concerns while I do my counseling is not answer enough.

Probing the relationship of modern psychology to Christian anthropology, or of psychotherapeutic style to pastoral care and leadership, is scarcely a new enterprise, of course. We cannot here take account of the entire genesis of "psychological man," the term Philip Rieff applies to people living in this late 20th century, but a brief view of ministry in the heyday of the pastoral counseling movement will serve our present purpose.

In the 1950s, as books from Carl Rogers came on the scene, serious-minded pastors and theological students devoured his Client-Centered Therapy and learned from it some crucial lessons. They learned to stop preaching and to do more listening in the pastoral encounter. They learned, going beneath the parishioner’s words, to "follow the affect," as we say now, and to reflect feelings back to the parishioner. I recall even yet a most vivid diagram from my own pastoral counseling instructor in 1950. Placing an arrow exactly parallel to a line he had already drawn to represent the story the parishioner was telling, he said: "This is to be your listening comment, your expression of understanding. You are not to introduce a detour, a side road."

We learned in those days to avoid intruding with the assortment of anecdotes, easy encouragement and doctrinal baggage that had so often been the stock in trade of well-meaning ministry both as we visualized it and as we had seen it practiced. We stopped imposing unwanted prayer on people. We were, we thought, being more intentional about our professional role.

Two decades ago the clinical training movement, based on the pioneering work of Anton Boisen and others in the late 1920s, was finally gaining noticeable momentum. Supervised clinical experience further helped pastors and seminarians develop empathy and drop their preachments. Since then pastoral counseling, greatly assisted by the clinical training pattern, has developed into a dominant area of ministry, mounting to its present ascendency in practical theology.

During the ‘60s, one might assume, we were occupied with other matters altogether. Clergy were scarcely perceived as nondirective listeners as they joined the movements for civil rights and peace, or the war on poverty. The counseling movement was not dormant, however. The formation of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) in 1967 represented a consolidation of the field, and it provided an organizational base for a surge of growth. Within a few months 81 seminaries applied for affiliation with the association, 27 more than had participated in the predecessor bodies at the time of merger. That rapid growth has continued, from 256 certified supervisors and 153 accredited centers for training in 1967 to the more than 750 active supervisors and 298 centers at present.

Another sign of the counseling movement’s vitality is the rise of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC) and of pastoral counseling centers across the landscape, Still to be fully determined are the meaning and possibility of third-party payment to such centers from insurance and public sources, and of state licensing of pastoral counselors. The issues involved, however, illustrate the question of alliance or tension with secular healing roles when representatives of the church offer help to troubled persons.

By the mid-’60s, theoretical issues were being joined at the level of practice in ministry. Earlier books attempting to assess the impact of psychological assumptions on theological doctrine included David E. Roberts’s Psychotherapy and a Christian View of Man in 1950 and Albert Outler’s 1954 contribution, Psychotherapy and the Christian Message. Each portrayed both the affiliative links and the tensions between the assumptions underlying psychotherapy and the newly vigorous theological consensus within the Protestant community. Books by writers with similar concerns now occupy several feet of library space.

Counseling Aims and Faith

The dominant teacher during the ‘50s was Seward Hiltner. Although acknowledging that pastoral counseling had the same ultimate aim as other dimensions of pastoral work -- that of bringing people to Christian faith and the Christian fellowship, where those goals were "relevant" -- Hiltner defined the special aim of pastoral counseling in more flexible terms, virtually indistinguishable from those of secular counseling: "The attempt by a pastor to help people help themselves through the process of gaining understanding of their inner conflicts" (Pastoral Counseling, 1949). Such a definition now appears to be under question.

In 1966 Thomas Oden published Kerygma and Counseling. Subtitled "Toward a Covenant Ontology for Secular Psychotherapy," it had as its thesis that "there is an implicit assumption hidden in all effective psychotherapy which is made explicit in the Christian proclamation." Don Browning found himself with similar concerns at about the same time, although his Atonement and Psychotherapy (1966) is more heavily theological. Analogies between Christian doctrine and the underlying, non-explicit approach of the therapists were stressed. Oden followed in 1967 with Contemporary Theology and Psychotherapy.

For pastors, this material offers substantial theological justification for the supportive, kenotic style of counseling and pastoral care, along with a belief that, without formal words of doctrine, we build health and even faith through our concern for the counselee. In the broadest sense we communicate the gospel. Nonetheless, we still face theological questions. Is that sense of communicating the gospel too broad? Are we rationalizing our deference to secular professionals rather than reflecting our understanding of who we are in service to Christ and the church?

Thus, Edward Thurneysen’s A Theology of Pastoral Care reached us (English translation, 1962) like a bombshell. With Barthian vigor Thurneysen attacked the secular assumptions of humans on their own, and asserted that the goal of pastoral care was nothing short of bringing persons to the "breach in pastoral conversation," to confessing their sin, and to hearing from the pastor the word of forgiveness. In Oden’s terms, Thurneysen "reduces counseling to proclamation," while Hiltner represented a "diluted and functional theology." Even so, a reader had a sense that if the only choice were between Hiltner and Thurneysen to guide day-by-day work, the decision must go to Hiltner.

Edward Thornton reacted more vigorously yet, calling Thurneysen a frightened man "seeking to build a closed system," one who "sees the minister as a water pipe conveying the Word of God to the people" (Theology and Pastoral Counseling (Fortress, 1964], p. 50).

Yet one has the feeling that Thurneysen’s work has served to keep alive a healthy uneasiness in our pastoral care and even pastoral counseling has not. We sense that the work of preaching, teaching, pastoral care and even pastoral counseling has kerygmatic responsibilities unfulfilled by Rogerian habits of empathic listening. It is at the working level that the tension is particularly felt. Our listening has been helpful, we believe, and yet we continue to wish that the parishioners could know more of the robust faith of which they are capable. Is the gospel finding channels through us, we ask.

More Aggressive Movements

The present environment, religious and secular, contributes significantly to pastoral malaise. For whatever reason, the evangelical churches are growing, unlike the "mainliners." Dean Kelley has argued that the conservatives provide a clearer meaning system for their adherents, The culture at large is shifting on several fronts toward a style more prescriptive, less permissive.

Moreover, the secular therapists themselves are becoming less and less passive. O. Hobart Mowrer, perhaps the most vocal moralist among the psychologists in the early ‘60s, is now joined by Karl Menninger, as his book title Whatever Became of Sin? suggests. Like Mowrer, he urges pastors and therapists to hold persons more accountable in the counseling dialogue. Rogerian types are being replaced by more aggressive doctors of the psyche; reality therapists, transactional analysts, practitioners of Gestalt and existential counseling.

The Human Potential Movement, so influential that some have called it our new religion, states a theology in its very name. Human destiny equates with the realization of personal potential, and each group leader will have a fairly ready answer for what that is, whether it is a new state of consciousness or a particular sense of well-being. In all probability the answer will not include a phrase about glorifying God, although it may say a fair amount about enjoying something or other. In the growth centers one is rather explicitly directed to "get in touch" with oneself, to "let it all hang out," to "realize yourself." Est is the secular equivalent of the hard-line sect groups, judging from reports.

Messages of one sort or another are being pushed vigorously in these movements. At least two books have unpacked the theology implicit in Transactional Analysis, and the nutshell summary of Christian doctrine in TA terms is now commonplace: "I’m not OK. You’re not OK. But that’s OK."

Any ideas that there can be a value-free psychotherapy become more and more problematical. One writer (H. Newton Malony, in "The Demise and Rebirth of the Chaplaincy" [Journal of Pastoral Care, Vol. 29, 1975]) neatly summarizes four kinds of assumptions operative in the different therapeutic styles found in mental health centers: The biophysical (which focuses on the physical body); the intrapsychic (which focuses on mental dynamics); the behavioral (which focuses on learned habits); and the socioeconomic (which focuses on the situation)." He suggests two other points of view, and proposes that the chaplain be their advocate in the professional mix: a focus on meaning, arguing that the mentally ill have lost or have never found meaning in life (Tillich, Frankl); and a focus on morals, suggesting that a violation of moral obligation or social responsibility accounts for mental distress (Mowrer, Boisen).

Reversing the Trend

Two recent books deserve special comment in connection with such issues. Paul Pruyser has addressed them in a provocative discussion of The Minister as Diagnostician (Westminster, 1976). While praising the clinical pastoral education movement for the help it has offered pastors, he worries about the one-sidedness of the conversations in which he has participated at Menninger Clinic: "The theologians sat at the feet of the psychiatric Gamaliels . . . eager to absorb [psychological knowledge] . . . without even thinking about instructional reciprocity" (pp. 23, 24).

Pruyser, a psychologist, is a modest man who knows that human life must be seen through more than psychological lenses if it is to be seen whole. Writing about pastoral case conferences at the clinic, he observes:

These pastors all too often used "our" psychological language. When urged to conceptualize their observations in their own language, using their own theological concepts and symbols, and to conduct their interviews in full awareness of their pastoral office and church setting, they felt greatly at sea.

As lay theologian, Pruyser proceeds at helpful length to remind us of those familiar insights into the human situation which are our special domain. He is not artificially pushing for more evangelical God-talk in pastoral conversation, but rather for more sensitivity to dimensions of faith and experience which are altogether appropriate for the pastor and chaplain to explore with parishioners and patients What does this person most honor and revere ("awareness of the holy")? How does the world seem to come at him or her (providence)? Does the person embrace life experience or shy away from it (faith)? Other of these "diagnostic variables," similarly translated for encounters in pastoral care, include grace, repentance, communion and a sense of vocation. They are in every ease perspectives that lend themselves to meaningful pastoral conversation.

Pruyser acknowledges a variety of motivations that may bring people to pastors for help in their trouble, but maintains that pastors sell themselves short if they overlook the most probable of all reasons: that the person had in mind some "soulsearching," a look at the self through theological lenses. The person makes. a tentative self-diagnosis, he says, in the very choice of coming to a pastor. For the pastor to work with that self-understanding makes more sense than to avoid it by playing amateur psychiatrist.

Don Browning’s most recent book, The Moral Context of Pastoral Care (Westminster, 1976), is an even firmer reversal of the trend toward imitating the psychotherapeutic disciplines in conceptualizing the gist of pastoral care.

Browning does not disown the recent past, but without question he wants to go beyond the stance that he and Oden shared then: "The preoccupation with therapeutic acceptance and Christian forgiveness characteristic of the 1960s, especially of the work of Paul Tillich, Seward Hiltner, Daniel Day Williams, Thomas Oden and myself, was not so much wrong as one-sided in its emphasis" (p. 104). In part, Browning seeks to root pastoral care in the Jewishness of our Christianity, which emphasizes moral guidance. Throughout the history of the Christian community, he says, the pattern of pastoral care has been pastoral discipline.

Browning’s primary view of the church is derived from that past from sociologists such as Parsons and Weber, and from theologians such as Gustafson. The church is called to be a community of moral discourse, a community of inquiry and action. This emphasis is the basis for Browning’s appeal to ministers and the pastoral counseling specialists of ACPE and AAPC that they root themselves explicitly in a moral context. The church is called to be intelligent and articulate in its moral reasoning, rather than to celebrate antinomian "do your own thing" growth groups as the wave of the future in Christian liberation. Browning levels a great deal of criticism at the faddism of recent Protestant history, marked by grabbing onto one modality of therapy after another -- from Rogers to Berne to Jung -- and losing sight of its own moral rootage in the process.

Pastoral Care Within a Wider Ministry

What, then, is the course for the enlightened and conscientious pastor who is aware of the value of the Rogerian contribution and of the deep psychodynamic processes that so affect our human interaction? Being aware, pastors will certainly continue to listen not only to the parishioner/counselee, but also to any signs that they themselves are short-circuiting the process of growth by glib or impatient responses in the interview. In addition, two further perspectives suggest themselves.

1. Pastoral counseling is not the center from which all other ministerial functions are to be derived. If, as was maintained in the ‘60s, the church is mission, then the overarching image for the total ministry must be more assertive. We are not corner grocers, waiting for religion-hungry patrons to drop in for two pounds of pastoral care. St. Paul did not set up an office in Ephesus and begin, "Tell me your problem."

Hiltner points out that shepherding is but one of three areas for ministry, the other two being communicating and organizing. Shepherding itself includes the "guiding" function alongside healing and sustaining. Our task, then, becomes that of discovering the appropriate amount of energy to be invested in shepherding as well as the style of pastoral care that is to be our own. While liberation may not be adequate as a summary motif for the church’s mission and derivative leadership roles, it does hold out for us a more active overarching image than shepherding and counseling. We are also preachers, liturgists, teachers and community organizers, and we hope conceptually to keep all these together in a viable discipleship.

2. Pastoral care, including pastoral counseling, has in it a freedom, a vocation, and a resource beyond the legitimately circumscribed domain of secular counseling. Yes, freedom -- because from the very beginning neutrality is "blown" by the label itself and by the "self-diagnosis" (Pruyser) of the parishioner who seeks help from a pastoral figure. Every therapist is somewhat symbolic as a socially sanctioned expert; ordination grants a particular designation. We are to use this identity creatively rather than back away from it.

We have freedom, too, for intervention and pastoral initiative. In this regard there is some envy by social workers and counselors who are genuinely concerned for people, but whose own structured roles do not include the opportunity to drop in on a family in a congregation to say, "I thought I would come by; you seem troubled." Human welfare would suffer a genuine loss were adoption of the more formal professional counseling model to displace pastoral initiative.

And vocation. Every counselor works with an underlying framework for listening and moving on with a relationship. How often it becomes necessary to relearn the truth that we are not passive in our perceptions. We select data and impose meanings -- every one of us -- even as we strive for better listening and more objectivity in the counseling relationship.

The pastor’s frame of reference is a view of human life not drawn primarily from the psychological disciplines, be they ever so humanistic. We see the person in larger terms, as standing in a web of moral relation and also within the creative and redemptive love of God. Inevitably this conception will influence the pastoral conversation at some points along the way, in subtle ways at the least. We will acknowledge rather than hide the fact. Whether God-talk is introduced is another matter. As Pruyser stresses, our particular vocation is to see the situation through our lenses.

A unique resource for pastoral care is found in the parish church, with its caring and its praying. Though most parishes are ill equipped for helping every troubled person to find an appropriate slip-port group, still for many a parishioner this can be done. Once again, such resources are the envy of those secular counselors who lack access to community support groups that could be part of the healing process. Further, we have the root activity of worship, to which, as pastors, we point by means of our own identity even without much talk of it.

Moving with the Relationship

How assertive shall we be in pursuing this vocation? Will the counselee "hear" any introduction of specifically religious terms? Usually not, I suppose. We begin with Rogers even yet. Communications theory, findings of psychologists, and a doctrine of sin all remind us of the screens that get in the way of both parishioners’ expression of their problems and the counselor’s hearing. The counselee’s words mean more than they say. They come from images of the world that are at odds with those of the pastor. The situation is not unlike the language difficulties of the foreigner who can speak only in halting English. Add the entire baggage of emotion which prevents from being said much that needs saying. For the pastor there are also the problems of ego and impatience -- wanting to show the way, to play God, to solve the problem for the other. Therefore we listen -- attentively, actively, patiently.

However, the relationship is as important as the technique. So we do share, eventually, something of our response to the parishioner’s story. We even, by manner or words, tell a story of our own faith, as parishioner and pastor together face the dilemmas that oppress the one seeking help -- and all of us. If the parishioner can hear it, together we can acknowledge the resource we both share: the guiding word and caring love of God. We are that free -- free to talk about that reality.

We may even pray.

Bible Stories, Literalists and the Sunday School

My daughter and son-in-law have built their home way back in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia. With their own hands they built it, helped by a few relatives and college chums pitching in sporadically during summer vacations. It’s a lovely place, hidden in a valley with just enough flatland to support a few cows, pigs and chickens, a small apple orchard and a garden that year by year will change toward what I call dirt from the clay and sand base that already provides them with most of their produce in a good season.

This couple’s older children are five and three years old, as are some other children who live not too far away. Not having found a nearby church (Betsy and Jeff have been driving 50 miles for services when they could make it), they have, with mixed hope and uneasiness, participated in starting up a small home-based Sunday school for the people in their cove: “two Catholic families, one Southern Baptist, one Methodist, and us.”

Because the environment in the hills of West Virginia is literalist and fundamentalist, the way the Bible stories are being told in the new Sunday school has this young couple on edge. “The things they have covered, far too literally for me,” writes Jeff, “include Noah’s ark and the flood and the creation story.” Then he goes on:

“Rereading these, I was again horrified at the violence, the demeaning position of women, and the wrathful and vengeful nature of God. How do you feel about this kind of biblical history?” In answer to that invitation, here goes:

Dear Jeff and Betsy:

I appreciate your worry about what a literalist reading and retelling of those old Bible stories may mean to Abigail and Sarah. You are well-educated people -- one of you in biology and one in educational psychology -- with a fine liberal arts background, so the foolishness of reading the classic yarns of Genesis as literal history is apparent to you. But please don’t let that put you off. Stick with the group. Here are four simple points in response to the uneasiness expressed in your letters.

1. Children are amazingly resilient little persons when they come from a home as secure and supportive as yours is. Some in your group tell them the Bible stories in very literalist terms, but that is how children of Sarah and Abigail’s ages have to think anyway. . . With the aid of the discussions you yourselves are also having with the children, God will eventually evolve for them into something less literally old-man-with-a-beard than at present. Although at least one writer/scholar counsels us to postpone all talk about God until children are 12, since before that they picture the Deity in such concrete terms, I see no way that we can do that in a culture like ours. Let the children hear interpretations from both the literalist Christians and from you; you have a far greater impact on your kids than has half a morning at Sunday school.

2. Stories are part of our culture, and Bible stories are an essential part of our religious culture. How can we talk adequately about Passover, baptism and even Easter without knowing the story of the exodus from Egypt? How can we understand Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of Jesus’ 40 days in the desert without remembering Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness? If we are to speak of a God who, despite human struggle, pain, loss and grief, promises us grace and peace, how can we leave out the story of Noah and the rainbow promise, and the dynamism of the covenant with Abraham? Those covenants have sustained the Jewish people through pogrom, Holocaust and untold anguish. How could we interpret our nature and destiny in a purposeful creation without those stories of Creator and creation so beautifully condensed in Genesis 1 and 2? Let the stories be told, even by those literalists in your Sunday school.

3. In your concern about violence, again remember the corrective gift of your home, and the resilience of children. Remember, too, that violence is nothing new to children. Violence is nearby even for your daughters. I shall always remember Abigail’s protest to you, at butchering time, about “Mr. Brown,” the cow she had named. When you tried to comfort her with some comment about how sad it is that things have to die, she said, “But Mr. Brown didn’t just die; you killed him.” She was only three years old. You won’t play up the violence in the biblical stories, of course. I pray that your fundamentalist friends won’t do so either. But violence is a part of the account of the American Revolution that Sarah will learn about in the fourth grade, and it’s also a part of biblical history. Those were violent times, when David and Saul faced the Philistines, and when Jesus was crucified by the Roman authorities. There is no hiding place from that kind of world until we grown-ups can do a better job of accepting that there is neither Jew nor Greek in the community of God. And the lore of the Bible, even if interpreted literally, seems likely to have a place in building toward that day.

4. Your part in that Sunday school will have an impact, I’m sure, despite how outnumbered you feel. For the time being, stay with it and build some bridges with your literalist Christian friends. Even if they rule you out, your faith is as authentic as theirs. You are all trying to pass on something marvelously good and important to your children, and I wish you well.

Are Humans Wired to Dream?

 

Book Review:

Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. By J. Allan Hobson. Oxford University Press, 192 pp.

The Paradox of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming. By Michel Jouvet. MIT Press, 227 pp.

 

Not long ago I had a conversation with a Roman Catholic bishop who is an excellent administrator, a thoughtful leader and a world traveler. We met in his office not far from the burial place of Bishop Frederick Baraga, a 19th-century missionary to the Ojibwa known as the "snowshoe priest" -- a beloved figure among Indian people and the creator of the first Ojibwa dictionary. When our conversation turned to personal and pastoral matters, I happened to ask the bishop about dreams. He responded cordially, but with a touch of amusement: "I don’t dream." When I asked what training he’d received over the years on working with dreams, he replied, "None. At least none that I can recall having any impact on me."

Should this good, wise bishop be interested, there is a fascinating world awaiting him. In the 1990s the scientific study of sleep and dreams catapulted into public awareness because of a federal initiative that funded brain research. Using sophisticated computer-driven imaging techniques like PET (positive emission tomography) and the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), researchers opened up new details about the operation of the brain.

After a decade of study, two tightly written volumes by distinguished neuroscientists have emerged, each posing varied perspectives on this body of research. J. Allan Hobson is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Michel Jouvet is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and professor of experimental medicine at the University of Lyons. Both neurologists remind us that all warm-blooded mammals dream, to various degrees, each and every night. Though we may not remember these nightly excursions into our own personal psychic landscapes, research continues to confirm what was first reported from electronic monitoring during the 1953 landmark studies at the University of Chicago: we’re wired to dream.

Human beings sleep in episodic stages of REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM cycles. Dreaming is associated with REM sleep. Dream sleep accounts for about 20 percent of adult sleep time. Children and infants spend 60 to 80 percent of their sleep time in the dream state. Certain pharmaceuticals, including barbiturates (sleep medications), as well as alcohol, repress REM sleep. Studies show that if’ dream sleep is repressed, the brain will compensate during following sleep cycles with increased REM sleep. And when REM activity is suppressed, people may sleep longer but don’t feel fully rested.

Hobson, recipient of the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Sleep Research Society, examines dreaming through the lens of physiology. He lays out the complexity of thermoregulation during the dream state, the shifting interplay of neurotransmitters, and the profusion of chemicals that every second fire off billions of neural connections in the thinking-sleeping brain.

Interestingly, Hobson has reservations about common pharmacological interventions in brain function. In a description of a sleep disorder known as RBD, in which patients enact their dreams through movement, he notes that a deficiency of dopamine (a specific brain neurotransmitter) is one key marker of Parkinson’s disease. He suggests, chillingly, that the prolonged use of antidepressants known as SSRIs can lead to RBD. Accordingly, he warns against long-term use of such psychotropic medications when treating depression and anxiety disorders.

Hobson casually dismisses any notion that dreams have a deep, nonphysiological meaning. He calls such notions "the mystique of fortune cookie dream interpretation," He holds up the "formal functions" of sleep states, emphasizing several critical physiological forces at play in the dreaming brain. One of the first signs of sleep deprivation, he notes, is the breakdown of the skin. Even a slight decrease in REM sleep causes a measurable drop in immune function. Thermoregulation is also affected when brains are deprived of the dream state. In lab studies, sleep-deprived rats have been invaded by bacteria from their own bowels. These lab rodents, Hodson graphically reports, are "eaten up by normally symbiotic hitchhikers that were no longer satisfied just to go along for the ride."

Every night sleep revives our emotional life and reinforces basic brain mechanisms that allow us to fight, flee, feed and procreate. A physiological restoration happens during REM sleep. Hobson is persuasive and straightforward on this point and on the goal of his research: "In the place of dream mystique," he writes, "we aim to install dream science. And the science we intend to install has a solid, firm base in neurobiology."

Jouvet’s essays take readers on a scientific and sociological tour of the history of sleep and dream research. Regarded by many of his peers as the world’s leading sleep and dream researcher, he identifies the dream state as a distinct, vital "third state" of mental activity to be respected for its unique function. For Jouvet, the function of dreaming is to restore, protect and preserve individuality.

Though highly respected for the rigor of his research, Jouvet nonetheless approaches the "cold reason" touted by Hobson with a measure of caution. He leaves open the possibility that dreams have more than physiological meaning, as elusive as that is to demonstrate. He quotes biologist Frances Crick (codiscoverer of the double helix of DNA): "Absence of proof is not proof of absence."

Jouvet refers to the dream state as "paradoxical sleep," pointing out that while the body goes into a semiparalysis, the limbic system (the emotional and memory parts of the brain) moves into heightened activity.

Neither behaviorism, which avoids the problem of relating the brain and consciousness, nor functionalism, which is interested only in chemical interactions, adequately addresses this phenomenon.

The dream state, Jouvet suggests, is primarily a cleaning function by which the brain, operating as a closed circuit, rids itself of parasitic modes by creating new information circuits. It’s a necessary life-or-death process protecting survival and individuality. Dreaming allows us to function in shifting, often threatening environments.

From a physiological perspective, then, it’s clear that dreaming is critical for sustaining life and normal brain functioning. But what other, if any, contributions may the dreaming brain offer?

Respected neurologists such as Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania, along with colleagues Eugene D’Aquili and Vince Rause (authors of Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief), say not only that we’re wired to dream but that we are wired to have unifying mystical experiences. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of Harvard Medical School’s Mind Body Institute, suggests an even deeper, broader integration of mind and environment that humans achieve: "I am astonished that my scientific studies have so conclusively proved that we are wired to believe," he writes, "that our bodies are nourished by prayer and exercises of belief. The veracity of the experience of God is undeniable to me" (Timeless Healing).

Perhaps the deeper, more complex and underlying question that needs to be asked about dreams, given the scientific evidence, is whether our brains are part of "closed" or "open" systems. Are we the sum total of our biology and environment or are we capable of being influenced by forces outside the boundary of personal consciousness and physical connection? Hobson and (perhaps to a lesser degree) Jouvet both maintain that the brain is part of a "closed" system.

As children of modernity, we are left to wonder what to do with the legacy of dream interpretation found in all great religious traditions. Judeo-Christian scriptures and teachings are shaped by such experiences. What about the dreams of Jacob and Joseph, the prophet Daniel, the wise men, Pontius Pilate’s wife and Peter? What about the dreams of St. Jerome, Constantine, Martin of Tours, St. Ignatius of Loyola and, in our own era, Martin Niemöller, the German pastor who, on the basis of a dream, decided to publicly oppose Hitler?

Jouvet and Hobson offer a valuable service by introducing us to the complexity of neurological findings. One contribution that the religious community can make is to remind researchers that the long tradition of religious dream interpretation cannot be reduced to biology. Such a reduction is like dismissing a Rembrandt painting as nothing more than a sequence of brush strokes.

Resistance to listening and recovering our own dream lives may he rooted in the secular, economically driven egocentricity of the West. Paul Tillich and others have warned about the captivity of one-dimensional thinking which has drained religious symbols of their power. Speaking about this problem of modem consciousness, Edward Edinger, a Yale-trained physician and analyst and author of The Creation of Consciousness, quotes Carl Jung:

All modern people feel alone in the world of the psyche because they assume there is nothing there that they have not made up. This is the very best demonstration of our god-almighty-ness which simply comes from the fact we think we have invented everything psychological; that nothing would be done if we did not do it. It’s an extraordinary assumption. That one is alone in one’s psyche. Sometimes, something suddenly happens which one has not created, something objective and then one is no longer alone. This is the object of (religious) initiatory practices. To train people to experience something which is not their intent, something strange, something with which they cannot identify. This becomes the experience of God.

Hobson concludes his book reflecting on this dilemma from the perspective of neurological science. The relationship between the conscious awareness of a dream (and its subjective meaning) and the physiological interaction of the brain’s chemistry presents, he said, a "hard problem." What value does an awareness that we’re dreaming carry? Why does the meaning of a dream often haunt us? He acknowledges, reluctantly, that neuroscience many never solve this question.

Some cultures, still rooted deep in their tradition and fused to their religious teachings, have their own answer to Hobson’s "hard problem." For the past several years I’ve worked on environmental projects with American Indian communities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and I’ve become acquainted with remnants of an Ojibwa religion called Mediwiwin. Originating on the shores of Lake Superior hundreds of years ago, this community is described by its followers as a "dreamer society." An elder from the Red Cliff Reservation recently told a friend of mine this Mediwiwin story about the origin of the world:

The Great Manitou first created the waters, then the rock, the sun, then the forests. Soon he was lonely so he created the animals of the land and the fish of the sea. Each was dependent on the other. He was delighted with his creation so he next fashioned a couple of two-legged creatures and called them man and woman. Suddenly he realized he had made a terrible mistake. The two-legged ones were, because of their dependency, vulnerable upon everything else. He pondered this and asked himself, "What shall I do?" He decided to give the two-legged ones a chance to be equal, to exercise balance through insight and visions. He gave them a special power, a gift: the dream.

More recently I visited a Potawatomi Indian community near the shores of Lake Michigan. There I met Don and Vicki Dowd of the Mediwiwin Society. Don mentioned that he had met with a priest who had asked about native spiritual traditions and how they might be recovered. His reply to the priest was: "Tell the truth about Bishop Baraga and the journal entries." He explained that the Mediwiwin believe Baraga not only attended native ceremonies and prayed with Ojibwa but asked to be initiated "into the way of the dream."

There is no record in his published journals that Baraga ever explored the Mediwiwin dream spirituality. The tale of his crossing over into the dreamer society may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, the story itself hints of hidden worlds, or of a single universe connecting disparate realities.

In our own time and place, the worlds of myth and science, of religious experience and empirical research, are frequently set in opposition to one another. It may be a striking irony that neurologists like Hobson and Jouvet can contribute to a recovery of what many people in churches have abandoned: a belief in a divine force outside ourselves, a healing presence deep within that still speaks through dreams and visions.

Sweat, Stones and Visions: Native American Spirituality



Its midafternoon. In a borrowed ‘76 AMC Hornet, holding a fast-food chicken sandwich in one hand and balancing a cup of ice water in the other, I drive eight miles north from this Oregon university town to an abandoned air force base which now houses a modest, little-known alcohol treatment Center for American Indians. As the car radio blasts its frenzied commercials, the sun is shining on meadows along the edge of the lush green coastal hills. A mist from the morning -- wavering, mysterious -- still clings to the valley floor. As part of a personal search for common ground between my own religious tradition and that of native Americans, I have accepted an invitation to share in a sweatlodge ceremony today. Sensing my need to prepare for this passage into another world, I switch off the car radio. Led Zeppelin gives way to the dull rhythm of tires on pavement.

I arrive to see 15 acres of cinderblock, prefab buildings. Many have broken windows; most are painted a drab green. I drive into the parking lot of a run-down barracks unit. The grass remains unmowed. Pieces of discarded machinery, an occasional rusted can litter the lonely landscape. To my right, I catch sight of the ceremonial grounds: the medicine circle, made up of three circular sweatlodges, each about 12 feet in diameter and four in height. In back of each lodge stands a cedar pole 15 feet high, with colored cloths and a single feather teased by the wind. In the center of the circle is a well-used firepit, bordered by three small altars made of earth and stone, each in front of its lodge.

I walk toward the office building. A handful of dusty cars and pickup trucks reflect the afternoon sun. Two dogs play at the far end of the barracks.

Later that afternoon, I sit with Victoria, a 30-year-old Seneca from Cleveland. We talk of the treatment center’s struggle for funding and her work as project director to balance the delicate political dependency on federal and tribal bureaucratic structures. One of 130 such alcohol treatment programs in the country, this one has sought to incorporate Indian tradition and spirituality into its approach. It is trying to reclaim the deepest resources of the native American heritage in order to combat the crippling effects of alcoholism -- an insidious psychosocial cancer eating away the remnants of native American communities. Along with Indian cultural events, support groups and local medical consultations, twice a week the sweatlodge ceremonies are carried out: the ceremonial pipes are prepared, the rocks heated in the firepit, the ancient spiritual songs remembered, the purification rituals relived.

The fire is being lit, the wood split. One hears now the ring of an ax -- deliberate, purposeful. I lean against a photocopying machine in the main office, a stained table with instant coffee to my left and a corner shelf piled high with periodicals. Three or four of us talk together of religion.

The small, round-faced woman, Ivy, is 20 years old and comes from the Lummi reservation in Washington. She speaks of the sweathouse as her “sanctuary.” Her father was once an electric-guitar player, her mother a singer. She recalls years of traveling with them: “They played for different churches,” she says, “all kinds.” She figures she’s seen them all -- and will never forget one that preached that all folks who were left-handed were going to hell. “You know,” she says, half smiling, “I never got over that one. It gave me so much guilt. I was left-handed, see.” I catch a quick glint of her eye. Pat, a staff member, part Blackfoot, takes another cigarette. There is a kind of painful humor now about their early experiences in the Catholic Church.

I have been drawn here over the past year by native American friends. My role as a non-Indian, a Lutheran pastor and a Western-trained psychotherapist was first challenged years ago while I was working and living with a number of Chippewas, members of my first rural parish in northern Michigan. As I increasingly realized the incompleteness of much Western theological reflection, I first turned to, then became disillusioned with, the exclusively materialistic, behavioristic bias so dominant in much of secular psychotherapy. My reading in psychiatry and religion confirmed for me the importance of the symbolic and the intuitive. I have cautiously watched, with interest and support, the assault on the overtechnologized concepts so predominant in Western medicine and religion. (See Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness [Bantam, 1981]; Vine Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence [Harper & Row, 1979]; Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health [Random House, 1976]; Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness [Harper & Row, 1974].) My conviction has grown steadily stronger that in the remnants of that which our white culture has sought so systematically and unconsciously to destroy lie clues to an understanding of ourselves and others as common creatures of the earth.



The fire is burning down. I wander outside to the medicine circle where six of us have gathered. Now I understand why they smiled when I asked, “What time will the sweat begin?” Indian time, right time, intuitive time, nature’s time: when the fire burns down. We watch the burning logs together. Fourteen rocks stacked carefully in the center, now glowing red-hot from the remaining coals. Conversation passes among us casually, softly.

Dutch, an Oglala Sioux raised in South Dakota, tells me about the numbers of rocks used for different ceremonies. Tending the fire is a lean, longhaired, blue-jeaned staff member called Alfredo. Relaxed yet intent in his movements, he reminds me of a hippie of the ‘60s. He’s part Indian, Dutch tells me, and will be the medicine leader for the sweat. A younger man moves from the woodpile to the circle. Eager; helpful; his voice is stuttering, tongue-thick -- scars from the ravages of alcohol. Alfredo motions. It’s time.

We wait in running shorts or cutoffs. Ivy and another woman stand with wraparound blankets. The pipe is prepared and laid gently against the small earth altar in front of the lodge; the tobacco is blessed and lit. Small ribbon offerings of varying colors are tied to the inside frame of the lodge. A pail of water and drinking ladle are brought and placed next to the door.

Alfredo nods and the thick-tongued one acknowledges his sign. He will be our Stone tender, the fire keeper. Circling the lodge clockwise, I follow the other six and stoop, in my turn, to enter the three-by-three-foot entry. We sit together cross-legged around a shallow pit. The leader asks if anyone is here for the first time. He says the medicine circle has no beginning, no end; he speaks of unity and the importance of the Four Directions; of Grandfather, whom, he says quietly, “we call God”; and “the earth, our Grandmother.”

I remember Victoria telling me that the sweat ritual used here is based on the Lakota tradition  -- the Indians of the High Plains. As Alfredo prepares for the entering song, I remember the Sioux word for Grandfather: “Tunkashila.” The long-haired one continues speaking quietly about the lodge as a womb: the darkness, the heat. The ritual of purification, of going back, is to connect us again with Grandfather, with Grandmother. He speaks about the stones that will be brought in: the stone people, our ancestors. Before him lie two antlers taken from the altar outside to handle the heated rocks.

The ceremonial pipe is lit and passed around the circle, each of us drawing four breaths. The leader beckons the stone tender to bring stones, seven of which are touched by the pipe, greeted with “Ho Tunkashila,” and placed in the pit. Sweet clover is scattered on the stones. We smell the scent, and wisps of smoke fill the lodge. Dutch leans over and rubs the mists of natural incense on his arms and chest. Alfredo asks for water from the stone tender. The door of the lodge is closed now, the blankets pulled down over the entrance. Darkness surrounds us; care is taken that no light is visible during the ceremony. Whether eyes are open or closed will not matter. Alfredo begins in Lakota with incantations, songs, prayers. In the darkness there are sounds of the ladle being dipped into the pail, then water being poured upon the rocks. The heat -- intense, increasing -- envelops the body in waves. The hiss of steam fills the senses. There is nowhere to stand up, no place to move. The medicine leader carries on with the singing of a spirit song, the ladle tapping a drumbeat on the side of the galvanized pail. The steam and heat penetrate the darkness.

I hear gasps for breath. Inside, deep within me, I feel the grip of fear. I want to run. A sudden, desperate urge rises to escape. I steady myself. More steam. Thinking I will faint, my mind cries out, “When will this be over? What excuse can I find for getting out of here?” Familiar habits, techniques for dealing with fear of being trapped, don’t work now. The senses are bombarded with intensity. My nostrils and eyes, my mouth and ears, are filled with steam and heat. I feel the moisture dripping from my body. My ears fill with Alfredo’s incantations and the rhythm of the Lakota chant. I hear others around me join in an easy, high-pitched wailing song.

Our ceremonial leader shouts a Lakota name for Grandfather. With a cry, “Ho Tunkashila!,” the makeshift door of blankets is thrown open. Air and light surround us. Water is brought in. “Here, friends, drink of the water of life.” Around the circle the ladle is passed, each drinking and pouring the extra on face and body. No sense of hurry or time here; no notes, hymnbooks, worship manuals or electric organs. Five minutes pass, ten. Alfredo drinks last. Two more stones are brought in. The fire tender closes the door. Once again, we are surrounded by darkness. The second round begins.



The now-familiar litany begins again, “Grandfather, have pity on us top-legged creatures.” There is more steam and heat; the sound of a makeshift drum, the tapping of a drinking ladle on the side of the pail. I feel faint; the boundaries of time and space begin to collapse. I hear the prayers -- petitions of thanksgiving, a plea for a cousin murdered on a reservation days earlier, prayers for a family, for the fish of the rivers. The heat becomes more intense. I give up control, let Ivy carry what is left of my consciousness on the sound of her voice, chanting the ancient songs.

The third and fourth rounds follow, intermingled with resting times of light, air and water. The scent of sweet clover burns, permeating our circle. Somewhere in those moments, I open my eyes to the darkness, and carried by the dull rhythm of the ceremonial chant, sweat soaking my body, heat singeing-my nostrils, I wait for a vision from the other side of my consciousness. I catch then a glimpse of a man hanging from leather thongs, pierced, in pain, mortifying his flesh, waiting for a vision. The Sun Dance: that holy liturgy of the sun, a sacred quest of the Plains Indians. His face is mine; I recoil in fear, looking again, seeing nothing.

I recognize that my unconscious has been triggered with a vision, paralleled in recent months in the symbol language of my dreams; a struggle with my ego, my consciousness; my need for breaking through and touching a deeper sense of self. I sense anew the struggle with both my love and hate for the pressures surrounding those of us who carry the socially approved but psychologically presumptuous roles of professional healer, clergy or therapist. The vision is a real one for me, foretelling of pride and denial, to be broken only in experience by pain and travail.

The heat increases now, the chanting, incantations becoming stronger. Steam and heat fill my mouth and eyes. In the darkness, Alfredo leads us in a final liturgy of thanksgiving: “Have pity on us, Grandfather.” His prayer triggers for me the opening words of the mass, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” Here is a primal human cry, set against the personal encounter of Infinite Mystery. There are prayers now for the medicine circle, the earth, those who look upon the sweatlodge from the outside, the stone tender. A shout of “Ho Tunkashila!” is lifted upward. For the last time the door flap is flung open. We leave the lodge in circular fashion. Some fall to the grass, breathing deeply the twilight’s fresh air; a few move toward the garden hose near the barracks for water; still others walk toward the makeshift shower rooms in the drab green building turned treatment center.

I stoop to pick up my towel from the side of the firepit and recall something the man named Dutch said as we waited by the fire hours earlier. About how religion was “not meant to be easy.” How the sweatlodge reminds us of that. And Ivy, in our conversation near the photocopying machine, said that the first time she went through the purification ritual she thought she was going to die -- a long-standing fear for her, of darkness and confined places. It was in the community of the sweatlodge, with the prayers and songs, that she was first able to break through and conquer her fears and to catch a glimpse of hope. As I walk back toward the parking lot, I feel a sense of unspoken communion, a common bond with those who shared the songs and heat, the prayers and ceremonial pipe.

This descent into the spirit world has been in many ways a strangely familiar journey for me. I think of my studies at the Jung Institute in Chicago years ago, and am reminded again of the power of the unconscious, the mystery and power of the symbols and dreams that lie deep within the individual psyche. I appreciate now in a new way the sweat-lodge’s role in the native American spiritual tradition -- a unique blend of physiological cleansing and liturgically guided encounter with the deeper levels of self and Spirit.

Reclaiming in these moments my own religious tradition as a Lutheran clergyman, I am struck again by the contrasts as well as the similarities between the two heritages. The essential character of Indian time, in which a ceremony begins with no acknowledgment of chronological time -- “When the fire is ready” -- bears a disconcerting contrast to our attempts to regulate an efficient, smooth-running Western liturgical worship. I am struck by my own tradition’s frequently misguided efforts to fit spirituality into neat time frames like those scheduled for theater performances or athletic events. As if we could regulate our encounters with God. The sweatlodge reminds us of another way: of surrendering; allowing ourselves to be “gripped” by the Other, renewed, recast, reborn.

There is an implicit understanding too that the medicine leader in the sweatlodge has “been there before.” A certain trust is offered in the conviction that he or she can endure this deeper world of pain, heat and darkness. The leader knows the language, the rituals, and performs them almost unconsciously, casually. He or she is the first to enter, the last to drink. The priest/leader is the invoker, the singer of medicine songs, the teller of tales, the friend of symbols. The sweatlodge guide, as priest, is not as much a friend as a guide to another kingdom deep within -- a Spirit World on the “other side.”

My hand reaches to the doorhandle of the car. I pause for a last moment, gazing into the shadows of Oregon’s setting sun. More than anything this day, I have been struck with the unrestricted, open invitation to the sweathouse ritual I have shared. There is no pressure for the treatment center’s members to be involved, no judgment on those who choose not to reclaim that part of their tradition. The center offers the sweatlodge purification ceremony with modest notice -- but with rhythm and regularity. There seems to be a keen understanding of religious experience here as an ultimately personal encounter, guided by community and ritual, but essentially non-dogmatic. I ask myself if it has not been this affirmation of personal destiny and purpose that has historically allowed native American spirituality to be so receptive to Christian religion in accommodating and creative ways. This attitude, implicit in the religion of the American Indian, is the affirmation of a God who transcends all dogma, laws and codes. It is this very personal encounter with the holy that marks Indian spirituality as essentially experiential, yet creation-bound.



Weeks later I sit with my seven-year-old son in a small clapboard house on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I talk with a 70-year-old Red Rock Sioux, her hair white and braided, surrounded by cardboard boxes of letters, discarded magazines and papers. She speaks to me through her remaining teeth of her memories of early childhood: her mother’s story of her brother’s birth in the hills near Wounded Knee on a cold December night in 1890; her own long, good years serving as an Episcopal deaconess for the church’s mission. She still plays the organ for the small chapel and helps lead weekly worship for the reservation parishes. Her knee bandaged from bones now grown old and tired, she talks to me of the resurgence of Indian spirituality, the increasing anger and despair of the young and militant, the power and promise of a God beyond space and time. Her eyes grow deep and understanding.

My son Joshua notices a braided band of sweet-grass near a cupboard door. He lifts it; the end is charred and burned. The old woman tells us it was given to her by a relative over near Rosebud, 50 miles east. Custom says it’s to be burned like incense during long winter nights, to keep away spirits from the other world. “Of course, I don’t believe those things,” she says, turning to stare out the dusty window. I hear the drums now of the sweathouse, feel the heat, hear the Lakota spirit song, and think perhaps I have seen, if for but a single moment, a twinkle in her eye.