Articles – Page 218 – Religion Online

American Catholicism Assessed From Within

An editor of a Protestant journal of opinion recently stated that one of the current tasks facing a Protestant religious journalist is to tell American Protestants that America is no longer a Protestant country. Whether Protestants have to be informed of this fact may possibly be debated but the fact itself cannot be. Yet no one will draw the illegitimate conclusion that America is already or is becoming a Catholic land. Percentage-wise, the Catholic Church has not grown much in the last forty years.

But in this land of many religious minorities how are we to interpret the Catholic reality? Sociological studies have been made but the limitations and detachment with which such studies are produced rarely shed great light on the lived existence of the Catholic collectivity. An investigation must be made from the inside. Yet this is a difficult task. There certainly is something that can be called a collective consciousness of the total group, but to get at it one must rely on an individual consciousness that is hopelessly hemmed in by its own individuality. Nevertheless, it is worth while to make an attempt at investigation even under such precarious conditions.

Aristotle wanted definitions to be derived from genus and differentiae. The American Catholic Church is therefore a Catholic church and different from all other Catholic churches because it is American. This may seem to say little, but actually it says much. Differences are not accidentals tacked on to the genus. They suffuse it totally.

There is no call here to describe generic Catholicism. Our effort will be directed to the American differentiae. The American component of American Catholicism obviously entered into it by way of history Into a land staked off as the claim of Protestant groups, the Catholic intruded. This intrusion came not as a single blow but in a steady flow over 150 years. By and large the Catholic came either as a non-English speaker or as an Irishman. In either case he was culturally alien to the British possessors of the land. Religiously he was not only different but suspect.

Whether we like it or not, Protestants and Catholics are inevitably related to each other by the concept of opposition, and the opposition is stronger the nearer we approach the moment of the split of one from the other. Today we are all striving manfully to overcome the sense of opposition, but we are descendants of the past and history works in all of us.

The first Catholics, therefore, walked into a hostile environment. This does not mean that there were barbarous persecutions or gross inhumanity. The persecutions were petty and the individual Catholic ( could and did avoid them either through personal friendship with individual Protestants or by taking refuge in a ghetto built by himself and his kind.

The immigrating Catholics were also, in general, poor folk escaping from the hardships proper to lower social classes of Europe. They did not bring with them much learning, nor even a great awareness of the good of learning. The capital the Catholic brought with him was his will to improve his secular condition and his readiness to work hard in his attempts. Those who did not have this capital returned to their lands of origin or soon died.

As the English know, America, in spite of its English roots, is not England. It is a new thing with subtle power. The American Dream, or whatever we wish to call it, had (and pray God that it still has) a transforming power that it infused into its own, making them one. The European Catholics who came to America became American. The result was that the Catholicism they brought with them became American as well.

It was not done without growing pains. Some of the Europeans of the nineteenth century did not want an American Catholic Church but a confederation of European Catholic churches on American soil. They were led by German spokesmen, but World War I showed the Americans of German stock that they themselves were Americans and not Germans. The whole American Catholic Church suddenly became aware of itself as Catholic and American and has never since lost that awareness.

From 1918 onwards, Catholicism in America took on a new vitality because of its own achieved identification. The result was that any clear-eyed observer could see that the American Catholic Church was a power and a force in the land. It was no longer struggling to survive or to be accepted. It had "arrived."

However, the effects of its earlier history showed up clearly. There was a sudden pride of achievement that was more adolescent than mature. Catholicism became cocky and would tolerate no criticism from within or without. Where it could, it "threw its weight around." T he older fear and resentment toward Protestants now turned into smug, but edgy, aloofness. One could almost hear the American Catholics say: "You have had your day; now we have ours."

The pain and distress involved in the Al Smith campaign of 1928 was a salutary and chastening experience. Even if America was not religiously Protestant, it was by no means pro-Catholic. In consequence, a more objective self-examination slowly spread over the group. Catholics began to criticize themselves and did so with a candor that should have amazed non-Catholics, but they did not even notice.

The basic weakness inherent in the Catholic community was its lack of scholarship. It had loyalty, organization, and numerical strength but it had too little intellectualism, in spite of its growing educational system built laboriously by the Catholics without outside aid. This weakness could not become conscious until a sufficient number of American Catholic intellectuals were formed; and they were being formed in the '30s and '40s. The result is that voices have been since heard and embarrassment felt. However, these things are themselves the first steps of coming improvement.

At the present moment, the American Catholic Church is neither a harassed minority nor a belligerent group. It is more prone to conservatism than radical change. Its tendency is toward American chauvinism rather than anything anti-American. It is rather contemptuous of what is foreign, even when visible in the Catholic Church elsewhere. Its generosity, activism, and optimism are probably more American than Catholic.

One thing American Protestants must recognize, though they are slow to do so, is that American Catholics are no threat to them, nor do they wish to be. The diminution of Protestant power understandably makes Protestants nervous, but there is no ground in Catholicism for their nervousness.

The American Catholics do not consider Protestantism as their great preoccupation nor do they pay much attention to it. They arrange their own affairs and conversations with little or no concern for the Protestant dimension of our country. At times they are faced with certain movements that have a nuisance value, as for example the Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU) that Catholics fortunately do not identify with the Protestant community. (In fact, it must be embarrassing for many Protestants to see this group use in its proper name a label that is so much bigger than it and that means something better than the POAU movement.) However, in general the American Catholics do not define themselves or their activities in terms of Protestant reference.

This attitude, besides the advantage of eliminating maintained hostility for Protestantism, also has a palpable disadvantage. Although American Catholics have many friends and relatives who are Protestants, yet they know so little about Protestantism and show no great desire to know more. It would almost be true to say that the American Catholics, in constant amicable relationships with Protestants, ignore Protestantism. They are not curious to find out the doctrines of Protestantism, nor its ways of worship and structure. It is not clear in their minds what distinguishes an Episcopalian from a Methodist. Luther vaguely means something, but Lutherans are supposed to be undifferentiated Protestants with a German background. The multitude of the more angular, smaller denominations simply confuses the Catholic without stimulating him to clarity his confusion.

In such a situation the American Catholic is totally unprepared for ecumenical dialogue, though this is the task that our moment calls for. There is no Catholic hostility to ecumenism. There is just a great ignorance of what it is and why it is important.

Some few voices have been raised in American Catholic circles pointing sympathetically to the ecumenical movement, and they have been heard. But they have not made a deep or wide impact. Perhaps the few Catholic ecumenists will manage to arouse great interest in their work, and there are signs that the young Catholics, clerical and lay, are waking up to its importance. However, as of the moment much is being accomplished. The American Catholic makes his own the principle lately enunciated by Professor Oscar Cullmann -- that Catholicism and Protestantism are irreconcilable. But unlike Cullmann, the American Catholic does not see that much must yet be done in Christian charity.

The electoral campaign of 1960 is already aborning. The presence of Senator John Kennedy among the possible candidates will produce intranquility In God's goodness it may be the occasion for Catholic ecumenical action. Perhaps it may even do the contrary.

Certainly the ecumenical council to he summoned by Pope John XXIII should produce some good fruits, at least in the world-wide preparations for the council sessions. Just now, with these possibilities before us, we must wait, hope, and see.

Right and Wrong: A Framework for Moral Reasoning

It would be a shame to die without winning some victory for humanity. Horace Mann

I would not judge a man by the presuppositions of his life but by the fruits of his life. Reinhold Niebuhr

[God] maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Matthew 5:45

No question assumes greater moment in these days of our years than that of right and wrong. But what is needed and lacking is a framework for moral reasoning. In contrast with peoples and nations of earlier stages in history, we show less zeal in our search for a framework. The need is less to find early agreement than to fence in the problem. In the words of James T. Burtchaell, the provost of Notre Dame: "In these matters . . . we have no satisfying consensus not because we wrangle over them too much but because we wrangle not enough." The one art most needful of restoration is the ancient art of moral reasoning, of wrangling not about personalities or policies but about the moral propositions and values underlying them.

No Simple Signs

The three quotations cited above drive anyone concerned with the question of right and wrong immediately to the heart of the moral problem. The first by implication asks and answers the question "What is the purpose of life?" by saying that it is to serve humankind. The second points not to theory but to practice, not to words but to deeds, not to faith but to its fruits as the indication of human service and fulfillment. But the third reminds us that there are no simple signs to prove that one person has done right and that another has not. We must await history’s judgment and not the clamor of the crowd. Both the good and the evil suffer and are blessed, not for their deeds but "as the wind listeth."

Perhaps what these three quotations have to say is not that people fail to seek the good but that, on the one hand, the good appears as through a veil darkly and then escapes us while, on the other hand, we endlessly claim that our modest victories for humankind are God’s victories. We use our advantages, our little successes, our power and privileges as final proof that we have done God’s work -- and humanity’s. If we were merely mistaken in this, if we imagined that God’s sun had shined on us because we were virtuous when we were not, the damage would be limited and calculable. It becomes unlimited and incalculable and the mischief abounds when, in a kind of uncontrolled self-righteousness, we point to material circumstances as "the fruits by which men should be known and judged." Superior influence, wealth, prestige and power are taken both as the signs of our having been anointed for our goodness and the source of our authority to preside over the family, the nation or the world -- in short, to rule those within our sight.

The problem is ever new and ever old. The Jesuit editors of America, writing on Watergate in that journal’s January 1973 issue, warned that the problem for President Nixon -- and the problem beyond Nixon -- was that absolute power had come to equal absolute righteousness, and "absolute righteousness equaled absolute ruthlessness." Lord Acton was even more terse: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Whenever a strong public mandate or enormous wealth or present power is taken to mean freedom from all those responsibilities and constraints which living together requires, we are in the grip of a modern version of an all-virtuous chosen people or of a latter-day Puritan elect. Some group of persons is asking us to believe that they are a chosen people and beyond all law and morality.

Reinhold Niebuhr often told the story of two of his senior parishioners in the first church he served in Detroit. One, a millionaire, was utterly convinced that his wealth had come about because he had tithed from the time he was a young man. Another member in his 70s, who had given interest-free loans and credit to striking workers in a time of widespread industrial unrest, died a broken and bankrupt man. Why was one so conspicuously rewarded and the other so harshly treated when both had done God’s will? What becomes of the view that material status or social prominence is evidence of inner strength? Where are we to turn to judge the fruits of a person’s life? Are there other tests as palpable and real?

Exchanging Old Injustices for New

Not in my lifetime have Americans been so preoccupied with right and wrong. I would like to think that we are concerned over wrongdoing today because we hunger for right-doing. We are drenched with reports from the media about the transgressions of persons in public and private life; rich and poor make up the procession. Our worst fears are confirmed; the suspicions an older generation sought to quiet or place in context for the young, in classrooms or in the home, are back to haunt us -- in the most glaring forms. Those who promised law and order obstructed justice; reformers worked harder, it appears, to create new channels of influence than new ideas. It is scarcely surprising then that

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

["The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats]

And yet the trouble with sounding the apocalypse is that life goes on. The problem which Yeats portrayed with such piercing illumination earlier is with us still. People do want to win a victory for humanity, but weariness and disillusionment set in. Pattern and process are more important than personalities. Instead of personal devils, we need to keep our eye on those forces that play on us all. The course of history follows a tortured route: we fight injustice and seek noble goals, gain power to that end, somehow are corrupted by power and zeal, breed new injustices, and are challenged for our excesses and injustice. This is the dreary path of social change and corporate stagnation.

Try to name one group of persons or nations which in running the course from victim to victor has not shed some of its virtue along the way: business, labor, blacks, white ethnics, Catholics, Jews, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The crimes committed in the name of justice rival those that arise out of injustice. We seek through the vitality of influence and power to arrest the injustice of others but impose in turn new forms of injustice because we are never as just as we claim to be: parent with child, children with parents, protesters with establishment, majorities with minorities, minorities with majorities, rich nations with poor, and poor nations with rich. Yet in every setting, for every group, the confrontation is portrayed as a clash between an all-virtuous force -- WE -- and an evil and demonic enemy -- THEY. Only when it is too late, when much blood has been spilled, is it discovered that there was virtue on both sides, along with a considerable admixture of evil.

Morality: Collective and Individual

What then can we say about the moral problem, its perennial dimensions and lasting features? First, the requirements for winning a victory for humanity differ on individual and collective levels. Political groups and nations pursuing a worthy purpose need to mobilize and generate popular support. Political leaders cannot speak in whispers; their language must inspire, excite, mobilize and arouse. Citizens need to feel, apparently, that they can achieve through the actions of states that which is denied them in their personal lives. Not only a nation’s goals but also its achievements are cast in the language of hyperbole. It is not enough to reopen contacts with communist China: the public must be given a television spectacular and strong language about the 20th century’s most far-reaching foreign-policy triumph -- most far-reaching, that is, until the next. The mass media are made for overkill, and group passions will settle for nothing less.

Individual victories for humanity are more personal and tentative, private and dispersed, unpublicized and uncalculating. Nations and groups expect a quid pro quo, want something in return, see good deeds in terms of trade-offs. When foreign assistance is given, they look for expressions of gratitude. Individual morality differs because it is closer to the flow and reality of direct human interrelationships. People as individuals do good without being able to trace the consequences. Interpersonal ethics are less often a bargain between parties. The individual can sacrifice self and self-interest to serve some higher purpose ("I give my life in order to find it"). Representatives of the nation or group do so only at great risk, given their responsibility to their publics. Because they must claim so much, they have trouble with Wordsworth’s definition of morality: "That best portion of a good man’s life, -- /His little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love." Yet for most of us, this is the arena in which we serve humanity -- if we serve it at all. We do good -- or others do good to us -- but life rushes on before such deeds are counted or calculated.

The ‘Relevant Fruits’

Second, society tends for the most part to judge the fruits of a person’s life in the light of its own values and priorities. Is it fair to ask what else we could expect? Where else are society and individuals likely to turn but to their operational values? Outward signs thrown up as valid by society become the measure of a person’s inward life: goods and possessions, prestige and power, social and economic prominence, gifts and influence. For every example of our Puritan forebears, the suburban church today offers its counterpart. It is as if society asked: How else but through outward signs are the elect to be identified? Yet the sham and superficiality of these standards led to the revolt of the 1960s. However history may judge the differing facets of the youth movement, it cannot but praise its loud denunciation of the gospel of affluent suburbia. For in the 1950s and 1960s religion and ethics, which were intended to stand in judgment of selfish materialism, became its servants. Little wonder that families were torn asunder by the contradictions of this union. Little wonder that inspirited youth turned against the inner conflicts in the society of their elders. And little wonder too that those in rebellion, being children of the culture, proved short-lived prophets and fell back into apathy.

Reinhold Niebuhr spoke of the relevant fruits of a person’s life and offered them as an alternative to the narrow judgments of a materialist society. Rather than allow society to set the standards, Niebuhr drew on religion and philosophy to guide him. The relevant fruits for him were "a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice."

And Niebuhr added: "Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I judge him by his fruits, and I therefore have many agnostic friends." Charity born of love, balance and proportion, and moral indignation over injustice, coupled with the will to do justice, were Niebuhr’s standards. Present in a person, they reflected spiritual strengths and resources; if they were absent, no matter a person’s prominence or power, Niebuhr resisted every social pressure to say such a person was especially chosen of God. He spoke rather in the language of Cardinal Suhard of "living in such a way that one’s life would be inexplicable, if God did not exist." He quoted wryly but not without some approval a statement made in the Detroit of his time that there were two Christians in the city and that both of them were Jews.

A Viewpoint of ‘Gott Mit Uns’

Third, William James observed that the trouble with Christians was they were forever lobbying for special favors in the courts of the Almighty. They wanted their prayers answered instantly and precisely in the form and at the time specified. They displayed an all-surpassing vanity in believing that God would intervene to upset the processes of nature in their favor. They expected that the sun would rise and the rains fall at their bidding and in their favor, thereby closing prematurely all the indeterminate structures of meaning within which people live out their lives. They took the mystery and tragedy out of human existence, made a success story out of the profoundest of humanity’s dramas.

Our problem today is less that of people fervently praying for the early fulfillment of their interests. We have few recent cases, if any, that parallel President McKinley’s praying to God to ask his guidance on whether to annex the Philippines -- receiving, of course, the answer he sought. Yet in another sense, leaders of sovereign nations and of political movements and parties all too often look out on the world from a viewpoint of "Gott mit uns." They justify the use of blemished means to achieve supposedly unblemished ends. In this limited sense, at least, Richard Nixon and William Sloane Coffin, in their struggles in the 1960s, had something in common.

Every true believer in religion and politics should listen periodically to Cromwell’s words: "Believe by the bowels of Christ ye may be wrong." Even when we sense the tragic and fragmentary character of our acts, we are likely to place them outside the framework of history. Even so brilliant a diplomat as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger observed, in an extended interview with New York Times columnist James Reston:

History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as an historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved [New York Times, October 13, 1974, p. 341.]

In an earlier period, this separation of the tragic dimension of history and of practical immediacy was not as sharply drawn. President Lincoln saw himself as acting under the judgments of history and of God. For him not only history but policy had its tragic character. It would never have occurred to Lincoln to see himself solely as a problem-solver. Dr. Kissinger seems, elsewhere in his interview, to be saying that because Americans prefer statesmen who solve each and every problem, this is how statesmen must look at their task. The further assumption which others make -- though perhaps not Dr. Kissinger -- is that the American solution is always best.

Addressing the question of right and wrong, then, is pre-eminently a first-order task in the United States. We have left behind for ill or good "the ceremony of innocence." Overreacting, there are those who doubt that one person, one political party, and one set of values can be better than any other. To politics and social efforts they appear to be saying "ohne mich" (without me). If enough people were to choose this route, America could follow the path of Weimar Germany and other nations and civilizations before it which declined as a result of inner decay and loss of will.

Living with Ambiguity

Yet apathy, however serious, is only one of our difficulties. The central issue is the moral problem. From Tocqueville to the present, every sensitive observer has noted the persistent concern of Americans with questions of right and wrong. For decades it has been possible for Americans to speak to the world in sweeping moralistic tones. The United States, it seemed, stood above Europe’s ancient rivalries; our politics did not require entangling alliances designed to turn back forces that threatened a whole continent. Today we no longer claim immunity from the harsher side of world politics, for we are in the front line. For example, as Secretary of State Kissinger journeyed to Moscow for his late October meetings with Soviet leader Brezhnev, the military announced that the U.S. had launched an antiballistic missile from an aircraft. As we struggle to maintain an equilibrium of power, we are caught up in necessities of international politics far exceeding those of 19th and early 20th century Europe.

It is not surprising, therefore, that we have left moralism behind us. Our task as a great power is too immediate and too compelling for us to speak down to the world from a high pulpit. But this leaves us with a responsibility to define what we mean by right and wrong. First, moral judgment is not silence or tolerance for evil in the face of complexity. Moral indifference can be excused neither by apathy ("The best lack all conviction . . . the worst/Are full of passionate intensity") nor by wallowing in uncertainty. There is injustice and human need all around us; catastrophe for individuals, institutions and communities can happen here. For those who look around them at almost every form of institutional life, actions little short of the human barbarism which happened in Nazi Germany are happening here. Nor is it any excuse to say that moral values are emotive and can’t be proven. If justice cannot be defined, injustice can surely be recognized.

Second, judgments on right and wrong come down to on-balance discrimination. Not only right and wrong compete, but right and right are in rivalry. Moreover, operating moral principles are not absolutes but are related to other principles. Freedom of speech and assembly does not guarantee the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Freedom of scientific inquiry may not protect the right of a graduate student to build a nuclear weapon in his kitchen. In personal life, choices of right and wrong come down to balancing the competing moral claims of self and family, personal security and professional interests, short-term and long-run good.

Above all, moral judgment involves living with ambiguity. We cannot know the consequences of our acts, however noble our intentions. The French Revolution gave birth to crusading nationalism, the Protestant Reformation to the nation-state. Moral judgment, which is closer to action than to thought, demands that we live with the consequences of our acts, some of which are irretrievable.

Finally, right and wrong include the thoughts we think and the actions we take under God’s judgment. The practical and proximate take, their strength from higher principles enshrined in religion and philosophy. The nation’s founders far more than our contemporaries saw themselves as acting under the judgment of history. There were an almost infinite number of rights and wrongs for individuals in their public and private life. By comparison we have tended, in Paul Tillich’s words, to see morality as slavish adherence to a narrow moral code. Dean Acheson said of a contemporary: "He believes there is only one kind of immorality, outright thievery." Because the higher truth sets forth goals toward which men and women strive but never fully realize it understands and forgives moral shortsightedness.

Prophets and Politics

Walter Lippmann in The Public Philosophy grapples with an issue that has long concerned Reinhold Niebuhr in lectures and writings, namely, the problem of a relevant political ethic. There are, Mr. Lippmann argues, two realms that earlier and wiser philosophers and theologians described as the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. The one is the realm of the spirit; the other is a realm of immediate, particular, and ambiguous events. He doubts that the wisdom of one can serve the other, for there is a hiatus between religious and philosophic truths and the actual perplexities with which man must deal. In a day when religious prophets and secular high priests often proclaim that political problems would quickly be swept aside if leaders trusted more to their common humanity, Mr. Lippmann shockingly asserts that modern-day seers and saints have remarkably little to offer by way of practical advice and specific guidance. For those who look to eternal verities for directly applicable political solutions, he observes: "The deposit of wisdom in the Bible and in the classic books does not contain a systematic and comprehensive statement of moral principles from which it is possible to deduce with clarity and certainty specific answers to concrete questions." In consequence, men look to religion in vain for tidy, comprehensive, or deducible answers to specific current problems.

This view is patently a heresy if we hold it up to recent official pronouncements of Catholic and Protestant leaders. One highly placed churchman writes that the Evanston Report on International Affairs which "asserts the Christian imperatives of action for peace" certainly "provides relevant guidance for….the years immediately ahead." Another far bolder declaration of November 20, 1954, by the Administrative Board of the Catholic Welfare Conference implies that the godly righteous who have renounced atheistic materialism will be able "to withstand the enemy from without." The Catholic hierarchy concludes that the godly righteous in the name of the Cross can triumph over the new paganism of godless sinners expressed in secularism in politics and avarice in business and the professions. A third and more recent Protestant pronouncement is found in this statement: "As for the relation of church agencies to the program of technical co-operation it will suffice to say that in so far as this program is essentially humanitarian in character, Christian missionaries and the personnel of church-related institutions are prepared and eager to co-operate with this program, on a consultative and voluntary basis."2 The balance of the text invites us to infer that unless the church can impose its own humanitarian terms on the enterprise of states, it will eschew co-operation.

If Mr. Lippmann's views are alien to present-day religious thought, it must be said that the distillate of these three pronouncements taken together comprises a political ethic that bears almost no relationship to the thought of devout and learned minds through the ages. At the same time it spurns the honest secular wisdom compressed in Mr. Lippmann's little book; it has no more in common with Augustine than with Niebuhr. It seems bereft of the deepest Reformation insight placing us all, whether sinners or saints, under the same condemnation in the city of this world where "there is a law in their members which wars against the law that is in their minds." For moderns, the prevailing and official approach to the relation of church and state, whether Catholic or Protestant, is more buoyantly optimistic about the translation of objective religious truths into concrete political policies than about the theory of the two realms. The historic view insists that although no definitive demarcation line can be drawn between the two orbits, the texture of one is existence and of the other, spirit. The relation between the imperatives of religion and politics is a never-ending problem for inquiry in each contingent circumstance. Religion is at one and the same time irrelevant as a sure guide to the perplexities of practice and eternally relevant as ultimate transcendent principle. The assumptions and consequences of the historic and modern approaches are in this sense fundamentally at odds with one another. In no sphere is the choice of one or the other conception of political ethics more fraught with consequences than in international relations, for the answer to the query whether ethics have any bearing at all upon international politics rests with the formulation of a more relevant concept of ethics. When a particular version of international morality is found wanting in practice, publicists, philosophers, and politicians conclude that morality has nothing to do with politics. This happens to be a rough and approximate account for international politics of the temper of our present era. Wilsonian morality which equated peace and a good international society with democracy and national self-determination was rather too simple to meet the harsh necessities, for example, of a viable economy in Central Europe. Even great men or perhaps especially great men -- join, without knowing it, the procession Burckhardt called "the terrible simplifiers." If there is an absolute in the realm of political ethics, it is that no single proximate moral standard, whether self-determination or the United Nations, can be held up as an absolute.

This is at the root of our modern predicament as a current example will illustrate. The halls of Congress are perhaps not the most likely schoolroom for an examination of political ethics, and yet the pathos of our quest for a relevant political ethic was caught with clarity and perception by a staff member of the New York Herald Tribune who on February 22, 1955, reported on the statements of Mr. George V. Allen, former Ambassador to India and at this writing Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, and of Mr. Van Kirk to the Sub. committee on Technical Assistance of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The former ambassador cast his argument for technical assistance to countries like India in essentially political terms.

It was in our interest to prevent India from turning for aid and comfort to the Communists. If we would avoid the stigma of hypocrisy, we should not conceal the fact that the imperatives of our national existence command us to lend what assistance we can to this pivotal Asian member of the British Commonwealth. If we are less forthright, we shall only invite the resentment, disdain, and rebuke of the Indians, who will point to the dross of self. interest that joins inextricably with the gold of moral purpose in every foreign policy. The best we can do, Mr. Allen advises, is to identify and consolidate our interests with those of India. Indeed, the highest ethical standard for nations may be the mutuality of their national interests and purposes. India, with a subcontinent to exploit and develop, shares with us the need of an era of economic growth, international peace, and security. Thus it must be said that the relevant political ethic for the diplomatist requires, to begin with, an awareness that the texture of interstate relations is comprised of multiple national interests, with their military, political, economic, and moral components, which clash in conflict or are resolved in consensus and agreement. In politics, interest or power and morality can rarely be conceived of in isolation; and ethical judgments must be made not in the abstract but in relation to the contingent realities of the particular situation. Moral principles in their pure form seldom intrude on the political but are modified in the light of the facts of interest and power.

Dr. Van Kirk, on the other hand, prefers to believe that good policies can be free of any such ambiguity and uncertainty. The issue of right and wrong is unequivocal and unmistakable. If government policies result in programs that "are essentially humanitarian in character," the churches will give their support. "It is important….that programs of technical co-operation be kept wholly independent of considerations of military or defense strategy." He contends that "the U. S. Technical Co-operation Program is sufficiently important and effective to stand on its merits and is therefore fully justified without reference to military or defense support objectives." In these terms the art of governing is the quest for broad humanitarian objectives, not the search for practical national objectives that serve both the state and its friends.

The crux of the problem confronting us emerges in the juxtaposition of these two points of view. On the one hand, the diplomat who proceeds within the narrow limits of the national interest is unlikely to conceive of principles or programs divorced from the necessities of the state. On the other hand, the churchman transcends the turmoil of politics as such. The statesman's first duty is to the people, or "generations living and dead," whose safety and welfare he is pledged to protect and defend. If acts of generosity and magnanimity endanger national security, he cannot but turn his back. In the same spirit he looks to responsible leaders of other states as, first and foremost, their peoples' guardians. Recognizing the paramountcy of the national interest for those he represents abroad, he can hardly be surprised to find others subject to the same standards and considerations. With moderation and wisdom he may be enabled to discover the points at which his national interest and theirs come together, not primarily in abstract pronouncements but in the daily search for consensus on specific issues and policies. Technical assistance, no less than military assistance, must be viewed in this context; and it will not do to say that what is done in one sphere has no bearing or dependence upon what is done in the other. Both are grounded in the mutual self-interest of the participating powers and the convergence of their needs and interests at the nodal points where policies are worked out. For, as the West's experience in Asia attests, there must first be created a viable economic base before programs 0f military assistance can be expected to succeed. Likewise, economic reform in the absence of military security can only tempt the lurking aggressor. It is significant that India, which more than any Asian country has emphasized the primacy of economic over military aid, was among the first, through its ambassador, to commend American policy makers for the firm stand taken in 1950 in Korea. This, the Indians were convinced, was an earnest of our decision not to scuttle Asia; it was the indispensable prerequisite for programs of social and economic reform on which, with our help, others hoped to embark.

It can, of course, be argued that local and particular interests are absorbed and disappear within the programs of the United Nations. This, in fact, is the prevailing view of moderns who insist that foreign policies must be humanitarian in character. In all this we are reminded of research trends in the 1930's in international studies when American scholars preferred to view every international movement as good, and all national efforts as bad. Where the League of Nations and National Socialism were concerned, this distinction was in general quite plausible. If the examples had been the Communist International and the legitimate aspirations for national security of, say, England or the United States, the dichotomy between good internationalism and bad nationalism would have been seen to be fallacious. Indeed, scholars since the war have conceived of international institutions essentially in terms of international politics, which is to say, they have studied the United Nations in terms of the respective claims for national security by the member states. International organizations provide the framework within which nations strive to harmonize their independent purposes, and United Nations policies are essentially the resultant of the policies of its members.

The same prophets who urge that defense and security objectives must be wholly disassociated from technical assistance are, however, inclined to conceive of the United Nations as dens ex machina. They seem to believe that if states in their practice are often self-consciously defensive and militaristic, the new international machinery will rid them of this archaism of an earlier, more evil age. Moreover, since the good life is associated with broad humanitarian objectives contrasted with narrow nationalistic aims, a program by the United Nations is by definition superior to one carried forward on unilateral or regional terms. It so happens in Asia and Africa where the memory of Western imperialism is strong, that a multilateral U.N. program of technical assistance based on genuine international consensus and executed by multiracial personnel is more likely to be well received. Yet the risk of too absolute a commitment in politics is illustrated on precisely this point Recognized authorities tell us that in some parts of the world, for example, at some places in Latin America, U.S. personnel have been more acceptable and effective than U.N. personnel, and in Asia the prestige of the Colombo Plan has often been very great. Moreover, it is sometimes argued that the number of autonomous agencies, whether national or international, in the technical assistance field together often fail to do justice to the magnitude of their task.

Mr. Lippmann is therefore right in at least three respects when he questions the relevance of religion for politics. First, the religious point of view which provides so-called humanitarian goals for the statesman as a direct and immediate substitute for selfish national purposes "misconceives the nature of international relations." It assumes that states, even more than individuals, are capable of pure altruism, whereas precisely the opposite is the case. Second, it falsely presumes that the components of foreign policy are easily separable and that what we do in the economic sphere need have nothing to do with our military aims. Since the various facets of our policy -- economic, psychological, military and political -- are all grounded in the same objective considerations of national interest and seldom susceptible for long to the whimsy or good will of a President or Secretary of State, this distinction is likewise defective. Third, and most basic, religion is so consistently irrelevant to politics because the problem of the translation of ideas from one modality to another is often obscured. Religion, like philosophy, assumes that objective and ultimate truths, as such, are absolute in character. Yet absolute truth in politics is singularly inappropriate. Moreover, religious observers and publicists create for themselves pseudoreligious absolutes out of political machinery and programs that are more wisely and effectively viewed in pragmatic terms by the diplomatist.

Religion, in short, is resistant to successful foreign policy when the city of man is equated with the city o God. More properly conceived, it offers resources for understanding the nature of man and politics. Christian realism, by illuminating the misery and grandeur of man, can be a textbook for the diplomatist. It can rid men of their illusions while preparing them for their "finest hours." But more important for our purposes, Christian realism provides proximate moral standards that are neither as lofty as "the law of love" nor as bitterly tragic as the struggle for power. I take it that Christian realism accepts the fact and reality of the two realms but dedicates itself untiringly to an inquiry into political behavior at the boundary line separating the two. If there is an answer to Mr. Lippmann -- and to some extent he corroborates this himself -- it lies not in official religious pronouncement but in the philosophy that informs Christianity and Crisis. Incidentally, the quality of mind and character of this journal's senior editor, Reinhold Niebuhr, that makes the deepest imprint on younger followers is the contempt he shares with John Milton for "a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

FOOTNOTES

1. Christianity and Crisis, Vol. XIV, No. 22, p. 176.

2. Statement by Mr. Walter W. Van Kirk, Executive Director of the Department of International Affairs of the National Council of Churches, to the Subcommittee on Technical Assistance Programs of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, February 21, 1955.

Christian Faith and Technical Assistance

The revolution that has taken place in the last decade in our capacity to speed up technological change has confronted the Christian churches with an ethical dilemma of no small proportions. Throughout the last two thousand years, Christianity and Judaism have provided the religious ethic which gave meaning and purpose to the attempts to ease the misery and lighten the darkness of the slave, the serf, the peasant, the heathen, and the aboriginal inhabitants of the newly discovered continents and islands beyond the sea.

In the Judaic ethic, to heal, to teach, and to feed the poor were good deeds, benefiting the giver, in fact benefiting the giver to such a degree that the recipient was hardly expected to reciprocate with more than formal deference. Similarly, in traditional Christianity the care of the sick, teaching the ignorant, and feeding the hungry were all works through which individuals, acting in Christian compassion and charity, walked more closely in the ways of the Lord.

This position was congruent with the state of technology during the first nineteen hundred years of the Christian Era. Christian compassion for suffering loomed far larger than Christian ability to cure disease; Christian charity might succor and help the needy, but the Great Famines and the Black Death raged across Europe; Christian piety and devotion might reproduce manuscripts by hand, but universal literacy waited upon printing, mass production of books, and the audio-visual methods of the twentieth century. From the kitchens of monasteries and colleges there might be distributions to the poor at Christmas of lumps of meat the "size of a child's head," and within convents the children, left after plague and famine swept the land, might be lovingly reared. Against plague, famine, and ignorance, these were slender bulwarks indeed. Religion counseled resignation to the will of God, and tempered the bitterness and rebellion of those whose children died one by one in infancy, or remained the sole survivors of some plague. As compassion was the appropriate active Christian virtue for those who ministered to the unfortunate, so resignation was the equally appropriate virtue in those who must how their heads before a series of misfortunes which we would today account as preventable.

Meanwhile, both compassionate service and gentle resignation were reinforced by an other-worldliness which despised material things, even while distributing bread to the starving, or bathing the terrible sores on the feet of those who had no shoes in winter. This other-worldliness could survive even while using as good symbols those tools by which men gained their bread and journeyed over the seas to obtain new foods -- the plough, the sickle, the ship -- these were symbols which could be combined with the deepest religious devotion. Then came the machine, the substitution of fuel for men and women walking treadmills, the substitution of mechanical processes for the weariness of human hands. At first the machine seemed to be enslaving the human spirit rather than releasing it. As men and women entered the mines and factories, it seemed clear that the machine was Moloch devouring the souls and bodies of newly urbanized, lost, exploited human beings. The plough, the sickle, and the sail remained symbols of simple Christian goodness, of the yielding earth, of the good grain reaped in the fields, and of the traveler for whom one prayed, but the machine which was to increase the yield of the land and make the journeying traveler safe became identified with Mammon. The machine and all its works were evil -- set against the vision of a New Jerusalem that might instead be built in England's green and Pleasant lands. As the products of the machine grew, men came to live in cities which became more identified with godlessness. Materialism, industrialism, and urbanism became a trilogy of the works of the devil-an emphasis which was not lessened by the emphasis of Bolshevik propaganda upon godlessness coupled with the new deification of the machine.

So today we find ourselves in a parlous state. Since World War II the new technology, combined with the upsurge of aspiration and hope among all the peoples of the world, means that we confront a possibility of preventing hunger and premature death and of opening up the opportunities of literacy and experience beyond the wildest dreams of only a few decades ago. We confront this prospect not with the full vigor of religious dedication, but with divided hearts and minds, with a doubt whether anything born of the machine can be good, with a fear that it is materialistic to plan, to import tractors, or to set up assembly lines, to wear mass produced goods, buy paper books, or even-for some recently Christianized primitive peoples-to want shoes. A religious ethic attuned to compassion and resignation in a world of suffering and poverty is confused and stumbling in the face of a possible world where no one need go hungry, or die for want of a known remedy, or go ignorant and illiterate through life.

Communism and its adherents experience no such confusions. However much their methods may compromise their ends so that they are unattainable, they are clear in the congruence between health, education, and welfare, on the one hand, and the Communist ethic on the other, and young Soviet delegates to international congresses are moved to genuine tears by stories of land reclamation in some valley of starving peasants. The full vigor of their belief that food, health, and education are the most worthwhile ideals to pursue, for themselves and for other men, can go out to meet the awakened hopes of the hungry, ignorant, disease-ridden peoples of the jungles and deserts of the undeveloped countries of the earth. Meanwhile, the minds of Christian missionaries abroad and Christian people at home are divided; in their insistence that men do not live by bread alone, they are unwilling to let their hearts be kindled by the possibility that all men may have bread. All too often the enthusiasts who are dedicating themselves to the cause of technical assistance, fighting for more appropriations, seeking to develop ways and means of harnessing the skills of part of the modern world to the service of the rest of the world, must work with only their own secular zeal to sustain them, without benefit or backing from the churches. "The mission told us the Truth, but they did not show us the way," say the awakening peoples of the Pacific Islands, rebelling against teaching which told them "the Truth about the beginning of the world," but did not "tell us how to keep our babies from dying or our people from dying as young men."

The failure of the Christian churches to pick up this unprecedented hope for the peoples of the earth and to carry it as a sacred trust as part of their task of cherishing and protecting "the lives of men and the life of the world," is paralleled by another ethical dilemma -- the desire to exploit technical assistance, to make feeding and teaching and curing people into a bribe, to keep the peoples of other countries on our side against communism. Over and over again, one hears the argument that technical assistance is good policy, the only way to hold back the march of communism. This is an appropriate argument in the mouths of those who believe that other men will do good deeds only for their own ends and is of a piece with setting up school lunch programs, not to feed children but to dispose of surplus agricultural products. Surely, holding back the tide of communism -- or, put in religious terms, fighting the Devil -- is a lesser good than cherishing God’s children. How can we pause in a discussion of how, if we will, we can bring relief from hunger and pain and ignorance to millions, to suggest that it is also sound national policy? The invocation of this lesser good somehow dims and detracts from the shining purpose with which the vision of what can be done today should be able to infuse the imagination of contemporary Christians. Christ said, "Feed my lambs," and today there is the possibility of food enough to feed all his lambs; he said, "Heal the sick," and with aureomycin and sulfa, malarial control, immunization and vaccines, "they can be healed." Instead of this vision of a Christian ethic of the brotherhood of man which is realizable here on earth now, we have "technical assistance as a useful adjunct of national policy," suitably combined in small proportions with bilateral agreements involving the instruments of warfare. This produces an ethical misalliance between defensive warfare -- which can never be defined by religious people as anything but an evil which may nevertheless be absolutely necessary if the conditions which are necessary for religion are not to disappear from the earth -- and sharing life and hope between the technically advanced and the technically unadvanced peoples of the world. When technical assistance is thus reduced, either to an instrument of anticommunism or to an instrument of purely national policy, it no longer can completely command the religious imaginations of men.

In discussions of Point Four, it is customary and relevant to point out that many of the issues involved are already familiar to Americans who have given willingly of their substance and their lives to bring the gospel and to bring medicine and education and food to the peoples of other countries. However, they have not done this as Americans, but as American Christians, as particular groups of Christians, Methodists, or members of the Society of Friends, Episcopalians, or Baptists. Even in secular activities of sending food and clothing abroad, Americans have traditionally been extremely generous as individuals or as members of voluntary organizations, but grudging and stipulating when it came to Congressional action for the same ends.

European observers have often been confused by the apparent paradox of Americans who, in response to an appeal for voluntary abstention from essential foods, responded so magnificently in World War I and who in World War II expressed continuous anxiety for fear we would "starve to death" if we tried to feed the world. Yet the difference is quite explicable. I remember discussing this with a high official abroad during the war who said, "Any. way, you Americans are not going to export the food that is needed. You are going to eat it up yourselves." When I objected vigorously that the American people had shown over and over again their generosity, their willingness to give up butter and sugar that others might not starve, that because in this war it was government planned, people had not understood the need, he said, "Go home, and find a religious leader who will be willing to make the people understand." But there was no such religious leader ready; the groups who tried to make Americans realize that a decision not to ration soap would be translated into nutritional deprivation for millions of children were led by left wing groups with suspect motivations. The actual enormous contribution—which should still have been much greater—that the United States Government made to feeding the world was virtually without benefit of clergy and loomed in the minds of the American people, not as too little -- which they would have considered it had they acted privately and voluntarily, as Christians rather than as federal tax payers -- but as too much.

Our ambivalence, as Americans, about the role of the federal government, at home and abroad, is a compound of our dislike of the federal government’s getting into habits of playing Santa Claus and our dislike of anyone receiving hand-outs. The genius of the Point Four program was that it emphasized the role of Americans, acting through the federal government, in providing "know-how" rather than goods, in helping other peoples to help themselves. As such, there is much in the Point Four program which can catch the imagination and enlist the devotion of Americans -- as Americans, and as Christians. If there were no other way in which technical assistance could be brought to Iran or Indonesia, then Point Four would represent one of our highest possible aspirations, perhaps exceeding, in dramatic if not in real value, the activities of voluntary associations of Americans, because the United States Point Four program has to operate in a world where national states take on either the true aspects of the bellwether of the flock, or that of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

But Point Four operations are not our best invention because we have already conceived and designed an even better way, a way that is more compatible with the practice of the brotherhood of man. In giving technical assistance today and helping other peoples to overcome starvation, ignorance, and preventable disease, we have the choice of acting bilaterally, as members of a single, very rich, very prosperous, generous, but necessarily self-interested (for it is the function of national governments to protect their own people against all others) nation-state, or as members of an associated group of nations, in which we who wish to help and they who need help meet in an equality of interest and dignity. If Christian generosity and Christian giving are to be congruent with those democratic institutions which visions of the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God have done so much to foster, then any discrepancy between giver and receiver which can be wiped out must be wiped out. Simple sharing, not lordly benefaction, ennobles both giver and receiver while the least extra, unnecessary, in a sense technological discrepancy, begrimes and demeans such sharing.

Within the framework of the United Nations Technical Assistance program, all the members the United States, Venezuela, France, Indonesia, Norway, although some are larger and stronger, some highly developed technically, some beginners in the task of putting modern science at the service of their peoples -- act on a basis of equality within an organization which is their own. When the government of Venezuela or Greece asks help from the United Nations Technical Assistance program, it is one member of a group of brothers asking help from their own group, not the poor asking the rich, or the weak the strong, or the unskilled the technically trained. The United Nations may have to recruit all the technicians from the highly developed countries, but within international teams these men will work -- in dignified, guaranteed equal status -- with the representatives of the countries who have asked for assistance. As the richest country, the United States may foot the largest bill, not as a single benefactor of the mendicant peoples but as one among the peoples of the world.

Point Four, if stated as a way in which we, the fortunate, may help those less fortunate, has high ethical appeal in focusing the moral energy of Americans, as citizens, on the responsibility of the United States in the modern world. But, as Kipling emphasized long ago in his much misunderstood poem, "The White Man’s Burden," the task of the more technically developed country -- the country whose technology, or religion, or political institutions bear the marks of generations of high-level concerted felicitous effort -- is to make the recipients of help not into sycophants or dependents but into peers. Within the framework of the United Nations, all member peoples are peers, and it is the stated aim that the peoples of Trust Territories be helped to become full self-governing peoples also. Here there need be no confusion between Christian sharing and more limited national interest, no puffed-up pride of superior nation status. The people of any nation who proclaim themselves Christian have a role in regard to other nations in which no incompatible or partial aim need confuse the full involvement of their religious dedication.

But -- even granted the partial suitability of Point Four, the more complete suitability of United Nations Technical Assistance progress as the structural expression of the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God, where no brother should set himself up above another -- are still in difficulty. We still have with us Christian ambivalence about the fruits of the machine, Christians’ willingness to brand (as I have heard it branded by men in holy orders) the desire of mothers that their babies should not die as "materialism," Christians’ willingness to denounce the machine -- which as the successor of plough, sickle, and mortar, has made it possible for men to live more worthily of their humanity -- as the enemy of spirituality. Under an elaborate superstructure which sometimes also draws help from the specious argument that people’s cultures should be respected (an argument which got short enough shrift when it was a matter of giving other people the full details of our culture-laden religious ideas) too many Christians have drawn aside their skirts from the "materialism" of a program that will teach the hungry how to feed themselves. They thereby continue to support the Christian virtues of compassion and resignation, which were appropriate to the inevitable sufferings of man. But they do so in the context of the midtwentieth century, in which hunger and ignorance and epidemic disease are no longer inevitable, but definitely, immediately preventable.

The religiously gifted know, centuries early, what men pray for for other men, and in conclusion I should like to quote from an old Elizabethan prayer:

"They that are snared and entangled in the utter lack of things needful for the body cannot set their minds upon Thee as they ought to do; but when they are deprived of the things which they so greatly desire, their hearts are cast down and quail for grief. Have pity upon them, therefore, most merciful Father, and relieve their misery through Thy incredible riches, that, removing their urgent necessity, they may rise up to Thee in mind.

Thou, 0 Lord, providest enough for all men with Thy most bountiful hand….Give meat to the hungry and drink to the thirsty; comfort the sorrowful, cheer the dismayed and strengthen the weak; deliver the oppressed and give hope and courage to them that are out of heart.

Have mercy, 0 Lord, upon all forestallers, and upon all them that seek undue profits or unlawful gains. Turn Thou the hearts of them that live by cunning rather than by labour. Teach us that we stand daily and wholly in need of one another. And give us grace, in hand and mind, to add our proper share to the common stock; through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Christianity and Cultures: Transforming Niebuhr’s Categories

Exactly fifty years ago, in 1949, H. Richard Niebuhr delivered the lectures at Austin Seminary that became the book, Christ and Culture. 1 have long been an admirer of Niebuhr and, even though our theologies are rather different, throughout my career I have been influenced by his work, especially by Christ and Culture. I have often used his typology as a tool in teaching. Also, throughout my adult life, the question it poses—of how Christians should relate to their surrounding culture—has been a central one to me, both intellectually and spiritually.

Despite its enormous influence in the past fifty years, I think Niebuhr's analysis in its present form could be near the end of its usefulness. Although Christ and Culture still is very widely used as a teaching tool, much of the scholarly attention it attracts is along the line of saying that its categories are wrong or misleading. Often they are said to be hopelessly wrong and misleading. My good friends from Duke, Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, argue that "few books have been a greater hindrance to an accurate assessment of our situation than Christ and Cu/ture."¹ As a historian I can also appreciate the force of other historians' critiques that see Niebuhr's categories as simply not helpful. I deal every day with the particulars of how Christians have negotiated their relationships to culture and can see countless illustrations of the problems inherent in describing these in any neat theological categories.

Moreover, as a historian I am acutely aware of the degree to which Christ and Culture is a product of its time. The theological and cultural questions that Niebuhr took for granted in the post-World War II era were vastly different from those today. The 1940s are virtually a lost era to most of us today. We can hardly imagine what it was like to be an adult in that time. Just to mention the most obvious difference that separates us: we live in ,in era in which we take multiculturalism for granted. Niebuhr wrote at a time when "Amos 'n Andy" was a top radio show, racial segregation was still legal. and the principal agenda for himself and his audience was building a unified culture, e pluribus unum. To what extent can categories generated in that context be relevant to ours?

So the question I want to deal with is: Can these categories be saved? In answering that question I do not intend to present an analysis of Niebuhr or his theology. There are many helpful such analyses already and many who could do that better than I. Rather I think it may be more of a tribute to Niebuhr to take some of his most helpful thoughts of a half-century ago and to see if we can translate it so that it may continue to be useful in this very different era. I want to clear the way for that by briefly' looking at some of the principal critiques of Christ and Culture and offering some answers to those critiques

First, however, it will be helpful to provide a brief reviews of what Niehuhr himself says. Here I will not go into any great detail, but simply try to clarify the essential points.

"A many-sided debate about the relations of Christianity and civilization is being carried on in our time." So Niebuhr begins, setting his lectures in the context of a debate that has since been forgotten After the debacle of Nazism. the Holocaust, fascism, the horrors of World War II, the rapidly rising threat of international communism, and the danger of the bomb, American and British cultural leaders were engaged in intense debates over the future of Western civilization. Was there any way of strengthening its moral base so that it could meet the challenges of the technological age? How could the civilization avoid falling back into barbarous tribalism or succumbing to pseudo-scientific Marxist moralism? What is often forgotten is how prominently Christianity figured in these debates. While some cultural leaders (such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook) were saying that the open-minded attitudes of liberal,secular science were the only was to build a civilization free from prejudice and irrational intolerance, many other prominent spokesmen were saying that Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition could provide the best basis for a truly tolerant and liberal civilization. ²For people like Niebuhr, totalitarianism abroad and racism at home provided the most immediate context for thinking about the reforms that a progressive Christianity might bring to civilization. Tolerance was therefore a central issue. While Niebuhr had no illusions about building the Kingdom of God on earth. he favored a unified civilization to which Christian influences could make positive contributions.

In the context of this debate, Niebuhr begins by addressing accusations that Christianity has no positive contribution to make to civilization or culture (he uses the two terms more or less interchangeably). The secular proponents of a healthy tolerant civilization are thus those who really set the terms for Niebuhr's analysis. These cultured despisers of Christianity say, in effect, that civilization is the supreme value and that Christianity is essentially a threat to its health. They say that Christians either become so otherworldly that they are irresponsible citizens or they take over civilization and become intolerant. In effect, these critics say that Christianity should therefore be subordinated to cultural ideals. Progressive cultural ideals should reign supreme and traditional religion is either best abandoned or brought into line with those higher ideals.

Niebuhr responds to this secular culturalist critique by developing his famous typology. The relationships of Christianity to culture, he points out, have always been far more complicated than the critics recognize. True, some Christians have withdrawn from culture and some have been intolerant, but these are not the only Christian cultural attitudes. In fact, we can identify five distinct motifs that describe how Christians typically have related to their cultures. Each of these has biblical precedents and each has been advocated by some of the leading thinkers in the tradition. These categories, he recognizes, are what sociologists call "ideal types." No person or group will conform to them precisely and exemplars of one type will often show traits of others. So he acknowledges that they are "historically inadequate." Nonetheless, he believes, they are helpful for identifying recurrent motifs in Christians' typical stances toward culture.³

Niebuhr's categories have been subjected to numerous critiques and present a number of problems if we are to continue to use them, Without attempting to be exhaustive, let me summarize what I see as the major criticisms that bear on our purpose, which is to see if we can refine and clarify his categories so that they may' be useful to future generations.

1. Niebuhr's abstract category of "Christ" is inadequate and misleading.

One of the most basic critiques of Niebuhr is that his very use of the terms "Christ" and "culture" in defining the problem sets up a theological dualism ,that will be unacceptable to many people today, Niebuhr, following his teacher Ernst Troeltsch, on whom he wrote his dissertation, is working in the Kantian tradition which posits a gulf between the transcendent truths of faith, such as the ideal of "Christ," and the historically conditioned culture, which shapes everything else.⁴ The problem for modern theologians is how to bridge this gap between faith and history. Hence the whole "Christ and culture" problem depends on a dichotomy that many theologians today may find unacceptable. Niebuhr, for instance, like a lot of his contemporaries, tended to separate the Christ of faith from the Jesus of history.

The practical implication. many people will say, is that Niebuhr's Christ and culture terminology seems to imply that "Christ," or more strictly speaking, Christian attempts to follow Christ, are not themselves culturally conditioned. Niebuhr seems to be working with an idea of a transcendent Christ who stands above culture. One can understand how someone might argue for such a transcendent ideal. For instance, if one believes that Christ is in some sense God incarnate, then there is a sense in which the divine second person of the Trinity stands above history, There is also a sense in which the teachings of Christ might be said to have some trans-cultural character, despite being embedded in very particular cultural forms. Whatever Niebuhr's theological intentions, his examples all suggest that what he is really talking about is various Christians' efforts to follow Christ. These conceptions of what the Christian ought to do, the objector will point out, are themselves very much shaped by culture. So to speak of them as "Christ" and everything else as "culture" is very misleading.

I think this point is well taken and an important reminder not to misconceive what Niebuhr is talking about. However, I expect that he would heartily agree with the point. He had no intention of talking about a culturally disembodied "Christ" as opposed to culture. Rather he is simply adopting a language to juxtapose that which we see as duties shaped by Christian commitment and the dominant culture.

It is curious, I think, that Niebuhr in this book puts his emphasis on the seemingly more abstract "Christ," rather than on the church or Christianity. In earlier writing he had become known for his outspoken declarations that the church must distinguish itself from the world. In a well-known essay published in 1935 in a collection titled The Church Against the World, Niebuhr deplored the captivity of the church to the spirit of capitalism, nationalist idolatry, and anthropocentrism. He even wrote that "no antithesis could be greater than that which obtains between the gospel and the capitalist faith," by which he meant faith in wealth. And far from sounding like a transformationist he deplored that "the church has often behaved as though the saving of civilization and particularly of capitalist civilization were its mission."⁵

Nonetheless, these earlier remarks may also suggest why he does not usually speak simply of "the church" or "Christianity" in this book. If one talks about "the church" or "Christianity," one is talking about people, entities, or traditions that are obviously so compromised with their cultures that it would be hard even to state the problem. The term "Christ," on the other hand, makes it clear that the problem that he is dealing with is the teachings of Christianity, especially with respect to what various groups have meant by "following Christ," For the same reason, I think, he deals primarily with leading Christian theologians, rather than with denominations or historical movements. He wants to get at the problem of how Christian faith should be related to the dominant surrounding culture and to point out the various types of ways leading thinkers have addressed that problem. Certainly he recognizes that the views of these thinkers were themselves historically conditioned.

Further, though it is true that Niebuhr developed his categories in a particular theological context for his own theological purposes, that does not necessarily mean that we cannot appropriate them for other purposes or adapt them to other theologies. True, if we hold to another theology, we should not be taken in by the specifics of his theological formulations. But, as with anything else that may have origins in an ideology with which we may disagree, once we recognize those origins we are in a position to selectively appropriate tools that may be employed in the framework of' our own outlooks.⁶

Nevertheless, if we are to continue to use the Christ and culture language, we have to do it with a warning label that using the term "Christ" as opposed to culture can be misleading. The Christ and culture juxtaposition may reinforce the tendency of Christians to forget that their own understanding of Christianity is a cultural product.

The importance of underscoring this warning becomes clearest if we think of the cross-cultural exchanges involved within world Christianity. British Anglicans and African Anglicans, for instance, may differ in many ways that are shaped by their cultures, despite the formal similarities of their creeds. Western Christian missionaries inevitably bring with them the Gospel message, but it is already embedded in Western cultural forms. So missionary work is not simply a matter of bringing Christ to an alien culture, it also always involves a cultural dialogue and an exchange between two cultures. The two cultures learn from each other and the mission is shaped by "Christ" only as part of this cultural exchange. So it is also when Christians encounter non-Christians within one country, such as the United States. One sub-culture encounters other sub-cultures. Properly speaking, we should frame the question as "the culture of Christianity," e.g. urban American Catholicism, "and other cultures." e. g. American urban political culture.

One step in the right direction to remind us of this essential point is to shift the terminology as I do here, from "Christ and culture" to "Christianity and cultures" and to point out that this is shorthand for saying "The culture of Christianity and other cultures." With Niebuhr we still want to say that we are talking about the teachings of Christianity or what it means to follow Christ and that these have some transcendent reference. But we also need to emphasize more clearly that we have these spiritual treasures in earthen vessels.

2. Niebuhr's undifferentiated use of "culture" confuses the issue.

Closely related to these latter points are what have been the most devastating critiques of Niebuhr's actual analysis, those aimed at his use of the term "culture." These critiques, which have been best articulated by the Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder, grow out of underlying differences in theological viewpoint. What Yoder recognized is that Niebuhr's use of "culture" is loaded against traditions such as the Mennonite, which Niebuhr classifies in the "Christ against culture" category. The problem is that Niebuhr uses culture almost indiscriminately as equivalent to "anything people do together." So it includes everything from language to warfare. Having defined culture in this monolithic way. Niebuhr then turns around and criticizes "Christ against culture" advocates for not being consistent in their anti-worldly profession. They may reject the pleasures of sex and of wealth, renounce learning and the fine arts, and refuse to participate in civil government or warfare, but they inevitably adopt some other cultural forms, such as language. learning of earlier eras, or agriculture.⁸

Yoder points out, however, that this is precisely what Christians should be doing. at least by most accounts. His summary is worth quoting at length:

Some elements of culture the church categorically rejects (pornography. tyranny, cultic idolatry). Other dimensions of culture it accepts within clear limits (economic production, commerce, the graphic arts, paying taxes for peacetime civil government). To still other dimensions of culture Christian faith gives a new motivation and coherence (agriculture, family life, literacy. conflict resolution, empowerment). Still others it strips of their claims to possess autonomous truth and value, and uses them as vehicles of communication (philosophy, language. Old Testament ritual, music). Still other forms of culture are created by the Christian churches (hospitals, service of the poor, generalized education).⁹

Clearly if we are to save Niebuhr's analysis from this critique, we must adopt more discriminating and specific meanings when we use the term "culture." It seems to me, however, that this can be done. In fact, Yoder illustrates some very good ways do it. The real question is whether one wants to use this flaw in Niebuhr's own account . in order to dismiss Niebuhr's analysis or whether one might want to correct the flaw as to better usc Niebuhr's analysis.

Most of' the time Niebuhr was not thinking about things like language, agriculture, or hospitals. and his examples have to do with just two general areas of culture toward which Christians have characteristic stances. The first is toward higher learning, secular reason, ,and the arts. The second is toward the dominant cultural structures represented by government, business, and the common ideologies and values that underlie these. It should be obvious, however, that when we describe various Christian :groups as having characteristic attitudes on these matters, we are not saying that they have monolithic attitudes toward them. Almost all Christian groups accept some higher learning ,and employ some of the arts, even if they characteristically reject most of their culture's versions of these. Furthermore. ,attitudes toward government or business or the cultural ideologies on which they are based will vary greatly depending on the particular culture we .are talking about. Christians of a particular theological heritage may find themselves to have very different attitudes toward a seemingly benign liberal democracy than they will have to a tyrannical Marxist police state.

Closely related to these observations is what might be called "the multicultural objection to the entire Niebuhr project. Niebuhr wrote in the "consensus" era of American history. His principal concern was with building a healthy and unified mainstream culture to which socially progressive Christianity might make a contribution.¹⁰Today o there is much more awareness that "culture" means different things to different people: Often people define themselves against the mainstream culture by defining themselves in terms of a sub-culture. particularly an ethnically based sub-culture. That was true in Niebuhr's day as well, He had even grown up in a German ethnic commune. Nonetheless, he pays little attention to how one's sub-cultural identity may cut across one's attitudes towards "culture" generally. Similarly he says little of' how social class may be a factor in determining cultural attitudes, though that also is a factor he was well of' and had even written about in The Social Sources of Denominationalism.

Once again, the proper response to the various objections that Niebuhr uses term "culture" too monolithically is therefore not to throw out his categories but rather to start using the term "culture" in more specific and discriminating ways. We always need to ask what general culture or sub-culture we are talking about and further what specific aspect of that culture is our matter of concern.

3.The categories are not historically adequate.

This brings us to a further potentially decisive difficulty, that the categories are simply not historically adequate. A few years ago two conferences were held at Vanderbilt University to discuss the legacy of the usefulness of the categories for actual historical analysis. The results were fairly negative. While the historians expressed respect for Niebuhr and for his influence, a number argued strongly that his categories would not work for real history.

The root of such complaints is that Niebuhr's categories are a theologian's ideal types. derived from logic more than they are from history. History is simply a lot more messy than that. If we look at particular groups who are supposed to be representatives of one of the types, we find that there are many ways they do not fit the type at all. That is why Mennonites, such as Yoder, have been up in arms about being classified as "Christ against culture," when they actually fit that category in only a few respects. (Neither did it help that Niebuhr apparently confused the Mennonites with the Amish). Charles Scriven in The Transformation of Culture: Christian Social Ethics After H. Richard Niebuhr, argues that the Anabaptist position provides the most adequate means to transform culture. Or one can find Lutherans who are transformationists and Calvinists who withdraw from culture.

My response to this complaint is to say, if the categories are too abstract and seemingly inflexible as Niebuhr presents them, Why not translate them into terms that are historically more adequate? Then historians, theologians, other scholars, amid ordinary people would still have very useful analytical tools for thinking about certain fundamental issues.

The way to fix up the categories is to get away entirely from the idea that the cultural attitudes of each spokesperson or group can be fit neatly into one of the categories. Niebuhr himself recognized that the types were "historically inadequate" and that actual historical figures or groups sometimes displayed all of the traits, But since lie was developing a new typology, he played down the complexities and emphasized the typologys' heuristic or explanatory powers. He also lapsed from his own cautions at one notorious point by criticizing the "Christ against culture" representatives for not being consistent in their position. That was an unfortunate inconsistency on his part. as he does not criticize any other group on that ground. and often notes that a group might be classified under more than one motif.

Nonetheless, by usually speaking as though his ideal types characterize real historical figures, he leaves the impression that each Christian or group can be adequately typed by one or the other of the cultural attitudes. To correct this misleading impression. what we need to emphasize is that the categories are simply, as Niebuhr himself acknowledges. leading motifs. A motif should be seen as a dominant theme with respect to some specific cultural activities. It suggests a musical analogy. A dominant motif may be subordinated in one part of a symphony while another takes over. Identifying a dominant motif in a particular Christian group toward some specific cultural activity should not lead to the expectation that this group will not adopt other motif toward other cultural activities.

This brings us to the crucial point that the categories work if we emphasize that they are not mutually exclusive. Virtually every Christian and every Christian group expresses in one way or another all five of the motifs. With respect to one cultural activity, they may typically express one motif, with respect to another they may characteristically adopt quite a different stance. Even with respect to a particular category of cultural activities, as regarding learning, the state, the arts, contemporary values, popular culture, business, leisure, and so forth. Christians are likely to manifest something of all five of the attitudes.¹²

One might ask then, why bother? If we all express at one time or another all of the attitudes and our attitudes are so complex, do not the categories simply leave us with a muddle? Perhaps so. But the very point is that we will be even more in a muddle without some such categories with which to talk about these complexities. The reason for the muddle is that history—like individual life—is extraordinarily complex and filled with complications and ambiguities. Such analytical categories help us to begin to sort out these complexities. They provide a workable way to think about our attitudes toward these questions amid to help evaluate what our attitudes should be. Furthermore, even though we can now see that everyone is likely to adopt all five of the attitudes. still, with respect to particular cultural questions, we can usually identify one attitude as dominant. So we really do have a clarifying set of classifications. Moreover, these classifications, or some combination of them, might be helpful in establishing rules of thumb for thinking about how we should characteristically relate to some particular types of cultural activities.

Let me give an example of' how this more complex analysis might work with respect to one historical case with which I am most familiar, the history of fundamentalism and post-fundamentalist evangelicalism in twentieth-century America. Writing from the vantage point of Yale Divinity School in the late 1940s Niebuhr had little interest in this tradition and little notion of its potential for continuing vitality. He delivered his lectures just a few months before Billy Graham hit the big time in Los Angeles. Niebuhr talked about this movement, as was then common, as simply "Fundamentalism," and it was clearly an outlook for which he had little time. Accordingly. he relegates fundamentalism to,. of all places. the "Christ of' culture" category. This in spite of the fact that he must have known well that fundamentalists defined themselves primarily as militant opponents to many cultural trends. Niebuhr. however. saw them as simply leftovers from the past, opposing twentieth-century cultural trends only because they were so deeply committed to nineteenth-century outlooks and mores. They accepted a pre-Darwinist cosmology; and insisted on prohibition of various vices, thus reflecting the mores of nineteenth-century revivalism more than the New Testament.¹³

It is certainly true that there is some justice in this critique. One of my interests in the study of fundamentalism and American culture was to understand the degree to which this religious tradition, which claimed to be based purely on New Testament Christianity, was actually shaped by American cultural traditions. Fundamentalists, like many other Christians. have often confused Christianity with certain dimensions of their culture. The clearest examples of' such a "Christ of' culture" attitude is that they have sometimes lapsed into nationalism that has virtually merged American patriotism with the cause of Christ. They sometimes speak as though America is the new Israel.

Nevertheless, one can find all the other motifs within fundamentalism as well. They are militantly against some dimensions of the culture and often speak of America not as Israel, but as Babylon. At other times they adopt a "Christ above culture" attitude, for instance, in adopting the prevalent American attitude that "business is business," while adding to it higher spiritual practices. At still other times or toward other issues, they often have taken a "Christ and culture in paradox" view, perhaps best expressed in the pietist motto. "In the world but not of the world." Yet while they have sometimes been political quietists. they have at other times, as in the recent rise of the Christian Right. been ardent transformers of culture.

What can be said for fundamentalists can be said for virtually any Christian tradition. We can understand far better how its proponents deal with particular issues by sorting them out with these categories. For instance, even American Protestant liberals whose theology may seem as bland as a Hallmark card, can be shown to stand firmly against the culture on certain issues. Let them be confronted by overt racism, sexism. or sexual exploitation and they will be up in arms thundering anathemas and warning their constituents to stay away from certain cultural practices.

These observations also bear on the inevitable objections of today's politically correct that Niebuhr's categories are useless because he himself does not deal with issues such as gender or race, or that he deals with the thought of elites instead of what the .ordinary people thought or did. The fact of the matter is that once we get away from Niebuhr himself and try to use the categories constructively, they are extraordinarily useful for analyzing the attitudes of almost any Christians on almost any cultural issues. To what extent is contemporary Christian feminism shaped by adopting the views of the dominant culture, and to what extent might it represent an attempt to transform or Christianize those views? How have they negotiated the relationship between Scripture, Christian tradition, and their feminist views? Why do many women resist feminism? Or to what extent has Christian African American political thought in the past half-century been shaped by a desire simply to be full-fledged participants in American culture and to what extent has it been shaped by a separatist impulse? One could do a lot worse than to employ Niebuhr's categories for sorting out these issues and clarifying how participants should think about them.

4. We need more categories.

Once we have dealt with the central issue--that almost all Christians exemplify something of all of the types but that on particular issued we can find dominant motifs--it is easier to deal with this last objection, that we need more categories.

Many people who have commented on Niebuhr have suggested that this or that group does not fit any of Niebuhr's categories and that new ones need to be constructed. To suggest just two examples, where does militant liberation theology fit? Or what about the many Christians who see the conversion of souls as the preeminent task and will embrace any cultural means to further that end?

My view is that one can deal with most such anomalies by emphasizing once again that actual historical groups will be characterized by combinations of dominant motifs. So, even though we start with only five unhistorical ideal categories, various combinations of these can help us understand a much larger number of actual historical types.

Further, we have to recognize that dwelling on the Christ and culture question does load our discussion in ways that does not do justice to some groups. Many revivalist Christians, for instance, who see the conversion of souls as their preeminent task are simply not thinking much about their attitudes toward culture, even though they have some very definite attitudes. Niebuhr's categories would help them think more clearly about their actual approaches to various aspects of culture, but we can not impose on them an agenda that seems to say that this is the most important thing they should be thinking about.

As to the possibility of adding categories, one of the most constructive suggestions comes from University of Chicago Law professor Michael McConnell. He suggests that if one approaches the question not on the basis of theological rationales, but rather on the basis of what Christians actually do, new categories will emerge. For instance, he thinks that "Christ against culture" could be divided into "Church apart from culture" and "Church in conflict with culture." On the other hand, he thinks the third and fourth types could be consolidated under "Church accommodated to culture." Despite differing theological rationales, he argues, they do not make any difference in practice. "Christ transforming culture," he suggests. might better be called "church influencing culture." He also thinks we should add two additional types. "church controlling culture" and "culture controlling church."¹⁵

I can appreciate the usefulness of these suggested revisions of the categories. I certainly think there is a distinction that can be made between "Christ against culture," by which Niebuhr means Christ separated from aspects of culture, and "Christ against culture." in the sense of Christians feeling at war with aspects of the culture.¹⁶ However, as my analysis of fundamentalism suggests. the sense of warfare can already be expressed under the rubric of any' of three of the existing categories. Some who see themselves at war choose to separate from the mainstream culture, some live militantly in a paradoxical relation to that culture, not of the world but still in it. Or others might be engaged in warfare of transformation, as in recent culture wars, or in liberation theology. So in this case I would not suggest adding any categories, but simply making clear that, for Niebuhr. "Christ against culture" means "Christ separating from culture."¹⁷

Generally my attitude is that if the categories are to remain useful, we should take a conservative approach to them, preserving the five we have and not .adding new categories. Five is as large a number as most people can easily remember anyway. And there is very little chance that a new set of categories will catch on the way Niebuhr's set has.

Each of the major objections, then, can be adequately answered. If we adopt the flexibility and interpretations I have suggested, recognizing the complexity of any real historical subjects. then Niebuhr's five categories can be extremely useful analytical tools.

I should say in closing that they are introductory tools. They are useful primarily for getting people to begin thinking more clearly about these issues. Once that has happened they may want to modify the tools to suit their purposes and will likely want to keep them out of sight in their finished work. Like any typology they invite simplistic thought and too easy categorizing of other Christians. Nonetheless, if used properly, they can continue to be a rich resource for helping Christians think about their relationships to the world.

One final potential criticism may be mentioned in the light of what follows. It is sometimes argued that the way Niebuhr frames his categories makes it inevitable that his own transformationist position turns out to be the most favored. Yet while Niebuhr is clearly an advocate of such an outcome, I see no reason why the use of his five categories should dictate that result. For now it is sufficient to give just one counter example—which is my own view. I think that "Christ and culture in paradox,." or some version of a two cities or two kingdom view, should be the most usual rule of thumb for Christian attitudes toward mainstream culture, although each of the other attitudes is sometimes appropriate as well.

NOTES

1.Stanley Hauerwas and William N. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon. 1989), 40.

2. See for example C. T. McIntyre, God History, History, and Historians.' An Anthology of Modern Christian Views of History' (New York: Oxford University Press. 1977).

3.'H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 43-44. He also acknowledges in this same passage that "traits will .appear that seem wholly unique and individual," so he does not regard his types is exhaustive.

4. Michael J. Baxter, "Let's Do Away with Faith and History: A Critique of H. Richard Niebuhr's False Antinomies," Modern Theology (forthcoming). Cf. John Howard Yoder. "How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture," Glen H. Stassen, D.M. Yeager and John Howard Yoder, eds. Authentic Transformation:' A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon Press. 1996). 58-6!.

5.'H. Richard Niebuhr, "Toward the Independence of the Church," in H. Richard Niebuhr, Wilhelm Pauck, and Francis P. Miller. The Church Against the World (Chicago: Harper and Row, 1945). 128-139

6.Stanley Hauerwas, who has been one of the most vocal critics of Niebuhr for loading his .account in favor of transformationism,. nonetheless concedes that the categories have heuristic value. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 246-47.

7.Yoder. "How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned:.A Critique of Christ and Culture, 56.

8. Cf. .a similar critique in Charles Scriven, The Transformation of Cu/ture: Christian Social Ethics after H. Richard Niebuhr.(Scottdale, Penn.:Herald Press, l988).

9. Yoder, "How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture," 69. Yoder .adds "egalitarianism. abolitionism, and feminism," which are more confusing, since they both reflect wider cultural trends, yet in their particular church forms are cultural products of churches.

10. Richard J. Mouw and Sander Griffioen, Pluralism anti Horizons (Grand Rapids: MI, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993), 134-40, offer a helpful discussion of this point.

11.For instance, a helpful .analysis of this point is provided by Diane Yeager. "The Christ who comes into the world comes into his own: The Method and Theoretical Perspectives Informing Christ and Culture." (Paper for conference on "The Enduring Problem: H. Richard Niebuhr's , Christ and Culture After Forty Years," Vanderbilt University, May 14—16, 1993..) The second conference was held in 1994. 1 am indebted to John R. Fitzmier, got furnishing me with copies of the conference papers.

12. Niebuhr recognized this complexity when he wrote in his essay The Purpose of the church and its Ministry: Reflections on the Aims of Theological Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 26, "The world is sometimes enemy, sometimes partner of the Church, often antagonist, always one to be befriended; now the one that does not know what Church knows, now the knower of what the Church does not know,"

13. Christ and Culture,, 102. For Niebuhr's views of fundamentalism see his "Fundamentalism", Encyclopedia of Social Science, vol. VI (New York: Social Science research Council 193!), VI, 5 26-27.

14/ Liberationists might see a dictatorship as very much of the Devil—and so separate themselves radically .against the current political culture—but still be transformationists, hoping eventually to change it. Or .a variation on the question is some recent Catholic liberation theology that has been based on a theology of grace,. articulated by Vatican II, which sees .all people as already to some extent the objects of God's grace. making it difficult to draw a clear line between the "natural" and the "supernatural." Cf. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990), 206. This theology and the liberationists' .appropriation of Marxism for their cultural analysis does not fit in exactly with any of the theological motifs that Niebuhr relates to his types. My inclination is to say' that liberation theology is principally a sub-type of the transformationist motif, While Niebuhr illustrates his type with theologians who appeal primarily to the doctrine of creation, the precise theology is not essential to defining the type.

15. Michael McConnell. DePaul Law Review, 42:1 (Fall 1992), 191-221. 1 am indebted to the summary in John F.Wilson, "The Last Type in Christ and Culture, and the End for which it was Created". (Paper for conference on "The Enduring Problem: H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture After Forty Years," Vanderbilt University. 1994). 14-15.

16. Gabriel A. Almond, Emmanuel Sivan, ,and R. Scott Appelby: in Fundamentalisms Comprehended, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Applebv, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), 426 and 447, argue that world "fundamentalisms" can be classified into four types: "the. world conqueror. the world transformer, the world creator, and the world renouncer." They also suggest that fundamentalist groups progress historically from one type to another.

17. Niebuhr himself recognized the additional type in which culture controls the church, but used it only to state the problem of defining what the Christian alternatives ought to he. Historically there might be .a category for the church controlling the culture, I would say, however, that such .attitudes could be absorbed in the category of "Christ transforming culture.

Irony of Ironies: Evaluating the Moderns

Book Review: Modern American Religion (Vol. I): The Irony of It All: 1893-1919 by Martin E. Marty (University of Chicago Press, 385 pp., $24.95.)

One of the striking features of the late decades of the 20th century is the extent to which we are still recapitulating the debates of the century’s first decades. This is the more remarkable when we realize that from our perspective American cultural leadership at the turn of the century was incorrigibly Pollyanna-like in its moods. Yet we are still discussing many of the very issues that arose out of that 19th-century atmosphere of seemingly limitless faith in humanity’s ability through science and native virtue to unite the race and achieve indefinite progress. Certainly political thought has not advanced much. During the 1980s many have puzzled as to how we got a president whose theoretical positions seem straight out of an early-century five-and-dime. But the alternatives are, broadly speaking, of the same vintage. Our options have not changed much since the 1912 election which featured Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt. William Taft and Eugene Debs -- except we have fewer options.

In American Christianity, our dependence on the agendas set early in the century is even more striking. And again this dependence is the more notable because in some respects the dominant religious tones of the two eras seem so different. The optimistic spirit that produced the prohibition effort, for instance, seems quaint to us, and we are more alert now to racial and gender discrimination. But think of how many of today’s issues took their shape during the turn-of-the-century decades. The social gospel, the relationship of Christianity to socialism and Marxism, the problems of modern warfare, nationalism and imperialism are standard themes. Ecumenical Christianity is still a commonplace ideal and a rare reality. Problems of relating biblical criticism and modern philosophies to Christian tradition are still in a state of flux that would seem familiar to an early-century theologian.

Most surprising in its persistence is the conservative side of American Protestantism. Rather than politely disappearing as most of the early trend-setters predicted, turn-of-the-century varieties of conservatism have actually become more vigorous than their allegedly more modern counterparts. Biblical inerrancy is debated in America’s largest denomination with the same vigor, and in almost the precise terms, that it was in the 1890s Charles Briggs trial. Creation and evolution are being argued even more energetically now than then, and in 1987 have been before the Supreme Court. And what are the most distinctive features of today’s American religion? Mostly movements that took shape within the past century -- pentecostalism, the holiness movement, fundamentalism and dispensational premillennialism. And in odd ways, these groups have taken over much of the agenda of the old social gospelers, presenting us with programs for Christianizing America. At the rate things are going, they will soon be talking about the 21st century as "the Christian century."

In the light of these continuities, we welcome a comprehensive account of this formative era from the peerless historian of American religion, Martin E. Marty: It is titled Modern American Religion (Vol. 1) : The Irony of It All: 1893-1919 (University of Chicago Press, 385 pp., $24.95) In this first volume of a projected four-volume history of American religion in the 20th century (the legend has already arisen that the last volume will be completed on the day he retires) , Marty looks at the impact of modernity on a breathtaking variety of American religious groups and individuals. He knows enough in detail about their mutually contradictory claims and pretensions to regard them with a slightly bemused attitude. He sees irony, accordingly, as the most appropriate theme.

Marty follows Reinhold Niebuhr in describing his outlook as one of "humane irony." This motif, he says, is especially appropriate to the early 20th century because illusions of innocence were so common then. Moreover, we can now see that many idealistic efforts of the period produced results that were the opposite of what the actors intended.

Perhaps the central irony is that already mentioned: the groups that were expected then to lose to the powers of modernity look today like winners. Marty notes concerning this period most often described as liberal, modernist or progressive that, ironically, this was also the era in which virtually every enduring and vital American religious conservatism was born." Other ironies might have been observed at the time. Religious modernists who were attempting to save Christian credibility in the secular intellectual climate were not often taken seriously by secularists (of course, those potential secularists who were impressed by modernism were modernists, not secularists) Even the secularists in America, like John Dewey, were typically not God-killers, as were many in Europe, but promoted secularity by blending it with new forms of religion. Conservative ethnic leaders often argued that separateness from dominant American culture was essential to internally uniting their group; but every ethnic group was sharply divided over this very issue. Religious ethnics in modern America often wanted to become fully American at the same time they were avoiding being modern, not entirely recognizing that it was a package deal.

In the meantime, America’s prominent opinion shapers, both modernists and progressives, were talking endlessly of a cosmopolitan vision of a mutually accepting people producing a united culture, but were segregating and excluding nonwhites from their midst and opposing immigrants who were not from northern Europe. The social gospel was especially ironically flawed on such fronts. Walter Rauschenbusch in one address linked Anglo-Saxons with "princely stock." In 1912 he approved every plank in the Democratic Party platform save one -- that calling for women’s suffrage. Marty, who usually remains cool, is especially critical of the social gospelers, whom he describes as "vague on program, weak on detail, generally out of touch with laborers, [and] inept at politics." The crowning irony of this irony-filled era Marty effectively saves for the book’s climax: this age filled with ecumenical rhetoric was also a great age of civil religion; hence with World War I, warfare became the great ecumenical event. "America was losing its innocence in an effort to reclaim the purity and innocence that came with its founding." It was using the most divisive instrument of warfare to bring wholeness to the world. "What missionaries would not accomplish, war might."

These are marvelous insights. Yet this great volume has its flaws. The chief is that it has literary difficulties, as Marty, true to form, was the first reviewer to point out. At the end he adds a "conclusion" which is actually an extraordinarily thoughtful reflection on whether the theme of irony has succeeded in holding the narrative together. Marty does not say it has not, but he does tell us that, having asked himself the question regarding the three future volumes, "Am I ready to ‘go’ with this ironic vision?" he has answered No. Marty identifies the problem exactly and, if I may dare say it, it is a classic irony of a strength turning out to be a mixed blessing. The strength is that Marty has covered a plethora of material. He defines religion broadly enough to include helpful accounts of major American thinkers in history, philosophy and the social sciences. He covers also the varieties of modernist theologians, many ethnic groups who tried to stay sheltered from modernity, the major denominational types, all sorts of countermodernist movements, and groups that sought to restore wholeness through physical or psychological therapies, ecumenism, social Christianity or patriotism. Each of these topics has many subtopics, so that typically the story of each has to be confined to from two to five pages.

The problem is, as Marty points out, "amid hundreds of religious groups and thousands of events and movements" how to sustain a narrative. This problem becomes acute for anyone writing American religious history once we give up the idea of a mainline Protestant center. An interpretation must hold things together. Without such a strong interpretation in this volume, we get something of the feeling that we are being guided from room to room of a sizable art gallery. The guide is skillful and offers insights in every room. He also provides a valuable taxonomy, classifying every work and person around the theme of their reactions to modernity. If it were high art we were looking at, this might be enough. But one cannot produce high art in three-or four-page narratives. So we need an interpretive center that provides a plot. The motif of irony does not quite do that. When applied to such a wide range of topics it becomes diffuse, with a different twist each time it appears.

Marty notes that he has purposely attempted not to overinterpret, not to force complex events into distorting molds. That again is a virtue. But we are left with the feeling that this first volume is underinterpreted. In the next volume, "conflict replaces irony as the major theme." That may solve the problem, though conflict is also so universal that the narrative will need a center. We can hope, though, that in the light of the whole, this first volume will turn out to look like the first few hundred pages of a Russian novel in which massive skill is required just to get all the characters properly on stage.

We can get at the ironic flaw in this volume as it stands on its own if we compare it with Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, from which Marty borrows his theme. Three differences must strike us. First, Marty knows more history than Reinhold Niebuhr ever dreamed of. Niebuhr, largely self-educated, read a few American history books and was ready to go. Not knowing too much is a great advantage in creating a historical plot, especially for someone like Niebuhr who had a fine sense for what was significant. Second, Niebuhr’s narrative has a clear center. It is the American establishment, whose collectively pretentious self-perceptions are filled with lessons for a later day. Marty also justifies using the theme of irony for the early 20th century because of the unusual pretensions of the establishment leadership of that era, but he wants to avoid even vestigial versions of such pretensions that would keep mainline Protestants on center stage, as they are in traditional American religious histories. The result of such evenhandedness is that the theme of irony loses much of its unitive potential. When it finally does make a climactic appearance in the closing chapters on ecumenism, the social gospel and war, it is effective -- but it has been offstage too long.

Finally, and most importantly, the great difference between this book and Niebuhr’s is theological. If there is any major irony in this valuable and insightful volume, it is that it dwells on a putatively Niebuhrian theme of irony without talking about original sin. Granted, Marty is writing not theology but history (and Niebuhr was using history to write theology). Nonetheless, even as a historical matter, the question of original sin was one of the grand issues of the turn-of-the-century era, arguably its greatest divide. Indeed, it was various denials of original sin, or various affirmations of natural human potentials, that produced much of the era’s optimism, and hence many of the ironies. Many of the religious countermoderns, on the other hand, were asserting a more pessimistic version of the unaided human condition, and hence the need of more radical divine corrective. Ironically, to be sure, many of these countermoderns combined the traditional doctrines with their own versions of optimistic Americanism so as to undercut their own theological affirmations.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the 20th century is that it has been the century whose most enlightened thinkers thought they could do without the concept of sin, especially original sin. Inheriting 19th-century philosophies that were optimistic about human nature, early 20th-century moderns refined and canonized them. It is this trust in human nature that produced the now seemingly hollow political philosophies for which we nonetheless still contend. By denying original sin, moderns, who often prided themselves on their empiricism, were denying a point of traditional Christian doctrine for which there is immense contemporary evidence. When neo-orthodox writers pointed this out in the middle decades of the century, many listened for a time. Now, however, the impact of that lesson seems to be fading.

Such themes, though suggested by this volume and probably not far from Marty’s own evaluative framework, remain implicit in it. Perhaps it would seem overly didactic to spell them out, or too much an intrusion of private judgments into a work directed to the public domain. Nonetheless, no less an "atheist for Niebuhr" than Perry Miller, in his great volumes on the New England Mind, stated baldly that what he admired about the Puritans was that they faced directly the realities of the human predicament. The way the Puritans qualified and implemented this fundamental insight was strewn with devastating ironies. Still, by starting with the frankly stated premise that the problem is the flawed human character in a mysterious universe, Miller was able to highlight the universal aspects of even so eccentric an experience as that of the Puritans.

Marty has produced a truly impressive work, far more balanced and fair than a more highly interpreted account would be. It is masterful in its balance. That is the truly good side of what this review has turned into an ironic flaw. This book is well worth reading. Because he has avoided imposing a strong central interpretive plot, it does not read like a novel; but it does not read like a textbook either, which is to say that it is quite palatable, especially if taken at a careful pace. It is an authoritative and remarkable compendium, often framed in the words of the participants and informed by a voluminous array of historical scholarship. It is filled with wisdom, and each brief narrative is worthy of close attention. Only Martin Marty could have written so comprehensive a volume with so much authority and insight.

God on the Brain: The Neurobiology of Faith

The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet.

By James B. Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright. Pilgrim, 233 pp., $20.95.

In late 1997, an unusual story about the discovery of a "God-spot" in the brain began to appear in newspapers and newsmagazines. In a series of tests, epileptic patients with heightened brain activity in the temporal lobe showed hypersensitivity to religious words and phrases. Some news services announced that scientists had discovered the source of religious experiences.

On Internet discussion groups, atheists crowed that religion had been proven to be nothing more than a dysfunction of the brain. Some theists countered, equally glibly, that God had designed our brains to be receptive to the divine; consequently, atheists seemed to be missing a vital piece of equipment.

Researchers had indeed found a region of the brain that could be linked to religious experience, but they neither claimed that this region was the cause of all such experiences nor sought to disparage or "reduce" religion or religious experience. What they had discovered, rather, was that what goes on in the brain is profoundly connected to what goes on in the mind, even in the most sublime of all experiences. They also demonstrated that neuroscience is becoming increasingly important for thinking about some of the basic claims of religion.

James Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright seek to break new ground in the dialogue between religion and science. They also hope to demonstrate that neuroscience is not only the appropriate but the preferred partner in that dialogue.

There has never been a better time to make this argument. President George Bush and the U.S. Congress declared the 1990s the decade of the brain, and it has lived up to that declaration. Spurred by the development of advanced scanning techniques such as PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imagining), neuroscientists are getting glimpses of the brain in action. These maps allow them to observe the brain as it never has been seen before.

This culmination of more than 100 years of serious brain research is finally allowing us to ask some truly interesting questions: Where do emotions come from and why do we have them? How do we think and learn? How does the three-pound, gelatinous mass that we call the brain produce our identities? Though final answers are still along way off, it is significant that we can now begin to frame such questions in a scientific way. In some cases, the answers seem startling. Far from endorsing a simple reduction of mind to mere neurons, many neuroscientists are embracing paradigms that emphasize the holistic character of brain function and the ways that reason and emotion interplay to make up a self.

This book is neither a neuroscience textbook nor a systematic theology. Rather, it is a working-out of theology through the lens of the neurosciences. Ashbrook, who before his recent death was a pastoral theologian and professor emeritus of religion and personality at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Albright, executive editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, seek to develop a "neurobiology of faith." To do so is possible because the brain holds a peculiar place in the universe -- and, more specifically, in our universe. We ourselves, in a sense, are brains. To study the brain is to study ourselves, but in a way that makes us both subject and object. It is as if we were trying to look both in and out of the window at the same time.

Furthermore, to study ourselves, the authors claim, is to study God. Ashbrook and Albright's introduction states that "God-talk is really human-talk, since it is we who are conversing." That is, because we can experience God only as human beings, in the process of learning about human life we will necessarily learn something about God as well. Even more than this, understanding the human brain can be the key to understanding God.

It is worth taking this startling claim seriously. Asked to name the most exotic thing in the universe, most of us would mention either the very large (black holes and supernovas) or the very small (all those spooky little particles). But the most incredible structure in the entire universe may be what is sitting behind our eyeballs. Inside our heads is the most complex and sophisticated device in creation.

Every brain contains approximately 100 billion cells called neurons. Neurons connect with one another to form complex communication networks that, among other things, enable us to walk, talk and breath without thinking about it.. There are a staggering 100 trillion neuron connections in the brain. As anyone who uses a comparatively simple desktop computer can testify, it seems a miracle that such a complex system could work without crashing. Yet the brain smoothly, day in and day out, enables us to perceive objects in color, distinguish the year and place of a wine by taste, and (sometimes) understand calculus. Black holes seem boring by comparison.

But can study of the brain really tell us about God? Given the robustness of Ashbrook and Aibright's claims, the actual justifications they give for them are rather weak. While any knowledge of God must indeed be conditioned by human experience, Ashbrook and Albright actually claim much more than this: that the brain not only patterns our experience of God, but its very structure can inform us of God's nature. This is possible because "the human brain is orderly and purposeful as the universe is orderly and purposeful." Since order and purpose ultimately derive from God, studying them can give us deeper insight into theological truths.

Yet it is also clear that, ultimately, Ash-brook and Albright's belief in God does not derive from these sorts of arguments. For them, God is something that is experienced, not argued about. The result of this orientation is a book that is more a thoughtful meditation than a discursive argument. Neurobiology is used not so much to discover truths about God as to evoke them.

Ashbrook and Albright argue that a central feature of human cognition is our predisposition to humanize what we perceive. This humanizing begins with the self. In the past two decades, the growing trend in both neuroscience and philosophy has been to counter the old reductionist tradition that we are nothing but a collection of neurons, nothing but the physical constituents of our bodies. Rather, our selves emerge from all the activities of those buzzing neurons. Avoiding the extremes of both a materialistic monism and a mind-body dualism, Ashbrook and Albright advocate an emergent holism that recognizes that the brain has a "bottom up" influence on the mind, but also that the mind has a "top-down" influence on the brain.

The brain is a constantly changing organ. As you read these lines, they induce different firing patterns in the brain. Some of these patterns may be fairly transient, but others may persist. The relationship between the mind and the brain is not a simple, one-way road; it is dynamic. For this reason, Ashbrook and Albright prefer to speak not of the mind or the brain, but of the "mind/brain." The "I" is not simply a Cartesian soul, but the dynamic interaction and product of a human mind, a human brain and a human body.

But for Ashbrook and Albright the concept of the humanizing brain implies much more than this. They claim that reality itself is humanlike. Two main implications seem to follow from this claim. The first is that the brain plays a primary role in what we perceive. If we are asked to describe what we see when we look out of the window, we are likely to paint a seamless panorama, exquisite in detail and color, and vaguely rectangular. Years of scientific research have shown, however, that this panorama is a construction, enabled by multiple systems of neurons specialized for visual processing.

These neural systems often take shortcuts in processing the data sent in through the eyes. These shortcuts are detectable by a variety of optical illusions and deficits produced under testing. The panorama that we are able to describe is made possible, in part, by the fact that our eyes are constantly moving. Hold your index finger about a foot in front of your face and try to concentrate on it without moving your eyes at all. Not only will you find this difficult to do, but you will soon experience a sudden decrease in your peripheral vision.

Many other and quite unusual effects, however, appear only as a result of brain damage. A phenomenon known as "blindsight" occurs in some patients who have damaged visual cortexes. These patients suffer blindness in a portion of their visual field. Yet if asked to guess where an object is in that blind area, they can do so correctly most of the time. It appears that somewhere in the brain the information is being processed, but it cannot be accessed as part of a visual field.

An even more unusual condition is known as facial agnosia. This condition results in the victim's inability to recognize faces, although recognition of other objects is not generally impaired. It appears that our brains have very specialized modules for identifying faces and reading facial expressions. In fact, our ability to recognize and remember faces is nothing short of remarkable. Over a lifetime, we remember thousands upon thousands of faces. We do it so well that most of us easily compensate for nonessentials, such as beards and hairstyles. The old saying, "I never forget a face," is rooted in good biology.

Our facility for seeing faces, even when they are not there, leads to the next meaning of the humanizing brain. When Ashbrook and Albright say that reality itself is humanlike, they are claiming that we are predisposed to put a face on external reality, to treat it as if it were a human agent. In a roundabout way, this becomes a justification for belief in God. We cannot help but put a face on the ultimate. Because of the structure of the mind/brain, we prefer to see the ultimate in personal terms, and it is in those terms that the ultimate is the most meaningful to us. This does not mean, however, that God is merely a projection or construction. The data are real, but it is the brain/mind's construction of those data that gives them a personal quality.

While I have reservations about this argument, it should not be dismissed out of hand. Studies in developmental psychology show that infants and toddlers are predisposed to treat the world as animate. For them, a ball rolls not because it is following Newton's laws of motion, but because it wants to roll. Similarly, many aboriginal religions possess animistic characteristics. They see rocks, trees and rivers as inhabited by spirits and describe natural events in intentional terms. Our mechanization of the natural world is a rather recent cultural aberration.

Central to Ashbrook and Albright's book is neuroscientist Paul MacLean's division of the brain according to its evolutionary heritage. This framework partitions the brain into its three evolutionary episodes: the reptilian, the mammalian and the "new brain" or neocortex. In MacLean's original schema, each evolutionary episode is reflected in the physical makeup of the brain and the behaviors associated with those brain regions. Thus, the earliest or reptilian portion of the brain, associated primarily with the brain stem, is most involved with autonomic regulation and the most basic of survival Strategies involving food, procreation and territoriality. The mammalian brain, sitting roughly on top of the brain stem and including a number of structures associated with the limbic system, plays a primary role in emotional responses and memory. The neocortex, unique to humans, is strongly associated with language, reasoning and attention.

Ashbrook and Albright use this framework to speak of both human nature and the human experience of God. The territoriality of the reptilian brain is reflected (problematically for the authors) in the territoriality and jealousy of the God of the Old Testament. The mammalian brain's predisposition to and need for nurture can serve as a metaphor for understanding a nurturing God. The split between left-brain and right-brain modes of reasoning do and should evoke different ways of experiencing God. Throughout, the brain and its structures are used as metaphors for speaking of God and the role of God in our lives.

The way Ashbrook and Albright use MacLean's model reveals the current state of neuroscience. The two authors recognize what has now become common wisdom: the triune brain is not simply triune. While particular structures of the brain can be seen in terms of their evolutionary heritage, the functions of many of these structures have changed and are much more complicated than previously thought. In other words, the reptilian and mammalian portions of the human brain do not always do the same things as those structures do in reptiles and mammals. Indeed, these regions continue to play important roles in memory, the integration of information, and consciousness -- all elements critical to the operation of the neocortex. Thus, Ashbrook and Albright do not take MacLean's model completely literally, but use it as a helpful heuristic for thinking through the behaviors associated with these various stages and systems.

The difficulties with MacLean's model point to a larger issue that Ashbrook and Albright spend a significant amount of space analyzing: to what extent is the brain modular? Much of modern neuroscientific research has been dedicated to associating specific brain regions (or "modules") with specific behaviors or abilities -- an approach which has met with considerable success. Language tends to be located in the left hemisphere. Most visual processing occurs in the back of the brain, which is why we see "stars" when we receive a blow to the back of the head. Spatial reasoning seems to be associated with the right hemisphere.

Yet these modules do not work in isolation from each other. Language is a case in point. A considerable amount of language processing appears to occur in the left hemisphere, and brain damage in these areas can result in quite specific language impairments. Damage in a region known as Broca's area, for instance, can lead to an inability to speak, although comprehension remains intact. But it is now clear that the right hemisphere plays a significant role in language processing as well, and that language comprehension and production involve many regions of the brain. To complicate things further, young children who suffer brain damage in the left hemisphere often develop language normally, with the right hemisphere picking up the slack. Increasingly, scientists are finding that brain functions are integrated and dynamic.

One of the most influential and dramatic illustrations of this integration is the case of Phineas Gage, recently republicized by Antonio and Hanna Damasio arid cited by Ash-brook and Albright. In 1848, Gage suffered a horrible accident while working for the railroad. An explosion sent a seven-inch metal rod crashing through his skull and the left frontal lobe of his brain. Miraculously, Gage survived the explosion, did not lose consciousness and reacted rather calmly throughout the event. But after he recovered Gage was no longer the same man he once had been. Once a productive worker, Gage now was often tardy and verbally abusive.

Recent research on people with similar injuries reveals the same pattern. These people seem to lack not any reasoning ability but the emotional associations that guide reasoning. They are unable to make decisions and do not have the emotional inhibitions that prevent us from saying whatever comes to mind. Reason and emotion seem to be integrally entwined.

Indeed, much of the most exciting research today is being done on the relationships between those aspects of the self that we have long held to be opposed: reason and emotion, mind and body the physical and the mental. These dualisms that have permeated Western models of thinking are being swept away. It is here, perhaps, that the most fertile interaction between theology and neuroscience can take place, for it is the challenge to these traditional categories that is most relevant to theological concepts of the self and possibly of God as well.

The Christian view of God is preeminently personal. If our view of the human person changes, so will how we speak of God as a person. But the range of implications goes far beyond this, for neuroscience also affects how we see our relationship to God. What do we mean by the image of God? In what sense are we free, moral agents? What does resurrection mean? And do we really have a God-spot? The Humanizing Brain serves as a thoughtful introduction to many of these issues. It is, however, merely the first stage in an expanding dialogue, one that is already both stimulating and rewarding. The decade of the brain is nearly over, but the process of discovery for scientists and theologians is only just beginning.

An Unfolding Creation

God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution.

By John Haught. Westview, 224 pp.

Though many people believe that evolution is established fact, it is rarely considered a suitable topic for theological reflection. While conservatives are locked in a constant battle over the age of the earth and the historicity of Noah’s flood, liberals are often wary of evolution’s purported implications. Slogans such as the "survival of the fittest" and images of nature as "red in tooth and claw" seem far distant from the lessons of humility and community found in church and synagogue.

John Haught’s latest work seeks to change this perception. Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University and director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science and Religion, brings considerable theological acumen and scientific awareness to this difficult topic. He provides a thoughtful and insightful theological framework that not only finds room for evolution, but also sees it as integral to a fuller understanding of divine purpose.

As the title indicates, Haught seeks not simply to provide a theology in dialogue with evolutionary theory, but a theology of evolution. He takes a middle path in the dialogue between science and religion. On one end of the spectrum, fundamentalists and atheists claim that Christianity and evolutionary science are mutually contradictory; the truth of one entails the falsity of the other. On the other end, liberal theologians and some science writers advocate a separate-worlds model. As Stephen Jay Gould has recently emphasized, religion tells about the Rock of Ages; science tells about the age of rocks. Since science and religion deal with different domains, no conflict can occur.

Haught will have none of this. Darwin’s theory of evolution, he insists, radically affects theological claims. It challenges the theological hierarchy of being that places humankind above and separate from the rest of creation. Not only does it make us reconsider the task of natural theology, it influences such topics as creation, eschatology and the problem of evil. Haught therefore encourages neither opposition nor separation, but engagement. More specifically, he encourages readers to consider a theology that is significantly informed by the broadly accepted claims of modern Darwinian theory. But Haught is careful to distinguish between science and the claims often made on behalf of science. Accepting evolutionary biology neither confirms Christianity nor denies it. Rather, it alters the way we think about many basic issues.

While Haught’s treatment of the relationship between science and theology is interesting, it is the theological work that stands out. By placing the dialogue between religion and science within a framework that strongly engages many of the most important currents of contemporary theology, Haught accomplishes what few others have. Throughout, he emphasizes the historical and eschatological character of Christian thought. While we must still retain a hierarchy of being, Haught asserts that it is not a vertical but a horizontal hierarchy. Humankind is significant because of its role in the unfolding of creation, an unfolding that is not yet complete and which is directed toward a yet unfulfilled promise.

From the perspective of process theology, Haught also addresses the problem of evil as amplified by evolutionary thought, with its eons of struggle and extinction. Nature reveals to us a God who persuades but does not command, a God who expresses love through selfemptying, incarnation and shared suffering. Taoist metaphors and contemporary Muslim and Jewish thought help Haught to amplify his position.

Haught also tries to relieve tensions between theology and Darwinian evolution, particularly in regard to issues of purpose and ultimacy. Here we encounter the differing natures of scientific and theological discourse, for while science is limited to what is observable, theology seeks to understand the whole. Thus, Haught rejects sociobiologists’ claims to be able to explain morality. For him morality comes out of a sense of meaning that cannot come from science alone but that must appeal to religion. But while evolutionary science may not be able to indicate an unambiguous direction to life, it reveals enough of a pattern to be consistent with theological claims of an ultimate purpose or promise.

Most readers should find considerable food for thought in this book, though it leaves some questions unanswered. Haught frequently criticizes the intelligent-design movement championed by Michael Behe and Philip Johnson, but does not engage with the movement through extended argument. His discussion of the doctrine of the resurrection in terms of a deeper (pancosmic) relationship with the universe, while pregnant with possibility, is brief and somewhat vague.

These, however, are minor quibbles. Few theologians have struggled with Darwin’s theory as eloquently as Haught has. His book should establish that much can be gained from the kinds of insight that a dialogue with evolutionary biology has to offer.

Divine Summons

I have learned over the years that students, wearily carrying out a writing assignment, often have recourse to the dictionary. Assigned to write on a specific topic, they will begin with a dictionary definition. Let it never be said that I have learned nothing from reading their papers all these years. Look up the word vocation in a dictionary, and you will find that the first two meanings given will be something like the following: "1. a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action: esp: a divine call to the religious life; 2. the work in which a person is regularly employed: occupation."

It was in part the genius and in part the danger of the Reformations of the 16th century that they tended to collapse the first of these into the second. One’s vocation became simply one’s work. To be sure, for the Reformers this was a wider concept than what we have come to mean by work -- which is, roughly, a job for the doing of which one is paid, a way to make a living. For example, familial responsibilities, though they do not belong to the sphere of work, were clearly understood by the Reformers to be part of one’s vocation. Hence, a man could be very conscientious in the duties of his occupation and still fail terribly in his calling as a father.

Even granting such qualifications, however, it is true to say that for the Reformers vocation came to be associated with the responsibilities of everyday life, rather than with a divine summons to do something extraordinary. To that sanctification of everyday work -- and to the dangers of such sanctification -- I will return in a little while. It is one of the tensions built into our concept of vocation.

Even if we connect vocation not only with work but also with the domestic and familial responsibilities so essential to life, there may be other duties that call us as well. When Ken Burns produced his much acclaimed series of public television shows on the Civil War, one of the most powerful moments for many listeners was the reading of a letter written by Major Sullivan Ballou of the Second Rhode Island regiment to his wife, Sarah. Believing that his regiment would engage in battle within a few days, and reckoning with the fact that he might not return alive to her or to his sons, he wrote to Sarah, using quite naturally the language of vocation: "I have sought most closely and diligently, and often in my breast, for a wrong motive in thus hazarding the happiness of those I loved and could not find one. A pure love of my Country and the principles I have often advocated before the people, and ‘the name of honor that I love more than I fear death’ have called upon me, and I have obeyed." In such an instance we may find it harder to say whether we are still talking about the duties of everyday life, or whether a sense of vocation is here associated with something more heroic and extraordinary. In any case, this example begins to push us in the direction of the first -- and deeper -- tension I want to explore.

Students writing their papers tend to look simply at the several dictionary definitions of a word, but an unusually diligent student might also find ways to make use of the etymological information supplied in a dictionary entry. In the instance of the word vocation, this is not very complicated. Our English word has its root in the Latin vocare -- to call or to summon. A vocation is a calling -- which implies a Caller. It is a summons. Taking this seriously will, I think, draw us into reflection upon a disturbing problem built into the idea of vocation. It reminds us also that -- however often the concept of vocation has been connected especially to the Reformers, Luther and Calvin -- the concept also has other important roots in Western culture.

It is, after all, Aeneas, depicted by Vergil as the destined founder of Rome, who says, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: "I am the man / Whom heaven calls." The Aeneid is, among other things, a poem about vocation. In their recent book, Heroism and the Christian Life, Brian Hook and Russell Reno have noted how Vergil’s poem, certainly one of the formative epics of our culture, compels us to ponder what is the deepest problem in the idea of a vocation -- namely, whether obedience to a divine summons diminishes or enhances the one who has been called. So I begin there.

Of the Aeneid C. S. Lewis once wrote that no one "who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent." What he had in mind was the Vergilian sense of vocation, which distinguishes the Aeneid from Homer’s equally great epic, the Iliad. Homer’s subject is not really the great contest between Greeks and Trojans; it is the personal story of Achilles’ refusal to fight and of the events that bring him, finally, to change his mind. It is a story about the personal glory and honor of an heroic figure, and in such a story there may be fate but not vocation. There are personal triumphs and personal tragedies, but not a calling or a destiny in service of which greatness is exhibited. There is fate, but she is blind and, in her blindness, establishes a kind of equity among the warring parties. Both the nobility and the tragedy of heroes such as Achilles and Hector are set against a background of meaningless flux. Thus, Simone Weil writes that "the progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw." What is absent is divine purpose -- and, therefore, as Lewis notes, none of the events in the Iliad can have the kind of significance that the founding of Rome has in the Aeneid.

Aeneas’s story is quite different. He is, Vergil tells us at the very outset, one who "came to Italy by destiny." Suffering countless setbacks both on land and sea -- "so hard and huge / A task it was to found the Roman people" -- still he was "a man apart, devoted to his mission." To be the man whom heaven calls exacts a great price. Having already endured the ten-year siege of Troy and its fall, having lost his wife while making his escape with a small band of surviving Trojans, Aeneas must still suffer the wrath of Juno -- storm, plague and warfare -- as he journeys from the ruins of Troy (on the western coast of modern Turkey) to Italy.

Seven summers after Troy’s fall, Aeneas’s company -- still on the way -- takes refuge from a storm at a port in Sicily. There they hold a festival to commemorate the death of Aeneas’s father, Anchises. But in the midst of these games the Trojan women are moved to consider how long they have been wandering and how many hardships they have suffered.

But on a desolate beach apart, the women

Wept for Anchises lost as they gazed out

In tears at the unfathomable sea.

"How many waves remain for us to cross,

How broad a sea, though we are weary, weary.

All had one thing to say: a town and home

Were what they dreamed of, sick of toil at sea.

The women set fire to the ships, hoping -- though unsuccessfully, of course -- to compel the company to settle permanently in Sicily. They force Aeneas himself to wrestle with "momentous questions."

Should he forget the destiny foretold

And make his home in Sicily, or try

Again for Italy?

Finally, he accepts the advice of Nautes that those "too weary of your great quest" should be permitted to remain behind and settle in Sicily. "Set them apart, and let them have their city / Here in this land, the tired ones."

A vocation exacts a price, and not all can pay it. Even though it may seem to draw us, its point is not happiness. It is, as C. S. Lewis notes, the nature of vocation to appear simultaneously both as desire and as duty. "To follow the vocation does not mean happiness; but once it has been heard, there is no happiness for those who do not follow." The price of a calling had been made clear to Aeneas himself even earlier. In one of the most famous books of the Aeneid, Vergil recounts the love affair of Aeneas and Dido. Their ships buffeted by a tremendous storm at sea, the Trojan company has made it to shore on the coast of North Africa, where the new colony of Carthage is being founded by a group of immigrants from Tyre and their queen, Dido.

Weary of the endless journeying to which Aeneas’s destiny has committed them, the Trojans are glad to stay for a time at Carthage while they repair their ships. Aeneas, in particular, finds happiness and seeming fulfillment in overseeing the work of building Carthage, and, ominously, he and Dido fall passionately in love. But when Jupiter learns this, he commands Mercury to remind Aeneas of the task he has been given.

What has he in mind? What hope, to make him stay

Amid a hostile race, and lose from view

Ausonian progeny, Lavinian lands?

The man should sail: that is the whole point.

Let this be what you tell him, as from me.

"The man should sail." In the Latin, one word: naviget! The divine summons -- which wounds even as it lures.

Mercury delivers the message, Aeneas hears and obeys. He gives orders to prepare the ships to sail, but, of course, Dido learns what is happening and begs him to stay.

Duty bound,

Aeneas, though he struggled with desire

To calm and comfort her in all her pain,

To speak to her and turn her mind from grief,

And though he sighed his heart out, shaken still

With love of her, yet took the course heaven gave him

And went back to the fleet.

Her sister Anna brings Dido’s pleas to Aeneas, asking him at least to postpone his departure and not to leave so abruptly. "But no tears moved him. . . . God’s will blocked the man’s once kindly ears." Aeneas has for the first time in a long time been happy and content in Carthage -- sharing Dido’s love, overseeing the work of construction. Dido seems finally to have found new love, years after the death of her husband Sychaeus. The Trojan company seems to have found a place to settle.

But it is not the homeland to which they are called, and it is not the city Aeneas has been summoned to found. This is not his calling. "The man should sail." As Hook and Reno write, Vergil "does not wish us to cast our lot with Dido and our anachronistic ideas of authenticity." Do you want to know what is your vocation? Then the first question to ask is not, "What do I want to do with my life?" It is not as if I first come to know myself and then choose a vocation that fulfills and satisfies me. For it is only by hearing and answering the divine summons, by participating in my calling, that I can come to know who I am. We are not who we think we are; we are who God calls us to be. "The man should sail."

And sail he does -- away from Carthage, willing to participate in his destiny. But perhaps for all readers, and certainly, I suspect, for at least some, a question presses insistently upon us. Hook and Reno sharpen the point when they write: "Aeneas sails away from Carthage changed, a greater hero in potential, but in most ways obvious to him and to us, a lesser man." That’s the issue: Does obedience to his calling enhance or diminish Aeneas? That calling has drawn him away from ordinary human loves, it has compelled him to harden himself against quite natural emotions, it has brought upon him and those who accompany him countless hardships. That calling requires not that he seek to be himself, not that he ask first what he wants to do, not that he authentically determine his being -- but that he obey. He says to Dido: "I sail for Italy not of my own free will" (Italiam non sponte sequor). One way to put all this is to note that for many readers Aeneas seems to become an almost divine figure, more than human, as his person is folded into his calling as founder of Rome. The other way to put it is to note that it can sometimes be hard to distinguish between one who is more than human and one who is, simply, inhuman. Especially for us, devoted as we are to authenticity and autonomy, the divine summons to obedience may seem to have left Aeneas diminished rather than enhanced. Such may be the price of a calling.

In Book I of his Confessions, Augustine remembers how, as a boy, "I was forced to learn all about the wanderings of a man called Aeneas, while quite oblivious of my own wanderings." How sinful must he not have been, Augustine suggests, to care more about the wanderings of Aeneas in search of a homeland than about the wanderings of his own soul away from the One for whom he was made. "What indeed can be more pitiful than a wretch with no pity for himself, weeping at the death of Dido, which was caused by love for Aeneas, and not weeping at his own death, caused by lack of love for you, God. . .?" And yet, at a deeper level, we must suppose that what Augustine learned from Vergil may have reinforced what he was eventually to learn from the scriptures, from his mother Monica and from Ambrose.

The wanderings of Augustine’s soul find their pattern in the story of Aeneas. "I came to Carthage," Augustine writes at the outset of Book III, conscious certainly that this was Dido’s Carthage, "and all around me in my ears were the sizzling and frying of unholy loves." And years later, having decided to teach rhetoric in Rome rather than Carthage, a decision opposed by his mother, Augustine stole away on ship at night, going -- like Aeneas -- from Carthage to Rome, and leaving a weeping woman behind. This is the Augustine of whom, in that great scene in the garden, Lady Continence asks what is essentially a vocational question: "Why do you try and stand by yourself and so not stand at all? Let him [God] support you." This is the Augustine who, having been converted from the false ideal of personal authenticity and having handed over to God his broken will, torn between desire and duty, concludes that he can be an authentic self only in submission to God’s call -- concludes, indeed, that only God can catch the heart and hold it still, that only God can know him as he truly is. "There is still something of man, which even the spirit of man that is in him does not know. But you, Lord, know all of him, you who made him."

Thus, Augustine learned -- more from the story of Jesus than from that of Aeneas -- "what the difference is between presumption and confession, between those who see their goal without seeing how to get there and those who see the way which leads to that happy country." That way was not anything Augustine had done, his own hard and huge task; it was something that had been done for him. What he found in the story of Jesus that he had not found elsewhere was "the face and look of pity, the tears of confession, your sacrifice." The story of Jesus’ own obedience makes clear that what looks like an annihilation of the self may, in fact, be its enlargement. We flourish as we answer obediently God’s call. And this, in turn, has an important effect on our understanding of vocation. As Hook and Reno observe, the more we believe that God has himself done whatever needs to be done and that our task is simply to answer his call, "the less room appears to be left for our greatness, our achievement, and accomplishment." Vocation, it seems, need no longer be heroic -- which brings us back to the other issue I identified at the outset.

Consider, for example, the following passage from John Galsworthy’s novel One More River, in which a character named Dinny reflects on the death of old Betty Purdy.

Death! At its quietest and least harrowing, but yet -- death! The old, the universal anodyne; the common lot! In this bed where she had lain nightly for over fifty years under the low sagged ceiling, a great little old lady had passed. Of what was called "birth," of position, wealth and power, she had none. No plumbing had come her way, no learning and no fashion. She had borne children, nursed, fed and washed them, sewn, cooked and swept, eaten little, traveled not at all in her years, suffered much pain, never known the ease of superfluity; but her back had been straight, her ways straight, her eyes quiet and her manners gentle. If she were not the "great lady," who was?

Perhaps there is something heroic here, but nothing extraordinary. There is no quest for the great deed required by God. There are only the everyday tasks, infused with the sense of duty and dignity that may make it appropriate to describe them as a calling.

When less room is left for our greatness and our achievement, this is what ultimately happens to the idea of vocation. If the seeds were already there in Augustine’s rereading of the story of Aeneas, it took centuries for this leveling or democratizing of vocation to work itself out in the thought of the 16th-century Reformers. "The affirmalion of ordinary life finds its origin," Charles Taylor writes, "in Judaeo-Christian spirituality, and the particular impetus it receives in the modem era comes first of all from the Reformation.... The highest can no longer be defined by an exalted kind of activity; it all turns on the spirit in which one lives whatever one lives, even the most mundane existence." That spirit is eloquently captured in George Herbert’s poem "The Elixir," which reads in part:

Teach me my God and King,

In all things thee to see,

And what I do in anything,

To do it as for thee....

A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine;

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,

Makes that and th’ action fine.

This is the famous stone

That turneth all to gold:

For that which God doth touch and own

Cannot for less be told.

This sentiment, both beautiful and powerful, intensifies our sense of vocation not by drawing us away from ordinary duties to some great quest but by drawing us more deeply into them. The strength -- or, at least, one strength -- of this shift is that the demands and the blessings of a calling are placed on every person. When a vocation is something as extraordinary and heroic as the huge labor of founding Rome -- or, even, to take the example that more concerned the Reformers, something as extraordinary as the monastic life -- it cannot be generally accessible. So, for example, in his well-known essay, "Our Calling," Einar Billing, a Swedish Lutheran theologian of the early 20th century, wrote: "The more fully a Catholic Christian develops his nature, the more he becomes a stranger to ordinary life, the more he departs from the men and women who move therein. But in the evangelical [he means Lutheran] church it cannot, it should and may not be. The evangelical church does not seek to create religious virtuosos, but holy and saintly men and women in the call." Now, Billing writes, "the demand to become a unique Christian character is put on each and every individual."

As those who have read Gustaf Wingren on Luther or Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch on "innerworldly asceticism" will know, the power of such an understanding of vocation -- sanctifying the work of every life, however humble -- is undeniable, but it is by no means free of danger. The beauty of Herbert’s poem notwithstanding, we should be hesitant to sanctify drudgery -- as if one should not retire from it if one could. Still more, there is sometimes backbreaking and dangerous labor, or tedious and boring work, that must be done if we or our loved ones are to live, but the language of vocation imbues such work with a kind of meaning and significance that may seem unbelievable to those who must actually do it. They work to live; they do not live to work. Taken seriously, the sanctification of such laborious or tedious work with the language of vocation would suggest that we should struggle to find more time for it, not plot ways to escape it.

More important still, this sanctifying of ordinary work, this sense that it becomes exalted if only approached in the right spirit, may cause us to forget that a divine summons must not only hallow but also transform whatever we do. When the difference between a carpenter and a Christian carpenter, a historian and a Christian historian, a father and a Christian father, an artist and a Christian artist, a soldier and a Christian soldier -- when all these differences are reduced to a matter of the "spirit" in which the work is done, we are well on our way to making the divine summons largely irrelevant. Whatever work we want to do -- we’ll just call that our vocation.

This is to nod at the call of God and go on our way; it is to lose the infinite, transforming horizon of God’s call. To the degree that we collapse the divine call into the work we regularly do, work pretty much like that done by many others, we really collapse the two love commandments into one. We suppose that in loving the neighbor -- and in no more than that -- the love of God consists, as if we were made, ultimately, for work and not for rest in God.

We should be equally clear that a life faithfully committed to the responsibilities of our vocation is not itself "the good life." God calls us not just to that but to himself -- beyond every earthly joy or responsibility, beyond any settled worldliness which places its hope for meaning in those we love or the work we do. This lesson is taught unforgettably in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The engine that drives Dante’s desire for the beatific vision is not simply love for God. It is love for that particular woman, Beatrice, whose beauty has drawn him every step of the way and through whose beauty he is being summoned beyond himself and toward the One who is Beauty itself. On his journey through hell and purgatory Dante has had Vergil as his guide. By the time we come to the end of the Purgatorio, in fact, Vergil has come to seem a permanent fixture on Dante’s way. Then, in Canto XXX of the Purgatorio, Beatrice finally appears. And instantly, Dante writes,

There came on me, needing no further sight,

Just by that strange, outflowing power of hers,

The old, old love in all its mastering might.

Overcome by emotion, Dante turns, as he has so often along the way, to Vergil for reassurance -- and Vergil is gone. He has taken Dante as far as he may, as far as human wisdom is able, but now love -- love for that particular woman Beatrice as the image of a still greater Beauty -- must take Dante the rest of the way. Tears come unbidden to his eyes, and Beatrice says:

Dante, weep not for Vergil’s going -- keep

As yet from weeping, weep not yet, for soon

Another sword shall give thee cause to weep. . . .

Look on us well; we are indeed, we are

Beatrice. How hast thou deigned to climb the hill?

Didst thou not know that man is happy here?

The loss of Vergil, his master and guide, is a sword that pierces Dante’s soul -- a necessary pain if he would see God. But an even greater renunciation awaits Dante in Canto XXXI of the Paradiso. In preparation for that renunciation we might recall the scene in Book VI of the Aeneid, when Aeneas, journeying in the underworld to see his father Anchises, confronts Dido among the souls of those who have taken their own life. He weeps as he speaks to her:

I left your land against my will, my queen,

The gods’ commands drove me to do their will, . . .

And I could not believe that I would hurt you

So terribly by going. Wait a little.

Do not leave my sight. . . .

But she had turned

With gaze fixed on the ground as he spoke on,

Her face no more affected than if she were

Immobile granite or Marpesian stone.

At length she flung away from him and fled,

His enemy still, into the shadowy grove

Where he whose bride she once had been, Sychaeus,

Joined in her sorrows and returned her love.

Dido turns away from Aeneas -- but not in hope for any new and greater love. Instead, she returns to an old love, and Aeneas takes up again his huge and hard task.

Not so for Dante as he journeys toward the vision of God. Beatrice has now taken him as far as she is able. She has brought him to the very brink of that final mystical vision shared by all the redeemed, she has prepared him to look upon the face of God. And now, if he is to answer the divine summons, he must turn from image to reality. As Dante gazes at the snow-white rose that is filled with rank upon rank of the redeemed who look upon God, he turns to Beatrice that she may explain it to him.

And she is gone -- returned to her place within those heavenly ranks. Looking up, Dante sees her "in her glory crowned, / Reflecting from herself the eternal rays," and he utters a plea that she continue to pray for him.

Such was my prayer and she, so distant fled,

It seemed, did smile and look on me once more,

Then to the eternal fountain turned her head.

The austerity of that moment is overpowering. When we consider all that Dante has endured to find her, when we consider that it was she who had charged Vergil to be his guide, she who, as Dante says, "to bring my soul to Paradise, / Didst leave the imprint of thy steps in Hell," and when we consider that now -- at last -- he has come to her seeing all that, we must see yet one thing more. It has, finally, been the beauty not of Beatrice but of God through Beatrice that has been summoning Dante all along the way. Having accomplished that, she turns her face away from him, once more to the eternal fountain. She does not leave him, nor he leave her behind, but together they are to gaze at the love that moves the sun and the other stars. It is not simply the beauty of Beatrice that has been summoning and drawing Dante, but God, and in looking away from him to God she does no harm to his joy or her own. "Didst thou not know that man is happy here?"

C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife Joy, ends with an evocation of this scene from the Paradiso. Lewis writes: "She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me."’ Likewise, in his powerful and astringent chapter on charity in The Four Loves, Lewis writes that "there is no good applying to Heaven for earthly comfort. Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind. . . . We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. . . . It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it."

Beyond and through every earthly love and every earthly duty, we are to hear the call of God. On the one hand, we are called to the God who can put an end to our work and bring fulfillment to our loves and labors. "Didst thou not know that man is happy here?" But on the other hand, this call will often exact a price along the way -- the price of renunciation, of huge and hard labor. At times, to be sure, by God’s grace, our calling may bring considerable joy and satisfaction, but it cannot offer settled contentment. For, as Augustine says, "It is one thing to see from a mountaintop in the forests the land of peace in the distance.., and it is another thing to hold to the way that leads there." Which is to say: For now, "The man should sail."

Mastering Our Gen(i)es: When Do We Say No?

Among the stories, many no doubt apocryphal, told about George Bernard Shaw is one in which the dancer Isadora Duncan suggests to Shaw that they should have a baby, saying, "Think of a child with my body and your mind." "Ah," replies Shaw, "but suppose it had my body and your mind." This is in essence, the sort of argument to which we incline most readily when we worry about recent advances in the study and manipulation of genes and about the implications of the Human Genome Initiative. It is an argument that emphasizes uncertainty, the limits of our knowledge and the mistakes to which we are prone.

It is certainly not a silly argument, but it is destined to lose. It will lose not because of our hubris, not because we refuse to acknowledge limits or that mistakes may occur, but because by itself the argument is self-defeating. Attempting to hold before us a yellow caution light, it in fact allows us to proceed with a good conscience: We are being careful. We are aware of the dangers of human presumption. We are concerned about ethical questions. But like the father portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in that wonderful scene in Kramer vs. Kramer in which, contrary to repeated warnings, the little boy takes ice cream from the refrigerator, we have not found a persuasive way to say No.

"Proceed with caution" may be the morally correct advice. But not, perhaps, on every issue. We have not, in my view, risen to the level of moral seriousness unless and until we are prepared at least to contemplate saying No. That we are prepared to say it does not mean we must, but it means we may.

The larger issue here is theological, concerning the meaning of being human. We are strangely two-sided creatures: located in a finite world of space, time and biological constraints, yet transcending those limits with a freedom that finds its ultimate limit in the God for whom we are made. Therefore, we cannot say that it is always wrong to take control of nature and turn it in directions we think good, for such self-transcendence is an expression of the freedom that is essential to being human. Neither should we assume, however, that freedom is the sole truth about our nature, that every step beyond old limits is a praiseworthy exercise of the freedom that characterizes us. Any particular step may be the one we should not take, the one that will destroy something as essential to our humanity as freedom is.

In one of his many intriguing essays, Lewis Thomas contemplates the deeply buried origins of the word "hybrid." It comes from the Latin hybrida, a name for the offspring of a wild boar and a domestic sow. But, Thomas notes, in its more ancient origins the word "carries its own disapproval inside." Its more distant ancestor is the Greek hubris -- insolence against the gods. Hence hidden somewhere in the development of our language is a connection between the unnatural joining of two beings and human usurping of the prerogatives of the gods. "This is what the word has grown into, a warning, a code word, a shorthand signal from the language itself: if man starts doing things reserved for the gods, deifying himself, the outcome will be something worse for him, symbolically, than the litters of wild boars and domestic sows were for the Romans." Thomas is no Luddite, however, as his concluding reflections make clear.

Is there something fundamentally unnatural, or intrinsically wrong.. . in the ambition that drives us all to reach a comprehensive understanding of nature, including ourselves? I cannot believe it. It would seem to be a more unnatural thing. . . for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with curiosity. . . and then for us to do nothing about it or, worse, to try to suppress the questions. This is the greater danger for our species, to try to pretend . . . that we do not need to satisfy our curiosity [The Medusa and the Snail].

Like a good modern, Thomas is more fearful of sloth than pride -- more fearful that we may. leave unexplored some potential for good than that we may exercise our freedom in ways that are finally destructive of our humanity.

In That Hideous Strength, "a modern fairy tale for grownups," C. S. Lewis imagined a National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E) which is undertaking an ambitious attempt to control and shape nature. Filostrato, a slightly mad clergyman who is a member of N.I.C.E., says at one point that he awaits a more rational day when artificial metal trees will replace natural ones. Then, if we tire of a tree in one place, we simply move it elsewhere. "It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess." Applied to human beings, Filostrato’s hope is equally sanitized. "What," he asks, "are the things that most offend the dignity of man?" Answer: "Birth and breeding and death." To take control of them is, we must admit, part of the Human Genome Initiative -- indeed, still more, part of the modern project whose "legitimacy" and "curiosity" have been defended by Hans Blumenberg in his provocative (if Teutonic) book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. What Blumenberg does not pay much attention to, however, is that the rise of the modern project was interwoven with renewed interest in magic and esoteric religion, with the thirst for control and mastery of the secrets of the universe. Still today that thirst is present: to get control of our genes and thereby, perhaps, of the elusive genies whose very unpredictability and unreliability threaten efforts at mastery.

With the advances in knowledge that are almost certain to be gained from the Human Genome Initiative -- or, if its critics should win the day and it lose support, from more piecemeal genetic - research -- we will know more and- more about genetic factors causally related to health and disease and to other important aspects of life, such as intelligence and emotional states. We will gain increased mastery over birth, breeding and death. How will such knowledge be used? Is there any way of discerning in advance which exercise of freedom will prove destructive of our humanity and not truly liberating?

Before worrying about future subjunctives, we ought to pay a little heed to present indicatives. Every day new advances in our ability to diagnose -- though not necessarily to treat -- genetic disorders are being used. They are used in making decisions about abortion after prenatal diagnosis. (And soon they will be used in preimplantation genetic screening to determine whether to implant or discard the embryo.) This is not, of course, treatment of a disorder; it is simply elimination of the one suffering the disorder. But it is a use -- the most likely use, at present -- of advancing understanding of the human genome. Here is an instance in which an exercise of apparent freedom has not, in fact, proved liberating. Barbara Katz Rothman has argued persuasively that prenatal diagnosis has offered women chiefly "the illusion of choice," seemingly new possibilities which have created "new limitations on choice." The technology of prenatal diagnosis has redefined the meaning of motherhood: it is making it difficult to commit oneself to an unborn child whose diagnosis is not yet assured; it is making it increasingly difficult .to exercise one’s freedom not to abort if the diagnosis is a bad one; it is encouraging women to think of their child as a product for whose quality they must accept responsibility; and it is making it more difficult to deal with disorders and afflictions that are not within our control and must simply be accepted. Rothman’s is a powerful argument: more freedom has turned out to be less.

Reinhold Niebuhr could not have asked for a better illustration of his common refrain: that our natural vitalities may often prove destructive rather than creative of human possibilities. A desire to transcend some of the uncertainties inherent in our finite condition has created not new freedom but chains that bind in powerful and disturbing Ways. Only with great difficulty will we keep such chains from being institutionalized. Recent reports tell of a Health Maintenance Organization that wanted to cover the cost of a prenatal test for cystic fibrosis only on the condition that the woman agree to have an abortion if the fetus was afflicted with the disease. When challenged, the HMO backed down -- for now. But it is worth repeating that the most likely immediate use of new knowledge of the genome is for prenatal diagnosis and abortion of the "defective." We ought to reject that ground for abortion. That approach both expresses and encourages an attitude that opposes not disease and disorder but the diseased and afflicted human being. Such an attitude is ultimately in conflict with itself; for the urge to cure disease presupposes openness to the human dignity of sufferers and concern for them.

There are other future -- and increasingly present -- possibilities. It is common to distinguish between genetic interventions aimed at somatic cells (all bodily cells that are not involved in reproduction) and germ cells (that will become sperm or ova). To alter a person’s somatic cells is to make a change that will die when he or she dies. This is a possibility already with us and one whose scope will be considerably enlarged in the near future. To alter a person’s germ cells is to make a change that may be passed on through generations of descendants. This is a possibility whose day may come, but it is less likely in the immediate future.

With this distinction in mind some have drawn a line between intervention aimed at somatic cell therapy and intervention aimed at germ cell therapy. I suspect that on first reflection such a line -- which permits the first and prohibits the second -- both does and does not make sense to us. On the one hand, there is something awesome about an intervention that no longer deals only with the soma, the bodily form, but goes right to the very core of human identity in order to shape the future not simply of one person but of his or her descendants. We may well draw back from such an undertaking, which can seem almost godlike in its pretension to mastery.

But on the other hand, when we reflect further, we may also wonder why such a line should be drawn. Where is the clear line in a progression from (1) using animal insulin to treat diabetes, to (2) using gene remodeling techniques to grow insulin in a host bacterium that will reproduce rapidly and from which a plentiful supply of insulin can be harvested, to (3) genetic surgery to replace the defective gene in a person diagnosed as diabetic, to (4) genetic surgery immediately after fertilization in order to replace the defective gene and alter the germ cells which would otherwise have transmitted the disease to one’s offspring? We may note, as Hans Jonas put it, that even the last of three stages would not quite be characterized as the godlike act of new creation; it could still accurately be called repair or therapy. Indeed, its advantages might seem considerable: it treats the root of the problem and not only its symptoms, thereby avoiding the risk of passing the disorder on to future generations.

Nevertheless, our first intuition -- which sensed that a line ought to be drawn prohibiting alterations of term cells -- is, I think, a sound one. And the reason is precisely what seemed to be the trump card in the case for such intervention: the control exercised over future generations. To give that card its due we must add: control designed to prevent future suffering and eliminate the need for future interventions at the somatic level. Such intervention would aim at correcting not simply the illness afflicting a particular person but at shaping the nature of others still to come. Not only a human being but humankind is then the object of our intervention. Even when such intervention aims to be beneficent, we should say No to it. More than 40 years ago C. S. Lewis noted that "what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." The end of this process, which we picture as the creative exercise of our rational freedom, proves to be bondage.

The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future. The real picture is that of one dominant age.., which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. . . There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.

The dehumanizing deeds, if they are done, will not be done by obviously evil men and women. They will be the work of those who are moved by the thirst for knowledge, fame and power -- but also by beneficent concern for future suffering. A real devil we could resist. But a project of human mastery carried out in the name of beneficence, promising to relieve suffering -- that it is harder to turn our back on.

The principles that have emerged thus far are these: We should seek new knowledge of our genes (and we can say this without deciding whether the Human Genome Initiative is the wisest and most cost-effective way to do so) We should seek therapies for the genetic disorders that afflict many people. But we should turn against disease, not against those who are diseased. And we should focus our therapeutic efforts on particular afflicted human beings, not on humankind. These principles go at least some way toward guiding our aims in genetic research and directing our use of advances in knowledge. They rule out selective abortion of defective fetuses, and they focus our attention on therapies aimed at somatic cells rather than germ cells.

For the present, of course, even somatic cell therapies will be very few, but their number will grow. How, finally, shall we think about that possibility? The time may come when we can replace the defective gene that causes diabetes. The time may also come when -- even granting the complex interactions of nature and nurture -- we can intervene to alter a gene or genes that strongly determine some cognitive abilities. Is there any important moral difference -- any line that can be drawn -- between intervention aimed at treating what everyone acknowledges to be a disease and intervention aimed at enhancing cognitive ability?

To make such a distinction requires a carefully circumscribed definition of health, one quite different from the famous definition once given by the World Health Organization: "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Many criticisms of such a wide-ranging definition have been offered, and surely it cries out for religious critique. Complete well-being? Offered by physicians who, though they have long since renounced the garb and ways of the shaman, are still cast in the role of soter? If a definition like this one guides our aims, there will be no end to our efforts to reshape those who fall short of complete well-being. And, significantly, we will never reach a time when we are prepared simply to accept a person as he or she is -- to oppose diseases but accept persons without qualification. There will be no logical end -- apart from the current frontiers of knowledge -- to our proposals for remaking and reshaping those for whom we are responsible.

A less Promethean definition of health, which recognizes that there is no single positive vision of well-being, would still allow us to intervene against disorders that bring pain or hinder an individual in carrying out the biological functions necessary for personal or species survival. There is, of course, much more to our desires for life and happiness than that, but our visions of fulfillment differ in countless ways. It may be difficult, and is in any case unwise, to attempt to control such choices, but we should limit the interventions we impose on others in our care -- limit them to those that clearly seek to treat disease.

In our saner moments we know that parents today are far too eager to use the methods already available -- chiefly in the realm of controlling nurture rather than nature -- to shape the lives of their children. We are unwilling to let the mystery of personhood -- equal in dignity to our own -- unfold in the lives of our children. Contemplating the question of whether we are really likely to use advances in genetics to create children whose abilities and talents are enhanced in various ways, Robert Wright has suggested that the answer is obvious if we simply look at what we already do.

Each year thousands of Manhattan parents work up a cold sweat over whether their four-year-olds will get admitted to the best private kindergartens or merely the very good ones. And, for that matter, similar worries preoccupy parents all across the country. They spend millions prepping their kids for SAT tests, honing their athletic skills, and teaching them to carry a tune. . . . Just your typical parent, sitting nervously in the bleachers at a Little League game.

Hence we need more than clarity about disease and health. We need a renewed sense of the mystery of the human person and the limits to our own efforts at shaping and transforming character. Here the argument from uncertainty has real validity. As John Henry Newman wrote: "Basil and Julian were fellow students at the schools of Athens; and one became the saint and doctor of the Church, the other her scoffing and relentless foe."

Even more, we need the virtue of love. Love -- that can say, without qualification, to another: "It’s good that you exist." Love -- that in its open-hearted acceptance of another disciplines and restrains the urge to transform and remake. Love -- that is willing to be godlike when confronted with the diverse aims and even the suffering of our children, willing, that is, sometimes to bear suffering rather than simply to try to do away with it.. Probably we cannot draw any clear and distinct line here, but we are badly in need of powers of discernment.

Oliver O’Donovan has called attention to the contemporary significance of the distinction between one who is begotten and one who is made. One whom we beget shares in our being, is equal in dignity to us. One whom we make has been distanced from us, become the product of our will, and we know how limitless that will can be. Of course, parents are responsible for the nurture of those whom they have begotten, and such nurture can and should sometimes be demanding. But when we know ourselves as begetters, not makers, we will seek to shape and nurture only those whom we first accept without qualification. Were that outlook to shape our analysis of somatic cell interventon we would have little to fear from it. Indeed, were that outlook more generally to shape our vision, we should be more accepting of recalcitrant genes and less eager to be master of the genies from whom ultimately we have nothing to fear.