Media Dominance

In the early 16th century, Martin Luther, assisted by enterprising printers unhandicapped by copyright laws, swamped the market with five pamphlets for every one put out by his Catholic opponents. Other Protestant writers poured out their own flood of sermons, treatises, polemics and devotional writings. For more than three decades Protestants dominated the recently invented printing press. By the time the Catholic authorities found a way to use the new medium to their own advantage, the religious landscape of Europe had been utterly and irreversibly transformed.

In the late 20th century, evangelical Christians appear to account for more than 80 percent of the Christian presence on the World Wide Web. How long will this dominance persist, and what are its long-term implications? And how might we explain this imbalance in the use of a revolutionary new technology?

It is easy to surmise that the print medium better suited the Protestant than the Catholic message. Protestant emphasis on the word, and especially the word of scripture, lent itself to written argument. Catholicism, in contrast, was more visually and ritually oriented. Perhaps more to the point, much of the Western church’s practice and ritual had developed over the centuries, only later receiving theological explanation. To defend theologically practices that had first arisen apart from strictly theological concerns was a difficult task unless one had recourse to the authority of tradition -- something not allowed by Protestants, who insisted on "scripture alone." Thus their need for many pamphlets. Finally, the Catholics were defending an existing institution, warts and all, while at least in the early decades the Protestants were advocating an ideal. It took some time for them to build their own imperfect institutions and become vulnerable to Catholic criticism that reality differed significantly from the ideals they espoused. In the meanwhile, Catholics were at a severe disadvantage.

While helpful, these observations take us only so far. They may explain why it was difficult for the Catholics to defend against Protestant attack. They do not explain why the Catholics were so tardy in using the press to creatively further their own ends.

At this juncture we must look at motivation. Before the Reformation got under way, Catholic authorities had used the press to do more efficiently what they already had been doing with manuscripts for centuries: multiplying documents needed by priests and the hierarchy in the normal performance of their duties. With the Reformation, they saw the press more as a problem than an opportunity, a problem most effectively solved by censorship and repression. With the complacency of an establishment, Catholic authorities did not believe that the Roman church should have to explain its beliefs to its own faithful, much less proselytize among those who had fallen away.

In contrast, the Protestants, bubbling over with missionary zeal, wanted to convert readers and hearers to their new understanding of the gospel. They saw the press as a God-given means to a crucial end: a dramatic reform of the church. They were zealous proselytizers. Catholics long had no response except that of rebuttal and repression. It took them more than three decades to realize that the printing press had opened up a new world that required the Roman church to attend to its own flock in new, unprecedented ways.

What does this suggest for the early 21st century? A plausible case can be made that the technology of the Net, the Web and television is more compatible with evangelical than with mainline understandings of theology and worship. The Good News may be mediated by technology, and individuals can come to faith apart from other believers (but not, most would agree, apart from the Holy Spirit). But with its breakdown of traditional propinquity in space, time and vivid relationships, the virtual world of the Web raises perplexing questions for denominations that understand themselves in terms of physical presence, whether in corporate worship or in the use of the sacraments. More of the mainline churchpeople than evangelicals are likely to have theological problems with the virtualities of Web-mediated religion.

But then as now, the key difference lies not in theology -- or at least not directly in theology -- and not in technology per se, but in motivation. Today’s evangelicals, like 16th-century Protestants, seek to proselytize and convert in ways that today’s mainline largely does not. At the same time the 16th-century example suggests that the mainline would be ill-advised to allow evangelicals to monopolize the educational potential of the Net and the Web. Like the 16th-century Catholics and the printing press, today’s mainline needs to assess the positive educational potential of the Internet and Web and put it to use for its own faithful. And who knows, with the right approach, they may find themselves landing a secular surfer or two.

Virtual Worship

"There is no there there," said Gertrude Stein about Oakland, California. "There is a different there there," say I, an Oaklandite by birth, about virtuality. "Virtual" presence differs from "real" presence in propinquity -- time, place and relationship -- as well as vividness and interactivity. The technology of virtual presence simulates "being there"; it holds out the promise of presence on demand -- and thereby demands that we do some careful thinking about presence. Consider "virtual worship."

One of the more professional virtual worship sites, www.zchurch.com, a ministry of Bethel Temple in Evansville, Indiana, greets you with an animated cartoon map of a small community, a forthright and disarming evocation of virtual place. Each cartoon house may be clicked, taking the visitor to "interactive worship," video archives, prayer requests, marriage counseling, interactive e-mail cards, women’s and men’s chat rooms, personal testimonies, a community center for discussion groups, Christian education and so on. A click on the cartoon river, for example, leads to a statement on whether you need to be baptized. A click on the garage allows for downloading "plug-ins" that support the virtual experience -- shockwave/flash, real player G2 and up-to-date browsers.

All in all, Zchurch offers a highly polished interface, as good as the better commercial sites -- which is another way of saying that although this is the state of the art, the art remains crude. You have to rely heavily on your imagination to generate a sense of being there.

Zchurch broadcasts live once a week, and the virtual worshiper can participate in "real time" -- a fascinating retronym, like acoustic guitar or dial telephone. But you needn’t be "live." You can "join" worship at any time with a click on the play button on the "interactive worship" page. A video from the previous worship service comes streaming downline to a 3x2 inch TV window on the screen. Video requires a large pipe (that is, bandwidth), but most of us have only a garden-hose-sized connection to the Net. Picture quality is sacrificed when the pipe is small, so the virtual worshiper experiences a series of small, jerky stills rather than a flowing video. The sound quality is also less than high fidelity (though that may not differ from some "real" churches’ audio systems).

Although virtual worship is primitive now, the potential is clear. As the pipe gets larger, videos on the Web will soon match the sound and video quality of broadcast worship services. Vividness will increase, but a completely enveloping experience must await video goggles and the sense-reproducing body suits predicted by futurologists. (Don’t hold your breath; it will take much time and money to develop effective body suits. Some knowledgeable observers doubt that the complete simulation of embodied experience is possible short of plugging directly into the nervous system, if then.)

Zchurch does better on interactivity than on vividness. With one click, you can access the hymn texts and sing along with the "live" audience -- another retronym that we’ve long become comfortable with, thanks to stereo systems and television. You can write in the "guest book" and read other visitors’ comments. You can look up verses in the Bible, consult a Bible dictionary, make prayer requests and join e-mail discussion groups. You can even click on "donation" and tithe like the live audience, over a secure server like those of the commercial sites -- a nice commingling of God, Mammon and technology. According to an article in the March 17-19 USA Weekend, Net worshipers find the services meaningful and fulfilling. But even so, we must remember that they are not "really" there; they are "virtually" there, and that difference raises questions.

I feel a need to rub elbows with fellow Christians, kneel at a communion rail, taste the bread and wine. But others may not. In the virtual church the worshipers can be literally spread out around the world and "join" the congregation when they choose to click the play button. In what ways does the loss of propinquity change community? Does the change matter, either to God or the worshiper?

And what about the sacraments, a crucial element of worship for many Christians? If the Eucharist is seen as a memorial, a means to encourage recollection of Christ’s sacrifice, then a virtual memorial may do. But for those who believe in the real presence in the Eucharist, no virtual experience can substitute, not even a simulation of the touch, taste and smell produced by virtual-reality body suits. And what about baptism? Is belief sufficient even if the water is virtual?

For most Christians, technology can add welcome new means for evangelization and catechesis. But virtual worship challenges us to think deeply about theological first principles. Christians agree that the body of Christ is not confined to time or space. But it is not virtual; it is transcendent.

The Power of a Picture: How Protestants Imaged the Gospel

In last year’s election campaign we were reminded that images can overpower words. The U.S. military prohibited the taking of pictures of flag-draped coffins arriving from Iraq even as it freely shared statistics on the number of American dead. It knows that the images are more powerful than the numbers. Digital photographs from Abu Ghraib prison provoked an outcry that written complaints were unable to elicit. Campaign commercials offered images intended to attract or repel, all in the service of selling a candidate or discrediting an opponent -- irrespective of any policy position actually taken or advocated.

Images work at a nonconscious level. Research shows that TV ads -- whether negative campaign commercials or advertisements for a brand of toothpaste -- influence viewers’ attitudes even if viewers insist that they do not. A critical voice-over on network news that discusses a campaign ad’s many misrepresentations is cheerfully accepted by the commercial’s makers because they expect the images to overpower the critical commentary.

Protestants are inclined to underestimate the power of images in religion. Yet at the founding of Protestantism and in its early decades its leaders were very much aware of the power of religious images and did all they could either to remove the images entirely -- the iconoclasts’ solution -- or to recast them in a way that exalted word over image.

In his masterful tome The Reformation of the Image (published last year by University of Chicago Press), Joseph Koerner explores how the Reformers met this challenge. The focus of his study is Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1547 Wittenberg altarpiece. In the predella, or bottom border, it shows Martin Luther preaching Christ crucified to his Wittenberg congregation; in the triptych’s left wing, Philipp Melanchthon baptizes an infant; in the right wing, Johann Bugenhagen exercises the power of the keys in confession; and in the center panel, Jesus feeds a morsel of bread to Judas (reception by the unworthy!) while Luther, shown as one of the 12 and depicted as Junker Georg, receives the communion cup from a servant, who shows considerable likeness to Cranach, the artist.

In late medieval Catholicism, images were used by the faithful to develop the disposition to act in a Christian fashion and the aptitude to do so well. They were employed and championed as tools for increasing Christian virtue. The crucifix, for example, could serve as a focus for meditation on Christ’s sacrifice for our sinfulness and help the devotee cultivate the virtues of humility, gratitude, and identification with Christ’s suffering on behalf of the world. The crucifix was, then, an idol not to the devotee but only to the iconoclast; the idolater, Koerner declares, is a "fictive foe."

The Protestant alternative to smashing images was using them to depict belief. Consider the Wittenberg altarpiece. Luther stands in the pulpit with his left hand laid upon an open book of scripture and with the right gesturing to a central crucifix. The Wittenberg congregation faces the crucifix (and Luther) and responds in prayer. The crucifix to which Luther gestures and the congregation responds appears, as it were, within quotation marks. It represents the message drawn from scripture, not the utterance that conveys that message -- and that message, Luther insisted, whether drawn from the Old Testament or the New, always points to Christ crucified.

The good news of the crucified Christ as Luther understood it, and as depicted by Cranach, is both present and removed. It is present as the content of all scripture (it does not matter where scripture is opened under Luther’s left hand) and it is the (pictorially literal) undergirding for the sacraments depicted in the surmounting triptych. It is simultaneously removed in the theologia crucis and deus absconditus of Luther’s theology and in the uncertain mooring, unworldly lighting and aesthetic blandness of Cranach’s painting. These images and actions are but visible, embodied signs of an invisible promise – "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." (It is worth pointing out, as Koerner does, that a depicted crucifix is itself an image of a negation, simultaneously an icon and an iconoclasm, an image of God that violates all expectations about God, "a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles.")

The deliberate crudeness of Cranach’s crucifix functionally resembles the strategy employed by modern newscasts when they show campaign commercials inside an obviously fictive TV set. Both strategies serve to give the viewer distance on the image, to remind the viewer that the image is to be seen as image, not as reality.

Koerner asks of the Reformation images the same post-modern question we ask of campaign (or consumer) commercials in the 21st century: less what they mean and more what they do -- and in whose interest? As historians have long recognized, the meaning of the Wittenberg altarpiece is straightforward, if intricate: its images are visual summaries of confessional statements such as the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. But what do they do?

In answering this question, Koerner explores the equivocacy of images and (largely futile) attempts to nail down an image’s meaning by means of verbal gloss. Luther famously claimed that scripture interpreted itself, but just to be sure he fitted out his published Bibles with introductions, glosses and theologically informed translations to guide the self-interpretation.

In their own way artists followed suit, offering in their altarpieces (and other woodcuts and paintings) images of the Lutheran church that attempted to interpret themselves, sometimes to the point of providing explanatory captions alongside textually derived images. In these glossed altarpieces the church that preaches the word truly and celebrates the sacraments rightly sees a self-interpreting depiction of itself preaching the word truly and celebrating the sacraments rightly. This public depiction encourages its members to behave as depicted, to conform internal conviction to official confession.

We moderns tend to view religious images and symbols (and associated rituals) as representing an inner state of belief that precedes the image, symbol or ritual. These beliefs could also be expressed -- as they were in the confessions of the 16th century -- verbally and, relatively speaking, unequivocally. This is a quintessentially Protestant understanding -- one that has shaped much secular analysis. Yet images, symbols and rituals can move us and shape us at nondiscursive levels; they can impart feelings, understanding and aptitude of which we literally cannot speak.

Luther, Koerner reminds us, appreciated the power and even necessity of embodied communication. Both the predella and the triptych give visual expression to Luther’s deep conviction that God, who is hidden and invisible, accommodates God’s self to our finite and fallen nature by revealing God’s disposition toward us through material things: in the incarnation, in the sacrament and in the Good News of scripture received, above all, through hearing (a material reality, but not visual, to be sure). The altar-piece is an embodied, material, visual communication of that embodied, material communiqué.

Luther as Skeptic

Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death, by Richard Marius. Harvard University Press; 542 pp. $24.50.

Most of Martin Luther's biographers end their books in the 1520s, some 20 years before Luther's death. This allows them to leave Luther as a revolutionary (and theological) hero, rather than as an established curmudgeon. And it enabled them to avoid dealing with the older Luther's repugnant attacks on Catholics, Jews, Turks and fellow Protestants.

Richard Marius follows this tradition by ending with the 1525 quarrel between Luther and Erasmus over the freedom of the will. But Marius finds even the young Luther repugnant. Rather than idealizing the youthful revolutionary, Marius sees in his rebellion the seed of subsequent religious wars. He even ventures the ahistorical surmise that modern European history would have been "more serene" and less disfigured by hatred and massacre had Luther either been dissuaded from entering the monastery or died a martyr at Worms.

The polemical exchange that pitted the irenic skeptic, Erasmus (with whom Marius clearly sympathizes), against the belligerent dogmatist, Luther, provides Marius the perfect opportunity to sum up his case:

• Luther's fear of death and his doubt that there is a God who can or will raise the dead explain his psyche and theology and account for the "Reformation breakthrough";

• these fears and doubts drove Luther paradoxically to claim absolute certainty and to excoriate those with whom he disagreed;

• finally, Luther's insistence on sola scnptura unleashed religious anarchy, since others, much to his dismay, read scripture differently than he did.

As Marius lays out the crucial lectures, sermons, treatises and confrontations of these early years, he aggressively sells his thesis, drawing the reader's attention again and again to Luther's obsession with death -- not hell, purgatory or even judgment, but annihilating death -- and the younger Luther's equation of this fear with unbelief. Following the lead of Ernst Bizer and Oswald Bayer and dating the "Reformation breakthrough" to late 1519, Marius brilliantly argues that a new understanding of the gospel promise freed Luther to accept his inner fear and doubt. But this precarious liberation generated its own tension and required repeated renewal. "A promise by its nature looks to the future, something not yet complete," Manus explains.

In this life, God does not lift the Christian out of human nature, and God does not reveal himself beyond any shadow of doubt. Weak human nature will not let us believe in the promises of God with a confidence that purges from the soul the anguish of fear and unbelief, the Anfechtungen... Therefore, in Luther's discovery of justification the Christian was liberated from the self-imposed requirement to present a perfect mental attitude to God, to confuse belief with knowledge, faith with the direct intuition of an observed world. Whereas in the earlier Luther the fear of death was the ultimate form of unbelief, the Luther who discovered justification by faith understood that no matter how great our faith, it cannot be strong enough to stave off terror before death.

In subsequent years, the unresolvable tension in Luther's soul between present doubt and future hope goaded him into frantic advocacy, disparagement of doubt-inducing reason, and vitriolic polemic. "Christ for Luther was like a campfire projecting a circle of light against the vast dark of earthly life," Marius states. "Whenever the darkness threatened to encroach upon that illuminated ground, Luther flung more of his volatile ink onto the fire, causing it to flame up again in his own heart, and keeping the darkness at bay."

Is this a recognizable portrait of Luther? Yes, although overdrawn. It is not necessary to turn Luther into a closet Renaissance skeptic to appreciate Marius's insight that doubt and fear of death played a larger role in Luther's psyche and theology than scholars have appreciated.

Why, then, does Marius risk overstatement, and why does he indulge in expressions of distaste and condescension? He offers a clue: "But it may be that those who have experienced modern fundamentalism, with its paradoxical psychology and its confusion of assertion, rationalization, mystical love, and abject fear, can best understand Luther's mind and heart, and his quest for God. Typical fundamentalists assert a roaring confidence in their faith -- and run colleges and seminaries where not a breath of dissent is allowed lest their faith be swept away. Luther's mentality was not far distant from that." Nor, I suspect, was Marius's own upbringing. Perhaps Marius, too, is attempting to exorcise his ghosts by writing.

Marius's novel and shrewd insights earn his biography an honored place alongside such other idiosyncratic but brilliant portraits of Luther as Eric Erikson's and Heiko Oberman's. And Marius's Luther reads better than theirs -- better, in fact, than almost all other Luther biographies.

Christian Colleges: A Dying Light or a New Refraction?

As a president of a church-related college, I find much criticism of church-related higher education to be well-intentioned but wistful nostalgia. Critics such as James Burtchaell, whose book The Dying of the Light was reviewed in these pages by Ralph C. Wood (February 3-10), have simply not indicated realistically how, in the face of massive changes in society, church and human knowledge, church-related colleges could have maintained their traditional church-relatedness in all its 19th- or early 20th-century glory.

Consider a partial list of developments since just World War II: a broad national decline in denominational loyalty, changes in ethnic identity as hyphenated Americans enter the third and subsequent generations after immigration, the great explosion in the number of competing secular colleges and universities, the professionalization of academic disciplines with concomitant professional formation of faculty members during graduate education, the dramatic rise in the percentage of the population who seek higher education, the sharp trend toward seeing education largely in vocational and economic terms, the rise in government regulation and financing, the great increase in the complexity and cost of higher education, the development of a more litigious society, the legal end of in loco parentis, an exponential and accelerating growth in human knowledge, and so on. To put the matter bluntly, the world and the churches have changed substantially over the preceding decades. So why do Burtchaell and George Marsden, to name the two most prominent recent critics of church-related higher education, expect that colleges of the church would not have to change as well? Do the changes that have taken place at church-related colleges constitute the "dying of the light"? Or are we only seeing a different refraction of the light as the prism of society changes?

In The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief(1994), Marsden offers an elegiac account of the way in which the effort by liberal Christians to identify Christian ideals with Western civilization may have served to make many church-related colleges and universities halfway houses on the way toward a secularity that Marsden sees as hostile to Christian influence. In The Dying of the Light, Burtchaell surveys 17 church-related colleges and concludes that the liberal accommodation of culture led, in the words of his subtitle, to the "disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches." Both authors stress that at least in the earlier phases the disengagement was unintended, although Burtchaell, the more condescendingly sardonic of the two authors, emphasizes the role of self-deception and presidential hubris.

"Culture Protestantism," to use Karl Barth's term for the liberal accommodation that Marsden and Burtcháell deplore, deserves more charitable treatment. Christian service to the world through higher education does not cease to be Christian when many of those providing and receiving the service are no longer Christians, much less members of the college's founding denomination.

Two types of church-related colleges have dominated the American landscape. They correspond to what H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic mid-century study Christ and Culture termed the "Christ transforming culture" model of the Reformed tradition and the "Christ above culture" model of the Catholic tradition. My college, St. Olaf, and other Lutheran colleges and universities represent a third Niebuhr model that has had its own successes, but is less well known on the national scene: "Christ and culture in paradox."

Burtchaell writes out of a Roman Catholic tradition that sees Christ as a supernatural fulfillment of the aspirations of culture, in the same way that grace is seen as perfecting nature and theology as perfecting philosophy. This ideal was generally framed in neo-Thomist terms, with first philosophy and later theology acting as the intellectual glue that united the disparate academic disciplines. All learning pointed, with the assistance of revelation and grace, toward the supernatural source of the world and reason and toward the supernatural end of humanity, which is the contemplation of God. The hierarchy implicit in this vision was historically reflected in the way in which Catholic schools tended to be centrally governed and answerable to church authorities. The great strength of this approach is that it holds out hope of integral, unified knowledge of the world and of God; it is an intellectual vision that has epistemological and political consequences. The particular challenge it faces is whether it can fulfill that hope, even imperfectly, without absolutizing a particular, culturally conditioned view of the world, of right reason and practice, and of God.

In the past several decades Catholic higher education has undergone significant change. In the late 1960s and1970s Catholic colleges and universities adopted independent lay boards of trustees and put governance issues in the hands of the college itself. At the same time, Catholic professors criticized their institutions for intellectual mediocrity, redefined "academic excellence" in line with the standards of leading graduate schools, and turned (with equivocal success) to theology to provide what Holy Cross historian David O'Brien has termed "the bridge between the older Catholic identity and the newer, more excellent version of Catholic higher education." The 1990 Vatican document Ex corde ecclesia reflects a somewhat belated attempt by the Vatican to reassert juridical control over Catholic higher education and (some fear, others hope) to return it to its earlier unifying intellectual moorings. Not surprisingly, Ex corde ecclesia is hotly debated by Catholic educators, and BurtchaelI's book may be viewed as a salvo fired from the neoconservative camp.

Marsden, who writes out of the Dutch Reformed tradition, offers a slightly different vision. Underlying Marsden's analysis is the conviction that culture, including academic study, is fallen or perverted but capable of transformation through Christian approaches to knowing. Hence Marsden in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997), a follow-up to The Soul of the American University, argues for a specifically Christian scholarship and contends that Christians may in fact enjoy a certain epistemological privilege over their secular counterparts. Accordingly, he suggests not only that Christians should be allowed to contribute to today's academic debates on an equal footing with, say, Marxists or feminists -- a goal most Christian academics would applaud, as would I -- but also ventures the more dubious suggestion that a Christian perspective may transform the relativism that bedevils today's scholarship and provide a more dependable foundation for knowing and believing.

Both Marsden and Burtchaell offer much that is worth pondering. It must be noted, however, that both are seeking to prescribe what a church-related college should be. Their whole analysis of decline hangs on a prescriptive or normative understanding of church-relatedness, and that normative understanding resembles suspiciously what the colleges were, or at least claimed to be, sometime earlier in the century, in perhaps some "golden age" of church-relatedness (and, unfortunately, often concomitant ethnic insularity and academic mediocrity). Unless the critics are willing to concede that it is, by their definition, impossible for a church-related college to exist in today's world -- and some, unhappy with contemporary society, may be willing to grant such a point -- they must be willing to think through what it might mean to be a church-related college in today's world. This the critics of church-related higher education have largely failed to do

I think that much of the critics' distress about changes in church-related higher education rests ultimately on their epistemological concerns: Christian higher education, the scholarship it produces and the students it graduates should be substantively different from its secular counterpart. I agree about the graduates but disagree about the scholarship. Let me explain by returning to the theme of "Christ and culture in paradox."

Lutherans and like-minded Christians recognize the authority of both Christ and culture, Christian revelation and secular knowledge, but see them as in significant -- perhaps humanly unresolvable -- tension with each other. The Christian in this world is subject to both, and this dual obedience is never achieved without difficulty and without sin. "More than any great Christian leader before him," Niebuhr observed, "Luther affirmed the life in culture as the sphere in which Christ could and ought to be followed; and more than any other he discerned that the rules to be followed in the cultural life were independent of Christian or church law." This perspective can have profound implications for higher education.

The Lutheran distinction between Christ and culture, or rather, between the two ways in which God rules God's world, is traditionally expressed in the language of the "two realms" or "two governances" of God. From a Lutheran perspective, higher education resides properly within the secular realm where justice is sought and where reason, one of God's greatest gifts to humanity, offers primary guidance. Situated within this realm, church-related higher education is called to employ reason to pursue truth with all the intellectual rigor at its command. There should be in most cases no substantive difference between scholarship by Christians and by non-Christians.

What to make then of Marsden's argument (or, alternatively, the neo-Thomist argument) that a Christian perspective should make a difference in scholarly results? Consider Marsden's contention in Outrageous Idea that the "doctrine of creation... has important implications in the field of epistemology.... For one thing if Cod has created our minds as well as the rest of reality, then it makes sense to believe that God may communicate with us in nature as well as in Scripture, even if as 'through a glass darkly.' In such a theistic framework, we have reason to suppose that God would have created us with some mechanisms for distinguishing truth from error, however darkened our hearts and puny our intellects."

The historian in me recognizes in this argument an echo of a late-medieval debate. The existence of what Marsden calls "some mechanisms for distinguishing truth from error" rested then as now on the scriptural testimony that human beings were created in the image and likeness of God -- most fully expressed in the human mind, which was, as it were, able to "think God's thoughts after God." At issue, then, was the relationship between God's 'thoughts" and the created world. To put it simply (although the matter is not simple at all): Is the world comprehensible because the world was created by God, who is rational and who created the human mind in the image and likeness of God's own rationality? If so, then human minds, created in the image and likeness of God, should be able to understand the world in which we find ourselves; much of the skepticism of modern society needs then to be rethought by Christians. Further, the relativism in much of academia should also be challenged by a certainty guaranteed by a rational, creator God.

But in the medieval debate an alternative question was posed: Is the world as it is because God simply chose to make it as it is? In this case, we cannot assume that just because our minds are like the mind of the world's creator we can understand the world, or, more extreme, that we can deduce how the world should work. Rather, we must use our minds to discover the way in which God chose to make the world. We are given no epistemological guarantee. Lutherans and others in this tradition are left with (admittedly fallible) reason, experience, and experiment--the sharpest tools of the modern academy work. In the "Christ and culture in paradox" approach, then, the Christian substance appears in the Christian calling of faculty, staff and students and in the Christian context surrounding the academic enterprise -- only rarely in the results of scholarly inquiry itself.

The critics are not likely to be happy with this Lutheran end-run around their concern that the Christian perspective is being "academically marginalized." They will rightly point to the danger that the distinction between "two realms" and the "voluntaristic" understanding of God's activity in creation may simply grease the skids for the slide into secularity. But as Niebuhr noted, Lutheran and other adherents of "Christ and culture in paradox" readily confess that all human action, whether within the secular or the sacred realm, will be tainted with sin and so subject to abuse. This is no reason to despair. As Luther told Melanchthon, "Sin boldly!"

Niebuhr also observed that those calling for a new synthesis of Christ and culture on a neo-Thomist basis had, in fact, more in common than they realized with the accommodating liberal culture-Protestants they deplored. "What is sought here," Niebuhr concluded, "is not the synthesis of Christ with present culture [Niebuhr's "Christ above culture" type], but the re-establishment of the philosophy and the institutions of another culture," namely the culture of the 13th century. Niebuhr made a similar point regarding fundamentalists, who sought less to position Christ against culture as to restore a Christ and culture of the 19th century. Marsden and Burtchaell may be committing a similar fallacy. As Niebuhr put it so well, "The effort to bring Christ and culture, God's work and man's, the temporal and the eternal, law and grace, into one system of thought and practice tends, perhaps inevitably, to the absolutizing of what is relative, the reduction of the infinite to a finite form, and the materialization of the dynamic."

Burtchaell's title, The Dying of the Light, illustrates the tendency toward excessive solemnity that bedevils most discussions about colleges of the church. We need to remember that the faithfulness of the church and of the church's institutions, including colleges, depends ultimately not on what we do for ourselves but what the Holy Spirit does for us. Cod has shown throughout the centuries, in the Bible stories and in church history, that God can accomplish God's purposes despite all the human weaknesses and foolishness that stand in the way. A sense of humility and, yes, an accompanying sense of humor are not out of place. We need to be able to laugh at our pretensions and shortcomings. And God can be trusted to preserve the colleges of the church in the form and way that God wills.

The Real Jesus of the Sayings “Q” Gospel

The topic of "the real Jesus" did not even exist until the Enlightenment, unless one wanted, as a latter-day Monophysite or Arian or Adoptionist, to revive long since forgotten heresies. But with the Enlightenment, or, more precisely, with the historicism of the nineteenth century, the question of the real Jesus was posed: Who really was Jesus, as a real person in history? What can the historian say? Over the last two centuries, there gradually emerged a new access to Jesus, made available through objective historical research.

I. The Rediscovery of the Sayings Gospel Q

Up until modern times, people could only know about Jesus through their religious experience in the church, codified in creeds and doctrines about Christ. . We all know, no doubt by heart, the Jesus of the Apostles' Creed, which has turned out to be based not on a text Jesus taught his disciples but rather on the baptismal confession developed in Rome in the second century and projected back onto the beginnings. But in that familiar creed Jesus' own history, what he himself said and did during his lifetime, is fully bypassed. Not what he said and did, but only what they said about him, counted as saving information: born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. But what in between? Is that of no significance? Did not Jesus himself think that what he said and did had saving significance? Has Paul's kerygma of cross and resurrection, which is what lies behind the Apostles' Creed, really said everything that we want to know about the significance of Jesus? In the case of other dying and rising gods of the Roman Empire, what one narrates about the myth, is the nub of the issue. Nothing else is known about them -- if they actually lived, nothing has survived to be reported -- only the myth about their dying and rising. They are prototypes and guarantors of the afterlife, hardly more. But Jesus really lived in time and space and was significant enough that all these myths were absorbed into his significance, as the one and only dying and rising God. But what was Jesus' own significance, which gave him this predominance?

To be sure, the Evangelists themselves have already tailored their narrations of Jesus' sayings and healings to focus on the kerygrna, making the gospel of cross and resurrection the quintessence of the whole ministry of Jesus. So can one then be spared the details? Yet for modern people, a person who remains historically inaccessible is somehow unreal, more fancy than fact, indeed a myth. It would boil down to a kind of modern Doceticism if, moved by awe before the exaltedness of Jesus, we were to declare his historical reality to be academically unattainable or religiously irrelevant. The result was, in the nineteenth century, the quest of the historical Jesus, of which Albert Schweitzer wrote so masterfully.

It may be no coincidence that a century and a half ago, as this rediscovery of Jesus was just getting under way, there came to light a collection of Jesus' sayings used by Matthew and Luke in composing their Gospels. Matthew and Luke updated the sayings so that they made clear what Jesus must have meant, namely, what Matthew and Luke meant, and imbedded his sayings into their copies of the Gospel of Mark, making of Matthew and Luke hybrid Gospels, partly Mark and partly the sayings collection.

Then, after Matthew and Luke used it in their enlarged, improved Gospels, that primitive collection of Jesus' sayings was itself no longer copied and transmitted by Christian scribes, since the church of course -- unfortunately -- preferred those more up-to-date and complete Gospels. The more primitive text was itself lost completely from sight. In fact, it ceased to exist. For since we have no first-century copies of anything Christian, no copies of Q survived. It was never heard of again, after the end of the first century, until, in 1838, a scholar in Leipzig, Germany, Christian Hermann Weisse, detected it lurking just under the surface of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Since after its rediscovery it was commonly referred to as a source of the canonical Gospels, scholars came to call it simply "the source," in German, Quelle, abbreviated Q. But since "Q" sounds rather cryptic, not to say flat, we have of late come to call it, for clarity's sake and to be able to refer to it as a text in its own right, not just a source for something else, the Sayings Gospel Q.

This old Sayings Gospel was not like the canonical Gospels, so colored over with the kerygma of cross and resurrection that the historical Jesus, though embedded therein, was actually lost from sight by the heavy overlay of golden patina. Rather, this document was just primitive enough to contain many sayings of Jesus without kerygmatic overlay and without the Q redactor's own additions. Here the real Jesus, who actually lived in history, has his say. So what did he have to say? Such questions have again become acute in our time, at least among modern people who stand within the Christian tradition but also want to know what really happened, what Jesus was really up to.

I can of course only attempt a preliminary answer, for my work is far from complete. And I limit myself almost exclusively to this lost and rediscovered collection of Jesus' sayings. I am working intensely on reconstructing word for word in Greek that Sayings Gospel, by undoing as best I can the improvements by Matthew and Luke, so as to listen to what Jesus himself had to say. In fact, I am heading an international team of more than forty, mostly younger scholars who, over the past decade, have been trying to decide just how that Greek source read, before Matthew and Luke updated it, but, thank goodness, left it sufficiently intact that our efforts are not in vain.

We have assembled an enormous database of opinions expressed by scholars over the past 150 years about the original wording of Q. After sorting French, German, and English excerpts from scholarly literature in chronological order, we have been meeting up to three times a year in America and Europe to evaluate that mass of scholarly opinion and thus to work out what seems the most objective reconstruction of the sayings, one by one. We have gone through all of Q once and are beginning to go through it a second time, now publishing, at Peeters Press in Leuven, our massive database under the title Documenta Q. A first volume, containing the Lord's Prayer appeared last spring; a second volume, containing the temptations of Jesus just appeared this spring; and a third is in press. Three more volumes are to appear in 1997, and we hope to maintain the tempo of four per year until we complete the publication of the database in 2002. In view of this massive publication of scholarly opinion, I refrain here from 1earned-sounding discussions with the scholars, so as to keep in focus the text of the Saying Gospel itself.

We will also publish around the year 2000 a one-volume critical edition of Q in a synopsis, including the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, Mark, and Thomas, with English, German, and French translations of Q and Thomas, which is already being edited. Just to make available a reliable copy of the oldest Gospel, lost for 1900 years, is itself worth doing. But, even more important, Q points back, in its oldest layers, to what Jesus himself had to say. What could he possibly have been thinking as he was doing what he was doing? Thanks to the Sayings Gospel, the question is really not all that impossible to answer. I do think we can catch sight of what he was up to. That is where I want to begin with you tonight.

II. The Sayings Gospel's Presentation of Jesus

Since I am working from a collection of Jesus' sayings, I have to abstain from the narrative part of his biography, the stories of his birth, healings, Holy Week, and Easter, for, as we will see, they are not in the Sayings Gospel Q at all, or at most, present in a very indirect way. Yet I am happy to limit myself to the Sayings Gospel Q, to concentrate on what Jesus must have been thinking, to judge by what he was saying.

But before turning to Jesus' sayings, let me at least say what one can infer from Q about his life: He grew up in a small village of lower or southern Galilee called in (Q 4:16) Nazara, but always called Nazareth elsewhere in the canonical Gospels, a hamlet perhaps too small even to have had a local synagogue in which Jesus might have learned to read the Hebrew scriptures. He must have found "sermons in stones," to judge by the local color that becomes so eloquent in his parables (the stones themselves being especially prominent in Q).

In any case, we know nothing about him until he left home to join the apocalyptic movement of John by undergoing John's initiation rite, baptism in the Jordan. John did not seem to have provided much guidance as to what to do next, other than, having straightened up, to fly right. Baptism by immersion in the Jordan must have symbolized taking off one's old worldly identity and reemerging as a new, godly person. But what does that mean? Where does one go from there?

Perhaps, it is Jesus' wrestling with this question that comes to mythical expression in Q as a debate with the devil in the three temptations of Jesus. In any case, the temptations are the only thing that occurs in Q between John's baptizing Jesus and Jesus' launching his own ministry with his inaugural sermon. For Jesus went directly to the people with the good news of a lifestyle underwritten by God himself.

Before turning to the substantive issue of where Jesus' ideas went, I would like to digress a moment to speak superficially, geographically, about where Jesus himself went: Jesus moved to Capharnaum on the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee, chosen perhaps because it was ideally suited to the lifestyle he had in mind. Capharnaum was beside the lake, which provided a God-given year-round food supply, was well below sea level, and hence had a mild climate, and was a crossroad for land and sea travel. There were secluded villages in the forested mountains behind, to which Jesus could withdraw, one on the Galilean side of the frontier, Chorazin, and one just across the frontier, under a different ruler, Bethsaida, which seems to have been the home town of others baptized byJohn. He got along well with the despised customs officials (whom we probably translate inadequately as "tax collectors," not to say "publicans") and the equally unwelcome centurion of the Roman army of occupation stationed at Capharnaum, who implored Jesus to heal his boy, pointing out that Jesus could do it by just giving a command without even having to profane himself by entering a gentile house.

Let me get to the issue of what Jesus was up to. He seems to have found his own mission in speaking to the more basic question of where one goes from here rather than simply in continuing John's initiation rite. Apparently, Jesus himself did not baptize. But he must have begun by believing in the imminent day of judgment as John proclaimed, for why would he otherwise have immersed himself in John's cause? Yet he himself did not make the repetition of that rite, or John's apocalypticism, the focus of what he himself was up to.

One only needs to look at the single overlap of their vocabulary, the metaphor of the tree and its fruit. John used this metaphor to call on people to bear fruit resulting from repentance, warning that if one did not produce good fruit, one would soon be chopped down at the judgment like a diseased tree (Q 3:8-9). Jesus dropped the threat of judgment but reflected on the metaphor itself (Q 6:43): There are indeed different kinds of fruit trees, as anyone living on the land knows, and each bears its own kind of fruit. Thorn bushes do not produce figs, and bramble bushes do not produce grapes. A healthy tree produces edible fruit, but a diseased tree produces only fruit that never ripens. Now, people are like trees: If you are good, you produce good things, but if you are evil, your produce is bad. What comes out of your mouth shows what kind of heart you have, just as what fruit comes off a tree shows what kind of tree it is. What matters is being the right kind of person. Then you will automatically produce the right kind of fruit. Here Jesus' message, in distinction from that of John, was not "Be good or get chopped down!" but rather "Let me tell you what being a good person really means -- I call on you to be just that!"

As this little sample illustrates, Jesus sought to come to grips with the basic intentions of people. He addressed them personally, as to what kind of people they were. He called on them -- he did not teach them ideas, as would a theologian. For when we take his sayings and distill from them our doctrines, we have manipulated his sayings for our own purposes, first of all, for the purpose of avoiding his addressing us personally. We reclassify his sayings as objective teachings to which we can give intellectual assent rather than letting them strike home as the personal challenge he intended them to be. Our learned, highly technical scholarly debates about Jesus' teaching would be, from his perspective, our dodge. So he would not agree with any of it but would want to cut through it all for an honest look at our heart.

If I then proceed to present, in as objective a way as I as a scholar can, his teachings, my very objectivity would be my dodge, by means of which I would evade his point. Therefore, in trying to talk really about what he had to say, what I say has to retain his note of direct appeal. This tone of interpersonal encounter, this person-to-person mode, is the only really objective way to talk about what Jesus was talking about, for it was that personal talk that he was talking, and walking.

III. What Did Jesus Have to Say in the Sayings Gospel?

Looking out for number one is not the way to go. One should not be concerned about one's own life. Just think of the ravens (Q 12:22-31). They neither work the fields nor store in barns, so as to have enough stored up to get through the winter. They do not need to worry about such things, for God provides their nourishment. It is similar with lilies, what we would call wildflowers, which do not need to produce their clothing on a weaver's loom, and yet the splendor of their adornment far exceeds the glorious costumes of a king like Solomon. God provides their clothing -- he already knows what you need! You should count on him just as they do. Trust him without a care in the world! What one normally calls faith in God is only little faith, hardly better than what gentiles call religion. No matter how hard you work at self-preservation, you will not be able to stretch out life so as to avoid death. So it makes more sense to get involved in the actualization of God's rule, where fulness of life is to be found, than to focus on self-preservation.

What does it really mean, to seek God's rule? Here, Matthew interpreted God's reign by adding, as a kind of gloss, "God's righteousness" (Matt. 6:33). So one talks about Matthew's moralizing interpretation of the kingdom of God. But that probably is not all Jesus had in mind. For, in another place in the Sayings Gospel, almost the same as was said about the ravens and wild flowers crops up again, and so one passage can help interpret the other; that passage is the Lord's Prayer (Q 11:2-4). Here, the petition "Thy kingdom come!" is again glossed by Matthew's added interpretation, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!" But here it becomes clear that the so-called moral interest of Matthew does not come to expression as a moral appeal to the community but rather in a petition directed to God. It is he who should establish his will on earth! God's rule is what brings God's will, his own righteousness, to earth. And we can only ask him to do this for us. Of course, he will not have established his will on earth as long as people act unjustly among themselves, but that is not the actual focus of the prayer. God himself should bring to pass his just will!

The prayer in Q itself, prior to Matthew's gloss, had interpreted the first petition, "Thy kingdom come," as having to do with God's providing food, in what had been the immediately following petition, "Give us this day our daily bread!" So God's rule has to do primarily with eating? This option, offensive not only to us but already to Matthew, motivated him both to insert "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" and also, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (the Beatitudes pronounced on the poor and hungry), to add that God's blessing has to do with the "poor in spirit," who "hunger and thirst after righteousness," not simply with hungry beggars, which is what the Greek word translated "poor" actually means. But Jesus himself did not take offense at talking literally about food. In this regard, liberation theologians have understood Jesus well, for they experienced the setting of his sayings as they themselves lived among the poor and oppressed of South America. It is not because the poor are better or more worthy that the Beatitudes apply to them but simply because their plight is greater. Contrary to all outer appearances, they are fortunate, because God's rule means taking care of them.

The Lord's Prayer is followed in Q itself by its interpretation (Q 11:9-13): Even a far-from-perfect human father will not give his son a stone if he asks for bread, or a snake if he asks for fish. How much more then the heavenly Father! You only need to ask him, and he will give you good things. It is this kind of trust that Jesus meant by "faith." This time, it is Luke who spiritualized: God will give the Holy Spirit. But Jesus himself promised that the heavenly Father would give bread and fish.

One comes nearer to Jesus' lifestyle when one looks a bit more closely at his mission instructions, addressed to the most active disciples, nicknamed today "wandering radicals." They do not have a penny in their pocket. They need neither purse nor backpack, since they take with them neither money nor supplies (Q 10:4). They live like the ravens and wildflowers in the field, or like the dirt-cheap sparrows that never fall to earth without God's knowing (Q 12:7). These disciples entrust themselves, completely unprotected, to God. They do not even wear sandals (Q 10:4), perhaps as a symbol of penance, perhaps only to attest that they, even if unprotected, nevertheless get by. They are not even equipped with a club to protect against wild animals or robbers. They go like lambs among wolves (Q 10:3).

One should offer no resistance (Q 6:29-30). If someone hits you on one cheek, you should offer him the other. Even a mugger who snatches your coat should be given the shirt off your back as a gift. If someone asks you for something, give it to him, and if someone seeks a loan, do not ask for it back. We are not only to ask God to forgive us but to forgive the debts of those in debt to us (although we have accustomed ourselves not to hear that part of the Lord's Prayer).

One should love one's enemies, indeed pray for one's persecutors. Usually, )one is generous to good people, one's social equals, who can return the favor. But that is being no better than customs officers and gentiles. Rather, you should imitate God, who rains, and shines his sun, on bad people as well as good. Only if you act that way, are you a child of God. Jesus was first called son of God not because he was like a Roman emperor, or like Hercules, or like other sons of God in that society, but because he was like God, loving his enemy.

With such a lifestyle, one seems not to have any chance in everyday reality. However, it has belatedly come to attention that, for example, in concentration camps, people have a better chance of survival if they band together into small groups of selfless persons who are ready to give the little they have to the most needy among them. Of course, our plight is not so desperate, and so we do not have to turn to such drastic measures. Think of the rich young ruler, who was just plain too well off, too much like us, to be a disciple of Jesus.

We are not normally the other person's help but rather his fate, just as he is our fate. He has nothing to eat because I have stashed away extra bread. I am cold because he is hiding an extra coat in his backpack. He does not have a penny to his name because I have hoarded money in my money belt. We are all tools of evil, which is why life is ruined for us all.

In the extreme case of blood vengeance, which takes place between families or clans or villages in many "backward" parts of the world still today, we all agree that such a thing can only harm both sides and hence is to be gotten rid of by any means possible. Yet, in the less spectacular cases that take place under more normal circumstances, the equivalent selfishness, acting in one's own interest, no matter what damage is done in the process to the other, is considered somehow acceptable in our so very "civilized" culture. Everybody is normally expected to look out for number one.

But God's rule is something quite different. And it was that rule that Jesus and his circle wanted to introduce. How that took place in practice is described in some detail in the mission discourse: At the very beginning, before there were sympathizers, when there were no safe houses to which one could turn, much less house churches, the committed few disciples (and no doubt Jesus himself) walked, barefoot and without any supplies, from place to place.

One knocked on some unknown door and said, if the door was opened at all, "Shalom!" (Q 10:5~6). This greeting was not meant in a purely empty sense, the way we say "good morning" without having the least interest in what kind of day the other person will have, and as one could, then and today, say "Shalom" in a completely empty headed way. Rather, if one was let in, the head of the household was called "son of peace," that is to say, the blessing originally implied in the greeting "Shalom" came upon the host. But if one was turned away, the blessing returned to the one who had knocked, who then had to go farther and keep knocking until he was received and could actually give his "Shalom."

One ate what was put before one, be it simple, be it sumptuous. The Jesus people were not ascetics in the technical sense. John used for clothing and nourishment only what was, so to speak, directly offered by nature (Mark 1:6). He neither ate bread nor drank wine (Q 7:3 3). That is why he was thought to be crazy, demon possessed. John stood in sharp contrast to Jesus, who sat at table with such worldly people as customs officers and sinners. Of course, he was also rejected, though with the reverse justification: He was smeared as a glutton and drunkard (Q 7:34). In any case, Jesus did not make an issue, one way or the other, out of what he got to eat.

With regard to clothing and nourishment, Jesus lived from what people, usually women, prepared for him. The interpretation of the petition "Thy kingdom come!" in the original Prayer in Q itself, namely, "Give us this day our daily bread!" was not answered by manna falling from heaven but rather by women, who, following a recipe found in Q (13:21), hid leaven in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened then put it into the oven until it was transformed into bread.

Such wandering radicals as Jesus sent out, who went as he did from house to house, were called at that time, before there were church offices like priest or bishop, simply "workers" (Q 10:2, 7). Whatever the workers were given as food or housing, they had earned, worked for. Their work consisted in what they could offer to those who lived in the house, the "peace" they could give in return for the hospitality. It consisted in healing those who were sick, accompanied with the reassuring word "God's rule has touched you" (Q 10:9). That is to say, this is the way of life that one should seek, free of care like the ravens and wildflowers, the rule whose coming one was to ask for in the Lord's Prayer. For one only needs to ask, and it will be given; to seek, and one will find; to knock, and the door will be opened (Q 1:9). One can entrust oneself to God as heavenly Father -- that is what they believed, practiced, and proclaimed.

Sickness is not the will of God, not part of his rule. It is evil. When the sickness was accompanied by odd gestures and cries, as in the case of mental illnesses and "moonstruck" epileptics, it was attributed to demons, impure spirits. So it was particularly noticeable that God intervenes in such cases. It is by his finger that demons are driven out (Q 11:20), irrespective of whether it was Jesus or "your sons" who functioned as exorcist (Q 11:2 1). Jesus (like other exorcists) had power over demons, not because he, like Faust, was in league with their leader Beelzebul (Q 11:15) but because God rules here and now with God's own finger (Q 11:22). It is a matter of God's intervening to provide bread, to heal the sick, that is to say, to rule. The petitions of the Lord's Prayer, no doubt used as a table prayer by Jesus when admitted to the hospitality of a home, were actually promptly answered in the house of the son of peace.

The reality of death is not denied in an illusory way. Though the sayings are reassuring, death is presupposed in a realistic way: The grass in the field, no matter how beautiful today, is tomorrow thrown into the oven (Q 12:28). The sparrows are never forgotten by God, and yet they fall to earth (Q 12:7). One is called upon not to fear physical death, so as not to lose one's very self, panicked by fear of death (Q 12:4), which is the greatest threat of evil forces, from unbearable pain to dictatorships.

The saying about taking one's cross (Q 14:27) may presuppose Jesus' own death, which is not otherwise mentioned in Q. But the two other sayings of the same cluster probably go back to Jesus himself and say much the same thing: One must even leave one's own family behind to participate in Jesus' cause (Q 14:26). Only the person who loses one's life for Jesus' cause will really save it (Q 17:33). Even if Jesus did not himself predict his death, as the predictions of his passion that recur repeatedly in Mark would have us think, one can hardly assume that Jesus did not envisage the possibility of his persecution or assassination, even though the Sayings Gospel offers no explicit predictions of his death. He was surely prepared inwardly to accept death if it came to that, as his followers should also be.

IV. How does the Sayings Gospel Handle Jesus' Death?

Although the Sayings Gospel has no passion narrative or resurrection stories, this omission does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the Q people knew nothing of Jesus' fate or had never thought about where it left them. It is hardly probable that his death was not quickly rumored among his followers, even into the most obscure corners of Galilee. But then, after his death, was not the only sensible thing to do, to give up the whole thing as some tragic miscalculation, a terrible failure? Jesus had assured them, "the Father from heaven gives good things to those who ask him," and yet his last word according to Mark was "My God, My God, why have you left me in the lurch?" (Mark 15:34). What was there left to proclaim?

The emergence of the Sayings Gospel was, to put it quite pointedly, itself the miracle at Easter! Rudolf Bultmann formulated a famous, or infamous saying to the effect that Jesus rose into the kerygma. But perhaps we would do better to say: Jesus rose into his own word. The resurrection was attested, in substance at least, in the Q community, in that his word was again to be heard, not as a melancholy recollection of the failed dream of a noble, but terribly naive, person, but rather as the still valid, and constantly renewed, trust in the heavenly Father, who, as in heaven, will rule also on earth.

There are a few sayings in Q that are best understood in terms of such a "resurrection" faith. "What I say to you in the darkness, speak out in the light; and what you hear whispered into your ear, preach from the rooftops" (Q 12:3/Matt. 10:27). This sounds as if Jesus had rather secretively only whispered his message and left the spreading of the good word to his disciples. We would have expected it to be just the reverse. Surely Jesus said it better, louder, and clearer than anyone! But perhaps such a saying reflects the recollection that his message was suppressed by force and thus obscured but then became all the brighter and louder as it was nevertheless revalidated and reproclaimed.

There may be the same kind of contrast between the time before Jesus' death and the time after it in the saying about the unforgiveable sin. The saying is usually thought to be telling those who had rejected Jesus himself when he was alive that afterwards they are not irretrievably lost but have a new chance through the preaching of the disciples equipped with the Spirit after his death.

In both these difficult sayings, the preaching after Jesus' death is held to be more audible, more effective, more true even, than the preaching of Jesus himself. This is an "Easter faith" of a special kind!

The Easter faith of the Sayings Gospel then has primarily to do with the authority of Jesus' sayings, which even after his death are not devalued but only then come into full power. In this high evaluation of Jesus' sayings lies the Christology of the Sayings Gospel. This is why Jesus' first disciples did not really need to use christological titles, which seem so indispensable to us.

"Why do you call me Lord, Lord, but do not do what I tell you?" This question introduces the concluding exhortation of Jesus' inaugural sermon in Q (6:46). Thereupon follows the double parable of houses built on rock or sand (Q 6:47-49). Everyone who hears my words and does them will be acquitted in the judgment! Not the high priest in the temple in Jerusalem or the baptism of John the Baptist in the Jordan River brings the ultimate salvation, but rather keeping Jesus' words, as they are conserved in the Sayings Gospel--to be sure, on the condition that they are really kept, observed, and not just conserved.

The eschatology of the Sayings Gospel shares the view that in the general resurrection, everyone will be judged according to his or her own works, as commonly assumed in antiquity, in Judaism, and even by Paul (2 Cor. 5:10). Since all will rise at the same time, one will observe the judgment of the others and in some cases even influence it: "Your sons" who are exorcists "shall be your judges. . . . The queen of the south will be raised at the judgment with this generation and will condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here" (Q 11:19, 31-32). Q's closing word is that those who have followed Jesus "will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel" (Q 22:30). Everyone will be there at the day of judgment, and the truth will out!

So it is not surprising that, in their own defense, people would appeal for acquittal by referring to their connection with Jesus: "Then you will start saying, 'We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.' And he will say to you, 'I do not know you. Away from me, evildoers!'" (Q 13:26-27). Such Q texts do not yet have in view Jesus as the Judge but rather envisage him, among the character witnesses who testify, as the crucial one in the view of the Judge. He speaks up for, or against, people who appeal to him. Another saying puts it a bit differently: "Everyone who confesses me before men, the son of man will confess before the angels. But whoever denies me before men, the son of man will deny before the angels." Here, too, Jesus is not Judge but a witness in court. The angels are the judges. Yet the early Christology of the Sayings Gospel can be sensed from such eschatological sayings: If Jesus' witness is decisive for one's fate, since neither God nor the angels will reject his witness, then it really does not make much difference with what title or lack of title that happens. If it's decided, it's decided! Doing what Jesus said, not what somebody else said, but really doing it, is what stands up in the day of judgment.

In the course of the christological development, Jesus himself comes to be understood as the Judge. His witness, as after all decisive, is objectified, becoming functionally the Judge's sentence itself, and so he comes to represent or replace God or the angels. In the Sayings Gospel, this development is hardly more than suggested. The saying with which Q closes, to the effect that those who have followed Jesus will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Q 22:30), has for the first time humans as judges and so surely must presuppose that Jesus himself functions as the main Judge, though this is not said explicitly. But even this concluding saying does not imply that Jesus is the exclusive judge but envisages a judging shared with his inner circle. The bare beginnings of the later Christology are only suggested but not at all developed. One thing that makes the Sayings Gospel so fascinating, not only for laypersons but even for theologians, is to see the first gingerly steps from Jesus' own, rather selfless message, oriented to God's reign, which he activated while otherwise being unaware of himself, to our focus on him as the center of our faith!

V. How Can One Get From the Sayings Gospel to Us?

If the Sayings Gospel gives us insight into the doing and thinking of Jesus, how does that connect to us? Q as a document ceased to exist after the first century. Is not its Jesus, the real Jesus, also gone? Simply detecting, a century and a half ago, a collection of his sayings imbedded in Matthew and Luke does not necessarily mean that we have any connection with him.

The real Jesus, as I have sought to portray him on the basis of the Sayings Gospel, was not only in his way otherworldly -- he was worlds apart from us! Yet we may still want to understand ourselves as his disciples, his church, with him as our Lord. The efforts undertaken again and again over the past century to trace a line of continuity from the historical Jesus to Paul and from there to our church have been all too tenuous -- more ingenious than convincing. It is easier to trace the path from Paul's Christ to us than to trace the path from Paul back to Jesus. Although Paul is our oldest source, dating back to around 50 C.E., Paul himself had not met the historical Jesus but only the resurrected Christ, who for Paul literally and figuratively so outshone Jesus as to leave Jesus out of sight.

Yet there was in early Christianity another path from Jesus to the church, less dramatic than the great theologian and missionary Paul, but more pervasive in the actual life of early Christians: the Gospel of Mathew! That Gospel was by far was the most widely used early Christian book, to judge by the number of copies that have surfaced in the dry sands of Egypt, or by the number of quotations in early Christian writers, or by the number of textual corruptions introduced from Matthew into other Gospels by scribal copyists obviously more familiar with Matthew. The Christianity that step-by-step won over the ancient world, until the Roman Empire became the Christian Byzantine Empire, was primarily the Matthean rather than the Pauline kind of Christianity. It was a Christianity of mercy and philanthropy, which won the allegiance of the underprivileged and suppressed, that is to say, the mass of the population, more so than the Pauline theology that ultimately flowed into Neoplatonic philosophical theology of the educated minority (with literacy standing at about 15 percent). Christianity as a mass movement so powerful that Constantine finally had to yield to its pressure was more a Matthean Christianity; and that means it was, through Matthew, really connnected to Jesus.

In this sense, the question of tracing the path from Matthew back to Jesus is a way to see how we effect the last step back to our roots. But here we hit upon an untilled field. The discipline of church history always traced the path of events via Paul. A conspiracy of silence has obscured what happened to the movement that Jesus launched in Galilee, ever since Luke's Acts told the story of the church's beginning with only one passing allusion to there even being a church in Galilee (Acts 9:31). Luke's view of the Christian witness skipped from "all Judea and Samaria" to "the end of the earth" without even mentioning Galilee (Acts 1:8). Paul knew very few sayings of Jesus and did not have a kind of religiosity, much less a theology, built on Jesus' sayings; he even argues that knowing Jesus according to the flesh, the earthly Jesus, is not really necessary (2 Cor.5:16), so as to argue that he is in no regard less qualified than Jesus' own disciples.

The Book of Acts also presents such a Pauline Christianity: Jesus has ascended to heaven, and it is the Holy Spirit who since Pentecost leads the church. Sayings of Jesus are conspicuously absent from the life of the church in Acts. Luke had buried them back in his Gospel, and once he had finished copying out the end of Q (at Luke 22:30), he rather explicitly said that the idyllic, unreal world of Jesus has been put behind us, for we must now come to grips with reality, buy a sword, become the church militant, and replace the kind of mission Jesus had advocated and practiced with one like the missionary journeys of Paul.But when one turns to Matthew, the contacts with the Sayings Gospel Q are so striking that one has now come to realize that the Gospel of Matthew was written in a community that itself had been part of the Sayings Gospel's movement.

So it has become a new scholarly task to supplement the standard version of church history, based on Paul and Acts, with the church history that leads from Jesus via the Sayings Gospel to Matthew, that is to say, from Galilee directly to Antioch without the detour via the Damascus road. For the Gospel of Matthew probably comes from the region of Antioch, from a small community that had begun in Galilee and continued there for some time, since one was told not to go on the roads of the gentiles or into the towns of the Samaritans but only to the lost sheep of Israel (Matt. 10:6-7). Perhaps it was the war with Rome in the 6os, which devastated Galilee before reaching Jerusalem, that finally forced the remnants of the Q community to join the refugees fleeing north up the coast to the nearest metropolitan area, Antioch, the capital of the former Seleucid Empire.

The first steps from Galilee to Antioch, the beginning of the path from Jesus to us, can be sketched as follows:

(1) Jesus' immediate followers reproclaimed Jesus' sayings, which were collected into a number of small clusters, to function as prompters or handouts for such wandering radicals.

(2) The editing of such clusters into the Jewish-Christian Sayings Gospel Q took place at about the time of the fall of Jerusalem (70 C.E.).

(3) The first major part of the body of the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 3-11, into which the text of Q is largely compressed, was composed as a kind of rationale or justification for the Q community's having held out so long in its exclusively Jewish orientation.

(4) The complete adoption of the Gospel of Mark into the Gospel of Matthew, in chapters 12-28, reflected the reorientation of the Q community, now the Matthean community, into the worldwide mission of the gentile church, legitimized through the Great Commission to convert all nations, with which the canonical Gospel of Matthew closes.

Let me in conclusion speak briefly to each of these four stages that led from the real Jesus to the Christianity of which we are heirs:

(1) The collection of sayings of Jesus that in Luke 6 is called the Sermon on the Plain and in Matthew 5-7 the Sermon on the Mount is a very old collection originally composed as a unit in and of itself, with its own introduction, the Beatitudes, and its own conclusion, the twin parables of the houses built on rock or on sand. Between, in the body of the sermon, lie the sayings most characteristic of the real Jesus: those concerning love of enemies, turning the other cheek, giving the shirt off one's back, and forgiving debts. There was another such small collection on prayer, including the Lord's Prayer and its commentary about the father who gives to the asking son neither stones nor snakes. A third collection was about ravens and wildflowers. These three little clusters are so close to each other in meaning that the Matthean community put them all together, perhaps at a very early date, into what we know as the Sermon on the Mount. Then there was the collection of mission instructions, telling how the Q people were to carry out their Jewish-Christian mission. It is these oldest collections of sayings of Jesus that produced the picture of the real Jesus that I described at the beginning of this presentation.

(2) The final editor of Q took sayings of Jesus that were still circulating, including these small clusters, and edited them in two regards: On the one hand, he superimposed on the Q material the Deuteronomistic view of history found in the Old Testament, according to which God lets Jerusalem be destroyed not because God is unfaithful but because Israel is, having rejected God's prophets, indeed having killed them, rather than listening to them. The final editor of Q thought history had in this regard repeated itself:

Jesus' offer of salvation had been by and large rejected, and so God had abandoned again his house in Jerusalem and turned it over to the Romans to destroy. So Q pronounced judgment on "this generation." For its rejecting of Jesus, God was rejecting it.

But another concern of this editor of Q was more inner-Christian, namely, to reinterpret John's talk of a "Coming One" who would hold judgment to refer not directly to God, whom John must have intended, but rather to Jesus. The editor organized the first main section of Q around a cluster of predictions from Isaiah to the effect that the Coming One will heal many sicknesses and evangelize the poor. Between John's prediction of a Coming One and the claim that Jesus, having acted as Isaiah predicted, is that Coming One, lie the inaugural sermon, beginning "Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God," in which the evangelizing of the poor is documented, and the healing of the centurion's boy at Capharnaum, one healing representative of all in the list of healings collected from Isaiah. This is Q's "proof" that Jesus is the Coming One prophesied by John as coming to hold judgment. And so God's judgment on Jerusalem at its destruction can be interpreted as retaliation for the rejection of Jesus' message by the Judaism of that time, "this generation."

This Sayings Gospel, organized in this way, may have converted a few followers of John but did not by any means effect the conversion of all of Israel, the impossibility of which is already writ large in the Sayings Gospel itself. The text ends with the reassurance to the disciples that they will, after all, judge the twelve tribes of Israel, even if they could not convert them. Yet this negative outcome is not the last word.

(3) The small and failing Q community knew about the much more successful gentile church. Such contacts would have emerged at the latest when the survivors of this Jewish-Christian community, which reached Antioch after the war, found there the gentile church. The community of the Sayings Gospel Q, which had intensified over the years its Jewish-Christian exclusivity, had, perhaps quite haltingly, to modulate into the community of the Gospel of Matthew, which in effect ended up repudiating that exclusivity. But Matthew, before turning to the gentiles, produced an enlarged, improved, concentrated version of the first major section of Q, in which Jesus was proven to be the Coming One predicted by John, which one can still read in chapters 3-11 of the Gospel of Matthew. But this was in effect the swan song of the Q community, as it was absorbed into the gentile-Christian church, except for holdouts who returned to the baptist movement or to emergent normative Judaism, or became small Christian sects that we, on the winning side, call heresies: the Ebionites, meaning the "Poor," or the Nazarenes, claiming Jesus of Nazara.

(4) This belated self-justification of the survivors of the Q community in Matthew 3-11 did not succeed in forestalling the inevitable. So what was left of the Q community, absorbed into what we should now call the Matthean community, took over the gentile-Christian Gospel of Mark and copied it out pretty much by rote in Matthew 12-28, with only an occasional editing out of especially offensive gentile traits, finally justifying going over to the gentile side of Christianity with the Great Commission by the resurrected Christ to evangelize all nations, thus canceling Q's Jewish-Christian basis in a Jesus who limited his mission to Israel.

So Jewish Christianity ceased, for practical purposes, to exist as an independent entity. Yet the Jewish-Christian Gospel incorporated in Matthew as the last will and testament of the Q community made its way into the growing gentile church as a major part of the most widely used Gospel of all, the Gospel according to Matthew. So the real Jesus' actual sayings remained, in spite of everything, accessible. The church today can still listen to Jesus, which, in my opinion, is is precisely what we should do. He is very unsettling, as I am sure you felt as I tried to present his sayings. But his goal of a caring, selfless society may be the best future we can hope for, and work for.

The Virgin Mary is No Wonder Woman

Charles Moulton, who did his most creative work under the pseudonym of William Molton Marstan, will never be canonized as a saint of the church. Yet when the judgment of history is in, I suspect that Charles Moulton will be credited with having done more to bring about the emancipation of women than did that figure that the Christian tradition has named the Virgin Mary. I certainly do not mean to offend the sensitivities of those who have been taught to revere the Virgin as the ideal of womanhood, but I do intend to examine the effects on woman of the figure of the Virgin when compared with the creation of Charles Moulton.

Who was Charles Moulton? His name is not a household word but his creation is. Moulton is the man who in 1941 launched the career of a comic strip character who was know as Wonder Woman. Moulton was a psychologist. He was also the inventor of the lie detector. In an autobiographical note in the Wonder Women Archives Vol. 2, he describes himself as "an early feminist," who believed that "a woman's rightful place was as a world leader, not servant or helpmate."

Sharlene Azan, a staff reporter for the Toronto Star described Wonder Woman in a feature story in that paper, as the "hero of my adolescence," who "helped me imagine myself out of a life where being a good girl meant being quite and obedient." Wonder Woman countered this definition which was imposed on most young girls by their mothers, teachers and the social order as a whole. Wonder Woman encouraged self-confidence, not passivity. Her message to her female followers was a single one: "Girls you can do the same thing." It was a banner no one else was flying in the forties and even in the fifties where home economics rather than physics was thought to be the proper elective for female students.

When Ms Magazine, the brain child of Gloria Steinem, hit the news stands with its first issue in 1971, the cover featured the picture of Wonder Woman who had by now become the patron saint, if you will, of the feminist movement. Gloria Steinem said of her, "she symbolized many of the values of the women's culture that feminists are now trying to introduce to the mainstream: strength and self-reliance for women, sisterhood and mutual support among women." The impact of Wonder Woman on women over the last 50 years is hard to measure. In some sense there is no mythic comic strip character who has replaced her for girls and young teens today. But that does not strike me as a problem, because mythic roles are not necessary if those women who had their imaginations raised by Wonder Woman simply went out and did it…which they certainly did. They are today the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, the Sandra Day O'Connors, the Margaret Thatchers, the Diane Feinsteins, the Elizabeth Doles and Hilary Clintons. They are also that host of young women who have crashed through the glass ceilings in business, education, law, science and finance. I look at my own four daughters for documentation. One is a managing director of a major Southern Bank, one is an attorney, one has a PhD in Physics from Stanford and one is a Captain in the U.S. States Marine Corps, the second woman ever to pilot the attack helicopter known as the Cobra. Fantasy role models are not necessary when you have real life ones. That is what Wonder Woman helped to produce.

Compare and contrast for a moment the freeing empowering influence of Wonder Woman with what women have historically received from the Virgin Mary. Mary's power was never direct, it was always quite secondary, like girls, it was said, were supposed to be. The Virgin Mary's power was that of intercession, a kind of "divine pillow talk." She was so pure and so gentle that she was thought to be able to move with her requests the father God or the judging Son Jesus, both of whom had the real power.

Mary's pilgrimage into western mythology was a slow one. She is never mentioned in all the writings of the Apostle Paul, the earliest creator of material that came to be included in the New Testament. Paul, who wrote between 49-64 C.E., had no interest in Jesus' origins. His only references to Jesus' family came when he said that Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law." He asserted that "according to the flesh," Jesus was descended from the House of David. Paul also made reference to Jesus' brother, a man named James. No divine origin here, no miraculous birth, no virgin mother.

The pattern was continued in Mark, the earliest Gospel, written between 70-75 C.E. or 40 to 45 years after the earthly life of Jesus came to an end. Once more there is no story here of a miraculous birth. There are, however, two references to Jesus' mother, but neither is flattering. She appears in this first Gospel to be embarrassed by Jesus, to think him "beside himself" and Mark says that she went with Jesus' four brothers, James, Joses, Judas and Simon, and his two sisters to "take Jesus away" [see Mark 3 and 6]. That is hardly the behavior one would expect from a woman who had been visited by an angel and who had been told that she was to be the Virgin Mother of the Son of God.

The Virgin story entered the Christian tradition in the early 9th decade gospel of Matthew, some 55 years after the death of Jesus. It was repeated in the late 9th or early 10th decade gospel of Luke, and then it disappeared in favor of the concept of Jesus' divine pre-existence in the 10th decade Gospel of John. The mythology of Mary, however, was destined to expand in the development of Christian history.

By the early years of the 2nd century the idea of the Virgin as the ideal woman began to grow. First, it was said of her that she was a virgin mother. Next, she became a permanent virgin, making it necessary to transform the biblically mentioned brothers and sisters of Jesus into half-siblings or cousins. Next the church fathers claimed for her the status of being a postpartum virgin which caused the hierarchy of the church to go through intellectual gymnastics to prove that the hymen of the Virgin Mary had not been ruptured even during Jesus' birth. Tales circulated that perhaps Jesus was born out of his mother's ear! Then someone found a text in Ezekiel [see Chapter 44:1] which suggested that when "the gates of the city were closed only the Lord could go in and out." Without either shame or apology that verse, written about 800 years before the birth of Jesus, was said to demonstrate that Jesus could be born without disturbing the gates of his mother's womb.

Next in the 19th century the Virgin was declared to be immaculately conceived. Even her own birth was now said to have been miraculous. The stain of human sin found in the myth of the fall of humanity (in the Garden of Eden) was not allowed to touch her. Finally in the 20th century, literally at the dawn of the space age, Mary was proclaimed to have bodily ascended into heaven. This new doctrine was based on the fact that no one knew her place of burial. The reason, the Church's leadership suggested, was that she had never died.

Is this a feminine role model that today's young women will or should follow? Hardly. Yes, Mary was a woman, but she was both de-sexed and de-humanized by a condescending and patriarchal hierarchy before she was finally said to have been lifted into God. The clear message of Mary was that both the body and the sexuality of a woman were evil. The ideal woman was not a flesh and blood woman, she was portrayed as sweet, passive, docile, compliant, obedient, virginal, and unreal, hardly the qualities that would empower younger females today to break out of their stereotypical expectations. Mary's call was a call to obedience, a call to conformity. It was not a call into being. The Virgin Mary's chief problem was that far from being a woman who could inspire real women to new heights, she was a construct of a male world. She was the kind of woman the defining males of the time, who were overwhelmingly the ordained clergy, wanted women to be. When the priesthood of the church became open to celibate males only, they wanted a woman who would not threaten their virtuous calling. A perpetual virgin was the perfect answer.

The result of this history is that the Christian Church today is still one of the most sexist institutions in Western civilization. The patriarchal man wants purity in his wife, as well as a mother for his children. The Virgin Mother filled that need, but she was hardly an ideal woman. What man wants to be married to a permanent virgin? We need to remember that the world that proclaimed the Virgin Mary to be the ideal woman treated all women as second class citizens. Today, one cannot help but note that in the nations of the Western world that most honor the Virgin Mary, the status of woman remains very low. She has not been an asset in the quest for the emancipation of women. If I were holding before my daughters or my granddaughters a model for their lives and my choices were the Virgin Mary and Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman would win hands down.

If the goal of organized religion is to call all people into the fullness of their humanity, as I believe it is, then perhaps church leaders ought to look at those they hold up as role models. Both Wonder Woman and the Virgin Mary are mythological figures. The church does not like to admit that ,but it is true. Neither woman, as we have come to know them, ever lived in history. Only one of them pretends to be historical, the other freely admits she is not. But Wonder Woman has done more to break the culturally imposed boundaries on women than the Virgin Mary ever did. Wonder Woman has shaped, freed, called and transformed the limits for more women since her birth in 1941 than the Virgin Mary has done in 2000 years. If it were possible to do so I would nominate her for sainthood.

Charles Moulton, in the name of my four daughters and my two granddaughters, I, a bishop of the Episcopal Church for 26 years, wish to thank you.

The Continuing Christian Need for Judaism

Between every parent and child there is always a combination of emotions -- one that includes love and hate, dependence and rebellion. Judaism is Christianity’s parent; that is a fact of history. Unfortunately, it has been the negative side of the combination that has marked most of the relationship between these two faiths through the centuries. Ofttimes the hate and rebellion have reached inhuman and murderous proportions. Both Overt and covert acts of anti-Semitism have soiled the pages of history with unforgettable amounts of both blood and shame which stand forever on the Christian church’s record.

The negative emotions between the parent and child, however, never exhaust that relationship. The other side of hate is love, and the other side of rebellion is dependency. But in the parent-child relationship it frequently appears that love and dependency cannot be celebrated, and mutual appreciation, acknowledgment of indebtedness and the willingness to learn anew from the witness of the parent cannot be experienced, until children come of age.

In our generation, a new dawn may be breaking in Jewish-Christian relations. I cannot forsake or even modify my deepest convictions about the one I call Lord and Christ, but I can respect and treasure the tradition in which my Lord was born and from which he and the entire Christian movement have sprung. I can also learn from Judaism past and present and find my Christian life enlightened, enriched and deepened by Jewish insights.

It is the reality, of this conviction that creates for me the only possible basis for true dialogue between Christians and Jews. Dialogue can never be an attempt at conversion, nor can it occur if one party assumes an objective ultimacy or a superiority for his or her point of view. Dialogue must be an interaction in which each participant stands with full integrity in his or her own tradition and is open to the depths of the truth that is in the other.

In this dialogue I as a Christian want first to acknowledge, then to express my gratitude for, and finally to bear witness to the continuing insights of Judaism that challenge, stimulate and enrich Christianity. If Judaism were to cease to be, if Christianity were to lose that peculiar Jewish witness and these insights were to lose their power or have their distinctiveness blunted, then Christianity would be poorer, more open to distortion. I as a Christian need Judaism to be Judaism lest the ultimate truth of God be compromised or even lost in the shallowness of a rootless Christianity.

Three major themes are rooted in Judaism without which Christianity, especially at this moment in the life of the church, would be adversely, perhaps fatally, affected: the Jewish sense of history as God’s arena, the Jewish passion against idolatry, and the Jewish background which illumines the New Testament.

The God of History

At the very heart of Judaism is the understanding of a God who is rooted in history. God for the Hebrew is not an idea to be contemplated but rather a living force to be engaged. God’s arena for the Jewish mind is history. The mystery of God is revealed in the ongoing events of life, and any people who would know, serve or worship this God must be willing to plunge into life.

There can be no escape into otherworldly piety if one is to worship Yahweh, for this is the God who brought his people out of Egypt and for whom bondage and slavery are an abomination. This is the God who parted the waters, who led his people by cloud and fire, who covenanted with them at Mt. Sinai, who guided them in their homeless wanderings in the wilderness, who established them beyond the Jordan. who was known in victory and in defeat, in sustaining power and in vengeful judgment, who worked even through Israel’s historic enemies to purge his people. This God the Hebrews encountered even when their nation was destroyed and they were exiled. For even in Babylon -- a captive people once again -- they discovered that Yahweh was still the God of history and that they could still sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. The same God, said Jeremiah, who brought you out of Egypt will also bring you out of the north country.

When the Hebrews told the story of their God, they also told the story of their history, for the history of Israel was the history of their meeting with the holy. They looked at their history not as a museum in which God was encased but as a chronicle of their experiences that empowered and enabled them to press on into the unknown future, for the God who had met this people in the events of yesterday would also meet them in the events of tomorrow.

Holding this conviction, one will always appreciate the past but will never worship it. One will always treasure history but will not be immobilized by it. The God who constantly is doing new things in history can always be trusted to be consistent.

Faith (emunah in Hebrew) was not understood to be intellectual assent to propositional statements. “The Faith,” that handy phrase which dogmatic religious folk use to designate a body of organized creedal convictions fully worked out with footnotes by C. B. Moss and implying that all revelation has been concluded, was not a concept that the Hebrew mind could embrace. Rather, faith meant an attitude of expectancy in history. Faith was the call to step boldly into tomorrow, to embrace the new -- with confidence that every new day would prove to be a meeting place with the holy and eternal God. The opposite of faith was to cling desperately to yesterday, fearing that if one ever left it, one would leave God.

It was because of this conviction about the meaning of faith and history that the Hebrew tradition could produce prophets. Prophets were not predictors of future events. They were those who had the eyes to discern the presence of the holy God in the living moments of history, and they spoke to that insight, opening the eyes of the people of their generation to the realization that God was active in their lives. Security for the Hebrews did not reside in an unchanging tradition. It resided only in the holy God who was always in front of his people calling them to step boldly into the future.

No insight into the nature of God is more vitally needed by our generation of Christians. In this century, change has come more rapidly than the average person’s emotional system is able to absorb. We have moved from a horse-and-buggy mentality to space travel; from a pony-express communication system to instant satellite communication; from thousands of separated, independent, local communities to one deeply interdependent society; from enormous distances and the resulting security-fostering provincial prejudices to a globe so small that I have had breakfast in Tel Aviv, lunch in Paris and dinner in New York all in the same day.

The result of this rapid rate of change has been to frighten many persons into seeking some unchanging “security blanket” which they can wear or under which they can hide. For many, yesterday’s religious certainty provides that blanket. So they artificially respirate the corpse of yesterday’s insights, yesterday’s convictions, yesterday’s religious experience; they feel secure and they defend their security system with the vehemence of the Inquisition. This attitude, so prevalent in the Christian church today, is not to be attacked or condemned; rather, it desperately needs to be understood. These people are looking for God, but faith, as the Hebrew mind understood it, has died.

The living God of history is our true security, not some reflection of this God or some unchanging tradition. This biblical God was and is and is to come. This God of history enables us to lay down our false religious security blankets and plunge into life. We engage history, we risk, we venture, we live. By faith, Abraham could leave the security of Ur of the Chaldees. He left home, kinspeople, security -- and went into the unknown in the confidence that God had promised to meet him there.

It is the Jewish tradition that has kept this insight alive -- an insight which today contradicts and challenges all of those Christian fears that, in fact, deny belief in the living God of history. These fears manifest themselves in the revival of an anti-intellectual oldtime religion that was not adequate yesterday, and gives no promise of being adequate for today or tomorrow. Judaism teaches Christians the value of being theological and religious wanderers and pilgrims. In an age of intense anxiety and rapid change, it counters the yearning to locate our security in anything less than the holy God of history.

A Welcome, Frightening Challenge

The second major conviction of Judaism so clearly needed by the Christian church today is a passion against idolatry. I do not mean what most people mean by idolatry. I am not concerned either with graven images or the kind of idolatry against which so many of my profession rail: the substitution of something like wealth or success for God. I mean rather the idolatry of religious folk who seem to believe that they can speak, act and judge for God himself. I mean the idolatry that successfully tempts so many religious people into thinking that they possess the ultimate truth of God -- the idolatry of the evangelical tradition that equates the words of Holy Scripture (usually the King James Version) with the eternal, life-giving Word of God. This is the idolatry of the Roman tradition that believes

the truth of God can be or has been captured in the ex-cathedra utterances of the bishop of Rome -- the idolatry of many who like to pretend that ultimate truth has been captured in the ecumenical councils of the early church, in the historic creeds, or in the “unbroken tradition of the catholic faith,” which usually is the same thing as the speaker’s special prejudice.

A major theme of Judaism is the “otherness of God” -- the God who can say, “My ways are not your ways, nor are my thoughts your thoughts.” This God of Judaism can never be fully symbolized; he can only be pointed to. This is a God whose being is beyond the human capacity fully to comprehend, whose name is beyond the human capacity even to utter. This God is ultimate. His ultimacy cannot be captured by things made by human hands or with words shaped by human lips or with concepts designed by human minds. God is ultimate; the church’s understanding of God is not ultimate. When the church substitutes its understanding of God for ‘the reality of God, we have become idolatrous. Nothing besides God is ultimate, no matter how sacred. The Bible and the creeds point to God but do not capture him. The

tradition of the church may point to the ultimacy of God, but it will never capture him either -- and sometimes it may amount to nothing more than sanctified prejudice or pompous ignorance.

Something dreadful happens to religious people when they mistake their understanding of God for God himself. Inevitably, those who believe that they possess the absolute truth of God find it quite easy to persecute those who do not share their point of view. When God’s truth is “possessed,” wagons are inevitably placed in a circle, for that ultimate truth must be defended. Nothing is quite so evil as fanatical religious people who in the name of God carry out inquisitions, pogroms, heresy trials, witch-hunts holy wars and crusades. We have ample evidence of this perversion in Christian history, and today Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran is absolutely true to his historic prototypes.

The Jewish condemnation of idolatry stands as constant guard against this mentality. It serves forever to remind us that God, blessed be his name, cannot be captured in symbols, words, creeds, Bibles, traditions. Certainly we cannot live without these symbols and traditions; they are enormously important, but their task is always to point beyond themselves to that which is ultimate. If they are ever invested with infallibility or ultimacy, they will become idolatrous -- a fact for which Christian history provides ample evidence.

If God alone is ultimate, if he cannot be captured in either words or symbols, then one can never be secure or at peace with faith. But the absence of religious security or religious certainty is a virtue, not a vice. I agree with the wag who said, “If you can keep your head while people all around are losing theirs, you probably don’t understand the issues.” For me, any religious system that gives or promises to give peace of mind is idolatrous; the price we pay for “peace of mind” will be nothing less than the sacrifice of something basic to our own humanity. We would have to stop questioning or growing.

A major task of the Christian church today is to call people out of religious idolatry into an exciting and fearful religious insecurity. We should shake at the wonder of the vision of God that is always beyond us; we should welcome a future filled with frightening challenges. With its passion against idolatry, Judaism serves as a guide toward this goal.

A Loss of Perspective

Christians have paid a fearful price for their anti-Semitism -- a price quite different from the much greater one that Jews have paid. It has not come in physical persecution, in the creation of a ghetto mentality, in insults to personal dignity. Rather, when Christianity severed itself from its Jewish roots, the Christian faith itself became distorted, for it removed itself from the prophetic correction of Judaism. This development produced a Christian inability to interpret our own Scriptures because we failed to see them in their original Jewish context. Such distortion can be observed in the Christian art that portrays our Jewish Jesus as a northern European complete with blond hair and blue eyes. Every New Testament writer save Luke was Jewish, and Luke was a gentile proselyte; surely their Jewishness would have shaped their stories.

Much of the misuse of Holy Scripture, much of the creedal literalism that has caused bloody inter-Christian warfare, is part of the price Christians have paid for the loss of a Jewish perspective in Scripture and doctrine. We severed our roots from Judaism and victimized our own understanding of Christ. This could be illustrated, in many ways; one example involves both biblical exegesis and traditional doctrine. It appears in the creedal phrase, “He ascended into heaven.”

No story in the New Testament gives literalistic people more difficulty than this one. The first point to note is that the content of the ascension story comes from Luke, and Luke alone. Matthew and Mark have no ascension content unless one counts the last verse of the Markan appendix, which biblical scholars are unanimous in declaring to be a later addition. The fourth Gospel speaks of Jesus’ ascension only in the strange Easter morning confrontation between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden of Gethsemane. “Touch me not,” says Jesus, “for I have not yet ascended to my father. But go tell my brethren,” he continues, “that I am ascending to your Father and my Father, to your God and my God.” When the risen Christ appears to the disciples on Easter Sunday afternoon, he breathes on them, and they receive the Holy Spirit. The clear Johannine understanding is that the already ascended Lord is appearing; Luke, in contrast, carefully places the ascension at the end of the resurrection appearances.

The second noteworthy feature of Luke’s ascension story is its pre-Copernican world view; Luke expresses clear commitment to the truth of a literal three-tier universe. The earth is flat; hell is under the earth, so to get there one must descend. Heaven is above the earth, and to get there one must ascend.

Doctrinal development has tended to ignore the Johannine order, to concentrate on Luke and to literalize the account. In medieval art forms the Christ is portrayed as rising from the earth and disappearing behind the clouds. From our 20th century scientific perspective in which we have seen space vehicles that rise into the atmosphere, we might suppose that the ascension placed our Lord into orbit rather than into heaven.

Had we been in touch with our Jewish roots, however, we might have understood Luke’s account in a nonliteralistic manner. We would recognize first that literal human words can never capture the reality of God. If one cannot even speak the name of God, one can hardly assume that human words have the power to capture God’s truth.

We would also see this account in terms of the biblical antecedents. Luke looked to the Old Testament tradition for images that he could heighten in his attempt to describe the divine life and power he perceived in Jesus of Nazareth. One image he used was that of Elijah, conceived of by Israel as the father of the prophetic movement, and whose life in the biblical accounts was surrounded by enormous miraculous power. It was Elijah who had been “received up” into heaven, and it was Elijah who after his ascension poured a double portion of his human spirit on his disciple, Elisha. So Luke, drawing on this Old Testament material, tries to heighten the Elijah story to stretch his language sufficiently to speak about Jesus.

The Gospel writer portrays Jesus as setting his face to Jerusalem where he too will be “received up” into glory. The followers of Jesus assumed that this meant the glory of a re-established Israel, and so they hailed their hero with hosannahs and palm branches. But for Luke, this Jesus was a new and greater Elijah, who like the Old Testament prototype would be “received up” literally into heaven; then, in stark contrast to the Elijah prototype, who bestowed his enormous but still human spirit on Elisha, this Jesus would bestow his infinite spirit upon the church, giving it life for all ages. For that infinite spirit of Jesus would be nothing less than the Holy Spirit of God, which, says Luke, conceived Jesus in the first place.

So the ascension becomes for Luke not a literal event that baffles scientists and historians, but a symbolic event lifted out of the Old Testament and told to open the eyes of faith, to behold this Jesus as he really is -- God of God, light of light, begotten not made.

A Fruitful Dialogue

Like the ascension story, many other sections of the New Testament are clarified through examination of Hebrew counterparts. The confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel illumines the story of the overcoming of all language barriers at Pentecost. The feeding of the 5,000 is elucidated by the Old Testament story of manna in the wilderness. The flight to Egypt by the holy family to avoid death leans on the story of the flight to Egypt by the people of Israel to avoid death by famine. The dreaming character of Joseph in Matthew is clearly shaped by the dreaming character of Joseph in Genesis. The murder of the Hebrew children by Pharaoh, from which Moses was spared, is retold by Matthew as the murder of the Hebrew children at Bethlehem by Herod, from which Jesus was spared. Jesus’ baptism parallels the Red Sea experience. Jesus’ 40-day temptation in the wilderness parallels the 40-year wilderness wanderings of Israel. Moses delivering the law from Mt. Sinai illumines Matthew’s Jesus dispensing the new law from the mountain. These and many other parallels could deeply enrich New Testament study and preaching.

To recapture the Jewish sense of a God who is made known in history, a God who calls us to lay down our fears and step boldly into tomorrow, to reclaim that Jewish sense of God’s ultimacy so that we can see all other religious symbols as less than ultimate and therefore subject to change, to rediscover our Jewish roots which time after time unlock the doors of Holy Scripture -- all of these can become the fruits of the dialogue between Christian and Jew.

Evangelism When Certainty Is an Illusion

Some years ago, when Episcopal Church leaders thought they were experiencing a communications problem, an elaborate plan for consultation with diocesan decision-making bodies was undertaken. At that time there was a noticeable decline in the number of Episcopalians in America. This program was designed to let “the grass-roots people speak” and to set future priorities for our church.

The results were published in a pamphlet titled “What We Learned from What You Said,” and evangelism and Christian education were the top two priorities listed. The denomination’s Executive Council then moved to respond to that survey. One step involved creating a position for a staff officer for evangelism in the national church structure and launching evangelism programs and promotion.

Interestingly enough, no one in that process sought to determine whether the vote for evangelism was a positive one, or whether it was a vote against programs of social involvement. Evangelism was a familiar word, and it had a pious ring. No one asked the people in the several dioceses what they meant by it or why it was their first priority. The definition of evangelism officially adopted by a later General Convention reads as follows: “Evangelism is the presentation of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, in such ways that persons may be led to believe in him as Saviour and follow him as Lord within the fellowship of the church.”

The resolution setting forth this definition of evangelism passed with a unanimous vote, which invariably means that it falls into the category of a “motherhood” resolution. Since not one of the terms in the definition was defined, they obviously were not debated. This would indicate either that a common understanding of the meaning of these words was universally assumed or that no one considered the resolution to be of great import. I suggest that the latter is the case.

It also seems obvious that many people concerned with declining church membership and attendance saw evangelism primarily in terms of church growth: anything that added sheep to the flock had to be good. Grass-roots church leaders, reeling under budgetary cuts and declining congregations, seemed sure that growth was their biggest need. But was it? Is it? And if so, what does evangelism mean?

We are faced with a number of assumptions that need to be examined. It is assumed that the one doing the work of evangelism has something which the one being evangelized needs, or wants, or should want. Historically, the motive for evangelizing arose from the altruistic concern of Christians to save the souls of the lost from perdition. Those who believed they knew Christ and therefore possessed salvation felt that they had a duty to make Christ known to those who did not know him and who were therefore without salvation. Evangelism efforts were fueled by the promise of a heavenly reward both for the newly converted and for the one who brought the message of salvation. The status of the missionary was both romantic and genuinely admired.

The cultural milieu of this evangelization was “Christendom,” that peculiar word which meant that Christianity and the social order were identical and inseparable. In “Christendom” there was a cultural assumption that only Christianity was true, and therefore the Christian church had not only the right but the obligation to share -- even to impose -- its truth on those who did not have it.

The great period of evangelism and Christian missionary expansion was the 19th century. Following the flag of colonial nationalism, missionaries fanned out across the world, determined to save the pagan savages whether they wanted to be saved or not. It did not occur to many people in the 19th century that there might be truth, integrity or value in a religious tradition other than Christianity. The world was neatly divided into Christians, Jews and pagans. This division, a product of both insensitivity and ignorance, fueled missionary activity directed toward the pagans, and it kept virulent the anti-Semitism that reached its climax in 1930s Germany.

In 19th century America, Christianity was identified with social respectability. Dominant community pressure made church membership not only a necessity but also the mark of civilization, good manners and decent living. The Episcopal Church was perceived in that era as the best church for educated, cultured and refined people to attend. Episcopalians deliberately cultivated the image of exclusiveness. This was our power, and our growth was almost totally among those who were upwardly mobile. Overseas missionary work was supported, but active programs of local evangelism were not encouraged in the Episcopal Church; they did not have to be. We had social prestige going for us, and that provided us with all the new members we really wanted.

Not many people in that day agreed on what the truth was, but they all seemed to agree that Christians had “the truth” and non-Christians did not; and so the Christian had a responsibility to give the truth to the non-Christian. That was an unquestioned presupposition of organized church life.

Evangelism as a working concept was born in this kind of world, and it was defined by this kind of world. It has not yet fully escaped either the definition or the preconceptions of that context. Evangelism by and large still assumes that there is a single definition of God, an exclusive Christian truth, and that the end of sharing that truth justifies the means, no matter how imperialistic. For these reasons active programs of evangelism flourish most in those churches in which the provincial consciousness is still in vogue, while in the mainline churches evangelism tends to reside in splendid isolation as a special interest of a limited group who are more subjective in their approach to God. It is difficult to oppose evangelism, for no one wants to oppose the spread of Christianity. So it is simply not engaged, or is kept peripheral, or is tolerated or ignored.

Nostalgia for the religious traditions of rural and small-town America forms part of the appeal of popular evangelists from Billy Sunday to Billy Graham. That nostalgia is also operating in the recent alliance of evangelical groups with right-wing politics which has linked religion with patriotism and yesterday’s family values with Christianity. These new devotees of evangelism are imperialistic, attacking those who deviate as secular humanists (read pagans) and demanding conformity of its adherents under pain of excommunication (read being targeted for defeat in the next election).

Evangelism as an activity of the church seems to require for its very existence a sense that those who evangelize possess certainty. Its vital nerve is cut by relativity. Its appeal is inevitably limited to those who share particular attitudes and convictions. Many people who are strong on evangelism tend to have a strong bias against intellectualism; they frequently encourage Bible study, but they seldom accompany it with serious biblical scholarship.

Inside the church establishment, evangelism is usually given more lip service than real commitment. Seldom making a serious impact on the life and policy of the church body, it consumes its energy in planning conferences on evangelism or on prayer and encourages the new packaging of old revival techniques in such activities as the charismatic movement or the Faith Alive movement.

Evangelism offices and commissions gather and affirm the various groups that identify themselves under their broad banner; they sponsor workshops on church growth, offering helpful techniques for how to make church life more inclusive, how to bring back those who drift away, how to incorporate new members more quickly, how to set up and carry out community-building activities such as lay visitation. But at the deepest level this program of evangelism is, I believe, addressing only the Christian “in” group or fanning the religious nostalgia of the past. The vision of Christianity to which it calls people is by and large a narrow view of the way things used to be. Evangelism as it is presently constituted does not address the central missionary and evangelical questions of our post-Christian world, questions which are far more radical than those who are committed to evangelism seem to recognize.

These questions pour forth in a spate: How can we talk about Christ in a pluralistic society in which “the truth” is not believed to be the possession of any person or tradition? With the exclusive claims of Christianity surrendered, can we still proclaim the gospel?

Can evangelism, growing out of a simpler world, ever become sophisticated enough or refined enough finally to escape its basic attitude of imperialism? If there is no “unchanging truth,” what do we evangelize about? If we admit that we do not possess the whole truth, can we be evangelists for our partial understanding of the truth of Christ? If we admit that our truth is partial, not whole, will we not sink into a hopeless sea of relativity? Is not our power as a church directly related to the myth of our certainty? The only churches that seem to be growing today are the churches that claim and proclaim certainty.

What reward do we offer to entice nonbelievers into believing? Is that reward legitimate? Do any of us really believe that heaven is reserved for those who think and believe as we do? Even if we say that believing in Jesus is necessary to be saved or to gain heaven, do we agree on what believing in Jesus means? Do we dare limit God’s grace or God’s action by our creeds, our Scriptures, our theology? Yet if we do not so limit God, will the unique revelation of the Christian gospel disappear? In our day of an expanded sensitivity to the religious yearnings of the world’s people and an expanded consciousness of the variety of their religious experiences, must we revive the power of yesterday’s limited religious certainty as the only means to avoid having Christianity join the gods of Olympus as a footnote in the religious history of the human race?

There is ample reason to believe that these questions have been answered unconsciously by the institutional church, but they have not yet in most instances been faced consciously. The conviction that fueled yesterday’s evangelistic efforts sounds like religious bigotry today. To the degree that evangelism is rooted in the certainties of yesterday, it will always be an ineffective and even discordant tool for the church eager to enter the world of tomorrow.

Look for a moment at three specific examples of the questions that missionary strategy in our age raises about evangelism.

A new Episcopal church is founded in a community where one has never been. Other Christian churches are active, so why do we locate a branch of our tradition there? We may believe that our church offers something unique, but we are frequently hard-pressed to define that uniqueness. On an-other level we are not immune to empire-building, and, like every business, we cannot resist the temptation to open yet another branch office in an area that looks promising.

A second question arises in the inner city, where old churches must struggle to find new reasons for existence. Why do we stay? Whatever is unique in the Episcopal Church would be even more difficult to define in the inner city; not many residents here are worried about apostolic succession, valid sacraments or Henry VIII’s sex life. So rationales abound. We stay in the city to make a witness, we say, to offer hope, though hope for what is not always clear. We announce our intention to identify with the poor and dispossessed, but frequently the poor and dispossessed are not aware that we are identifying with them and seem uninterested in identifying with us. We state our desire to build through the church a sense of community, though sociologists tell us that effective community in the inner city is usually built around an issue, not a building or a tradition.

We see sincere people claiming Christ but still manipulating others with fear, superstition or the promise of heavenly peace and glory in another world. They have an appeal, but in all honesty we want to avoid that image. We are fearful of being guilty of the Marxist charge that we are an opiate for the people. Sometimes we meet that fear by pretending, at least verbally, to take the cause of the people as our cause, to be a voice for the voiceless. We also want to avoid the charge that we are producing “rice Christians,” bribing into church membership those whom we can win with promises of material help.

In the inner city we quickly go deeper than the culturally conditioned concepts of the Episcopal Church, or we do not survive. Christ must be incarnate in that world, indigenous to those people, or he will be, as he has been before, another agent of colonial oppression. In the inner city, the evangelical style from another century with its promise of glory, its anthropological view of human depravity apart from Christ, its respectable definition of Christianity, becomes part of the problem, not the cure. The questions we need to address here are not generally addressed by proponents of evangelism. What is Christ’s essence? What will Christ be like when he is indigenous to this world? How is Christ met? How does Christ love, forgive, feed, nurture, encourage? Can Christ be real in the city, and if he can, how does that reality relate to the Christ whom evangelism groups talk about?

Consider one more situation. A declining church sits in the shadow of a massive high-rise apartment building which brings hundreds of new residents to that community each year. They are a cross-section of the secular society of our generation, for the most part rootless, transient and highly mobile. Some are singles living in formal and informal relationships, with wide ethnic and cultural diversity and equally wide sexual and social mores. Others are married (perhaps divorced more than once) and oriented not at all to the community in which they sleep but rather to the city in which they work.

These people are not church-related and are not even nostalgic about a past that may have included the church. The evangelistic tactics that would call them back to the world view of yesterday, a world view they abandoned ages ago because it no longer made contact with their lives, are doomed to failure. They listen to the new religious conservative movement calling for “a return to the traditional family,” which seems to include the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the banning of abortion. In this call, they hear organized religion affirming a stereotyped view of women that collides with a new feminine consciousness. They live in a world organized in a radically different way, and the suggestion, for instance, that women are biologically incapable of being priests strikes them as quaint at best, ludicrous at worst.

These modern, secularized apartment-dwellers could not care less whether we are Protestant or Catholic, to say nothing of whether we are Presbyterian or Methodist. They are engaged in trying to make sense out of their lives, and in that effort they hear the traditional church speaking only in the accents of yesterday. A church dominated by its own institutional struggle to survive and grow simply does not touch their lives. A church clinging to a narrow certainty is not appealing to the churning, insecure world they know.

Yet they are looking for something. Underneath the busyness of their lives is an echo of emptiness. It is experienced when the endless variety of sexual partners gets boring, when the alcoholic consumption rate gets heavier, when the depression cannot be crowded out by crowds. What does evangelism mean here? What is the essence of the Christian gospel that we might offer in this world?

In these three vignettes of the church confronting the world, we are forced to think anew about what we Christians have to offer and how it can be offered in a pluralistic, increasingly alienated and empty world. How can we offer the gospel to secular people who are less and less nostalgic, less and less inclined to take seriously traditional religious claims?

First of all, the proclamation of the gospel must be honest. It is not a sin to be wrong, especially since truth is so vast that no one can possibly embrace it fully. All that any of us can do is point to truth. We cannot capture it, package it or claim it. To be religiously dishonest is to be unforgivably manipulative. And religious dishonesty is rampant in the institutional church today. It occurs every time any religious body claims infallibility for any idea it presents.

Christianity itself does not and cannot embrace the whole truth of God. So I can make no claims for God that are ultimate, and if I do, I am dishonest. I cannot limit God to my understanding of God. I cannot limit salvation to those who share my vision, no matter how broadly I draw that vision. I cannot act as though God works only in those ways which I understand or with which I am familiar.

To be honest in our day is to embrace relativity as a virtue and to recognize that absolutism is a vice -- any kind of absolutism, whether it be ecclesiastical, papal, biblical or the absolutism of sacred tradition. Embracing relativity will end for all time the religious imperialism that has far too often been a mark of evangelistic and missionary endeavors.

In the short term, I am convinced, this honesty will cause the church as an institution to lose power. Our purpose will be blurred and, in the opinion of many, our credibility will be diminished. I am also convinced that churches that give up the claim of certainty will decline, and that church leaders who dare to face these issues openly and publicly will be attacked and abused by people who need what an honest church cannot give.

We cannot give what we do not have. Certainty has never been our possession, but rather, our illusion. We offer companionship on a journey and the hope that the reality of God will be at the journey’s end. But in this life the journey will never end.

Yet as soon as all that is clear, we must quickly say our most positive word about evangelism. When we say that we do not have the whole truth of God, that must not be taken to mean that we have no truth of God. St. Paul said, “I see through a glass darkly,” but he did see. And so do we. And what we see we must share because love demands that we share with others the gifts that bring meaning to our lives.

There is a note of reciprocity about the word “share.” I share only with someone with whom I already have a relationship. There is a receptivity in the other which makes sharing possible. If I try to share with a stranger, he or she would experience not a gift but a burden. If I try to give another what he or she has not requested or does not want, I am clearly meeting my needs, not the needs of the other. If I imply that I have something the other needs in order to become a better person, I am playing the “I’m OK, you’re not OK” game, which cannot be received as anything other than hostility. If what I have to share limits the choices to only rejection or conversion, it cannot be loving, no matter how pious or holy my rhetoric might be. If I seek to force another to acknowledge the meaning I have in my life without being sensitive to the meaning by which he or she lives, I am not proclaiming the gospel. In my opinion, then, many forms of evangelism are not good news but bad news.

But when I have been touched by a fascinating book or enjoyed a good movie or read a penetrating editorial or been delighted by a new recipe or been moved by a provocative sermon, the people I know learn of these enriching moments. In the course of human relationships, I share these joys with excitement and enthusiasm. They are not only offered but also received. True sharing requires both actions.

The experts of Madison Avenue tell us that the most effective advertising is by word of mouth. So it is with the sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It must be given as an offering in love, not as a manifestation of my superiority -- offered without calculation or ulterior motives and without any hint that my word is the final word to be spoken on the subject.

My Christ may not be ultimate, but he is real. My Christ may not be definitive, but he is operative. And for me this must be the most distinguishing mark of evangelism in our day -- one which, in my opinion, will come very close to rendering every planned and contrived program of evangelism deficient at best and negative at worst.

So I am suspicious of those who have to isolate evangelism and concentrate on it as a separate activity of the church. If it is not related to everything the church does, then the church is suspect. But when the church isolates evangelism into a separate program or emphasis, then evangelism is suspect. Sharing Christ finally is of our being, not our doing.

If sharing our being is the primary means of doing Christian evangelism, then the life of the one who would be an evangelist must be radically open and unthreatened; he or she must be capable of listening deeply, be enormously sensitive, be able to risk, and possess the ability to embrace vulnerability and uncertainty as inseparable from life in Christ. The one who will witness to Christ must be marked by the gifts of Christ: love, joy, peace, patience. The pious certainty, the ready and unquestioned definition of evangelism, the thin smile that so often covers the hostility of the insecure Christian who seeks to impose Christ, the words of love that scarcely veil the attitude of judgment: these are the marks not of Christ but of human brokenness.

The only reward Christ offers, I believe, is the Christian life of openness, vulnerability, expansion, risk, wholeness, love. Nothing else: not success, not heaven, not an escape from hell, not friends, not security, not peace of mind. I feel I must beware of evangelistic Christians who come offering rewards. I am frightened of those who want to do something to me or for me “for my own good.” I am apprehensive when I meet those who suggest that we have to “carry Christ” to someone or someplace as though Christ does not dwell there already and is somehow limited.

Churches need to help people in the art and practice of prayer, but not by denying the reality of the world we live in, not by calling us into patterns or practices we cannot possibly adopt without serious mind-bending exercises. Prayer must be part of the definition of evangelism, for I cannot share a presence of God I have not personally experienced, and this is the essence of prayer.

Churches need to help in the task of community-building so that lives might be attracted to the quality of love, acceptance, forgiveness and inclusiveness that I believe must mark the people of God. When people touch the life of the church, they want to feel the power of those qualities that will cause people to inquire into their source and meaning.

Churches need to be teaching centers where faith and tradition can be explored, where truth can be pursued without the employment of authoritarian cliches like “the church teaches” or “the Bible says” to stifle the questioning process. The bearers of our deepest understanding of the gospel inevitably both capture and distort it. The Bible, the creeds, the sacred traditions are only pointers to God which must be transcended, explored in the light of each new day.

The church’s prophetic word must be heard in the public sector, searing in judgment against those actions, both individual and systemic, which continue patterns of oppression based on strength or race or sex or tradition. A church that talks of salvation but does not battle for social justice will be dismissed as phony. A church that shuns controversy for fear of upsetting its membership has ceased to be the church and has become a club. No program of evangelism will save it. And the church’s prophetic word needs to be turned on itself as well as on the world. I look to the church to address its own idolatries and prejudices.

Effective evangelism, therefore, is the all-embracing thrust of the total life of the church. It cannot be reduced to a program or an emphasis, or belong to a narrow sliver of church people who like to witness publicly. It cannot be based on an assumption, conscious or unconscious, that we have the truth and others do not. It cannot be arrogant or otherworldly or ignorant of the vast new insights and realities of the modem world. It cannot be a nostalgic attempt to return to yesterday’s religious security.

I do not believe a church grows in worthwhile ways by trying to grow. Church growth, if it is to have integrity, must be a by-product when the church is true to its deepest calling to be the body through which the infinite mystery of God is confronted and all life is freed from bondage and expanded to its fullness. It must be achieved in the willingness to live in risky vulnerability without defense or security. I am confident that a way can be found for such a quality of life to be shared and received. Thus, evangelism in the modern world might be done with integrity, with effectiveness, and above all without planning to do evangelism.

The Emerging Church: A New Form for a New Era

Most of us assume that churches have always been around, that they have always functioned more or less as they do now, and that they have always been organized in what we recognize as a traditional manner. Such, however, is not the case. A church, like every other institution, is a product of history. It is an institution in evolution, and there is nothing eternal about its present form.

If a local congregation announced today that it planned to close its church school because it did not see the Christian education of children as the legitimate task of a church, that announcement would, I suspect, produce no little criticism and consternation. Yet church schools are in fact a very late development in Christian history; in an earlier era it would have been inconceivable that the church had any responsibility for children’s religious training. Today no church is considered complete without a parish house or education building; but in the 13th century, if anyone had suggested that a church should erect a building to house the religious activities of the congregation, that person would have been regarded as out of touch with reality.

The form of the church is forever in process. This realization raises some historical questions. How did the church evolve into its present shape? What historic forces molded it? What new forces are at work? How adequate is the present shape for what the church conceives its task to be? What will the church of the future look like?

I

It is my contention that the primary force that molds the shape of the institution called the church is the attitude the people of a particular era hold toward the church and its beliefs. That is to say, the shape of the church is a response to a societal attitude, and the church cannot be understood historically save as an institution in dialogue with its world. Allow me to test this thesis by illustrating it with large chunks of history. Obviously, when history is taken in large segments, we can make only generalizations that will always have exceptions. Yet there is a validity in these generalizations because there is a discernible attitudinal shift from one epoch to the next.

If we can take the year 30 A.D. as the date of the historic beginning of Christian history and 313 A.D., the date of the edict of Milan, as the moment when Christianity was legitimized in the Roman Empire, then the first major chunk of history is in focus. In this era the dominant non-Christian world into which the church was born related to the Christian movement with hostility. It was a crime to be a Christian -- one that in many instances was punishable by death. The struggle between the church and the world was constantly breaking out into periods of intense persecution. Christians were fed to lions, drawn and quartered, and even turned into human torches to illumine Roman night parties.

Obviously, survival in that kind of world required organizing one’s life to deal with harsh realities. This is, of course, what the church did; the result was the birth of a church in the catacombs. In such a period there could be no nominal Christians. The price of commitment was frequently life itself. The catacomb church was in hiding. Its activities were clearly circumscribed. Worship, which included teaching and tradition-building, was primary; caring for one another in the struggle to survive was secondary. No other activity seemed appropriate.

Many things we think of as “churchly” were clearly inconceivable in that era. There were no physical church structures, no advertisements, no bazaars, no stained glass or musical instruments. The church was not tied to a place, a corner or a building. Rather it was wherever the people gathered. Its location was a carefully guarded secret. Christians of that time developed signs and codes “for the baptized only.” A painted fish on a door might identify that spot as a Christian gathering place. Making the “sign of the cross” revealed Christians to one another. They developed elaborate procedures to protect themselves from spies who might be in their midst.

In the first 300 years of Christian history this catacomb existence was an appropriate response to a hostile world which, in fact, determined the shape of the church, and that ecclesiastical shape was clearly relevant to that period of history.

But in the year 313 A.D. the attitude of the society -- or at least the official attitude of the government -- shifted, and when it did, suddenly it rendered the previous shape of the church irrelevant. The catalyst for this change took place, according to tradition, on the night before the battle of Milvian Bridge, when Constantine supposedly had a vision of a cross in the heavens with the words “In this sign conquer” emblazoned underneath. Constantine, needing at that point all the help he could get, decided to strike a bargain with this Christian God. “If I am victorious tomorrow in the battle for the empire, I will do two things,” he was reported to have said. “I will make Christianity a legal religion within the empire, and I will be baptized.”

He was victorious, and he kept half of his vow. He issued the Edict of Milan, establishing Christianity as a legal religion and ending persecution, but he declined to be baptized. Constantine felt that if he were to be baptized he could never “sin again,” and he had some more “living” he wanted to do. So he postponed his baptism until he was on his deathbed and then by historic accident managed to be baptized by one later declared a heretic, thus casting shadows of doubt over his eternal destiny.

Be that as it may, with the stroke of his pen on the Edict of Milan the whole reason for the first shape of the church disappeared. A new attitude requires a new response. Because human beings were not substantially different in that era, there were some, I suspect, who insisted that their church not change. But when the force that an institution is organized to deal with disappears, it is inevitable that the new force will call out a new response. Not to change is to become a museum. So out of the catacombs the church came, and a new shape emerged.

Obviously, it did not happen all at once. Between 313 A.D. and the height of the 13th century, for example, there were many changes. Christianity went from being a legal religion, to being the only legal religion, back into a brief period of persecution, and finally emerged as the dominant force in Western civilization. Through those phases the church lived and changed and grew, seeking always to respond appropriately to the attitude the culture expressed toward what Christians believed.

II

By the 13th century that attitude was clear. The world bowed low before Christianity, submitting every aspect of its life to Christian domination. Western civilization was informed by, submissive to, and shaped in accordance with its Christian content. The church was the center of life -- all life. The cruelest discipline it could impose on a wayward member was excommunication, for to be placed outside the life of the church was to be placed outside of life itself. All the cultural forms -- drama, art, music -- became vehicles through which Christianity found expression. The church assumed a new attitude of heady power -- an attitude which made possible the great cathedrals of western Europe. The cathedrals were built in the center of the population on the highest hill to dominate the countryside, just as the Christian faith dominated the culture. Everything in the community was touched by the church. There was no sense of a division between the sacred and the secular, for everything was caught up in and blessed by the church.

Prior to this period of history, the traditional words of blessing before a meal were “Blessed be thou, O Lord God, King of the Universe”; in this era the focus shifted ever so subtly and the food itself became the object of blessing -- “Bless, O Lord, this food” -- for food was considered mundane or profane, and only when touched by the holy words of a Christian could it be brought into the realm of the sacred. Somehow the biblical story of creation that saw all of life, including physical reality, as blessed by God in creation and pronounced good had been forgotten. The church alone could bless and sanctify all of life, and the church’s task was to shepherd this enormous power and use it to proclaim the gospel -- and, not coincidentally, to enhance its position of dominance.

Another aspect of this church-society relationship was seen in the emerging entertainment theater of that day. Wandering bands of minstrel players would go from village to village to perform for the populace. The content of the plays was overtly religious, and the stage was inevitably in the church itself before the high altar. No one questioned the appropriateness of this setting. No one said that only holy acts or narrowly defined liturgical acts were proper before the altar, for the church was the center of life. In the 13th century, religion had not yet become tangential. When the play was over, the men of the village would join the men of the traveling troupe; filling their mugs with beer, they would drink to the glory of God before the high altar. No one thought that sacrilegious or irreverent behavior.

In this era it would never have occurred to Christians that they needed special buildings for housing religious activities, for the church embraced and blessed the whole society. Every meeting of the women of the village was a meeting of the village’s churchwomen. There was no sense of a secular domain outside the dominance of the sacred. The Christian nurture and education of the children of the village was by no means an institutional task, but rather a parental one. A child was taught what his or her parents considered to be the essentials of the Christian faith. Children were taught the Bible, the creeds, the Ten Commandments and the liturgy by their parents, just as certainly as they were taught social customs. It was inconceivable that a family not perform this obligation faithfully. (It was only when church leaders began to recognize that such education was in fact not being done in the homes that “Sunday schools” were born -- but that occurred much later in Christian history.)

Since the organized Christian church had achieved such dominance in the society, those who directed it also had enormous power. The bishop of Rome was the acknowledged head of the church; hence his power was clearly dominant in all of Western civilization. In the high Middle Ages, the pope was by any measure the world’s most powerful figure, ecclesiastical or secular. Bishops dominated kings; on the local level, the dominant member of the village society was the head of the local church. Our word “parson” is a vestigial reminder of the fact that the priest was called “the person.” The 13th century was a status paradise for clergy.

Obviously, with the Christian faith dominating the entire culture, with society bowing low before the church as a willing and docile servant, the external form could not be a church in hiding in the catacombs. The great cathedrals and the concept of Christendom were called into being by the attitude of the world in which they lived. The institutional shape of the church in history is always determined by the attitude of the world toward that which the church professes.

III

But the 13th century was not the millennium. Time moved on, and when it did, new attitudes were born which inevitably forced a new response and ultimately a new shape on the institutional church. From the 14th century until sometime in the 20th century (to be arbitrary I will say the end of World War II), many forces conspired to break up the medieval synthesis and to create the modern world. Certainly those forces included the Crusades, the rise of nationalism, the broadening of opportunities for education, various political reform movements, the rise of democracy, the Reformation, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of humanism and the birth of a new interest in the natural sciences.

That emerging world was in no mood to be dominated by an ecclesiastical enterprise called the Christian church. People had discovered vast arenas of life outside the narrow confines of the medieval world, and they were not willing either to ignore or to sacrifice these to the dominant religious enterprise. The church, feeling threatened by uncontrollable forces, responded with increasing defensiveness, but the dike had broken and no one could hold back the tide. A new attitude was abroad, and once again the structures of the church would have to respond with change. As with every such moment of history, it was not that the structures of the past were wrong but that they were no longer appropriate to the new realities.

This emerging new world was not born at once, nor was it always hostile to the Christian tradition. It was willing to grant to Christianity a place of enormous influence but not a place of domination. The church was no longer to be the center of all life, but it was still to be the center of religious life. This was at first an imperceptible change, for religious life was still a vast area. The relentless march of time would, however, shrink what was thought of as religion’s proper domain while it would greatly expand the arena known as “secular.”

A society that relegated Christianity to the religious domain inevitably forced the church to restructure itself in response. Great cathedrals were no longer appropriate shapes or models for Christian ecclesiastical institutions. This new attitude produced the kind of church most of us have grown up in. The parish church, in which the religious life of the community was centered, was the emerging pattern.

The work of the church was to encourage the spread of religion, to elicit that elemental religious response that seems to be native to human nature. Worship, religious education and social service constituted the church’s vocation, but before long, religion came to be identified with whatever went on inside the church structures. More and more the maintenance of structures came to be substituted for mission. Institutional service and institutional preservation became dominant themes.

This was an appropriate strategy in many ways, for if the church was a significant but not a dominant institution, it followed that the more people who became involved, the more influential the church would be. Religious activities required religious buildings, so parish houses or educational buildings became both necessary and typical. Mission work came to be defined as giving everyone a job inside the institution. Mission involved encouraging more and more church activities as the church sought to expand the domain of religion. Dinners, bowling leagues, bazaars, and softball teams were now recognized as legitimate forms of church work. Coffee and mimeograph ink began to take on the nature of sacraments. The successful minister was the one who could build up the institution with more members, more activities and more involvement, keeping everyone busy and minimizing conflict. His success tended to be measured by his ability as a money-raiser; the ultimate “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” was reserved for the minister who guided a congregation through a new building program.

In one church that I served, where my building “monument” was erected, the costliest room in the new structure per square foot was the kitchen. It was the envy of every restaurant in town. That the building had a gymnasium and an elaborate kitchen, surrounded by a few classrooms, said a great deal about our concept of what a church is. Churches in this era were beehives of activity, and the 13th century status position of the clergy that once made them dominant in the whole society was preserved in this increasingly narrow domain of church life. The minister was the most important figure in the church. If we press the beehive analogy, the minister was the queen bee, and the laypeople were the worker bees or drones. In fact, an active layperson was called “a good worker.”

In many ways this institutional church structure served its world well; deep emotions were developed among people -- emotions which they attached to their church life. Christmas pageants, sunrise or midnight worship services, bazaars where deep friendships were formed, special moments of joy, such as a baptism, or of sorrow, such as a funeral -- all of these seemed to guarantee an eternal place for an institution that the society acknowledged to have a legitimate sphere of influence: the religious sphere. Once again, the structures had changed to accommodate the attitude of the world.

IV

But while Christians were actively pursuing church work and seeking to expand their influence, once again the attitude of the world began to change. Under the onslaught of the physical sciences, the life sciences, the social sciences, and the philosophical thought processes that accompanied them, the religious arena shrank to such a point that the church began to be perceived as no longer a significant influence at all, but rather as a minor institution that could safely be tolerated or ignored. Organized religion seemed to be more and more isolated from the decision-making processes of life.

Following World War II, there was a great surge of church life and church building that momentarily mesmerized church leaders who saw a new golden age emerging on the horizon. But the other factors that had long been growing in our increasingly secular society were only temporarily halted. Institutional churches were busier and busier, but the world at large paid less and less attention.

The church officially stood firm against divorce, yet between 1900 and 1970 the divorce rate in the U.S. increased by 900 per cent. Who was listening to the church? It continued to give lip service to the importance of the Ten Commandments while a morality revolution, fueled primarily by the insights of Sigmund Freud and the scientific ability to separate sexuality from procreation, swept through the Western world like wildfire. The serious issues of justice in society tore the institutional church asunder. The most overtly religious section of our nation, the Bible Belt of the south, could not see the evil of segregation in terms of its gospel. The Supreme Court, voicing the attitude of the culture, announced that separation of church and state implied freedom from the influence of religion.

In 1952 another symbol became obvious in the presidential election. There was no “religious issue in the campaign, despite the fact that the candidates were unbaptized Dwight David Eisenhower and nonchurchgoing Unitarian Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr. To have candidates who were nonreligious, at least in the traditional sense, did not appear to bother our secularized society. This supposition was confirmed in 1960 when there was a “religious issue” in the campaign. That issue, interestingly enough, did not coalesce around the fact that Richard Nixon was a Quaker -- though Quakers have historically been associated with opposition to war -- for it was generally understood that Nixon was a nominal uncommitted Quaker. The problem was that John F. Kennedy was a practicing Roman Catholic. The issue had to be defused, for it was perceived as a handicap to the Kennedy candidacy. In a campaign appearance before the Houston Ministerial Association, candidate Kennedy vowed that he would keep his religion and his public life separate. That is, his religious convictions would not interfere with his presidency. Our society was saying in these two instances, it seems to me, that it’s OK to be nonreligious, and that if religion is your thing, you must separate it from the rest of life. The domain of religion had thus shrunk to a tiny, very private internal one. It was a very short step from that point to the theological proclamation that startled many in the 1960s: “God is dead.”

V

The institutional church became aware only very slowly of this cultural shift from having a place of significant influence to being merely tolerated. But when the religion boom of the post -- World War II years was over, it could no longer be ignored. A new attitude had emerged in the world, and a new response was inevitable and essential. Since that post -- World War II realization, a new shape and focus of the church have been struggling to be born. The question before the church was “How do you structure yourself when you live in a world that barely notices your existence and merely tolerates your presence?” Many Christians simply ignored this reality and went on as if no change had occurred. It was a grand illusion. But those who were in touch with the world began to see a new response taking shape in the mid-’50s.

There was, first of all, a discernible shift away from church activism, and churches began manifesting a training-center model. Suddenly throughout America’s denominations, almost as if by divine fiat, a moratorium on building was declared; new congregations were discouraged, and questions about the meaningfulness of many church programs were articulated. The dimension of training for life and witness outside the church emerged as the most legitimate church activity. It was as though its leadership had recognized that the institution itself had no power, but that individual Christians who still held membership in the body could be quite influential in their decision-making roles in secular society. Phrases like “the scattered church” became popular. The church was seen as an army camp whose whole purpose was to train, prepare and equip its soldiers to assume their posts along the battlelines of the secular society.

The more deeply we began to look at the training function of the church, the more popular became things like Group Life Laboratories, Sensitivity Training and, later, Transactional Analysis. In every major tradition of American Christianity it was a time of new focus on Christian education. New church school curricula were published. Adult education materials rolled off the press. But somehow, though many Christians found life and meaning in this new thrust, the realm of religion continued to shrink, and soon even this new trend lost its excitement. Still, an emphasis was discovered here that was not to remain dormant forever. The commitment to worship God with our minds was, at least in part, the church’s way of dealing with a new attitude that had been born overtly in the ‘50s. That attitude might best be expressed with the words, “bored toleration toward organized and institutional religion.” The secular society of the ‘50s possessed an attitude of confidence that was close to arrogance. The great push toward a New Deal had been halted only by the war, but now it could be resumed under a new name, the Fair Deal. This in turn was followed by the eight years of the laissez-faire government of President Eisenhower. The optimism of the ‘50s faded into the early ‘60s, and we heard of New Frontiers and of efforts to build the Great Society. Landing on the moon and conquering space were within our grasp. In that confident era the last thing the world needed was an ancient, archaic, medieval church that seemed to many of the enlightened generation to traffic in magic and superstition. It bothered only the religious few that theologians could debate the death of God. Society as a whole was not interested.

But the church learned in the ‘50s that, whatever the shape of the church’s future, a training dimension must be part of it. A commitment to open and honest scholarship must mark the church’s corporate life. But the optimism of the ‘50s and early ‘60s did not last forever, and new forces were yet to emerge.

VI

By the mid-’60s a funny thing had happened to that spirit of confidence and arrogance in society. Those of us who shared the idealism of John Kennedy saw the ugly head of racism begin to rip the social fiber of this country apart. Consciousness was raised by the civil rights movement that polarized the nation and loosed a violent and sometimes demonic spirit within the body politic. This demonic spirit seemed to demand a victim. Adlai Stevenson, visiting Dallas in October 1963 in his capacity as United Nations ambassador, was physically abused and spat upon by an angry Dallas mob. Two weeks later, the young president who seemed to embody idealism and hope was struck down by an assassin’s bullet in the same city.

That death became a rallying cry for the new president, Lyndon Johnson, who pushed civil rights legislation through the Congress almost as an expiation for our corporate guilt in the murder of John Kennedy. Johnson, out of his own liberal roots, spoke boldly of building the Great Society, but the streets of this land were increasingly unsafe even for the president, who more and more found himself to be a virtual prisoner in the White House. Joined to the quest for social justice at home was an increasing revulsion at our murderous behavior as a nation in the tiny and war-weary country of Vietnam. Bitterness abounded. More victims seemed to be required. When Martin Luther King Jr., was murdered, the cities of America exploded in rage, fire and wanton destruction.

Calls for law and order began to be heard in the political arena, often from the same politicians who had earlier encouraged massive resistance to the law of the land. Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race, driven from office by the temper of the times. Bobby Kennedy was the next victim to fall to a bloodthirsty national mood. We were in a war we could not get out of -- a war we had neither the stomach to win nor the willingness to lose. We declared “War on Poverty” -- a war that ended in disillusionment and defeat.

We began to hear the secular voices of the world saying vastly different things from those of the previous decade. Gone was the arrogance, the confidence in the future. A new cultural humility was heard uttering the plaintive word “Help -- anybody help.” Education and optimism would not solve the problems of racism, war, poverty, alienation. Our answers are no answers, the secular world was heard to say.

VII

The institutional church began to sense once again a shift in the culture. Bored toleration faded. “Maybe the church has a voice that ought to be heard” was the message that many Christian leaders were hearing. Inevitably, there was a response -- a new shape to church structures, a new thrust to mission that began to emerge. Gradually abandoning the tiny and threadbare domain called religion to which it had been relegated since the 13th century, the church once more laid claim to the possibility of being a life resource. Fueled in large measure by the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christians started to speak of “religionless Christianity.” Justice, politics, economics, race relations, war and peace were now seen as legitimate areas of Christian concern.

There was, of course, the cry from many that we Christians had abandoned the Bible and religion for secular concerns. In fact, what was happening was that we were rediscovering the Bible, which always had “secular” concerns, and the God of life who is revealed there and who calls his church to worship him with our strength -- the strength of our involvement in the human quest for justice. We listened to Erich Fromm, an American psychiatrist, who said that no one ever thinks his way into new ways of acting; he always acts his way into new ways of thinking. The church of the ‘60s was committed to action first, theologizing about that action second. We found it necessary, in the words of Episcopal Presiding Bishop John Hines, for the church to “take its place humbly and boldly alongside of, and in support of, the dispossessed and oppressed peoples of this country for the healing of our national life.”

It was an exhilarating decade for the church. Debate, polarization, defection, daring bold action, and mistakes marked the life of the organized church; but through it all the church once again laid claim to the entire world as its legitimate domain. It would never again be an institution limited to religion as its private and only appropriate sphere of interest.

In the midst of that era the church acted to redress the balance of power in our society, to empower the powerless. It was done in the name of Christ, though many of the poor, the alienated and the dispossessed might not have recognized the Christ the church was talking about in its corporate prayer and worship. Christian efforts in the social arena did not win converts. Indeed, they were not calculated to do so. The membership in America’s mainline churches actually declined in this period. A shift in power is never welcomed by those who have power -- at least not unless they can see with long-range vision and recognize that their own vested interest is ultimately served where power is shared and no one is left powerless. The church actually acted against its short-term vested interests.

The Episcopal Church, for example, gave a $40,000 grant to a Mexican-American group known as the Alianza to assist its members to process their legal claims against the United States government for treaty violations. One diocese immediately cut off its $80,000 contribution to the Episcopal Church. That church also aided an institution called Malcolm X University in Durham, North Carolina, at a terrific cost among many of its southern constituents who could not see the genuine pain and anguish beneath harsh black rhetoric. These constituents believed their church was supporting lawless violence; feeling betrayed, they abandoned it financially.

In this same era churches began to raise ethical and ecological concerns and to face political questions in stockholder gatherings of major American corporations. Life was our arena -- all of life -- and no part of it was to be exempt from the spotlight of the gospel which proclaimed a God “who so loved the world” that he entered it. We discovered in. the late ‘60s that we were called in imitation of our Lord to enter the world to be change agents, to act out the redemption that we believe has been accomplished in Jesus our Christ. Again, the church was responding to the attitude of the world. That world faced unsolvable problems and invited anyone who might help to do so.

VIII

But social justice, while an essential aspect of the Christian’s individual and corporate life, does not exhaust his or her other Christian commitment. There were, of course, excesses in the ‘60s on the part of many Christians who seemed to believe that social action was the only legitimate expression of the Christian life. So a correction was found as the ‘70s dawned, the angry voices of the alienated minorities diminished, the bloody Vietnam war ended, the cities grew less hysterical, and the nation discovered that its institutions were strong enough to withstand the enormous challenge of corruption in the highest office of this land, finally expelling that corruption in a violent period of national purging. And then we watched the birth of a somber but tranquil time presided over by President Gerald Ford, who will probably be remembered primarily for his decency. In the quietness of that moment a new attitude once again called out a new response. We Christians came to be aware that action must grow out of and express a deeper commitment which itself has to be nurtured, that activism whether inside or outside the church will not finally fill up the empty spaces in the human heart. This discovery seemed to coincide with a new emerging attitude of openness in the society as a whole.

Suddenly, or perhaps not so suddenly as we might have imagined, all kinds of people in all kinds of ways began an honest search for a new sense of the transcendent, the mysterious, the holy. The search had many forms, some of which were distinctly outside the domain of the organized church: Zen, various kinds of meditation, the occult. But others were inside traditional religious circles -- a nostalgic return to old-time religion, the charismatic movement, neofundamentalism. Certainly a nation was speaking out of its corporate sense of need when it chose a president who carefully cultivated the image of old-time virtue coupled with a public commitment to a warmly evangelical brand of Southern Baptist religion.

But underneath all of these forms, both the nonreligious and the religious, a new human yearning for God, or for what the symbolic word “God” stands for, sought expression. Every human life seems to need and want spiritual integrity, the ability to know and worship that which is ultimately real and which creates and re-creates us in its own image as we are drawn into worship. This cultural hunger is even at this moment calling the church to new frontiers, new shapes and forms, as we once again seek to respond structurally to the attitudes of our world. We are being called to nothing less than a new capacity to worship with our hearts.

In the decades of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s we have seen a new shape and form of the church emerging relevant to the emerging attitude of the society.

We are living at the time of the birth of a new Christian consensus which someday can be studied alongside the church of the catacombs, or the age of the great cathedrals, or the time of the church as the center of religious life. That emerging church, I believe, will combine elements of these three decades -- the emphasis of the ‘50s on commitment to training and to significant Christian education; the emphasis of the ‘60s on the claim that God is involved with all of life and the willingness of Christians to be involved in the pain of the world at the price of jeopardizing their institutional vested interests; and the emphasis of the ‘70s on a renewed search for a significant sense of the holy. Each of the emphases will inform, challenge and correct the abuses and excesses of the other; a new shape for the church will be born in human history. It will be as different from the traditional church of our experience as the great cathedrals were from the church in the catacombs. But nonetheless it will be related to its historic predecessors, calling in the accents of the 20th century for Christians to worship with their minds, their strength and their hearts. And Christians will recognize that continuity when they call the new shape and form of the body of Christ living in the 21st century a church.