Articles – Page 197 – Religion Online

What Makes Faith Mature

Visit any mainline Sunday school class and you will probably find only a smattering of adults and high school students. The students will seem bored and uninvolved, the teacher burned out and ill-equipped. Then follow some church members through the week. Few will show any signs that they are Christians. They won’t read their Bibles or pray. They won’t work in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. They won’t participate in rallies to fight injustice or discrimination. People in mainline churches live lives unaffected by their faith. And part of the problem is that churches are not doing what it takes to make faith Mature.

That’s the alarming conclusion of a major new study of mainline congregations titled Effective Christian Education: A National Study of Protestant Congregations. Conducted by the Minneapolis-based Search Institute and funded by the Lilly Endowment, the study surveyed 11,122 people in 561 congregations in six denominations: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) ; Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) ; Southern Baptist Convention; United Church of Christ; and United Methodist Church. Originally the study included only traditional mainline groups, but the participating denominations agreed to add the Southern Baptists to the study because of that denomination’s thorough educational programs. The three-and-a-half-year study found that "effective Christian education is the most powerful single influence congregations have on maturity of faith." Researchers also claim that Christian education has the potential to renew Congregational life and reverse downward membership trends. Yet, the summary report continues, "Many of the factors needed for effectiveness in Christian education are not currently operating in large numbers of congregations."

The research team faced a formidable question in undertaking the study: How does one measure Christian education’s impact? How do you quantify the growth of faith and program effectiveness? Presenting the research findings at a conference in late March, project director and Search president Peter L. Benson explained that the study posited that "the primary aim of congregational life, is to nurture a vibrant, life-changing faith." Then the researchers made two key assumptions. First, faith is a way of living, not just an adherence to doctrine and dogma. Second, faith is life-transforming and has a dramatic, lasting impact on the believer. With this framework, the research team, together with theologians and denominational leaders, developed a 38 question survey focusing on two themes, summed up in the report as follows: "A person of mature faith experiences both a life-transforming relationship to a loving God -- the vertical theme -- and a consistent devotion to others -- the’ horizontal theme." High scores in both dimensions indicated an "integrated" or "mature" faith. Low scores in both dimensions indicated an "undeveloped" faith.

The findings are anything but encouraging. "Only a minority of Protestant adults evidence the kind of ‘integrated, vibrant, and life-encompassing faith congregations seek to develop," the study reports. "For most adults, faith is underdeveloped, lacking some of the key elements necessary for faith’ maturity." Specifically, 36 percent of adults have an undeveloped faith and only 32 percent have an integrated faith. Ten percent have a vertical faith (high in the vertical dimension only) and 22 percent have a horizontal faith (high in the horizontal dimension only) At every age, women have a more developed faith than men. And half the men in their 40s have an undeveloped faith.

Three areas pose particular problems to adults in developing faith. Many adults don’t experience a sense of well-being, security or peace in their faith. They have trouble seeking spiritual growth through study, reflection, prayer and discussion with others. And they do little to serve others through acts of love and justice. For example, 78 percent of adults never spend time promoting social justice. Seventy-two percent have never marched, met or gathered with others to promote social change. Sixty-six percent never or rarely encourage someone to believe in Jesus Christ. And the same percentage don’t read their Bibles when alone. Moreover, adults have little interest in learning about people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds or in peacemaking and social-justice activities.

Thus, most church members have been unmoved by the mainline denominations’ heavy emphasis on peace and justice issues. In fact, instead of drawing people toward these concerns, the emphasis may have actually turned people away from them. "If the word ‘political’ is in the [survey] item, the average Protestant will react negatively," said David S. Schuller, a project consultant from the Association of Theological Schools: This finding confirms suspicions, but it also raises questions. How can denominations and congregations find ways to get people interested and involved in service and social issues? Researchers suggest making service and social justice integral to Christian education. "Some of the best religious education occurs in these moments of giving, of connection, of bonding to others," the report notes. "Service needs to be a cornerstone of educational programming, partly because it is educationally rich, and ultimately because, as people of faith, we are called to serve.

The study also uncovered significant problems among teenagers’ faith development. Sixty-four percent of mainline teenagers have an undeveloped faith. More alarming, the percentage skyrockets for teenage boys after eighth grade. While 66 percent of seventh- and eighth-grade boys have an undeveloped faith, 83 percent of ninth- and tenth-grade boys do. Such a decline may be partly attributable to natural intellectual and spiritual development as young adolescents ask questions and struggle with who they are. Yet two denominations -- the Southern Baptist Convention and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) -- do not experience this decline. A significant reason for the decline in the other four denominations may be the confirmation process. By the end of the eighth grade, young people have "graduated" from confirmation and there is little to keep them coming back and growing in faith after that.

How do congregations address these problems? Researchers discovered several key factors that, when present, promote faith.

Most important is family religiousness. The greatest impact on a person’s faith occurs when families participate in devotions together, parents talk about their faith to their children, and the family does service projects together.

In examining congregational factors that promote faith growth and maturity, Christian education is the most vital factor. Nothing matters more than Christian education," Benson claimed. "Done well, has the potential -- more than any other area of congregational life -- to promote faith and loyalty." In fact, Christian education has twice the impact that other factors have in congregational life. "The more a congregation embodies the Christian education effectiveness factors," the report claims, "the greater the growth in faith by youth and adults, and the greater the loyalty to congregation and denomination."

Researchers visited 52 congregations that do a good job of promoting. faith maturity -- in which Christian education is the center of congregational life, influencing the church’s worship and outreach. "The whole program of the church is Christian education . . . [and] the vision of Christian education was a holistic one," recalled José Abraham de Jesus, UCC area conference minister for the Chicago Metropolitan Association, Illinois Conference.

Among the factors that create an effective Christian education program, according to the study:

• Teachers who have mature faith and who know educational theories and methods.

• A pastor who is committed to education, devotes time to Christian education and knows educational theory and practice.

•An educational process that applies faith to current issues, examines life experiences, creates community, recognizes individuality and encourages independent thinking and questioning.

• Educational content that "blends biblical knowledge and insight with significant engagement in the major life issues each age group faces." Effective adult education emphasizes biblical knowledge, multicultural and global awareness, and moral decision-making. Emphases for youth include sexuality, drugs and alcohol, service and friendship.

• A high percentage of adults active in a congregation.

• An education program with a clear mission statement and clear learning objectives.

Yet congregations rarely exploit their potential in these areas. The average church embodies only 35 to 40 percent of the effectiveness factors. Areas in which churches rank highest include biblical knowledge, encouragement of questions, pastoral commitment and pastoral expertise. They are weakest in such areas as social, political and cultural concerns, programs that build community, and peer involvement.

Benson believes part of the problem is myths about Christian education. First, people think of Christian education as a ministry for children. This belief is reflected in the downward spiral of involvement. While 60 percent of elementary-age children participate in Christian education, the percentage drops to 52 percent for junior-high youth, 35 percent for senior-high youth and 28 percent for adults.

The second myth is that good teaching involves transferring information. "The effective program," the report argues, "not only teaches in the classical sense of transmitting insight and knowledge, but also allows insight to emerge from the crucible of experience." Third, churches seem to believe that teaching doesn’t require training. Only half the congregations offer training in effective teaching methods each year. And only 21 percent give training in denominational theology and tradition. The final myth is that Christian education is separate from the rest or congregational life -- not the center of energy for everything else the congregation does.

The report concludes:

Christian education in a majority of congregations is a tired enterprise in need of reform. Often out-of-touch with adult and adolescent needs, it experiences increasing difficulty in finding and motivating volunteers, faces general disinterest among its "clients," and employs models and procedures that have changed little over time. . .

The good news is that most of the factors making for effectiveness in education are within the control of congregations. With the right support, commitment and energy, effectiveness can be greatly enhanced.

In addition to measuring faith maturity, the, study attempted to measure congregational and denominational loyalty. In general the study found that adults are solidly committed to both institutions. Sixty-five percent of mainline adults have a high denominational loyalty, and’ 76 percent have a high congregational loyalty. The study also found that congregational loyalty can predict other factors in congregational health. Congregations with a loyal membership tend to grow, members tend to give, and there is more congregational activity. However, loyalty is much "softer" among young and middle-age adults. In terms of denominational loyalty, 78 percent of those 60 and older have high loyalty. But the percentage drops to about 58 percent for those younger than 60.

A similar pattern holds for congregational loyalty. While 85 percent of those 60 and older have high loyalty, the percentage falls to 73 percent for those between 40 and 59, and to 69 percent for those between 20 and 39. While loyalty may naturally increase with age, it may also reflect a shift in how people view church. "It is probably prudent to assume that loyalty is softening," the report suggests. The study also found that the same factors that promote faith growth appear to increase denominational and congregational loyalty. Thus, said Benson, "if we do good work in promoting faith maturity, we get the by-product of loyalty. We don’t have to choose between the two.

Denominational differences were the topic of considerable discussion at the conference. These differences were generally insignificant among mainline denominations, but researchers were surprised by the relative strength revealed by the Southern Baptist statistics. For example, while the percentage of adults with undeveloped faith in mainline denominations ranged between 33 percent (UMC) and 47 percent (ELCA) , it drops to 23 percent among Southern Baptists. The SBC figures may not be that telling Southern Baptists had the lowest participation rate of any denomination in the study, making its data less reliable than those from the other denominations. But researchers believe the differences are at least suggestive. The SBC churches scored higher in congregational strengths that enhance faith maturity. For example, they scored highest in climate for thinking, warmth, worship quality, Christian education involvement and caring. And they scored almost as high as mainline denominations in service. The reports adds, however, that "this project says more about common realities facing denominations than differences. . . . Each of the six denominations has great but untapped potential to increase its impact on faith maturity and loyalty."

The study’s faith-maturity scale was object of some criticism. Critics worried that the structure didn’t leave a place for doubts and questions based on faith-development models. As a result, the study may have simply looked for traditional faith expressions. Yet the study didn’t attempt to measure "right belief." Rather, it focused on how individuals act on their faith. In fact, Benson said, people with integrated faith generally were nonconformists and nontraditionalists. He said they had ups and downs in faith, were social critics, were highly interested in inclusivity and were relatively unorthodox in their view of faith and the world.

Another question raised was whether the study included adequate representation of racial and ethnic minority groups. "The ethnic and racial constituencies are not well-represented" in the survey data, said Delores Carpenter, associate professor of religious education at Howard University Divinity School. Such a concern is valid, but it’s also part of a larger concern for the denominations, While only 3 percent of those surveyed were from racial and ethnic minority groups, that figure reflects the realities in the denominations. And the researchers sought to overcome this deficiency by including a large number of racial and ethnic congregations in the site visits to effective congregations. Despite these and other objections, the study’s basic structure has been widely accepted -- and not just by the participating denominations. Search is already using its research instrument in a survey being conducted for the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Will the study have a significant impact on the church? A previous major Search Institute study, Young Adolescents and Their Parents, did little to reshape denominations’ youth and family programs because denominations did little to act on the information. However, this study not only points to specific problems but identifies key areas that, when addressed, will begin correcting the problems.

David Ng, professor of Christian education at San Francisco Theological Seminary, said the study gives Christian educators "the tool we can use to gain the attention of the rest of the church. . . . It may be most valuable in that it forces us to sharpen our definitions of the educational task." But, he added, "for all the potential we see in this to be a catalyst for change. . . the project is not a quick fix.

. . . [It] is an opening wedge." Charles Foster, director of the Christian education program at Candler School of Theology, noted that "the significance of this study will come when it’s put in dialogue with other major studies," such as studies in mainline decline, education and faith development.

Many people fear, however, that the study’s impact will be lost in the debate over details. "The major impact of the findings may not inform what’s going on in our seminaries adequately," Schuller worried. Some academicians may dismiss the study because they’re concerned that faith can’t be measured. He challenged his colleagues to maintain a balance between questioning the study methods and acknowledging what the study did find.

Denominations also need to look realistically at their situations and test their results against their experience. Robert Glover, executive for Christian education for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) , asked, "Can we share this new knowledge with all the other things we have to do?" Nearly everything denominations do is important td somebody, he noted. Yet revolutionizing Christian education could well be the key’ to reversing downward trends in mainline denominations. "It is my conviction," Benson said, "that what we decide to do this decade will have a great deal to say . . . about the health and vitality of our churches in the coming century."

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CHART #1

Promoting Faith (1st chart from the middle of this article)

The Search Institute study found six factors that, -when present in congregations, increase faith maturity and congregational loyalty. The first factor, formal Christian education, has twice the impact of the other five.

1. The congregation has an effective formal Christian education program, including Sunday school classes, Bible studies, adult forums, family events, music and drama programs and new member classes.

2. Members perceive that their congregation encourages questions, challenges thinking and expects learning.

3. The congregation successfully recruits members to volunteer to help people in need.

4. Members perceive that their Sunday worship is of high quality.

5. Members see their congregation as warm and friendly.

6. Members personally experience other members’ care and concern.

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CHART #2

The Nature of Mature Faith

On the basis of consultations with scholars, reviews of the literature and surveys of adults, the Search Institute researchers designed a research tool around the following eight dimensions of "mature faith." They suggest that a person with mature faith:

1. Trusts in God’s saving grace and believes firmly in the humanity and divinity of Jesus.

2: Experiences a sense of personal well-being, security and peace.

3. Integrates faith and life, and sees work, family, social relationships and political choices as part of religious life.

4. Seeks spiritual growth through study, reflection, prayer and discussion with others.

5. Seeks to be part of a community of Believers in which people witness to their faith and support and nourish one another.

6. Holds life-affirming values, including a commitment to racial and gender equality, an affirmation of cultural and religious diversity and a personal sense of responsibility for the welfare of others.

7. Advocates social and global change to bring about greater social justice.

8. Serves humanity consistently and passionately through acts of love and justice.

From Peter Benson and Carolyn H. Eklin, Effective Christian Education. A National

Study of Protestant Congregations -- A Summary Report on Faith, Loyalty, and CongregationalLife (1990) Minneapolis, MN: Search Institute. Reprinted by permission.

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Muslim in America

"If you lose your children, no number of mosques will help you." These words of Jamal Badawi are repeated in one form or another by Muslims all over America. Speaking at an annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Badawi continued:

Establishing of Islamic schools, in the environments in which we live, takes precedence over building mosques. You can have a huge decorative expensive mosque and lose your children and end up having no one in the mosque to pray. I have seen it in Australia, where the early Afghan immigrants built mosques like monuments, some of which are now museums. Many of their children have already been lost.

In a gymnasium-turned-mosque in Houston or a mall storefront in Atlanta, young Muslim children are studying Muslim history, learning their Arabic letters, reciting verses of the Qur’an in Arabic and raising their hands to describe the five pillars of Islam in weekend Islamic schools. On the whole, American Muslims have placed a priority on a solid educational program for young Muslims, even before buying or converting property for a mosque. Every mosque has a weekend school of one sort or another, with programs on Saturdays, Sundays or both. As Mian Ashraf of the Islamic Center of New England puts it, "We have a tendency to take Islam for granted, especially those of us who grew up in an Islamic environment before coming to America. But here you have to work at it. We’re scared that we’re going to lose our identity. Our kids are going into this melting pot, where they might not be able to maintain their religious values, and we’ll lose them."

On a Sunday afternoon in 1993, I parked in the lot at the Islamic Foundation of Chicago, in the Bridgeview area. I entered the prayer room and found about 75 high school boys seated in the middle of the carpet under the dome. I took a seat at the back and listened. The speaker was a young journalist from Oak Lawn who had grown up in America. He was eloquent, and everyone seemed attentive. "When I was growing up, what did I know of Islam? There was Allah, the Prophet Muhammad. But mostly what we heard as kids was, ‘Don’t eat pork. Don’t date. Don’t be like the Americans.’ It was all a list of don’ts. Islam was, for us, one series of stop signs. But this is not enough, this is not Islam. We were ripped off. Islam is more than a no."

I felt I was listening to the Muslim version of some of the great Methodist youth ministers whose passion and commitment had widened and changed my own vision of Christianity. He continued:

When I left home and got a job, when I started to travel, I had to ask myself, "Who am I?" There is no running away from this question. You have to answer it. You can’t run to the military or to college. You have to ask yourself this question.

I was in Japan 10,000 miles from home when I opened up the Qur’an one night and asked myself, "Am I going to believe this or not? Is this going to be in the least relevant?" And when I look into the Qur’an, I find that there is nothing else that is relevant.

So I want to challenge you. I want you to do two things. First, sit for five minutes with yourself every single night. Ask yourself who you are and who God is. Just five minutes a day. And second, I want you to open this book. Read it, just a verse at a time, a verse a day. I guarantee, it will change you. And you will change the world. The world needs changing too. Two-thirds of the people dying of hunger in the world, in Somalia and Ethiopia, are Muslims. Two-thirds of the world’s refugees are Muslims. No one else is going to do this, but we are asked to do it. We are commanded to do what is right and to forbid what is wrong: that is what the Qur’an says.

He fell silent, and a question-and-answer session began. I wondered if I would ever hear anything quite so persuasive at a Hindu youth group in Chicago or at a Buddhist temple. In these traditions there is nothing that resembles the concept of daw’ah, the mission invitation to one’s own community and others to follow this path of faith. There are knowledgeable and engaging swamis and monks, to be sure. And there is certainly a deep concern about the younger generation. But a riveting focus on Islamic education characterizes the Islamic communities of America.

I was impressed with the young man’s articulation of the negative identity young people so often deplore. The leaders of the Islamic Society of Southern California address the issue of young people in unequivocal terms in a book they have prepared for American Muslim communities, In Fraternity:

One of the most detestable actions that could be conceived is to make coming to the Islamic Center an unpleasant experience to the young people. We hear it time and time again from parents across the country: "Our children hate to come to the Islamic Center." Some parents force their children to go to the Islamic Center. How shortsighted we are! Our children have to be convinced and motivated if we want them to make use of the institutions set up in the name of Islam for the future generations of Islam. This is the United States of America, and everybody knows parental authority ceases to function beyond a certain age.

The philosophy is that if the youth do not want to come, something is wrong with the center.

Our youth group is autonomous and enjoys its own self-government through an elected board and an elected chairperson from amongst themselves. Not pressured by the elders, the youth find no reason to feel animosity or reservation against them. Many of them find in the center the comfort they lack in their own homes.

The youth group in L.A. does not strictly segregate its activities by sex. It is clear, they say, that the marriage crisis among young Muslims is, in part, because Muslim girls and boys get to know non-Muslims better than Muslims when mosque activities are separate. As the leaders of this mosque see it, segregating Muslim boys and girls simply means that young people arrive at the age of marriage without getting to know other Muslims of the opposite sex at all. The summer camps in the San Bernardino Mountains, the weekend conferences in Orange County, the social service activities -- all are undertaken by young women and men together. So far, they say, dozens of successful marriages have come from the youth group alone.

Both the Islamic Center of Southern California and the Mosque Foundation in Chicago are associated with full-time Islamic schools. Across the country, there are more than 200 full-time schools, according to the Council of Islamic Schools of North America. A 1998 New York Times article reported 23 Islamic schools in New York City alone, and more in the planning stage. At Al Noor in Brooklyn, the student body capped at 600, and 400 more had to be turned away. The noted Islamic Cultural Center of New York in Manhattan is in the process of building a school in the lot next door that will accommodate a thousand students when it is completed. The American Muslim community is keenly involved and interested in the possibility of vouchers, for an Islamic education system is clearly in the making.

Dawub Tauhidi, founder and principal of the Crescent Academy International in a suburb of Detroit, is a Euro-American convert to Islam with a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University of Michigan. Tauhidi describes how the school began. "There were three of us, myself and two doctors, who all had fifth-grade kids. We wanted our kids to have an education that respected Islamic values and enabled them to become grounded in Islam, so we started a small Islamic school in Ann Arbor. It grew quickly. After two or three years, I realized that we had put our hand on something there’s a real need for." Among the goals of the school is "to provide the Muslim students of the U.S. with an environment where they can practice their Islamic rituals and where they can find role models for Islamic behavior and attitudes."

After the Ann Arbor school was flourishing, the group bought land for another school in a suburb of Detroit. "The most we could scrape together was $500,000. In the end we spent more than $2.5 million." Doors opened in 1991 for kindergarten through fifth grade. By 1995, sixth through ninth grades had been added and plans for a high school were quickly developing. "When we started back in 1985 there were probably 15 Islamic schools in the country. Now there are about 200 full-time Islamic schools."

Yellow school buses bearing the name Crescent Academy International were parked in the lot when I arrived on a March morning. In the classrooms, boys wore white shirts and girls wore plaid jumpers, some with scarves. In the second-grade room, the teacher was sitting in slacks on the front table, a scarf wrapped around her head, reading a story to the class -- everyone paying eager attention except the two who were cleaning the hamster cage. The middle school was housed in a set of prefabricated buildings next door. The English and the literature classes would be familiar in any junior high school, but Arabic class is also required three times a week, Islamic studies three times a week and the study of the Qur’an three times a week. Do they study other religions as well? I asked. Tauhidi responded, "We have a hard enough time getting a good curriculum in Islamic studies together. Students have to feel secure about themselves first. Because of the history of the modern Muslim world, most are insecure."

A domed prayer room has a tall window that looks out to the fields, indicating the direction of Mecca. The early afternoon prayer is part of the school day, and, depending upon the time of the year, the late afternoon prayer is also included. This school prayer room is also the local mosque for about 100 families in the area, and adults join the children for prayers at noon on Fridays.

The public-private school debate is lively within the Islamic community today. Tauhidi takes his place in a long historical debate on parochial education in the U.S. when he says, "Muslims have to wake up and realize that they have to take care of their children. As the community gets stronger, we can make a contribution to society. But first the community, including the younger generation, must get stronger." Many Muslims despair of the drugs, the dating, the entertainment-saturated culture that are so much a part of the public school experience. Muslim parents have responded by supporting full-time Islamic schools that create a stronger environment of support for Muslim faith and practice.

Others in the Muslim community oppose this trend. A panel on the public-private school debate at a 1993 ISNA convention in Kansas City drew hundreds of participants. "Will two or three hours of weekend school do it, when 70 hours a week are spent in the non-Islamic environment of the public schools or the TV?" asked Aminah Jundali, the mother of four children. "You put children in school eight hours a day five days a week, and then you expect them to come out of that with an Islamic personality and Islamic values? That’s almost an impossible task." A young high school girl responded in favor of public schooling. "It is even harder for us as girls, because we wear hijab to school and we stand out as different. Still, I want to go to the public school, because if we are not there as Muslims, how will other kids ever understand anything about Islam?"

Both sides in the debate realize that it is not an either-or issue. Full-time schools are being established, one after another, year after year. But it is also important to focus on issues critical for Muslims in the public schools. To this end, ISNA published a brochure that is sent to public school teachers and administrators. "You’ve Got a Muslim Child in Your School" spells out some of the basics of Islam and specifies some of the restrictions. One section reads:

On behalf of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest organization of Muslims in the United States and Canada, we would like to request that in view of the above teachings of Islam, Muslim students in your school system should not be required to:

1) sit next to the opposite sex in the same classroom;

2) participate in physical education, swimming or dancing classes. Alternative meaningful education activities should be arranged for them. We urge you to organize physical education and swimming classes separately for boys and girls in accordance with the following guidelines:

• separate classes for boys and girls in a fully covered area

• only male/female instructors for the respective group

• special swimming suits that cover all the private parts of the body down to the knee

• separate and covered shower facilities for each student

3) participate in plays, proms, social parties, picnics, dating, etc. which require free mixing of the two sexes;

4) participate in any event or activity related to Christmas, Easter, Halloween or Valentine’s Day. All such occasions have religious and social connotations contrary to Islamic faith and teachings.

We also urge you to ensure that the following facilities are available to Muslim students in your school:

1) They are excused from their classes to attend off-campus special prayers on Fridays (approximately 1:00 to 2:00 P.M.).

2) They are excused for 15 minutes in the afternoon to offer a special prayer in a designated area on the campus. The prayer is mandatory for all Muslims and often cannot be offered after the school hours.

3) All food items containing meat of a pig in any form or shape, as well as alcohol, should be clearly labeled in the cafeteria.

4) At least one properly covered toilet should be available in each men’s and women’s room.

5) Muslim students are excused, without penalty of absence, for the two most important festivals of Islam: Eid Al-Fitr and Edi Al-Adha, in accordance with the lunar calendar.

Such requirements may strike the Muslim student as precisely the list of "don’ts" that constituted the young Chicago journalist’s negative experience of Islam when he was a child. Most of what children end up telling their classmates and teachers is what they can’t do. For school boards and principals, a brochure such as this may be received as a welcome and educational set of guidelines for a new situation. On the other hand, it might be received as an unwarranted intrusion into the secular atmosphere of the school. What is clear, however, is that church-state issues in public education have changed forever and that such issues as school-sponsored prayer, the posting of the ten Commandments and the teaching of creation science are the arguments of yesterday.

Shabbir Mansuri is a pioneer in Islamic participation in public school curricula. He was an engineer in California when he entered the 1990 debate over the California state guidelines for the teaching of Islamic history and religion in social studies. As he tells the story, his sixth-grade daughter had come home giggling over the portrayal of Muslims at prayer in her textbook: e.g., Bedouins who rubbed their faces in the sand before praying. "Daddy, should we get some sand in the living room?" she said. Mansuri laughed with her but was disturbed by the textbook. Before long, he had organized Muslim participation in textbook hearings. One text had a unit on Islam that began with a picture of a camel; he got it thrown out. "I looked at all the other units and the pictures were of people. But with Islam, a camel. The human element was completely missing. Why a camel, when most Americans already think of Muslims as remote, and therefore faceless?"

Mansuri founded the Council on Islamic Education and has organized a wide range of Muslim scholars and teachers to work with textbook publishers as they revise social studies and world history texts. The scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, examined the new textbooks. Finally, the notorious camel was thrown out. "I felt so proud to be an American," Mansuri said in a subsequent interview "That an individual like me, an immigrant, a concerned parent, went through the textbook adoption process and that changes were made because I participated -- this is amazing. Nowhere else in the world does this happen."

The committee continues its work. "I’m not interested in just bringing an Islamic perspective, but an academic perspective, to all these studies. . . . We are not looking for an ethnocentric curriculum. We want only that schools accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society. . . . We need to participate in a positive way, with a contributory approach. . . . Once you make schools understand that you are part of the solution, not part of the problem, they will listen to you.

On Seeking and Finding in the World’s Religions

Is there any such thing as a religious faith which in quality or texture is definitely not Christian, but in the approach to which one ought to put the shoes off the feet, recognizing that one is on the holy ground of a two-sided commerce between God and man? In non-Christian faith may we meet with something that is not merely a seeking but in real measure a finding, and a finding by contact with which a Christian may be helped to make fresh discoveries in his own finding of God in Christ?"

A. G. Hogg, the principal of Madras Christian College, raised these questions over 50 years ago at the Tambaram World Mission Conference. At the most recent General Assembly of the World Council of Churches, in Vancouver in 1983, the theological significance of other religious traditions still remained a controversial issue. When a report recognizing the work of God in the lives of people of other faiths was presented on the Assembly floor, it was hotly contested. A dozen substitute formulations were offered. Far from the "holy ground" of seeking and finding that Hogg and his colleagues could affirm in the faith of others, the Assembly finally settled for a recognition of "God’s creative work in the seeking for religious truth among people of other faiths." In the confusion of plenary debate, delegates were finally unsure about the "finding."

"Theology of religions" is the generally accepted term for how we as Christians articulate our faith in the light of the religious plurality of the world. How do we think about this plurality? Is it an obstacle to be overcome or might it be considered within God’s providence? How do we understand the work of Christ or the Holy Spirit in relation to non-Christian traditions, which clearly have sustained the lives of countless millions and generated great civilizations? There has been a flood of writings in this field over the past ten years, proposing various theologies of religious pluralism and systematizing those that have been proposed. Alan Race, Paul Knitter, Gavin D’Costa and others have set out the various theological options. The "exclusivism" of Hendrik Kraemer, following Karl Barth, is contrasted with the "inclusivism" of Karl Rahner and the "pluralism" of John Hick. Alternatively, there have been "ecclesiocentric," "christocentric" and "theocentric" proposals. Theological systematization aside, this is clearly a question of deep concern to many Christians -- theologians, clergy and laypeople alike. In one way or another they ask: How can we think about the devout faith of our Muslim or Hindu neighbor?

Because much recent thinking on this matter has been generated by individual theologians, the World Council of Churches’ unit on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths called a consultation of 25 Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians in Baar, Switzerland, in January to ask if there is an emerging consensus among those who have been wrestling with these questions. Never before had there been a discussion on the theology of religions that involved such an equally weighted encounter of Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant thinkers. Bringing as they did, quite different theological traditions and resources, were there some things they could affirm together?

The Orthodox participants brought. the reminder that Orthodox theology continually refreshes its thinking by reference to the early Church Fathers, who were much concerned with the question of God’s activity in the other sects and traditions and in the wisdom of humankind. Alexandru Stan of the Romanian Orthodox Church summarized some of the thinking of the Eastern Church, from the time of Justin Martyr, on the presence of God in all peoples, Christian and non-Christian alike; Metropolitan George Khodr of Beirut extended Orthodox thinking on the wide and restless work of the Holy Spirit; and Bishop Anastasios Yannoulatos of the Greek Orthodox Church offered a perspective shaped by his work as moderator of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.

The Roman Catholic theologians came with the substantial heritage of Vatican II on other world religions, as well as the challenge of post -- Vatican II theologies from the inculturated churches, especially in India. Bishop Pietro Rossano, for many years with the Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christians and now the rector of the Later-an University in Rome, outlined the range of positions on the plurality of religions, and Jacques Dupuis of the Gregorian University in Rome, with 36 years in India behind him, set forth a broadly inclusivist Christology, drawing on the key documents of Vatican II, including Nostra Aetate, Gaudium et spes and Lumen Gentium.

The Protestant theologians -- Asian, African, European and American -- came, in one way or another, carrying the heritage of the modern mission and ecumenical movements. Kenneth Cracknell of Wesley House, Cambridge University, put together a synoptic view of that long history, from the Edinburgh Conference on World Mission in 1910 to the San Antonio Conference on World Mission in 1989. Robert Neville, dean of the Boston University School of Theology, presented new perspectives on Christology, and Françoise Smyth-Florentin of the Reformed Church’s theological faculty in Paris took up the question of the work of the Spirit.

The questions addressed at Baar had been explicitly framed by a major ecumenical consultation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 1977, the same consultation that developed the WCC’s Guidelines on Dialogue (1979)

• "Are we to speak of God’s work in the lives of all men and women only in tentative terms of hope that they may experience something of him, or more positively in terms of God’s self-disclosure to people of living faiths?"

• "What is the relationship between God’s universal action in creation and his redemptive action in Jesus Christ?"

• "What is the biblical view and Christian experience of the operation of the Holy Spirit, and is it right and helpful to understand the work of God outside the Church in terms of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit?"

After the Vancouver General Assembly in 1983, the dialogue program of the WCC, led by the Sri Lankan Methodist theologian S. Wesley Ariarajah, began to address head-on some of these difficult questions. The confusion on the Assembly floor in Vancouver reflected the fact that Christians have not been enabled to think theologically about the religious faith of their neighbors, as believing and praying (or meditating) people with a spiritual history and tradition of their own. The inability of many Christians to think coherently about whether the Hindu or Buddhist is merely "seeking" or also "finding" seemed to necessitate a new round of theological thinking.

The controversies at Baar were not, however, over the issue of "seeking" and "finding." There was profound agreement that God has found people, and people have found God, throughout human history and in the contexts of many religions and cultures. To dispute this would run directly counter to the biblical understanding of God as creator, present and active everywhere, the God of all people. But is God’s activity and even God’s saving presence to be understood in relation to individual people only or also in relation to the religious traditions that form the context for their faith? In other words, do people manage to find God in spite of their religions or because of them? There were some who insisted that "religions," even our own, are not God’s business. They are our human responses to God’s presence and activity. Others could easily affirm God as active in the lives of persons. but not in the structures, teachings and Scriptures of other religious traditions. The Roman Catholic participants were clearest on this issue. As Jacques Dupuis put it, Vatican II affirmed positive elements not only in the personal lives of people of other faiths but in the religious traditions to which they belong. It is in the sincere practice of their own faith that people come into relationship with God, not in spite of it. Here the consultation concurred. The final document insists that all religious traditions are ambiguous, in that religion has functioned to support "wickedness and folly" as well as its higher aims. The document also insists, however, "that God has been present in their seeking and finding, that where there is truth and wisdom in their teachings, and love and holiness in their living, this, like any wisdom, insight, knowledge, understanding, love and holiness that is found among us, is the gift of the Holy Spirit."

On Christology all agreed that we "need to move beyond a theology which confines salvation to the explicit personal commitment to Jesus Christ." But how do we understand the saving presence of Jesus Christ in relation to people of other faiths? Should we say, as some inclusivists do, that it is because of Christ’s saving mystery, offered to all, that salvation is available to the Hindu, for example, in the sincere practice of his or her faith -- that in Christ salvation is mediated to Christians through the church and to non-Christians through other traditions of faith? Many, especially the Roman Catholics, were comfortable with this approach. Others were uncomfortable with the idea that we can understand the Hindu’s affirmation of the saving reality of God’s presence only if we see it as accomplished in Christ, even though the Hindu would not wish to understand it that way. What role does our neighbor’s self-understanding have in our theological formulations? The awareness of the particularity, indeed the precious particularity, of our language, ‘even the language of "God" and "salvation," made some unwilling to use’ it to blanket the religious lives and experiences of people of other faiths.

The document contains a somewhat modified inclusivist view, aware that when we speak of Christ we are speaking not from on high but out of the context of our faith. The Orthodox continually reminded us of the "eschatological element" that should make us pause before the mystery of God’s unfolding activity. The document reads: "The saving mystery is mediated and expressed in many ways as God’s plan unfolds toward its fulfillment. It may be available to those outside the fold of Christ (John 10:6) in ways we cannot understand, as they live faithful and truthful lives . . . in the framework of the religious traditions which guide and inspire them. The Christ event is for us the clearest expression of the salvific will of God in all human history (I Tim. 2:4)"

On the third question posed by the Chiang Mai meeting, regarding the Holy Spirit and religious plurality, the statement declares: "We have learned again to see the activity of the Spirit as beyond our definitions, descriptions, and limitations, as ‘the wind blows where it wills’ (John 3:8) We have marveled at the ‘economy’ of the Spirit in all the world, and are full of hope and expectancy. We see the freedom of the Spirit moving in ways we cannot predict, we see the nurturing power of the Spirit bringing order out of chaos and renewing the face of the earth, and the ‘energies’ of the Spirit working within and inspiring human beings in their universal longing for and seeking after truth, peace and justice. Everything which belongs to ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’ is properly to be recognized and acknowledged as the fruit of the activity of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:27, cf. Rom. 14:17)"

"We are clear, therefore," the statement goes on to say, "that a positive answer must be given to the question raised in the Guidelines on Dialogue, ‘Is it right and helpful to understand the work of God outside the Church in terms of the Holy Spirit?’ We affirm unequivocally that God the Holy Spirit has been at work in the life and traditions of peoples of living faiths."

The final brief section of the document, "Interreligious Dialogue: A Theological Perspective," suggests that "our recognition of the mystery of salvation in men and women of other religious traditions shapes the concrete attitudes with which we Christians must approach them in interreligious dialogue." It insists, as well, that interreligious dialogue must "transform the way in which we do theology." "We need to move toward a dialogical theology in which the praxis of dialogue together with that of human liberation will constitute a true locus theologicus, i.e., both a source and basis for theological work."

Such theological thinking will be grounded firmly in a Christian context and in the language of commitment particular to the Christian tradition, interpreting the dimensions of our faith for the Christian community. Yet such theological thinking must be undertaken in full awareness that theologians and thinkers of other traditions not only "listen in" on our conversations, but also are engaged in interpreting religious plurality in the context of their own traditions of faith. A new era of theological thinking has surely begun.

Communism’s Collapse: The Receding Shadow of Transcendence

"The year 1989," declared former U.S. Ambassador Jack Perry to our Charleston Foreign Affairs Forum, "will go down in history as annus mirabilis -- a year of wonders." Many had thought, he continued, that communism and all the governments that flew that ideological banner would come to an end; but no one could have predicted that the end would be so swift. Many had said that communism lacked popular support; few realized what pent-up resentment would boil forth once people were free to speak about the tyranny of the past half-century and more.

Beyond all these surprises, Perry pointed out, is the stunned recognition that things will never be the same again -- that a great social, political and economic power, one which our world has reckoned with for most of this century, is unraveling. And while the shape of our world was at least familiar last summer, now we stare blinking into a void. What can it mean?

Speculation seems to be in two directions. Some say that the demise of communism means the triumph of democracy. The dynamics of a free and open society, in which the individual has full range for creative capacities, have shown their superiority over tyranny built upon a 19th-century ideology. Others claim that the decline of communism points toward the ultimate victory of the human spirit in what has been essentially a spiritual struggle. Desires to express real values, honor the truth and worship God freely could not be frustrated forever by repressive public policy.

While both of these ideas appeal to me at times, especially while looking for those proverbial cracks in the once seemingly paved-over world of communism, it’s clear that neither of these views does justice to the enormous changes taking place. Both the failure of communism and the rising dream of democracy speak of a deep crisis that has only begun to take shape. The crisis of the 1990s is one that touches upon the core of human desires, expectations and dreams. Between the failed dream of communism and the rising dream of peace, plenty and personal liberty lies a world reeling dangerously between false idols and social disintegration. "What will replace the ideological materialism of the communists? Will it be merely the practical materialism of the West?

Jean-François Revel has pointed out that a centralized dictatorship is not the only source of despotic evil:

As soon as the legitimate authority loses its grip on society it is replaced by a legion of de facto powers ranging from the Mafia to Neighborhood Committees and constituting a sort of patch-work dictatorship, a despotism disseminated throughout the body social.

This possibility points us toward a greater crisis that stems from a world plunging itself into a secularized darkness, a world that has lost its anchor in transcendent values -- a world, in short, that has forgotten how it once longed for heaven.

It is true, of Course, that the downfall of communism has also been accompanied by the re-emergence of the Christian churches in the East. That is a sign of hope -- but it is not the only sign that comes into view. There is also ethnic strife, the spirit of revenge, and developments such as the publishing of Playboy magazine in Hungary -- a move announced in a full-page ad in the New York Times with the words, "Exporting the American Dream." It is too easily assumed that it is a good sign when the East wants what the West has.

Both the East and West are included in this larger crisis. In his famous Harvard commencement address Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that were he to choose for his country between the external evil of Soviet communism and the internal, seductive evil of Western materialism, he would not willingly choose the latter. But can we assume, as many do, that in rejecting communism Eastern Europeans are choosing what we have?

The eclipse of communist ideology makes it all the more important to remember that, despite its antireligious tradition, Marxist-Leninist communism was, conceptually, the product of a world that felt the need for a transcendent vision. Communism is, more than anything else, the secularized remnant of a transcendent ideal. Until its moral capital had completely vanished, it traded on a sense of moral outrage at the injustices of the world, and it proposed a revolution to create a better one. It looked for a godless kingdom of God.

This point is not the least bit novel. Eric Voegelin, author of the magisterial Order and History and one of greatest historical philosophers of our age, saw in communism a secularized variety of gnosticism. Heidelberg philosopher Karl Lowith pointed out years ago that "the Communist Manifesto still retains the basic features of a messianic faith." Its scheme of world-historical conflict evokes images of forces of light and darkness, of "Christ and Antichrist in the last epoch of history." It is not by chance, wrote Lowith,

that the task of the proletariat corresponds to the world-historical mission of the chosen people, that the redemptive and universal function of the most degraded class is conceived on the religious pattern of Cross and Resurrection, that the ultimate transformation of the realm of freedom corresponds to the transformation of the civitas Terrena into a civitas Dei, and that the whole process of history as outlined in the Communist Manifesto corresponds to the general scheme of the Jewish-Christian interpretation of history as providential advance toward a final goal.

But we don’t need to understand philosophical similarities between Christianity, Judaism and communism to understand that what is now evaporating from the European landscape is a kind of faith -- a faith in something larger than the individual, something one might give oneself to in devotion and sacrifice. Whittaker Chambers described his turning away from the Communist Party as the loss of a religious identity. We can listen to the words and triumphant strains of the "Internationale" and hear what is best described as an apocalyptic hymn:

Arise, ye prisoner of starvation,

Arise, ye wretched of the earth,

For justice thunders condemnation,

A better world’s In birth

Tis the final conflict

Let each stand in his place,

The Internationale

Shall be the human race.

Is this really science? Or is it an appeal to that longing for transcendent truth and justice that we know as religion?

Besides noting that communism represents a kind of survival of transcendent values -- though reduced and distorted -- it is also important to observe that it has succumbed in a world of increasingly nontranscendent values. Its shell of idealism survived into an age slowly losing its capacity to live for anything above the level of private life. It was something to die for, and many willingly did.

Of course it was also, in the minds of some, worth killing for. To some political minds it was an ideological cover for murder. Lenin knew that one could not make an omelet without breaking eggs. Trotsky’s ideal of "permanent revolution," in the hands of his nemesis Stalin, resulted in decades of "omeletmaking." But if one has a reason for killing -- a truly sufficient logic for murder -- that too is evidence that one still believes in a transcendent order. The fact that the transcendent order is illusory doesn’t make an ounce of difference -- and even the fact that one does not specifically believe it makes no difference, as long as it is there. Even as the formalized creed of a society, the ideology is the basis of praxis -- it serves as a principle which calls on individual sacrifice on behalf of something other and greater than oneself. This logic must at least be sufficient for the pretense that murder serves a higher purpose than personal ambition or avarice.

We must not forget that even while Stalin’s murders multiplied, Solzhenitsyn found in the Soviet prison camps "true believers" -- not party functionaries, but those who believed in the party even while they confessed their nonexistent crimes. These were, in many ways, among the world’s last great followers of a transcendent order -- martyrs to a faith even as the system created by that faith. crushed them.

It was a long way down from the kingdom of God that the Bible speaks of and the "City of God" as Augustine envisioned it to the world of the proletarian vanguard. But if we do not recognize the important relationship here, we fail to understand the full importance of what has been expelled when the demonic bondage of communism has ceased.

Does it necessarily follow that democracy will replace communism? The terms themselves are ambiguous. On the one hand, democratic freedom may mean the ideal of the individual exercising his or her own free will -- a value based upon solid conviction and nourished by a Christian view of the competence and dignity of the individual soul. However, democracy also can be seen as the vagrant wishes of the individual. The conviction that this can be a grounding principle for a society is as seductive as it is devastating to any genuine attempt to build a society. Yet what is most consistently communicated about democracy in the late 20th century is what Edmund Burke and our founders would identify as a "vulgar appeal" to those appetites that, given free reign, make society impossible.

Twentieth-century views of democracy seem often little more than a preference for "having it my way." The unprincipled free reign of individual choice has, of course, long been seen as the sure prelude to social evil. Half of the Book of Judges laments the grotesque evils of an Israel in which, because it had no king, "every man did what was right in his own eyes." The profaned version of democracy that grips the imagination of much of the world, comes very close to the moral chaos that Judges describes.

Our culture might not have survived if it had been founded on such sentiments. One is reminded of a remark made some years ago by political scientist and former ambassador George F. Kennan about the East-West conflict. "I sometimes wonder," he said, "what use there is in trying to protect the Western world against fancied threats when the signs of disintegration from within are so striking."

Another vision of democracy; however, sees it not only in terms of its result (private freedoms) but in terms of its foundation upon the virtues known in the classic tradition as "republican" or "civic" virtues. These virtues make society possible by opposing the egoistic whims of personal choice. Such virtues as patience, temperance, prudence and industry are the prior conditions of a democracy, and therefore of democratic freedom.

These virtues are based upon a strong sense of loyalty to a transcendent order -- to something outside and greater than ourselves. They suggest, by definition, something to which the individual responds with piety, loyalty and love -- attitudes that call forth the habits of self-restraint, self-control and personal sacrifice.

The exercise of patience, for instance, assumes that action directed toward the future is superior to action devoted only to the moment: it is self-restraint based upon a good that is seen as superior to the momentary self -- the self-of-the-fleeting-moment. Patience, like industry, honor, duty and prudence, is an instance of the self living for that which is greater. As our founders rightly insisted, people governed by such habits of mind and conduct have no need of a monarch.

With the veil of communist ideology (however reductionist. and perverse) ripped away, the choice left open is not between communism and democracy. Were that the case, nothing would be left but the sanguine acceptance of an assured outcome.

We are back to a more ancient struggle between a world vision based upon the satisfaction of self-centered desire and another kind of vision that may seem impossibly simple because it is conceptually a very simple matter. Morally, and in terms of the life of the spirit, it requires the greatest sacrifice possible. The answer that I have in mind actually entered an earlier world full of power struggles, social conflict, philosophical confusion and economic disparities based on appetite, influence and exploitation. It was a vision of peace only because it demanded a price. The price it demanded was eloquently symbolized in the cross, an instrument of torture and death.

The struggles faced today by East and West demand a new insight into the human condition, an insight realized in the cross of a self-giving God and consummated in the response of human love and obedience. If it is through the suffering faithful believers that this mystery is shared in the world, then perhaps deliverance will come from faithful people of the unshackled East and not from a West anesthetized by material comfort and thus still unaware of its own capacity for self-destruction.

Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Sensible Land Ethic

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf," writes Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949) Leopold reports what happens to a mountain when all the wolves, who are predators, are exterminated. The rancher wants to protect his cowherd, the hunters want to protect the deer population, and so the wolves are eliminated. Without the wolves, the deer population explodes. Too many deer means that the mountain cannot keep pace in its task of providing food for the deer. The deer herd begins to die "of its own too-much."

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps better the cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

So also the cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.

The many articles I read these days on animal rights and on the need to extend ethics to include all of creation lack Leopold’s understanding of the ways of nature, of basic ecology and of what it means to live intimately on the land. Instead, I find increasingly within the animal rights movement and within discussions of environmental ethics (although less so there) a perspective that illustrates just how alienated from the rest of nature the human species has become.

This perspective is one that does not know how to think like a mountain or even what such a directive means. It does not understand the process of life and death. It says simplistically: All killing is wrong; therefore, it is morally wrong for humans to eat meat. Furthermore, if we eat lower on the food chain, we will live in harmony with the earth. This perspective distorts the principle of the sacredness of life to a point where it threatens life itself, for it does not understand that one species supporting or being supported by another is nature’s way of sustaining life.

Predation is a fact of life too often confused with cruelty -- the malicious intent to do harm for harm’s sake and without regard for the rights of the victim. But cruelty to animals is morally different from human predation on animals -- eating animals’ flesh and using their hides and other parts for clothing, food or shelter. In our contemporary affirmation of Native American spirituality, we often overlook the fact that Native Americans hunted animals for food and other necessities. They respected the rights of nature while relying on it for sustenance.

Cruelty to animals is a manifestation of human sinfulness; it is one more sign that our relationship with God, ourselves and the rest of creation is in need of healing. Scripture says that Christ came to restore all of creation. But evil and sinfulness are the consequences of human actions and decisions. The plants and animals and the earth itself are not co-conspirators in evil (as those who see predation as evil must logically claim) but are victims, sufferers of the consequences of human evil. In other words, it is inappropriate to call the downing of a buck by a wolf cruel.

Leopold offers us a useful review of basic ecology. He defines a "land ethic" as a guide for human action toward and in the created world. According to Leopold, the basic source of knowledge for a land ethic is the biotic pyramid of which the human species is a part:

Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.

The species of a layer are alike not in where they came from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat. Each successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above. Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. . . . The pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical progression from apex to base. [Humankind] shares an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels which eat both meat and vegetables.

Those who claim that it is morally wrong for human beings to eat meat because it involves killing an animal must logically claim that predation itself -- in all contexts -- is evil. But predation is part of nature as created by God. If it were evil, even those who eat strict vegetarian diets of only organically grown foods would be guilty through association. Biological control of pests and diseases by definition requires predators, and healthy, life-sustaining soils are not possible without predation.

The human species should not apologize for its predatory role in the biotic pyramid. When the pyramid is functioning properly, nature is in harmony with itself. The disharmony comes when things get out of balance -- as when the mountain lost it wolves and was taken over by its deer. Therefore, the vision of lions lying down with lambs is a gross misunderstanding of harmony in nature; it assumes that harmony within nature, the biota, should be identical with harmony among humans.

To affirm the existence of predation in nature, however, is not to espouse a philosophy of social Darwinism. Predation is part of the way nature functions and humans are indeed part of nature, but there is something wrong with the form of predation that is inherent in unbridled economic or social competition among humans. To make such a leap of logic is to commit the other glaring error often made by proponents of animal rights and environmental ethics: they fail to see that the rights endowed to animals are not identical with the rights of human beings. Yes, we are an animal species, but we, by our ability to think and reason, are also different from the wolf, the deer, the cow and the rest of creation. To deny this reality is to run from the responsibilities it carries. No other species can alter its habitat with the deliberation that the human species can. And human beings are the only species capable of self-determination; we do not function solely out of instinct.

Recognition of our solidarity with all other living things cannot erase our distinction from them. In Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (1986) , Douglas John Hall addresses this reality and relates it to the commandment to love. Hall first reminds us that love of God and love of neighbor, while inseparable, are not the same. The neighbor is not God, nor are we ultimately accountable to our neighbor. Furthermore, God’s "needs" are not the same as my neighbor’s. Thus my relationship with God is different from that with my neighbor.

This is also true with respect to the third counterpart of my being, the extrahuman world. It is not the same thing -- though it is never an entirely different thing either -- to love my own kind and to love the otherkind.

Thus God, neighbor, and nature confront me with different responsibilities just as they each offer me different gifts. This difference . . . must be honored.

Our failure to recognize the differences between humankind and extrahuman creation is but one more manifestation of our alienation from nature: we don’t even know enough about nature to see the differences within it. Perhaps this is why North American culture is so uncomfortable with the reality of death. Perhaps it is our inability to face the prospect of our own death, our own intimate participation in the ways of nature, that causes us to be uncomfortable with killing animals to meet human needs. If this is the case, then proposing that all farm animals be set free so they will not be killed for human consumption reflects not so much a concern for the rights of those animals to live as a need to quiet one’s own conscience, a conscience so alienated from nature that it does not understand that one species getting its food from another is part of the way nature functions.

How, then, do we develop an appropriate land ethic? Just as social ethics directs intrahuman activity and is based on what it means to be a human being, a land ethic directs our actions toward the land and must be based on the needs of the land to support life. In Leopold’s words, the land is not merely soil, "it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals." The land has a right to be what it is meant to be to the fullest extent possible, given the rights of that with which it shares existence. The latter part of this previous statement is important because even my rights as a human being are by definition limited by the very fact that my fellow human beings have rights as well. (Human goals and the needs of the biotic pyramid are not nearly as much at odds with each other as our industrial, mechanical culture would have us believe.)

Hall’s point is that different criteria -- different ethics -- characterize and direct our relationship with God, with other human beings and with the rest of the created world. While all three relationships are interconnected and inseparable, the differences need to be recognized in order to understand what it means to be in right relationship with the other, whether that other is God, our neighbor, or the biota -- the earth. Being in a state of connection with nature should not stop us from carrying out our role as predator, but instead teach us what it means to be an appropriate predator, one that contributes to the proper functioning of the biotic pyramid.

An example of appropriate human predation is the Heifer Project International -- a nonprofit development organization that uses livestock projects to help poor people achieve self-sufficiency. It recognizes that poor people need animal protein in their diets. Raising livestock such as a small flock of chickens greatly increases food security for a poor family. Chickens eat both plants and insects and a host of other food sources that humans cannot eat. Not only do the chickens provide the family with a source of meat, but the family can also eat the eggs or hatch them out to maintain or increase the flock. Such use of livestock by humans is not the least bit cruel nor does it violate the animal’s rights -- it’s simply practicing good land ethics.

The way most livestock sold for meat is raised under the American industrial model of agriculture is morally reprehensible. It is unethical to raise a chicken in such a way that a hen must share a tiny cage with a half dozen other hens and never once see daylight or set her feet upon the grass -- much less delight in the catch of a juicy grasshopper. But it is one thing to say we should not eat this factory chicken on the grounds of the immoral means by which it is raised and quite another to equate all meat eating with cruelty to animals.

Those of us who are concerned with the rights of extrahuman creation would do best to listen to what nature has to teach us about itself and its needs before we venture to determine its rights. Only then can we know what it means to live in right relationship. To assume that we can know this without consulting nature is not only ethically irresponsible, it is the ultimate example of our anthropocentricity and alienation from nature.

Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy

Havel wonders at the tremendous strength of an oppressed people who "seemingly believed in nothing," yet who cast off a totalitarian system within a few short weeks, "in an entirely peaceful and dignified manner."

Text:

On December 29 at the Hradcany Castle, high above the Vlatava River that wends its way through the city of Prague, playwright Václav Havel, leader of Civic Forum, was elected president of Czechoslovakia. After a short speech, Havel and some members of parliament crossed the castle compound to St. Vitus Cathedral where the archbishop of Prague, Cardinal Frantisek Tomásek, celebrated a Te Deum Mass. To quote words spoken by Havel a month earlier, when the Communist Party agreed to give up its 41-year monopoly on political power: "History has begun to develop very quickly in this country."

Havel is a study in the spiritual ferment that lies at the base of collapse and renewal in Eastern Europe. As early as the spring of 1989, Alexander Dubcek, the communist leader of the Prague Spring of 1968, emerged from the silence of two decades to receive an honorary degree from the University of Bologna. He then made a journey to Prague where he called on Havel.

The memory of those heady days in 1968 takes on a new meaning in this era of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. Dubcek’s Action Program when he was first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party called for the democratization of political life, decentralization of the command economy, ideological openness and full exposure of Stalinist crimes. Little wonder that when Gorbachev visited Prague in early 1987, his spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, described the essential difference between Gorbachev and Dubcek in two words: "Nineteen years."

The fabric of those 19 years contains a little-known thread picked up in Zhores Medvedev’s biography Gorbachev (Norton, 1986) Zdenék Mlynár was the secretary of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1968 and one of the chief architects of the Prague Spring. In exploring the student life of the young Gorbachev at Moscow State University, Medvedev shares Mlynár s account of his student years in the Soviet Union, where for five years his roommate, study partner and friend was an ambitious young law student named Mikhail Gorbachev. The issues of the Prague Spring and the present restructuring of Soviet and Czechoslovakian political culture were quite plainly the product of dormitory room bull sessions.

The spiritual legacy of the Prague Spring is very much a part of the movement for Czech national renewal that Havel embodies. Symbolically, he would accept the office of president only if Dubcek would become head of the parliament. What began two decades ago must be completed. The playwright-politician is not insensitive to the dramatic dimensions of history itself.

But there is a second spiritual dimension at work in Havel, and for that he draws, consciously or unconsciously, from the 14th-century movement for Czech national renewal that centered around the proto-Reformation figure Jan Hus. Church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette described the Hussite movement in Bohemia as stressing high ethical purpose over radical theological speculation, and moral reform over ecclesiastical revolution. Hus, rector of the University of Prague, advocated the rights of the people against the power of a Latin church and a German intelligentsia. Although the language of scholarship was Latin, he wrote and preached in the just-emerging Czech language.

After Hus was burned at the stake in 1410 by the emperor, Sigismund, the Hussite spirit animated the Czech nation, giving birth to a small countercultural church that survived underground for centuries as the Bohemian Brethren. The spirit of Hus energized moral insight and ethical action in the service of God and the truth. Today, in Prague’s Old Town Square, Hus’s statue dominates the scene, and underneath it is this inscription: "Love the Truth. Let others have their truth and truth will prevail."

The formation of the modern Czechoslovak state in 1918, after centuries of domination by Germanic Hapsburg power, is associated with the leadership of the Masaryk family. In those days of national rebirth, politicians and clergy alike focused on the moral renewal of the nation. In that spirit, under the leadership of Karel Farsky, an independent Czechoslovak church was formed as a breakaway movement from Rome. At the outset it claimed 800,000 communicants, drawn largely from the working class. The church claimed as its heritage the spirit of Hus and Jan Amos Comenius, the last bishop of the Czech Brethren. The mass was to be celebrated in the Czech language, accompanied by a Eucharist in which both the bread and the cup were shared by clergy and laity. There was an echo here of the Hussite practice of sharing the cup with all worshipers that was not a part of Roman Catholic practice until the reforms of Vatican II. The theme of moral renewal of the nation was there as well, as Farsky spoke in words of an almost messianic sweep and force "of the importance of the God-enlightened human being in reshaping the present social order into a more perfect one." The Proclamation to the Nation, announcing the new church, ended: "We are fulfilling the prophesy of the great bishop, Jan Amos Comenius, that the rule of thy affairs shall again return into thy hands." During the trauma of Nazi occupation and the subsequent confinement of the Czech national spirit within Marxist-Leninist ideology, little was heard from the Czech National Church. But, like the spirit of the Czech Brethren of old, it was there in the underground of national life.

Havel stands as an heir to these two spiritual traditions: the renewing breeze of socialist reconstruction first felt in Eastern Europe in the Prague Spring of 1968 and the spirit of Czech moral and spiritual transformation, drawn from the Hussite underground of nationhood and culture. Havel’s lineage was clear in his New Year’s address to the nation where he spoke of the Marxist-Leninist legacy of a decayed moral environment:

We have become morally ill because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and doing another. We have learned not to believe in anything. not to care about one another and only to look after ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility and forgiveness have lost their depth dimension.

This is the language of spiritual and moral renewal -- surprising talk from a national leader. In what crucible was this compound generated? On what anvil was this soul shaped and hammered?

Several months, ago the English-language edition of Havel’s prison reflections, Letters to Olga (Henry Holt) , appeared in the West. Writing under the watchful eye of the prison censor, these reflections are a stirring indictment of the Marxist-Leninist state and a call to personal and national spiritual renewal. Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s gulag writings has a document of such moving power emerged from the tradition of prison literature.

The man is human-all-too-human, as he chides his wife for packing his prison "care" packages improperly and as he exults in his recordings of the Bee Gees and Pink Floyd. He studies his Bible and admits to an affinity for the "Christian sentiment," but insists: "I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way." Havel also shares Saul Bellow’s sense of that channel in the deepest part of ourselves which is conscious of a higher consciousness. Each human being is responsible, says Havel, to the "absolute horizon of Being." He shares a moment in the prison work camp which filled him so totally with a sense of joy and well-being that he was "suddenly given a glimpse into the abyss of the infinite, of uncertainty, of mystery." One evening the television weatherwoman loses her sound and stands before the cameras in speechless embarrassment. From that incident, Havel crafts a reflection on the human condition and the pathos and empathy of soul with soul.

All of this is both abstract and moving. but it is to the ethical theme of responsibility that Havel directs his most illuminating insights. "But who should begin?" he asks Olga. "Who should break this vicious circle?"

The only possible place to begin is with myself . . .it is I who must begin . . . For the hope opened up in my heart by this turning toward Being has opened my eyes as well. . . . Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether I am lost.

His letters abound in a kind of Heideggerian spinning of scenarios concerning Being, and one can well imagine a different kind of spinning taking place in the mind of the dutiful prison censor as he tried to determine what was dangerous and what was harmless in "the word." And so it slips out and through:

And just as man turns away from Being, so entire large social organisms turn away from it . . . For this reason we may observe how social, political and state systems, and whole societies, are inevitably becoming alienated from themselves.

Here is the language of Marxian analysis in the service of a transcendent frame for social and national renewal. The nation cannot be reclaimed without turning toward Being and there is a humbling awareness that the turning begins with the individual. Such language pushes beyond the cramped confines of a Czech prison cell. We too are engaged.

Havel also reflects on his own moral failure during his first imprisonment, five years earlier. In a petition to the Public Prosector for release, he was able to craft his phrases with just enough ambiguity so that his freedom was granted; but as a result his statements were used by the government to give the impression that Havel had drawn back from his critique of the regime. When it became clear to him what his "honorable cleverness" had produced, he was gripped by remorse:

It’s not hard to stand behind one’s successes. But to accept responsibility for one’s failures . . . that is devishly hard! But only thence does the road lead. . . to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise and to its transcendental meaning. . . . I have my failure to thank for the fact that for the first time in my life I stood directly in the study of the Lord God himself.

It is strikingly clear in those letters from the closing period of his imprisonment that Havel is moving within the sphere of profound religious archetypes as he seeks to make sense of his personal journey and of the struggle for freedom of expression and human rights as delineated in the Charter 77 Movement which brought him to his prison cell:

Yes: man is in fact nailed down -- like Christ on the Cross -- to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between lie torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.

A "hint of horizon" is present in Havel’s life and prison writings -- heir as he is to the spiritual foundation of a nation and its people. The grid of paradoxes continues to unfold in Eastern Europe as the playwright of the absurd seeks to guide a nation in making sense out of the suffering of the past and an unknown future. The promise of social renewal is not enough. The Marxist-Leninist vision of the future -- what Czech novelist Milan Kundera described as "organized forgetting" -- is now supplanted by a leader who knows that remembering is redemptive, that human dignity is finally an expression of the inexpressible mystery. that we each find our "outline . . . in the memory of Being."

When Havel addressed his nation on New Year’s Day he wondered at the tremendous strength of an oppressed people who "seemingly believed in nothing," yet who cast off a totalitarian system within a few short weeks, "in an entirely peaceful and dignified manner." We can picture him in those Wenceslas Square days of mass demonstrations, addressing the crowds from a balcony as one who indeed believed in something greater than the political events that were unfolding. For a brief moment, he himself embodied the spirit of the Czech nation, but more than that, he drew from the people a hint of horizon without which the human venture is flat and lifeless. Havel ended that New Year’s address with a double echo of Czechoslovak history: "My most important predecessor [Tómas Masaryk] started his first speech by quoting from Comenius. Permit me to end my own first speech by my own paraphrase. Your Government, my people, has returned to you!"

The Romantic Appeal of Joseph Campbell

Of all the charges that Brendan Gill lodged in the New York Review of Books (September 28, 1989) against the heretofore sacrosanct Joseph Campbell, the most stinging was not that Campbell was either an anti-Semite or a political reactionary but that his work appeals to guilt-ridden yuppies seeking a rationalization for their materialistic narcissism. Campbell’s pet litany, "Follow your bliss," purportedly inspires his fans to do whatever makes them happy, including making money.

Gill’s cynical evaluation of Campbell’s posthumous popularity prompts both logical and factual questions. Gill’s argument is based not on any polling of Campbell’s devotees but on speculation. The popularity of Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (originally published by Pantheon Books in 1949) , the book that has most spurred fans to pave their own yellow brick road, peaked not in the ‘80s but in the ‘60s. Campbell first uttered the phrase "Follow your bliss" to his Sarah Lawrence undergraduates decades earlier. Even if that innocuous slogan bestows carte blanche on all who heed it, it does not follow logically that to encourage people to do whatever they most deeply want to do is to encourage them to do any one thing rather than another.

Furthermore, Campbell psychologizes the message he says myth tells. True heroism, to him, is not external but internal: the hero’s literal search for wealth or anything else symbolizes his search for self-knowledge. The land to which he treks symbolizes the unconscious. Even if all disciples of Campbell became investment bankers, their acquisitiveness would be merely the outward expression of an inner quest.

Most important, Campbell’s message is far more mystical than individualistic. Campbell is an uncompromising world ecumenist. As he says at the outset of Hero, he wants to demonstrate that all myths are one in order to demonstrate that all peoples are one. In the recent The Power of Myth (Doubleday, 1988) , the book based on the Bill Moyers television interviews, he continue to say that "we still need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet."

Gill’s assertion, focusing on Campbell’s private pronouncements rather than on his writings, is not just silly but shallow. Campbell’s inspiration to others has come from his authority as an analyst of myth. His advice carries only as much clout as his insight into myth. Had Gill really wanted to damn his lifelong friend, he would have attacked the man’s theory rather than merely disclosed gossipy tidbits.

I suggest that Campbell’s appeal derives from the unashamed romanticism of his theory of myth. His recent popularity reflects no changing ethos of the generations but only the unprecedented publicity given him by Moyers.

Campbell’s romantic view of myth is the opposite of a rationalist view, one epitomized by the Victorian anthropologists Edward Tylor and James Frazer. To rationalists, myth is a wholly primitive explanation of the physical world. It is the primitive counterpart to science, which is exclusively modern. Myth and science are not only redundant in function but also incompatible in content: myth invokes the wills of gods to account for the origin and operation of the physical world; science appeals to the mechanical behavior of impersonal forces like atoms. There are no modern myths: "modern myth" is a contradiction in terms.

By contrast, Campbell and other romantics see myth as an eternal, not merely primitive, possession. Nothing can supersede it. Where rationalists believe that science better serves its explanatory function than myth, romantics believe that nothing duplicates the psychological or metaphysical content of myth. Read symbolically rather than, as for literalists, literally, myth refers not to the physical world described by science but to either the human mind or the cosmos. To rationalists, science makes myth both unnecessary and impossible for moderns, who by definition are scientific. To romantics, science runs askew to myth, which does not refer to the physical world and is therefore still acceptable to scientific moderns. Like Carl Jung, Campbell dares to pronounce science itself mythic. To rationalists, nothing could be more anathema.

Rationalists regard the function served by myth as indispensable. Romantics consider myth itself indispensable to the serving of its function, which is above all the revelation of the nature of reality. Moderns as well as primitives not merely can but must have myth. Rationalists contend that without some explanation of the environment, be that explanation mythic or scientific, humans would be perplexed. Romantics assert that without the revelation found exclusively in myth, humans would be unfulfilled.

Rationalists grant that myth, like science, can be effective -- functional -- when it is believed to be true, but in fact it is false: myth is a cogent but nevertheless incorrect explanation of the world. Science provides the correct one. Romantics assume that myth is effective not merely when it is accepted as true but only because it is true: the wisdom it offers would not be wisdom if it proved false.

The first aspect of Campbell’s romantic appeal is the elevated status he accords myth. Myth constitutes a collective Bible for all humanity. It alone contains the wisdom necessary for what amounts to salvation. Both the array of functions Campbell ascribes to myth and the scope of his definition of myth guarantee its irreplaceability. Dreams, ritual, art, literature, ideology and science become varieties of myth rather than alternatives to it. An action as well as a belief can be mythic, and the belief need not take the form of a story, which itself can be of any kind.

Because myth defined so broadly is indispensable to the serving of its indispensable functions, Campbell declares unabashedly that without myth, even myth taken literally humans are lost: "For not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been . . . the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers. . . . With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder. and despair" (Myths to Live By [Viking, 1972]). Because no other theorist makes myth as indispensable, no other theorist, not even Jung, is as much an evangelist for myth as Campbell.

A second aspect of Campbell’s romantic appeal is his esteem for primitives. He maintains that moderns can barely equal let alone surpass them. Rationalists view primitives as intellectually inferior to moderns: where primitives invent myth, which is a childish as well as false explanation of the world, moderns create science, which is a mature as well as true explanation of the world. Campbell views primitives as wiser than moderns: primitives know intuitively the meaning of myth that moderns need depth psychology to extricate. In fact, primitives know the meaning that moderns have altogether forgotten and need Freudian and especially Jungian psychology to recollect. Campbell thus claims only to be rediscovering, not discovering, the real meaning of myth -- a meaning known fully to our forebears. Jung himself, not to mention Freud, never goes this far.

A third aspect of Campbell’s romantic appeal follows from the second: if primitives already know the meaning of myth which moderns are merely recovering, that meaning is always the same. An unbroken tradition binds the hoariest myths to the newest ones. Contrary to the rationalist view, there are modern myths. Campbell singles out the distinctively modern myths of space travel, as typified by the Star Wars saga. But modern myths have the same meaning as primitive ones.

A fourth aspect of Campbell’s romantic appeal parallels the third: not only do all myths bear one message, but the message borne is the oneness of all things. Myths not only assume but even preach mysticism. Myths proclaim that humans are one with one another, with their individual selves and with the cosmos itself. No tenet is more staunchly romantic than the conviction that beneath the apparent disparateness of all things lies unity.

A fifth and final aspect of Campbell’s romantic appeal is his assumption that the mystical message of myth is true. To Campbell, not only is the true message of myth the oneness of all things, but all things are truly one. Myth thus discloses the deepest truth about reality.

As fetching as Campbell’s theory of myth is, it is flawed. First, Campbell operates dogmatically, asserting rather than proving his theory. Because he analyzes surprisingly few myths, at least few whole ones, he rarely puts his theory to the interpretive, not to mention explanatory, test. At the same time he ignores rival theorists. Other theorists of myth define it more narrowly than Campbell; find in myth functions other than the ones Campbell finds; and consider dreams, ritual, art, literature, ideology or science equal, if not superior, ways of fulfilling those functions. Others interpret the meaning of myth differently from Campbell.

Beginning with the third volume of the four-volume The Masks of God (Viking, 1964) , Campbell dogmatically describes the function of myth as fourfold. Myth instills a sense of awe and mystery toward the world; offers not an explanation of the world, which science provides, but a symbolic image for an explanation -- for example, the image of the Great Chain of Being; preserves society by justifying social practices and institutions like the Indian caste system; and harmonizes individuals with society, the cosmos and themselves. Why these disparate four functions, Campbell never explains.

Similarly, Campbell dogmatically insists that the true meaning of myth is ahistorical rather than historical and symbolic rather than literal. He also insists that the symbolic meaning of myth is psychological, metaphysical and mystical: myth preaches not that all is unconsciousness or all ultimate reality, but that unconsciousness and consciousness are one and that ultimate reality and everyday reality are one. Myth finds unconsciousness within, not beyond, consciousness, and finds ultimate reality within, not beyond, everyday reality, which is therefore to be embraced rather than rejected. Why the meaning -- the sole meaning -- of myth must be ahistorical, symbolic, psychological, metaphysical, mystical and world-affirming, Campbell never explains.

Other theorists would demur. Some read myth both literally and historically. Others read myth literally but non-historically. Campbell, equating a literal interpretation with a historical one, assumes that to read the Oedipus myth literally is to believe that there was once a king named Oedipus. Others such as Lord Raglan and Vladimir Propp would suggest that the myth literally describes the life of a hero by no means necessarily believed to have lived. Still others take myth symbolically but neither psychologically nor metaphysically. Émile Durkheim, for example, contends that myth describes society rather than either the mind or the cosmos. Freud and Jung take myth psychologically but not metaphysically. While many theorists of myth assume, like Campbell, that all myths harbor the same meaning, only Lucien Lévy-Bruhl considers that meaning mystical.

Campbell’s interpretation of myths differs not only from that of other theorists but also from that of believers. Mainstream Christianity, Judaism, Islam and ancient Greek and Roman religions do not teach that heaven and earth or soul and body, let alone god and humans, are one. Indeed, the worst sin in Western religions is the attempt to efface the divide between god and humanity. Mysticism is a minor strain in the West and typically rejects the world rather than embraces it. Campbell’s unruffled response is that Western religions misunderstand their own myths. How he knows better than believers themselves the meaning of their own myths, Campbell never reveals.

Second, Campbell contradicts himself on the meaning, function and origin of myth. On the one hand he regularly interprets the meaning of all myths as mystical. On the other hand he comes to read modern Western myths as espousing self-reliant individualism rather than self-effacing mysticism.

Likewise, Campbell does not always say that myth serves the four functions noted. Most often he considers its prime function a revelatory one: myth discloses a deeper side of both humans and the cosmos. Tied to this function is an experiential one: through myth humans do not merely discover but actually encounter this deeper reality. At other times the function is more mechanical: myth activates the release and even the sublimation of emotions.

Sometimes Campbell says that myth arises out of the unconscious, which is alternatively an inherited, Jungian-like entity and a forged, Freudian-like one. Other times he says that myth emerges from the effects of either recurrent or traumatic experiences. In all of these cases, each society invents its own myths. At other times, however, he says that myth originates in one society and spreads elsewhere. Occasionally Campbell gives these competing explanations in the same book.

Third, Campbell argues circularly. He declares that myth serves foremost to reveal the oneness of all things, but it serves that function only if all things are in fact one. How does he know that they are? Because myth says so! We are to trust myth because myth is trustworthy. Where other theorists turn to psychology, sociology, history and other disciplines to elucidate and evaluate myth, Campbell deems myth both self-explanatory and self-validating. For example, rather than using history to assess myths of primordial matriarchy, he draws from myths historical conclusions about matriarchy. Myth, proclaims Campbell, is always right. Why? Because it is myth.

Fourth, Campbell is lopsidedly comparativistic. Making comparisons is unobjectionable. By definition, all theorists seek similarities among myths, and the quest for similarities is central to the quest for knowledge. But in his search for similarities Campbell brazenly ignores lingering differences. Though he continually professes interest in differences as well as similarities, he finally dismisses all differences as trivial: "Dissolving, the ethnic [i.e., local] ideas become transparent to the archetypes, those elementary ideas of which they [i.e., the ethnic ideas] are no more than the local masks" (Historical Atlas of World Mythology [Harper & Row, 1988])

In Masks Campbell does distinguish between primitive, Eastern, Western and modern Western mythologies. He further divides primitive mythology into hunting and planting myths. Yet he simultaneously asserts that hunters are at heart planters, Westerners at heart Easterners, and modern Westerners like primitive hunters -- in which case all peoples and so all myths are really one. Indeed, all myths turn out to preach the same mystical homily.

A revealing foil to Campbell’s comparativism is Jung’s approach. To interpret a myth Campbell simply identifies the archetypes in it. An interpretation of the Odyssey, for example, would show how Odysseus’s life conforms to a heroic pattern. Jung, by contrast, considers the identification of archetypes merely the first step in the interpretation of a myth. One must also determine the meaning of those archetypes in the specific myth in which they appear and the meaning of that myth in the life of the specific person who is stirred by it. One must analyze the person, not just the myth.

Fifth, Campbell uniformly ignores the adherents of myth. Though he investigates why and how myths originate and function, he never asks who invents and uses myths. He does not care. Hence his insistence that Westerners have systematically misconstrued their own myths. While Campbell’s refusal to defer to the actor is refreshing, his indifference to the actor is startling. Few theorists of myth end with the actor’s point of view -- otherwise they would have nothing of their own to offer -- but nearly all start there: that point of view provides the phenomenon to be explained and interpreted.

Sixth, Campbell typically ignores the story in myths -- most ironic for someone lauded as a masterly storyteller. With the conspicuous exception of Hero, the only place in which he provides a pattern for myths, Campbell ignores the plot and instead isolates either the beliefs underlying the plot or else specific archetypes in the plot. The fact that, as noted, he analyzes few whole myths, and includes as myths creeds and even rituals, underscores how limited for him is the role of storytelling.

A final weakness is that Campbell wrongly pits myth against religion. He assumes that in the West, though somehow not in the East, religion inevitably literalizes and historicizes myth. He sees the typical church father not as Augustine but as Jimmy Swaggart. Actually, mainstream and not just heretical Christianity and Judaism have traditionally interpreted the Bible symbolically as well as literally. Conversely, some of the most fervent antinomians have been literalists. Campbell’s equation of institutionalization with degeneration and of individualism with purity is adolescent. Max Weber noted long ago that the institutionalization of any movement is not only inevitable but also necessary: the alternative is extinction.

Here, too, the difference between Campbell and Jung is acute. Jung is wary of the psychological risks of spontaneous religiosity, praises quintessentially institutionalized Catholicism for its psychological efficacy, nearly equates mainline Protestantism with modern atheism, nevertheless bemoans the decline of Christianity generally, and turns anxiously to analytical psychology as a modern substitute. Campbell, by contrast, far closer to Nietzsche than to Jung, castigates traditional Christianity generally as institutionalized and therefore psychologically impotent, damns his own boyhood Catholicism most of all, revels in the anticipated demise of all Christianity, and sees no need for a substitute for it. Jung suggests that psychology at once replaces religion and interprets its extant myths. Campbell argues that psychology merely restores the interpretations of myths directly imbibed by earliest humanity but haplessly missed ever since by its "churched" successors.

Despite these many criticisms, Joseph Campbell merits praise. He more than anyone else has helped revive popular interest in myth. His indefatigable proselytizing for a comparativist, symbolic, psychological and mystical approach to myth has done much to liberate those raised on a particularist, literalist, historical and antimystical approach to the Bible above all. Campbell’s work is an important introduction to myth. It is simply not the last word.

Welcoming the Stranger

Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition

By Christine Pohl. (Eerdmans, 185 pp.)

My wife and I were visiting some old friends, a couple in their 80s whose health had been failing. At the time of our visit, the husband was confined to a wheelchair and was struggling with dementia. He was only intermittently able to participate in conversation, and he often had difficulty recognizing his wife. Her health was much better, though she has been showing signs of wearing down from her years of giving faithful, ongoing care to her husband.

We reflected with the wife on the countless ways in which they had shown hospitality to Duke students over the years, particularly international students. For example, they had sponsored a weekly game of badminton for international students. Every Friday night for over 30 years, the wife told us, they had gathered in the East Campus gym to play badminton. Over the years, she estimated, they had welcomed over 3,000 international students to those games. The couple had invited many of those folks to their homes for meals, and the wife told us that a surprising number of them continued to write from all over the world.

My wife and I had heard stories about the couple leading Bible studies for German prisoners of war in England, but we had never heard the stories directly. I asked the wife to tell us about their time in England during World War II. She told us about the Bible studies, and how moving it had been to read scripture together in the midst of war.

We also learned that their hospitality had been even more extensive than leading Bible studies. They took a portion of their rations each week and gave them to others in need, especially to the POWs. As word got around that they were offering their rations to others, townspeople began to bring food to the couple to help them get through the week. As we listened to her talk, we realized the continuities in this couple’s generous, hospitable life -- whether it was with German POWs and other townspeople, Duke students far from their homes, or good friends.

Even so, I was not prepared for the closing words the husband offered to us as we prepared to leave. He had not spoken much during our visit, and when he had it was often unclear whether he was really following the conversation. Yet he spoke with confidence and warmth. "Come and visit us again when you can," he said. "And, remember, if you ever need food or anything else, we will gladly offer you whatever we have on the stove or in the refrigerator. You always have a home here."

What could we say? Here was a man confined to a wheelchair, unable to get in and out of bed without assistance, only intermittently able even to recall how many children he has, nonetheless offering us hospitality as if we were the ones in need.

Yet his offer seemed entirely natural. Hospitality had become so much a part of this couple’s way of living as Christians that such gestures had become second nature. The husband literally did not need to think about what to do -- his offer was an expression of what he and his wife had become through the years. They had cultivated habits of hospitality.

I thought of these friends as I read Christine Pohl’s book, Making Room. "We become proficient in a skill by performing it regularly, and by learning from persons who are masters of it," she says at the outset. "Hospitality is a skill and a gift, but it is also a practice which flourishes as multiple skills are developed, as particular commitments and values are nurtured, and as certain settings are cultivated. In addition to theological and historical discussions of the practice of hospitality, we need contemporary models from whom we can learn what hospitality to strangers might look like today"

Pohl provides such contemporary models to learn from, focusing not so much on individual masters as on communities of Christians for whom hospitality is a way of life. Some of the communities she visited and learned from are well known: the Catholic Worker, L’Arche, Benedictine monasteries, the Open Door Community. Others may be less well known, but their ministries bear a powerful witness: Good Works, Inc., Jubilee Partners, L’Abri Fellowship, Annunciation House.

These communities are expressive of Christian identity and are nourished by rich spiritual practices. Their lives and activities are shaped by "the kinds of guests they welcome, the types of spaces they inhabit, and the theological traditions on which they draw." For some, the guests are predominantly the urban poor. For others, the guests are persons with disabilities, students and seekers, homeless people, or refugees. Some operate in rural areas, others in urban settings; some are linked physically to large church spaces, others exist as homes or monasteries. Some of the communities are rooted in the evangelical tradition, some mainline Protestant, some Roman Catholic, some ecumenical.

Pohl displays the diverse convictions that undergird these communities, the practices that shape them, and the hopes and struggles they face. They serve as a touchstone and an inspiration, enabling readers to gain a sense of just what Pohl means when she describes hospitality as a way of life that embraces both skill and gift.

Yet the stories of these communities are not the conceptual heart of Pohl’s book. Indeed, in many ways they serve as a counterpoint to the focus of her investigation. How is it, Pohl wonders, that the practice of hospitality -- a practice that was central to Christian identity for so much of the church’s history -- has been largely eclipsed in the modern period?

In the light of this question, the exemplary communities she describes are powerful precisely as a contrast not only to the presumptions of modern American capitalism, which has a "hospitality industry," but also to the presumptions of mainstream American church culture, in which "hospitality committees" are charged with providing coffee and doughnuts after church. Most Americans aspire to have the resources that will enable them not to be dependent on the hospitality of strangers for food, shelter and safety. We organize our lives to protect ourselves from vulnerability.

Pohl emphasizes that "hospitality is central to the meaning of the gospel." Jesus’ ministry and proclamation of the kingdom are inexplicable apart from issues of hospitality; Paul urges fellow disciples to welcome one another as Christ had welcomed them; the writer to the Hebrews enjoins readers not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for like Abraham and Sarah they may be entertaining angels unawares; and the letter of James offers a powerful critique of showing partiality to the rich at the expense of the poor.

This emphasis on the centrality of hospitality continues in Christian tradition, and the first part of Pohl’s book, "Remembering Our Heritage," retrieves that tradition. She describes the ways in which Christians often appealed to their practices of hospitality as key components of the credibility of the gospel; hospitality was a criterion for leadership in the Christian communities; and leaders such as John Chrysostom emphasized hospitality throughout their preaching. Over time, Christians began to establish institutions to care for pilgrims and the poor, institutions that supplemented home- and church-based hospitality. Monastic communities became key carriers of the tradition of hospitality through the Middle Ages. Hospitality involved attending to the physical, social and spiritual needs of strangers; it meant not only offering food and shelter, but recognizing strangers as persons of equal worth and dignity. It also was a key practice in transcending national and ethnic distinctions in the church.

Pohl argues that in many parts of the Western church hospitality got lost in the 18th century. As early as the 16th and 17th centuries, theologians and social critics were mourning the loss of a vital practice of hospitality. Pohl quotes Samuel Johnson’s response to James Boswell’s question about "how far he thought wealth should be employed in hospitality." Johnson observes of his 18th-century world: "In a commercial country, a busy country, time becomes precious, and therefore hospitality is not so much valued. No doubt there is still room for a certain degree of it; and a man has a satisfaction in seeing his friends eating and drinking around him. But promiscuous hospitality is not the way to gain real influence."

Pohl believes that hospitality has faded as a significant and coherent moral practice. Attention is still paid to the needs of strangers and the poor, but that attention is diffuse, located in specialized institutions, and severed from the language and practice of hospitality as it appears in the gospel. In short, the rich theological and practical significance of hospitality as a way of life has been eclipsed.

Pohl recognizes that we cannot address that eclipse by calling for a wholesale, indiscriminate recovery of an ancient and pre-modern practice. For one thing, it would not be possible simply to recover it, given significant socioeconomic, ecclesial, political and cultural changes. Furthermore, some aspects of the Christian tradition of hospitality are deeply disturbing"; she notes that "only honest and serious attention to the failures, omissions, and tragedies in the story will allow us to make use of its strengths."

She confronts that challenge in the second part of the book, "Reconsidering the Tradition." She discusses the challenge of understanding the "power of recognition" and its often inequitable exercise; difficulties in maintaining distinctions in a community without allowing them to become barriers; struggles to understand the different kinds of strangers whom we encounter -- including those closest to us from whom we have become estranged; and issues of power, possessions and marginality. Pohl beautifully weaves together her experiences in contemporary Christian communities and her appreciative yet critical engagements with sources from the Christian tradition. The result is an illuminating analysis of the intersection of theological, moral, political, economic and cultural issues in the struggle to practice hospitality.

The third and final part of the book, "Recovering the Practice," offers suggestions for retrieving the tradition of Christian hospitality. Critically drawing on the wisdom of the past, illuminated by significant attention to some contemporary countercultural attempts at engaging the practice, Pohl explores the theological and moral significance of hospitality as a way of life. She attends to the changed dynamics of modernity, recognizing that we now confront strangers on a massive scale. Pohl does not shy away from addressing a full spectrum of issues: the particularity of others that each person encounters and the broad structural questions of immigration, refugees and poverty. Obviously, she cannot address this range of issues in their complexity, but it is crucial that she recognizes that hospitality embraces local, translocal and global issues.

Pohl believes that "because hospitality is basic to who we are as followers of Jesus, every aspect of our lives can be touched by its practice." She then asks: "If we use hospitality as a lens through which to examine our homes, churches, jobs, schools, health care, and politics, might we see them differently? Can we make the places which shape our lives and in which we spend our days more hospitable? Do current practices within these settings distort hospitality or shut out strangers?" Such simple yet powerful questions can compel us to make changes in our lives -- changes that on one level may be the equivalent of small gestures but which, if cultivated over time, have the potential to reshape us and our communities.

To be sure, Pohl’s book raises as many new issues as it proposes solutions, and she recognizes as much. There is much to be learned from the ways other cultures and some American subcultures have practiced hospitality more vibrantly than has mainstream Western culture. And there are significant historical and contemporary issues about the relationship between economics, culture, morality and theology that Pohl’s analysis illumines but cannot adequately address.

It appears that the practice of hospitality depends on the vitality of other practices. As the quotation from Samuel Johnson suggests, one of the enemies of hospitality is commodified time. A sense of keeping the sabbath, or what Dorothy Bass calls ‘Receiving the Day," may he necessary to reshaping our commitment to offering and receiving hospitality. Another enemy of hospitality is acquisitiveness, the disordering of desires that leads us to think that we need more and more of everything. In this sense, perhaps we need a more critical sense of what it means to practice "saying yes and saying no," reshaping our desire more in the direction of the knowledge and love of God manifested in communion with diverse others and less in the misguided hope that "whoever dies with the most toys wins."

Hospitality is also bound up with issues of forgiveness and the ordering of communities, and leads us to consider questions about boundaries and barriers. How do we sustain a sense of boundaries, of restrictions, of the guidelines and standards necessary for rightly ordering communities while also sustaining an unambiguous welcoming of strangers? How do we understand the very description of "strangers" when it has been so significantly altered by the landscape of modernity?

As hospitality depends on other practices for its sustenance, so it also requires amid occasions the cultivation of specific virtues such as patience, courage, truthfulness, generosity and hope. But when poorly understood or practiced, the language of "hospitality" also can tempt us to distortions and corruptions that generate sentimentality or cynicism.

Part of the power of Pohl’s analysis is that she confronts the difficulties and challenges involved in practicing hospitality, even as she compellingly describes the ways in which it can reshape communities and lives. She shows how the practice of hospitality opens us to other practices and virtues, enabling us more profoundly to welcome Christ into our midst.

Pohl writes, "Offering hospitality in a world distorted by sin, injustice, and brokenness will rarely be easy We need a combination of grace and wisdom. Substantial hospitality to strangers involves spiritual and moral intuition, prayer and dependence on the Holy Spirit, the accumulated wisdom of a tradition, and a pragmatic assessment of each situation." I would emphasize that the "intuition" Pohl refers to is actually something that must be shaped and formed by habits and virtues, lest we invite the contemporary "intuitionism" that appeals to largely unformed impulses and "gut feelings." But given the shape of Pohl’s attention to hospitality as a habit, a practice and a way of life, I suspect that there is not a significant difference in our understanding of the gift and skill of discernment necessary for practicing hospitality well.

On one level, Pohl’s book is a relatively straightforward call to think about one’s own home, work, church and community from the perspective of Christ’s welcoming grace, and to take some concrete steps to practice hospitality in authentically Christian ways. On another level, Pohl’s analysis suggests that those initial concrete steps may occasion more radical transformation of our lives and our character, as we discover that becoming hospitable people also invites and requires us to attend to other practices and virtues.

It is probably no accident that those whom we lift up as saints, both those officially recognized and those whom we hold close to our hearts, are typically people who embody powerful habits of hospitality. Pohl’s instructive and insightful book shows, through its engagement with scripture and tradition as well as in its powerful evocation of contemporary communities, how lives can be shaped by practices such as hospitality and the habits developed through those practices. As my wife and I discovered afresh in our conversation with our friends, it is a powerful experience to behold the holy glow of people who not only have practiced hospitality, but who have become hospitable people.

Giving Voice to the Silences

Receiving a phone call from my friend in Iowa that muggy Wednesday morning in August did not seem unusual at first; we maintained regular contact. But his response to my question "How are you doing?" stopped conversation rather than started it. "Kevin just called from Indianapolis. Brenda died last night in a hiking accident."

I was dumbfounded. The only response I could muster was a rather garbled "What?" Brian calmly explained everything he knew about the accident. The fact that Brenda was dead slowly began to dawn on me, but it still seemed more surreal than real. Brian and I talked a bit about our days in divinity school with Kevin and the wonderful time the three of us had in St. Louis just a couple of months earlier. We also reminisced about our memories of his wife, Brenda. But it became painful to continue talking. We agreed that later in the day we would discuss arrangements for attending the funeral.

My wife, Susan, and I knew we needed to call Kevin, but we had difficulty even picking up the phone. What could we say? We spent the better part of the morning trying to help each other cope with the news, and trying to figure out what we might say to Kevin. I remembered all the well-intended and heartfelt things that people had said to me at the time of my father’s unexpected death, words that sounded hollow at best and callous and counterproductive at worst. I tried to think of words that would express my pain and acknowledge Kevin’s even more intense pain.

There was a close bond between the Armstrongs and the Joneses: my wife and I had been eucharistic ministers in Kevin and Brenda’s wedding some five years earlier, and Kevin had been one in ours some four months later. Kevin had helped me cope with my father’s death. But somehow neither the bonds of our friendship nor my wife’s and my ministerial training helped us find appropriate words.

After morning had finally passed into afternoon, I picked up the phone. I thought I was composed and would find something to say when I heard Kevin’s voice. But when he answered, all I could stammer out was Kevin, I’m sorry." I remember more the silences of our conversation than the words, except for Kevin’s recounting a conversation with the paramedic. The paramedic had asked Kevin about his occupation, and upon hearing that Kevin is a minister, he said, "Well, I guess you know better than anyone that God has a purpose for everything." To which Kevin had responded, "Well, if God has a purpose for this, that purpose stinks."

Kevin asked if Brian and I would help celebrate the Eucharist at Brenda’s memorial service. I was honored that Kevin asked us to do this, but also trembled at the thought. I had planned to attend for Kevin’s sake, but I also had to cope with my own grief. Brenda’s death reminded me of the brokenness of the world and the fragility of our lives. In such a time, how could I help to lead the worship of a God who seemed so distant and silent in the midst of all this pain?

As I prepared for the trip, I decided to pack Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son to read on the plane. I had first read this little book a year earlier, and remembered being deeply moved by Wolterstorff’s reflections on the tragic death of his son Eric. I thought that rereading this book might give me some perspective, and perhaps even inspire some words to say to Kevin. Instead, my reading the book anew released some pent-up tears, unleashing emotions that caused other passengers to wonder what was wrong with the man in 6C. But the reading also gave me some perspective through those tears: "I shall look at the world through tears," wrote Wolterstorff. "Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see."

Kevin met my plane. We held each other, trying to bridge the distances caused by the particularity of grief, the solitude of suffering. At first we did not speak -- we did not need to. When we began to talk we spoke about arrangements for the service, how things were going at the house and how Kevin’s and Brenda’s families were doing. A little later a similar scene was repeated between Kevin and Brian. But in our various conversations with each other we rarely mentioned directly the pain that had drawn us together.

At the service, Kevin planned to speak briefly if he had the composure. When he began, his quivering voice made me wonder whether he was doing the right thing. But as he thanked people for coming, as he recounted his response to the paramedic, and as he reflected on what it means to praise God together even in the midst of a tragedy, he seemed to gather a strength that was not his own, that could have come only from the Spirit.

He said that the day before he had thought: if only the good news of the gospel traveled as fast as the bad news of Brenda’s death, we would be much better off. But then it hit him -- that was precisely the point. The bonds of the gospel had enabled this news to travel. We gathered as a community of the gospel, a community that loved Brenda, but more important, as a community bound together by God. We were, he said, a broken community, broken by the tragedy of Brenda’s death. It was in that brokenness that we could see the broken bread of Christ’s body as well as the hope embodied in his resurrection.

This confronted me with the mystery of the Triune God, enacted particularly in the Eucharist, in all its majesty and awesomeness. As we stood at the table when it was time to begin the liturgy, the Spirit gave me the voice to begin, "The Lord be with you." As we moved through the eucharistic liturgy of death and resurrection, our voices pierced the silences. The conjunction of silence and voice occurred most prominently with the words, "Renew our communion with all your saints, especially Brenda and all those most dear to us." In communing with Christ and each other, so also were we communing with all the saints. The restoration of relationship in the Eucharist had given voice to the silence of tragedy.

Following the service, several people commented on how powerful the service had been. One person commented, "I have come to realize that the meaning of the resurrection, in all of its hope, comes only by giving voice to the brokenness." A couple of months later I would come across a remark by a rabbi: "There is nothing so whole as a broken heart." I had been looking for words, and the Eucharist provided the Word. The voice that could hear the silences of the people and thus interrupt those silences is the Word who suffered and endured the tragedy and brokenness of the cross.

The eucharistic celebration provided the context for a different kind of speech. The echo of the Word could be heard in conversations into the evening. A new language was audible among people who otherwise did not know each other, who had discovered a strange friendship in communion with Christ. People were delivered from the trivialities of small talk to reflect on the hope that in death we may find life. Kevin and I found the voices with which to articulate the sadnesses we had shared first in my father’s death, and now in Brenda’s; Kevin talked in greater detail about the accident, the isolation of grief, and fears of the future. As we talked, we kept returning to the mystery of the Eucharist and the Word spoken there. Kevin reminded me that the first sermon I had preached after my father’s death was titled "Is There Any Hope?" In the darkness of Brenda’s death, we wondered together anew. And yet, silently, in the light of the Eucharist, we received hope anew.

It has been almost a year since Brenda’s death, and yet the events of those days continue to bear meaning. In particular, they have driven home to me the importance and significance of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Nicholas Lash suggests in Easter in Ordinary that there is a pattern to the doctrine of God as it is confessed in the creed, a pattern that reminds us of the importance of the movements among the confessions of "Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

For example, the goodness and creativity in the world remind us of God’s empowering Spirit, which breathes life into all that is and which enables and sustains relationships. Such a perspective may tempt us toward pantheism. Even so, there are too many tragedies in the world, tragedies that sunder communities and break relationships, to sustain the pantheist view. These tragedies reduce us to silence, bringing home to us the difference between God and the world. The darkness of tragic deaths like Brenda’s may tempt us toward agnosticism or atheism. But in the midst of such darkness, the Word embodied in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth enables us to give voice to the silences. The power of that Spirit of creativity gives us a voice in the brokenness of the world, and thereby helps us participate in the reconstruction of relationships and communities. We need always to remember all three parts: the darkness and silences, the joy and creativity, and the Word that gives creative voice in the midst of darkness. In none of those can we stop and say, "This, and this alone, is what and who God is."

In reflection on the promise in Revelation that on the day of shalom "there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away," Wolterstorff writes: "I shall try to keep the wound from healing, in recognition of our living still in the old order of things. I shall try to keep it from healing, in solidarity with those who sit beside me on humanity’s mourning bench." It is too easy to pretend that Christ’s resurrection, the incipient sign of the "new order of things," cancels the pain of death. We do not follow Christ uncrucified; we follow Christ crucified and risen. If there is hope that in death we may find life, it is only by recognizing that "there is nothing so whole as a broken heart."

Is It Just Nostalgia? The Renewal of Wesleyan Studies

Irving Howe sees a critical parallel between immigrant Jewish literature and literature of the American South in the 20th century. In each case, the passion to evoke a culture in letters seems driven by the authors’ sense that their cultures are fading away, doomed to certain and swift dissipation into the pervasive ethos of modern America. William Faulkner, chronicling the demise of the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury, and Howe himself, depicting the immigrant Jews of New York and their absorption into the surrounding culture in World of Our Fathers, both describe worlds that were, in their eyes, all but gone with the wind. Their enterprise, we might say, was one of nostalgia -- not in a bad sense, but in that each believed that the ethos he described could never again be a living culture.

It is worth pondering that observation now, for while signs of the decline of Methodism and old-line North American Protestantism grow ever clearer, a younger generation of Wesleyan scholars has taken up the task of recapturing the theology and ethos of Wesley and the early Methodists. As a self-avowed, practicing member of this band, I wonder (as we flee from the wrath that is surely to come) if our work will be a harbinger of renewal in the church or another instance of nostalgia over a religious culture rapidly disappearing.

To be convinced of the magnitude of the contemporary passion for Wesleyan studies, one need look no farther than the works being produced by graduate students and junior scholars: there are dissertations, monographs and scholarly articles, along with a sprinkling of more popular works. Although the field of Wesleyan studies was brought to life at mid-century by Methodists involved in the ecumenical movement (Cohn Williams, Frank Baker, Albert Outler, John Deschner and others) , it now flourishes with the ever-increasing output of the thirtysomething generation of Methodist traditionalists. Not only are graduate theological schools producing more theses and dissertations on Wesleyan subjects, but Methodist periodicals (Quarterly Review, Methodist History, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society) are increasingly printing their articles, and new publishing enterprises are emerging to take up their longer monographic works (among these are Zondervan’s Francis Asbury Press imprint, Abingdon’s Kingswood Books imprint, and Asbury Theological Seminary’s new series in Pietist and Wesleyan Studies) These scholars are quite likely to be found in the Wesley Studies Working Group of the American Academy of Religion.

Although it is difficult to generalize about this group, we can note that they gravitate toward the theological center. Some were weaned on the radicalism of the 1960s, and now seek deeper roots in their tradition. Others were reared in conservative Wesleyan and Methodist churches and seek a more intellectually credible account of their faith. Almost all reject the extremes of theological fundamentalism and liberalism. Their use of Wesleyan sources (meaning material from John and Charles Wesley or the "Wesleyan" traditions after them) typically blends historical investigation with concern for contemporary relevance. None (that I am aware of) envisions returning to the conditions of the 18th or 19th centuries (as is sometimes alleged) , but all find aspects of earlier Methodist experience that challenge what they perceive as the current deteriorating state of Methodism.

Even a cursory examination of these scholars’ works reveals their concern for contemporary issues within Wesleyan and Methodist circles. Responding to recent discussions of the so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral of religious authority (Scripture, tradition, experience and reason) , a number of dissertations focus on Wesley’s understanding of religious authority -- for example, Rex Dale Matthews compared Wesley’s thought to that of the Enlightenment (Harvard University, 1986) ; Gregory Scott Clapper studied Wesley and the religious affections (Emory University, 1985) ; and I examined Wesley’s view of Christian antiquity (Southern Methodist University, 1984) Scott Jameson Jones at SMU is now exploring Wesley’s understanding of scriptural authority.

Some have looked to Methodist tradition for explicit models for contemporary theological reflection. Stephen Arnett Seamands studied the Christology of 20th-century Methodist neo-orthodox theologian Edwin Lewis (Drew University, 1983) Two scholars have given Wesley’s religious thought a contemporary, "postmodernist" interpretation. Clapper’s work and Mark Lewis Horst’s study of Wesley’s approach to Christian thought (Yale University, 1985) took Yale theologian George A. Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age as a key to revisioning the theological enterprise based on Wesley’s integration of practice and reflection.

Others have taken up contemporary concerns for the renewal of spirituality, preaching and liturgical life in their examinations of Wesley and even 19th-century Methodist figures. Steven Harper studied John Wesley’s devotional life (Duke University, 1981) Craig B. Gallaway examined the sense of divine presence expressed in the Wesley hymns (Emory, 1988) , while Henry H. Knight offered a critical appropriation of Wesley’s understanding of the "means of grace" (Emory, 1987)

Studies of 19th-century topics (with concern for contemporary relevance) have been undertaken by Gayle Carlton Felton, who examined Methodist baptismal teaching and practices in the previous century (Duke, 1987) , and by Carol Marie Norén, who studied the doctrine of Christian perfection as expressed in the preaching of a Swedish-American Methodist preacher of sanctification, Nels O. Westergreen (Princeton University, 1986) A dissertation on 19th-century Methodist services for marriage and burial is currently under way at Notre Dame by Karen Westerfield Tucker.

In two cases, contemporary social issues impinging upon the Methodists have inspired studies. Paul Wesley Chilcote took up the intriguing subject of the British women preachers of John Wesley’s era (Duke, 1984) and Douglas James Williamson wrote on the career of the 19th-century Methodist reformer William Fisk (Boston University. 1988)

This may not be simply a Wesleyan phenomenon: younger religious traditionalists of varied denominational backgrounds are now seeking academic credentials. Since George Marsden moved to Duke, a steady stream of graduate students from Fuller Seminary, Wheaton College, Gordon-Conwell Seminary and other traditionally evangelical schools are studying here, especially in the field of American Christianity. Presbyterian and Episcopalian traditionalists may share some of same frustration with the falling away of what used to be called "mainline" religion in America. On the other hand, newer evangelical denominations are thriving, and I suspect that students from these backgrounds (such as the Assemblies of God) have somewhat different motivations for pursuing academic credentials.

I suspect that those of older traditions of North American theological reflection look disdainfully upon the new scholarship. Old-style liberals will probably find the younger scholars’ stress on the integrity of Methodist faith narrow and limiting. The neo-orthodox, I presume, would find all things pietist and Wesleyan distasteful. Newer generations of liberals would find the reversion to 18th- and early 19th-century sources irrelevant in a postMarxian and post-Freudian context.

From within the movement, however, a different sort of critique arises, more or less on its own: Is it just nostalgia? Almost all in the movement (myself included) bristle at the thought: we entered scholarly study in the first place with the more or less avowed intent of helping to renew the church. But our intentions alone do not answer the question; it haunts us as we crank up our computers in the morning, as we read Scripture and pray, as we cart volumes home from the library and as we lie awake at night. Are our works, perhaps unintentionally, just a lament over the inevitable passage of a distinctly Methodist ethos, a futile shriek that goes up as Methodist people are further swallowed into the bland anonymity of fern-bar, shopping-mall and video culture? The question will not be answered soon, but one thing has become clear to many of us: the critical study of a tradition does not ensure its life; in fact, the critical study of a tradition may well be a sign of its death.

The academic study of the Methodist tradition could produce good feelings but little religious renewal. Consider how Martin Buber’s studies of Hasidism evoked rather good feelings from well-educated, middle-class Jews toward the Hasidic tradition (relieving the prejudice that the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, had raised against the Hasidim) Consider also that very few of these folk seriously contemplated taking up a Hasidic lifestyle. Perhaps a generation of Methodist professionals and well-educated laity some decades hence, proud of their tradition, will display nice coffee-table books about Wesley and early Methodism, content to know that the scholarly archives have all the footnotes, but without any serious intention of taking up the early Methodist faith and mission. "I can remember in the old days we used to have Sunday evening services," they will say, with the same fervor with which one might recall Ed Sullivan.

Some might object to this prediction, insisting that there is within our movement a considerable emphasis on personal spirituality and corporate liturgical life that should keep the movement from being merely academic. That is true; but one need revise the scenario only slightly to take this fascination with spirituality and liturgy into account. In addition to owning coffee-table books, our future Methodist traditionalists might be equally well educated about liturgical vestments, seasons and colors, and quite willing to discuss their conversion experiences over coffee with Amaretto. Perhaps they would attend a discipleship meeting every month or so to say a prayer or read the Scriptures, and then discuss the latest works in Wesleyan scholarship.

It is not an encouraging scenario, and as a historian I know better than to insist that the script has to be followed. It just has a certain compelling logic to it, and if I am not mistaken I can see it unfolding even now in the ethos surrounding the renewal of Wesleyan studies. We are, I’m afraid, more intellectuals than evangelists. And, realistic as I wish to be as a historian, I’d confess to a certain degree of nostalgia in my work. Perhaps only a sense of tragic loss can compel the urgent search for one’s roots.

Some would say (is that a Calvinist whispering in my ear?) that we must refer the issue to Providence. I shall do so after this paragraph. But we shall not easily avoid reflection on our movement and the contribution we want to make to the church. Moreover, I am not content simply to refer the issue to Providence. It is, I suspect, Providence in the first place that brings us to a kind of conviction, in asking whether we will provide a vision for the renewal of the church or just nostalgic memories to be enjoyed for a season, and then forgotten.