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The Ultimate and the Ordinary: A Profile of Langdon Gilkey

When the winter quarter ended this year at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Langdon Gilkey, the Shailer Mathews professor of theology, retired after a quarter-century at the school, where he had been a colleague of such eminent theologians and scholars of religious studies as Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade, Paul Ricoeur and David Tracy.

Although he will continue to teach occasionally -- at both the University of Chicago and the Lutheran School of Theology -- Gilkey has formally closed his teaching career, which began almost four decades ago. He has taught at Vassar and Vanderbilt and at universities in Japan and the Netherlands. He has lectured to academic and ecclesiastical groups on four continents, taught Sunday school classes and delivered sermons in Baptist churches in the North and South, attended sessions of Vatican II and participated in tantric yoga sessions sponsored by the Sikh movement in America. His experience, presence and influence bridge the often artificial chasm between the academic study of religion and the parish, between northern and. southern cultures in the U.S., between Protestantism and Catholicism, and between Christianity and other religions.

Throughout his career, Gilkey’s theological interests have ranged from traditional theological concepts, such as creation and providence, to theology’s dialogues with the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts. And recently his interests have turned to Christian theology’s conversation with other religions. Among his enduring achievements have been the publication of ten books and a hundred essays, a term as president of the American Academy of Religion, and the teaching of thousands of students who now lead in the study and practice of religion.

Students and friends remember him most vividly for his adventurous spirit, sense of humor, love of sports, devotion to family and skill as a storyteller. With typical humor and sensitivity, Gilkey tells of his pleasure at being named to the Shailer Mathews chair in theology. His daughter, then in early grade school, was delighted too. "I am so glad, Dad, that you have somewhere to sit down." He realized that he was introducing her to Platonic ideas. Disappointed with the abstractness of his chair, she presented to him a dollhouse-size wicker chair with the comment, "Here is a real chair." He keeps the little chair in his office as a reminder that the significance of the title is relative to one’s respect for Platonic ideas and the nature of higher education.

Gilkey’s stories are more than vivid anecdotes. They expose his existential vulnerability and exemplify how the human condition is fallible, humorous and potentially compassionate; they also provide the ground for meaningful theological discourse.

Gilkey has repeatedly written about the mutual formation of his life and thought, first in Shantung Compound (1966) and most recently in an intellectual autobiography, "A Retrospective Glance at My Work," the introduction to the festschrift volume The Whirlwind in Culture (1988).

In Shantung Compound, he reflects upon his internment in a civilian war camp. After graduating from Harvard, Gilkey began teaching English at Yenching University in China, then under Japanese occupation, and while he was in Beijing the United States entered World War II. As a precautionary action, the Japanese rounded up Americans and other Allied civilians in China and interned them in Shantung Compound. Confined in a small space with 1,500 to 2,000 other people, he had an opportunity to observe the world in a microcosmic form. "This internment camp reduced society, ordinarily large and complex, to viewable sizes and by subjecting life to greatly increased tension laid bare its essential structures." He suggests that what makes this story so interesting and enlightening is not its extraordinary character but its concern with ordinary life. For the problems that he and his fellow captives experienced were caused not so much by their Japanese captors as by their own behavior. For example, they defended their space allocation, making sure that beds were not moved a few inches to create unequal space. Craving eggs, they began to smuggle them into the camp and trade them in a black market. They sought status and influence based on ability to work ‘rind think rather than on an inherited position of privilege. They desired fair distribution of Red Cross packages -- even when the entire contents were ill-fitting shoes of a single size.

Through these events, Gilkey explores the fallibilities and possibilities of the human condition. He discerns the fundamental character of human beings -- their needs, greed, anxieties, fears, hopes, egos and capacity for humor and generosity. The book is more than a religious autobiography: it is autobiography as theology, and as such it provides a contemporary example of the sort of theological reflection found in Augustine’s Confessions.

Gilkey has consistently interpreted the ordinary character of life with extraordinary clarity and depth. In the footnotes of his 1964 book How the Church Can Minister to the World Without Losing Itself -- a title that Gilkey neither proposed nor liked -- he comments on the character of religious life in the South and his interaction with it during the late 1950s and early 1960s. "Several years of Sunday-school teaching in a Nashville church, and the frequent researches of students into the religious habits, capacities, interests, and learning of their parishioners, long ago convinced [me] that even in the ‘Bible Belt’ the Bible is a relatively unknown book -- sacred, of course, but quite unfamiliar." Similarly, he tells about the occasion when he delivered a lecture at a major Baptist university in the Southwest. Thinking that his presentation would be received more sympathetically if he delivered it in sermonic form, he selected an appropriate biblical text to read at the beginning of his speech. Since he had not taken a Bible with him, he planned to use one from the university chapel. Surprisingly, he discovered that there was no pulpit Bible in the chapel, so he had to use the Bible from his hotel room.

Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (1985) continues his autobiography as theology. It describes his involvement in the trial that challenged the constitutionality of the Arkansas law prescribing the teaching of "scientific creationism" in public schools. He examines the conflicts between some scientists and religious leaders, observing the ironies that distinguished this trial from the Scopes trial a half-century earlier. In the Arkansas trial the suit was filed by an ecclesiastical coalition, while the defense called scientists to support the "scientific creationist" theory. The religious leaders argued for the non-preferential treatment of their religious traditions, while the scientists sought to expand the aegis of science to include the religiously based premises of "scientific creationism."

Gilkey consummates his published reflections on the mutual formation of his life and thought in his festscrift essay. Here he charts the development of his theological method and concerns from neo-orthodox propositions to a Christian pluralism that accepts the "rough parity" of Christianity with other religions.

What interests him most now is "dialogue among religions and of religions in their interface with cultures." Though reluctant to offer predictions, which he regards as statements "mostly [about] where we think things ought to go, particularly in the direction of the interest of the speaker," he projects that "the plurality of religions will become more of an issue as we become conscious of more variety among religions. The problem of pluralism is going to grow.

In their dialogues with other religions, Gilkey cautions, Christian theologians will face a fundamental problem: retaining that which is essential to the Christian faith while remaining open to genuine dialogue with other faiths. Gilkey suggests that Christians "must hang on to the character of the mystery of the divine. We do know that the divine requires justice and that the divine is love. That is the uncompromising foundation for Christian theology in its dialogue with other traditions."

These projections, however, are subject to the vicissitudes of history. As Gilkey emphasizes, "Events are always the clue. Who knows what Bush will do, how the Ayatollah will act, or where Japanese developments will take us?" The course of theology will be integrally connected with political, cultural and economic events in the coming years, even as Gilkey’s own theology has developed out of the praxis of his life.

As a champion competitor in tennis, Gilkey toured France in the late 1930s with a Harvard-Yale team, barely escaping the outbreak of war. Upon his return to Harvard for his senior year he collaborated with Avery Dulles to organize a Keep America Out of the War Committee. But as the horror of Hitler’s advances continued to mount and as the committee tried to align British colonialism with Hitler’s conquests, Gilkey and Dulles withdrew from the organization. The moral complexities surrounding the war seemed irresolvable to the young, liberal philosopher. On the one hand he aspired to a pacifist position; on the other he upheld the ideals of justice and freedom. The two conflicting urges seemed to pull him in opposite directions -- one toward staying out of the war and the other toward joining the fight for freedom and justice.

Increasingly uncertain about how he could respond to American involvement in the war, he heeded his father’s suggestion that he hear "Reinie" preach. On a Sunday in early April 1940, Gilkey went to the Harvard chapel to listen to Reinhold Niebuhr, who offered an analysis of international power struggles. "Suddenly, as the torrent of insight poured from the pulpit, my world in disarray spun completely around, steadied, and then settled into a new and quite firm and intelligible structure. . . . My conversion -- and that is the right word -- was quick and complete." Within two weeks he read all of Niebuhr’s works, and revised his anticipated course on "Modern Western Thought" to include Niebuhr’s answers to the queries of the progressive humanism that was popular among liberal philosophers. It was a Niebuhrian perspective that provided the framework for interpreting the Shantung experience -- through neoorthodox categories of transcendence, sin, revelation and grace.

At the close of the war Gilkey returned to the U.S. to prepare for a career in international law. But he found the course work boring and turned to the study of philosophy and theology at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, where Niebuhr taught and where he was to meet Tillich. Their influences would pervade his entire career. Like Niebuhr, Gilkey has had a prophetic sense of justice and political awareness; for 40 years he has worked for civil rights, justice and peace. He even risked his own professorial appointment in the early ‘60s when he protested the expulsion of a black activist student from Vanderbilt University. And like Tillich, Gilkey has identified and explored the depths of theological and cultural symbols, finding in them clues to the fundamental religious underpinnings of existence.

Historical events and personal relationships prompted Gilkey to write Naming the Whirlwind (1969) , an extended prolegomenon for theological method. During the mid-1960s, the death-of-God theology had denied the meaningfulness of theological discourse in our modern, secular, technological age. Gilkey himself was the midwife at the birth of death-of-God theology. Intrigued by the common concern about the seeming meaninglessness of theological language, Gilkey had introduced William Hamilton, Thomas J. J. Altizer and Paul van Buren to one another’s works. But Gilkey’s critiques of the death-of-God position were also frequent in the following months and years, and his arguments in Naming the Whirlwind performed the euthanasia on the movement. This may have been the first time in history that a single theologian helped both form and dissolve a major theological position.

In this work he provides a foundation for the reasonability of theological language. To accomplish this, he pursues the limits, significance and possibilities of ordinary, personal, secular experience. He identifies in the structure of existence a latent dimension of ultimacy; this dimension is found beneath and through the contingent, temporal and relative character of existence itself. In turn, the indeterminate character of existence constitutes the basis of human freedom in which people have distorted and aborted the possibilities for doing good that the structure of existence itself affords. Restoration of the full possibility for good, he concludes, cannot emerge from the ambiguous and contingent possibilities in existence itself. Renewal or healing must come from some dimension beyond the limits of the ordinary, secular order.

This line of reasoning does not prove the existence of God or the adequacy of Christianity. What Gilkey does establish is the reasonability of theological language and the reasonability of people’s quest for meaning and queries about the significance of history. Having established the feasibility of theological discourse, Gilkey recognizes that the challenge for the Christian theologian is to interpret and apply Christian symbols to the problems and hopes of the present age. Like Tillich, Gilkey calls this method of theology "correlational." The theologian explores the hidden depths of historical experience and relates the biblical witness to God as creator, providential caregiver, savior, judge and transcendent mystery to the questions that emerge from the latent dimension of existence.

Gilkey attempted to implement this process while still a graduate student. He attended a conference for American Baptist ministers and theologians at Green Lake, Wisconsin. The denomination, he recalls, had long been divided between conservative evangelicals and liberals. At the meeting a group of young theologians, like Gilkey, supported the kind of theological perspective espoused by the evangelicals, one that focused on revelation, sin and grace. Gilkey pleaded that to interpret modern history one must use such specifically theological motifs as divine judgment and the Second Corning. After the meeting, much to Gilkey’ s surprise, a conservative sought him out and remarked, "I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to hear the younger men talking this way about the Second Coming! It’s going to come soon, isn’t it? And where do you think it will be? Just outside Jerusalem?" Astonished that the man was projecting literal expectations into his symbolic framework, Gilkey realized that theologians must clarify the nature and meaning of theological symbols, as well as employ them appropriately in discourse.

Some 40 years after that experience, Gilkey continues to reaffirm that "the perennial task of theology is so to state the Christian faith that it is a help to the people of the church." But having established the ground for theological discussions in the nature of ordinary experience, Gilkey does not limit theology’s influence to the realm of believers. As he puts it, "Theology has an inner and outer role."’ In a recent conversation he commented about theology’s "outer" or public role: "It should set in its own terms the best ideals of the culture that it is in." but it should not merely advocate the cultural ideals. "At its best," he concluded, "theology should be a prophetic critic of church and culture."

Whereas in the aftermath of World War II Gilkey emphasized Christian themes of crisis, he now calls for a renaissance of thought on the mystery of God, because "reality is pretty much a mystery." In its dialogue with modern science, in exploring the structure and sustenance of reality, and in its encounter with other religions, theology constantly confronts dimensions of divine mystery. "The mystery of the divine is crucial for understanding" the nature of reality and the goal of theology.

More than any theologian since Tillich, Gilkey has addressed the existential, cultural, social and political issues that our "time of troubles" (one of his favorite descriptions of our era) has pressed upon us. In this regard, his work has been significant not only for Christian theology’s understanding of reality and its relation to the divine, but for Western culture as a whole, since he has repeatedly and creatively examined the structures and meaning of groups, events, actions and art.

With grace and perception, Gilkey has explored the ordinary anxieties and fallibilities that perplex us. Through his analysis of ordinary experience, he has Uncovered and surveyed the ground for theological discourse. Through personal testimony, historical analysis and biblical awareness, he has established a contemporary foundation for a Christian interpretation of the dimension of ultimacy within ordinary experience. In so doing, he has made theology intelligible for our secular and troubled age.

Stalking the Spiritual in the Visual Arts

Book Review:

The Visual Arts and Christianity in America: From the Colonial Period to the Present. Expanded Edition. By John Dillenberger. Crossroad, 290 pp., $39.50.

Dillenberger argues convincingly that art has been a secondary matter in American culture. One reason is that from the colonial period through the 19th century the Protestant majority in America was "a linguistic, hearing culture." The dominant modes of perceiving and representing the world were auditory and verbal rather than visual. Protestants mistrusted the image and regarded its role in the Roman Catholic liturgy as typical of an alleged Catholic penchant for mystery, sensuousness, feeling, superstition and idolatry.

Despite the fact that Dillenberger laments the Protestant bias, he seems to accept the Protestant claim that images lack clarity (claritas) and engender mystery. Mystery and clarity are not necessarily mutually exclusive, however. And if the auditory were singularly clear and the visual singularly mysterious, then poetry and music would be deprived of mystery. The Protestant insistence on clarity pertains to a preference for discursive or propositional thinking, not auditory-vcrbal expression. And mystery is not simply a function of obscurity. John Flaxman’s engravings from the Iliad are paradigms of Neoclassical clarity, yet are wonderfully evocative. By the same token Impressionist painters sacrificed visual clarity, but hardly for what one could characterize as mystery.

In his 1986 book A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities, though offering a more balanced use of the terms clarity and mystery, Dillenberger argues that a blatant contrast between language and painting followed the rise of Protestant orthodoxy. Not only does he overlook the rich and compelling complexity of the language and literary imagery of post-Reformation Protestant poets and mystics, but he also ignores the widespread practice among partisans of the visual such as Goethe, Conrad Fiedler, Albert Aurier and Wassily Kandinsky of characterizing painting as a "visual language." They did not intend to subordinate painting to a verbal sensibility, but rather to recognize in the painter’s art a power of expression equal to that of spoken language, an expressive potential realized in the idiom of the visual alone. Language as such is not the villain.

Dillenberger continues his examination of the visual arts in America with a useful and wide-ranging survey of the status of the visual arts in Spanish Catholicism in the Southwest, in religious journals and in the views of clergy, important patrons, collectors, galleries and artists themselves. Juggling art history and religion is not an easy task, but Dillenberger usually achieves a satisfying balance. Some exceptions: we are liberally treated to images said to depict civil religion, but we learn very little about the theology of civil religion. On the other hand, we are introduced to the nature and spirit of transcendentalism, but aren’t told much about how the "softening contours and the blurring of details" in landscapes by George Inness reveal "underlying structures that directly mirrored the divine."

Dillenberger implies that Inness was pursuing mystery by blurring and softening. Thus Dillenberger returns us to what may he his leitmotif: discerning what is spiritual in pictorial form and what is not. He develops this motif in regard to sacramentalism and in connection with the success of abstraction on the American scene.

Dillenberger links the evaluation of images in the history of British and American Christianity to views on sacramentality in a way that is most suggestive, but in no way conclusive. He suggests that sacramental theologies are less antagonistic toward the visual than are nonsacramental ones. Perhaps he reasons that the mystery of the sacrament encourages what he considers the mystery of images. Yet his theory fails to account for Luther’s indifference and Calvin’s outright iconoclasm. Still, his idea that visual sensibilities and sacramental theologies are mutually supportive is intriguing.

Many regard this claim as self-evident, as a sort of visual fact rather than the aesthetic disposition or judgment it actually is. What exactly does Dillenberger mean? Dillenberger’s theories on abstraction lack the critical scrutiny he shows elsewhere in his work. He argues, for instance, for a gradual evolution from representational form to complete abstraction. Accordingly, 19th-century painters like Thomas Cole and John Kensett sought to convey spiritual affinities in their work, but were limited to naturalistic technique. By the turn of the century, however, painters had loosened themselves from the tight grip of appearances, but still remained in the orbit of representation, Hence Matisse’s work "never reached the radical focus that in abstract expressionism separated recognizable form and reality." By the 1940s and ‘50s painters cut their bonds to nature altogether and began exploring the spiritual resonance of pure form. So the argument goes.

The problem with such genealogies of artistic ascent is that they turn artists into precursors of unborn generations. Thus Matisse is a precursor of Barnett Newman. Yet the art of Matisse is not an imperfect type foreshadowing the final dispensation of Abstract Expressionism. Matisse did not "reach" Abstract Expressionism for the simple reason that it was not his intention to do so.

Dillenberger seems to assume that representational art is less spiritual than abstract art since it depicts objects and is therefore less mysterious. But is the art of Michelangelo or Rembrandt less spiritual than that of Kandinsky or De Kooning? Dillenberger wants to discern in Abstract Expressionism a union of spirituality and visual sensibility that might produce authentic cultural symbols. But whether or not this union exists, abstraction per se is not the artistic antidote to American Christianity’s suppression of the visual. The Rothko Chapel, for instance, will never offer a suitable environment for Christian worship because it is singularly visual and removed from Christianity’s textual and historical particularities. Furthermore, Christians have always employed abstract forms, but often without the slightest visual sensibility. Abstract forms are especially susceptible to discursivity or denotation, from traditional church "picture language" to the hermeticism deciphered by popular Jungian interpretations of Adolf Gottlieb and Jackson Pollock.

But if the spiritual in art is not primarily a matter of content or representational or nonrepresentational technique, what is it? Dillenberger provides a clue by suggesting that the work of art is a symbol. The term symbol has been criticized in recent years for its link to Romanticism (which understood it as a revelation of the infinite or absolute) But the term is one that Dillenberger, along with his friend and teacher Paul Tillich and others like Ernst Cassirer and Paul Ricoeur, takes quite seriously. Dillenberger claims for art something of the sacrament’s power of presence. By understanding presence as something more than "mere appearances," Dillenberger has come to consider abstraction the pictorial procedure by which artists penetrate beneath the visible surfaces of nature in search of a subject’s "essence" or deeper truth. Thus, "forms of abstraction" become "the way in which the forces and vitalities of nature [are] set before us as positive mysteries, echoing something about nature and about ourselves."

For example, Dillenberger says Pollock has "glimpsed new realities" and Abraham Walkowitz has represented "the essence of motion" in his studies of dancer Isadora Duncan. Similarly, he writes that in her flower paintings O’Keeffe "uncovers the mystery of nature and its curious affinities." Mysteries, vitalities, essence are all notions anchored in the depths of Romantic and Idealist thought. But what exactly is the philosophical -- and theological -- apparatus that pioneers, practitioners and partisans of abstraction employ?

What we do find in abstraction, however, is a novel way of seeing. For Martin Buber and John S. Dunne, spirituality consists not in any phenomenon or object but in the nature of our relations to things and to others and to ourselves. Likewise, art reveals the spiritual in the dynamic relationship between image, referent and viewer. The image rewards the searching gaze with the presentiment of an order or authority of a purity, grandeur, power, knowledge, love, integrity or stature which is other than the viewer. One encounters this otherness as a presence and revelation -- whether of God, the artist, nature, the unconscious or whatever one is inclined to find.

According to this definition, the wo4 of art functions as a symbol when ii offers the viewer a manner of looking ai something which reveals an otherness, What we look at may be a recognizable subject or the nonreferential manipulation of paint over a surface. But we encounter in the symbol a new relationship with what we see. Its power lies in the ability to change how we see and therefore to transform our relation with what we see. The revelatory power of an image consists in its ability to shape vision. To disclose the "essence" of an object, a feeling, even of the very act of painting as in the case of Abstract Expressionist painters, means to envision a characteristic way of seeing. Factual statements about nature reduce art to mere illustration and assimilate it to conceptual habits of thinking -- precisely what Dillenberger rightly criticizes in American Protestantism. Rather, the purpose of "spiritual" art must be to fashion the manner in which we encounter the "other" in acts of vision.

Any presence which the spiritual in art evokes is something which we are unable to see in its entirety, something we are unable to make into an immediate object of our knowledge. In this I believe Dillenberger is right. But such a presence is not necessarily a function of obscurity or clarity. A landscape by Caspar David Friedrich or an interior by Jan Vermeer is considerably clearer than a work by Inness or Rothko, but no less evocative of mystery or presence. Each of these artists offers us a vision that changes how we see by refusing to treat what we see as all that is there. As paradoxical as it may seem, presence in painting is achieved by limiting the visual. To make present is to refuse to represent one’s subject entirely -- whether the artist employs a representational or a nonrepresentational, a clear or an obscuring, technique.

Since the unseen by definition cannot be seen, artists (and evangelists?) present symbols to establish visually a relation between us and the unseen which does not reduce the transcendent to a finite form. The symbol suggests that the spiritual is something considerably more than any single object, yet partially unveiled in our act of seeing. Therefore we describe this presence in terms of transcendence: depth, invisibility, obscurity, inwardness, hiddenness. Luther said that Christ’s body and blood were present "in, with and under" the bread and wine. These terms indicate the elusive, indefinable presence of the spiritual, they don’t merely locate it.

With all this said, Dillenberger’s readiness to take the image so seriously in articulating spirituality is admirable and, one hopes, prophetic. His book is an unprecedented contribution to the field of American art history and should secure an enduring place of importance in the burgeoning scholarship on art and religion.

The Protestant Struggle with the Image

Among protestants the visual arts and Christian worship have often had very little to do with one another. Though most Protestant church interiors include a banner or a cross, perhaps even a sculpture or a painting, in most instances the art serves little more than an ornamental purpose. As a result, such works only reinforce a general indifference toward the place of art in Christian worship.

This attitude has been inherited largely from the Reformation. Following several years of confrontation with Andreas Karlstadt and his iconoclastic party over the destruction of images in churches, Luther concluded:

Images, bells, eucharistic vestments, church ornaments, altar lights, and the like I regard as things indifferent. Anyone who wishes may omit them. Images or pictures taken from the Scriptures and from good histories, however, I consider very useful yet indifferent and optional. I have no sympathy with the iconoclasts [Luther’s Works, American Edition, Fortress, vol. 37, p. 371].

Though Luther thought depictions of biblical narrative served a didactic purpose, and even included them in his German translation of the Bible, their place in worship remained "indifferent and optional"; they should not be destroyed, but neither should they be strongly recommended. indifference stopped short of the vigorous iconoclasm of Calvin, who claimed in the Institutes of the Christian Religion that the only images that belong in churches are "those living and symbolical ones which the Lord has consecrated by his Word. I mean Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, together with other rites by which our eyes must be too intensely gripped and too sharply affected to see other images forged by human ingenuity." For Calvin, images drew human eyes away from God and threatened to replace God’s sovereignty with idols. An intense rivalry -- indebted to Old Testament denunciations of idolatry and images -- existed in Calvin’s mind between the visual image and the spoken word. Indeed, Calvin premised God’s transcendence on the specially revealed word of Scripture and sacrament, God’s chosen means of self-revelation. The visual image was something humanity idolatrously fashioned in the vain attempt to represent God.

A subtler kind of skepticism regarding images manifests itself in the tendency to subordinate the image to the spoken and written word. A case in point is Luther’s use of his personal seal, which he regarded as "a symbol of my theology." In a letter to a friend he deciphered the meaning of the colors and forms. In accord with the tradition of emblems popular in his day, Luther assigned to each component of the image a theological significance:

There is first to be a cross, black [and placed] in a heart, which should be of its natural color, so that I myself would be reminded that faith in the Crucified saves us. . . . Even though it is a black cross, [which] mortifies and [which] also should hurt us, yet it leaves the heart in its [natural] color [and] does not ruin nature; . . . Such a heart is to be in the midst of a white rose, to symbolize that faith gives joy, comfort, and peace; in a word it places the believer into a white joyful rose; for [this faith] does not give peace and joy as the world gives and, therefore, the rose is to be white and not red, for white is the color of the spirits and of all the angels. Such a rose is to be in a sky-blue field [symbolizing] that such joy in the Spirit and in faith is a beginning of the future heavenly joy; . . . And around this a golden ring, [symbolizing] that in heaven such blessedness lasts forever. . . Luther ‘s Works, American Edition, Vol. 49, pp. 358-359].

Without the key provided in this letter, a precise decoding of Luther’s seal would be impossible. This use of the image binds its visual components to the "higher" reality of their conceptual meaning. The visual remains unintelligible without the knowledge of its abstract code.

A more pictorial and naturalistic but no less conceptualized variation on this approach is the popular painting by William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1851 - 1853) , in which Christ knocks at the allegorical door of the heart, waiting to enlighten it with his lamp of truth. The scene is an extended illustration of Revelation 3:20 ("Behold, I stand at the door and knock.") which Hunt attached as a legend to the picture’s frame when it was exhibited. As Hunt himself pointed out, nearly every object in the picture is imbued with a symbolic significance. The closed door symbolizes the "obstinately shut mind"; the weeds represent "the cumber of daily neglect"; the orchard signifies "the garden of delectable fruit for the dainty feast of the soul"; a bat flitting about is "a natural symbol of ignorance"; the lamp alludes to Psalm 119: "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." Hunt even regarded the night as a biblical allusion: "The night is far spent, the day is at hand." Certainly Hunt’s image is a concretely optical one, a typically Pre-Raphaelite array of meticulously observed detail and rich color. But this dense collection of natural objects is organized in an allegorical scheme which renders it legible. If we fail to "read" this allegory, the picture will not mean to us what it meant to Hunt.

Such preference for the word or concept accounts in large measure for the meager presence of imagery in Protestant churches today. Church interiors are not generally designed to accommodate large paintings or sculptures, because they "speak’ less effectively than a preacher in a pulpit. Karl Barth went so far as to claim that ‘there is no theological visual art. . . . The fundamental form of theology is the prayer and sermon."

As Protestantism distanced itself from the image, patronage of the arts shifted to the marketplace. Linked to this change is the transformation in 19th-century art known as modernism. Modernism has modified how we see and understand images in ways that the church has for the most part either ignored or regarded with antagonism. Many Christians today see with eyes uninformed by modernist aesthetics; with their visual habits rooted in pre-modern artistic practices, they are incapable of interpreting an image as anything but a narrative or symbolic illustration of a written text -- or else as something approaching the idolatrous.

Despite some important continuities between 20th-century painters of Christian subjects and those of earlier centuries, the differences are significant. The historical precedent in treating Christ’s descent from the cross, for instance, is to infuse the deposed body with pathos. For centuries artists have evoked this feeling of graceful resignation by a diligent attention to gesture, facial expression, and carefully designed composition. Paintings by Rogier van der Weyden, Rembrandt and Rubens exhibit a common reservoir of expressive devices such as poses, costume, and presentation of the scene.

Modern painters often depart from this practice. Édouard Manet depicted an emphatically dead Christ (1864) ; he refused to solicit traditional sympathy and restricted himself to nearly clinical observation. Christ’s eyes are glazed and sunken, his body limp and starkly lit. The spotlight technique which Manet borrowed from Spanish Baroque painters has the effect of the cold flash of a press photo or the glaring light of a morgue. The flattened forms and uncomplimentary presentation of the corpse leave the believer faced with the disturbingly physical reality of Jesus’ death.

Artists had treated the death of Christ in a stark manner before. Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (ca. 1511-1515) is one noteworthy instance. But no one had focused on the mechanics of human vision the way Manet did. His painting is very much about looking, about seeing a traditional subject in a way that eschews sentiment and convention for the sake of an unflattering, unaffected gaze at the hard facts. His brushwork and lighting do not allow the image to fade behind the subject, but deliberately affix it to the picture’s surface. In Griinewald’s smooth panels the paint does not intrude on our vision the way it does in Manet’s painting.

In addition to abandoning esteemed pictorial devices; modern artists have avoided treating subjects in a narrative, anecdotal, illustrative or allegorical manner. Such interests, they have claimed, reflect a literary or conceptual sensibility which subordinates the image to the written or spoken word. In fact, painters of the past century have done virtually everything in their power to short-circuit the discursive character of previous art and aesthetics. As a consequence, the image is no longer made to vanish behind its subject matter. The physical surface of the painting itself has become the focal point of the work of art. The art consists no longer in concealing the labor of the artist behind the description of an object, but in displaying the process of creation as an end in itself. The result is a degree of visual autonomy unprecedented in the history of Western Christian art. The image acquires a presence and an intimacy that refuses to defer to narrative or (in the case of nonobjective art) recognizable subject matter. Compare, for example, Albrecht Dürer’s well-known woodcut Crucifixion (1498) with Francis Bacon’s triptych of the same subject. (1965) Everything in Dürer’s print has historical or dogmatic significance. Bacon’s work, on the other hand, is a manifest challenge to the viewer. He makes certain concessions to visual traditions in format (the triptych has been the standard device for altar paintings since the Middle Ages) and in subject matter (the limbs of the "crucified" figure are wrapped in bandages, and a communion rail appears to the right and behind the central figure) , but these concessions actually accentuate his departure from tradition. The figures -- amorphous slashes of paint and brushwork -- occupy a bald, surreal, stage-like space. The scene is nightmarish in its combination of blank clarity and hideous obscurity. The picture is thoroughly at odds with itself. Its rigid compositional attempt to define a rational space is undermined by the floating figures and particularly by the raw application of paint, which sits on the surface of the canvas and reminds us of its autonomous nature as scraped pigment. The painting is unified only by the fact that the violent treatment of paint expresses the agony of these twisted sacks of flesh and blood.

Like a great deal of modern art, Bacon’s painting does not possess conceptual or discursive meaning. This is difficult for Christians looking at an image titled Crucifixion to understand. As a system of denotation, discursive language conveniently maps the world for us and refuses to leave any wilderness uncharted. But a vital source of power in the image -- whether visual or poetic -- is its ability to work beyond the scope of the word: to evoke, suggest, allude to or embody aspects of experience that elude discursive reasoning. And it is just this unnameable power, embraced by iconophiles and modernists alike, that clashes with Protestantism, a religion of the Word.

Protestantism has exempted from this censorship only ‘the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15), Jesus Christ, and (among certain traditions) the sacrament of the altar. By referring to Christ as the image of God, Paul is taken to mean that just as a picture shares with its original something of its nature, so Christ shared God’s nature. Likewise, the elements of the sacramental host are signs that share mysteriously in the being of their supernatural referent.

Christian iconoclasts have perennially argued that images have no place in the church because images of human devising fall short of God’s self-revealed image in Jesus and the sacraments. Others, like Luther, are prepared to accept only those images encoded with discursive meanings. In both cases, the word is considered a full and undistorted disclosure of divinity. In ascribing a transparency to the word, iconoclasts maintain that revelation removes from both the incarnation and the Scriptures the deforming effects of human representation.

Yet the variation in the New Testament’s several resurrection accounts ought to be enough to dispel this hermeneutical naïveté. Faith, in the end, rests not on the authority of a pristine set of signs but on a community that offers in its symbols a distinctive identity, an overarching story, a collective self-image. And among the most powerful of these symbols are the unabashedly visual ones, whether in New Testament narrative, ancient creed, Renaissance fresco or Reformation hymn. Indeed, no religious faith operates without images of some sort -- pictorial, architectural or poetic -- whether their presence is acknowledged or not. As Luther himself observed, "It is impossible for me to hear or bear it in mind [the passion of Christ] without forming mental images of it in my heart." As obvious as it may seem, it is worth stating explicitly: the image is at the very heart of our experience and representation of our relationship with God. At stake is how the image fares -- whether it is repressed as idolatrous or inessential or whether it is celebrated for the major role it can play in shaping belief.

According to a modernist critique, the image itself is the means for envisioning one’s relationship with God. The image is no longer conceived platonically as a copy, nor does it intervene between viewers and object. Rather, the image shapes the nature of the vision itself. In other words, the task, as recent theological discussion has urged, is to create not images that purport to describe God, but images that articulate, by virtue of metaphor or analogy, a relationship with God.

Thus Bacon’s image conveys viscerally the dimension of suffering in the human condition that cries out for delivery, redemption. Even if Bacon did not intend an expressly Christian content, the Christian cannot fail to respond to this image as a longing for God. Sacred images in Christian art are finally images of a community’s search to understand its relation to its past, present and future; it is in these images that the community experiences its relationship with God. The purpose of the image is to embody this complex relation and give it a compelling presence and reality in worship.

Yet modernism can pursue this presence so singularly as to deny any notion of transcendent meaning. The signified vanishes beneath the surface texture of the image. Surely this is as unfortunate as the totalitarian domination of the word. And despite its dream to the contrary, modern art is ultimately no more capable of dispensing with words than iconoclasm is of eliminating images. The autonomy of the image is no less shortsighted than the autocracy of the word.

As the two chief sensibilities of representation, word and image are engaged in a dialectical relation. The church stands to gain by a critical awareness of both domains and by a readiness to accept what each can offer the other in the apprehension and evaluation of religious experience.

The Satanic Verses and Beyond

While the Prophet Muhammad was in Mecca, preaching against Arabian polytheism, ; he asked: "Have you seen al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat, the third, the other?" These words are recorded in the Qur’an as part of what Muhammad believed to be direct divine revelation. The Qur’an goes on to ridicule these three supposed deities, condemning them as "nothing but names you have devised." Some classical Muslim commentators, however, record that Muhammad may have originally interjected another phrase suggesting that the pagan deities were "exalted birds" through which the Meccans could intercede with Allah; but he quickly retracted these words, saying that they were of the devil.

These so-called Satanic verses, which inspired the title of Salman Rushdie’s novel, are for Muslims evidence of the Prophet’s utter trustworthiness, of his ability to distinguish true from false revelation, and hence of the authenticity of the Qur’an as the very Word of God. Islam’s detractors, by contrast, have used these words to impugn the nature of Muhammad’s inspiration, to caricature him as at best confused, at worst a tool of Satan. This is nowhere more evident than in the long history of medieval Christian polemic against Islam which perpetuated a character assassination of Muhammad, with lasting consequence for Western attitudes toward Islam.

Rushdie has said that his book is not about Islam but "about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay." In two chapters that take the form of a fictional dream of a fictional character, Rushdie deals in a fantastical way with the birth of a great world religion which claims to be based in revelation. It is these chapters which cause such deep offense to Muslims. Though allegorical in style, they clearly refer to the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad, his wives and companions in terms that are bound to give insult. The naming of the prophet as "Mahound," for example, directly evokes medieval European polemics which called Muhammad by this word, a synonym of the devil. He is said to have written his revelation at the prompting of one of his companions (another Salman) His wives are portrayed as harlots, and his companions as bums.

The book is not an objective critique of Islam, to be sure; but to protest that it is not about Islam, or at least about what Rushdie thinks of religion and revelation, is disingenuous. Rushdie admitted as much in a detailed BBC interview. "Islam is one of the greatest ideas that ever came into the world." Arguing that the historicity of its founding events is ambiguous, he went on: "Let’s take the themes I’m interested in and fantasize them and fabulate them and all that, so that we don’t have to get into the issue: did it really happen like this or not?" The theme which interests him most, he said, is how recipients of a new idea act: "When you’re weak, do you compromise; when you’re strong, are you tolerant?" Regarding the Prophet’s strength, Rushdie emphasized that Muhammad "was very tolerant" in victory, though he permitted the death of a satirical writer. Rushdie remarked: "At the very beginning of Islam you find a conflict between the sacred text and the profane text, between revealed literature and imagined literature."

Thus, Rushdie’s book is also about human doubt, which he calls "the central condition of the human being in the 20th century . . . the basis of the great artistic movement known as Modernism." The only sense in which he admits that his book is anti-Islamic is in its attack upon an uncritical acceptance of religious authority, which has been enforced by contemporary fundamentalists. "Their extremism is actually something fairly new," he contends. "Islamic culture is the one in which I grew up -- I know it well. In my family, in the Indian subcontinent, there was an absolute willingness to discuss anything. . . . These people’s [the fundamentalists’] Islam is not the only Islam."

Muslim protest is nonetheless understandable. Islam believes that Muhammad was the final Prophet of God, by whom God set his seal upon the truth of all earlier revelation. The Qur’an proclaims Muhammad to be "a beautiful example for whosoever believeth in God and the Last Day." Islamic theology upholds the Prophet’s sinlessness, and the Qur’an also warns seriously against blasphemy, which includes "speaking falsely" against God and his prophets; for those who do there awaits a "dire punishment" in the judgment of God on the Last Day. Islamic law has taken this as grounds for making blasphemy a capital crime.

Though Ayatollah Khomeini and others who call for the death of Rushdie have invoked this law against blasphemy, many authoritative Muslim leaders have condemned Khomeini’s action as itself in contravention of Islamic law. According to senior religious scholars at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, recognized throughout Sunni Islam as an unrivaled center of orthodox learning, blasphemy must first be proven in an Islamic court, and the guilty allowed to confess and retract the blasphemy. Capital punishment is allowed only where there is no repentance. Tahir Mahmoud, legal scholar at the New Delhi Institute of Islamic Studies, has said: "What Rushdie has done is definitely a crime against Islamic law. If he were a citizen of an Islamic state he could be prosecuted. But he is not. And under Islamic law any Muslim is not just allowed to kill anyone. The secretary general of the Arab League expressed similar views. However distasteful Rushdie’s book is, he said, he has become the focus of "a dimension of intolerance that is not tolerated by Islam itself."

These voices find much support among Muslim leaders in Britain and the United States. One of the leaders of the anti-Rushdie campaign in Britain, Hesham el-Essawy, head of the Islamic Society for the Promotion of Religious Tolerance in the UK, is on record as saying that he does not want the book to be banned, but wants Viking to include a note, like an erratum slip, stating the orthodox Muslim view. He condemns Khomeini as a "bigot," and with respect to Rushdie quotes the Qur’anic verse bidding Muslims to use "wise and fair exhortation, and reason . . . in the better way."

Hasan Abdullah of the University of Chicago says: "We are really outraged at the pronouncements of Khomeini and the fundamentalists of Islam, because it is a religion of tolerance of opinion, of discussion, of dialogue; it is not a closed religion." Condemning the book as "a blatant assault on Islam," the Islamic Society of North America nevertheless insists that "Islam does not condone violence or the incitement to violence directed against its author and those associated with its publication."

In late 1988 in Pakistan, where the recent election of Benazir Bhutto set back the Islamization program of her late predecessor, Zia al-Haqq, the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance used Rushdie (who has family in Karachi) as a rallying point for opposition to Bhutto, who, schooled in Britain and America, stands in the same liberal intellectual tradition as Rushdie. The American Cultural Center in Karachi thus became the focus of demonstrations. The fire spread to the Pakistani community in Britain, centered in the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North.

In India, Rajiv Gandhi was quick to concede to demands to ban the book made by a few Muslim members of parliament, presumably because he wanted to secure votes among the Muslim population. No doubt there was also a personal element in this case, since Indira Gandhi was the target of an earlier Rushdie novel, Midnight’s Children, over which she threatened a libel suit against Rushdie.

Egypt, struggling with domestic conflict between fundamentalists and liberals, banned the book, just as it banned a much greater book by Nobel laureate Neguib Mahfouz, Children of Our Alley, because of its allegorical insinuations about the Prophet and early Islam.

Khomeini, looking to restore his own prestige among fundamentalists inside and outside Iran after his compromise in ending the Iran-Iraq war, was not going to be upstaged by these acts. His anti-Rushdie statements must be seen as part of the power game going on in Tehran between the pragmatists, led by President Ali Khamaini and Speaker Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, and the purists, led by Prime Minister Hussein Moussavi and Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashami. Rafsanjani, who aspires to win the presidency, is the architect of Iran’s gradually improving relations with the West, which are vital for rebuilding the Iranian economy. No wonder he urged Western diplomats to be patient while he tried to abate the storm in Tehran. The withdrawal of the European legations adds to the difficulties of the Iranian pragmatists.

Rushdie is understandably incensed that his book is being kicked around as a political football. He has been particularly critical of Rajiv Gandhi, whom he accuses of being "Philistine, anti-democratic and opportunistic." But Rushdie’s Muslim critics see another form of opportunism surfacing around the book in the West: the campaign for freedom of speech is judged by some to be cover for a new bout of anti-Islamic rhetoric (Islam being identified solely with Khomeini) , and is seen as closely tied to the commercial interests of authors, librarians, booksellers and the media.

"How long," asks Hesham el-Essawy, "are we going to sit watching one TV program after another insulting Islam? If this goes on, with a second generation of Muslims growing up in Britain faced by this wall of misunderstanding, they will one day react violently." Similar sentiments have been expressed by Muslims in the United States: "Here you can trample on people’s feelings; do you call that freedom of expression?"

The real question the Rushdie affair raises is how to deal with the collision of values. Muslim societies still have a more traditionally religious worldview; Rushdie observes, "If you come from India or Pakistan, how can you reject religion? Religion is the air everyone breathes." It follows that it is hardly possible to discuss religion in the same way as is done in the much more secularized cultures of the West. But in a pluralistic world community no culture has the unassailable right to project its values as universal. This is acknowledged in Rushdie’s much-publicized statement of regret which he offered to sincere Muslims offended by the publication of his book: "Living as we do in a world of many faiths, this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others."

The same point is well made by Neguib Mahfouz, who dislikes but accepts the ban on his work as understandable in the culture in which he lives. "Not all countries are alike in cultural standards," he points out. But Mahfouz supports Rushdie’s freedom in Britain, where Rushdie describes the role of the writer as that of looking at things "differently from the way in which the people in power tell us to look at the world."

The question of how different cultural values may coexist within the new pluralism of Western society has become critical in multireligious Britain and in parts of North America. Behind the public posturing around Rushdie’s book, important social realities have been revealed. One of Rushdie’s favorite spots in London is Brick Lane in the East End. In the 1930s it was a place of Jewish settlement; now it is the home of Pakistanis and Bengalis. The market there is full of young people who are Asian by descent,

Muslim by religion and British by citizenship. It is in their lives that the issues of pluralism are being struggled through. No longer fitting easily into the cultural traditions of their parents and having as yet little place in British culture, they exist in a sort of anonymity, the butt of racist abuse. It is their crisis which fuels the fictional fantasy of Rushdie’s book.

For the sake of those in such situations, be they in Bradford, Brick Lane, Chicago or Detroit, let those who feel secure in a majority culture listen to what Rushdie has to say, and match appropriate criticism of his excesses and insults with a healthy dose of self-criticism for the racism in Britain and the West which is one of the main concerns of his book.

Loving a Prostitute

Our culture often portrays the prostitute as someone beautiful, sexy, seductive and in control. An aura of mystery surrounds her, and many may want to imitate what they perceive as her glamorous lifestyle. She seems to make a lot of tax-free money and to be totally independent. A mother once told me that her young daughter had commented that she wanted to be a prostitute when she grew up. The mother was horrified and quickly tried to determine why the child had such aspirations.

Why does the prostitute horrify us? Why does she confuse and mystify us? She lives in a subculture that is alien to most of us. To understand her trauma and tragedy we must enter into her world and let go of our self-righteousness.

Consider Marnie. She was 15 when she entered prostitution. Her family was severely dysfunctional: her father drank and abused her mother emotionally and physically, and her mother constantly made excuses for his behavior. Marnie would hide in fear when she heard her father approaching, for she knew that he would strike out in rage at her mother and anyone around. Her mother was afraid to leave the relationship, and Marnie felt very insecure and alone. Her father was unable to hold down a job, so there was never enough food in the house and sometimes the utilities were shut off. Holidays had no meaning, and often Marnie’s parents forgot her birthday because they were absorbed in fighting. She found home intolerable. At school, she felt awkward in her dirty and torn clothes, yet school offered a refuge from the trauma of home.

One day after school, when her mother was out looking for a job, Marnie found herself alone with her father. He approached her while she was alone in her room and forcefully started undressing her. The sexual abuse began. Marnie was only nine. The abuse continued for the next six years, always accompanied by her father’s threat, "If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you." Marnie’s sense of self continued to deteriorate and no one understood why she did so poorly in school. At 15, Marnie decided to run away from home. She wanted to be free of the violence. She bought a bus ticket to the city, and almost immediately after arriving there met a man who noticed her bewilderment and offered to take her to his home.

Life was safe and secure in his apartment. There were no fights and no abuse. She got all the food she wanted and nice clothes, too. After a week her friend began to bring home pornographic movies, which they would watch for hours. He also introduced her to cocaine. One day he told her that she needed to start paying him back for his kindness. He wanted her to go out and do the thing that she saw in the videos and had practiced with him. She was to come back each night with a certain amount of money. If she didn’t, he would beat her and withhold cocaine. If she tried to run away he would tell his street friends and her life would be endangered. Marnie had unknowingly made her way into the life of prostitution.

This life, which may seem exciting for a while, eventually takes its toll. A prostitute risks her life every time she gets into a car. If arrested for soliciting or for prostitution, she will end up in jail if she cannot pay the fine. The need to support her drug habit keeps her on the streets. She ages quickly. After a while she might leave her pimp for another one or try to work on her own. Most likely she will have children. She might know the father of her child, or the child might be a "trick" baby, the offspring of a customer. She may give her child up for adoption, but usually she gives the infant to a family member or tries to care for the baby herself. Unfortunately, since the prostitute was probably raised in an abusive family, she is very likely to be an abusive parent herself.

Are there any alternatives for her? What are her needs as she attempts to leave "the life"? It is precisely in response to these questions that Edwina Gateley founded the Genesis House in Chicago in 1984 as a place for new beginnings, a house of hospitality, nurturing and hope for women in prostitution. Genesis House continues to grow and has made contacts of varying kinds with thousands of women.

Many women hear about Genesis House in lockup before they appear before a judge. In the close quarters of the holding cell, trained Genesis workers talk with the women about a variety of topics, including AIDS. Other women are referred to us by various agencies or hear about us through word of mouth. These initial contacts offer a message of hope: "Yes, there is life after prostitution." They also present a challenge: a woman must choose how she wants to live her life and take responsibility for pursuing her hopes and dreams.

Women who turn to Genesis House undergo a careful assessment of their needs and options. Drug or alcohol rehabilitation is often the first priority. Unfortunately, few inpatient treatment centers will accept those who have no insurance, and waiting lists are long for the facilities that do. Government cutbacks in welfare programs have also limited such crucial facilities. It is difficult for someone with a powerful addiction to wait weeks for treatment.

Having made the decision to recover from her substance abuse, the woman faces a range of other issues, such as employment, education, housing, memories of abuse and incest, self-esteem, self-confidence, intimacy and friendship. She must learn how to re-parent herself, to find within herself an inner direction and strength that will lead her to a fulfilling future. It is not easy. The task of finding healing and wholeness is enormous when there is so little upon which to build. To address this, Genesis House strives to offer something money cannot buy: love.

The history of the early church offers similar stories of love as an instrument of conversion. Writings about the early desert hermits tell of the seductress somehow finding her way to a solitary who leads a life of prayer and meditation. Having lived in solitude for so many years, the ascetic has touched the pains and joys of being human and is humbly aware that no one is excluded from frailty, weakness and sin. The contemplative’s love, compassion and understanding awaken in the harlot deep longings for that which is life-giving. Often such stories end with the harlot giving all of her material possessions to the poor, leaving her former livelihood and committing herself to a life centered on the gospel.

Writers of the Middle Ages expressed confusing statements about prostitution. Generally, any woman who entered into prostitution was excommunicated from the community for explicitly living in sin. Arguments sprang up as to whether she should keep the money she earned. The conclusion was that she could, for it was hers even though the way she earned it was not ethical. This exemplifies the double standard that church and society have imposed on prostitutes throughout history: what she does is deemed wrong, yet she is rewarded, or paid, by her customers. Thomas Aquinas used the prostitute as an example in explaining why God permits certain evils in the universe, since without them a greater good would be threatened. Quoting Augustine, he says, "Do away with the prostitutes and you will throw everything into confusion with lusts" (Summa Theologica, Q. #10, art. #11). What does he have in mind as the greater good?

During this era papal pronouncements encouraged the prostitute either to marry or enter a convent. To those who would marry a prostitute the church offered many indulgences for saving her soul. At the same time, both church and state benefited from the taxes levied on brothels. Such a lack of compassion and loving acceptance only widens the gap between the church and the women who work in the streets or brothels.

While a few women do freely choose prostitution and become high-class call girls catering to a select clientele, in my experience prostitution is a profession for the poor, for runaways, and for those addicted to narcotics or dysfunctional relationships. To legalize prostitution would condone it as a survival mechanism for women who have no education or job skills, and whose self-esteem is minimal because of a life of abuse.

My work at Genesis House has taught me that change is possible if an honest, caring love supports it. Ultimately, a woman must assume responsibility for her own future and choose for or against the street life. The challenge to live "straight" is almost overwhelming. Some women fear they cannot do it; the pain is too great and the odds are too formidable.

Church and society must accept their complicity in prostitution. We need to address family violence, incest and the availability of day-care and drug treatment, and re-examine the way we view women. We need to develop educational and job-skill programs for those whose emotional victimization has hindered their ability to learn. We need to ask ourselves if we view our own sexuality as a gift from God to be lovingly shared with tenderness and respect, or as a weapon that hurts and demoralizes others.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "Prostitutes are a necessity. Without them, men would attack respectable women on the streets." Jesus looked at the men who were about to attack an adulteress and said, "Let you who is without sin, cast the first stone." These sensitive words of Jesus must constitute the basis of the church’s response to women caught in the oppressiveness of prostitution. Name-calling and stone-throwing do not solve the pertinent issues. Compassion, understanding and a love that allows another to grow must undergird any conversion.

Hearing and Healing Hedda Nussbaum – A Reflection on Mark 5:21-43

Lisa Steinberg lay near death on the cold tile floor in the bathroom of her adopted parents’ Greenwich Village apartment. Hedda Nussbaum waited helplessly for the man she believed could heal Lisa to come and lay his hands on her. Joel Steinberg, Nussbaum’s lover and batterer for 12 years, had already laid his hands on Lisa on the evening of November 1, 1987, when he dealt the blow that would kill the six-year-old girl. Nussbaum’s request to Steinberg, like Jairus’s to Jesus in Mark 5:23, was that her daughter be healed. "My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live." Finally, 13 hours after Steinberg allegedly beat Lisa, he gave Nussbaum permission to call for help. She dialed 911, but it was too late, and the little girl died.

The Gospel account of the death and resurrection of Jairus’s daughter frames the story about a hemorrhaging woman who, like Nussbaum, sought healing from a man she believed had special powers. Although some commentators claim that the encounter with the hemorrhaging woman simply occupies an interlude in the story of Jairus’s daughter, her healing points to the faith necessary for new life. Understanding Lisa’s death and the battering of Nussbaum through the lens of Mark 5 can provide a new hope for all battered women.

On his way to heal Jairus’s daughter, Jesus was interrupted by a suffering woman in the crowd who touched his garment. She believed that she could break the cycle of physical torment and be made well simply by tapping the resource of Jesus’ power. Despite the urgency of Jairus’s plea, Jesus stopped immediately and inquired, "Who touched my garments?" Receptive to the particular touch of a bleeding and hurting woman, Jesus used the feminine pronoun in his question. But Jesus’ disciples exclaimed impatiently, "You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say ‘Who touched me?’"

The disciples’ impatient and incredulous tone is echoed in the contemporary attitude toward women who stay in abusive relationships. Many of us assume that we are not responsible for healing battered women. How can we possibly be expected to discern who they are, to recognize that they need help, when so many battered women seemingly ignore or refuse assistance? The question "Why does she stay?" receives more attention than "How have we failed to respond adequately to her touch?"

Fascination with the Steinberg murder trial centered more on the question of how Nussbaum could have remained with her abuser than on why Steinberg believed he had a right to shatter the lives of his adopted child and his lover. Because many women have absorbed the ethos of male dominance and female dependence, they do not believe in themselves enough to recognize injustice and leave a violent situation. When a woman begins to tell a story of abuse, she is reaching out for help and healing.

When Jesus was touched by the hemorrhaging woman, he responded to her touch and gave her the opportunity to tell her story "in fear and trembling." After listening to "the whole truth," Jesus affirmed the woman, saying: "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."

Even as Jesus spoke, Jairus’s people came to report the death of his daughter. Because a woman needed healing, a little girl did not live. Jesus told the people, "Do not fear, only believe." He went to the little girl and, amid disbelieving laughter from those mourning her death, said to the child, "Tal’itha cu’mi," which means, "Little girl, I say to you, arise." She immediately arose and the people were amazed.

Jesus’ response to the hemorrhaging woman and his miraculous resurrection of the little girl provide a model for a religious response to domestic violence. As more and more abused women tell their stories, we must respond with the gospel mandate to care for the suffering and to proclaim a resurrection image, a new household of freedom and justice.

Nussbaum testified that she had once called her father and asked him to come and get her. When Steinberg arrived home, he found her packing her bags. Discovering that she had called her father, he knocked her down and then forced her to take an ice-cold bath. When Nussbaum’s father arrived, Steinberg asked him to take Lisa to the store. Upon his return, Nussbaum told her father that everything was fine and that she did not need any help. This pattern repeats itself over and over again in the tragic lives of battered women.

Nussbaum testified that she sought medical attention many times in her 12 years with Steinberg. In addition to being beaten, Nussbaum was burned, forced to take ice-cold baths and denied food, and her sexual organs were beaten with a broomstick. She suffered a ruptured spleen along with many other serious injuries. Nussbaum informed hospital personnel that her boyfriend had hit her, but she asked doctors not to put that on the record because, as she explained at the trial, she wanted to protect Steinberg. Many women do not report abuse out of loyalty to their men, or fear of the beating they will receive if their men find out.

The medical community needs to be more responsible for women like Nussbaum who are obviously in abusive situations. They must not only be able to detect signs of domestic abuse, but be ready to refer the abused to social services. This type of training is beginning to occur, yet the traditional myths that the woman is to blame or that domestic violence is a private issue still prevail. A number of years ago, a study at Yale-New Haven Hospital found that one out of four battered women left the hospital with such diagnoses as "neurotic," "hysterical," "hypochondriac," or "a well-known patient with multiple vague complaints."

Left unsupported, battered women often begin to believe that they have done something to deserve punishment. Nussbaum admitted that she had seen Steinberg as godlike and had believed that her emotional problems had caused all the stress in their apartment. Only after Nussbaum told her story to supportive listeners did she begin to understand the injustice and absurdity of that belief.

Police and legal responses, although improving, also reflect archaic stereotypes about domestic violence. Anglo-American law has traditionally granted men a legitimate right to beat their wives "when necessary." Because women were the property of the master of the house, men had a natural right and duty to maintain control and dominance. An 1824 Mississippi case voiced the lawful authority of men moderately to chastise their wives. The "Rule of Thumb" known from English common law, however, limited the weapon to a size no wider than one’s thumb.

Some police officers, although now mandated in some states to make arrests when responding to domestic disputes, still refuse to take, these situations as seriously as other assault calls. I have been told by many women with whom I’ve worked at the New Haven Project for Battered Women and at the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit in Manhattan that the police have refused to make an arrest and simply walked the abusive man around the block to calm him down.

Once an arrest is made, the prosecution of a domestic crime is difficult because the legal profession has traditionally viewed it as something to be settled between a husband and wife. A woman may also feel guilty for helping to prosecute a man who continues to profess his love for her. Both these problems are reflected in a question I once heard a judge ask a battered woman, as he denied her a restraining order on her husband: "You don’t really want me to kick him out of his home, do you?" Until our cultural values about intimate relationships are consistent with the new laws regarding violence against women, we will continue to generate mixed signals about the need for justice in the home.

Women become more and more reluctant to report beatings, especially to a male pastor, when they believe the violence stems from their failure to be a perfect girlfriend, wife or mother. Nussbaum fully believed that Steinberg was a better parent and a better person than she was; thus her cry for help throughout her years with Steinberg was often barely audible.

Like Jesus, we must learn to recognize when a woman is in need of healing. When a woman continually blames herself for violence or abuse in her home, we should be able to recognize that she is touching the hem of our garment, desperate for help. Jesus stopped in the middle of a crowd on his way to an urgent mission to ask "Who touched me?" As soon as someone cared enough to ask that question, the woman felt free to come before Jesus and the crowd to tell her story. The truth flowed naturally and easily. She was instantly healed.

For Nussbaum it took the death of her daughter to provoke any interest in her story. Testifying in November before a crowded courtroom and on live TV about Steinberg’s abuse proved cathartic for her and eye-opening for others. Waiting in line in the Manhattan Criminal Court building to hear Nussbaum testifying, a woman told me about her own sister-in-law’s abusive situation. This woman was beginning to realize, through Nussbaum’s testimony, that she needed to reach out to her sister-in-law and help her to love herself enough to leave. Watching Nussbaum tell her story, I was amazed at the courage, strength and composure she had gained from a supportive audience. With each day she testified, she grew more and more sure of herself, of the injustice she endured, and of the tragedy of Lisa’s death.

The tragedy of Lisa’s death did not have to happen. Nussbaum could have saved Lisa’s life had she not believed so deeply in Steinberg’s right to control her. If she had had an opportunity to tell her story earlier, she might have had faith enough in herself to leave him and take Lisa with her. Nussbaum’s powerful and moving testimony, and her renewed faith in herself, cannot bring Lisa back to life. Yet her testimony and healing can keep Lisa alive in our collective conscience as a renewed sign of the need to attend to healing and wholeness in our personal. social and political structures.

Tell All or Go to Jail: A Dilemma for the Clergy

A clergyman of the American Lutheran Church has been ordered confined in jail for contempt of court because he refused to answer questions before a grand jury investigating the "occupation" of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for two months last year by militant Indians. Paul Boe refused to answer on the grounds that his testimony would violate a confidence entrusted to him as a clergyman attempting to minister to the spiritual needs of a group -- the American Indian Movement (AIM) -- with which he had been closely related since its founding in 1968.

The federal judge hearing the contempt charge rejected Dr. Boe’s claims but staved the imprisonment to allow an appeal. Several church bodies and leaders have joined in an amicus curiae brief to support Boe’s appeal. They include -- in addition to Boe’s own denomination -- the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Lutheran Church in America, the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., and the Rt. Rev. John F. Hines, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

This case poses some very significant legal and theological problems: Are the churches claiming same kind of special privilege? Are clergymen entitled to keep silent before the grand jury when others (i.e., journalists) are not? Is the "priest-penitent privilege" properly invoked when there is no pastor-parish setting in which confession is a religious duty incumbent upon priest and penitent, when the "penitents" are not necessarily members of the priest’s denomination, when there is no "confession" as such, and when the clergyman is asked to divulge not the content of a confession, but, as the legal briefs say, observations made by him "incident thereto"?

Confession in the New Testament

The "priest-penitent privilege" or the "seal of the confessional" is a recognition in law of the confidentiality of anything told to a priest in the practice of individual auricular confession of sins, considered a sacrament in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity. The New Testament apparently enjoins the confession of sins (cf. James 5:16, for example) , but does not necessarily view it solely as a secret transaction between one priest and one penitent. Indeed, confession might be (and often has been) made before the congregation; the clergy, as such, need not be a party to it at all.

The public (or at least congregational) admission of wrongdoing is characteristic of small, close-knit, high-demand, sectlike religious groups. As the congregation grows larger and more diverse and less like a family, such open confession becomes rarer and harder. To encourage individuals to relieve their souls of remorse, then, the church developed the confessional, with elaborate protection for the anonymity of the penitent and the secrecy of his confession. Not until the patristic period was there written recognition of the importance of secrecy, and not until the fifth century were there ecclesiastical regulations requiring it. (Cf. W. H. Tieman: The Right to Silence [John Knox Press, 1964])

During the medieval period, a priest who divulged anything confessed to him was disgraced, defrocked, driven out to become a wanderer. An exception to this rigorous rule might have been the duty to give evidence in court concerning a crime which a priest learned about in the confessional; but as the civil law of evidence developed, it included a privilege for the priest against being compelled to reveal anything told to him under the "seal of the confessional." This privilege endured in England up to the time of the Restoration, when it was eliminated. It endures in the United States in some form in the statutes of all but six states (Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Texas and West Virginia) , and in an ambiguous condition in the federal law (which governs in Boe’s case).

The ‘Traditional’ Statute

In an article published in the Spring 1968 issue of the Valparaiso University Law Review, Fred Kuhlmann (at the time chief counsel for the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod) classifies these statutes. What he calls "the traditional statute reads something like the following:

No minister of the gospel, or priest of any denomination whatsoever, shall be allowed to disclose any confessions made to him in his professional character, in the course of discipline enjoined by the rules of practice of such denomination.

This is the type of statute in effect in 23 states, among them South Dakota, where Paul Boe is claiming the privilege. When narrowly construed, as some authorities insist all privileges should be, a statute of this nature protects communications of a very limited class.

1. The communication must be made to a clergyman;

2. He must be acting in his "professional capacity," not just as a friend, associate or onlooker;

3. The communication must be a "confession";

4. It must be made "in the course of discipline enjoined by the rules of practice" of the clergyman’s denomination (not "rules or practice," but presumably some official written regulation of the denomination) ;

5. The person making the confession must be a member of the same denomination and thus under obligation of the same "rules of practice" as the clergyman;

6. The denomination’s "rules of practice" must require confidential individual auricular confession rather than merely permitting or encouraging it;

7. The communication must be clearly intended at the time to be and to remain confidential;

8. It must not be made in the presence of, or subsequently divulged to, third parties, or treated in such way as to lose its character of confidentiality (as by being recorded in files that are open to casual inspection).

In most of the recorded decisions cited by Kuhlmann, the privilege has been denied for violation of one or more of those conditions. In the relatively few cases where the privilege was upheld, most of these tests were not strictly applied. For instance, in 1931 a Minnesota court-generously expanded limitations nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6 to mean simply that all clergymen are obliged by their denominations to hear the troubles of all who come to them and to offer what spiritual help they can (In re Swenson).

Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have broadened the privilege of clergymen under their statutes to reach a result similar to that of In re Swenson; namely, to include (a) communications received (or given?) in the course of marriage counseling, pastoral counseling, or other spiritual help given in confidence; and (b) communications of persons not members of the clergyman’s parish or denomination.

The Federal Rule

The federal rule on the "seal of the confessional" is far from clear. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Rule 43) provide that the competency of a witness to testify is to be determined by statute, precedent, or the law of the state in which the case arises. The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (Rule 26) provide that in the absence of statute or rule, the court shall follow "the principles of the common law as they may be interpreted by the courts of the United States in the light of reason and experience." Strictly speaking, under the "federal common law" there is no privilege for clergymen; but it is wonderful what "the light of reason and experience" can do! The Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit determined in 1958 (Mullen v. U.S.) that there is such a privilege, and a federal court in California added in 1971 (In re Verplanck) that it covers not only a clergyman engaged in draft counseling but his lay assistants!

This pattern was confirmed and regularized in the Federal Rules of Evidence recently promulgated by the U.S. Supreme Court. This document contains a commendable rule concerning communications to clergymen: "A person has a privilege to refuse to disclose and to prevent another from disclosing a confidential communication by the person to a clergyman in his professional character as spiritual adviser." Unfortunately (for the Boe case at least) , Congress "impounded" the proposed Rules of Evidence until it could review them and enact what it approved. The revisions now being drafted in the House Judiciary Committee have reportedly eliminated all privileges, not only for clergymen and counselees but for attorney and client, physician and patient, husband and wife, etc.

Boe’s Claim

So Boe’s claim is a legal conundrum. Does it come under the South Dakota (traditional) statute, the Mullen and Verplanck precedents, Rule 506 of the proposed Rules of Evidence, or the House judiciary Committee’s reversion to the strict common-law principle of no privilege at all? Given even the most favorable combination of these, it is still unlikely that Boe can qualify for the privilege unless the courts can see beyond the prototype inherited from medieval times of a cloistered priest sitting in the confessional booth listening through an opaque screen to the whispered confession of an individual penitent parishioner.

Obviously, Boe’s role at Wounded Knee was not a traditional ecclesiastical one; AIM was not a "parish" of the American Lutheran Church (though that church has made regular grants to it) ; probably no one was confessing his or her sins; and Boe was not asked to divulge the content of any such confessions anyway. He was asked what he saw at Wounded Knee, and he answered a number of grand jury questions which he felt did not violate any confidences. What he refused to answer was a question about whom he had seen carrying guns. He contended that revealing the identities of persons with whom he had associated at Wounded Knee would violate the relationship of confidence and trust which he had built up over several years.

Of course no one likes to be thought of as ‘‘betraying the confidence’’ of friends or associates. Yet if grand juries and courts were to be deprived of all evidence subject to that reproach, a significant amount of eyewitness testimony would be eliminated. The U.S. Supreme Court held recently (Caldwell v. U.S.) that journalists have no such privilege in the absence of any indication that the legislatures want them to have it; hence the effort to enact "shield laws" in Congress and various states. But in the case of clergymen, there is considerable evidence of legislative intent; namely, the statutes of 44 states and the District of Columbia (plus the proposed federal Rule of Evidence No. 506).

Why Such a Privilege?

The rationale for the priest-penitent privilege once was that without it some persons would fail to confess their sins and thus forfeit their soul’s salvation. That is not a suitable rationale for civil legislation in this country. The only proper justification for the privilege is that it protects relationships that are of greater value to society than any items of evidence that might be obtained by abrogating it. This is ostensibly the case with laws protecting the confidentiality of the relationship between husband and wife, attorney and client, physician and patient. The clergyman-counselee protection is no more a ‘‘special privilege’’ than any of these other relationships. It is entitled to the same degree of consideration, no more and certainly no less.

It is worth noting at this point that many other considerations often blur the merits of a given claim of privilege. Kuhlmann’s impression, he said, was that courts tended to rule on the privilege in the direction of the verdict the court thought ought to be reached. If the clergyman’s evidence would help to convict a defendant the court considered obviously guilty, he was compelled to testify. If the court suspected that his evidence would damage the outcome it desired, the privilege was broadly construed and he was not permitted to testify even if he wanted to.

Boe’s attorneys contend that the prosecutors are using the grand jury to fish for additional evidence to assist them in convicting persons already indicted -- an illegal and improper use of the grand jury. They also contend that the same or better evidence is available from many witnesses at Wounded Knee who cannot claim the privilege, but that the federal prosecutors are pillorying Boe in an effort to discredit one of the sources of legitimation of the American Indian Movement -- not the first time in recent history that grand juries and federal courts have been used to impress upon dissidents the weight of official displeasure, whether or not convictions were obtained.

So it is neither necessary nor prudent to assume that prosecutors or judges are always wise or righteous -- any more than clergymen or militant radicals. A good rule of privilege would be one which gives each party an opportunity to attack or defend the claim of privilege and gives judges less discretion in according privilege than some have exercised in the past.

A New Role for Clergymen?

At stake in the Boe case is an emerging relationship of great importance to society as a whole, but the "seal of the confessional" may not be the best image under which to understand it. In protecting the "priest-penitent privilege" and extending it (in 22 jurisdictions) to clergymen-counselors and their counselees, legislatures have shown sensitivity to a relationship they thought worth conserving -- not just for the sake of individual counselees and certainly not for the sake of any or all clergymen, but because it contributes to the healing and the equilibrium of society as a whole.

One of the functions of religion is to help people handle their anxieties, guilts, fears, rages, doubts and despairs by enabling them to find ultimate meaning in their lives. One of the clearest ways in which this function is performed is the counseling relationship, in which a trained professional helps troubled persons work through such problems. This function, which is of important value to society, is made more difficult if counselees must always fear that what they admit to the counselor may be extracted from him by threat of imprisonment, or if the counselor takes the attitude, openly or impliedly, "Don’t tell me anything that might get either of us in trouble."

The most effective counselor is one who takes risks in order to help those who need his help, who makes an unguarded commitment to stand by the troubled person through thick and thin. This does not necessarily mean to condone or conspire in criminal activities, since the effective counselor understands that deliberate violations of the law are serious and seldom the answer to any problems; they can be justified only in the few instances where the laws are unjust or where obedience to them works a greater wrong than overt conscientious disobedience.

In our day, it may be that troubled persons in groups are in need of pastoral counseling together rather than singly (as in group therapy?) , and that the most therapeutic part of their togetherness is what they do together to remedy their troubles. Militant organizations like the American Indian Movement do not exist for therapeutic reasons, and perhaps that is why they offer the best "therapy." That term is used here to suggest that just as individual counseling and therapy are useful for coping with individual problems, so group counseling and therapy might be useful for coping with collective problems. This is probably as far as the "confessor-counselor" image should be pressed. However, there is another traditional image that -- though like all images, it has its shortcomings -- may be useful for understanding what is happening on the edge of contemporary Christian ministries.

A ‘Chaplaincy’ to Groups with Special Needs?

The image I refer to is that of the chaplain, the bearer of the concern and compassion of Christians to special populations having special needs, either because of isolation (armed forces, prisons, hospitals) or because of unique and homogeneous character (industry, professional groups, universities, police forces, etc). In similar fashion, a few clergymen have undertaken or been assigned by their church bodies to enter into such a relationship with oppressed or deprived groups in our society. Some have worked closely with migrant farm laborers for years and are now active in the movement led by Cesar Chavez. Others have played roles of the same sort in antipoverty struggles in the inner city. The Rev. John P. Adams was assigned to such a role with the Poor People’s Campaign by his denomination and the ecumenical community. These men were not called "chaplains," but the "chaplaincy" is perhaps the closest analogue to what they did and do.

A similar but distinguishable role which clergymen sometimes take or are assigned to is that of mediator or "honest broker" between the opponents in an effort to resolve conflict. That is the role Adams took in Wounded Knee, rather than being "chaplain" of one of the parties, as Boe was, or as Adams had been in situations such as the Poor People’s Campaign. The "chaplain" and "mediator" roles must be carefully distinguished from each other, but both must rely upon trust and confidence in order to perform their important work -- important not just to them or to the groups they serve, but to all of us.

At their best, such "chaplains" help to "damp" the explosions of social conflict, to channel it into constructive or at least rational forms (rather than impulsive or self-destructive), to provide links to the other structures of society, to lend legitimacy to the objectives of the militant groups, to help them to weigh the choices before them and to communicate their hopes and needs to the "outside world," and to supply spiritual nurture and encouragement.

In conflict situations, the "chaplain" role comes under heated attack from "the other side," and the church is accused of "taking sides," The mediator role is often attacked by critics on both sides. And one of the risks the "chaplain" and the mediator run is that of being called to give evidence against the party or parties with which he or she has worked, of being converted retroactively into an agent of the prosecution, a spy co-opted out of the ranks of the trusting.

If such persons can be compelled by court order to "tell all," it will not be long before clergymen are unable to gain access to the militant groups which they might be able to help in the ways already indicated. Of course, there is always reporter Earl Caldwell’s answer: to go to jail rather than testify against his confidential sources. Boe may well choose this course if his claims of privilege fail. But he should not have to go to jail for 12 or 14 months for carrying out a religious ministry from which not only the militant Indians but all of us benefit.

Whatever the outcome of the Boe case, it should be apparent that many denominations do not adequately protect the confidentiality of their clergymen’s counseling ministry. Every denomination should have a clear-cut regulation requiring ministers to respect and preserve the confidentiality of communications made to them in a counseling relationship. Furthermore, the denominations should urge all state legislatures to adopt (or reinforce) statutes that more adequately protect such confidentiality. At the same time they should intercede with Congress (House and Senate Judiciary committees) to approve Rule 506 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which would provide such protection in federal courts.

Are Tax Exemptions Subsidies?

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The drive to penalize private schools that discriminate on the basis of race by denying them tax exemption poses some serious problems of “bleed-through.” If the penalty could be limited to racial segregation, few except segregationists would object. But the rationale advanced for tax penalization is not now limited to racial segregation or even to violation of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. It relies on either or both of two elements that are lately supposed to be qualifications for tax exemption: public benefit and public policy.

To qualify for tax exemption, it is now contended, an organization must benefit the public and must not violate public policy. Schools that discriminate are excluding or disadvantaging a portion of the public and therefore do not truly benefit the (whole) public, and they also violate the federal public policy against racial discrimination. These two criteria were not applied to federal income tax exemption until 1969, when the IRS, under Randolph Thrower, borrowed them from the law of charitable trusts and applied them to the Internal Revenue Code’s section on exempt organizations -- Section 501(c), as applied in Treas. Reg. 1.501(c)(3) -- 1(d)(2).

Prior to that time, tax “exemption” had simply been a formal recognition that nonprofit organizations normally have no net income and so are not appropriate objects of income taxation. As Cordell Hull, author of the Revenue Act of 1913, said: “Of course any kind of society or corporation that is not doing business for profit and not acquiring profit would not come within the meaning of the taxing clause.” There were no tests of public benefit or conformity to public policy applied. Indeed, in 1966 the Supreme Court observed that even criminal activities were not punished by the tax code.

. . . the federal income tax is a tax on net income, not a sanction against wrongdoing. That principle has been firmly embedded in the tax statute from the beginning. One familiar facet of the principle is the truism that the statute does not concern itself with the lawfulness of the income that it taxes. Income from a criminal enterprise is taxed at a rate no higher and no lower than income from more conventional sources [Commissioner v. Tellier, 383 U.S. 687, 1966].

If the tax code is to be used to penalize conduct that is not criminal but is only contrary to public policy or renders no public benefit, then it is important to notice the assumption underlying that innovation and its implications for all voluntary organizations, particularly churches.



The underlying assumption is that tax exemption is a public subsidy, a form of federal financial assistance, and that other taxpayers must make up the taxes not exacted from an exempt entity. (This assumption is shared by virtually all persons quoted in the press on this issue: members of Congress, leaders of civil rights organizations, church leaders, experts on constitutional law, etc. Reagan administration officials do not deny this assumption but insist only that Congress, not the IRS, should determine who is entitled to the supposed subsidy.) From this assumption arises the corollary that to qualify for that “subsidy,” an organization must be of benefit to the public and must not violate “public policy” -- whatever that may be.

The consequences of that rationale, however, are ominous for democracy, for freedom of association, and for religious liberty. If the legislature -- or the IRS -- can give or withhold tax exemption from nonprofit organizations on the basis of its interpretation of what serves the public benefit or violates public policy, then we are all in trouble. For instance, organizations trying to assist Haitian and Salvadoran refugees to avoid repatriation, or organizations urging boycott of banks doing business with South Africa, or organizations counseling young people not to register for the draft, or organizations protesting increased military expenditures, or organizations demonstrating against nuclear power or against mineral exploration in wilderness areas, are all in danger of losing their tax exemptions for violating “public policy.”

But it is fallacious to equate tax exemption with subsidy. Boris Bittker, in an important 1976 Yale Law Journal article, “The Exemption of Nonprofit Organizations from Federal Income Taxation,” states the correct concept: “The exemption of nonprofit organizations from federal income taxation is neither a special privilege nor a hidden subsidy. Rather, It reflects the application of established principles of income taxation to organizations which, unlike the typical business corporation, do not seek a profit.”



A tax exemption simply does not function as a subsidy does. The U.S. Supreme Court, in upholding the constitutionality of church property tax exemptions, has recognized this difference:

Obviously a direct money subsidy would be a relationship pregnant with involvement and, as with most governmental grant programs, could encompass sustained and detailed administrative relationships for enforcement of statutory or administrative standards, but that is not this case. . . . The government does not transfer part of its revenue to churches but simply abstains from demanding that the church support the state. No one has ever suggested that tax exemption has converted libraries, art galleries or hospitals into arms of ~he state or employees “on the public payroll” [Walz v. Tax Commission, 397 U.S. 644, 1970].

Specifically:

In a tax exemption, no money changes hands between government and the organization. The organization cannot buy a thing with a tax exemption. Without contributions from its supporters, it has nothing to spend. Government cannot create or sustain by tax exemption any organization which does not attract donations on its own merits.

There is no specified amount to a tax exemption, as there is to a subsidy; it is “open-ended”; the organization’s income is determined by its contributors, each of whom decides individually how much to give.

Likewise, there is no periodic legislative or administrative struggle to obtain, renew, maintain or increase the amount, as there would be with a subsidy. The organization does not have to expend its energies applying for, defending, reporting, qualifying, undergoing audits and evaluations; nor does the government have to devote its resources to administering these tests and scrutinies.

A subsidy is not voluntary in the way that tax-exempt donations are. The individual citizen has little or no choice in the matter when the legislature taxes the citizenry and appropriates a portion of the revenues as subsidies to private organizations for purposes it deems appropriate (and of course it could not properly give any such subsidies to churches).

Finally, a tax exemption does not convert the organization into an agency of “State action,” whose activities are thus sponsored and endorsed by government, whereas a subsidy may do so. (“No one has ever suggested that tax exemption has converted libraries, art galleries, or hospitals into arms of the state or employees ‘on the public payroll,’” said the court in 1970. Well, perhaps someone has suggested so now.)

A Senate Concurrent Resolution introduced in January by Senators Gary Hart (D., Colo.) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) asserts that Congress intended to deny tax exemption to segregated private schools when it adopted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which contains in Title VI a prohibition of “federal financial assistance” to any segregated institutions. It is instructive to note, however, that in the debates of 1964, proponents and opponents of the proposed Civil Rights Act both listed all of the forms of federal financial assistance that would be cut off if the act passed, and neither side mentioned tax exemption. So if, in reconstructive hindsight, tax exemption is now claimed to be federal financial assistance, then, of course, churches are not entitled to it at all!

But if the assumption is wrong, if tax exemption is not a subsidy or a form of federal financial assistance, then the tests applied to charitable trusts are not appropriate to tax exemption, and exempt entities need not be required to render what the legislature or IRS considers public benefit or to conform to what they construe to be public policy.



The earlier rationale for tax exemption was that nonprofit organizations are simply not part of the tax base to begin with because their members already pay their own share of the costs of government as taxpayers in their own right. If any taxes were to be collected from the nonprofit organizations which they have formed to achieve their shared purposes, those taxes would have to be paid by the members, supporters, contributors to such organizations. They would in effect be taxed again for organizing themselves into groups for activities from which they derive no monetary gain and which indeed might also benefit the community.

This issue is complicated by the fact that “tax exemption” refers to a bundle of things. Organizations so designated are exempt not only from federal taxation of their net income but also from payment of social security taxes, federal unemployment insurance, various sales and excise taxes, and taxes on real property. “Tax exemption” also refers to deductibility: of charitable bequests from federal inheritance taxes, of charitable gifts from the federal gift tax and of charitable contributions from the donor’s gross income.

The rationale is not the same for all of these. It is not easy to justify as a matter of “right” the exemptions from taxes paid by most employers, and one could contend that if nonprofit organizations employ people, they should pay the appropriate employers’ share of social security and unemployment taxes just as any other employers do.

The tax-base rationale applies only to the exemptions from income, sales and real-estate taxes. The remaining items refer to deductibility of charitable contributions, gifts and bequests, which are otherwise taxable -- deductibility not to the recipient nonprofit organization, but to the donor, on the rationale that what the donor gives away to a charitable organization should not be treated as income for purposes of taxation since, unlike taxable income, it does not represent the consumption or accumulation of income for the donor’s personal aggrandizement.

The criteria of charitable trusts could and I should properly apply only to the area of deductibility, which also represents the principal area of impact of the federal exemptions. That is, it would normally not have any great effect on a nonprofit organization to be taxed on its net income, since it seldom has any. Loss of deductibility of contributions would have a much greater effect, and it is the only area to which the criteria of charitable trusts should apply. In other words, an organization that does not serve the public benefit or which violates public policy might properly be deprived of deductibility of charitable contributions, but not of exemption from income taxation.

The difference might seem only technical in income taxation, but it is more practical with regard to sales, excise and property taxation, where nonprofit organizations enjoy important insulation from governmental imposts and oversight by virtue of their not being a legitimate part of the tax base. This is not just a logical nicety but an important protection of the freedom of association -- a freedom that has been safeguarded in decisions like NAACP v. Alabama (357 U.S. 449, 1958), which held that a state may not compel a voluntary association of citizens to turn over its list of members because that might subject them to governmental penalties. Similar considerations should apply with respect to the powers of government to tax such organizations, since “the power to tax can become the power to destroy.”

When groups of citizens get together to accomplish purposes of mutual interest (from which they derive no profit), it should not be the responsibility of government to inspect, evaluate and approve their endeavors on the basis of supposed conformity to the prevailing notion of “public benefit” or “public policy” of the moment. It is the responsibility not of government to formulate and perpetuate public policy but of the citizenry, who can do so wisely, creatively and effectively only by organizing themselves in voluntary groups around their various shared interests and concerns. Precisely because the public policy they envision may be different from that currently in effect, their voluntary organizations need to be as free as possible from governmental surveillance, scrutiny and supervision.



Tax “exemption” -- meaning exclusion from the tax base -- is one mode of insulating such groups from the tides of popular opinion and the caprice of incumbent governors. It should be something legislatures cannot turn on or shut off at will, something that is anchored in the essential right of freedom of association protected by the First Amendment.

But even if that bastion were, regrettably, to fall, a further protection should be maintained to safeguard the free exercise of religion on the part of organizations seeking to carry out what members believe to be the duties of conscience required by their religious obligations; i.e.. those involving “duties superior to those arising from any human relation” (Chief Justice Hughes dissenting in U.S. v. MacIntosh, 283 U.S. 605 1931, an opinion which has become a keystone of the conscientious-objector exemption from Selective Service requirements).

Religious bodies should seek to reclaim the original rationale of nontaxation of nonprofit organizations in general for the sake of freedom of association for everyone. But if that cannot now be done, they should not surrender any defensible safeguard of the autonomy of religious organizations to embody the free exercise of religion of their members. To characterize that nontaxation as a governmental “subsidy” or as “federal financial assistance” is needlessly and fallaciously to give away an important protection of religious liberty.

Statism, Not Separationism, Is the Problem

Separation between church and state is a phrase often used to summarize, perhaps to sloganize, the relationship between religion and government envisioned by the founders and decreed by them in the religion clause of the First Amendment. For some reason, this shorthand phrase seems to inspire intense antagonisms.

We are often told in portentous tones that these words do not occur in the First Amendment (or anywhere else in the Constitution) , that there has never been "absolute" separation of church and state (seemingly with the implication that therefore there shouldn’t be any such separation) , and that the concept has become outmoded with the demise of the quaint notion of limited government and the expansion of the activities of both governments and churches.

Of course, any, five-word formula is apt to have its shortcomings as a description of a complex constitutional construct, but it is curious that so much negative emotional baggage seems to have become attached to this one. If we reflect on a comparable concept, "separation of powers," we might recall that it, too, is not found in the Constitution, that there never has been "absolute" separation between the three branches of government, and that the expansion and complexity of modern government has not rendered it impractical or obsolete. There are occasional arguments over how the principle ought to apply in concrete, current situations -- as there ought to be -- but there is not much contention that the principle itself is outmoded or counterproductive, except from those who find frustrating any formal limitations on the omnipotence of government.

Why should not a similar principled but reasonable realism apply to separation between church and state? Like separation of powers’, it is a wise, though not magically sovereign, ideal that we should seek to understand and approximate as best as we can in the problematic situations that confront us, instead of deprecating or denigrating it. Rather than asking how close we can come to blurring the distinctions between religion and government without actually violating the First Amendment, we should ask how we can most fully differentiate the unique, important and very different functions of each so that each can be most fully itself rather than an imitation of, or interloper upon, the other.

The latter concern seems to be the thrust of Michael McConnell’s argument. He recognizes some important values underlying the religion clauses but seems to view with alarm the course the Supreme Court has followed recently in applying those clauses. He represents the court as haying succumbed to a doctrinaire enthusiasm for "strict separation" that is pressing toward complete secularization of American public life. There are such pressures in American society, but the court has not fallen captive to them, at least not since 1970, when Chief Justice Warren Burger spent many words rejecting the earlier hard-line -- though still not "absolute" -- separationist stance of the Earl Warren court. Said Burger, "We will not tolerate either governmentally established religion or governmental interference with religion. Short of these expressly proscribed governmental acts there is room for play in the joints productive of a benevolent neutrality which will permit religious exercise to exist without sponsorship and without interference." "Benevolent neutrality" continues to be the goal of the court today. "Separation between church and state" has not retained much currency in the court’s opinion since 1970. Therefore, it is puzzling to contemplate in 1989 a warning against making separation the key to church-state relations. It has not been the key for nearly 20 years, though some people are still trying, rather unsuccessfully, to resuscitate it. Beating a dead horse might seem a harmless practice, if it did not divert attention from a charging one.

Hyperseparationism is often a symptom of the fear of imperialistic faith groups (supposedly) seeking to dominate society and government (as most faith groups would like to do -- in the sense of wanting their vision for all humankind to prevail) Prior to the 1960s the Roman Catholic Church may have aroused that anxiety; more recently Protestant fundamentalism has stirred it. Neither of these represents the real threat to optimum church-state relations, and both have served as distractions from the danger of the moment, which is not religious dominance -- or even "secularism" -- but statism. Lower court judges and the justices of the Supreme Court have "failed to offer a ‘principled or predictable alternative" to "strict separation" because they -- like the American people -- do not agree among themselves on the nature of the problem or how to resolve it. But in many recent cases they have tended to agree more readily on another thesis: that the free-exercise clause does not interpose protections of religious obligations and practices that it once did (from 1940 to 1981) , and that the establishment clause does not have the, force against government action that it once did (from 1948 to 1985)

Contrary to McConnell’s contention, establishment-clause claims have not fared well in the Supreme Court lately. In the past five years the court has upheld five such claims but has rejected six, one of them unanimously -- not exactly a landslide for "separation." The unanimous 1987 decision in Corporation of the Presiding Bishop v. Amos revised a lower court’s holding that Congress violated the establishment clause when it permitted churches to hire their own members in preference to others for nonreligious jobs, a form of religious discrimination prohibited for other private employers. The court stated:

A law is not unconstitutional simply because it allows churches to advance religion, which is their very purpose. For a law to have forbidden "effects" …it must be fair to say that the government itself has advanced religion through its own activities and influence.

That is a far cry from separation and an encouraging sign for free exercise. But it may have another meaning: the court did not say that the free-exercise clause required this accommodation but only that if Congress wished to provide it, it was permissible. So the decision may be more a sign of deference to Congress than of solicitude for religion. A similar explanation may apply to the court’s rejection of seven free-exercise claims since 1982, during which time it upheld only one.

In those cases the court deferred to the judgment of the Air Force that the free-exercise claim of a Jewish officer who wore his yarmulke on duty could not be accommodated; it deferred to the judgment of correctional authorities that the free-exercise claim of a Black Muslim to attend Friday afternoon religious services could not be accommodated; it deferred to the judgment of the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service that building a logging road through a national forest was necessary despite the damage to religious practices of Native American tribes in that area; it deferred to the Internal Revenue Service’s ruling that Bob Jones University was not entitled to tax exemption because of its religiously motivated rule against interracial dating and marriage on campus; it deferred to the judgment of the secretary of labor that a religious community must pay its members the minimum wage for work they performed in the group’s business although the members said they had religious objections to being paid for their work. The only free-exercise claim upheld was controlled by an earlier precedent from 1963.

I agree with what seems to be the implication of McConnell’s argument: that most, if not all, of these rejections of free-exercise claims were wrongly decided. But the court’s resistance to those claims was not, in my view, because of any mindless fealty to "separation between church and state" -- quite the contrary. The court has been whittling back on both free-exercise and establishment-clause claims in favor of wider amplitude for the exercise of the powers of government. And it has not whittled back nearly as far nor as fast as the Reagan administration urged, while representing itself as a great champion of religious liberty. As Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas Law School has observed:

[The Reagan administration] has been quite vocal in its minimalist view of the establishment clause. But . . . it [has taken] an equally minimalist view of the free-exercise clause. Its position . . . is not pro religion (or anti-religion) , but simply statist. The administration does not believe that minorities should have many rights that are judicially enforceable against majorities.

The Supreme Court has been moving (more slowly than the Reagan administration did) in the same direction. Some of its members seem to feel that individuals should not have many rights that are judicially enforceable against the government. Apparently, individuals, minorities and courts should get out of the way and let the government -- in its infinite wisdom -- govern. That view, of course, would put the courts on the side of the strong against the weak and nullify the whole purpose of the Bill of Rights, which is to protect individual rights against government powers. Nevertheless, in some cases -- and for various reasons -- the more statist members of the Supreme Court are sometimes able to convince other justices to obtain such outcomes as those deplored above. McConnell proposes "to replace ‘separation’ with the ideals of neutrality and accommodation." Those are good ideals, but so is separation. It does not need to be replaced, just reinterpreted. balancing it with free exercise -- as the Supreme Court seems to be trying to do when not drawn into a statist stance. Neither religion clause should be subordinated to the other; each protects an important aspect of religious liberty. Under the free-exercise clause every person is entitled to respect for her or his religious commitments, and their free exercise should not be burdened by governmental interference except to secure "compelling state interests" (such as protection of public health and safety, not just public welfare or order) that can be served in no less burdensome way. Under the establishment clause every person is also entitled to government that does not sponsor, support or inculcate one religion, religion in general or all religions collectively; that does not prefer one religion over another; that does not build up the real estate or the personnel of a religious institution or set up religious proprietaries not required to supply state-impaired religious access; and that does not compose, initiate or promulgate official prayers, rites or liturgies, or otherwise "play church."

My main area of disagreement with McConnell would be over the eligibility of church-related agencies for tax funds to perform ostensibly public services. This is admittedly a perplexing boundary area between the religious and the secular. When churches believe that their mission requires them to provide education, health care, social work, disaster relief, refugee resettlement, shelter for the homeless, food for the hungry, assistance to the aged, or whatever, they are often providing needed public services for which the public is willing, able and responsible to pay. Often the churches do so with skill, commitment and compassion that are of special worth to the public. Should they not be eligible for public funding available to nonreligious private agencies providing such services? Reasonably, they should, providing they do not become the only agencies providing such services. No people in need should have to go to or through a church agency to obtain public benefits to which they are entitled if they do not wish to do so -- particularly if those public benefits are’ shaped to conform to the sponsoring churches’ religious beliefs that are not shared by the recipients. (A case in point is that of a publicly supported, church-related hospital which is the only hospital in town and which refuses to permit certain medically accepted surgical procedures -- such as abortion or tubal ligation -- which are objectionable to the church but not to the patients of other faiths or no faith who depend upon that hospital for health care, and whose tax dollars support it.)

In accepting public funds for rendering public services, church-related agencies take on responsibilities to the public that reach beyond the church’s faith community. In serving the public they cannot impose faith criteria or faith requirements upon members of the public who have not voluntarily accepted them. Though churches are entitled, unlike other private employers, to hire with their own money their own members in preference to others, they are not entitled to do so with the public’s money. (That was the chief obstacle to enactment of the Act for Better Child Care in the past session of Congress.)

Similarly, if teachers employed by the public are assigned to teach on parochial school premises, they tend to come under the administrative aegis of the parochial rather than the public school (not that they teach religion, but that they otherwise function to some degree as adjunct faculty, increasing with tax funds the staffing resources of the parochial school -- a consideration apparently underlying two 1985 decisions but not well articulated by the Supreme Court)

On the other hand, much of the valued skill, commitment and compassion of such church-related agencies might be dissipated if they were to be completely "sanitized" of all religious influences or expression -- made to "act as if they were secular," as McConnell trenchantly but rather pejoratively puts it. They are made to act -- and should want to act -- as agents of the public fisc who cannot rightfully use the tax funds paid under duress of law by all the people -- of many faiths and no faith -- for the imposition of the religious beliefs or for the institutional advantage or aggrandizement of the sponsoring church.

Whatever balance may be struck in these areas of mixed secular and religious services funded by tax money, the mixture is inherently unstable and will tend to move in one direction or the other, usually toward increased responsiveness to broader interests than those of the sponsoring church (which is often called "secularization") -- a process seen in church-related colleges and hospitals even without tax funding, which merely makes it happen quicker and sometimes with the force of law. Since these "mixed" ventures may not always be the churches’ most direct or effective way of fulfilling their central function of explaining the ultimate meaning of life to their adherents -- and certainly not if muffled by the requirements of public fisc -- perhaps churches should be less eager to enter into what can at best be but a very unequal partnership with the public, and less tenacious in clinging to "mixed" institutions rather than letting them spin off to nonsectarian auspices.

For these reasons McConnell’s solicitude for the public funding of such mixed-service agencies of religious origin (and of inevitably attenuating religious affinity) may be to some degree misplaced. Whether church-related agencies can get all the public money they want with out having to conform to the constitutional requirements that properly go with it should hardly be the crucial litmus test of church-state relations or of the optimal application of the First Amendment’s religion clauses.

Michael W. McConnell replies:

But I think his response misses the point. When the ideal of separation accords with the ideals of neutrality and accommodation in any particular case, there is no problem. The case is easy. What is needed is a set of principles for deciding cases in which these ideals are in conflict. The Supreme Court has not provided any such set of principles, and the "test" it has handed down (which is binding on the lower courts that must decide most of the cases) is worse than useless.

Kelley suggests that the real problem is not the theoretical limitations of the court’s separationist model, but rather its "statism." There is something to this criticism. especially in free-exercise cases. I can agree with Kelley that the government is often wrong in these church-state cases, more often wrong than the Supreme Court is willing to admit. That does not. mean, however, that the government is always wrong.

Neither a "statist" nor an "antistatist" presumption will help, in deciding cases. Precisely the same question can arise in the guise of a challenge to government action as in support for government action. In the Pawtucket crèche case, the government erected a nativity scene and the plaintiffs challenged it. In the Scarsdale crèche case, the government refused to allow a nativity scene on public property, and the plaintiffs sued to compel it to do so. In the Forest Service case, Native Americans challenged the government’s refusal to protect their sacred lands from logging operations. One can as easily imagine the government deciding to protect the lands, and being sued by those who say the decision "favored" or "advanced" religion. In the remedial education case, New York City provided remedial teachers to parochial (as well as public) school students. This was challenged as an establishment of religion. In an earlier case, Missouri had refused to provide them, and parents of parochial school students sued.

The results in these cases should not turn on who is doing the suing. They require a substantive principle for interpreting the First Amendment. I have proposed one: the government must treat religious people and institutions the same way it treats comparable nonreligious people and institutions, unless special accommodation is needed to protect religious liberty from a facially neutral law that conflicts with religious obligations or forms of organization.

Kelley states that his "main area disagreement" with this proposal neutrality and accommodation has to do with the eligibility of church-related agencies, like church-based day-easy centers, for tax funds to perform public services. He concludes that church-related agencies should be eligible, "providing they do not become the only agencies providing such services." I agree with his conclusion, and with the proviso. Religious institutions must not be given a preferred place in publicly supported programs. It is enough that they be treated neutrally.

But Kelley would go a step further, requiring church-related agencies to hire staff from outside the faith and to refrain from inculcating religious doctrine. This he says is necessary in order to protect members of the public from "faith criteria or faith requirements" they have not "voluntarily accepted." Here I disagree. Kelley’s solution, which he shares in common with other moderate separationists, would constrict rather than protect voluntary religious choice.

Consider the day-care example. If the federal government gives some form of voucher, tax credit or reimbursement to low-income parents using day care, those parents will have many different options. In all probability, the majority of day-care centers will be secular; many others will be church-based but largely nonreligious; and a few will be overtly religious.

Under Kelley ‘s approach, parents would be free to choose secular or church-centered day care, but would be prohibited from using their benefits to purchase religious day care. If they choose a religious day-care center (one that hires staff within the faith or inculcates religion) , they will forfeit their right to the government benefits.

These parents are not "protected" from "faith criteria or faith requirements" they have not "voluntarily accepted." They are prevented from (or at least penalized for) voluntarily choosing the religious option. Secular choices are subsidized; religious choices are penalized. Nonsubsidized day-care centers will be placed at a disadvantage and may well be driven out of the market. This is not neutral. However well-meaning the intent, the effect is to discriminate against religious choices. The freedom of the individual to choose cannot be advanced by limiting the range of options.

Issues of public funding become more important as the government assumes a larger role in social welfare. The separationist model of church-state relations, even in its moderate form advocated by Kelley, leads ineluctably to a more secular, less diverse and pluralistic society. It is time to adopt a set of legal principles that recognizes and respects the religious diversity of the American people.

Revisioning Seminary as Ministry-Centered

I am a 52-year-old minister whose entire adult life has been spent in the professional service of the Presbyterian Church. I write out of love and a deep distress which has many geneses. First, the mainline Protestant church is in serious decline. Some go so far as to say it is dying.

Second, my major ministry, the San Francisco Network Ministries, is among people long ago abandoned by the church -- the frail elderly poor, the homeless, addicts and alcoholics, illiterates, people with AID’S/ARC who are living in poverty, prostitutes and other victims of our culture’s "sex industry," and people with various mental and physical disabilities struggling to live on meager benefit payments. There is a deep spiritual wisdom and hunger among these people, yet besides our street ministry, only one Roman Catholic and one Protestant church minister with some 25,000 people. This story is duplicated across the land, to the shame and impoverishment of the church.

Third, the Christian church has little access to or influence on the major policy making institutions of our society, in spite of the noisy presence of reactionary church voices and political campaign allusions to religious values. Decisions affecting the life of the planet, and especially the life of the poor, are made with little significant input from those who take the gospel of Jesus Christ as their primary guide.

I want to examine the form, content and role of seminary education in light of these three problems. While much of what I write has no doubt been said before, seminaries seldom show that they have heard it or are willing to take it seriously.

In May 1988 the Network Center for Study of Christian Ministry utilized a grant from Trinity Grants, New York City, to host a four-day consultation of ministry-based programs in seminary education from across the country. Represented were the Urban Training Organization of Atlanta, the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education in Chicago, the Women’s Theological Center in Boston, the New York Theological Seminary and the former Urban Academy of Chicago. We examined the programs’ theories and practice of adult education, clarifying our assumptions and exploring the implications of our work for seminary education in general. With the exception of the program at New York Theological Seminary, all the organizations participating were founded and are directed by people involved in ministry outside the academy (and even NYTS requires its professors to engage in nonacademic ministry). We all work on the premise that ministry studies are best conducted when they are centered on ministry rather than on the classroom or on students.

The NCSCM was founded in 1982 by the Pacific School of Religion and the San Francisco Network Ministries. It also includes students from San Francisco Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) , Church Divinity School of the Pacific (Episcopal) and the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Students enroll for one year of their M.Div. or D.Min. work, not an intern or additional year. Through an interview process, a student is placed in a parish or agency in San Francisco where he or she is engaged in ministry about 20 hours a week for nine months. The student also enrolls in four classes each semester in areas such as Old Testament, New Testament, theology, ethics, pastoral care, community ministry and spiritual disciplines.

These classes are open to NCSCM students only and are designed to be integrated with the students’ ministry. Field experience and academic work are in constant dialogue. Some classes are taught by practitioners active in a parish or agency, and some are taught by full-time professors from the participating schools. Each student works on-site with a field faculty person who, in turn, is trained by NCSCM staff and field education professors. Most students also choose to work with a spiritual director.

Academic rigor is not sacrificed. Indeed, students are not allowed simply to "master the material"; they must integrate classes with their day-to-day ministry experience, a much more demanding intellectual task. It is not possible to play the schooling game we all know so well, dealing with abstract principles of pastoral care or professional ethics, Jesus’ parables, innovative worship, or a Sunday youth fellowship. These pieces of life are not so neatly separated from one another. At NCSCM ministry and classroom continually probe, shape, question and reform one another. Ordinarily, when students are asked to write theological reflection papers on ministry experiences, they often fail to address the assignment -- seminaries have taught them theology, but not how to reflect theologically. Ministry-centered education seeks to redress that lack.

Whether they work with upper-middle-class parishes, ethnic or minority churches, undocumented refugees, small struggling urban churches, hospice patients, the elderly poor, delinquent youth or battered women, all students grapple with questions of class and race in a course on feminist ethics. Their case studies form the core of class discussion and theory in a Christian education course based on Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner.

They agonize over Christology while working in an agency reaching out to homeless runaway youths selling their bodies on the streets. Where is Christ on these mean streets and what difference does that make to anyone? Discussions of baptism and the Eucharist take a different tone when we realize that most of these street children have been baptized.

Students and professors search and are searched by the Psalms. How do the Psalms of lament, of disorientation or comfort speak to us, through us and for us in a small parish suffering nine deaths from AIDS during the fall semester? What form does pastoral care take in a parish bleeding from internal conflicts about life and ministry in a neighborhood undergoing rapid changes in matters of race, age, economic class and sexual orientation? What form does it take in a large, affluent parish about to undertake a multimillion-dollar building program? How do studies in ecclesiology relate such Christian congregations to the burgeoning numbers of homeless on the streets of every city in the U.S.? How does a course on work and economic justice inform ministries with non-English speaking refugees trapped in sweatshops, or with prostitutes, or with single mothers, or with bank executives? Where in our theology and ministries is the meeting ground on which all these people might learn from one another?

Calvin is better approached through his spirituality than through his theology. Spirituality bears to theology somewhat the relation of practice to theory or of action to contemplation, or, perhaps . . . of history to philosophy; even, perhaps of Hebraism to Hellenism. Christian spirituality . . . involves what the gospel effects in the believer. It includes everything we mean by the Christian life: prayer, worship, works of love, pilgrimage, what the gospel means for daily life. Spirituality is first-order Christianity; theology is second-order Christianity. Protestantism, like Catholicism, endured a reaction against the creative, and therefore frightening, impulses of the 16th century, and there arose a concern to domesticate, to systematize, and to control the frightening impulses. After the charismatic leaders came the routinizers. After the disturbing spirituality came the theology.

Bousma noted that the teaching authority of the church was claimed by the theological faculty, leading to a division between them and the "clergy who minister to the whole body of the faithful." Yet "for those who are in daily touch with suffering, needy, sinful humanity, what is most required is less theology than spirituality, applied Christianity, first-order Christianity." Calvin, Bousma continued, "insisted on the obligation of God’s people to bring the world that God had created into full obedience to his will. Calvin stated ‘We are not worthy to look upon Heaven, until all the world is reformed."

In our time, ministry-centered seminary education programs are calling attention to the same painful division between sacerdotium and magisterium that existed in the medieval church. It is time for a radical revisioning and restructuring of seminary education. First, it is imperative that faculty as well as students be engaged substantially in ministry outside the academy. A NCSCM student’s experience illustrates this necessity.

At a party, I met a man who worked for a company in the financial district and he became intrigued with our ministry, expressing interest in working with people with AIDS in a poverty area where we work. He made an appointment with me, saying he felt the pull to do something "more" with his life.

Before heading to his office, I stopped to see Dan. Despite having wasted to 110 pounds and having diarrhea and difficulties breathing, he had been in excellent spirits. This night, however, he was gasping for breath and lacked energy to talk. I sat behind him, holding his body upright, so that he could swallow some pills. I wanted to stay, but was aware that I was overdue for my appointment, so I found someone to sit with Dan.

Arriving for my appointment, I found the man feverishly at work preparing a presentation with time for nothing but embarrassed apologies. We made another date, which he also canceled.

I am haunted by having left a man in desperate shape in order to respond to another who, at the level of party conversation, had evinced interest in "doing more," yet who had created a world of work which did not allow him to step into another world. I realize that when I move from ministry site to seminary, I move from a desperate place to a place professing to care, but which has created a world of work -- books, papers and presentations -- which does not allow it to connect in any meaningful way with that other world. Books and papers are valuable, but as seminary is presently constituted.those things defend us from firsthand, visceral encounters with desperate people and places. We. need to be haunted by such encounters; until we are haunted, our busy works will not impact nor change the world’s status quo, because without being haunted we will not change our own.

Theological seminaries should abandon the practice of tenure for faculty, and with rare exceptions no one should be allowed to teach full-time in a seminary more than six years at a stretch, followed by at least six years of ministry in a parish or agency before another teaching stint.

One argument against this is that such a practice would dilute the quality of scholarship. No doubt it would change scholarship, but this would not necessarily be detrimental. It might even enrich the theological gene pool, drawing on the minds, faith, scholarship and spirituality of a much greater number of Christians committed to ministry. It would provide parish and agency with more leaders challenged and enriched by theological faculty and students. It would bring into the academy people with vast experience in ministry, dramatically altering both the process and the content of seminary education.

NCSCM’s experience reveals that seminary professors are often profoundly shaken by what they learn of ministry from interacting with our students, while many of our adjunct faculty, both clergy and lay, display superior teaching skills and understanding of their subject matter and contemporary ministry. Where is it written that the common good is best served by having competent Christian scholars frozen into tenured and adjunct status? It is time for Christian seminaries to abandon the model pressed on us by the university and risk a model more suited to the needs of today’s church. (A recent conversation with the dean of an Episcopal seminary revealed that Anglican seminaries in Great Britain have already made these changes.)

This policy opens the door for ecumenical enrichment. Knowing that tenure would be limited, Protestant seminaries, for example, might feel freer to hire Protestants from different traditions, Catholics or scholars of other faiths. They would be encouraged to seek out the wealth of teaching talent among clergy and laypeople outside the academy, and to find ways to develop, appreciate and reward them. Finally, this policy would lessen the time that faculty now waste on empire-building, issues of personal security and internal politics.

The entrenched understanding of scholarship must be dislodged and attention given to critical questions such as: What should be the goal of theological scholarship? Who should be the recipients of scholarship? What should be the sources, processes and materials for scholarship? What should be the language of scholarship?

Harold Recinos of Wesley Theological Seminary says that the purpose, of most scholarship is "to baffle the laity and to dazzle one’s peers in the academy." Charles McCoy of Pacific School of Religion suggests that it is "to add to the body of inert material in the library." Of course we must continue to provide .for investigative, speculative scholarship such as that displayed by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Norman Gottwald. The value of such groundbreaking work is indisputable. But our appreciation of scholarship must be expanded to include and encourage work produced primarily for non-academic, thoughtful, intelligent people of faith, and to value people-based research as highly as that which is print-based. We must structure the scholarly environment such that even the print-based research is always kept in dialogue with actual places, programs and peopIe in ministry. Our research must be haunted by firsthand encounters with suffering, needy, sinful humanity. William Weisenbach of New York Theological Seminary observed that Ph.D. programs reward "that 2 percent of the population who are true introverts, preferring solitary research to interaction with others." Such people occupy most seminary teaching positions.

On the M.A. and M.Div. levels, ministry-centered programs prefer short written or oral class presentations over the traditional term paper. When longer papers are assigned, we encourage having them prepared by colleague teams, or orally presented as work-in-progress so that peer and professor critiques can be utilized for shaping the final product. While this may not be the best preparation for traditional postgraduate work, it is the best preparation for practitioners, developing habits and skills of critical theological reflection and building truly supportive colleague communities. This method also requires professors to master a wider range of subjects.

Preparation for professional ministry is best accomplished where active ministry is occurring; therefore most seminaries should divest themselves of their real property.

From the outset, the NCSCM chose to have classes rotate weekly among the ministry sites of our students, a system that has proved to be an invaluable piece of the education process. Students and faculty gain an overview of ministry in the city, comparing and contrasting physical facilities, neighborhoods, staff, programs, financial resources and populations. Even confronting public transportation and the task of surviving cold weather raise theological questions for people of faith. It is difficult to deal abstractly with the prophets when you can hear 100 shuffling feet lined up outside for their one meal of the day.

Conversely, the location and relative splendor of many of our seminaries display a class bias against which Scripture consistently inveighs. In Power and Privilege Gerhard Lenski identifies clergy as members of the "retainer" class, buffering the ruling elite from the peasants. Which way lie our primary allegiance, identity and aspirations? Which are reinforced by the current milieu of seminary education?

Moving into smaller, more modest, rented, donated or shared space would free seminaries from the massive burden of maintaining their properties and liberate resources of money and time. Certainly there are problems with this move, chief among them being housing for students, but they are not insoluble and would yield to the knowledge and creativity of boards of trustees and others.

It continually amazes me that presumably mature students, more and more of them second-career people in their 40s and 50s, regress so quickly in the current adolescent model of education and regard the seminary as in loco parentis. By divesting themselves of campuses, not only could seminaries be freed from meeting many "nurture" needs (making funds available for scholarships) but students would adopt a healthier, more adult lifestyle, meeting their own needs in a variety of ways and places as the rest of the population does.

The time is long overdue for us to let go of the comforts of the private intellectual and therapeutic approaches to seminary education and to move toward the terrors of public communal discipleship.

Membership in most denominations is declining while the spiritual hunger of the people is deepening. The church’s influence on public policy is waning as the magnitude of human need and the precariousness of the planet grow apace. As we enter the dark night of our collective soul, few are sounding believable notes of hope. Ministers cast about for responses to displaced farm families, to the deepening misery of the rural and urban poor, to the epidemic use of drugs in every strata of society, to half a million homeless children; they seek techniques for church growth, approaches to spiritual nurture and meaningful worship. But few seem able or willing to grapple with underlying questions and causes.

In an October 1988 consultation on seminary education and urban ministry hosted by New York Theological Seminary, three brief papers addressed this point. Sam Solivan of NYTS raised the question of what language we should study and accept as part of the scholarly discourse. He noted that much of the most creative and challenging theology and biblical work is coming from the Third World, yet most Ph.D. requirements continue to insist on study in German, French, Italian and English. Theology from the Third World challenges not only language requirements but also major cultural concepts, assumptions and worldviews.

Noting that we do not live in a sacred world valuing "received knowledge" from holy writ, but in a profane world harshly criticizing that tradition, Victoria Erickson of Union Theological Seminary in New York City wondered if we dared invite our worst critics into our classrooms for dialogue. If we do not prepare leaders for the church who are able and eager to engage that world, the church will continue to lose its presence and influence. People don’t simply want to be told "who ‘the man’ is," she observed; they want help in understanding how he got our money and power and what it will take for us to get it back without violating the gospel in the process.

David Frenchak of Chicago’s Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education decried the practice of seminaries talking about the city while having no experiential knowledge of it. The sabbatical used for a brief foray into a U.S. or Third World ministry is little more than ecclesiastical tourism, providing snapshots but no in-depth picture of the majority of the world’s reality. "Healing," he complained, "is focused on psychology, not on justice." That cannot continue.

Christians are a people of Incarnation, of Word and Spirit. Those preparing for leadership in the church must bold those three elements together. Seminary education must inculcate such critical abilities, inclinations, and knowledge of our tradition that students leave seminary listening to people -- within the visible church and those outside it, especially the most alienated. We must also listen for the Spirit of God in our own work and prayer, action and contemplation, and bring biblical and theological study to bear on all we do and plan.