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Genethics: Implications of the Human Genome Project

The human Genome Initiative, begun modestly in 1988, will expand to a $200 million-a-year project by 1993 and continue into the next century. To the scientific-minded, this effort to understand the human genetic package is exploding with excitement. To the cautious naysayers, however, it entangles us in a net of unsolvable ethical and legal conundrums. One thing is clear: this research should be monitored by informed nonscientists as well as scientists for its theological, ethical, social and legal implications. Knowledge of human genes might not only rid future generations of intolerable diseases, but enable us to reshape human nature. Theologians may have to rethink the relationship between our creator God and the history of the human race.

HGI is a U.S. government-funded project that aspires to identify and map every gene on our 24 chromosomes. All the genes of a species put together constitute its genome, and the human genome includes perhaps 100,000 genes found in 3 billion base pairs. The sequence of these base pairs as found in DNA molecules provides the genetic information. The four bases -- adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, usually abbreviated A, C, G and T -- constitute the alphabet of the genetic language. We find them in pairs such as A-T or C-G strung out on strands of deoxyribose (sugar) and phosphate. The order of sequence in which these bases are arranged determines the way the genes name each species. HGI hopes to parse DNA’s grammar down into its component words and letters to create a giant dictionary of life.

Funds come primarily from the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The NIH project is headed by James Dewey Watson of Watson and Crick fame. James Watson and Francis Crick demonstrated nearly four decades ago that DNA constitutes our hereditary material, a scientific adventure described in the controversial book The Double Helix. Watson is in his early 60s now, an indefatigable researcher and Nobel Prize winner. Given the enormity of the task and the projected budget of $3 billion spread out over a 15-year period, the Human Genome Initiative is "big biology." Some call it "biology’s moon shot." Walter Gilbert of Harvard calls HGI the "Holy Grail" of genetics.

The primary motive behind HGI is the one that drives all pure science: the need to know. Yet what has convinced Congress and the public to support this megaproject is the potential medical benefit, namely, better treatment of hereditary diseases. Some 4,000 diseases are thought to be genetic in origin. Of these, sickle-cell. anemia and others result from a misplaced base letter in a single gene. In. other cases, such as hypertension or diabetes and some cancers, the problem stems from a discordant ensemble of genes. The ability to locate the individual gene or gene sequence responsible for each disease could revolutionize biomedicine in the 21st century. Scientists have already begun to pinpoint the genes involved in Huntington’s chorea and muscular dystrophy. It appears that the gene for cystic fibrosis is found in a narrow region on chromosome seven. Alzheimer’s disease is likely due to a defective gene on chromosome 21. Manic depression and schizophrenia may turn out to involve a genetic predisposition; alcoholism almost certainly does. Some believe we may inherit a susceptibility to heart attack, hypertension, arthritis, allergy and even certain learning disabilities.

Discovering the approximate location on the chromosome of the gene or genes responsible for a given disease will permit doctors to diagnose a genetic disease or predisposition before the onset of symptoms. The diagnosis may occur as early as a few weeks after conception. As research advances, scientists hope to determine the precise location of a given gene so they can test entire populations to identify carriers of the disease gene. They hope eventually to understand the actual biochemical defect in the gene. This knowledge will suggest directions for technological research aimed at correcting the defect. In time, this may lead to methods of intervention to treat many conditions before they appear.

In the short term, then, HGI will show us the genetic structure of humanity, much as we have known the human skeleton. In the long term, knowing this structure may allow us to find chemical and mechanical tools to change it -- fixing it where it has gone wrong in an individual and improving it where it puts whole populations at risk. In five years the genome "skeleton" will be visible and technological research will already be under way. We must be ready -- theologically, ethically and politically -- to understand this leap into our future as it begins.

The HGI project raises interesting theological questions. For example, how should we understand the image of God in us and in the evolution of the human race? In referring to evolution we do not mean to resurrect the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s over the Genesis creation account. Rather, we refer to recent attempts in sociobiology to account for the rise of human culture and religious values such as altruism. Determinists suggest that we are driven by "selfish genes" which employ culture and religion as media for their own survival. Those of a less determinist mind look upon culture and religion as examples of the human ability to transcend our genes, to see ourselves as more than our inheritance. Whether one is a determinist or a believer in self-transcendence, HGI may provide information that makes it possible to influence human destiny through biological engineering. Instead of being driven by our genes, we may be able to reorder our genetic code to change the very nature of human nature.

This possibility challenges us to ask about the relationship between divine and human agency. If the future is open, who is responsible for the transformation of the human race? Is it a cooperative effort? Theologian Philip Hefner of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago describes the human being as a "created co-creator." If we view ourselves in this light, we are both utterly dependent upon God for our existence and at the same time unavoidably responsible for creating the course of cultural and technological history. To say that the image of God is at work in us suggests to some theologians that God is drawing the human race toward fulfillment and that this process may be accomplished through human creativity.

To make this claim is not to say, however, that the genius of human creativity is always identical with God’s hand at work. While we are not commanded to stand still, we must be self-critical whenever we undertake deliberately to help God continue the creation. Driven by haste or self-seeking, we frequently confuse the short-term advantage with the ultimate good. Ignorant about the full range of long-term consequences, we face moral choices whose resolution seems to require the benefit of a divine foreknowledge that we humans shall never -- despite computer simulations -- entirely possess. In short, we are by no means God’s equals, even if we are in some sense co-creators. As neo-orthodox theologians, in the era of Reinhold Niebuhr have reminded us, technological advances cannot vanquish original sin. In fact, the greater the technological power, the greater the potential for evil. HGI may provide us with the power of knowledge and the opportunity for attaining a new and unprecedented level of human health, but it may also provide us with opportunities to exercise our greed and shortsightedness so as to open up new depths of human injustice and misery.

Genetic intervention, therefore, also raises ethical questions: some dealing with the treatment of living individuals whose genetic code is known and others dealing with hereditary advance through reproductive regulation and intervention. In the area of living individuals and genetic intervention are questions of patient responsibility and the sharing of genetic information: If a doctor could know that you will contract Huntington’s disease at age 40 or Alzheimer’s disease at age 60, at what age would you want to be told? Would you want to know at all? Would it be morally permissible for you to remain ignorant and perhaps pass the genetic fate on to your offspring?

Then there are questions involving the insurance industry: Someday insurance companies may require knowledge of the genetic makeup of every client. They may want to charge higher premiums to those who have a higher risk of inherited disease. They may even deny coverage on the basis of this knowledge, leaving millions of people without benefits. Should we invoke a principle of privacy or confidentiality in order to prevent insurance companies from finding out? Would it be fair to deny information to companies that need it for their actuarial tables? The ability to map the genome may render insurance companies irrelevant and dictate a whole new system of medical security and death benefits.

Similar dilemmas may arise in the workplace: Should employers have access to our genetic codes? In preemployment genetic screening, an employer would understandably select those individuals with the greatest potential for productivity. Should the employer have the right to refuse to hire workers on the basis of genetic criteria? Should employees have the right to refuse genetic testing?

A second general area concerns the application of new genetics to the unborn. How far should an individual’s rights to privacy and reproductive choice be qualified by duties to relatives and future generations? The question has social and political implications. What are the limits of society’s right to demand that individuals or families avoid producing genetically defective offspring? And what will be counted as a "defect" to be avoided? Would a propensity for obesity, for example, be grounds to force a couple to limit reproduction? In all likelihood, abortion will be used as a means of selecting healthy offspring by deselecting the rest. If prenatal tests show a disposition for cystic fibrosis or schizophrenia, should we permit abortion? Should society demand abortion? What will appear on the computer list of acceptable and unacceptable genetic traits that determine the life or death of the fetus?

Also, we must consider the possible dilemmas of in vitro fertilization. Hereditary advance could proceed through the creation of "high-grade"embryos that are implanted and brought to term. Should these embryos be bought and sold? If we put a price tag on physical stature, intelligence, race, or eye or hair color, as well as relative freedom from disease, our unborn children will become commodities. What kind of society will emerge if we begin eyeing each other’s children as we do each other’s cars, clothing and houses, mentally calculating "what that one must cost"?

Family ethics will need to redefine lovability within the genetically altered family. Imagine a family in which each generation is less "defective" than the previous one. What will be the psychological impact on parents supporting "superior" children? Will the sense of blood tie be tangibly loosened by the frequency of technological intervention in reproduction? Will a child be desirable on account of acceptable genetic traits and undesirable without them? Will "defective" come to mean "disposable"? Will "superior" adult children seek to dispose early of their "defective" parents?

It is conceivable that genetic intervention will move us in the direction of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We may begin innocently by trying to breed out hemophilia and end up breeding in genetic traits that fit the needs of social stratification, economic productivity or nationalist interests. Might the desire for improved human beings lead finally to a drive toward racial purity? Well in advance of any brave new world, we need to ask who will be making the decisions and according to what criteria. Who will be allowed to share in the benefits of genetic intervention and who will be compelled to submit to them?

Another major area of ethical concern is thus economic justice. Economic and social divisions may be reinforced by the unequal ability to buy genetic superiority. We are already guilty of gross inequalities in the delivery of health care nationally and globally. Because of the split between rich and poor, our society currently fails to give basic prenatal care in thousands of pregnancies each year. Health insurance is unattainable for many. For millions of people around the world even their basics of modern medicine are not yet available. If we succeed at genetic intervention during the prenatal period, who will benefit and who will be left out? Will there be one list of permitted procedures for the poor and another, much longer list for the rich?

Finally, we must face the possibility that we may endanger the whole human species by trying to alter part of it. The health of our long-term evolutionary development has depended in part upon the randomness of genetic recombination and mutation. Can we threaten this process of random selection? Does a short-term benefit warrant a long-term danger? On the other hand, perhaps by learning to avoid genetic deformities we may intervene just in time to keep from being wiped out by a tide of stress-induced or radiation-related mutations. Either to intervene or not to intervene in our genetic constitutions. then, could pose a danger for the future of humanity.

Should the existence of all of these pitfalls frighten us into pulling back and retarding the advance of scientific knowledge? Despite the dangers, we would argue that it is best to move forward on the assumption that more knowledge is better than less. Any ethicist who would have us value ignorance over knowledge is suspect. When we fear the outcome of research, we shirk our responsibility to the future by rooting ourselves in the status quo. But our present situation is by no means a moral utopia. It too is beset with problems. Our society is filled with those suffering from cancer and other incurable diseases as well as from mental disorders, child abuse and economic injustice. There is no good reason for making the present situation a barometer for measuring the alternatives. If we try to halt the advance toward new knowledge we may inadvertently give unwarranted blessing to our present state of ignorance. To defend present ignorance against future knowledge -- even if the consequences be unknown -- is to seek an illusionary moral haven. It would be better, we think, to use the new means at hand to reduce human suffering as much as we can while protecting human freedom and dignity.

We need ways to guard ourselves from ourselves. In particular, we need a reformulated commitment to human dignity. Such a commitment has been given a sound hearing before the international Human Genome Organization, HUGO. Two hundred scientists from 24 countries who attended a workshop on international cooperation at Valencia, Spain, in October 1988 proposed "respect for individual human dignity" to be the principle governing all genetic research and technology:

The, members of the workshop believe that knowledge gained from mapping and sequencing the human genome can have great benefit for human health and well being. Toward these ends, participating scientists acknowledge their responsibility to help insure that genetic information be used only to enhance the dignity of the individual. They also encourage public debate on ethical, social, legal and commercial implications of the use of genetic information.

Although the mere statement of such a principle is far from solving the ethical problems we have been examining, it is vitally important to keep the principle in mind. This or some similar moral safeguard will be essential to HGI and related biotechnology if human nature is not to be violated in the effort to improve it.

The responsibility of our generation, we believe, is to pursue this new knowledge, confront the ethical issues as they arise, and seek their resolution by negotiating humane policy. Because so many of the issues are interrelated, however, we cannot simply treat them singly. They need to be addressed in complex. clusters and studied in light of a broad vision for society, keeping in mind the caution born of experience. Our time calls for contributions from philosophers, theologians and ethicists in dialogue with scientists, economists and politicians. It calls for the combined work of at least two groups of contributors: visionaries who can project for us their pictures of the humanity we are called to become, and sober’ pragmatists who will remind us of our moral limits and our tendency to exploit others.

God’s promised fulfillment includes, among other things, the image of a New Jerusalem where "death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away" (Rev. 21:4) As we begin to engage in the business of genetic co-creation, how can we be sure that our path goes toward this fulfillment rather than toward some irreversible destruction? The wisest course is to admit that we cannot know with certainty whether our direction is compatible with God’s. The moral risks are genuine risks.

But as Christians we believe that the source of creation is also its ultimate hope. Human origins and destiny are linked together in God’s economy. Attempting to discern a moral way forward is essential at every stage of our journey, even though such discerning is never unambiguous. The goals and methods of genetic science must be considered in a continual, complex, many-sided con-versation among Christians and others who take the challenge seriously. We need to articulate and discuss conflicting visions as we attempt to project a just and generous use of the fruits of research. Participants in the conversation from all walks of life should seek to describe authentic human fulfillment and propose safeguards against the many opportunities for abuse, until a body of principles and a consensus about the best applications of genetic knowledge emerge. A common vision can evolve -- if indeed, the human creative process is related to God’s own.

The Call’s Cry in the Wilderness

The phrase "contemporary Christian music" evokes for many people visions of pious confection and Amy Grant; singers preaching to the converted in an extremely insular subculture. However, a few performers in recent years have brought to the industry a more substantial expression of feelings, thoughts and impressions that center on a seriously considered journey of faith.

Bob Dylan blazed the way in 1977 with a surprisingly overt statement of gospel faith in Slow Train Coming. Dylan has been weaving spiritual issues and observations into his songs ever since. Slow Train Coming forced both religious and secular critics to reevaluate his entire body of work in light of his startling turn toward Christianity. Dylan became the Christian music industry’s and the religious press’s new celebrity convert. Dylan, being Dylan, reacted predictably: after a couple more stabs at Christian rock, he went back to hiding his message in the cryptic, freewheeling lyrics that had led many to canonize him as a brilliant songwriter in the first place, Christian message or not.

Canadian folk-rocker Bruce Cockburn has also gained notoriety for shimmering poetic forays into both geopolitics (in the form of travelogue songs) and spirituality (celebrating nature and inner beauty in its multitudinous forms). Cockburn combines social protest and faith while confronting issues of poverty and violence in developing nations and celebrating the world’s diversity. The hugely successful Irish band U2 has taken a similar approach, using powerful music and images in its rock music with a social conscience. They followed their Grammy Award-winning album Joshua Tree with Rattle and Hum, a deliberate effort to dig deeper into American music roots (blues, gospel and country), recorded in Sun Studios where Elvis Presley got his start.

Closer to home, a California-based band that has been making a similar musical spiritual exploration, with very little notice or fanfare, is The Call. The Call’s music centers on lead singer Michael Been’s powerful vocals (characterized by the same huskiness and theatricality of the late great Jim Morrison’s), and his penetrating songwriting. The Call and performers like U2 and Bruce Cockburn have given the phrase "contemporary Christian music" new meaning and purpose. Been and The Call would probably find the term "Christian music" an awkward one to describe their work. Like that of Cockburn, U2 and others, The Call’s music reflects the beauty and joy of faith, as well as doubt and self-doubt, and the problems of hate and despair.

Unlike much of "contemporary Christian music," The Call uses no religious rhetoric and attempts no proselytizing. Their style is at once driving, confrontational, rhythm-oriented, vulnerable and self-deprecating. On stage they engage in very little banter between songs, nor do they use show-business tactics. Their records show not a trace of the self-righteous theologizing and Bible-quoting that ruins so much "Christian music."

Instead, the band has consciously chosen to use gripping and gritty images of conflict, cataclysm and deliverance, giving their music a genuinely provocative sense of the suffering, struggle and vision of their spiritual adventure. Been and keyboardist Jim Goodwin say this complexity reflects their belief that life contains extremes that cannot be addressed with a pat approach. Almost every one of their songs describes battles with the weapons of love and reconciliation, passing through death to life again in the span of a song. Been says his songwriting hammers away at the spiritual indifference in his own life, and his search for spiritual answers Sounding a little like a voice crying in the wilderness, he said, "I just keep writing the same song over and over." Typical of their approach is "Everywhere I Go," a song from their 1986 album Reconciled (Elektra) :

Raise me up, keep that promise that

you made,

Wake me up, keep that promise that

you made,

I think of you eveywhere I go

I look for you everywhere I go

I need you everywhere I go

Straight has curved,

Smiles, eyes, powers to confound me,

I lose my nerve,

Your voice echoes all around me

Ease me down, -

Keep that promise that you made to me,

Take my hand, my mind reels,

All my senses rise

(©l956 WS MUSIC CORP. & NEEB MUSIC CO. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.)

Their songs express hope in terms of a promise and not ownership, unlike the pious "claiming of victory" that some contemporary Christian musicians extol. The Call seeks to strip away false certainties and hopes, allowing for glimpses of real hope in which, as one song declares, "the language of the heart takes hold." Been seems to be trying to place listeners in the context of his own dilemmas and crises. "I think the best thing you can say about a song -- whatever experience I had writing it -- [is that] all the feelings are so universal," Been remarks. "Experiences everyone goes through, just different circumstances, different names, but it’s all similar. If you can write a song [to which] someone can go, ‘I relate that to this part of my life’ -- then you’ve really done it. That’s the best you can do. The most you can expect is to spark somebody’s life that they’ve got going." Raised in Oklahoma, having sung in radio and television shows since he was a little boy, Been hauntingly evokes his youth in a song named for his home state, about a dustbowl twister that wreaks spiritual and physical havoc upon a town. A fundamentalist preacher calls down fire and brimstone amid a vivid description of impending doom before the dawn breaks again. Recorded completely live in the studio, with only one guitar overdub, the spiraling velocity of the song’s turmoil and tension practically recreates the feel of a real twister ripping through one’s speakers. This kind of emotion and energy makes The Call one of the best rock and roll bands around.

Behind their dark iconoclastic fervor is a simple love of music and its power to heal and transform. That healing might first require experiencing the self-paralysis Been describes in the presence of his apocalyptic whirlwind, or simply the painful tearing down of old personal barriers, trying to get a grander scheme and purpose in the process, as described in a song called "The Woods" from the album Into the Woods (Elektra) :

Painful to see love without action

Painful to see years of neglect

Aching to see all that they see

Still telling lies to the remains of respect . . .

Thousands of plans, I’ve made many

I wonder just how many plans I have made

Feeling this mood overtake me

Finally to see the truth as it fades

Out of these wood will you take me

Out of these woods, out of the storm

Oh, sinless child can you save me

Oh, guilty man, freedom is yours.

(© 1910 WB MUSIC CORP. & WARNER-TAMERLANE PUBLISHING CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.)

In almost every song, The Call somehow forges the personal experience of hurt and anger into an instrument of healing. Rock music began as a musical expression of thoughts and feelings that society deemed subversive. Using rock’s intense energy and direct immediacy (be it expressing a personal or a social critique), Been stares anger and hurt in the face, confronts it and directs it into a more productive direction.

In "Sanctuary," The Call addresses the dislocation of war by looking at life in a refugee camp through the eyes of both a refugee worker and a refugee. Both are far from home and both wonder what happened to their lives; the chorus rings out a response, "We’re all the same here, you and I." In a "there-but-for-the-grace-of-God" song, Been attempts to stand in the shoes of the homeless, the prisoner and the unfortunate soldier caught up in the futility and absurdity of war. An earlier album, Modern Romans (Mercury) , is an album-length picture of the assault upon the spirit in our violent hollow culture.

Coming from a completely different set of circumstances and musical experience, Goodwin expresses the substance of this band’s lyrics and its spontaneity without resorting to the trappings of a big production on stage. Having joined The Call in 1984, Goodwin has brought a beneficial melodic flair to the band; for example, his use of cascading synthesizers in an ode to faithful perseverance and struggle, "I Still Believe":

I’ve been in a cave for forty days

Only a spark to light my way

I want to give out, I want to give in

This is our crime, this is our sin. . .

I’m flat on my back out at sea,

Hoping these waves don’t cover me,

I’m turned and tossed upon the waves.

When the darkness comes. I feel the grave,

But I still believe. I still believe . . .

(© 1986 WB MUSIC CORP. NEEB MUSIC CORP.. TARKA MUSIC & TILEFACE MUSIC All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.)

"I played in this band [Sparks] for two years that was just this goofy pop band with funny clever lyrics -- never anything remotely spiritual or deep in any way. Goodwin remembers. "It was just sheer entertainment music. We played to 5,000 people in Los Angeles. And these kids would be just jumping up and down, screaming and having the best time. It didn’t do anything for me to see this. It was fun seeing them having fun. There’s a difference between that, and being on stage playing a song like ‘I Still Believe.’ There’s very few bands that go up and play the way we do. We don’t do anything. We just go up there and play with as much emotion as we can. That’s part of why we do it that way. We don’t want to distract people from the lyrics, from the music itself."

So they offer gorgeous songs with gorgeous melodies, and a deeper and deeper appreciation for, as one song puts it, "the life that goes unseen." Good enough that Time named Into the Woods one of the best rock albums of 1987. Their 1989 release on MCA, Let The Day Begin (which received wide commercial airplay), focuses on intimacy, communication and personal transformation with a unique force, something admirers of The Call have come to expect and appreciate.

From the very first song on their first album to their present work, The Call’s music has reflected a furious understanding of the evidence of sin and grace. As one of the songs from Let The Day Begin declares, "You can’t escape the reach of love." With the new songs for a new album already well on their way to completion, and several well-known names being discussed as possible producers (including Peter Gabriel, Daniel Lanois, T-Bone Burnett and the Edge of U2) , the future seems to hold bright possibilities for The Call.

Not willing to cater to a superficially defined contemporary Christian music market, The Call will have to take their chances like everyone else in the mainstream record market, where formulaic music and demographics-concerned record companies prevail. Refusing to conform to the security and comfortable clichés of the "Christian music scene, The Call have carved out no easy niche for themselves. To do otherwise would not complement the personality of this band, or the intent of’ its members. Reflecting on the commercial aspect of the record industry and the place that The Call’s captivating, spiritually introspective music might have in the future, Been remarks, "We don’t expect music to owe us something, owe us a living. I never looked at it that way. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a hit record.. That’d be great, but it has to come out of us naturally."

Pakistan’s Christian Minority

No one really knows the size of Pakistan’s Christian minority, nor of the entire population. The most recent census -- conducted in 1981 -- gave a rough count of 84 million people of whom not quite a million were Christian. The unofficial 1990 estimate is 108 million, with an explosive birthrate of nearly 4 percent. That could soon mean up to 2 million Christians in this land of Islam.

One of the largest headaches these Christians will face concerns real estate. The church spires that dominate Pakistan’s major cities are legacies of British rule when large tracts of prime real estate in the Raj cantonment areas -- now the downtowns of Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Pindi -- were dedicated to cathedral and parish uses. After independence in 1947 most of this real estate passed to the native Christian churches. The upkeep of these old buildings and the need to fend off Muslims and dissident Christians who want the land preoccupy the country’s Protestant and Catholic hierarchies.

The federal capital of Islamabad is the one major Pakistani city void of Christian architecture because it was founded after independence. More befitting Pakistan’s official title of Islamic Republic, the capital’s skyline is dominated by the huge Faisal mosque, a gift from Saudi Arabia. The Protestant Church of Pakistan (a 1970 union of Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians) has an especially urgent real estate anxiety in the capital because conservative Muslim groups are pressing to keep the skyline free of spire and cross. While the government has sold land at fair market price to a few Christian groups, the Church of Pakistan has been unable to build because irate Muslims keep tearing down foundation stones, the most recent incident being the defacement of an inaugural marker unveiled by Archbishop Robert Runcie of Canterbury in a spring 1990 visit.

Nuisance troublemaking against Christians goes on quite unnoticed in the smaller towns and villages, but the problem in Islamabad became a cause célèbre because a number of diplomats worship in the house parish that seeks to build a permanent church. Thus the annual Human Rights Report of the U.S. State Department, mute the previous decade on discrimination and the occasional acts of violence against Christians, included in its January 1990 report the observation that "Christians have had difficulty in getting permission to build new churches" and that "Christians complain that there are barriers to Christians rising to high positions in public service, public corporations, universities and the military." The report did not allege that the government of Pakistan supported discrimination, but it speculated that "the government’s reticence in looking into incidents involving discrimination against minorities is a reflection of its fear of offending fundamentalist Muslims who wield substantial influence over their co-religionists."

The Pakistani government of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto denied the State Department’s finding and a number of more detailed criticisms about the treatment of two other minorities, the Hindus and the Ahmadis. A government spokesman stated on national TV that "the contents of the report regarding Ahmadis, Christians and Hindus were baseless." The spokesman continued, "The report was a classical example of disinformation aimed at creating disturbances in a country where people have been living so long with minorities enjoying full rights. [The claim] that the Christians were not allowed to build churches [or] hold high positions was totally wrong."

Pakistan’s charge of "disinformation" against the U.S. -- its closest military and economic assistance partner -- revealed Islamabad’s desire to protect Prime Minister Bhutto’s image in the "Christian" West. Bhutto and President Bush pledged at their June 1989 Washington summit, "We are now moral as well as political partners." But last month Bhutto was ousted from office and has been formally charged with abuse of power.

While church leaders kept silent on the State Department’s charge of discrimination, some populist Christian groups scrawled slogans calling for justice and rights for Christians on the walls of central Karachi and Lahore. Their protests, in dramatic contrast to the silence of church officials, stirred to the surface a long tradition of lay resentment against the higher clergy.

My interviews with Pakistani Christians about the discrimination charge revealed a growing antipathy between the senior hierarchy and the laity. The upper hierarchy, none of whom agreed to be quoted, acquiesces in the government’s denial and cites examples of Christians who in the past have served as senior judges, civil servants and ambassadors. Some church leaders explained that they had, above all, to protect their communications with Muslim leaders. Some also made caustic observations about their own flock. One bishop said many of the "competitive" Christians had emigrated to the US., Canada and Australia, leaving in Pakistan less capable Christians who charge discrimination to rationalize their lack of talent. "Show me a capable Christian and I’ll hire him," he said.

Laypeople and lower clergy allege that their clergy superiors are almost uniformly corrupt and that they accommodate the Muslim power game. There is also a spreading resentment of the authority invested in the Roman Catholic and Protestant bishops. Christian laity have blocked bishops who attempt to exploit the church’s large real estate holdings. The Protestant bishop of Karachi, for example, has been stopped twice in the past year by Christians who object to his plan to develop commercial space around the outer wall of St. Andrews, the second-largest Protestant church property in Karachi. In Quetta his plan to build 100 or more houses for poor Christians on church property is likewise stymied by local Christian resistance. Younis Khokhar, lay founder of the Fellowship of Believers (an outreach to interested Muslims) , asked, "Can anyone name a single bishop who doesn’t drive at least one Pajero?" (The Pajero, a Japanese-built luxury jeep, is the primary symbol of the nouveau riche.) Allegations abound that recent elections of several bishops of the Church of Pakistan have been bought.

The number of foreign mission workers in Pakistan is impressive, given the tortuous procedures required for obtaining resident and work visas. The indigenously led churches do not require foreign workers in administration, and the absence of any confessed strategy of witness and evangelism to the overwhelming Muslim majority would seem to minimize opportunities for foreigners to be useful.

Several hundred of these Western Christians are working with Christian organizations aiding the 3 million Afghan refugees and the indigenous poor. Their contribution to parish life may turn out to be as marginal as their assistance to the Afghans -- traditionally impervious to Christian witness.

Young faces from North America and Australia are offering assistance to the many Southern Baptist, independent Presbyterian and nondenominational congregations that make up the conservative right here. They usually are learning diligently one or more of the difficult native languages and are self-funded. They promote the faith through literature distribution (legal but difficult), training clinics and home Bible study. With local leaders absorbed in their real estate problems, these foreigners alone have the time, energy and resources to probe the legal and cultural barriers against proselytizing, evangelism and outreach. In view of the onerous restrictions in this predominantly Islamic society, it is not surprising that their enthusiasm sometimes leads them to steal sheep from other Christian pastures instead of preaching to Muslims.

Although conversion results are unknown -- only Christians who convert to Islam are news items -- foreign church funds do sustain the social service projects for the refugees, whether Muslim Afghans or the smaller numbers of’ Iraqi and Iranian Christian refugees. These funds spill over to help many poor Pakistani Christians who find little outreach otherwise from the Pakistan churches. Many services to the Christian poor, including drug education and rehabilitation programs, institutions for the handicapped and food programs are sustained by outside funding and the compassion of foreigners, particularly the omnipresent nuns. This promotes residual gratitude toward foreign Christians and highlights the leadership limits of the local officials. Whatever their exact number, Christians are leaven in deeply troubled Pakistan whose Muslim majority disallows increasingly the Prophet’s teachings about restraint from violence and his injunctions to honor the Ummah (religious community) Internecine Muslim murders are a daily occurrence in Pakistan, and, whatever the discrimination against Christians, it is more social and economic in nature and far less violent than what Muslims do to one another. Christian pastors are transfixed, however, with the fear of doing anything to stir the mullahs (religious teachers) against them and their flocks.

Most pastors believe the best way to keep Christian-Muslim relations calm is to maintain a low profile in terms of evangelism and gripes, to hunker down, protect the real estate from vultures without and within the community, maintain good relations with the Muslim power brokers and hope that the Christian poor will remain faithful. The same caution guarantees that no Christian voice is ever raised to counsel nonviolence, forgiveness and contrition in a society marked by tremendous outbursts of anger. Any idea of witness to the Muslim majority is muted. Any difference that Jesus and the gospel might contribute to social analysis is unexplored, and the church draws down the last deposits of goodwill and credit from its 19th-century legacy of schools and movements such as the YMCA. A senior Y official said, "The YMCA is still regarded with respect by many Muslims as a force for change when, in fact, the Y is rotten to the core." He felt the same about his church. "The people of God are not being what they could and should be. The bishops have Pajeros, the educated laymen are frustrated and drop out of church life, and the poor Christians are left to serve as sweepers.

The strategy of biding one’s time and enduring discrimination for fear that doing anything will only make matters worse can pass for prudence if there are positive trends in the general society. But the dynamics in Pakistan are not encouraging. The separatism that afflicts the Muslim majority has negative implications for the churches. Meanwhile, relations with India are deteriorating over the Kashmir problem -- and a third war between the two peoples would bring disaster to all religious communities. While President Bhulam Ishaz’s dismissal of Benazir Bhutto is arguably constitutional, no one doubts that the army now calls the shots. Its heightened influence should serve to dampen ethnic strife, and for a while Christianity’s many proud towers are safe from being torched through anarchy. But the army also ruled during the last two wars with India, and another violent round is now more likely. Should the two countries go to war again, the church spires of Lahore and Karachi may not stand long against a rain of Indian bombs.

A Second Look at Inductive Preaching

Take a typical Sunday sermon, if you can stomach it. It begins with an anecdote, usually first-person, sometimes amusing. Then a generalization about "what the gospel is saying to us this morning." Throw in a metaphor or two, add stories to taste, stir round and round to its utterly predictable ending ten minutes later. Ask the preacher for an explanation and you catch phrases such as "overhearing the gospel" and "inductive preaching." In other words, some homiletics professor gets the blame. After all, they told us to sum it up in one sentence.

Complaints that preaching has become trivial, superficial and downright boring are as old as the pulpit itself. But recent criticism blames the inadequacy of homiletical theory: the teachers of inductive and narrative preaching have given the busy pastor an excuse for poor preparation, shallow logic and self-indulgent personal reminiscences. A retired pastor complained, "All we get anymore are rehashes of the gospel. Whatever happened to the sermon?" What happened is that the sermon changed. The question is, Are we happy about it?

Many point to Fred B. Craddock as the most influential contemporary homiletical theoretician. Craddock made popular the phrases "inductive preaching" and "overhearing the gospel," and if he cannot be held entirely responsible for the "sermon in a sentence," he believes such a sentence will help the preacher attain thematic unity. He also suggested that sermons be "narrative" or "narrativelike." So it is not surprising that Craddock gets the lion’s share of the blame in recent pulpit reviews.

John R. Brokhoff’s As One with Authority (1989) is a pointed rejoinder to Craddock’s As One Without Authority(197 I) Brokhoff an old-fashioned Lutheran who was Craddock’s predecessor at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, exalts the sacrament of the Word (he believes sermons should be longer) and turns back liturgical renewal (Eucharist once a month is plenty) The Word is not something overheard but something overwhelming. Like the retired pastor he also seems to ask. Whatever happened to the sermon?

Another of Craddock’s critics. William H. Willimon. wants to turn back the clock. In his CENTURY article "Preaching: Entertainment or Exposition?" (February 28) , Willimon commends expository preacher Peter Gomes, who says "any sermon worth preaching is worth 30 or 40 minutes." Willimon claims that "so-called narrative homiletics, preaching as story and inductive preaching" have trivialized preaching by reducing it to a series of disconnected stories. Preachers have capitulated to television-dominated congregations who prefer entertainment -- presentations "with emotional response but without thought" -- to logical discourse. Narrative preaching, says Willimon, is made to order for the MTV age -- it offers a jumble of images, it doesn’t worry about transitions, and it is mercifully short. Given Craddock’s influence and the homiletical heartburn of successive Sundays, we might be tempted, with Brokhoff and Willimon, to anathematize his name as we reach for the Rolaids. But first we should consider what Craddock has done, how it has changed over the years and how it has been put to use.

Craddock, in As One Without Authority, proposed inductive form as one option in gospel proclamation. An inductive form would lead listeners in a certain direction rather than stating and then proving a conclusion. It would give listeners freedom to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions. The sermon would be open-ended -- but not entirely, for it would point toward the preacher’s own reading of the biblical text; the inductive sermon re-creates the process of discovery of meaning in the text. Thus, the inductive sermon would still be proclamation, but proclamation that jaded 20th-century listeners could hear. "Perhaps it will not be taken as irreverent to say that the movement of a sermon is as the movement of a good story or a good joke," Craddock wrote.

His theories were not taken as irreverent, but were enthusiastically embraced. Theologians were already enamored with story. Narrative theology came into vogue, followed by narrative preaching -- understood variously as preaching about narratives, preaching with narratives and giving sermons narrative form. Craddock, too, in Overhearing the Gospel (1978) , endorsed "narrative" sermons -- not that narrative should replace logic, or that sermons consist only of stories, but that the sermon has "the scope that ties it to the life of a larger community" and touches "intellectual or emotional or volitional" concerns while "conveying the sense of movement from one place to another" and "thinking alongside the hearers." The features of inductive preaching were here, though Craddock had dropped the term. Instead, he tried to combine it with a number of theological ideas -- community, tradition and universality -- under one rubric, "narrative."

The adequacy of that rubric for the entire range of faith has long been in question. But critics have misread Craddock on this issue. Willimon cites a "classic article" by Richard Lischer, "The Limits of Story," as testimony to "what story and narrative preaching cannot do," while failing to note Lischer’s distinction between Craddock and those who equate preaching with storytelling. Nor does he note Craddock’s apparent discomfort with "narrative": his careful qualification of the term, his use of the unwieldy adjective "narrativelike." In his most recent work, Preaching (1985) , Craddock dropped the terms "narrative preaching" and "inductive preaching" entirely.

The main current of subsequent homiletical theory, however, has exalted narrative at the expense of induction, despite increasing discontent with narrative as a theological category. Some speak of the inherent power of storytelling. Paul Scott Wilson, for example, argues in Imagination of the Heart (Abingdon, 1988) that stories put the preacher in touch with our shared human imagination. But Wilson abandons movement toward a goal: the "sermon in a sentence" comes quite early, the narrative images spiraling around it in successive waves.

Others are not quite so enamored with stories but continue to speak of narrative sermonic form. David Buttrick in Homiletic (1987) advocates dropping the use of all but the briefest stories in order to avoid distracting from the central message. Nevertheless, he speaks of sermon structure in terms of "plot," which, he claims, is not limited to stories. Here, as with Craddock, "narrative" has to be so carefully qualified that its use is at best, a metaphor.

Amid all the enthusiasm for narrative as a theological and homiletical category, "narrative preaching" came to embrace and overshadow ‘inductive preaching." Those infatuated with stories may wake up one Sunday to find themselves in the middle of Willimon’s sermonic hodgepodge, while critics of narrative theology may inadvertently throw out the inductive baby with the narrative bath.

Willimon lumps narrative and inductive preaching together, but directs his ire against the former: narrative sermons with little but entertainment value. That he does not understand inductive preaching is shown by his claim that "we preach a string of disconnected images without any transition . . . . because . . . we do not want our hearers to make the connections." The truth is exactly the opposite -- we want the hearers to make the connections themselves. Willimon’s alternative to narrative triviality, "to engage in thoughtful, often painful reassessment of our circumstances; to think it out, to consider the evidence and to act on our verdict" actually invites an inductive process. The way forward is backwards -- not to old-fashioned exposition, but to truly inductive preaching.

Willimon’s confusion points out a widespread conceptual defect among those who would preach inductively. In our typical sermon, a "theme sentence" is announced and illustrated with a myriad of disconnected images. This statement of "what the gospel is all about" is treated as a starting point rather than a goal: this is what the Bible means, take my word for it , no sense in getting into the details -- let’s talk about how Uncle Harry learned this lesson. The congregation is not led to see how the message was derived from the text and applied to the church. Worse yet, some preachers think inductive preaching means being deliberately obscure; the congregation is invited to discover not the message in the text, but whatever it is the preacher is trying to say.

Buttrick, Wilson and others pigeonhole the sermon into one form. Sermons constructed according to their advice would all sound the same. Craddock, on the other hand, never intended inductive preaching to be an exclusive form. The beauty of an inductive method is that each sermon will have a different form, depending on the biblical text preached. Narrative sermons can work well -- with narratives -- but a narrative preacher can’t handle Romans. An inductive preacher recognizes that a sermon on Romans requires a form different from one on Acts. Each sermon becomes unique, as each text is unique. If preaching has become trivial entertainment, perhaps we can blame narrative homiletics or a host of other factors. But let’s not blame inductive preaching without having tried it.

The Religious Response to Reproductive Technology

The controversial "Baby M" case and the recent Vatican document on "respect for human life and its origins" have prompted many in the religious world to face the ethical issues raised by the new reproductive technologies. Our understanding of the relationship between sex and procreation has been challenged by heretofore unimagined methods of reproduction. The emotional needs of parishioners who are eager to have children and have no hope other than these new procedures have also forced theologians to re-examine traditional doctrines.

On March 10, 1987, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its "Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origins and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain Questions of the Day," which expressed the Vatican’s moral opposition to such practices as in vitro fertilization (IVF) , artificial insemination by donor (AID), surrogate motherhood, embryo freezing, and artificial insemination by husband (AIH) when semen is collected through masturbation. The instruction did not represent a change in the Vatican’s position. In 1949, Pope Pius XII expressed opposition to both AIH and AID, and in 1982 Vatican radio condemned IVF as a venture "into the realm of immorality." The instruction was clearly attempting to influence the choices of infertile couples and to encourage a public call for government restrictions on reproductive technology.

On March 31, 1987, Judge Harvey R. Sorkow of the New Jersey Superior Court awarded custody of "Baby M" to the child’s biological father and stripped her biological surrogate mother of all parental rights. In making this decision, Sorkow declared legal the practice of surrogate motherhood and of surrogacy contracts. Since then, the New Jersey Supreme Court has reversed Sorkow’s decision, declaring surrogacy contracts in violation of New Jersey adoption law but allowing Baby M’s biological father to retain custody. Surrogacy contracts are also illegal in Michigan and Louisiana, but several other states have passed legislation permitting such contracts.

Reproductive technology raises the question of whether it is proper for science to interfere with natural reproduction. Jerry Falwell argues against surrogacy on the grounds that "God’s way is still the best way." The Vatican instruction argues that reproductive technology tempts man "to go beyond the limits of a reasonable dominion over nature." Taken to their logical extreme, however, these arguments would lead to the rejection of all types of medical treatment for infertility. (It should be noted that the Vatican instruction does not oppose the use of fertility drugs or surgical measures to diagnose and treat infertility.) Certain Jewish writers, in contrast, take the opposite tack and argue that people have a moral obligation to take all reasonable steps necessary to preserve reproductive health.

Another pertinent ethical question is whether it is morally right to subject potential parents and unborn infants to treatments whose long-term effects cannot possibly be known. The late Paul Ramsey, writing from a Protestant perspective, argued that IVF entails substantial health risks to the future baby and must therefore be rejected. In response, Priscilla and William Neaves argue in "Moral Dimensions of In Vitro Fertilization" (Perkins Journal, Winter 1986) that the risk of having an abnormal child is no greater with IVF than with natural conception. People who "object to IVF for this reason should find natural conception equally objectionable," they say. Surrogacy also raises ethical concerns about health risks to the biological mother. Some Jewish theologians have opposed surrogacy on the grounds that because giving birth puts a woman’s life in danger, she should not take the risk of childbirth unless she will enjoy the benefit of keeping the child.

Some ethicists object to reproductive technology on the grounds that it is immoral to spend time and resources on extraordinary means of promoting births when attention should be devoted to preventing unwanted births and improving the health of all infants. Others suggest that reproductive technology and the concern with infertility promotes an idolatrous view of parenthood that values genetic parenthood more than the act of nurturing a child. While recognizing this danger, Janet McDowell in "Ethical Implications of In Vitro Fertilization" (The Christian Century, October 19, 1983) argues that this attitude is no more common among IVF couples than among those able to conceive normally. Finally, some claim that reproductive technology will promote a perception of children as products rather than as human beings to be cherished in their own right.

sufficient that the spheres be held together, so that there is no procreation apart from marriage, and no full sexual intimacy apart from a context of responsibility for procreation.

Though orthodox Jewish opinion rejects masturbation, it supports AIH if no other method causes the wife to become pregnant and there has been a reasonable waiting period after marriage. Some fundamentalist Protestants who have addressed the issue do not oppose artificial insemination within the context of marriage.

Treatments that involve laboratory collection of genetic material (AIH, AID and IVF) raise questions about the appropriate use of such materials. Treatments like IVF, which involve the creation of a human embryo outside the womb or the removal of an embryo from the womb, raise questions about the moral status of the embryo and its rights. Can it be destroyed or experimented upon? Who will look out for its interests? The Vatican instruction condemns both the freezing of human embryos and nontherapeutic experimentation on human embryos. While not all religious leaders would rule out experimental use of embryos, most believe that human genetic material should be used only under limited conditions. The Vatican and some fundamentalist Protestants view the discarding of extra embryos as abortion. But most religious commentators believe that the best response to this problem is to see that reproductive technology is regulated, not banned.

Treatments that introduce genetic material from a third party (e.g., AID, ovum transfer, surrogacy) raise other questions. Does this technology violate the exclusiveness of marriage? What are the moral and legal rights and obligations of the contributor of genetic material? What are the emotional ramifications for the couple when only one partner is the biological parent?

Even theologically liberal Catholics are inclined to agree with the Vatican that the use of third-party genetic material violates the sanctity of the marriage covenant. Some fundamentalist Protestants even deem it tantamount to adultery. Some Jewish theologians reject AID not because it could be construed as adultery -- they argue that it is extramarital sexual intercourse and not the use of the genetic materials of a third party that constitutes adultery -- but because it could result in inheritance problems and because a child with an unknown parentage may unwittingly commit incest. Reform Jews, arguing that the latter is quite unlikely, consider AID permissible.

Are male and female roles in creating offspring equal, and does the nurturer of a child have the same rights as the child’s progenitor? These issues arise when a woman gives birth on behalf of others, through surrogacy, for example, or some possible applications of IVF. Also significant is whether contracts and monetary arrangements should govern human reproduction. Orthodox Jewish theologians oppose surrogacy for this reason, as well as for the health risks it poses for the birth mother. On the other hand, some liberal rabbis see surrogacy as an acceptable option when all other methods have been exhausted. While opinion is by no means unanimous, most religious leaders reject surrogacy. The Vatican instruction’s arguments against AID apply here as well, and fundamentalist Protestants dismiss surrogacy straightforwardly.

This is what theologians and religious ethicists are saying about reproductive technology. But is anybody listening? Judging from statistics on patients at the P/F clinics on Catholic attitudes on other sexual issues, on the attitudes of the general public toward reproductive technology, and on qualitative research conducted by my colleagues and me, it appears that infertile couples are not heeding religious advice. Studies have found high levels of public support for reproductive technology -- sometimes as high as 90 percent for IVF and 20 to 60 percent for AID and surrogacy (though those who support it in theory may not necessarily choose it for themselves if they were to find themselves infertile and desired children)

Given Catholic teaching on the subject, we might expect infertile Catholic couples to be less likely to choose IVF and other reproductive technologies. But a New. York Times journalist who spoke to infertile Catholic couples after the release of the Vatican instruction found that while they were upset by the statement, they did not see it influencing their choice of treatment. Indeed, Catholic laypeople seem to feel quite free to depart from church teachings on issues related to sexuality -- a 1985 poll found that 73 percent of American Catholics believed that Catholics should be permitted to divorce and remarry; 68 percent approved of the use of artificial means of birth control; and 63 percent believed priests should be allowed to marry. Catholics will probably react similarly to Vatican positions on reproductive technology.

My interviews with infertile couples indicate that such indifference to religious objections is widely shared. For the couples I interviewed, practical concerns overshadow ethical concerns. These couples have one overriding goal: to become parents. They judge treatment options primarily on whether they are efficient and practical.

None of the couples were reconciled to childlessness. The one couple who had not pursued treatment at the time of the interview decided that it was time for the wife, at age 41, to begin an infertility work-up. No one who had stopped treatment mentioned ethical or religious reservations. Couples rejected treatment not because the next step was morally repugnant but because they were tired of the process or because they saw adoption as a faster means of realizing their goal.

The Vatican instruction calls upon infertile couples who have had no success with church-accepted treatment to find in their sterility "the occasion for other important services to the life of the human person; for example, adoption, various forms of educational work and assistance to other families and to poor or handicapped children." Most of the couples in my sample are more than willing to adopt, but would not find the Vatican’s other suggestions for coping with infertility very helpful. Infertile couples see infertility as an immense problem, but one to conquer, not one to become resigned to. Thus, they are not inclined to take the religious critique to heart. Reproductive technology, most notably the advent and acceptance of birth control, is in part responsible for this "do anything, try anything" attitude, and for the relative lack of attention to ethical and religious concerns. The couples I surveyed are part of the first generation to come of age in a time when birth control was widely available. They are the first generation to come of age believing in the myth of birth control -- that the human reproductive process can be controlled by technology.

Infertile women who pursue high-tech treatments are sometimes portrayed as victims of a societal belief that achieving motherhood is the only way to become "a real woman." The women in my sample were not necessarily "traditional," however. I found it was the less traditional women who were most likely to pursue treatment. They were shocked and demoralized when they realized that birth isn’t as controllable as they thought, but they remained committed to finding technical solutions to what they perceived, as medical problems.

Furthermore, infertile men and women today have some reasons for hope. Though some have likened the response of the infertile couple to childlessness to that of a person grieving over a death, the analogy between infertility and death is no longer accurate. Death is final and undeniable, but infertility is not. New treatments are constantly being developed, and some infertile couples conceive independent of treatment. Few couples are ever told that they have no chance to conceive. The open-ended nature of infertility is, to the infertile couple, a mixed blessing: though they can always hope to have a child, this hope makes it hard for them ever to resign themselves to infertility.

Whereas a woman could once say, "I must accept that bearing a child has been foreclosed," now she must consciously decide to stop treatment -- she must take responsibility for "giving up." Acceptance of one’s infertility has been transformed from an act of humble resignation to an act of selfish will. This attitude makes it exceedingly difficult for many couples to stop pursuing parenthood. Thus the treatment approach to infertility raises another ethical concern: Is it exploitative to offer expensive and often futile treatments to people desperate to have a child?

As medical knowledge about infertility has increased, the ethics of reproduction is no longer the concern solely of the church. When infertility was considered a predestined state, infertile couples were probably more influenced by religious interpretations. Appeals to moral rights and wrongs are less convincing when we believe we can change our condition through technical know-how. Accepting the Vatican instruction’s approach to infertility requires a spirit of resignation -- not a common spirit among couples pursuing infertility treatment.

Religious commentators’ objections to reproductive technology are not likely to have much influence on either the decisions of infertile couples or on the attitudes of the general public. Public policy is likely to reflect secular, ethical and legal concerns. This is not, however to say that religious leaders will not exert a powerful influence on the development of reproductive technology. Religious groups’ main influence will stem from their direct influence on medical protocols. For example, most IVF clinics implant all fertilized eggs in the uterus to avoid criticism from Catholic leaders and others who believe that allowing a fertilized egg to die is tantamount to abortion. I suspect that many Catholic hospitals will develop GIFT (gamete inter-fallopian transfer) clinics rather than IVF clinics, because GIFT seems to be more acceptable to the Vatican. (In this procedure, instead of mixing sperm and egg specimens in a petrie dish and then implanting the embryo in the mother, doctors surgically implant sperm into the mother’s fallopian tube, where fertilization would occur in natural conception. Ironically, Catholic leaders have supported GIFT by deeming it more "natural" than IVF, though the former requires monthly surgery and the latter none.) It is heartening to think that religious organizations will be able to shape medical practice in ways that will help infertile couples while avoiding some of the ethical difficulties that the new reproductive technologies present.

Why ‘Separation’ Is Not the Key to Church-State Relations

Ask most educated Americans what the Constitution has to say about religion and they will respond: it requires a "separation between church and state." Never mind that these words appear nowhere in the Constitution, nor even in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof") , nor in the debates over its framing, nor in the documents that were its source and inspiration. The guiding metaphor, the "wall of separation between church and state," first appeared in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson 14 years after the First Amendment was drafted. Now it has overshadowed the actual language of the First Amendment.

Metaphors are not necessarily bad things, and this one captures an important element of religious freedom. If the institutions of religion and government were merged, the result would surely be, in the Supreme Court’s words, "to destroy government and to degrade religion." Neither the government controlled by a church nor a church controlled by the government will be what a government or a church ought to be.

In recent church-state controversies, however, the ideal of separation has come in conflict with the wider and more important ideal of religious freedom. A few examples, taken from recent Supreme Court cases, illustrate this point.

When Congress decided in 1965 to fund special remedial educational programs for needy youngsters, it recognized that many inner-city children attend private religious schools, either out of religious convictions or because such schools are the only affordable alternative to deficient public schools. Wanting to reach all eligible children, Congress required that remedial programs for those attending private schools be "comparable" in quality to public school programs. It turned out that the least expensive and most effective way to accomplish this was to send remedial teachers onto the premises of private schools. Experience from representative cities like New York, St. Louis, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, showed that transporting the children to other sites would consume up to one-third of the program’s budget. On top of that it would expose the children to greater safety hazards, it would tend to make the participants more conspicuous and thus brand them as inferior, and it would cause the children to lose more classroom time.

For 19 years the program operated on this basis in cities like New York without a single complaint that the remedial teachers had stepped over the line into religious matters. An extensive factual record, developed in the lower court, confirmed this situation.

In 1985 the Supreme Court ordered the program to stop. Allowing public remedial teachers to go onto the premise of parochial schools, it said, was an "excessive entanglement between church and state." The court opined (contrary to all the evidence) that the "pervasively sectarian" atmosphere of the parochial schools might cause remedial teachers, either "subtly or overtly," to begin to "indoctrinate the students in particular religious tenets at public expense." The most striking feature of this opinion is its almost mystical fear of religious influence. Few believers would be so bold as to claim that the mere atmosphere of their institutions is so spiritually charged that professionally trained secular teachers start to preach the gospel as part of remedial English and math.

Separationists cheered the decision. The precious wall of separation between church and state was rebuilt higher and more solid than ever.

For the needy children and their families -- not to mention for the legislation’s social objectives -- the ruling was a disaster. The schools were forced to adopt substitute programs that were at once more costly and less effective. By one official estimate, 5,000 fewer needy children could be served in New York City alone because of the money spent transporting them to ether locations.

This case also demonstrates how separation can conflict with religious freedom. Poor parents, no less than rich, have the constitutional right to educate their children in their religious faith. This is a right most prized by members of minority faiths who fear that the public schools will undermine their religious identity -- and by families like the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jewish ones that were the largest participants in the program in New York City. If the government were to fine a parent $10 for sending his or her child to a religious school, everyone would recognize this as an unconstitutional penalty on the exercise of religious freedom. The parents in the remedial program case were fined far more than $10. The court denied them access to a program that might improve their child’s future lot in life. Parents were put to a cruel choice: either give up their plans for a religious education or forfeit their child’s right to the kind of remedial education program Congress provides for all other children. When the First Amendment is interpreted to penalize religious choice in this way, there is a problem with the interpretation.

At public high schools across the country, students are permitted to form clubs and organizations, to speak and distribute leaflets or petitions, and to exercise free-speech rights not dissimilar to those we all have under the First Amendment. Sometimes their speech is rude or offensive; sometimes they support causes, like gay rights or the legalization of marijuana, that many in the community do not approve of. But so long as they do not disrupt the disciplines of the school, and their speech is strictly student-initiated and non-curricular, their rights are scrupulously protected.

Unless the students want to talk about religion.

Court after court has held that "while students have First Amendment rights to political speech in public schools," First Amendment considerations "limit their right to air religious doctrines." "Students’ free speech and associational rights . . . are severely circumscribed by the Establishment Clause in the public school setting." Loosely translated, this means that the First Amendment does not protect, but restricts, free speech in public schools if it is religious in nature.

This requires public officials to engage in continuous, discriminating, intrusive censorship of student expression. Students have the right to air extremist political "doctrine," secular philosophical "doctrine," even, presumably, the "doctrine" that God is dead and that religion is the opiate of the people. This is elementary free speech. But -- as one court recently held -- if a student hands another student a piece of paper stating that "if any man is in Christ he is a new creature," that act violates the principle of separation of church and state.

The Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service owns large tracts of wilderness in California held sacred by certain Native American tribes. Their members have come from time immemorial to worship in the solitude of these places. But now the Forest Service proposes to build a logging road through the area, a step that, as the district court noted, "would virtually destroy the Indians’ ability to practice, their religion."

The words of the First Amendment would seem to apply: Congress shall make no law "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]." But the metaphor of separation so dominates our legal thought that one instead turns to the question: how does the government avoid "entanglement" with religion? The government cannot own or maintain a church. Can it own or preserve an outdoor worship area? Should the government be permitted to promote the religious interests of a religious group by subordinating the secular interests of other citizens in access to logging areas? The Native Americans in this case were asking the Forest Service to become deeply entangled with religion by adapting its policies to their religious beliefs. Once again separationism stood in conflict with religious freedom. Sad to say, once again separationism won and religious freedom lost.

Even some who call themselves "separationists" agree that some or all of these decisions are unfortunate, recognizing that the theory of separation must be leavened with concern for religious freedom as well. Unfortunately, the theory in its most rigid form (call it "strict separation") has tended to impede development of more attractive interpretations of the First Amendment. The result in the courts has been a doctrinal muddle. The courts frequently stop short of insisting on strict separation, but they have failed to offer a principled or predictable alternative.

How have these results come to pass?

The Supreme Court, in a famous decision in 1971 (Lemon v. Kurtzman) , announced a three-part test for an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Government action violates the Constitution if it: (1) has no "secular purpose"; (2) has a "primary effect" that "advances religion"; or (3) entails an "excessive entanglement between church and state." While the first two tests might be interpreted to require neutrality toward religion, the "entanglement" test is pure separationism. Whether neutral or not, government action is unconstitutional if the spheres of religion and government are involved with each other. The public sphere must be strictly secular.

This test has had two unfortunate results. First, it has put religious freedom and diversity on a collision course with the welfare-regulatory state. If the public sphere, must be secular, then an expanding public sphere implies a shrinking sphere for religion and religious diversity. In the early days of the Republic, Jefferson could peak with some accuracy of a "wall of separation between church and state" because the limited sphere of government so rarely intersected the sphere of religion. The best protection for religion was to leave it alone. Since then, and especially in the 20th century, the scope of governmental activity has broadened to encompass areas, like education and social welfare; which in Jefferson’s day were private and mostly religious. These areas of overlap between a socially involved religious sector and a socially involved state tend to be the areas of church-state conflict today.

Social welfare activities typically involve interaction between government funding agencies and a variety of private service providers, both religious and nonreligious. Private groups can often deliver assistance to the needy more quickly, cheaply and humanely than can government bureaucracies, with greater sensitivity to the diverse interests, backgrounds and beliefs of the client population. Emergency shelters and feeding programs, for example, rely heavily on church and synagogue facilities and religious volunteers; the government supplies all or a part of the operating costs of food, blankets and the like. The same is true for international disaster relief, orphanages, family planning, refugee settlement, adoption services and hospitals. In all these areas and more, religious and other private organizations perform a large part of the services, and federal, state and local governments provide a large part of the funding.

To the strict separationist, these religious-governmental interactions are, at best, tolerable deviations from the separationist ideal. In principle, strict separatiomsts are committed to a long-term policy of secularizing government-supported social welfare activities. Already they have succeeded in imposing rigid restrictions on churches that participate in the federal government’s homeless shelter program. On the agenda for the next term of Congress is a proposal to channel assistance for day care only to secular day-care centers (or church-based centers that promise to act as if they were secular)

The result, of course, is less diversity in the mixed government-private philanthropic sector. Instead of having a variety of options, poor people dependent on government funding will be confined to a homogenously secular set of alternatives. Their range of choice will shrink; the overall level of pluralism and diversity in society will decline; the financial pressure of government subsidies will tempt religiously affiliated organizations to abandon their religious witness in order to serve more of the needy. Under conditions of the modern welfare-regulatory state, separationism is a powerful engine of secularization.

The second unfortunate consequence of the Lemon test is that it calls into question attempts to accommodate the religious needs of religious minorities. If the government takes affirmative action to facilitate the free exercise of religion, does this action have a "secular purpose"? Accommodating free-exercise rights necessarily "advances religion," and not infrequently will generate "entanglements with religion" as well. Thus, in recent years the Supreme Court has invalidated a Connecticut law (passed to replace the prior Sunday closing law) allowing workers to select their Sabbath day as their day off from work, struck down a Massachusetts statute allowing churches and schools to object to the issuance of liquor licenses in their near vicinity, and abolished an Alabama law allowing students in public schools a moment of silence.

None of these accommodations would induce or encourage anyone to adopt a religious practice against his or her will. Each of them seeks to protect’ the freedom to follow a religious practice in circumstances in which social or governmental action might threaten or inhibit it. But each runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s Lemon test.

Indeed, the separationist logic of the Lemon test has come into direct conflict with the free-exercise clause, which has been given poor second place in the Supreme Court’s First Amendment cases. Since 1972, the year after Lemon, the Supreme Court has rejected every claim by an individual to a free-exercise exemption, with the sole exception of claims for unemployment compensation, which are controlled by clear precedent dating back to 1963. Orthodox Jews have been expelled from the military for wearing yarmulkes; a religious community in which all members worked for the church and believed that acceptance of wages would be an affront to God has been forced to yield to the minimum wage; religious colleges have been denied tax exemptions for enforcing what they regard to be religiously compelled moral regulations; Amish farmers who refuse Social Security benefits have been forced to pay Social Security taxes; and Muslim prisoners have been denied the right to challenge prison regulations that conflict with their worship schedule.

Part of the explanation for these decisions is an exaggerated deference by conservative justices to assertions of governmental interests. But these justices would be in a minority if they were not joined by others who vote against free-exercise claims on separationist grounds. Justice John Paul Stevens, probably the most thoroughgoing separationist on the Supreme Court, has stated frankly that in his view, there is "virtually no room" for a free-exercise challenge to a facially neutral governmental practice. Free-exercise claims, he says, conflict with the "overriding interest in keeping the government.., out of the business of evaluating the relative merits of differing religious claims." Note the way in which the ideal of separation ("keeping the government out of the business") has come to overshadow even the free-exercise clause itself.

The results of these and other Supreme Court decisions call to mind the warning issued by Justice Arthur I Goldberg (no Moral Majoritarian, he) some 25 years ago in the School Prayer Cases. He commented that rigid 3 interpretations of the establishment clause can lead to

results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious.

Given these results, why is separationism still the dominant position of many civil libertarians, including most Jewish and mainline Protestant leaders in the field of church-state thought? One reason, I suspect, is a reflexive hostility to fundamentalists and socially conservative Catholics whose religious way of life is most likely to come into conflict with the dominant strains of our liberal secular culture. To the extent that this is true, mainline religious leaders ought to reconsider their position. Fundamentalists and ether conservative religious groups deserve our sympathy and toleration (even if they sometimes are intolerant of the rights of others) They are often the victims of religious bigotry and bureaucratic indifference.

More substantial is the fear that if separationism is abandoned, advocates of a "Christian nation" or some other version of religious, uniformity will come to the fore. At least we know that separationism will fend off the worst evils of church-state combination. If the "wall of separation" is lowered, we are told, our schools may be returned to the days of prayers prescribed by state legislatures; evolution may be banished from the classroom and replaced by "creation science"; and religious minorities may be at the mercy of intolerant majorities. Given the choice between separationism and its opposite, it is no wonder that most thoughtful people choose separationism. This is why we need a fresh approach to church-state thinking.

While separationism focuses on government involvement with religion, neutrality focuses instead on the effect of government action on individuals. Government action is "neutral" if it neither induces nor discourages religious belief or action -- in other words, if it offers neither incentive nor disincentive to practice a faith.

When the federal government provides the same remedial education to children whether they choose religious or secular education, it is being neutral. No parent will be induced to send a child to parochial school because of the program, since he or she can get the same program at public school. Separation, by contrast, is not neutral -- the child can obtain remedial help only by forgoing religious education. Separation thus introduces a powerful incentive to abandon a religious practice.

Similarly, when public schools treat all student speech the same way, they neither advance nor inhibit religion. They no more endorse religion when they allow the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to meet than they endorse a political candidate when they allow political clubs to meet. If there is any misunderstanding, school officials should take the opportunity to explain the fundamental principle of free speech in America: the government does not endorse every viewpoint it fails to suppress.

Far from endangering the major successes of the separationism movement, an understanding of the First Amendment based on neutrality and accommodation would provide a more persuasive underpinning for them. The real reason to be troubled by official spoken prayers in the public schools, for example, is not that they breach the "wall of separation" but that they encourage (and, given peer pressure, probably coerce) adoption of a bureaucratically dictated religious practice. Under the neutrality-accommodation approach, the Supreme Court’s school prayer decisions can be seen as protecting the independence and vitality of religious life (something most Americans support) rather than as succumbing to secularism (something most Americans oppose)

Some may be concerned that a policy of neutrality sometimes allows religious organizations to benefit from government programs, and thus from the expenditure of tax dollars. But this does not mean that religion is being favored by the state. If religious organizations -- be they homeless shelters, international aid agencies, day-care centers, colleges or hospitals -- are performing services the government wishes to support, there is no reason why they should not be eligible to participate on equal terms with non-religious organizations. A truly neutral government will direct its support according to neutral, secular criteria, neither favoring nor disfavoring organizations with a religious affiliation.

Accommodation is a special kind of neutrality. Sometimes a facially neutral governmental practice will affect some beliefs or institutions more severely than others. In order to ensure that the effect of government action is neutral toward religion, it is sometimes necessary for the government to tailor its programs to religious needs. Congress prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, for example, but quite properly exempts the Roman Catholic position on employing male priests. The government keeps its doors open on Jewish high holy days, but it grants leaves of absence to Jewish workers. Fortunately, despite some false starts and great confusion arising from the Lemon tests, the Supreme Court has recently recognized that religious accommodations can be permissible under the establishment clause.

Accommodations to religion should be upheld so long as they merely facilitate a religious choice freely made by the individual, do not invade the religious freedom of others, and do not discriminate among different religions. The government should not be permitted to create incentives for religious practice or belief (like giving favored status to religious organizations, as compared to other nonprofits) , to facilitate the religious practices of some at the expense of others (like offering vocal prayers in public schools) , or to accommodate one religion but not others with similar needs or problems (like limiting draft exemptions to members of traditional "peace churches") Within these guidelines, religious accommodations are fully in keeping with the First Amendment -- albeit in conflict with strict separation.

Some say that accommodations of religion are not neutral because they require special treatment of religion. This represents a deep misunderstanding of the purpose of the First Amendment. The Constitution requires neutrality toward religion; it does not require neutrality toward religious choice. On the contrary, the Constitution extends the highest protection to what the framers believed to be the inalienable right to exercise religion according to the dictates of individual conscience. Nor does the Constitution seek to create a secular public sphere. Religious pluralism and diversity -- not secularism -- are the animating principles of the First Amendment.

Separation between church and state is obviously a worthy goal, an important part of the American conception of religious freedom. Separation will frequently be the best means of preserving religious autonomy. But separation is not, and cannot be, the central guiding principle. Too often in recent years, separation has come into conflict with the more central principle of religious freedom. When it does, the metaphor must give way to the substance.

The Bible as Canon

The need for canonical criticism has been addressed elsewhere (for example, in Horizons in Biblical Theology 2 [1980], pp. 173-197). It has emerged in part as a way for the guild of biblical scholarship to respond to a number of stimuli: (1) the increasing charges by many theologians, lay and professional, that biblical criticism has tended to lock the Bible into the past as well as to make it a kind of archaeological tell which only experts can dig what author James Smart has called the strange silence of the Bible in the churches; (2) the vastly increased knowledge about the great variety of theologies and denominations in early Judaism and the early church and their differing canons of Scripture; (3) the modern ecumenical movement, which makes it impossible any longer to ignore the great variety of today’s theologies and denominations as well as their differing canons of Scripture; (4) increasing awareness of the hermeneutics which the ancient biblical authors themselves used when they called on traditions they had inherited, in both the Old Testament and the New; (5) new respect for the theological depths in the hermeneutics of the ancient biblical speakers and writers (called tradents); (6) growing consciousness among serious students of the Bible that biblical pluralism simply will not go away but begs to be formally recognized as a blessing equal to any other the Bible has to offer; (7) more awareness that only in its ongoing dialogue with the believing communities which produced it and which continue to find their identity in it does the Bible have its proper Sitz im Leben and hence its life-giving potential; and, finally; (8) the problem of biblical authority for the student who refuses to set aside intellectual honesty in biblical study.

Its nature as canon had to be bracketed, or set apart for later consideration, early in the history of modem biblical criticism in order for scholars to focus on the history of its formation. In the 18th century, canon meant primarily authority, and that authority was the province of the churches. By the end of the 18th century, German church historian and biblical scholar Johann Salomo Semler and others had reduced the concept of canon to the final stage in the history of the literary formation of the Bible. By the end of the 19th century, what started out as the sources labeled by biblical critics as J, E, D and P ended up being placed at Jamnia, the c. 100 CE. rabbinical synod. Western minds needed some authoritative council to wrap up canonization, and they found it, or so they thought, in Jamma. Hence canonization meant the means whereby the large literary units, the several books, got included and others were left out. Authority was superimposed upon the resulting compilation by an assembly of rabbinic scholars not unlike themselves. Thus reduced to what was manageable by the tools of literary and historical criticism, the concept of canon was tamed and remained docile until recently. Views of the canon of the New Testament and how it took shape have been similar.

This process has had to be critically reviewed. Recent work has shown that Jamnia was not an authoritative council at all in the sense that Western minds recognize. And the concept of canon is so integral to the very nature of the Bible that it would not stay tamed.

Lately, scholars have been more conscious that biblical criticism has all along subscribed to a view of the authority of Scripture, even while it tried to set the problem of inspiration and authority aside as improper for criticism to handle. One of the major characteristics of biblical criticism has been its pursuit of the ipsissima verba (or vox) -- the very words themselves, or the voice itself -- of the original speakers, writers and contributors to Scripture. As an exercise in historical research, such a pursuit has been quite legitimate. That is, it is right for the historian to attempt insofar as possible to recover what really was said and done by persons the Bible depicts. The historian must try to determine what in a given passage derives from that person and what seems to be added by a later hand. Then the searcher has the data at hand to reconstruct the moment in history under study, in order to present a cohesive and reasonably accurate account of what went on back there.

Unfortunately, the exercise has spilled over its normal bounds and become confused with the question of authority. When the textbook or the professor claims that such and such a passage is "secondary" or "spurious," the designation is supposed to be limited to the exercise in historical research; but almost invariably the student is left to believe that the passage is also spurious with regard to its authority for the liturgical and instructional life of the believing community. One wonders how many mainline-seminary-trained preachers, when preparing lessons and sermons, avoid those passages they were taught were "secondary." The tacit assumption is that if the words of the passage should be denied the original speaker or writer, then those words do not have the authority necessary to be sermon material.

That assumption presupposes a view of authority shared with fundamentalists and literalists, namely that inspiration of Scripture was from God or Holy Spirit to the ancient person vertically -- whose words were then horizontally preserved by disciples, preachers and scribes more or less accurately. The difference between biblical critics who fall into this confusion, on the one hand, and fundamentalists and the inerrancy folks on the other, is only quantitative. Biblical critics contend that only a certain percentage of the passage or the biblical book can be traced to the ancient person m whose name it is recorded, while inerrancy proponents claim that all of it can. As in so many other areas, liberals and fundamentalists really subscribe to the same basic presuppositions, the difference between them often being superficial, though seemingly irreconcilable.

The Princeton theologians Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield -- sometimes called the thoughtful fundamentalists -- put their position clearly in an article titled "Inspiration" published in the Presbyterian Review in 1881 (Vol. 2):

It must be remembered that it is not claimed that the Scriptures any more than their authors are omniscient. . . They are written in human languages, whose words, inflections, constructions and idioms bear everywhere indelible traces of human error. . . . Nevertheless the historical faith of the Church has always been, that 811 the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds, whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical fact, or of psychological or philosophical principle, are without any error, when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense.

While the value of such a statement clearly does not lie in its view of church history, it is an invaluable statement of the view of biblical authority held by the rationalist fundamentalists in the midst of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy.

Canonical criticism brings a corrective to the confusion by facing up to the question of authority within the guild of biblical criticism and by giving a value to historical criticism: the Bible comes to us out of the liturgical and instructional lives of the ancient believing communities which produced and shaped it. What is in the text is there not only because someone in antiquity was inspired to speak a needed word to his or her community, but also because that community valued the communication highly enough to repeat it and recommend it to the next generation and to a community nearby. So-called secondary passages represent the appreciation of the community in adapting the message to its needs, and they show us, using the necessary critical tools, how they did so. The Bible as canon is a community product in this sense. We simply would not have the words of the early writers if their listeners and neighbors had not preserved them. In the case of the judgmental prophecies, as well as of some other literature, there was apparently a span of time during which only a few valued what had been said. But invariably there came a time when the larger community or communities valued the words enough to set them on a kind of tenure track toward canon. Archaeology is m the habit of finding the literary product of ancient geniuses whose words were not so valued. What is in the canon is what "made it," so to speak, in contrast to what has only recently been found in holes in the ground in the eastern Mediterranean area.

Canon and community must be thought of as belonging together both in antiquity and today. Heirs of the ancient tradents, the biblical speakers and writers, continue their dialogue with those traditions as recorded in the Bible. The believing community always was and always will be the proper Sitz im Leben of canon, and that community has always included both the geniuses and the learners, the leaders and the followers. Each has always needed the other. It matters little how much of a genius an ancient author was, or how inspired, if there was not a community to appreciate at some point what was done, said or written. The question of the authority of canon resides in the ongoing dialogue between the believing community and its canon. And that canon includes both the original words and the early community responses to them. The community’s appreciation of and adaptation of what the original speaker had said is comparable to that speaker’s appreciation and adaptation of the traditions he or she had cited in the "original" speech or writing. The Bible, Old Testament and New, is full of older authoritative community traditions called upon and adapted to the newer historical contexts of community need.

It is often said that the Old Testament is the largest component part of the New in the latter’s citations of and allusions to Scripture and tradition. But the Old Testament is also replete with repetition and citation of older community traditions as well as of tried and true international wisdom. The prophet or the psalmist rarely goes for long without ringing in the changes on the Torah story. And even the wisdom writers, such as Job and Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), while never citing the Torah story, over and over again reflect indirectly on the theological traditions of ancient Israel and Judah. The so-called later hands and editors are true heirs of the masters themselves in this regard, for they have done likewise. As biblical scholar Brevard Childs says of German critic Walther Zimmerli’s work on Ezekiel: it is the Ezekiel book which is canonical, not the prophet Ezekiel. Indeed, the faithful in the believing communities today simply go and do likewise when they take the canonical heritage and adapt it and apply it to present need. One might say, in traditional terms, that the Holy Spirit has been at work all along in the formation of Scripture and all along its pilgrimage in the believing communities ever since.

The seven characteristics of the new discipline are repetition, resignification, multivalency of single texts, pluralism within the Bible as a whole, the adaptability-stability quotient of canon, the textual restraints which guard against abuse of Scripture, and hermeneutics. I want to explain each and then focus on canonical pluralism.

(1) The first characteristic of canonical Scripture is repetition. What is in the canon got there because somebody repeated something, starting a process of recitation that has never ceased. Nothing anybody said or sang could have made it into canon unless somebody else repeated or copied it, and then another and another did the same.

(2) The fact that each time a text got repeated it got resignified, or altered slightly to fit the new context of repetition or recitation, goes without saying. Someone says wonderingly, "Every time I read that passage I get something new out of it." Right. Why? Because each new situation in which we read it gives us slightly different ears to hear and slightly different eyes to see what the passage can say. The original author may have had one thing in mind, but once what he or she said is "out there," it has a life of its own. Or (to use traditional terms) it is out there for the Holy Spirit to use as she sees fit, or (to use critical terms) it is subject to the hermeneutics applied to it in the new context in which it is cited.

(3) Canonical literature is multivalent; that is, it may have plural meanings or values. The very fact that it made it into the canon would so indicate. Nearly any intelligible group of words held together by syntax is multivalent, but this is especially true of canon. Just think of all the sermons preached on the same Sunday on a given passage selected by lectionary. Any two that are alike probably became so by collusion. The meaning derived from a passage depends on the hermeneutics applied to it. Look at how differently Habakkuk 2:4 is understood at the various places it shows up in Scripture. Examples are endless.

(4) Pluralism is the fourth characteristic, but because I want to focus on it later, we’ll skip over it for the moment.

(5) The fifth characteristic is canon’s dual nature of being both adaptable and stable, its adaptability-stability quotient. Until the emergence of canonical criticism, biblical scholarship focused almost exclusively on the stability factor when thinking of Scripture as canon; that is, the question of what books are in a particular canon and what books are left out. For example, why is the Hebrew Book of Esther, which never mentions God explicitly, in the canon, whereas Judith, which is quite orthodox, was left out? It depends on which ancient or modern denomination one is viewing. The ancient Essenes apparently had an open-ended canon with many more books in it than the canon of the Pharisees, and certainly with many more than that of the Sadducees. But a modern canon also depends on which denomination one considers. Protestants have a short canon, Roman Catholics have the deuterocanonical or apocryphal writings in addition, the Greek Orthodox include yet more books, and the ancient Ethiopian church has 81 books in its canon. Canon is adaptable.

(6) Even so, the texts have built-in constraints that must be observed. While it is true that certain hermeneutic techniques such as numerology, allegory and tropology can make a passage say just about anything, canonical criticism draws attention to the limits imposed by the texts. Current media apocalypticists usually can twist biblical passages to say whatever will draw the attention they want, but even very well-meaning, critically trained preachers sometimes take a passage beyond its clear limits. As heirs of the early tradents and scribes, it behooves us to honor their labors, and to respect the texts they have passed on to us.

(7) The Bible is full of unrecorded hermeneutics, the seventh and perhaps most important characteristic of the Bible as canon. Nearly every biblical speaker or writer repeats or cites older traditions, or, in the case of the New Testament, Scripture. And they all, of course, used hermeneutics in doing so. We can now, for the most part, ferret out those principles (see "Hermeneutics of True and False Prophecy," in Canon and Authority, Fortress, 1977, pp. 21-41). By hermeneutics we do not mean principally hermeneutic techniques or rules, though we want to know those as well. Rather we mean the hermeneutic axioms the writers used; that is, their theology. German theologian Gerhard Ebeling has said that hermeneutics is theology, and theology is hermeneutics. In the case of canonical hermeneutics it is the author’s or the tradent’s view of God which makes a tremendous difference in how a passage is read and made relevant.

There are two major hermeneutic axioms discernible in the Bible: the one stresses the grace of God as the faithful promiser; the other stresses the freedom of God, as creator, to judge and even transform his own people. Luke makes clear his view that the principal reason Jesus offended so many of the religious establishment of his day was that he read old familiar passages stressing God as God of all peoples. Luke establishes this pattern already in his report of the sermon at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30) and continues to make it clear through the central section of the gospel. Luke even puts God’s grace in the light of God’s freedom to express this grace outside the circle of the faithful. Practitioners of a corruption of Christian consciousness, in their apologetic need to feel unique, have tried to limit God’s freedom in this regard to what he did in Christ in the first century. The task of ferreting out the hermeneutics used by the ancient biblical thinkers and authors themselves may be the most important task canonical criticism has.

The fact that the Bible has multiple ways of saying things, different accounts of the same thing and a healthy dose of contradiction does not need rehearsal. To fail to recognize pluralism in the Bible is to be dishonest. One of the reasons fundamentalism is abhorrent to many Christians is its dogmatic dishonesty. Nothing called Christian should require dishonesty at the very heart of what it professes.

Many intellectual Christians retain an unexamined conviction that certain biblical themes ought to be discoverable everywhere in the Bible. I often tell my students that if they feel they’ve discovered a "biblical" idea or theme, they should look also for its contrapositive; it’ll probably be there. The same Gospel that quotes Jesus as saying he came to bring peace (John 14:27 ff.) also quotes him as saying, "For judgment came I into the world . . ." (John 9:39). Each statement must be read in its own context, but our attempts at harmonization only serve to blunt the Word.

The Bible comes to us from the cultures of five ancient periods: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Persian period, the Hellenistic period and the Roman era. It is written in three languages, with all the various idioms and cultural givens derived from those eras and languages. Isaiah 2 says there will come a time when Judah will beat its swords into plowshares and its spears into pruning hooks, but Joel 2 says the Lord commands Judah to beat its plowshares into swords and its pruning hooks into spears. Each statement should be read in context. These riches must not be harmonized out of existence. As Qoheleth 3 says, there is a time for picking up stones and a time to put them down. We know these things, and if we are honest enough to admit of biblical pluralism, then we ought to find a way to celebrate it and formalize it.

The perspective of canonical criticism on biblical pluralism is that it provides a built-in corrective apparatus so that we do not absolutize any one agenda, or think we have God boxed into a set of propositions. When a student "gets into" Jeremiah enough to get excited about his hermeneutics and his mind-blowing theology, I then advise that student to read Qoheleth. For Qoheleth might be said to do a Jeremiah on Jeremiah. Prophetic rhetoric is such that it tends at times to be hyperbolic, and one should simply not expect the Jeremiah book to touch all the bases necessary to contain full canonical truth. The sharper the prophetic challenge, the less theological burden it can bear. So Qoheleth is in the Bible as a corrective to any tendency we might have to lay too much stress on Jeremiah.

Instead of thinking through the tendency to charge books we like, such as Isaiah or Jeremiah or Romans, with the full weight of canonical truth, we tend also to squint at a book like Nahum or ignore it altogether -- or simply regret it. But look at the riches of having both Nahum and Jonah in the same prophetic corpus: one speaks of God’s judgments against the Ninevites and the other of God’s grace toward them. Canonically speaking, that is not essentially different from having Amos speak harsh words of God’s judgment against his own people as well as their neighbors, followed by an Obadiah who speaks harsh words of God’s judgment against Edom. God is creator and judge of all peoples, including his own, and God is redeemer of all peoples, even Assyria and Egypt (Isa. 19:24-25 and the book of Jonah). Deutero-Isaiah is amazingly pluralistic, as may be witnessed by scholarly efforts to claim he was a universalist, followed by efforts to assert he was a nationalist. Thank God we have not only Romans from Paul’s hand but also Galatians.

The multiple-Gospel tradition is a canonical treasure, and it is time we celebrated the significant differences among the Gospels. The Lord and the early churches have given us four Gospels; why not stress the differences where there are genuine differences, so as to reap the blessings in store? We usually either harmonize the differences away, prefer one Gospel to the others, or engage in a kind of reductionism to find consistent themes. Matthew sees poverty as a spiritual quality, and Luke sees it as an economic condition Christians should tackle in society. People need both emphases -- maybe not on the same day or in the same historical context, but the two Gospels have always been there when the churches through the ages have needed the challenge to hear the one or the other. Did the Roman centurion say Jesus was the Son of God (Matthew) or simply innocent (Luke)? Canonically speaking, we have the richness of both statements; we need to affirm the wisdom of the early believing communities in handing both down to us. The second century Syrian apologist Tatian’s Diatessaron, a harmonizing of the four Gospels into one account, did not win out. Nor did the reductionist efforts of Origen of Alexandria.

There is no one right view of Scripture. On the contrary, canonical pluralism assures that there is no construct that can be built on Scripture which is not judged, and, we hope, redeemed, by something else in it.

God is God, not the Bible or the canon within the canon of any one position built on it -- no matter how fervent or how sophisticated it may be. God is one and we are many. And canonically the Bible may be seen as an ongoing prophetic voice that can keep us from absolutizing any one biblical viewpoint or running out of the theological ballpark with a pet biblical theme. The greatest challenge the Bible has for us all is the challenge to monotheize -- to affirm the integrity of God both ontologically and ethically. And that may very well be the toughest challenge the human mind has ever met. Part of what is meant by human depravity (a term liberals need to hear more clearly) is our natural bent toward polytheizing. We’d much rather have a bad god do all the things we don’t like and the good God (ours, of course) to do all the good things we like, with the assurance that ours will win out in the long run. Christian anti-Semitism stems largely from a failure to monotheize.

But the promise of these canonical traditions is that if we make the effort to monotheize, nothing in all creation can claim us: there are no idols; on the contrary, polytheism is reduced to pluralism, which, submitted to the judgments of God, can be a blessing. But monotheism is not easy: the dark side of Yahweh becomes repugnant to liberals and conservatives alike, and we lose even our tremulous hold on reality. (Conservatives have the devil to thank for absolutely everything they don’t like, but he never seems to challenge their own most precious premises.)

I have dwelt on honesty in terms of the pluralism in the Bible. But honesty also means making the effort, on reading any passage in the Bible, to theologize about it first rather than moralizing about it first. One should first ask not what the passage says we should do but what it indicates God can do with such a situation. Then it strikes us that God can also manage to redeem our situations -- and that is the first note of salvation. If the pharaoh’s heart had been soft and he had issued an emancipation proclamation for the Hebrew slaves, there might be a stele or monument, of gratitude to him for archaeologists to discover near Goshen, but there would have been no Torah. One should theologize first, then moralize upon the result of that reflection. This liberates the reader from absolutizing Bronze-Age, Iron-Age, Persian-Period or Hellenistic-Roman mores, and helps him or her focus on what God can do with, and what we can do in, our own current reign of terror.

Besides honesty, humility is required: the ability to identify in the biblical accounts with Ramses, Nebuchadnezzar and Herod, or with the well-meaning false prophets, soft-headed polytheizers and God-fearing Pharisees, in order to hear Scripture’s challenge.

Last, humor is needed -- and this means taking God a little more seriously each time we read Scripture and ourselves a little less so. The Bible as canon is a monotheizing literature, Old Testament and New, as the Christian trinitarian belief confirms and reaffirms. It is also a theocentric literature. Its perspective is to celebrate what God can do with almost any fouled-up situation we can devise, for none could be worse than those the canon describes in its utter realism about ancient struggles. The Bible gives us a paradigm of that realism covering some 15 centuries in antiquity. Isn’t that enough for us to get the point?

On the strength of the belief that God continues to respond with creative redemption today to what we offer up, let us continue as heirs of the biblical tradents and attempt in our day to pursue the integrity of reality, the oneness of God, in our own situations. The promise is that some of that integrity might rub off on us.

Saul Alinsky: Homo Ludens for Urban Democracy

Book Review:

Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy, by Sanford D. Horwitt. Knopf, 640 pp., $29.95.

When Auxiliary Bishop Bernard J. Sheil of the Chicago archdiocese embraced labor leader John L. Lewis of the CIO at the founding convention of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council 50 years ago, it was not only high public theater but the beginning of community organization as we have come to know it. Working backstage and in the audience and planting interpretations in the press at that event was a second-generation American of Russian Jewish parents. a product of Chicago’s West Side and the University of Chicago sociology department, who had a hang-tough presence, wire glasses and a way of speaking that both adopted and created a Chicago brogue: Saul Alinsky.

Five years later, in Reveille for Radicals (1945) , Alinsky described the new community organizing strategy as "collective bargaining beyond the present confines of the factory gate." Only twice more would Saul Alinsky try to form community-labor alliances -- in the stockyard areas of Armourdale in Kansas City and South St. Paul. But the other elements of community organizing would come together again and again: the foot-slogging, one-on-one recruitment effort to form an organization of organizations, the struggle to get past ethnic differences, the taking of the public stage, the sequence of conflict-organization-power as the route to negotiation, and the critical relationship to other social movements -- which became a guarded relation to the civil rights movement.

The accomplishment of this big new book by Sanford Horwitt (his first) , eight years in the making. is to put a multitude of Alinsky stories into historical sequence. It also tells lesser-known stories about Alinsky’s parents, his lifelong ambivalence toward the university, his prison work, his acceptance by mob figures, and his marriages. It takes us behind the scenes with friends kept and friends lost, including the seven notables composing his Industrial Areas Foundation. It describes his crisscrossing the country on lecture trips. fascinating college audiences and subduing hecklers, and refers to some little-known writings (including a biography of John L. Lewis and a play featuring two towering characters very like Lewis and himself) It records the perennial problem and occasionally decisive effects of funding. It recounts scenes made in restaurants and drops not a few vanities and some duplicities along the way. All this will prompt renewed interpretations and not a few psychobiographical speculations.

The concern here is with the public question this figure embodied. For to ask about the future of community and democracy in industrialized cities is to ask about Alinsky. And his experience with the churches is part of that question.

How do you become part of the city if, as was the case with black newcomers after the war, you are, practically speaking, invisible? The tactic, sometimes practiced and sometimes imagined, was to expose the very prejudices and inflexibility of the Man: eating watermelon outside a place of business, or coming all day in a circle to the employment office -- like movie Indians coming over the hill. You could speculate about ways of making it clear you were here to stay -- by, for example, occupying all the waterclosets at O’Hare airport during rush hour. Somebody always asks whether these things really happened. Well, you have to remember the strategic rule that a threat can be more effective than the deed.

Certainly when 46 buses carrying 2,500 black passengers from the Woodlawn Organization arrived at Chicago City Hall for voter registration, you could count on getting the desired unbelief and consternation, including police with machine guns. You had only to know what ethnicity and delivery of votes means in Chicago. At a city council hearing on schools, 50 people from Woodlawn could look like hundreds to the press. To the neighbors of a slumlord, a handful of picketers could look like an invasion.

Visibility made it easier to expose what others were doing, even when it came to confronting and negotiating with corporate giants. The University of Chicago’s plan to expand southward over the Midway could be interpreted as a wish to keep Woodlawn people from coming northward. In Rochester, New York, where the issues were housing and jobs, Minister Florence of the FIGHT organization could put the word "plantation" on policies of the city housing commission and major corporations.

Obviously you can’t gain power or standing if, having become visible, you are viewed only as objects or clients. The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council identified (Alinsky would say "froze") two natural enemies: the Kelly-Nash Democratic political machine and the social work establishment. After forming the Industrial Areas Foundation, Alinsky never again mentioned his work ,with the Chicago Area Project for youth which had brought him to Back of the Yards. BYNC’s first conflict was with a prestigious University of Chicago settlement house. Social work associations in Chicago, as later in New York, reacted predictably and obligingly with claims of professional expertise and prerogatives. "Welfare colonialism" became a charged Alinsky phrase used to break "the social work paradigm."

Alinsky could stretch this target to include "liberals" of many stripes -- whose moral indignation and sense of commitment, he often observed, varied "inversely with their proximity to the scene of conflict." He took issue with other movements. For followers of Martin King in the South, no doubt, passive resistance was a necessary tactic; in the North you needed something more sophisticated -- stable -- disciplined, mass-based organizations. New Left students romanticized the poor; their dream of "participatory democracy" was merely quaint without urban-adapted organization; they wanted "revelation not revolution." (Alinsky was brusque with student leaders. He never met with King.)

Federal programs for the poor, designed when the Kennedys discovered "the other America" through Michael Harrington, were seen as the work of distant planners who, in Alinsky’s phrase, failed to see ‘the difference between the world as it is and the world as we would like it to be." The Community Action Program of the War on Poverty with its slogan "maximum feasible participation of the poor" might at first sight appear inspired by Alinsky. He called it "political pornography." To imagine that municipal officials would sit idly by while federal agencies paid communities to skirt patronage and fight City Hall was to imagine something "that never was nor ever will be." "Maximum feasible misunderstanding" was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase for it, who credited Alinsky with "a near-perfect prognosis." From church charities to foreign aid, assistance programs became acceptable only when the self-interest on all sides was clear.

Many of these schemes found a future in post-Minsky organizations. Today IAF, steered by Ed Chambers (Alinsky’s choice) and four area coordinators, has organizations in 23 cities. They have achieved electoral and infrastructure victories in San Antonio, engineered school reforms in Baltimore, and built "Nehemiah Plan" housing in East Brooklyn. Gale Cincotta, who grew up in Chicago’s Austin community and fought with an IAF organization against block-busting and panic-peddling, now runs the National Information and Training Center which carries the action to national policies affecting finance, investment and housing.

"Specifically American" is what Jacques Maritain (revealed in this book as Alinsky’s friend and confessor) said of Reveille for Radicals, which was a bestseller. Harry Boyte, who seeks a usable past in people’s organizations, places Alinsky in an American populist tradition and sees a future in which empowered communities come together to address common goods ("common wealth") -- which are both the means and ends of public communication.

The Urban Training Center in Chicago was a national boot camp for clergy and organizers during the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Alinsky was a regular lecturer there, along with other community theorists and practitioners: Richard Hauser, Milton Kotler (usually accompanied by Pastor Leopold Bemhard, then at First Lutheran in Columbus, Ohio) , SDS neighborhood organizers, SCLC clergy from many cities, SNCC organizers, Maulana Ron Karenga of black nationalist work in California, Ivan Illich of Puerto Rican New York and Cuernavaca, Mexico. Twenty years later we’d have to say it is Alinsky whose stories are most remembered and whose effects are most in evidence.

It was Alinsky who aroused the most controversy in the churches, partly by making himself a sign that was spoken against. Horwitt cites the many individuals and groups who found themselves offended religiously, morally or aesthetically by Alinsky’s espousal of self-interest and power, his "rubbing raw the sores of discontent," his irreverence and vulgarity. These included writers in The Christian Century, and a denominational urban specialist and founder of UTC, who left his church office and the UTC board for a post at HEW.

Others moved forward on the waves Minsky made, and helped make more waves by releasing funds for organizational efforts. A minister with migrant workers could be called to a metropolitan council of churches; involved local pastors could move to denominational commissions (and help create UTC) More than one seminary president ascribes his organizational skills to Alinsky training.

But Alinsky’s eye was on parish pastors. To a young Father John Egan on his first visit to the IAF office, Alinsky gave this advice: "Decide early whether you want to be a bishop or a pastor -- everything follows from that." For Egan, later assigned to work with parishes associated with Alinsky organizations and to supportive work with Alinsky staff, everything did. At UTC, as elsewhere, Alinsky pointed to the Bible as an organizer s training manual and to Moses and Paul as organizers. Without Paul, where would the Jesus movement be? A paper by Nicholas von Hoffman, "Finding and Making Leaders," became a near-canonic text on how to enter a community and make your way to the indigenous persons who really call the shots. "Action-reflection," a procedural term in urban training, became something more than a buzz phrase for clergy and seminarians who sat with organizer Tom Gaudette between engagements of a community organization, sometimes to 4 A.M. (hours preferred also by Alinsky)

Beyond the prospect of saving a parish neighborhood from fright and flight, clergy found the very experience of a neighborhood organizing effort fruitful for ministry. Where people can’t act much at all, they can hardly be expected to act in faith -- or unfaith. Clergy and congregations were alleged to know something about community creation, interpretation, polity, organization and reorganization. Why could not some of these disciplines be transferred to participation in the wider community (using, to be sure, somewhat different terms) ? In addition to IAF, there are today training groups in a half-dozen cities that work with both organizers and clergy.

Then as now the unresolved issue was race. Alinsky’s idea was that community organization was the instrument for overcoming racial conflict. If excluded people acquired a place to stand, if mutually suspicious people could deal with one another on the basis of common problems, maybe then. IAF organizers were attuned to keeping issues of race from emerging abstractly and dividing nascent organizations.

It remains an unsettled question, however, whether deep racial divisions can be transcended in this way. Back of the Yards managed to set aside ethnic differences between Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Irish and Germans only to use this combined power to keep out blacks. (It was time, Alinsky said, to organize on the outside.) Looking back on a similar story in the Organization of Southwest Communities, von Hoffman laid this result squarely at the door of the clergy -- who, he complained, were "practically a caricature, a cartoon, of the sins of omission and commission." "Somebody is finally going to have to speak bluntly about these appointments." When Ed Chambers first arrived on that scene, Alinsky worried that the young seminarian would try to talk theology to the pastors, "which of course they would not understand."

Many congregations and clergy spent their time asking whether Alinsky organizations were "acceptable." But the real question was what could be done from inside such organizations.

Civilization has been described as a contest between homo seriosus and homo rhetoricus and elsewhere. "Serious" people assume that their own thought matches up with things as they are and their counsels with things as they should be. Experts tend to be "serious." The churchman who left UTC because of conscientious objections to Alinsky was "serious."

"Rhetorical" people, on the other hand, use speech not to identify things but to constitute and reconstitute subjects in terms of interest, to take up roles within the social drama, to focus, to score, and to win. Life becomes a game which any number can play. The line between fact and fiction is softened: you can learn a lot from "fiction," and "facts" are, as the word implies, "made" by those who use them. Seriousness becomes a matter of suspicion since it can be used to patronize, suppress and exclude. To be serious about racism is to dignify it. A more appropriate response is a pie in the face (Alinsky did this literally) "When they’re serious," Fanny Bryce used to say, "you know they’re lyin’."

At the outset of Rules for Radicals (1971) Alinsky announced his intent to be a Machiavelli for the "have-nots" -- what the have-nots don’t have is power. Exactly here is where serious people raise serious questions. "But does the end always justify the means?" For this Alinsky had more than one answer. To groups who in his view stood to be done in by such serious questions, Alinsky would say, "People who always ask about ends and means are people who always sit on their ends and never have any means. To others he would ask, "What else justifies them?"

From Horwitt’s reading of Alinsky’s strategies we learn also that means should be commensurate with ends. You do not adopt measures that foreclose the possibility of communicating in the future -- a point Minsky roared at ethnic nationalists. On college campuses he cited The Federalist on the need for power in all sectors of society -- power was as "American as cherry pie."

The very exercise of power tends toward discovery. Machiavelli wrote not only The Prince but Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, in which he went on to develop citizen rights and the institution of tribunes to protect them. Acting with scheme and artifice to get and hold power can lead the actors toward forming a genuine polity.

Horwitt calls Alinsky "a swashbuckling Renaissance man." The Renaissance was as noted for rhetorical flourish and public drama as for enlivened preaching in pulpits and streets. In this sense -- in a way different from Thomas Jefferson, who was a son of the Enlightenment with its catalogs and methods -- Alinsky might indeed qualify as our recent Renaissance man. He took Jefferson’s question about the fate of democracy in urbanized populations and translated it into the language of the country’s most avoided neighborhoods and caused it to be writ large in our industrialized cities. He brought the American experiment to the modern city -- unseriously, of course.

The Oral, the Local and the Timely

Book review: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. by Stephen Toulmin, Macmillan/Free Press.

 

"Modern" and "postmodern" are terms that both fascinate and puzzle us. Here is a book that undertakes to say what "modern" has meant and why, and that gives us a chance to think about what it will mean to leave that modern agenda behind..

As students we began "modern" philosophy with Descartes, but we did so without benefit of history. We even thought of Descartes as somehow above the vicissitudes of history in his pursuit of "clear and distinct ideas" that would prove unmistakable to anybody who achieved that kind of thinking. In describing thought and matter as separate substances, he came as close as any philosopher could come to seeming a disembodied intellect himself. We were not inclined to ask why this new beginning took place at just that time, why it spread all over Europe the way it did, why it lasted almost all the way down to our own day -- or why it should be over now.

This is exactly the kind of question a late-modern philosopher would ask. Stephen Toulmin is a physicist and a humanities teacher from England who has worked at the University of Chicago and is now at Northwestern University. As a historian of science he has commented at length on the current understanding of science as proceeding not simply by stepwise "advances" but also by "revolutions" or shifts of perspective, problems and procedures that gain acceptance within scientific communities. (There must have been a time, for example, when there were no more than 20 Newtonians, another time when there were only a dozen Einsteinians.) Toulmin looks at the historical context of those philosophies, theologies and physical and moral theories that, beginning with the 17th century, tried to become independent of any special context. He seeks circumstantial evidence for the modern attempt to rise above circumstances.

We all know how to raise questions about identifying "ages": Does the period in question stand at the end of one age or at the beginning of another? (Every time surely does both.) We are glad, nonetheless, when Toulmin puts a date on the beginning of modernity as he understands it. I won’t give away the special secret of this book except to say that Toulmin’s stylish sleuthing involves an assassination in the street, a heart in a chalice, a prep school sonnet in a miscataloged book, and the moons of Jupiter.

We are reminded, in any case, that the working life of Descartes almost exactly spanned the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) -- which found its warrants in the Peace of Augsburg (1555)and its sanctions in the Counter-Reformation of the Council of Trent and in Protestant dogmatism. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 instituted a system of modern nation states with their various authoritative and often short ways with the problem of dissenters. Once he is on the scent Toulmin finds much more to set the stage, including changes of climate, famine, plague and end-of-the-world predictions.

These events impelled a modern "quest for certainly" -- for some rational method of demonstrating the essential correctness of philosophic, scientific, religious, moral and political doctrines. When found, this demonstration separated mind from matter, subjected material nature to the human mind, elevated rational rulers over passion-led populaces and raised Western civilization over tradition-bound peoples. It is fascinating to consider that modern science found its impulse not simply in demonstrations or technical knowledge but in social-hierarchical and political goals. Some familiar ground shifts beneath our feet as this modern attempt to transcend traditions (often called "superstitions") is itself described as a tradition -- our tradition.

"Cosmopolis" is an assumed order of "cosmos" and "polis." The rationalist, individualist and anthropocentrc view of things that characterized modernity was part of a search for the "right" ordering of human affairs -- a civilization "in accordance with nature." This helps explain why the universal natural descriptions of Isaac Newton came to be received not only as probable (his term) but as quasi-official. Also why religious dissenters like Joseph Priestly and John Toland who questioned the mind-matter dualism were treated not simply as bad thinkers but as bad men -- certainly not gentlemen.

We are now able to say why this general obeisance to a presumed univocal scientific method should have dominated thought all the way down to modern logical positivism -- which is here viewed not as a new philosophic venture but as a last ditch stand that dug in, significantly, between the wars. Toulmin likes to make the point that Thomas Kuhn, a primary demolisher of uniform scientific rationality, published his first blast as a codicil of The Encyclopedia of Unified Science. So did John Dewey.

Concentrating as this book does on differences from age to age, Toulmin tends to downplay certain controversies that were raised within the early modern period -- and not only by dissidents. Some of these are accounted for on circumstantial grounds: the scientific differences between Descartes and Leibniz can be ascribed to their 50-year separation in time, the new political experiment in America (including nonestablishment and free exercise of religion) to America’s physical separation from Europe. Toulmin makes a point that people on both sides of the English Channel paid deference to the presumed universal tenets of natural religion.

This scarcely explains, however, the literal, chapter-by-chapter criticisms of John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding in G. W. Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (their deaths were only three years apart) , or ongoing controversies like those between Samuel Clarke and Leibniz. These writers were, to be sure, formally courteous, but seldom in history have philosophers taken more direct issue with one another -- they were not, as in some philosophic disputes, simply choosing to talk about different problems.

It is illuminating to observe how these "modern" philosophers all set out in similar ways. All of them offered to clear the brush in the way of human understanding, to put previous controversies to rest and to set knowledge on a proper footing. All of them proposed to do this by means of a foolproof method that they described in similar terms: they would begin with simple ideas and advance by means of simple steps to conclusions that would hold indisputably for everyone. Having said this, they proceeded to disagree at every point. They disagreed on what was to be taken as simple, they disagreed on what constituted simple steps and they disagreed in their results. In the end they came to unresolvable differences over the idea of God and God’s relation to contingency and freedom; they gave irreconcilable accounts of the relation between reason and revelation, nature and grace; and they maintained literal differences over the most basic physical notions of elements, matter, space, motion, causality and action. Such differences within the same historical and social context serve to complicate our story. (They lend ambiguity to the popular term "paradigm.") They might also help us set out the problem when it comes to thinking about communication amid the pluralities and ambiguities of our own age.

The way ahead for Toulmin lies in returning to 16th-century sources and adding them to our postmodern heritage. He cites English and French essayists and dramatists -- Erasmus and Shakespeare, Rabelais and Montaigne -- who "essayed" themes and allowed a variety of voices to be heard. For these writers, tolerance and, a perspicacious skepticism were virtues; they were not merely rational but also reasonable people. The loss that took place from the 16th to the 17th century is summarized by Toulmin (and by others) as an attempt to give up all rhetoric for logic.

Much depends, however, on what sort of rhetoric we mean to recover. Renaissance preaching is remembered for its verbal virtuosity and flourish, but that by itself might not help us. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) Francis Bacon saw this aspect of Renaissance rhetoric as a properly passing phenomenon. Speakers and writers had begun "to hunt more after words than matter, more after. . . the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of the matter, worth of the subject, soundness of argument, life of invention or depth of judgment." That sort of thing gave preaching a bad name. It helped produce resolutions by members of the Royal Society "to bring all things as near to mathematical plainness as they can."

A more productive rhetoric makes use not simply of "tropes" but also of "topes" (Greek topoi) , "topics" or "places" in which to discriminate the various meanings that proceed from different speakers and from different points of view, in which to reconstitute objects and problems for consideration and in which to invent actions and forms of organization. In brief, to hunt as much after matter as words. Such a practice could help preachers avoid errors on both sides -- of being overly deductive or overly cute.

Toulmin finds us now actually turning to what modernism, as he has described it, sought to escape. He sets forth our newer practice by means of three terms: "the oral, the local, and the timely." Can these words help us find directions for social and congregational life as we leave major themes of modernity behind?

The oral. So long as the approach to knowledge and meaning was conceived in terms of the mind’s eye (and "I") , God could be conceived as a great mind’s eye, or a great geometer whose thoughts were to be thought after him (him!) , or as an ultimate supervisor, on the side of all supervisors -- rather than as a hearer of the groans of the oppressed. Preachers who go back to a 16th-century source in Martin Luther sometimes take sharp exception to what Richard R. Caemmerer called "the Melanchthonian blight," a pursuit of deductive certitude by later Lutherans that tended to supplant the surprise and passionate trust of Luther’s Faith -- a faith that came by hearing. Similar criticisms are made today of a religious positivism that will not allow its terms to be historicized or let itself be criticized for reinforcing patterns of social domination. A point to remember is that 17th-century scientists by no means excluded God. On the contrary, God was explicitly included in those rational systems, beginning with Descartes and Newton. This helps explain why, when "that hypothesis" seemed no longer intellectually needed (LaPlace) , there followed a modern loss of God.

The "oral," says Toulmin, has become inescapable by virtue of the multiplicity of religions and cultures living side by side in our cities. (Though there is, understandably, a resurgence of majoritarianism.) Eyes come equipped to open or close, to look or look away or overlook. Ears are less controllable and controlling; they take things in sequence rather than all at once. Thus "the oral" implies attentiveness and responsiveness to people who are different, to "the other." It puts us on a level plane. Traditional (unmodern) communities do, of course, mark themselves off from enemies, but they do not put down those other groups as "underdeveloped." A primary, if unstated, effect of this book is to explain why the modern world carried racism to new heights in spite of Enlightenment theories about human rights.

We are enjoying today a revival of attention to stories that create and identify communities. While we customarily attach oral histories to ethnic communities, it seems worth remembering that these were all created from disparate groups. Congregations are explicitly united by received stories, books, saints, martyrs, days and gestures that serve simply by repetition to gain recognition and response. Clergy not only cherish and protect these but try to use them in ways that make for cooperation and peace rather than for separation and religious warfare. Thus they exercise a discipline of community creation and maintenance that is needed both in congregations and in broader communities.

The local. It was, perhaps, "modern" to imagine a uniform package of interpretations and judgments available from seminaries or denominational headquarters for delivery to every place (even though we might remember something different from the New Testament and the early church) Recently, however, anthropologists have been calling our attention to "local knowledge" -- what Clifford Geertz calls "the webs of meaning people themselves have spun." Those engaged in missionary formation speak of attentiveness, silence and "local theologies."

Events now require us to speak of medicine and morals, science and technology, technology and environment. Consider, for example, how the current ecological idea of "stability" requires self-referential communities -- despite modern megatools that appear to place the action elsewhere. Some ethicists are reminding us that we do not, in the ordinary course of things, make practical decisions by referring to experts or abstract principles but rather by referring to stories, precedents and maxims prized in our communities and by exercising virtues formed within them. Educators talk increasingly of "peer education."

Even when we study alone, they say, a conversation is going on. Jean Piaget describes "how judgment is made within an assenting community and how knowledge grows within an assenting community." Such activity sounds not merely academic but communal and pastoral.

Timely. Actions by definition do not wait upon natural events or full rational demonstrations. Environmental threats, for example, are not likely to be resolved in the natural course of things through fear or by rising prices in the market. (Catastrophes, Ralph Nader points out, cause the GNP to go up.) Nor can measures wait 40 years for all the evidence to be in. Nor are actions ever decided once and for all.

Shared stories and the history of their effects not only create communities and help them form judgments, they also afford analogies for deliberation on action. (Aristotle observed in the Rhetoric that all arguments for action are analogies.) This practice extends to finding common problems and common actions with other communities, even though they may form their justifications in somewhat different terms.

According to the classic "modern" understanding, there is comparatively little need for communities, congregations or ministry -- except as a kind of delivery system. Yet we can see now that congregations and communities are essential in the very course of finding meaning and action. Thus there is a fresh charter for ministry "in every place" and for ministry that uses a full deck of practical disciplines: a symbolics of community creation, a hermeneutics of forming community judgments, a homiletics (homologein) of "coming to say -- and do -- the same thing," and a systematics not only of ideas but of organizing and reorganizing institutions and roles. At work in all this is a now inescapable and biblical power of the word to form and reform communities.

For recovering modernists, a manifest and widespread fear is "relativism." During the modern period we knew at least that facts were certain, even if values came to be viewed as emotive or chosen. If today even "facts" are relative to communities that take up projects out of particular problems and perspectives, where does that leave us? This question is not easy, but we may begin by asking whether our fears grow partly from a previous assumption. While both facts and values are described today as chosen by communities (they are actually chosen together) , they need not -- for that very reason -- be taken as arbitrary. Both depend, to use a phrase of Richard Rorty’s, on "socially justifying belief." In Beyond Objectivism and Relativism Richard Bernstein finds within every act of human communication about things that matter (or things to be done) "a background of inter-subjective agreements and a tacit sense of relevance."

If, as congregations and ministers believe, God is in the conversation, this lends not only imperative but a certain facticity to all discussions of the future. The communications that take place, both, within local communities and in larger circles, about the future of cities and about vitally needed new relations between cosmos and polis thus become required, warranted and disciplined, even though no one can expect to have the only or the last word. It remains only to give -- rhetorically, to be sure -- a reason of the hope that is in us all when we converse about the city that is to come.

Geopolitics Within Seventh-day Adventism

Unlike their mainstream Protestant counterparts, Seventh-day Adventist missionaries did not create independent national churches in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead the church’s extensive educational, medical and evangelistic endeavors led to a highly centralized system, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Indeed, the president of the General Conference has stated that the Adventist Church is second only to the Roman Catholic Church in its hierarchical structure. The influence of this American-based hierarchy has resulted in an Americanized church. Americans make up the vast majority of General Conference personnel; funds, personnel and theology proceed outward from America; and translations of American hymns dominate international hymnals.

The General Conference’s structure is arranged in geographically based administrative layers, with churches grouped in conferences, the conferences in unions (which comprise several states or a smaller nation) , and the unions in 11 divisions (the North American Division includes the U.S., Canada and Bermuda) These administrative units, together with the medical, educational, publishing and food-processing institutions whose boards they control, employ more than 111,000 people. Tithes are not retained at the congregational level, but are passed up the structure, giving the hierarchy considerable flexibility to redistribute funds from wealthier parts of the world church to newer and poorer segments, and thus to orchestrate expansion. The hierarchy’s control over finances and its voice in the choice of leaders at lower levels also enables it to exercise considerable influence over the whole church. This is so in spite of a system of representation, in which delegates from the constituent bodies choose the committee members who select the officers and department heads at each level. However, constituency meetings, especially those at the higher levels of the organizational pyramid, have proved unlikely to act independently because the system for choosing delegates (who are appointed rather than elected) has ensured that the vast majority hold leadership positions in the church or other church-paid positions.

This pattern of control by Americans has continued in spite of the reality that in recent decades they have made up a shrinking proportion of Adventist world membership. Rapid church growth in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific islands, the Caribbean and parts of Asia has drastically altered the composition of the church. North Americans had dominated numerically for the first half century, making up 91 percent of the membership in 1890, and had continued to form a majority (52 percent) as recently as 1920; but by the end of 1979 they had declined to 18 percent of the total, and in 1989 to only 12 percent. The members in North America and the rest of the developed world are aging, while the membership in the developing countries is much younger. These changes in the numerical balance, together with the increasing replacement of American missionaries by nationals in leadership positions at the lower levels of church structure, have inevitably raised the issue of when and to what extent the distribution of leadership and other staff at headquarters will reflect these developments. At the General Conference session in 1985 an African graduate student studying in America pointedly asked when the Adventist Church would follow the papal lead in appointing African "cardinals." Many wondered then whether such stirrings would develop into a chorus at the 1990 session.

While the primary purpose of a quinquennial General Conference session is to conduct business, it is also a celebration of Adventism and its progress; a "fair" where church publishers, departments, educational and medical institutions and unofficial "self-supporting ministries" show their wares and garner support; an old-fashioned revival meeting; and a "family gathering" where church employees, in particular, meet former schoolmates and colleagues. Church officials, delegates and their families, support staff, and laity crowd the meeting in numbers that encourage local restaurants to create vegetarian menus and advertise that sabbath meals may be paid for in advance. Over 2,500 delegates from 184 countries participated in the 1990 session held in Indianapolis, and the attendance at the Hoosier Dome on the final day grew to an estimated 40,000.

Because of the air of celebration about the proceedings, which featured upbeat multimedia reports of progress from each of the world divisions and a final mission pageant with delegates in national costume, the session tended to focus on encouraging news rather than to address worrisome issues. Delegates were happy with the success of "Harvest ‘90," an outreach program that had aimed at adding 2 million members to the church during 1985-1990 and surpassed that number by 500,000, bringing the membership worldwide to 6.4 million. However, no one attempted to wrestle with the weaknesses of the program, which had, in effect, created a competition among divisions that ultimately placed pastors, especially those in developing countries, under great pressure to win converts. The result was that pastors often baptized people who barely understood the faith. Because program objectives forced pastors to shift their attention continually to new baptismal prospects, they failed to nurture converts. The program’s shortcomings led to an apostasy rate that was much higher than admitted, since pastors and administrators under pressure to perform well were naturally loath to report failures. Similarly, each of the two racially segregated unions in South Africa gave a report, both stressing progress without informing the delegates of the existence of apartheid in the church or attempting to address the issues it raised.

The main business of a General Conference session is to elect the officers and departmental heads at both the General Conference and division levels and to make changes in the constitution of the church and in the Church Manual. Delegates caucus by division on the opening day of the session to elect their quota of members to the nominating committee, which sits throughout the session. This committee, which comprises less than one-tenth of the delegates and in which the presidents of the unions form the largest category, nominates one person for each position. Its choices are normally ratified without question on the session floor. The other delegates debate and vote on the other issues on the agenda.

The election of president of the General Conference surprised the session. For the first time since 1922 an incumbent willing to run for another term was not re-elected. Reasons for this outcome were multiple: though world membership had doubled during Neal C. Wilson’s 12 years in office, his authoritarian management style had alienated several constituencies; he had been identified with several demoralizing theological and financial crises; his age, 70, was against him in spite of his astounding vigor, and a widespread sense of deep crisis and need for new directions had gone unanswered. Perhaps most of all, the expansive growth of the church in developing countries, which Wilson had determinedly fostered, had created an internationalization of the denomination that needed to be matched in leadership.

Replacing Wilson proved difficult. The representatives of the two largest divisions, both Latin American-dominated, emerged as the strongest bloc on the nominating committee. Its first choice was George Brown, a black West Indian who is president of the Inter-American Division -- which consists of the Latin American countries from Mexico to Venezuela plus all the Caribbean countries -- but he declined the post.

The nominating committee then turned to Robert S. Folkenberg. A son of missionary parents who spent most of his life and career in Latin America, he had served as president of a conference in the American South for the past five years. At age 49 he is the youngest person elected to the presidency since 1901, and is also the first person to be elevated to that post directly from that of conference president since the church was restructured and divisions were created in 1901. A bilingual American known and trusted in Latin America, he is an ideal choice for a period of transition from American dominance to greater international representation. Folkenberg is identified with change, for he had published a call for structural reform in the denomination’s clergy magazine, Ministry, a year earlier. Yet he also represents continuity, for he has been close to Wilson.

The convention elected an African as a vice-president for the first time, thus appointing a black "cardinal," while white Americans among the vice-presidents were reduced to two out of five, an all-time low. Two of the departments, Education and Church Ministries, are now headed by Latin Americans -- another major change.

Whether to allow the ordination of women as ministers was the major issue facing the business sessions. This was the culmination of almost two decades of study and debate in which the General Conference leadership had played an uncharacteristically indecisive role. The issue of women in ministry had first been raised mainly but not solely in North America in the early ‘70s, with questions concerning whether women could be ordained as ministers or elders. Some congregations began to ordain women as elders even though the issue had not been officially addressed.

The General Conference responded in 1974 by arranging a conference of theologians to explore the issue. When these theologians decided there were no biblical objections to ordaining women, the ordination of women as elders was allowed. Today 1,100 women elders have been appointed in North American congregations, and the practice has spread to other divisions, especially in Europe and Australia. However, progress toward the ordination of women as ministers has been much slower.

The new atmosphere resulted in increased numbers of women seminarians after 1974. However, these women found that after graduation and the usual two or three years of preordination service as "licensed ministers" their male classmates were being ordained but they were not -- because the issue of ordination of women had not been officially settled. As continuing licensed ministers, their roles were normally limited to being associate pastors of churches, hospital chaplains or religion teachers, and their functions were also restricted. Meanwhile, conservatives mobilized opposition to women’s ordination, with the wives of older and retired ministers playing an especially prominent role.

Increasing debate eventually forced the General Conference to return to the issue, especially after one conference allowed its women pastors to baptize. However, rather than taking a stand on the issue and then endeavoring to persuade the church to proceed accordingly, President Wilson vacillated, frozen by a fear of pluralism and disunity. Declaring that the whole international church must act uniformly, he called the first of three commissions of administrators and theologians, with representatives from each of the world divisions, to consider the issue in 1984. When the commission agreed that Scripture provided no directive concerning the ordination of women, the representatives from Latin America and Africa and other conservatives interpreted this as prohibiting a change of policy, while representatives, and especially theologians, from North America, Europe and Australasia interpreted this as allowing innovation. When all three commissions (in 1984, 1988 and 1989) proved inconclusive, the administrators of the General Conference and the divisions, meeting in their 1989 Annual Council, opted to recommend that the 1990 General Conference session vote against ordaining women on the grounds that it is opposed by a majority of the divisions and that to proceed risks "disunity, dissension, and diversion from the mission of the church."

With such a recommendation, the advocates of women’s ordination decided that their only hope was to persuade the session to allow any division that opted for it to proceed unilaterally. Delegates were unwilling to agree to that position, and the motion not to ordain women was endorsed by a lopsided vote of 1,173 to 377. Many of those most affected by the decision were excluded from the vote, for only 230 of the 2,644 delegates (8.7 percent) were women.

Ironically, the session later removed most of the functional distinctions between ordained and licensed ministers. The conferences had agreed to put a hold on women performing baptisms when the first women’s commission was called in 1984. However, by 1988 the constituencies of two conferences had become so impatient with the failure to reach agreement that they voted to permit women pastors to conduct both baptisms and marriages. Wilson accepted this as a fait accompli and rammed it through the 1989 Annual Council against intense Latin opposition, with the added stipulation that this decision was final and therefore did not have to be taken to the General Conference session. However, the change concerning marriages required an amendment to the Church Manual, which did need session approval. After a long and heavy debate, which concluded with lengthy speeches by Wilson and the head of the Ministerial Association, the change was accepted 776 to 494. This vote showed clearly that the delegates were voting in blocs: almost no delegates from the Latin American or African divisions voted for the motion.

With these changes the only functions a licensed woman pastor cannot perform are the formal organization of churches and the ordination of others. But the real sticking point has been clarified: power. Most of the leadership, committee and delegate posts are restricted to ordained people, and thus to men. Those eligible to exercise power within Adventism are still restricted to a limited category.

Perhaps the most notable omission from the session’s agenda was any discussion of AIDS. Adventists have been slow to become involved with the victims of this disease, for they have associated it with unworthy people. Their hospitals have not attempted to be at the forefront in treating it, and indeed some in Africa have been cavalier in their use of untested blood for transfusions; American members who have contracted the disease have often been shunned; and African church leaders have assumed that AIDS is not an issue affecting Adventists. The General Conference has formed an AIDS committee, which includes experts drawn from among its lay members, but the latter have become increasingly frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the committee. Being aware of the AIDS statistics in Africa, of the rapid growth of the church there, and of studies that suggest that the promiscuity of African Christians is not markedly less than that of non-Christians, it has concluded that AIDS must be severely affecting the African church and that it is imperative that Adventists give it priority. Consequently, the committee moved to have the issue placed on the agenda of the session, but was unsuccessful. Members of the committee have become disillusioned.

As the numerical balance within the world church has shifted dramatically in the past two decades, discussion has mounted concerning who should control decision-making -- those with the members or those with the money. This was brought into the open in the report of the General Conference secretary; also, the treasurer underlined the issue when he reported that "tithe from the North American Division comprises nearly 97 percent of all tithe received by the General Conference." The concentration of recent growth among the poor (including the growth in North America, where it has occurred mostly among recent immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia) has accentuated a drop in per capita giving, which declined by 3.9 percent between 1984 and 1989 (without adjustment for inflation) The other main component of this statistic has been a tendency among Americans to switch their giving from "tithe," which all flows out of the local congregation, to "offerings," which can be directed to local or "self-supporting" projects, as they have become increasingly disillusioned with central management. A major question, then, is how North Americans will respond financially to the new politics, which has increased the power of those with large numbers of members at the expense of those who have been bankrolling the system.

"Global Strategy," a new program of evangelism, was introduced at the recent session, and its emphasis could change Adventism considerably. In their efforts to spread the "everlasting gospel" of Revelation 14:7, which they identify as their message, Adventists have focused on only one segment of the verse -- "to every nation." They have frequently expressed pride that they have congregations in 184 of the 215 countries and areas officially recognized by the United Nations, and observed that this means the gospel commission is nearing fulfillment, which is a key indication that the Lord will soon return. However, Adventists leaders have now concluded that the church has neglected the rest of the verse -- "to every . . . tribe, language, and people." Their analysis divided the population of the world into some 5,000 ethnolinguistic or demographic groupings of 1 million people each. They found they had at least one church in 3,200 of these groups but no presence in the other 1,800. Global Strategy aims at targeting the latter groups so that they can all be reached by the year 2000 -- a huge task. One result of past concern for numerical goals was to focus funds on areas where growth was easiest -- which were often those where Adventist work was already well established. Because Global Strategy will divert funds to unentered, more difficult situations, it may slow the growth rate. It is likely that this program will also redirect Adventists from their previous practice of mainly winning converts from other churches to attempting to evangelize many groups that have had little contact with Christianity.

A major leadership theme at the 1990 session was the need to protect and foster unity. The secretary warned that "we cannot afford to fragment into national churches. This miracle of a united worldwide Seventh-day Adventist family will have to be maintained at all cost." Resolutions were introduced that sought to encourage uniformity in behavior. One was passed reaffirming the delegates’ acceptance of the "counsel from God" given through Ellen White and committing them to "live by the principles contained in it." But when another resolution attempted to detail guidelines for sabbath observance, some complained that it was an attempt to establish an Adventist "Mishnah."

It was fear of disunity that prompted the rejection of the ordination of women. It seems likely, however, that this decision will be undermined -- from below. Two conferences in North America, anticipating a negative decision in Indianapolis, voted before the session to schedule constituency meetings that would consider proceeding with the ordination of their women pastors. Since the presidents of these conferences publicly dubbed this a "moral issue," it will probably be difficult for them now to reverse positions, in spite of a warning from the head of the General Conference Ministerial Association during the debates that any unilateral action would be tantamount to rebellion.

This agenda, which has emphasized a rigid reading of "unity," was set by the outgoing administration. In his sermon on the final day of the session, Folkenberg replaced Wilson’s equation of unity and uniformity with "unity in diversity" and "unity is not uniformity." Moreover, Folkenberg has taken a stand for reducing the staff of the General Conference because of the shortage of funds and widespread demands that more tithe be retained at lower levels, and is already implementing this policy vigorously. The General Conference will probably become more specialized, and lower levels relatively more powerful. The structure of the denomination would then better reflect its diversity, and would allow contentious issues, such as the ordination of women, to be addressed locally.