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The Practical Theology of David Ford

If The United States and Great Britain are "two nations separated by a common language," then perhaps Christian theologians of the two countries are separated by a common theology." American and British theologians oft en find themselves in significant agreement -- drawing on similar sources and reaching shared conclusions -- but geographical distance as well as the very different church-state relations in the two nations have meant that Christians in one region are often unaware of theological developments in the other.

For example, although David Ford’s work is much respected among academic theologians, and he is one of the most important public theologians in the UK, his name is probably unknown to most Christians in the U.S. Educated in Ireland, Germany and the U.S. (as well as in the UK), Ford brings a wide range of intellectual resources to bear on his interpretation of the faith. His writings include scholarly reflections, works of spiritual guidance and literary interpretation, scriptural commentary, and a number of texts used in the training of clergy.

Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, Ford is a man of profound learning, quick wit and sparkling humor. He is much sought after as a preacher and lecturer. An adviser to the bishops of the Anglican Communion, he has written and spoken widely on themes as diverse as the role of theology in the university, the spirituality of the L’Arche communities, and contemporary Irish poetry

Scripture has been very important in your theological work, but your approach is different from those who treat the Bible as a rule book or a guidepost. You encourage people to enter its world and allow their imaginations to be fired by its structures, as they would in reading a novel. Is that a fair description?

I think that’s a partly adequate parallel. I wrote my dissertation on Karl Barth and biblical narrative, and I was very much influenced by Hans Frei and the Yale tradition of understanding scripture in terms of narrative.

My own engagement with scripture began when I was a teenager. I read the New English Bible translation, and found there a freshness and a gripping power. If the church is to remain true to its calling and to respond to new situations adequately, it has to be fed with scripture and to inhabit scripture. If the whole imagination of the church is to be able to resist the very powerful forces that try to co-opt it or subvert it, then it has to have a scriptural imagination.

As for the "novel"-like reading of scripture, I’d add that the issue of genre is important. When I wrote Praising and Knowing God with Dan Hardy, the Psalms and the poetry of the Bible were more primary than the narrative. And now the genre that most fascinates me is wisdom. It’s a sort of integrative genre, gathering together the prophetic, the legal and the poetic into a very rich understanding of reality.

The theme of wisdom runs through much of your recent writing -- wisdom not only as a genre of biblical literature, but as a theological category.

The wisdom tradition represents the self-critical side of the Hebrew scriptures. It’s thus a very good model for what theology should be doing: paying close attention to tradition while thinking through the difficult and dark questions. Wisdom demands an integration of rigorous thought with imagination and also practical concerns -- how things actually work out in the living of life. Part of its fruitfulness for me has been that it acts as a check on theology’s being too doctrine-centered, and not taking account of the imaginative and the practical.

I would never want to run down the importance of the intellect; I spend a lot of my time reminding people that you need to be at least as intelligent in your faith as in the rest of your life. But given our very pluralistic environment, in which you’re likely to come up against five different worldviews in the course of a day’s encounters with the media, you need a way of thinking, imagining and acting that makes deep sense, and that allows you to adapt and improvise in relation to these diverse views.

So wisdom is able to integrate theory and practice?

Yes. The opposite of wisdom is foolishness, and very few people are in favor of foolishness.

Did your thoughts turn to theology fairly early in life?

My father died when I was 12, so during my teenage years I was asking a lot of the hard questions. I almost led a double life, playing a very active role in school while pondering deep questions about the meaning of life. The key thing, as I look back, was the reality of God: if God is real, then that affects everything. I had no hint at all, during that period, of becoming a theologian. But accidentally I picked up, for a school prize, a paperback copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Why it should be in a Dublin bookshop still puzzles me; but there it was. I read it with fascination; it was beyond me in many ways, but it was clearly both intellectually very rigorous and highly practical. It sowed the seed of the idea of what good theology might be like.

Was the church playing any role for you at this point?

My parents were not particularly practicing. Just before his death, my father did become more interested, and I think that affected me at some level. Irish Anglicanism was very much centered on the Book of Common Prayer, and in my experience of the liturgy, repeated time and time again, the words and concepts and images were like empty booklets that could slowly be filled with meaning. But nearly all my contemporaries at school gave up on church, and I had a very tenuous relationship with it. My main engagement with Christianity was through books and conversations. When I went to the university I intended to study classics, and my preferred careers at that point were either with the Irish Diplomatic Service or with management in industry.

In 1968, my middle year at Trinity College, there were student riots and revolts all over, including in Dublin. It was also the time of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, setting off the period of "the troubles." Trinity Dublin was one of the few places where people of very different religious and ethnic persuasions were trying to come to terms with what was going on in Ireland at the time.

Large questions were at stake -- questions about the meaning of life, the meaning of history, of society, of justice, of human flourishing. I think that the stimulus of the radical political people made me realize that superficial answers wouldn’t do. And so I was driven to ask what theological approaches there might be.

At the end of my study of classics, I went through the interview process for different companies and got offered jobs in British Steel and Rolls Royce, and could well have gone that route. But I was offered a scholarship to St. Johns College, Cambridge, to study anything. Since I was fascinated by the subject matter of theology, I decided to take two years out, figuring I could always go into industry after that.

What happened during that time, such that you never went back?

I encountered some superb theologians who combined a great intellectual ability with a Christian faith that was deeply convincing. I think of people like Donald MacKinnon, Charlie Moule, Geoffrey Lampe, Steven Sykes, John Robinson, Brian Hebblethwaite and Don Cupitt. A very varied group of people, who were often in quite confrontational debate with each other. But the theological enterprise was certainly authenticated by people like that, and I was in no doubt that these questions which already gripped me were worth pursuing in a more thorough way.

Your first teaching position was in Birmingham -- perhaps England’s most multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious city. That must have had an impact on you.

Birmingham was an extraordinary experience. I was living in the inner city and it was a reasonably tough area. I lived with someone who was working to renovate derelict houses, so I lived in some of them before they were renovated and later became a house manager for one. I was also involved in a local Anglican church in the evangelical tradition. I deeply appreciate that strand of Christianity and was profoundly affected by it. At this time, the Church of England was taking the inner cities very seriously -- this was the Thatcher era, when the government was seen as really neglecting the poor.

Birmingham was a place where hospitality was essential. I had not really come up against other faith traditions, but there I was, living in a house among tower blocks, with a house mosque on the corner of my road. And the department of theology at the University of Birminghain was also very concerned about these encounters. John Hick was one of its leading members; he himself had been converted to a multifaith perspective by life in Birmingham, although he and I developed very different theologies. There was a monthly discussion group that used to meet in people’s homes -- an extremely diverse group of people who tried to face up to some of the key issues of that time and place.

Were you satisfied with that department’s evolution toward a more interreligious, interfaith orientation?

Partly, yes. I wasn’t at all against focusing on a variety of faiths, but I was against "religious studies" in any traditional sense. A department of "theology and religious studies" needs to allow each of the traditions to be studied not just in a phenomenological way, but also with an eye to their "truth and practice" questions.

There is no future in universities for theology that is confessional in a narrow sense (not being open to the range of disciplines and of religions); but neither is there a future for religious studies in a supposedly ideologically neutral sense, which fails to engage with truth-and-practice questions. The healthiest ecology for the subject in the modern university is one in which theology and religious studies are integrated.

I see the field of economics as a (perhaps surprising) parallel. Money may be the nearest thing we have to the bottom line in our culture, but we take it for granted that people just don’t study the phenomenon of money and its history and systems. The study of economics should be relevant for business, for management schools and so forth. What is good enough for money is good enough for God.

Has your experience working in various interreligious departments of theology and religious studies been reflected in your own work?

I find that the image of hospitality is very helpful. Each of the religious traditions is both host and guest in relation to the others -- sometimes more in host mode and sometimes more in guest mode. The ideal mode is that of friend. Guests and hosts may turn into friends -- and that has certainly been my experience.

At its best, this process of engagement across the boundaries of faith is one which should call you to go deeper into your own tradition, to ask fresh questions and to have new dialogue partners, so that whatever you write is in a sense accountable to those who are deeply rooted elsewhere.

This does not mean that you compromise; nevertheless, it really matters to consider before whom one is doing one’s thinking. And to have in mind, as one is writing ones Christian theology, particular Jews, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists. In all sorts of subtle ways, thinking about such readers makes you do it differently.

I understand that you are also involved in a conversation about scripture among Christians, Jews and Muslims.

That began about a dozen years ago when some of us Christians used to sit around the edges of the Jewish Textual Reasoning Group, which brought together Jewish scholars and philosophers at the American Academy of Religion. Some of us decided that it would be good to have a Jewish-Christian group, which was called the Scriptural Reasoning group; later on, it included Muslims as well.

We bring our scriptures to the table and study them in dialogue with each other. We have extremely lively debates and sometimes arguments, and we work with an alertness to the ways in which those scriptures have been interpreted in our communities over the centuries and today. And we find that this way of engaging with each other allows us all to be hosts and guests simultaneously.

This is in principle something that could go on in all sorts of contexts, not just in universities or congregations. Wherever there are Jews, Christians, Muslims involved in medicine, in chaplaincies, in business or whatever, this engagement with scriptures can be a way to begin a fruitful conversation.

Argument, in this case, can be the basis for friendship.

Yes, but I wouldn’t be sentimental about it. The deepest arguments tend to happen between husbands and wives, parents and children. Argument is dangerous; there are big issues of truth and life at stake. But the possibility of friendship across deep divides is an extraordinary one. Key friendships have provided something generative at the heart of the core commitments in my life.

I wonder if some of those friendships are part of what has encouraged you to see the visual arts and poetry as significant for theology.

It’s always seemed to me a natural implication of the fact that God is related to everything; if that is so, then obviously everything is related to God. So I am intrigued by the interrelations of disciplines, of different spheres of life, of different traditions which can feed into a basically biblically focused theology.

A particular Irish poet has been a significant conversation partner for you.

Yes, Micheal O’Siadhail, who is also a friend. Talking to him and reading his extraordinarily rich poetry have been remarkably helpful for doing theology. He is not by any means a "religious poet," but his depth of engagement with the big questions is such that the resonances with my approach are consistently fruitful.

I sense that your theological perspective has been expanded in quite a different direction as a result of your friendship with Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities.

That friendship began about ten years ago, through Frances Young, my New Testament colleague at Birmingham (with whom I co-wrote a book). She cares for her severely disabled son (now in his 30s), and she got to know Vanier and the L’Arche communities. The two of them and Donald Allchin gathered a group of theologians about ten years ago, and some of us have continued in the role of "theological accompaniment" with L’Arche, helping the community to think about what constitutes the "wisdom" of the movement. I have found it an immensely moving and formative experience to know the people in these communities.

One of the most powerful things for me has been to see people who are weakest, who are most marginalized, who well know that they are "nonpersons" in our society, and to see what happens when one centers a community on them -- honoring them, seeing them as gifts of God, of having vocations, of having gifts, of being able to love and be loved. One of the most repeated things in L’Arche communities is the testimony of assistants who have gone there and found that they are transformed by their friendships with these people.

L’Arche is doing something that’s prophetic for our culture. It’s not so much about "doing good" for the disabled as it is about seeing that we are all God’s children and that we all have vocations. And that is a sign of hope for our world.

Hospitality, generosity and friendship -- these seem to be recurrent themes. Have they emerged elsewhere in your work?

One area would be in my work with the archbishops of the Anglican Communion. At the Lambeth Conference in 1998, I was invited to head up a team that was organizing the opening and closing plenary sessions. It was an extremely good conference at the small-group and section level; there was a deep convergence on issues like homosexuality in a group that included people as diverse as Bishop John Spong and some of the leading African bishops. They had come to something of a common mind about what should and what shouldn’t be said. But that result was hijacked by a rather disturbing political process, and the section’s report was largely ignored.

Clearly, the archbishops of the Anglican Communion -- the primates of the 38 provinces worldwide -- had not come to a common mind, and had been caught somewhat unprepared at the conference’s plenary session. So they decided to have annual meetings, the first of which was in Portugal. Because I had been involved in Lambeth and knew all these people, I was invited to lead the Bible studies at that meeting. There were deep divisions, but there was also a strong focus on worship, regular Bible study and an agenda that focused on the big issues of the world as well as the church, so that no one issue was seen as dominating the entire church.

And the next year at Kanuga, in North Carolina, we had once again a combination of worship, detailed scripture study in small groups, and sessions on global issues such as AIDS. These sessions really helped the archbishops to come to more of a common mind; there were still differences, but they were far less significant.

Just sharing meals together for a week -- that’s something these busy archbishops do with very few other people. The role of worship, scripture study and a realistic way of facing the agenda of the world and the church together -- all provided a context for genuine unity that could never have come about by just battling away on issues that are highly unlikely to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction anyway.

Was there a single point of theological commonality?

It was on the importance of the cross in relation to unity. The blood of Christ unites us. When you ask people from Africa or Asia, "What would ever lead you to abandon your family?" it’s very hard to find anything. But the one thing that might engender even more loyalty than family is the church: those to whom you are united by the blood of Christ. It should be almost unthinkable that one would turn one’s back on Christian’s brothers and sisters for anything less than the central creedal tenets of the faith.

Anglican theology has recently been stirred up by the emerging school of "Radical Orthodoxy," associated with the names John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. Could you comment on that movement?

The first thing to be said is how immensely encouraging it is to find such enthusiasm and intellectual energy in an effort to renew mainstream Christianity. My main concern would be about the movements use of the Bible. It’s puzzling that a movement that makes such a strong appeal to Augustine and Aquinas should almost completely lack that very strong mark of both -- of being deeply immersed in scriptural interpretation.

I’m also somewhat allergic to its tendency to make large-scale generalizations about historical periods, and particularly about modernity. I see signs of this being moderated; but my own tendency is not to be so hostile to modernity. I do agree with some of Radical Orthodoxy’s critique of the ideology that has dominated much of Western social science. But there is another dimension of the social sciences in modernity: their engagement with the details of life, the actual contours of human existence over time. Radical Orthodoxy has tended to move toward intellectual ideas at the expense of a wisdom that takes account of those particularities.

It’s important to say also that it’s a very small and very young movement. In order to make a splash, it’s helpful to have provocative slogans. It’s actually one small dimension of a much wider, though less well publicized, set of movements in theology, associated with places like Yale and Duke, and the universities of Virginia and Cambridge, which are orthodox and radical but not necessarily Radical Orthodox.

Could you reflect a bit on the recent evolution of the divinity faculty at Cambridge? Once focused almost exclusively on Christianity, it has evolved into a multifaith venture, and has just moved into a glorious new building.

When I came in 1991 to Cambridge, the faculty was facing something of a crisis; it had already outgrown its building, and the lease was running out. And we knew that in the process of attending to the building, we needed to undertake a renewal of the faculty with a new vision. We tried to gather all of these strands together, and what emerged was a comprehensive development with five thrusts: the new building; the new Center for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies; endowed research posts; the parallel development of the consortium of theological seminaries in Cambridge; and curriculum development.

We succeeded in getting two new posts in Islamic studies, as well as a new post in New Testament and a new endowed post in theology and natural science. We worked to strengthen the Cambridge Theological Federation (our consortium of Anglican, Methodist and United Reformed seminaries), which also includes a new Roman Catholic institute and a new institute for Orthodox Christian Theology. The Center for Jewish-Christian Relations has been a great success, and has brought the whole dimension of interfaith engagement to the seminaries.

All of this must have required some serious money. Did you find yourself drawn into a fund-raising operation?

I had never seen it as part of my job description, but I found it to be quite an education. One met with a wide variety of people from all areas of life and got to communicate with them about the nature of the field.

For me, a basic theological truth came out of this effort: that generosity is at flue heart of the universe. God is a good and generous God; when one is generous, one is most deeply in line with the true grain of the universe. I became more convinced of that, and I found that it rings true to people. There are things that distort and block generosity. But the world is best understood and acted in as a place that is created for generosity and mutuality and love. That conviction should be at the heart of the spirituality of fund raising.

The project was much more than this building, but it is quite a building.

We decided, very wisely I think, not to have religious symbols in the building, but the architect came up with the idea of having a core of light down the center of the circular part of the building going right tip to the roof of the library at the top. You can now look up there and see the sky and look down and, on good days, see the sky reflected on the ground floor as well. It looks as if you’re suspended between infinity and infinity.

And in the entrance we inscribed, in seven scriptural languages, seven scriptural texts on the theme of wisdom. The longest and most passionate discussions in the faculty, as you might imagine, were about which languages and which scriptures to include.

The English quotation, I noticed, is "Teach one another in all wisdom."

And the Latin is from Proverbs: Saptientia aedificavit sibi domum: Wisdom has built herself a house.

The New Orthodoxy?

It's difficult to predict which new theological movements will have real staying power and which are destined for the scrap heap. When a group of prominent British academics introduced their 1977 collection The Myth of God Incarnate at a press conference, people were stunned and the book sold like hotcakes. Today, it's largely forgotten, difficult even to find. When an obscure Yale medievalist published a 1984 book with the boring title The Nature of Doctrine, he staged no press conference. Yet today, "postliberal theology" is almost a household term, and George Lindbeck's book is frequently cited.

What destiny awaits radical orthodoxy? It began quietly, with organizational meetings intended primarily for academics. Its origins lie in John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (Blackwell, 1990), which argued that a wide variety of supposedly secular discourses (sociology, political science, literary theory and philosophy) operate with implicit theological assumptions. Moreover, these theologies present human beings as isolated individuals, God as largely irrelevant, and our salvation as dependent on correct forms of sociological analysis, psychological therapy and/or political control. Milbank argued that Christian theologians should expose the vicious theologies of these secular discourses and supplant them with virtuous theologies drawn from the biblical and patristic traditions.

The contributors to Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward's book believe that the modern world has recognized but cannot yet admit its lack of meaning. "In its cyberspaces and theme-parks it promotes a materialism which is soulless, aggressive, nonchalant and nihi1istic, they argue. The book's essays examine various aspects of modern culture, "resituating" them theologically. Rather than traditionally "religious" topics such as "spirituality" and "morality," the chapters bear titles such as "language," "friendship" and "music." The contributors thus reject both correlational theologies (which too enthusiastically embrace secular disciplines) and neo-orthodox theologies (which fail to engage these disciplines seriously enough). Radical orthodoxy calls into question the standard dichotomies of "reason and revelation," "spiritual and material," "liberal and conservative."

The key theological term is participation. All things come from God and find their ultimate meaning in God; consequently; human beings find meaning only insofar as they accept God's invitation to participate in the divine life. This participation is not limited to Sunday mornings or even to "religious" activities; it pervades (or should pervade) our entire existence. Therefore, "every discipline must be framed by a theological perspective; otherwise these disciplines will define a zone apart from God, grounded literally in nothing."

Discourses about anything -- language, the body, perception -- can have meaning only if they acknowledge their participation in the transcendent.

In an opening essay on "Knowledge," John Milbank observes that secular philosophy tends to posit forms of knowledge that exclude God. The insights of two 18th-century pietist thinkers, Franz Jacobi and Johann

Hamann, demonstrate the hazards of this tendency. Both insist that "no finite thing can be known, not even to any degree, outside its ratio to the infinite,"and that "there can be no reason/revelation duality." These claims are illustrated by biblical figures: Pontius Pilate represents a knowledge that is false because faithless (he asks for truth, but won't stay for an answer); the Magi represent a knowledge that is true because faith-based (they wisely seek only because they believe). Knowledge is, ultimately, a matter of faith.

In an essay on "Bodies," Graham Ward reexamines standard biological and anthropological claims about the maleness of Jesus. Ward insists that gendered bodies are not just "given"; they are constructed by means of particular texts. In the biblical texts, "the specificity of Jesus' male body is made unstable from the beginning." Ward traces this claim from the annunciation and birth narratives through the transfiguration to the Last Supper, the crucifixion, the resurrection and, finally, the complete displacement of Jesus' body in the ascension. With each stage, the exact specification of Jesus' "body" becomes less clear, until finally, "the Church is now the body of Christ, broken like the bread, to be food dispersed throughout the world. The final displacement of the gendered body of Jesus Christ . . . is the multi-gendered body of the Church."

In his essay "The City," William T. Cavanaugh observes that the Christian story of salvation insists upon the essential unity of the human race -- in spite of humanity's sinful tendencies toward individualism and violence. In contrast, the founding myths of the modern secular state -- in Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke -- are all parodies of the Christian story. They describe human beings as individuals who must defend their (private) property against the encroachments of others. This myth can become effective only if it obliterates the Christian story of universal human communion. Because it cannot abide a "transnational" church that might compete for the allegiance of citizens, it redefines religion as inward and private. The consequences of this redefinition continue to haunt us, both in our extreme individualism and in our reliance on violence.

Time and again, Christians who seek to influence (and participate in) the state eventually succumb to the state's version of salvation. As an alternative, Cavanaugh points to the Eucharist as the means by which Christians can escape individualism and violence, turning instead toward true peace and reconciliation.

These three essays, and the other nine in the volume, are complex and difficult; they require patience and stamina. They are intended primarily for academics, and their practical implications are not always obvious. Such implications will have to be teased out and made explicit, by these writers and others.

Fortunately, some of that work is already being done. Routledge is producing a series of books examining such issues as economics and globalization from a "radically orthodox" perspective. Duke University Press has a similar series under the general title "Radical Traditions." The movement bears some resemblance to narrative theology, postliberal theology, and the kinds of cultural critique published by Eerdmans, InterVarsity and others (including the new Brazos Press, which intends to offer "unapologetic theology and theologically based cultural criticism"). Another "radically orthodox" development is the recently initiated Ekklesia Project, which seeks to shift Christian allegiances away from the state and the market and toward the historic trinitarian faith as embodied in concrete worshiping communities.

That radical orthodoxy's trinity of founder/editors, all Cambridge theologians, are now dispersed may be symbolic of the movement's future. Its cohesion may fade, even as its influence spreads. The book may not sell well, but the movement, under many names, seems likely to flourish and to deepen the practices of trinitarian worship, eucharistic communion, unabashed evangelism and faithful theological study.

Whatever Happened to Liberation Theology?

Not long ago a retired pastor and theologian who had lived and taught in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s came back to visit. He had some pressing questions: What does liberation theology mean to you people today? What authors do you read in your seminary classes? What aspects of liberation theology still seem relevant to you?

The questions were pointed and timely. Several of us entered into a heated discussion with our visitor, out of which a relative consensus emerged: We do read the classic texts of Latin American theology (Gutiérrez, Boff, Segundo, Sobrino, Miguez Bonino and others), some of them for their historical importance, others for their continuing relevance. Some of the insights provided by the first phase of liberation theology seem too important to let slip between the cracks -- for instance, the centrality of the category "the poor" for biblical interpretation; the awareness of structural, not just individual, evil; the use of the social sciences as dialogue partner for theological discourse; and the need to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to theology itself.

It seemed to us that another virtue of Latin American liberation theology had been to alert North American and European theologians to the fact that they, too, were producing contextual theology from a perspective no less particular than that of their Latin American colleagues. Our visitor nodded, took notes, and finally probed with clinical precision: But would you say liberation theology is dead? Oh no, certainly not dead, we replied, with varying tones of conviction. But one must think in terms of a dialectical process in which the core insights are taken up into the consideration of new problems, new situations and new questions.

Latin America is a very illuminating place to do theology; it is a fruitful locus theologicus. When I describe everyday life in Argentina to my North Atlantic friends, they often say it reminds them of the magical realism of Latin American literature and film. In Latin America one seems to move in a sort of hyperreality.

During the previous (Southern hemisphere) summer, the electrical company cut off power to a large portion of Buenos Aires. The company is one of the public services that were swiftly privatized in recent years, supposedly to help pay the foreign debt (though the debt is now larger than ever). Thousands of people living in high-rise apartment buildings were without light, water or elevators for many days, though they had paid their rather steep electricity bills.

In response to the apparent indifference or incapacity of' the authorities, protest broke out. One method of protest was to put up roadblocks made up of unused electrical appliances such as fans, washing machines and refrigerators. Other protesters burned tires. One could walk along a street with no working street lamps and see masses of electrical appliances and greasy, exhausted faces in the flickering light of the bonfires. All those appliances, objects of desire, bought dearly with a multitude of payments and small sacrifices, were supposed to make life more pleasant. Yet they had become useless because of larger structural problems -- in this case, the policies of a company interested not in the common good or in providing responsible service, but only in making a profit.

This hyperreal parable illustrates how Latin American reality so often shows the absurdity of Mammon's plan of salvation by exposing its cruelty. When profit is the only motor that fuels people's actions, society eventually falls apart. Latin American reality continually makes this point in many ways, both large and small. It is good for Christian theologians to be forced daily to remember that one cannot serve both God and Mammon -- an insight that was one of the principal themes of the first generation of Latin American liberation theologians.

Jon Sobrino has written that as long as there is suffering, poverty, exclusion and premature death on an immense scale -- which is ever more the case in Latin America -- there will be need for a theology (whatever its name) that poses the kinds of questions posed by liberation theology. One of the most important questions for Sobrino is, to use the words of Gustavo Gutiérrez: "How do we tell the poor of this world that God loves them?" The emphasis seems correct to me.

Yet even if many of the questions posed by liberation theology are relevant, one cannot necessarily respond to them with identical answers or even necessarily apply the same method in obtaining those answers. For instance, in its first years, liberation theology was conceived as (second-order) reflection and discourse based on a (first-order) praxis of liberation from oppression, especially from social, economic and political injustice. The poor, and with them the church of the poor and its theologians, seemed to be on their way to becoming historical "subjects" or agents in the transformation of society. Time has shown that this was not to be the case. Latin American societies have, for the most part, become even poorer; the category of "the excluded" has been added to that of the poor and marginalized. Growing sectors of the populations are denied access to education, basic health services, or jobs that would allow even a precarious subsistence, The poor, the marginalized and the excluded are not significant consumers, much less players in the global market; they have no access to information highways and hardly a chance to shape any of the other significant byways of the process of capitalist globalization.

To this fact one must add that rather than making an "option for the poor," many members of the former middle class -- the mainstay of many non-Pentecostal Protestant churches in Latin America -- have found that impoverishment has made an option for them. This is especially true for old people, for the unemployed and for single women raising children, as well as for many of the descendants of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of "Our America," as José MartI called Latin America. At the same time, many of the poor and the recently impoverished have opted for participation in churches that embrace forms of the "prosperity gospel," which promises rapid physical healing and does not challenge structural injustices. What "praxis of liberation" is to be recommended and reflected upon in these circumstances? In what ways can theology correspond faithfully to the God of its calling in this context?

Several factors need to be taken into account in order to find some answers to these questions. The poor tend to be politically weak because their continual struggle for survival is not conducive to sustained organization and mobilization. A theological praxis of liberation today needs to be conscious of these limitations. With a great deal of dry humor, Hugo Assmann wrote recently that he is astounded that no one pointed out to him in the 1970s how incredibly pompous the phrase "Pueblo oprimido, señor de la historia" (The oppressed people, lord of history") sounded. This sort of comment reflects a tendency to revise the understanding of praxis: one's expectations of oneself as a theologian and of the actual possibilities of a transformative praxis as a whole are perhaps more humble and limited than they would have been 30 years ago. This does not lead to resignation or apathy, but it does mean that the joy and the pleasures of life need to be allowed for by theology even in the midst of the pain caused by structural injustice -- something many poor people have known all along.

Although the poor do often have valuable insights and wisdom, theologians must not overload them with messianic roles, as has sometimes occurred in the past. The phrase "option for the poor" is first of all a theological statement about God's choice and should not lead to any romanticism about what the poor are or should do for the world. Nevertheless, the social and political dimensions of the gospel cannot be trivialized or overlooked by any theology or theopraxis that desires to take seriously the event of God in Jesus Christ.

To put it another way: the paradigm of the incarnation is now more meaningful to me and to others in Latin America than that of the Exodus. The Christology "from below" that helped theologians rediscover the historical dimensions of faith and the life of Jesus Christ is continually revitalized by a Christology "from above" that underlines that it really is the Triune God who chooses to walk on our paths in order to change them and us.

A critical theology today has a responsibility to bring up again and again in the public sphere the fact that it is in the public interest (and that includes the interest of the non-poor) to work against poverty and social injustice and for a state capable of limiting the ravages of unleashed market forces. Some concrete topics that need to be addressed are the inequities of taxation; the need to invest in public education, health and transportation; and creative cooperation between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the state. Sociological studies show that people are highly skeptical about professional politicians and all three branches of government. But that does not mean that political topics can be forgotten by theology.

One ray of hope today is the networking between NGOs and base-type communities of faith to address particular problems. These alliances can sometimes become structurally significant. This can be observed in the struggle to defend public school salaries, in forms of nonmonetary trading of goods and services, in incipient micro-banks oriented especially toward financing projects designed and carried out by women, or in protests against corruption in the public sphere. Such efforts represent the sort of sociopolitical praxis that can realistically shed light on theological reflection for those who work with the heritage of liberation theology.

When I mention base-type communities of faith I am referring to congregations in which reading and interpreting the Bible and developing all the gifts of the Spirit given to the community are central. One of the things theology must do in this context is nudge and equip church members to find creative ways to well up in joy and generosity even out of extreme poverty, as the Macedonian churches once did rather than looking only inward.

This kind of group is, however, by no means the only sort of church group in Latin America today. Much more spectacular are the new religious movements (within Christianity and without) which attract many thousands of participants. Scores of neo-Pentecostal groups meet in refurbished cinemas and offer entertainment and a kind of mass consolation that is attractive to many. The slogan of one of these groups is significant: "Pare de sufrir," that is, "Stop suffering!" The term "neo-Pentecostals" refers to communities of faith that don't belong to classical Pentecostalism and share only some of its characteristics. As sociologist of religion Hilario Wynarzcyk explains, the sociological profile of these churches includes leadership by charismatic pastors and a system of practices that stresses divine healing, personal prosperity, spiritual warfare, ecstatic trances accompanied by speaking in tongues, laughing and fainting and liberation from evil spirits. Pentecostal theologian Norberto Saracco prefers to regard these groups as "post-Pentecostal." While Latin American adherents of classical forms of Protestantism tend to cringe at the catalog of practices common to such groups, it should be added that a pneumatology of power, such as displayed in neo-Pentecostal religiosity, often serves as a concrete answer to those who in ordinary life feel powerless, offering them a sense of dignity.

The impact of such groups should be understood as a significant sign of the times for the new generation of Latin American liberation theologians. The desire of so many people to "stop suffering" now, not in some utopian future, needs to be integrated into theology. Neo-Pentecostal practices point out the importance of the body and of an embodied theology.

One might also ask what a liberating theology has to say about the practices of expulsing demons and miraculous healing that are central to many practicing Christians today in Latin America. It is significant that the word liberación as now used in many circles means "exorcism" rather than the overcoming of political and economic oppression. It would seem that such a wider liberation appears so remote to many people as to he meaningless, whereas the struggle against concrete evil spirits is extremely familiar to many persons with roots in traditional Latin American (including Afro-Latin American) religiosity. One task of theology in Latin America is to retrieve and refigure the rich symbols evoked by the clouds of powers and principalities dear to popular imagination and religion. But an equally important task is to point out both that they have a structural dimension and that Jesus Christ, in his humble way, made a mockery of those powers.

Latin America has such a wealth of symbols in part because it is made up of hybrid cultures; it contains a huge patchwork of ethnic and cultural influences and traditions. This implies a richness of perspectives that is now recognized. Whereas the first generation of Latin American liberation theologians was made up primarily of Roman Catholic priests and other male religious leaders, today there are many voices speaking from the perspective of gender or incorporating the rich symbols inherited from a pre-Columbian or an African heritage. There are also many theologians more at home with Luther and Calvin than with Thomas Aquinas. And there are others well versed in "postmodern" insights.

To speak of "postmodernity" in Latin America is admittedly rather polemical. One can certainly detect, for instance, a growing skepticism toward "modernity" in the form of master narratives and instrumental reason, possibly because Latin America has so often had a painful experience of these narratives and the exercise of such reason -- experiencing them from the "reverse side of history," to use Gutiérrez's apt phrase. What one actually sees is premodern, modern and postmodern elements in one hybrid culture, in one city, in one person.

This complexity strikes me every night when I walk home after teaching. Amid the hum of the motors on the street, I also hear the clackety clack of hooves hitting the cobblestones, the sound of a legion of cartoneros, people who scavenge in the streets each night trying to fill their horse-drawn carts with old newspapers, packing cartons, aluminum cans or edible scraps. Their carts are premodern; the newspapers they search for are typically modern; and the recyclers to whom they sell their tattered wares cater to largely postmodern concerns about preserving resources. The cartoneros point out, with dignity, that they prefer to be called recicladores, recyclers.

Elements of postmodernity as an intellectual current are indeed increasingly present in Latin America. I consider this an ambiguous gift: on the one hand, postmodern tendencies open up spaces for the new perspectives and voices mentioned above; on the other hand, as the social critic Jane Flax notes, a hard-core kind of postmodernity which would postulate the death of history, of the human being and of metaphysics undermines the kind of critical reason that is necessary to counter the "master narrative" constituted by capitalist globalization. A prophetic confrontation with this idolatrous metanarrative continues to be an important task of Latin American theology. Such a confrontation is needed to help neo- or post-Pentecostal Christians discern the difference between legitimate empowerment by the Holy Spirit and an individualistic doctrine of salvation.

Another task of theology is to cultivate and reflect upon the "small stories" in the community of faith without forgetting their connection to the "master narrative" of God's kingdom. I don't think we can "construct" the kingdom, but I do think that in the power of the Spirit we can anticipate it in small, significant ways. Latin American theology today lives by "hope against hope," in the apparently absurd confidence that small and humble practices of faith such as singing together or remembering the stories about Jesus can work toward rekindling a viable praxis of structural change. These practices also serve to empower and lend dignity to the poorest, while at the same time contributing to a sense of community.

One of theology's main tasks is to help the community of faith in its search for practices that truly follow in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth, in the midst of a great deal of ambiguity and provisionality. Therefore I have come to believe that theology in Latin America today is synonymous with the practice of spiritual discernment. Such discernment is never an individual task; it is nurtured in a community of faith that tries to follow Jesus the Christ by the power of the Spirit. It is very much a practical discipline, but not a pragmatic one. It avoids wishful thinking, living instead by hope. It makes use of whatever analytical tools it can acquire. It is finding new ways, in a new situation, tentatively yet critically, to rework doctrines such as Christology, pneumatology, eschatology and ecclesiology, taking into account the new questions that have arisen.

Christ is both liberator and healer. Both personal and structural "demons" must be recognized and dealt with as wisely as possible with the help of the Spirit. Our hope is both realized and future. Churches need to be places both of nurture and of prophetic denunciation. Such a theology of discernment combines both word and deed, operating with a sense of holistic mission.

Latin American liberation theology cannot provide a last reservoir of meaning for a jaded church that does not wish to seek first the kingdom of God and God's righteousness. Nor is it brought into existence by noble savages or by saints untainted by sin. But it does, by the grace of God, manage to discover enough glimmers of meaning to continue to labor joyously despite great trials, hoping against hope, looking for significant ways to let the "least of these" know how much God loves them.

Resistance and Reconstruction

The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology. Edited by Christopher Rowland, Cambridge University Press, 260pp. $19.95 paperback.

In San Salvador in the in the early morning hours of November 16, 1989, soldiers of the elite, U.S.-trained and equipped Atlacatl batta1ion crept onto the campus of the University of Central America and assassinated six Jesuits, including the university's philosopher-president, Ignacio E1lacuria. Instructed to leave no witnesses, they also brutally murdered two women: Elba Ramos, who cooked for the Jesuits, and her daughter, Celina. This crime, coming at the end of a decade of similar and worse atrocities finally compelled the U.S. government to pressure the Salvadoran government and military to come to the peace table. The resultant peace is scarred by the enduring poverty that brought the war in the first place, and by the violence all too commonplace in countries where the "cold war" was fought -- countries still awash in weapons.

This story encapsulates many of the complexities and ambiguities faced by any guide to liberation theology. It illustrates that the stories of liberation theology are local and often intensely personal. They are concerned with living a faith threatened by the inhuman forces released by the globalization of information, technology, economies and violence. Consequently, as Christopher Rowland states in his introduction, "one first of all does liberation theology, rather than learns about it." This raises great difficulties for those who appreciate or strive to evaluate this theology "from the outside." It also raises the question of who the subject of a work on liberation shou1d be. Is t the story of intellectuals and administrators like Ellacuria, or of poor men and women like Elba and Celina Ramos, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is its currency and success to be evaluated by its presence in books and on university campuses or seminaries? By the response of church leaders? Or does it turn on the faith, hope and love of those countless and often anonymous persons, like the two women, whom Ellacuria so tellingly named "the crucified peoples," "Yahweh's suffering servant today"?

Books on the subject tend to identify liberation theology with its most prominent proponents, usually academics. Yet liberation theology simply cannot be understood without an appreciation f how these proponents struggle to hold themselves accountable first and foremost to the poor they serve. Liberation theology's development has been driven not just by the genesis and clash of concepts, the back and forth of academic argument, but by the clash of ecclesial visions and superpowers, and the simple struggle to survive.

This book's opening essay by Gustavo Gutiérrez and its central section, where it captures this complexity, are its most successful parts. A fine essay by Andrew Dawson on the birth and development of small Christian communities in Brazil emphasizes that they did not grow out of an ecclesiology derived elsewhere. Rather, they resulted from an often ad hoc process in which the spiritual and physical needs of the poor, the teachings of Vatican II, the intentions of the Brazilian hierarchy (running both for and against the emerging agenda of liberation theology), the brutal repression perpetrated by Brazilian dictators, and the work of academics all played a part.

Gerald West's essay takes up the crucial problem of how the Bible can belong to and inspire believers and theologians in an age in which scripture scholars claim that they alone understand its "true" interpretation. He details the struggle to find a methodology which respects both the expertise of the trained scripture scholar and the insights of the ordinary reader, who is laboring not just to understand the text but to enflesh it. Finally, Charles Villa-Vicencio takes up the new work of making liberation theology not just a theology of resistance but of reconstruction in places like South Africa and El Salvador, where civil war has ended but the crushing burdens of building a more humane society continue -- in a new world order with less and less compassion or creative insight for the plight of the poor.

These essays present liberation theology as a theology that has come of age and that may have become less attractive to journalists because it has taken up the often unglamorous work of extending a core paradigm shift into the whole discipline. Part of this difficult work, particularly as it deals with economics, must be interdisciplinary. As Valpy Fitzgerald and Villa-Vicencio point out, liberation theologians (and liberation economists?) must move beyond general indictments of globalization and neoliberalism to the development of specific analyses and proposals for action, both in micro- and macro-economics. It will continue to be important to appropriate more and more of the Christian tradition, as both Denys Turner and Oliver O'Donovan urge.

Unfortunately, Turner and O'Donovan's essays evince the continuing ignorance of liberation theology on the part of European and North American theologians. It takes one's breath away to read a scholar of Turner's stature write that liberation theology is "strangely silent on issues of theodicy." One of Gustavo Gutiérrez's acknowledged masterpiece is On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Turner clearly knows his Marx, and he makes a compelling case that until Christian theology recovers the insights of the apophatic tradition, with its exacting strictures on the ways we too easily talk about God, it will be justly subject to critiques like Marx's. But Gutierrez has already explored this terrain. As early as 1982, in We Drink from Our Own Wells, he was proposing an innovative cross-fertilization between the Exodus narrative, the experience of the poor in Latin America, and the apophaticism of John of the Cross.

O'Donovan worries that liberation theology is so trapped by its reliance on ideology critique that it cannot produce either the content or even the ground on which to make authoritative positive proposals for the future. He seems either unaware of or unwilling to grapple with Gutiérrez's consistent grounding of the authority of a Christian vision for the future not in ideology critique or economic analyses, but in praise, contemplation and eucharistic celebration.

In sum, this book both details and at certain points instantiates the embattled place that liberation theology continues to hold today. Much of the church has heeded its clear warning that Christianity cannot continue (in Jon Sobrino's words) to talk about cross and resurrection while ignoring the world's crucified peoples and their need for resurrection. Many of its central terms (like "the preferential option for the poor") have become part of the contemporary theological lexicon. This genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Yet the profundity with which liberation theologians have worked out this warning and deployed its terminology continues to be misunderstood and distrusted by too many ecclesial authorities (as Peter Hebblethwaite's essay recounts), and trivialized and ignored by too many academics.

Finally, the story of liberation theology is the story of men and women like Elba and Celina Ramos; it is about the way that hope in the resurrection is breaking out, especially now, in the lives of the world's crucified peoples. As long as this hope, nourished by the Holy Spirit, resides in the hearts of the world's poor, there will be theologians who attempt to give an account of that hope. Perhaps this book does the most that any text about liberation theology can do: it invites us to consider what it would mean to have that hope -- both for the poor and for all of us.

The Restoration Vision in Pentecostalism

Book Review: The Assemblies of God: A Chapter in the Story of American Pentecostalism (2 vols.) By Edith L. Blumhofer. Gospel Publishing House. Vol. 1: 464 pp; Vol.2: 256 pp.

On a spring day in April 1914, 300 Pentecostal saints met in the Grand Opera House of Hot Springs, Arkansas, to form the General Council of the Assemblies of God. According to the minutes of that council, they looked back to reflect over the course of events that had occurred since a revival at the Azusa Street mission in Los Angeles launched the Pentecostal movement eight years before. They rejoiced that "almost every city and community in civilization has heard of the Latter Rain outpouring of the Holy Ghost, with many signs following, and hundreds of missionaries have consecrated themselves and gone forth until almost every country on the globe has heard the message."

Though undoubtedly sincere, this assessment would have struck an observer then as an exercise in hyperbole. Today the same statement looks more like a prophecy of things to come: the Assemblies of God has been the fastest-growing denomination in the U.S. And although not the oldest Pentecostal denomination, the AG has taken the lead at every major crossroads the movement has faced and has been at the center of every controversy.

Until the early 1970s historians of Pentecostalism argued that the movement emerged ex nihilo at the turn of this century as an alternative to fundamentalism in protesting the modernist trend that was capturing mainline Protestantism. Like the historians, adherents of the movement had little awareness that Pentecostalism was a development of an earlier tradition. This perception began to change with the appearance in 1971 of Vinson Synan’s work The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement. Synan argued that Pentecostalism was an outgrowth of the 19th-century Holiness Movement, which in turn had its origin in the teachings of John Wesley.

In reaction to this argument, Edith Blumhofer’s doctoral dissertation, "The Overcoming Life," completed at Harvard in 1977, sought to broaden Synan’s version of the 19th-century origins. Tracing a line of development from Charles Finney and the Oberlin circle in the 1840s to the Keswick Convention in England in the 1870s and then to D. L. Moody’s Northfield Conferences in Massachusetts in the 1880s, Blumhofer demonstrated that the growing perfectionist movement within the Reformed tradition paralleled developments within the Wesleyan-Holiness lineage. Most of the early Pentecostal adherents who formed the Assemblies of God, she contended, could easily trace their theological roots back to the Reformed side.

More recently, Donald Dayton has shown in The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (1987) that these developments in the Wesleyan and Reformed traditions were two wings of a larger movement taking place in 19th-century evangelicalism. A gestalt of four major doctrines concerning the work of Christ became the controlling center of the emerging theology. These doctrines were justification by faith in Christ; sanctification/Spirit-baptism as a subsequent work of grace; divine healing as part of Christ’s atonement; and the literal premillennial return of Christ at the end of the church era. Some in the Wesleyan tradition had a fivefold scheme, splitting the second doctrine into two separate experiences.

Grant Wacker is now making the case that Pentecostals saw the development of these five doctrines as part of a restoration scheme. They believed that beginning with Luther and the Reformation, God began restoring to the church truth which had been lost; Thus Wacker places the rise of Pentecostalism in the same cultural milieu as such diverse groups as the Disciples of Christ, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Seventh-day Adventism, all of which had their roots in a 19th-century restoration vision.

Although predating the work of Dayton and Wacker, Robert Anderson’s Vision of the Disinherited (1979) correctly identifies the premillennial return of Christ as the central focus which enabled Pentecostalism to emerge as a movement distinct from the earlier traditions. He notes that glossolalia was first seen as an eschatological sign signifying that a second Pentecost of the Spirit had taken place, bringing the church to a new and final dispensation, the era of the latter rain. During this final phase, Pentecostals believed, there would be a worldwide revival in which the nations of the world would have one last opportunity to hear the gospel and then the end would come. Early Pentecostals further believed that the gift of tongues which had been restored to the church bestowed actual languages which would enable them to speak in the languages of the nations.

The Welsh revival of 1904-5 set the stage for the emergence of Pentecostalism. Many of the Keswick and Holiness leaders stated in print that this was the latter rain that they had been expecting and confidently predicted that it would sweep the earth. When the revival spread to Los Angeles and was accompanied by the gift of tongues, the claim was made that this was the eschatological sign; the new era had truly dawned.

The fact that the Los Angeles revival grew out of a black church, that adherents proved unable to speak in actual languages at will, and that radical claims were being made typical of a newly formed millennarianist group prompted most of the leaders of the Wesleyan and Keswick traditions to reject Pentecostalism as spurious. This opposition merely served to fan the flames. By the time the initial Pentecostal revival began to die down three years later, the movement had been firmly established throughout the world.

Although adherents continued to believe that Christ could return at any time, it became increasingly apparent that he was not coming as quickly as most had anticipated. Some kind of structure was necessary if Pentecostalism was to preserve its gains. Many recognized the need for an umbrella organization and made plans to attend the Hot Springs council.

Two major criticisms, however, were leveled at the proposed meeting. Many were skeptical of any organization beyond the level of the local church. They interpreted the proposed council as an attempt to impose human organization upon a divine organism. Indeed, most of those who gathered at Hot Springs were equally concerned that they not establish another denomination. They defined the new organization as a voluntary fellowship of ministers who joined together for a common cause. Under the charter local churches were to retain complete autonomy, and no creed was adopted. Toward the end of the council a prophecy was given assuring those attending that their action had received God’s approval.

The second charge, leveled by Pentecostal leaders in the Southeast, concerned the doctrine of sanctification. Since 1910 a battle had raged over the Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace. During the first four years of the revival everyone, for the sake of unity, embraced it as one of the five cardinal doctrines which God had restored to the church. However, many adherents who had come from the Keswick tradition felt uncomfortable with the teaching.

In 1910 William Durham of Chicago broke ranks, declaring that sanctification was accomplished in Christ’s "Finished Work of Calvary." This was apprehended by the believer at conversion by faith and was actualized in the life of the believer over a course of a lifetime. The Wesleyan doctrine of a second instantaneous crisis experience was denounced as a man-made doctrine.

Durham’s message caused a firestorm throughout Pentecostal ranks. In two years’ time he had won the allegiance of most Pentecostals west of the Mississippi. He returned to Chicago in 1912 to launch his campaign in the Northeast and in the deep South, the heartland of the Holiness-Pentecostal groups. Whether Durham would have been successful in this effort can never be known. He died before these campaigns could begin, leaving the Pentecostal Movement sharply divided between East and West.

The leaders in the Southeast refused to comb to Hot Springs, suspecting that it was an effort to complete Durham’s unfinished work. Though understandable, this view was probably wrong. The leaders of the newly formed AG were more interested in reconciliation so that they could establish a truly national fellowship. Two years later, when the AG adopted a "Statement of Fundamental Truths," the doctrine of entire sanctification was defined in such a way that both "Second Work" and "Finished Work" adherents could sign the document in good conscience. (However, the fundamental breach was not healed. Several Pentecostal denominations, such as the Church of God in Christ; the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee; the Church of God of Prophecy; and the Pentecostal-Holiness Church, whose base of support is in the Southeast, still retain the Wesleyan understanding of entire sanctification.)

The newly organized Assemblies of God immediately encountered a second theological crisis, which was also set forth in a restorationist context. The second person of the Trinity had been the focal point of the five doctrines restored to the church. Jesus was the Savior, Sanctifier, Baptizer, Healer and Coming King. Furthermore, as Pentecostals looked to the Acts of the Apostles in an effort to follow the apostolic patterns of the early church, they noted that converts were baptized in water in "Jesus’ name." As a result, it had been a common practice in the movement’s initial years to practice water baptism using either the trinitarian formula found in Matthew or the christological formula noted in Acts. A fresh revelation now came to some that Jesus was not the second person of the Trinity but rather the Name of God, who revealed himself as Father in the Old Testament, as Son in the New Testament, and as Holy Spirit in the church age. The message swept the newly formed fellowship as one leader after another embraced the new teaching, including E. N. Bell, the first general superintendent.

The controversy raged for two years, the final showdown coming in the 1916 General Council, where trinitarians won by a decisive two-thirds vote. J. Roswell Flower, general secretary and managing editor of the Pentecostal Evangel, led the fight for the orthodox position. He charged that the new teaching was a form of modal monarchianism, which had been condemned as heresy by the early church fathers. Patient argument and shrewd political maneuvering paid off, although the cost was heavy. Of 585 ministers, 156 withdrew from the fellowship, taking their churches with them. They would move on to found such "Oneness" denominations as the United Pentecostal Church and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World.

The decision to exclude the Oneness teaching forever changed the nature of the Assemblies of God. Its leadership adopted a "Statement of Fundamental Truths," established a strong central executive and abandoned the restorationist understanding of church history.

External and internal battles over, the new denomination quietly withdrew into isolation, where it would remain for 30 years. Growth came slowly but steadily during this time. It took on more and more the characteristics of a denomination, strengthening its structures, sending forth missionaries, establishing Bible schools, and communicating with its constituents through the Pentecostal Evangel.

Following World War II, the Assemblies of God broke out of this isolation. They were invited to join the newly formed National Association of Evangelicals, a group of church bodies composed of the fundamentalist, holiness and Pentecostal traditions. Shortly thereafter they took a leadership role in founding the World Pentecostal Fellowship and its regional counterpart, the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America.

This shift did not come without opposition from some members. Several voices sounded the alarm that this trend represented a step backward, not forward -- a betrayal of the original aims of the denomination and as such a signal of accommodation with the world. In 1948 the protest took the form of a revival movement that came to be known as the New Order of the Latter Rain. The revival soon spread beyond the Assemblies of God to the larger Pentecostal context. Once again, restorationism provided the theological structures in which the revival’s message took shape. The leaders of the revival charged that the Pentecostal denominations had sold out. The revival signified that God was doing a new work in the world, and through this "New Order" he would establish his kingdom.

Once again, the Assemblies of God took the lead in responding to this challenge. The revival’s message was firmly rejected as heresy. Ministers and local churches who embraced the revival were forced to withdraw from fellowship. Other Pentecostal denominations followed the AG’s lead shortly thereafter.

Unlike the initial Pentecostal revival, the leadership of the New Order refused to organize beyond the local level in the face of this sustained rejection. As a result the revival spent its course by the mid-’50s and ceased to be visible. However, its message thrived in local congregations and in regional associations around the nation. By the ‘70s the New Order was providing the leadership for the highly visible Independent Charismatic Churches springing up across the land.

In the meantime, their newfound acceptance by other evangelical bodies proved to be a boon to the AG. The church flourished, membership grew, the missionary enterprise exploded, and the denomination’s social location was transferred to the middle class. The church received heightened visibility through the efforts of a number of evangelists who gained national attention in the ‘50s. As these evangelists developed radio and TV ministries, they began to win converts among Christians in mainline denominations, who opted to remain with their own churches. The groundwork had been laid for the emergence of the charismatic movement.

This turn of events forced the AG to rethink its stance toward mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The leadership has engaged in cautious but creative dialogue with several mainline denominations. It has sent observers to Faith and Order discussions of the National Council of Churches and participates in the Pentecostal -- Roman Catholic dialogues in Rome. At the same time the denomination has continued to strengthen its relationship with other evangelical groups. In the 1960s, for example, it adopted an inerrancy clause in its statement on Scripture in a show of solidarity.

This dual strategy has paid huge dividends. The denomination has gained visibility and respect across the theological spectrum. Much of its recent membership gains have been drawn from charismatics who have left their former churches to find a place of worship more compatible with their new experience.

As the Assemblies of God has matured, its attitude toward the larger culture has changed. The denomination was born in the midst of the Great War, and its leaders had viewed that conflict as the prelude to Armageddon. The male membership, for the most part, had declared themselves to be conscientious objectors. Thirty years later, the denomination was ready to defend the American cause in World War II. Its periodicals promoted the war effort and most of its sons volunteered. Not a few ministers served as chaplains.

In the ‘50s the AG established Evangel College in Springfield, Missouri, as its first liberal arts college. In the ‘70s it established a theological seminary. By the ‘80s many members were running for political office at the local, state and national levels.

The denomination’s maturity is perhaps best demonstrated in its increasing ability to be objective and introspective when reflecting upon its own history. As part of the celebration of its 75th anniversary, the leadership sponsored the publication of Edith Blumhofer’s two-volume history, a candid and at times probing appraisal of the denomination’s role in the larger Pentecostal context.

Blumhofer, who was on the faculty of the AG seminary when she published the history (she is now at Wheaton College in Illinois), devotes a full third of her text to the church’s prehistory. She draws heavily upon the recent scholarship mentioned earlier. In particular, she casts the emergence of Pentecostalism in the framework of the restoration theme. Citing an early Assemblies of God leader to this effect, she notes:

After years of careful study of primary sources, I am convinced that he was right. Other streams of nineteenth-century piety -- the diffuse holiness movement, German pietism, premillennialism, and higher life teaching -- intermingled in important ways in the Pentecostal subculture, each contributing an emphasis without which the movement cannot be correctly understood. Overarching all of them, however, was restorationism.

She makes a convincing case that restorationism was the embracing theme that held the early Pentecostal vision together. It is, in my judgment, the most valuable contribution of the work.

For the period from 1914 to the present, Blumhofer switches to the developmental model used by William Menzies in an earlier work, Anointed to Serve: The Story of the Assemblies of God (1971) She illustrates many of the points with fresh anecdotal material and brings into greater focus certain aspects of the history, such as the denomination’s response to the New Order of the Latter Rain.

Blumhofer’s most original contribution is her account of the role women have played in the denomination. While other scholars’ have noted that women had been’ active in ministry since the founding of the church, Blumhofer’s analysis reveals that the official position was at best ambiguous. Her critique is scathing. Women were given credentials to function as evangelists and missionaries but for years were denied the right to vote in General Council. They were forbidden to administer the sacraments. Seldom were they allowed to be the senior minister in a church. What few exceptions there were occurred when women survived the death of their minister husbands. Blumhofer sums up the general attitude: "Emphasis was always on woman’s responsibility, not her rights; on her service to the cause of Christ. not her leadership of it."

She concludes her work with a penetrating analysis of the forces which gave rise to the ministries of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. She sees in Bakker the long road the AG took from the rejection of popular culture to its identification with it. Swaggart represents the other side of the AG personality. Although he made use of the latest techniques of modern technology, he articulated the deep-seated yearning for an earlier age when the AG stood over against contemporary society. The public disgrace and moral failure of these two famous sons have called the whole denomination to sober reflection and have given its members a chance to integrate these polar urges.

It is precisely this unresolved tension, which runs throughout Blumhofer’s work, that needs further explication. The denomination came into being as a restorationist-countercultural entity. But from the moment of its inception, the AG has moved to embrace popular culture and to dissociate itself from its restorationist origins. Had Blumhofer used the restorationist framework to interpret the history of the denomination as she did its prehistory, the work would have been even more illuminating. For example, that the early leaders could denounce the church fathers as apostate one minute and then turn to embrace them the next in order to declare the "oneness" view of the Godhead to be heresy, was quite remarkable indeed. Restorationism has shown its creative but potentially destructive force repeatedly throughout the denomination’s history. How the AG has dealt with this phenomenon and how it should respond when it recurs in the future are two of this denomination’s largest issues.

The Assemblies of God will serve itself and the rest of Christendom best if it holds restorationism, with its counter-cultural themes, in creative tension with its desire to be part of the establishment. Restorationism, for all of its dangers, has been the fountainhead of this denomination’s life. If the Assemblies of God can embrace its origins, it is well positioned to be a mediating force and an agent of renewal to the rest of Christendom.

The Anxiety of the Runner: Terminal Helplessness

I have been a noontime runner for more than a dozen years. A decade ago I was a lonely figure on the campus track. But now, when the weather closes in and the geriatric jocks gather in the fieldhouse, I can count at least a hundred people at any one time between 11 o’clock and 12: 30, busy with the various stages of their exercise. The once-quiet woods now gallop with activity on fine fall days; on one football-less Saturday, more than 1,200 of us put on our Frank Shorter T-shirts and ran ten kilometers through the streets of East Lansing in times ranging from world class to plain ridiculous.

Apparently, those of us who run do not all do it for the same reasons. Some are competitors, steadily increasing time and distance, entering races where runners can really hurt themselves, and reading Runner’s World. Others are pure health freaks who never run any farther or faster, keep to the indoor track even when the sun shines, and talk about heartbeat rates and studies of longevity among runners. It seems that my crowd runs partly as an escape from the pressures of life. We’re the ones for whom the change into ritual clothing, the pain of running, and the shower of cleansing constitute a daily rebaptism into newness of life. For us, the time spent running is time no one else has a claim on, and the rewards are similar to those of prayer and contemplation. Indeed, such exercise may constitute a secular pietism.

I

At one time the division of runners into competitors, health nuts, and quiet time seekers satisfied my need to analyze the motivation for an activity that I engage in almost every working day. Recently, however, two tasks have opened up to me a deeper level of motivation. One project was to read and classify the responses of women runners to a questionnaire. The second was an analysis of my own daydreams, especially those that cluster about the act of running. I discovered through these efforts a more profound explanation for the phenomenon of the jogger in modern society, one that discloses another angst to place alongside Paul Tillich’s listing of the anxieties of death, guilt and meaninglessness, and psychologist J. F. T. Bugental’s addition of the anxiety of loneliness.

It was the questionnaire that first set me thinking. A woman runner and I, planning an article for a university publication about the growing number of women runners, devised a set of questions that probed for motivation. Some of the answers were ones we expected -- they testified to the sense of well-being that comes from a regular running program:

I like it when people make over me a lot because I run two miles a day.

Things never go right the rest of the day if I don’t run.

I know that if I can run a mile a day I can also . . . [fill in the blank with everything from “lose 50 pounds” to “live without my husband”].

It’s the only thing I do that’s all mine.

I was so fat and out of shape.

The other motivation -- the one that set me thinking afresh -- was one expressed in one way or another by 19 of the 20 women who responded to the survey: “I am going to run until I can’t put one foot in front of another, and then I’ll be dead. No geriatrics ward for me.

What these women were articulating was the hope that running will save them from a state of helplessness. Incapacity at life’s end is the new anxiety that modern medical technology has given Western society, and I am convinced that running has gained so many converts in recent years because people hope to guarantee that their bodies will not slowly decay in a modern convalescent home. Runners want to remain active and independent until they die. Hidden somewhere in the pursuit of regular exercise is the notion that if one keeps moving, one will never be caught in the wires and tubes and sterile unprivacy that the aged suffer today.

II

Let me describe the running phenomenon itself by borrowing Suzanne Langer’s “tension-act-release” curve.

Many noontime runners begin their working day by planning their daily run. If it appears that the way is clear, that no luncheon appointments or meetings will interfere, then all is well. Runners forget the advent hour of pleasure pain and do the work set before them. But let a conflict appear, and a cloud obscures the sun. Sometimes one can work around it by rearranging the hour of exercise. But when necessity simply allows no free time the runner works less enthusiastically, participates in luncheons and meetings grudgingly, and gains a reputation for obduracy. A colleague once snapped at a friend of mine: “You’d be department chairman if you’d quit running!”

The “trigger” that signals the reappearance of tension will vary. For the secretary it may be the approach of noon; for the faculty member, the end of a class or advising time. Something signals, and the attention turns to the track even if other activities intervene. I have no idea how morning runners can arise from slumber and immediately begin to run, though Annalies Knoppers, Michigan State University’s volleyball coach and a daily 13-miler, argues that the need to run is tension enough. If morning joggers miss their miles, she says, tension is the result. For the new runner, a fresh decision often requires recollection of the original motivation -- perhaps the remark of a friend or spouse about the need to lose weight. I used to recall the pain and humiliation of hitting a home run in a softball game, only to be so crippled by the dash-around the bases that I couldn’t return to center field next inning. I quit softball and started to run.

The motions that follow may differ, but each person goes through a pattern during which tension grows. A typical agenda would require traveling to the site of action, changing into ritual clothing, entering the place of exercise, doing calisthenics, and talking with others about the projected run.

My daydreams during this stage are of two kinds that have in common only that they are self-regarding or self-praising. The first usually centers on several unpublished books I have written (theological mystery thrillers!), and the scenarios always include publication instant adulation, and generous remuneration. The second fantasy is more significant: I have retired from university teaching (but still write best sellers, of course), and have become pastor of a rural church. Sometimes the setting is Scotland. There, because of my engaging personality, mature wisdom and natural genius (with God’s grace as an afterthought), the church flourishes mightily. The whole community finds a home there. As my due reward, I am asked to give lectures at seminaries -- lectures in which I tell the professors what’s wrong with theological education today.

These two fantasies I entertain while walking or biking to the fieldhouse. The first is mere wishful thinking, though it surely responds to the anxiety of death and the desire to create something to outlive me. But the second reveals my hope of remaining vital and active even in advanced age. In that daydream, I write, preach, learn to play the piano, give tennis lessons, and much else -- and always I continue to run. Rarely, death-thoughts arise: death always comes with an auto sending this aged but still jogging carcass hurtling to its end.

III

The act of running itself is the simplest of the three stages. To the aging competitor, time and distance are important; to the health-centered and quiet time runner, they mean less. But for any runner, a forced lay-off from running is agony; the anxiety of helplessness insistently whispers its message of “time-is-passing” and “the-body-is-aging.”

Why one person is satisfied to run a mile in ten minutes and another must run 13 miles at an eight-minute pace -- such mysteries are lost in the unconscious. But that labyrinth is also where the sibilant voice of anxiety insinuates. And it must he quieted before the course can he finished, even at some risk or at great inconvenience. Runners often prolong simple respiratory infections because they refuse to take a week off. Minor foot and muscle injuries cripple runners whose determination not to quit overstrains their ligaments. It is this anxious voice grown demonic in intensity that transforms casual joggers into fanatics who can’t stop until they have run ten miles a day. Tillich was right: the demons take our anxieties and magnify them into raging psychic needs whose feeding threatens our sanity.

My fantasy during the act of running is always the same. In real life I have four daughters. But in the midrun fantasy I have an adopted son. He is a fantastic athlete -- unbeatable at any sport -- and he always wins an Olympic gold medal in the 1,500-meter run. Now, of course, a son means a kind of immortality. But this son has a living father, who, though old in years, is young in heart, in stride and in accomplishment. If the daydream of the son quiets the anxiety of death, the presence of the father who shares in his victory quiets the modern anxiety of terminal helplessness.

The third stage in the act of running, that of satiety, needs little comment. Seldom are there daydreams. Instead, there is the rebaptism of the shower -- a reward well deserved and gladly received, except by the puritan few who take it icy cold. Secular clothes are donned, and I find myself no longer fantasizing. My mind is free to plan. I plot lecture outlines, study committee responsibilities -- in short, I am free of anxiety and able to enter refreshed into real life. My imagination, now free of self-aggrandizing and self-preserving daydreams, is released to cope with the rest of my life.

One runner I know has said: “I’m going to run till I’m 90. If the weather is bad on my last day, I’ll collapse and die on the indoor track. Don’t let anyone try to keep me alive, Fred. Just take a push-broom and shove me off the running surface. Then, when you’ve finished your run, call the coroner.”

A second runner related to me a dream in which he has reached advanced years and is killed in an accident. A surgeon is handed his heart on a tray so it can replace the diseased heart of a younger person. As the cardiac specialist picks up my friend’s heart, he looks at it, whistles admiringly, and says, “What a beauty. Too bad the youngster who had this is dead.”

From my own study of the Tillichian anxieties of death, guilt and meaninglessness, I am convinced that death is the deepest-rooted, the basic anxiety. But, as Tillich saw, cultural presumptions and pressures heighten other anxieties and give them warped significance. He showed why the guilt anxiety prevailed at the time of the Reformation, and he confronted brilliantly the anxiety of meaninglessness in post -- World War culture. Our ancestors scarcely knew the anxiety of terminal helplessness, at least in its present form. When illness laid them low in their advanced years, pneumonia quickly finished them off. But we today know that we could live for years lying in a hospital bed. Thanks to penicillin and the turning of comatose patients in their beds, people may sleep a score of years and never know their surroundings. Millions languish in homes for the aged, their minds and spirits exhausted but their bodies helpless to die.

I do not believe that the tap-root anxiety, the anxiety of death, is dealt with by running. The geriatric jogger is not engaged in what Ernest Becker called “an immortality project,” because that anxiety surfaces early in life and is handled more or less adequately in other ways. (One of those “projects,” by the way, is the publication of books and articles that will outlive the author.)

But the anxiety of living death, of helplessness, pervades civilized societies today. Running is a scientifically approved way of extending life; runners, however, do not so much want to gain an extension as they want to ensure mobility until death comes. “I’ll run until I drop,” one woman wrote in her questionnaire. Running, as a secular salvation that works no better than other secular saviors, poses questions for the ethicist, the theologian and the student of religion and modern culture, but especially for the pastor and church member. The church as a community of believers bears a special responsibility in addressing the anxiety of terminal helplessness.

IV

The individual who lives outside of a caring community is powerless to face the reality of terminal helplessness in any way other than suicide. My own two or three-mile run along the banks of the Red Cedar River will someday become a ten-foot shuffle from bed to bathroom with an attendant’s hand supporting me, unless I determine to stumble into the river some day and drown.

Only community responds adequately to terminal helplessness. The Armenian and Chaldean ethnic communities in Detroit are known never to allow their aged to be taken into institutional care. Death for them is an “at home” event whenever possible. The concept of a hospice for the dying -- especially those dying of cancer -- is also essentially a community idea. The hospice staff members give patients medication to ward off pain, give people some choices in their struggle to live through their death, and surround them with the persons and accouterments of home.

My father died summer before last. An apparently healthy man in his late 70s who had taken care of my bedfast mother through the half-decade of her decline and death, he had spent a busy day with me and my family. We had taken him on a short trip to renew our acquaintance with the hamlet where my mother grew up. Then we had shared dinner with my sister’s family and turned on the television to watch the Cincinnati Reds get trampled. My father never cared who won baseball games, but he cheered mightily when Pete Rose and company lost. So we all went to bed happy. The next morning when I went to awaken him, I found -- to borrow my mother’s language -- that “the Lord had called him during the night.” It was a happy death, for he never experienced what millions of the elderly go through, that living death of helpless inactivity as medical miracles and institutional care prolong their existence. That night as I tried to sleep, I thought of my running and of my need to keep moving. I knew at once that the effort was hopeless. I can only pray for a death like my father’s; I cannot guarantee it. I can only watch myself carefully until I see the signs and then put an end to my life. Or I can find a community that will allow me to die and help me as I prepare to be with the Lord.

V

Paul Tillich, in his classic study of existential anxiety, does not seem to realize the paralysis of this kind of helplessness. He subsumes the “anxiety of powerlessness” under its more powerful companion, the “anxiety of death.” But by lumping powerlessness with death, Tillich fails to treat it with the care he gives the anxieties of guilt and meaninglessness. I believe that death should be singled out as the generic root of all our disease. Following that, helplessness as a general anxiety, and terminal helplessness as a peculiarly modern case in point, need special focus.

But more important, Tillich does not treat any anxiety as if its primary antidote were to be found in community. Instead, corporate responses to anxiety are labeled as “courage to be as a part,” and one is warned against succumbing to “heteronomy” as an escape from anxiety. Certainly it is true that people have sought to avoid the persistent agonies of the human condition by losing themselves in some group or nation-state or ideology that promises health and meaning, while it destroys freedom. All this Tillich meant by heteronomy. Perhaps Tillich’s secular existentialist heroes, who exhibit the “courage to be as oneself,” do stand taller than any crowd, even a caring, life-enhancing one as the church can be. Whether such heroes help us much is a different thing. I think Tillich had no experience of real community. He lived through the collapse of German society after World War I, and taught as an exile in America most of his life. There is little evidence to be found in the section on the church in Tillich’s Systematic Theology, Volume III, that church-as-community (or Body of Christ) was real to him. My wife, Jean, who has read the spate of Tillich biographies, tells me that, except for his being rebuked for not attending chapel at Union Seminary, a worshiping community does not enter his life in America. In this, he is definitely a modern man. He is also of no help with the anxiety of terminal helplessness.

Certainly, the anxiety of death has been overcome for many by the church’s proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For many, the anxiety of guilt and condemnation has been overcome by the gospel declaration of pardon, usually made within the Body of Christ. The anxiety of meaninglessness, writes Tillich, can be overcome only by “the courage to accept acceptance.” Yet for most of us that acceptance is found first in human community, not in metaphysical pursuit of the “God beyond the God of Theism.” One can, of course, substitute other communities for the church, if within them human anxieties are accepted and confronted, and opportunity for meaningful sharing and response is afforded.

Of all human anxieties, the response to the anxiety of terminal helplessness is peculiarly community-bound. Yet ours is a time when community consciousness about the plight of the terminally helpless is uncertain, and ways of handling it are confused. Our age exalts youth and shunts the aged aside. I confess with shame that the sight of the very old or terminally ill fills me with dread. I dodge, sidestep -- do anything but confront those who bear in their fragile bodies my helpless future. I run! So our society with great relief allows the professionals to take dying out of our hands.

Until the time comes when church and synagogue can reaffirm a place in community for the aged and dying, suicide and suicide pacts have a “good sense” ring to them, even if they affront Christian theology. There are, to be sure, numerous church-sponsored homes for the aged that really are homes, not merely institutions for terminal care. Perhaps church-hospice arrangements can also humanize the last weeks of life that could otherwise be devoid of choices in convalescent homes for the aged and busy hospitals.

VI

I began with jogging and the daydreams that surround it; I end with a plea for community. The church must try to deal specifically with the environments of the terminally ill and the terminally aged. As hospices make their way into abandoned maternity and pediatrics wings of local hospitals, churches can push for their acceptance and church people can serve on boards of directors and aid in ministering to dying patients and their families.

Second, the whole problem of aging has to be rethought by churches that are determined to be the Body of Christ. It is a restatement of the obvious, but it is a fact that mainline churches cannot really ‘‘discern the Body” (I Corinthians) in our “speaker-audience” style of worship; nor can we take seriously our aged as part of the Body until they are as much a part of our church communities as puzzled parents, youthful rebels and businessmen. And that reality must be expressed and experienced first in public worship.

I suspect that these suggestions should be reversed. First, the pastor’s mentality and the service of public worship must be restructured so that all can discern that they are part of the body of Christ, regardless of age or health. Then extending the church’s ministry to all will be as natural as breathing -- or helping.

Breadlines and Storm Clouds: The Century 1930-1937

When the stock market crashed in October of 1929. The Christian Century was not unduly distressed; in fact, it viewed what had happened on Wall Street as potentially salutary, offering the American public “the privilege of sobering up” after a two-year “speculative debauch.” But the Century was hardly alone in thinking that the crash could teach a much-needed lesson; such public figures as President Herbert Hoover, former President Calvin Coolidge, John Maynard Keynes and Henry Ford thought so, too. The gloomiest forecasters predicted nothing more than a recession, to be followed by a sharp upturn within a few months. The New York Times did not even pick the market collapse as the top story of 1929, instead choosing Richard Byrd’s South Pole expedition. In January 1930, Andrew Mellon, secretary of the treasury, “could see nothing that is either menacing or warranting pessimism”; Hoover announced in May that “we have now passed the worst”; in September the president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney, declared that “the business horizon is clear.” But by then several million people were out of work and banks were failing all over the country, and by 1933 -- in the depths of the Great Depression --  the number of unemployed had reached 16 million, or about one-third of the available work force.

As the depression deepened and human suffering on a massive scale ensued, it became increasingly evident that the nation was in the grip of a grave economic and social crisis -- one that would not soon abate. In a memorable account epitomizing that crisis, Century Managing Editor Paul Hutchinson described a demonstration in which 20,000 men marched in pouring rain through Chicago’s downtown area shouting, “We want food!”; they then assembled on the lakefront for a mass meeting in which they stood ankle-deep in mud (November 9,1932).

In the opinion of the Century’s editors, the depression signaled something more basic than a temporary malfunctioning of the capitalist system; it was indicative of fundamental flaws in the system itself. For that system, based on acquisitiveness and unrestrained competition, inevitably resulted in an unfair distribution of wealth. And although the market crash was more a symptom than a cause of the crisis, the church had been complicit in the speculative frenzy that precipitated the crash: “The people who were gambling most recklessly sat in its pews, and never felt the slightest incongruity between their presence at worship on Sunday and their luck in the profit-chase during the rest of the week” (November 25, 1931).

As a remedy for “the breakdown of our competitive order,” the Century, in a March 11,1931, editorial, came out strongly in favor of a managed national economy:

It is time to cry aloud for an end to the era of laissez faire and the unhindered individualism of profit-seeking production. It is time for the preaching of a new evangelism -- the evangelism of the voluntary liquidation of the competitive system in order that there may be a planned economy which shall insure to every person in the nation an adequate supply of the goods of life.

Although few specifics were given for such an economic plan -- and no suggestions on how to bring about the “voluntary liquidation” of the old system -- the magazine was clearly championing a socialist ideal. In the same issue theologian John Bennett gave reasons why Christianity and socialism need each other. And the very next week an editorial titled “Two Years of Mr. Hoover,” while finding the president to be a man of conscience and courage, nonetheless took him to task for his “almost naïve confidence” in private and competitive enterprise and his “morbid fear of socialism.”



It might seem surprising, then, that Editor Charles Clayton Morrison endorsed Hoover for re-election in 1932. But Morrison believed that despite the Republican incumbent’s adherence to “rugged individualism” and his overly cautious approach to the depression, he would be more liberal -- or at least more responsibly conservative -- than Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. The editor feared that if elected, Roosevelt would go to the White House “under enormous obligations to the most sinister Randolph Hearst”; the Hearst “black shadow” would be cast over his entire foreign policy (October 5, 1932). Also, if Hoover had unfortunately retreated to an equivocal position on the prohibition issue, Roosevelt was all too unequivocal -- on the wrong (i.e., the wet) side. (Repeal of prohibition came about in 1933, but it was no doubt inevitable, regardless of who was elected in ‘32. Nonenforcement, bootlegging and disdain had taken their toll, turning a Protestant triumph into a major defeat and shaking Protestant self-confidence. With hindsight, the Century editorialized that the 18th Amendment was an inadequate, unwise and undemocratic method of effecting federal control of the liquor traffic; but this was a noticeable change of tune, for the magazine had long supported the amendment.)

Again in ‘32 Norman Thomas was the Socialist candidate. Morrison much admired Thomas and shared most of his views, but he regarded the two-party system as essential to American government, corrupt and self-seeking though that system might be. No third party could be effective, he felt, unless it displaced one of the major parties -- in which case it would become a competitor for power, with its idealism and sincerity certain to be “diluted with opportunism and corrupted with the lust of office and the greed for the spoils of office” (October 19, 1932). Managing Editor Hutchinson, who in 1932 joined the socialist Chicago-Call-to-Action Movement, did back Thomas that year -- a fact that was not acknowledged in the Century, however, until after the fact, in a casual reference in a book review (October 3, 1934).

In a series of editorials beginning in the spring of ‘32, the Century envisioned and promoted a different kind of third party -- a party without candidates, a party representing disinterested political principles rather than special interests. Intended to influence the two-party system constructively, the Disinterested Party would serve “as the organized and effective agency of progressive policies conceived and projected only for the well-being of the whole body politic,” and it would be “protected against decadence by its renunciation of officeholding and patronage.”

The presence in our body politic of such a party is the only means by which democracy can be saved from its present moral chaos, from the tyranny of entrenched interests, from the insolence of a predatory officeholding party system, and from the peril of a fascist dictatorship of big business, on the one hand, or of a communist dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other [December 31, 1932].

The Disinterested Party would exist only for its platform, and it would endorse only those major-party candidates who accepted that platform. It would be a changing platform, responsive to the changing conditions of the nation and the world. The platform planks for ‘32 embodied a number of Century concerns: U.S. adherence to the World Court protocol; U.S. entry into the League of Nations, provided that its covenant be amended to eliminate military sanctions; U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union (which was granted a year later); the safeguarding of the rights of conscientious objectors (including those denied citizenship, such as Canadian-born theologian D. C. Macintosh of Yale Divinity School); the abolition of compulsory military training in state-supported educational institutions other than military and naval academies; emergency measures for relief and public-works employment; the securing of constitutional rights for minorities; the reduction of gross inequality of income by steeply progressive rates of taxation on large incomes; “progressive socialization of the ownership and control of natural resources, public utilities and basic industries”; “the nationalization of our entire banking system”; and so on (June 8, 1932).

During the ‘30s, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, though himself a Century contributing editor at the time, became more and more critical of the kind of social-gospel liberalism that the journal had championed for decades. With his brand of neo-orthodoxy Niebuhr was endeavoring to transform and reshape the social gospel rather than dispense with it entirely, but he deplored what he saw as its shallow optimism, its naïve idealism, its moral absolutism. His objection to the proposal for a Disinterested Party foreshadowed more intense debates that were to come. From the standpoint of political realism, said Niebuhr, the proposal is “pure moonshine.”

It represents the inevitable confusion of middle-class intellectualism which imagines that political changes are achieved by the united efforts of good people who bring pressure to bear upon traditional political parties. Such a hope completely ignores the economic basis of politics and the political inefficacy of nonpartisan action [November 9, 1932].

A lengthy editorial comment appended to Niebuhr’s criticism contended that the Century shared his presupposition about the economic basis of politics and that in several ways he had misconceived the magazine’s thesis concerning the Disinterested Party. In any case, nothing like that party was ever launched on a truly national scale, although something resembling its modus vivendi may be seen today in various states in independent-voter organizations.

Put on the defensive by Niebuhr’s assaults on liberalism, the Century sought to counter him in various ways. For example, it argued that liberalism, contrary to its critics, is not a system of doctrines but simply a method of inquiry -- a free method unbound by orthodoxy’s rigid and authoritarian norms. Moreover, it maintained, Niebuhr himself relied on that method; he surely had not arrived at his views via fundamentalism. The magazine was right in saying that Niebuhr was essentially a liberal, but it was wrong in reducing theological liberalism to a method, for liberalism manifestly had doctrines and presuppositions of its own.



Roosevelt’s margin of victory in 1932 was so large that he was not beholden to William Randolph Hearst or anyone else. Relieved that their fears had been unwarranted, the Century’s editors became more and more enthusiastic about the new president and his New Deal policies. This support was not uncritical, however. Perceiving the president to be a trial-and-error experimenter more inclined to tinker with capitalism than to replace it, the magazine voiced concern that he might not move far enough toward socialism. Singling out capitalism as “the reason of our misery,” it hoped that Roosevelt would have the courage to carry out a government takeover of business should that prove necessary.

The Century interpreted the results of the off-year elections of 1934 as giving Roosevelt a clear-cut mandate that said, “Go left, Mr. President, go left”; it asserted that “many features of the 1934 election suggest that a union of forces for a vigorous offensive in support of an avowedly radical program is not impossible” (November 14, 1934). Of the “alphabet soup” of federal agencies initiated by Roosevelt, not all found equal favor with the publication; it was, for instance, doubtful about the National Recovery Administration long before the Supreme Court pronounced that agency s death sentence (even so, it carried the NRA eagle sign on its second page for many months). But the Century lauded the government’s taking a direct role in the development of natural resources in such innovative projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority. Concluded Managing Editor Hutchinson in a three-part series on the TVA: “The projectors of this many-sided venture have a real chance to produce, on a scale to command imitation, a new order of life for this country” (April 25, 1934).

How was this “new order of life,” this new economic system, to come about? According to the Century, “the new system calls pre-eminently for an economic man of cooperative, unselfish self-restraint, operating in a limited market determined according to a social plan,” and the only agency in the United States capable of calling forth that individual was the Christian church: “The function of the Christian church is to provide the new economic man whose birth and growth will match the birth and growth of the new economic system.” This, the magazine affirmed, “is the moment for which the social gospel has been waiting” (October 11, 1933). Furthermore: “If the Christian church once sees what is involved, it will find here the most challenging moral issue with which it has ever come to grips, the issue of persuading its members to the actual renunciation of profits, voluntarily, on behalf of the general good” (August 30, 1933). The paper was also of the opinion that “the step from the Roosevelt system to a true and candid socialization of the economic system would be a much easier one to take than is generally realized” (January 17, 1934).

Critics on the Century’s left differed with the magazine on how to reach the goals they shared with it; its notion of “revolution” was for them too evolutionary and too painless. The New Deal did not, in their estimate, constitute the hardest step in bringing about a socialized economic system; the idealistic weekly was sidestepping the crucial issues of class conflict and the factor of coercion in effecting social justice. And they were highly skeptical about the possibility of persuading middle-class Protestants -- most of whom were to the right of Roosevelt -- to forego profits voluntarily.

By 1937, however, labor had made such gains, “corporation buccaneering” had been so greatly curbed, and the administration had so radically reformed American capitalism that the Century was no longer calling for even an evolutionary revolution; it was already under way.

Once it became clear that the new capitalism would not be left entirely in the hands of capitalists, Editor Morrison seemed able to live with it. The Century was less politically ideological in 1937 than it had been in 1933 and 1934. But if it largely accommodated itself to Roosevelt’s domestic programs and policies, it was often uneasy with his foreign policy (except for his “good neighbor” policy toward Latin America, which it heartily approved of). Even in endorsing him for re-election in 1936, the magazine expressed “profound disquiet” over his “big navy proclivities.” Noting that “all along the international horizon flashes the lightning of coming storm,” the editors worried about the weaknesses of the nation’s neutrality legislation and wondered whether its farmers and industrialists would be able to resist the moneymaking opportunities of wartime situation (November 11, 1936). As domestic policy and foreign policy seemed to merge in an armaments policy designed as a “quick fix” to restore prosperity and end unemployment, the peace-oriented journal found the cure worse than the malady. Apprehensive from the time of Roosevelt’s “portentous” talk in Chicago in October 1937 about quarantining Japan -- and fearful of a ‘‘repetition of the folly of 1917” -- it broke with the president, eventually terming him the Führer of an inchoate fascism.



Calamitous though the depression was for the U.S., the Century’s editors gave no less attention during the ‘30s to major happenings abroad -- and most of those were calamitous, too. The depression itself had disastrous consequences elsewhere, especially in Europe, and in Germany the economic predicament and the resulting social malaise contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Events such as Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and its gradual penetration of China proper, coupled with Italy’s mid-decade conquest of Ethiopia, demonstrated the virtual uselessness of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, even though almost all of the world’s nations -- including Japan and Italy -- had ratified it, thereby proclaiming their renunciation of war. Having labored long and hard to promote and publicize the peace pact, the Century was hard put to acknowledge its ineffectiveness. Nonetheless it did so, saying that the pact was part of a peace structure based on the unsound presupposition that the plighted word of nations may be trusted, and that it had lost prestige since it was negotiated (October 16 and November 6,1935). During this period the Century followed closely the. progress of Mahatma Gandhi’s effort to gain India’s independence from Britain; though that effort had its ups and downs, it was one development on the international scene that the journal could be positive about. Primarily because of his espousal of nonviolent resistance, the Mahatma became a model of religious heroism for the Century and many of its readers. When he caused a split in his movement by putting the independence struggle “on hold” in order to crusade in behalf of his country’s “untouchable” castes, the paper lavished praise on him:

He has once more challenged the spiritual stupor of mankind. He did it before with his claim that the achievement of vast national purposes is not dependent upon resort to force. Here he penetrates to an even more greatly needed spiritual principle, namely, that the doing of justice must precede the gaining of justice. He stands in the direct succession of that prophet who saw that judgment must begin in the house of God, and of the even greater prophet who saw that blessing at the altar requires a prior establishment of right relations with the socially wronged [October 3. 1934].

The editors found Gandhi to be an embodiment of the Sermon on the Mount, but frequent contributor John Haynes Holmes went even further and touted him as “the Christ of modern times” (November 25, 1931). Understandably, this was too much for some readers, who sent in letters objecting to Holmes’s deification of the Indian leader, however noble and saintly he might be.

Initially, Century editors, like many other observers, underestimated the Nazi menace. In 1932, when Hitler was offered the chancellorship of Germany but seemed unlikely to be able to form a Reichstag majority, the magazine maintained that the Nazis no longer threatened to function “as a genuinely fascist party” (November 30, 1932). The next year, when Hitler did accede to the chancellorship, it editorialized that the necessary compromises of parliamentary politics had already taken the terror out of him (February 8, 1933). It saw him as no more than “a demagogue and a great political orator” --  hardly a man equipped to give Germany “that strong leadership it wants so badly.” Moreover: “The real German revolution is yet to come. . . . The third reich will certainly come, but Hitler is not likely to go down in history as its founder’’ (March 15, 1933).

Shortly, however, the extent of Hitler’s triumph, and the gravity of the situation thus brought about, was all too clear. It was a triumph, said the Century, that the allies had brought on themselves -- by refusing to take “the road of conciliation” and by making of the Versailles Treaty “nothing but a victors’ vengeance, a “brutal betrayal” of the German people’s confidence. “We who defeated Germany helped to make Hitler” (May 10, 1933). The journal denounced the Nazi regime’s “unspeakable brutalities” against Jews, urged the U.S. government to provide haven for refugees and deportees, and called for a boycott of the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany. It kept tabs on the worsening circumstances of Germany’s Protestant churches, and it commended the 6,000 pastors who dared to speak out against Hitler’s creation of a state-controlled “German Church.” At the same time it rebuked the pastors for opposing not Nazi totalitarianism in tow but only its encroachments on organized religion; they were making a truly heroic stand, but “the cause which they champion is not the fully Christian ideal” (February 7, 1934). By 1935 the Century was excoriating Hitler in unequivocal terms: “The madman of Berlin has cast away the last shred of pacific pretense and has thrown down the gauntlet to Europe.” But though German rearmament, along with the increased military budgets of the allied powers, made war an “acute possibility,” it was not inevitable: “The nations of Europe are all armed to the teeth, and still they cannot compel Germany to observe the terms of an unfair treaty. Something more is needed than weapons and more weapons, soldiers and more soldiers. Honest and equal disarmament has not been proved futile, for it has not been tried” (March 27, 1935). For the Century of Charles Clayton Morrison, war was never inevitable until the shooting began. “War, even in these dangerous days, is still as unnecessary as it is wicked” (April 8, 1936).

But when the hoped-for disarmament did not materialize -- and as Europe seemed to rush toward the precipice -- the magazine took refuge in neutralist sentiment. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 -- a war that was a kind of dress rehearsal for World War II -- it declared that its sympathies were “wholeheartedly” with the duly elected republican government; it detested “this Franco revolt,” which was going forward in large part because of aid from fascist Germany and Italy. Nonetheless, “it is the duty of the United States to maintain a zone of sanity in a world going mad by keeping out of war of any description in anyplace” (January 27, 1937). Ultimately -- and ironically, given the publication’s longtime internationalist stance -- that neutralism was hard to distinguish from isolationism. It held to that position until the attack on Pearl Harbor.



Recoiling remorsefully from the churches’ all-out support of militarism and nationalism in World War I, many mainstream Protestants committed themselves, in varying degrees, to Christian pacifism in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Denominational assemblies decried war as contrary to the will of God and the mind of Christ; thousands of pastors and students signed pledges vowing never to take up arms; the interdenominational pacifist organization known as the Fellowship of Reconciliation flourished. Reinhold Niebuhr, more and more convinced that the law of love cannot be an absolute guide of conduct in social morality and politics, defected from the ranks of the FOR early in 1934 and became a kind of bête noire to pacifists -- especially to those who claimed that pacifism was politically adequate. That same year, however, Niebuhr was also at pains to differentiate his neo-orthodox thinking from that of Karl Barth. Although Barth himself was one of Hitlerism’s “most determined foes,” Barthian theology abetted Hitler’s type of reactionary politics: “Here,” said Niebuhr, “religious absolutism which begins by making the conscience sensitive to all human weakness ends in complacency toward social injustice” (June 6, 1934).

The Century absorbed a Christian socialist periodical, the World Tomorrow, in August of that year, and its editor in chief, Kirby Page, a noted pacifist, became a Century contributing editor. Niebuhr and Page had been colleagues on the World Tomorrow; now both were on the Century’s masthead, presenting sharply contrasting points of view in the magazine. But partly as a result of the Niebuhrian onslaught, Page, though staunchly adhering to pacifism, gradually relinquished the claim to political relevance; for the Christian, pacifism was the way of the cross, the way of discipleship. The rationale was not peace at any price, but love at all costs.

Editor Morrison’s own position differed from that of both Niebuhr and Page, though it was closer to Page’s. He shared the pacifists’ convictions about the sinfulness of war, but he did not eschew the use of force in all circumstances and he never joined the FOR, despite numerous invitations and entreaties; he thought of himself as a pragmatic noninterventionist rather than as an absolute pacifist. His peace stand stemmed from his conception of the church, and to him the church was a distinctive amalgam of religion and culture, best exemplified in America. His primary concern was to prevent the church from becoming captive to secular forces, to preserve its freedom of action as an instrument of the social gospel --  and “the most acute aspect of the church’s subservient relation to the political state . . . is that of war.” Widespread renunciation of war would go far toward persuading both church and society of the fact that “the Christian allegiance is to a sovereignty which transcends all other sovereignties” (May 30. 1934). Going to war, Morrison felt, would mean the destruction of democracy and morality at home; America would no longer be true to itself, would no longer be the Promised Land: “We have discovered that our goodness, our moralism, is in large measure the expression of our relative detachment. . . . We are no more virtuous than others. The difference is a difference in circumstances (October 20, 1937). Different circumstances? To Niebuhr, that claim suggested a special blessing, a special grace, for America, and it smacked of self-righteousness.

The decade of the ‘30s saw the gradual disintegration of the social-gospel synthesis. At first the traumas of the depression afforded a rallying cry for church liberals, but divisions soon developed over the question of class struggle and the use of coercion -- divisions that were to deepen as the world situation darkened and war loomed on the horizon. “Crisis theology,” or neo-orthodoxy, was making inroads even in the pages of The Christian Century, and by decade’s end Morrison himself was calling for a “new liberalism,” for the old had become static and sterile -- an instance of arrested development. In any case, to his credit, he continued to open the Century’s pages to a wide variety of viewpoints -- even the views of those who, like Reinhold Niebuhr, often looked upon the magazine’s editorial opinions and proposals as “pure moonshine.”

Romero: Evolution of a Martyr

Perhaps it was inevitable that a film would be made about the life and death of Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Certainly the late Salvadoran archbishop’s story lends itself to cinematic treatment. In fact, Paulist Pictures’ Romero may be only the first of several films about the assassinated prelate; for example, director Gillo Poncecorvo (The Battle of Algiers) reportedly has a Romero project under way (tentative title: The Devil’s Bishop) But however many such films are made, none is likely to be as much a labor of love as Romero was. Spearheading the undertaking was Priest/producer Ellwood (Bud) Kieser, who during the course of the filming -- in and around Cuernavaca in Mexico -- celebrated mass for the cast and crew on four occasions, each of them followed by a fiesta. That sort of thing doesn’t happen very often in the making of a feature film for commercial distribution.

Although made on a shoestring budget by Hollywood standards (approximately $3.5 million), Romero was not easy to finance. After being turned down by all three television networks ("too depressing," said one; "too controversial," said another; "no love interest," said the third) Kieser took his project to several major studios -- but no luck there either. Finally he was able to obtain sufficient funding from his "own kind," with significant commitments from such organizations as the Catholic Communication Campaign -- the media-financing arm of the U.S. Catholic bishops -- and his own order, the Paulist Fathers. The result was the first feature film ever produced under Roman Catholic auspices.

Romero is, as Father Kieser likes to capsulize it, the story of a mouse who became a tiger. When Romero was selected as San Salvador’s archbishop he was considered a "safe" choice, one who would not rock the boat or get involved in an increasingly polarized sociopolitical situation, and at that time he was indeed a diffident and indecisive soul. Quiet, bookish and rather conservative, he was also on friendly terms with some members of the landed elite. But he was also a man of integrity, and as his eyes were gradually opened to what was going on around him -- particularly the exploitation and repression of the poor at the hands of the oligarchy, the government and the military -- he could no longer keep silent. During his short three-year tenure as archbishop, Romero became the conscience of El Salvador, broadcasting weekly -- except when jammings or bombings prevented him -- his simple yet eloquent gospel-based homilies calling for justice, peace and freedom. And forgiveness. Amid atrocities and torture he affirmed the Beatitudes. On March 24, 1980, not long after he voiced a plea to soldiers to disobey killing orders that were contrary to God’s commandments and their moral convictions, he was gunned down by a rightist assassin while saying mass in the chapel of the hospital where he lived.

The accomplished Puerto Rican -- born actor Raul Julia, who portrays Romero in the film, is especially effective in conveying this reluctant hero’s incremental transformation. As Julia’s subtle, nuanced performance indicates, even after gaining the confidence to speak out, the archbishop did not lose all his doubts, fears and hesitations. A principle catalyst precipitating the change in Romero was the murder of his friend and fellow priest Rutilio Grande. There is a scene in the film in which the country’s president-elect calls Grande a communist, and Romero replies: "You are a liar." Julia’s facial expressions and body language suggest that in no way does the archbishop relish uttering those words. But he cannot let his dead friend be slandered; the truth must be told.

Romero is faithful to the basic facts of Romero’s last three years, but minor liberties are taken with some events and personalities; as producer Kieser has said, he (along with director John Duigan and script-writer John Sacret Young) was interested not in turning out a documentary or a docudrama but in capturing the essence of a man. To a remarkable degree he and his team succeeded, but Romero is not flawless. Some of the scenes, especially at the beginning, verge on rhetorical overkill; one begins to expect a visual primer on liberation theology, although the didacticism becomes less obtrusive as the film progresses and Julia’s Romero becomes the focal point. Some scenes are all too predictable, some have a stagy, tableau-like stiffness. And with an almost entirely Hispanic cast, why not go all the way? Why make two exceptions, Richard Jordan and Harold Gould? Jordan in particular, though generally quite competent at his craft, is not convincingly Hispanic as Father Grande. Romero’s assassination, when it finally comes, seems almost perfunctory; since the filmmakers were willing to take liberties, why did they not make the climactic event more suspenseful and compelling?

The film does have its suspenseful moments, however, as in the sequence in which the archbishop visits Grande’s village church, which has been closed by the regime. At first intimidated and sent away by abusive military guards -- who machine-gun the tabernacle -- Romero soon returns to pick up the hosts scattered about the floor, as the soldiers fire over his head. He then comes back a second time, resolutely facing down the soldiers as he dons his chasuble and leads the villagers into the church to conduct mass.

Although Romero misses greatness, Julia’s restrained yet powerful performance makes the film well worth viewing. In Chicago recently to promote the movie, the Jesuit-educated actor acknowledged in an interview that the experience of portraying Oscar Romero had rekindled his Catholicism. Now a regular attender at mass, he is also active in the Hunger Project, a Catholic-sponsored effort to end hunger worldwide by the year 2000. (At the interview’s conclusion I said to Julia, "I hope you win an Oscar -- for Oscar." And I meant it.) Will the film be shown in El Salvador? Not to the general public, I daresay -- at least not in the near future. Unfortunately, the country’s agony continues.

Since Romero was murdered in 1980, more than 60,000 other Salvadoran civilians have been killed-about 85 percent of them by the military and the so-called death squads (generally the military in nonmilitary guise) This is not to deny that the leftist insurgents can be ruthless, too, but as a rule they are more discriminate. Though on a smaller scale than in the early ‘80s, political killings still go on, yet not one ranking military officer has ever been tried for human rights violations -- not even in the Romero case, despite the unassailable evidence implicating (then Major) Roberto D’Aubuisson and his cohorts. (According to former President Jose Napoleon Duarte, the actual trigger man was a bodyguard of D’Aubuisson’s whose last name is Regalado.)

Today, in fact, the charismatic D’Aubuisson -- a man widely linked to the death squads, a man described by former U.S. Ambassador Robert White as "a pathological killer" -- is probably the most powerful individual in El Salvador. (D’Aubuisson is a character in Romero, but out of concern that he might bring suit that character is called "Lieutenant Columa.") The party that he founded -- the Republican Nationalist Alliance, or ARENA -- now controls all branches of government: the presidency, the legislature and the courts. D’Aubuisson was not slated for the presidency himself because that would have been displeasing to the country’s benefactor, the United States (more than $3.5 billion in aid since ‘81) , so the more moderate Alfredo Cristiani was put up. But Cristiani is decidedly beholden to D’Aubuisson and the military.

How could the party of the death squads win last spring’s elections, even with all the money it poured into the campaign? Two of the chief reasons were voter apathy and military intimidation. Voter turnout was extremely low, in part because the populace was totally disillusioned by the broken promises, ineffectiveness and corruption of Duarte’s Christian Democratic government; moreover, the Christian Democrats’ candidate, Fidel Chavez Mena, was a lackluster technocrat. And any voter might think twice about dropping a ballot for a "wrong" candidate into a clear-plastic box as a soldier looked on. In any case, many Salvadorans consider elections to be utterly meaningless under the oppressive wartime conditions that prevail in their country.

Furthermore, since ARENA’s accession to office, church-state relations have deteriorated markedly. Recently the military conducted a midnight raid on a Christian refugee support office in San Salvador, abducting 70 people. The 30 women in the group were stripped naked and herded into a cell. Many of them were raped. Twenty-year-old María Mirtala López told an American priest who visited her in jail that she was hung by her breasts in an attempt to extract a confession. On July 18 the national police invaded the headquarters of the National Union of Earthquake Victims, making off with two truckloads of equipment and aid -- including all of the medicines -- before shutting down the office; three of the women arrested there were tortured and now face charges of being "international communists." On July 22, in the latest in a series of attacks on Catholic-run Central American University, four bombs exploded on the campus. Just last month four members of San Salvador’s Emmanuel Baptist Church were taken from their homes and tortured; three of them are still imprisoned.

More and more U.S. church workers are being deported from El Salvador or barred from entry; reportedly the ARENA regime has a list of personae non gratae that includes such notables as Archbishops Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee and John Quinn of San Francisco. Even though he has a valid visa, U.S. priest Richard Howard, Central America regional director of Jesuit Refugee Service, has been ordered to leave the country. Many church people fear that with North Americans absent from the scene, the crackdown will intensify. As Peggy O’Grady, a social worker from the San Francisco archdiocese, asked after being denied entry, "What don’t they want us to see?" The situation has sufficiently alarmed Senator Alan Dixon, a middle-of-the-road Illinois Democrat, that he is gathering signatures from colleagues on a letter of protest to President Cristiani. Although further U.S. aid to El Salvador seems a foregone conclusion, some congress people hope to make it conditional on assurances of open access to provide help to civilian victims of the civil war -- a right recognized by international law.

More diplomatic than Romero was, Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, his successor, has sought to serve as mediator between the opposing sides. But the government tends to repudiate his services as negotiator, and has refused safe passage to wounded rebels who have taken refuge in his cathedral and are in need of medical care. Recently Vice-Minister of Defense Colonel Inocente Montano accused the archbishop and Auxiliary Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chávez of "playing into the hands of the guerrillas" and "tilting the human rights statistics in favor of the guerrillas."

The one ray of hope in the situation, faint though it may be, is the fact that representatives of the government and the guerrillas, meeting in Mexico City, have signed an agreement calling for talks to begin in Costa Rica on October 16. Few analysts are optimistic about the scheduled negotiations -- but they are unprecedented, and a step in the right direction. Both sides, which are responding to a variety of pressures both internal and external, know how deeply the Salvadoran people desire a cessation of hostilities. The people continue to be inspired by the martyred Romero, their compassionate shepherd. But the peace and justice he worked and prayed for remain a deferred dream. May that dream one day be fulfilled.

Dean Peerman

Bare-Bones Imbroglio: Repatriating Indian Remains and Sacred Artifacts

Santa Fe

When I was a child growing up in a small town in southern Illinois, my parents once took me to the central part of the state to see the capitol building and Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield. On that same trip my father decided that we should drive some 60 miles further to the northwest to visit Dickson Mounds Museum near Lewistown. The primary attraction was a burial ground unearthed by chiropractor Don F. Dickson in the 1920s and containing the remains of over 200 Native Americans: I had never seen real skeletons before; I knew that the museum experience was supposed to be educational, but it all seemed kind of creepy to me. And even at that tender age it didn’t seem quite right for people’s bones to be on public display. (My mother, being part Cherokee, was somewhat discomfited, too.)

Recently Illinois Governor James Thompson; overruling the objections of American Indian groups who consider the Dickson Mounds exhibit to be demeaning and want it closed, decreed that the burial site will remain open. The human remains there, Thompson points out, are 900 years old and cannot be traced to any living tribe; furthermore, he says, this state-operated museum has never degenerated into "a sideshow or carnival for profit." The Indians counter that they respect ancestral remains of whatever tribe or however old, and they cite the belief of many tribespeople that. when hallowed graves are disturbed and their contents exposed, the spirits of the deceased are destined to wander restlessly until the bones are properly reburied. Moreover, since the governor’s action constitutes a reversal -- he had previously signed an order for the site’s closure -- he is, in the Indians’ view, caving in to tourism interests. The Indians intend to picket, file complaints and otherwise protest until the skeletons, along with funerary and sacred objects, are removed. Anglos, they say, can learn about Indians without bothering the bones of venerated Indian forebears.

But whatever the final outcome regarding the bones of contention in Illinois, Governor Thompson seems to be bucking a trend. Here in Santa Fe, in the heart of the tricultural Southwest (Indian, Hispanic and Anglo) , an attitude such as Thompson’s appears outmoded and highly insensitive to Native Americans, their heritage and their religious beliefs. Repatriation and reburial of Indian remains is already under way in various parts of the country; for example, Stanford University in California and the universities of Minnesota, South Dakota and Nebraska have returned or agreed to return their skeletal collections. In some instances the divestment has taken place voluntarily; in others, as in the case of Nebraska, it has required an act of the state legislature.

Long operated as a tourist attraction, Pawnee burial pits near Salina, Kansas, were covered over a few months ago -- thanks largely to the efforts of attorney Walter Echo-Hawk, himself a Pawnee and a leading lobbyist for the repatriation movement. Echo-Hawk is fond of remarking that if you desecrate a white grave, you go to jail -- but if you desecrate an Indian grave, "you get a Ph.D." Though he does not expect everyone to share the Indians’ religious beliefs, he feels that it should not be difficult to understand their belief that their dead deserve to rest in peace. The remains of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans lie in museum drawers or exposed sites; the Smithsonian Institution alone has approximately 19,000 skeletons or skeletal "specimens." (Not all of the Smithsonian’s skeletons are complete. For instance, it has only the skulls of the Cheyennes and Arapahos killed by the U.S. Army in the 1878 Sand Creek Massacre: the surgeon general of the time wanted just their heads shipped to Washington for study.)

The principal opponents of the return of Indian bones seem to be anthropologists, particularly forensic or "physical" anthropologists. Both the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association have taken stands against the pro-repatriation legislation now pending in Washington, maintaining that it would undermine scholarship. Newly devised technical tools, they say, make it possible to learn more from old bones than ever before, especially in regard to the nature and history of certain diseases. Responding to that argument, Carl Bryant Rogers, a Santa Fe-based attorney for the Indians, said to me: "Why single out the Indians? Why not dig up everybody’s ancestors?"

In some cases, Rogers went on to say, it may be possible, with Indians’ permission, to analyze skeletal remains before returning them. But in his opinion any marginal loss to science as a result of. bone reburial is outweighed by the human and religious rights at stake. Not even all anthropologists are united on repatriation, however. At odds with the SAA and AAA statements on the issue, Deward E. Walker, Jr., of the University of Colorado at Boulder contends that those organizations’ negative posture is jeopardizing harmonious relationships between field anthropologists and Indian tribes throughout the country. According to Walker, "Science and education have never been dependent upon retaining stolen property or dead bodies against the wishes of next of kin."

But that pending legislation -- the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act -- is making a number of museum curators nervous, including some who consider themselves sympathetic toward Indian interests. They are concerned less about the bones than about the objects often found with the bones -- objects, such as amulets, figurines, prayer sticks and pottery pieces, which they value chiefly for their artistic merit and their historical significance. In both its Senate and House versions, the proposed bill would greatly restrict museum field work on federal lands, and it would require any institution receiving federal funds to return not only human remains but also such "cultural patrimony" as funerary objects, objects of "inalienable communal property" and sacred objects. The most common complaint I heard from museum officials was that the bill’s terminology is too broad and too vague, with some key terms ill-defined. Indeed, the bill is so poorly worded, some of them said, that it could be interpreted as abolishing basic property rights where museums are concerned and mandating the deaccession of such substantial portions of’ their collections that they would be forced to abdicate their fiduciary responsibility -- and thus be in violation of other laws.

"Museums are already in conversation with Indian tribes on repatriation matters," said Michael I. Hering, director of the Indian Arts Research Center (a division of the School of American Research in Santa Fe) ; "the federal government doesn’t need to be involved in this issue." Virtually all of the curators voiced resentment over the fact that, as they see it, the government is trying to dictate a sweeping, generalized policy in a situation that calls for a case-by-case approach -- one that respects the diversity of the various tribes as well as the responsibilities of individual museums. Museum staffs are also aghast at the detailed inventories -- with a five-year deadline -- that the legislation stipulates. Unfortunately, as Thomas A. Livesay, director of the Museum of New Mexico (an overall term for all of the state-run museums and monuments) , admitted, it’s all too easy for condescending senators to say, "You mean you don’t even know already what you’ve got in your museum?" Many museums house artifacts numbering in the millions -- and the truth is their staffs don’t know what all they have. Having to identify for purposes of possible repatriation, the "cultural affiliation" of all those artifacts would indeed be an extensive -- and expensive -- undertaking. While that task might not be quite as costly as some curators make it out to be as of now the bill has no definite provision for appropriations to ease the burden; understandably, museum people are worried about their funding.

Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, a private institution, was formerly named the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art. Founded in 1937 by Mary Cabot Wheelwright of Boston, the museum was intended to preserve and document Navajo ritual and its attendant artifacts. But about 15 years ago the museum changed its focus to include the arts of numerous Indian groups, and it now offers rotating exhibits of jewelry, pottery, tapestry, baskets and paintings.

No longer on view, however, are the sacred ceremonial objects which originally were the Wheelwright’s raison d’être. For this museum has been in the vanguard of repatriation. Said Susan McGreevy, a member of its board and its former director: "We invite Indian elders to identify religious materials and ask them what should be done with those materials. Very often they tell us just to keep them." But her own "unequivocal" opinion, she said, is that "ceremonial objects do not belong in a museum -- adding that objects made for a functional use "should be allowed to self-destruct in the normal order of things."

Not all museum people are as emphatic as McGreevy, and even those who tend to share her views are quick to point out that determining whether a given item is sacred or secular can be very difficult. Sometimes the Indians themselves will not know an antique item’s original purpose, or will differ among themselves as to whether an object that was once sacred is still sacred. Another problem: for Indians who hold to traditional ways; the secular does not exist; all of life and everything in it, including material goods, is sacred. The bill before Congress does not define or delimit "sacred object" with any precision; it is the kind of loophole that leads Helmuth Naumer, head of New Mexico’s Cultural Affairs Department, to say that "if this law goes through in its current state, almost any Indian could claim almost anything." Those loopholes may not be quite as large as Naumer suggests, however The bill -- which focuses on tribes and not individuals or "almost any Indian" -- requires that a tribe establish that an object or objects in question originated with it and come under one of the three categories -- sacred object, funerary object, human remains. (An individual can make a claim only for human remains, and must be able to prove a familial relationship.)

Perhaps even more troubled about the bill than the anthropologists and curators are the gallery owners and antique dealers; though not directly affected, they fear that the bill, if passed, would set a precedent for future legislation that would affect private collections -- and could eventually put them out of business. One such merchant is Jordan Davis, whose Morning Star Gallery is a veritable museum itself (with some exquisite pottery items priced in the high five figures) Commented Davis to the Santa Fe New Mexican: "We all want objects that are culturally utilized and are truly sacred to remain in [Indian] hands, but this would open the gates. There are no safeguards here."

Leading the dealers’ fight against the bill is James Reid, vice-president of the Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association. One argument Reid advances is that the bill favors the religious beliefs of Native Americans over the interests of public collections and therefore runs contrary to the First Amendment’s no-establishment-of-religion clause. Attorney Rogers calls that argument "farfetched": "American common law and statutes that protect the sanctity of the dead and the sensibilities of the living apply with equal force, irrespective of the religion of the deceased or of the next of kin." Moreover, "the same is true under American personal property law that requires stolen property to. be returned to rightful owners -- the religion of the owner is irrelevant."

More persuasive is Reid’s point that the pending bill places an onerous burden of proof of ownership on museums; at this late date, in many cases involving their collections of Indian objects the details of the original act of acquisition do not exist. Also, the bill says nothing about what the Indians should do with repatriated materials, and a few dealers have voiced concern that some artifacts will fall into the hands of unscrupulous Indians and be smuggled abroad. But why abroad? Actually, those objects are much more likely to end up with -- and be peddled by -- the less reputable dealers right here in the US. The black market in Indian art and artifacts -- which knows no racial bounds -- is a thriving, multimillion-dollar enterprise.

Nor are the Indians all of one mind in regard either to the repatriation movement in general or the proposed legislation in particular. Ramona Sakiestewa, a Hopi spokeswoman and the first Indian I interviewed, said that not only is there no "generic" Indian point of view, but that "some Indian viewpoints are contradictory." She proved to be quite correct.

As a matter of ethnic identity and pride, most Indians support the ongoing effort to recover and reconstitute their cultural heritage. But they often differ on the details. Christianized Indians -- and Mormonized Indians, of whom there are many -- do not want returned to them items that they now regard as pagan. For a different reason, the Zuñis do not want back their forebears’ bones; they consider them to have become "tainted" while in Anglo hands. But they have wanted back -- and quietly and patiently campaigned until they succeeded in getting back -- wood-sculpture war gods stolen from them long ago. These sacred carvings are now exposed to the elements and will be allowed, according to their intended purpose, to decay into dust. Granting the loss to art and history,

Edmund J. Ladd, a Museum of New Mexico curator of ethnology and himself a Zuñi, noted that this instance of repatriation "makes sense if you consider [the war gods] religious objects that do their work by disintegrating." (Interestingly, some museums sought to use the "fiduciary responsibility" argument in an attempt to hang on to the Zuñi war gods, even though they clearly were purloined property -- not a very responsible use of the responsibility rationale, it would seem.)

As for the pending bill, activist Indian groups favor it -- groups such as the Native American Indian Artists Association, the All-Indian Pueblo Council and the National Congress of American Indians. Tribal governments generally support it too. Indians who are also curators are caught in the middle, though they tend to oppose the legislation. Ladd worries that were it to become law, it would pit tribes against museums and result in endless litigation. Dave Warren, a Santa Clara Indian whose home is in Santa Fe but who currently works for the Smithsonian, in the course of a long conversation refused to be pinned down, saying that the legislative situation is still too much in a state of flux for him to indicate which way he is leaning.

In view of the fact that for many years museums carried on a lonely struggle to preserve Indian culture -- at a time when the U.S. government was actively suppressing that culture and pushing for total assimilation -- it is ironic that the pending proposal, at least in its present form, has the potential for placing tribes and museums in conflict. (It is also ironic that the repatriation measure was first introduced by a since-defeated senator -- John Melcher, a conservative Montana Democrat -- who was out of favor with his Indian constituents and thought that such a measure might be a relatively cost-free way of placating them.) But whether or not the federal government should be involved in the repatriation issue, it is going to be -- that is the political reality -- and very likely some version of the pending bill will soon be passed. In its favor is the fact that not all museums would surrender Indian artifacts voluntarily. Even the Smithsonian has been dragging its heels; according to Echo-Hawk, so far none of its thousands of Native American skeletons have been returned despite a number of requests -- and it may have to be taken to court.

If the museum curators and antique dealers tend to exaggerate their complaints, some of those complaints are legitimate nonetheless. The bill before Congress could stand a fair amount of fine-tuning, definition-tightening and clarification. The issue is as complex as it is controversial, and further negotiations are called for among some very cool and very astute heads on all sides. (Final hearings should be coming up in Washington shortly.)

But surely it all comes down to the question of whether the first Americans are finally to enjoy the same rights enjoyed by later Americans. In all cases in which their claims are valid, the Indians should have restored to them the objects which they consider sacred and which are central to their ceremonies and rituals. (One possible compromise, in circumstances in which it is acceptable to the Indians: an arrangement whereby certain artifacts are circulated between tribe and museum. This solution has already proved feasible in some instances.)

And yes, there should be an end to the grave robbing. So often stripped of their dignity in life, Native Americans should be accorded the dignity of proper burial and peaceful repose in death.

Charisma and Institution: The Assemblies of God

The Assemblies of God is almost as large as the Episcopal Church. In 1989 it reported a constituency in the U.S. of over 2 million served by over 11,000 churches and 30,000 ministers (it lists 16 million adherents worldwide) In 1969 the AG membership in the U.S. was only 592,000.

Despite this remarkable growth in recent years, scholars, the media and mainstream church leaders have largely ignored the nation’s 12th-largest Protestant denomination. When the Assemblies of God did break into the news in 1987, it was as the setting for a soap opera featuring PTL’s Jim Bakker, who lost his AG ministerial credentials when news of his tryst with Jessica Hahn became public. The denomination was still dealing with the PTL scandal when another of its televangelists made front-page news:

Jimmy Swaggart, who had helped to bring down Bakker and force his dismissal by the AG, was accused of frequenting New Orleans’s sleazy motel district to satisfy his penchant for pornography. (Marvin Gorman, a former AG minister whose extramarital affair had been reported to the denomination earlier, had hired a private investigator to expose Swaggart’s activities.) Swaggart broadcast a tearful confession, but refused to accept the terms of the AG’s restoration program and so the denomination dismissed him from its roster of ministers. The public thus became aware of the AG not because of its rapid growth, but because of the misdeeds of its televangelists.

This neglect of the AG is unfortunate, for mainline churches can learn much from considering both the Assemblies’ growth over the past few decades and the crossroads that the denomination faces.

"Holy Rollers," a popular but pejorative term for Pentecostals, has fallen into disuse. That the term has become somewhat anachronistic is a sign of both the success and failure of Pentecostalism, that segment of Christianity of which the Assemblies of God is the most successful organization, at least among predominantly white groups. "Holy roller" refers to "rolling" in the church aisles, a practice that Pentecostals insist was rare, even in the earliest days. What they have practiced, however, is a very expressive form of worship that includes shouting and crying, dancing and shaking, speaking in tongues. and prophesying, allegedly under the influence of the Holy Spirit. As increasingly more members have moved out of the lower-income bracket and have been joined by middle-class charismatic defectors from mainline churches, their worship has become more contained. Attractively designed church buildings now dot suburban landscapes, replacing the storefronts and worn-out buildings that housed earlier AG congregations. These architecturally appealing houses of worship as well as the more formal and subdued worship taking place within their walls, however, may indicate that with its prosperity the AG has lost some of its distinctiveness as a Pentecostal denomination.

Pentecostalism began as part of a larger restoration movement that sought to return Christianity to what followers believed was its pristine form. They regarded separation from the world as essential to preparing themselves to be a faithful remnant, the bride for whom Christ was soon to return. Unlike other restorationists and more mainstream Christians, Pentecostals taught the "baptism in (or with) the Holy Spirit" -- a religious experience beyond conversion made evident in the convert’s ability to speak in tongues. Spirit baptism prepared one for other "signs and wonders," particularly the gifts of the Spirit listed in I Corinthians 12:7-11 which Pentecostals believe are readily available to believers during these "end days." Seemingly paranormal experiences, including miracles, healing, prophecy, discernment of spirits, words of knowledge and glossolalia, are accepted as bona fide Christian experiences.

But as sociologist Peter Berger noted some years ago, religious experiences, whatever else they are, are institutionally dangerous. The Assemblies of God learned this lesson early in its history when in 1916 it lost nearly a quarter of its following due to "heresy"’ that came from a private revelation denying the trinity of God. These and subsequent "heresies" made leaders somewhat wary of unbridled religious experiences and often led them to discourage the use of some of the gifts of the Spirit. Due to problems with allegedly excessive emotionalism as well as difficulties in transmitting charisma to a second generation, the Assemblies of God faced some of the same problems that caused the early church of the first centuries to abandon "signs and wonders." Over the years many voiced caution about performing "in the flesh," suggesting that the manifestation of many of the so-called gifts was unauthentic. In passing down the experiential faith of the early followers of the Movement (as the AG likes to refer to itself) to a new generation, members began limiting once-popular Pentecostal expressions. This taming of charisma coincided with a plateau of denominational growth by 1970. Especially in larger urban churches that were the prototypes for the growing sect, the Pentecostal form was still there, but much of the Pentecostal spirit was eclipsed as followers sought to be more like their non-Pentecostal neighbors.

A new wave of Pentecostalism broke out in the 1950s as increasing numbers of Christians from mainline churches began to experience Spirit baptism. After remaining in their respective denominations for awhile. many of these neo-Pentecostals began feeling like strangers in a strange land. They received a warm welcome from Assemblies of God congregations, some of whose pastors had become active in the larger charismatic movement.

In my survey of 1,275 AG adherents from 16 different congregations, only 30 percent were raised in the Assemblies; an additional 10 percent were converts from other Pentecostal sects. Nearly 60 percent were from mainline or evangelical non-Pentecostal churches. These converts have brought not only an enthusiasm to many staid and established AG churches but also their middle- and upper-middle-class status, which has legitimated greater openness to the range of the "gifts of the spirit." Due largely to this influx from mainline churches, confirmed membership in AG congregations jumped from 646,000 in 1970 to over 1 million in 1980.

Perhaps the greatest factor in AG growth has been the fact that the charismatic movement has never been fully accepted in mainline denominations and has been rejected by most fundamentalists. The movement reached its height during the 1970s as charismatic renewal groups formed in every major Protestant denomination, in Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches and among Jewish converts. That movement seemed to lose momentum during the 1980s, reducing the pool of readily available recruits. After years of steady growth, the Assemblies of God reached a plateau, with membership figures for 1988 and 1989 actually declining slightly.

This plateau can be attributed to several interrelated factors. Besides the waning of the charismatic movement in general, the AG felt the impact of new charismatic ministries and the effect of the televangelism scandals. Independent charismatic groups such as the newer Maranatha Fellowships, Word-Faith Churches and Vineyard Ministries promise fewer institutional restrictions. Unfettered by older Pentecostal history and traditions, these new sects attract experience-hungry charismatics who long for fresh spiritual encounters and who often mistrust institutional church ties. As for the Swaggart and Bakker scandals, although the denomination was commended for its handling of these situations, the publicity accentuated how far the AG had moved from its earliest restorationist vision. Unbridled wealth, sex scandals and competitive bids for power make great television drama but don’t attract moralistic Christians.

A greater problem confronting the AG -- one that may underlie the aforementioned issues -- is sociological: the tension between the charisma that initiated and renewed the Assemblies of God, and the rise of a bureaucratic organization that necessarily undergirds the successful denomination. Charisma -- elusive, fragile, affective rather than rational -- is particularly difficult to maintain in a modern and secular society. Charismatic experiences and institutional controls often conflict.

In Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, social psychologist Abraham Maslow noted how the great religions of the world developed around the religious experiences of the prophet and his or her early followers. These experiences inform doctrine and ritual and are seemingly enshrined within the institutional church that developed around the prophet -- a church that all too often then becomes inimical to the same religious experiences that birthed it. In Maslow’s words:

Most people lose or forget the subjectively religious experience, and redefine Religion as a set of habits, behaviors, dogmas, forms, which at the extreme becomes entirely legalistic and bureaucratic, conventional, empty, and in the truest meaning of the word, antireligious. The mystic experience, the illumination, the great awakening, along with the charismatic seer who started the whole thing are forgotten, lost or transformed into their opposites. Organized Religion, the churches finally may become the major enemy of the religious experience and the religious experiencer.

Just as other once-charismatic religious movements have followed the path of overinstitutionalization and over-regulation, which in turn has discouraged much of the original charisma, the Assemblies of God could suffer the chilling effects of routinization.

My research suggests that it has been the AG’s emphasis on intense religious experiences that has been a major factor in the denomination’s growth. Worship services were designed to permit intense experiences and expressions of faith, even those that seem wild and unruly to outsiders. In Assemblies of God churches there still are those who pursue strong religious experiences and desire the expression of the full range of the charismata. Some 74 percent of respondents to my survey claimed that the manifestation of all the "gifts of the Spirit" was "very important," and another 19 percent said it was "somewhat important." Most AG members have personally experienced these gifts: 65 percent claim to pray in tongues; 61 percent have personally experienced divine healing as a result of prayer; 55 percent regularly receive definite answers to specific prayer requests; 32 percent say they are regularly "led by God" to perform specific acts; and nearly 30 percent believe they have been used by God to prophesy.

It is at worship services where many learn to commune with God. Giving testimonies of salvation, miracles, Spirit baptism and healing are part of the ritual of nearly all AG churches. Neighbors’ and friends’ testimonies encourage others to be open to similar experiences. Nearly all AG churches have designated times each week to pray for divine healing and times for the old-fashioned altar calls for salvation. The giving of prophecies (whether it be through "tongues and interpretation" or the speaking of a prophetic announcement that is not preceded by glossolalia) and praying in tongues are regular events in most congregations. "Singing in the Spirit" (glossolalic singing) and "going under the power" (falling to the floor in a trance-like state) occur at least occasionally in the majority of the churches I surveyed.

There is much diversity in worship styles among AG congregations. Some are more formal and sedate, expressing gifts of the Spirit only on occasion. Others exhibit an old Pentecostal style, including the wailing and crying that often accompany manifestations of the gifts in these settings (and that more sedate groups find embarrassing) Still others have assumed the style of middle-class charismatic churches that openly demonstrate some of the gifts without some of the older-style expressions.

Pastors seem to be the greatest influences on style, and they determine the extent to which charismatic manifestations are part of the regular services. The more charismatic the pastor, the more likely his or her church will practice a wide range of the gifts. In my national sample of 246 AG pastors, 66 percent prayed in tongues daily (only 3 percent did so less than weekly) ; 93 percent said they had been used by God to prophesy to their congregations; 79 percent frequently received answers to specific prayer requests; and 54 reported regularly experiencing God’s direction to perform specific acts.

These religious experiences are not narcissistic expressions serving little communal purpose; they provide both the motivation and the basis for outreach that helps the churches grow. The stories of those who claim to have a highly intimate relationship with God -- a God who walks and talks with them -- undergird evangelism. Those who have had more religious experiences are more likely to invite nonmembers or inactive members to church, offer transportation to church services, invite neighbor children to church and directly witness to their faith. They are not otherworldly mystics; those who pray in tongues frequently, prophesy, have experienced spiritual healing and "going under the power," and believe that God answers specific prayer and leads them to specific actions are the ones who are most engaged in evangelism.

My ten years of observing the Assemblies of God lead me to believe that the charisma is most alive and well at the local church level. Congregational polity has allowed charismatic pastors the freedom to foster expressively charismatic churches in sometimes innovative ways. It is still possible, for example, that a young woman can hear the call of God to begin a new church. It is still possible -- but increasingly improbable. The institutional mechanisms that demand credentials over calling and encourage large bureaucratic congregations rather than small charismatic ones are easing the prophetic daughters out of the ordained ministry. Paradoxically, the institution that developed out of charisma and has been strengthened by fresh outbursts also seeks to tame and domesticate this spirit. it remains to be seen whether -- and how much -- charisma will rule over bureaucratic forms and regulations, or whether organizational concerns will stifle the Spirit.