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Psychoanalyzing C.S.Lewis

It was, I believe, Dr. Johnson who told an author that his work was both good and original -- but that, alas, what was good was not original and what was original was not good. Something like that is my own evaluation of A. N. Wilson’s biography of C. S. Lewis. Wilson does not tell us much that is new about Lewis’s life, though he packages what is already known into a lively and readable biography. What is to some degree original is the broadly psychoanalytic narrative thread Wilson uses to unify Lewis’s life.

The first biography about Lewis, also titled C. S. Lewis: A Biography, was. written by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper in 1974 (about a decade after Lewis’s death) Green had been a close friend of Lewis, and Hooper has edited and overseen the posthumous publication of many of Lewis’s essays and letters. But the Green-Hooper biography is not too lively and does not really advance its readers much beyond what Lewis himself had written in his autobiographical works. In 1986 William Griffin published Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life. Griffin deliberately eschews the typical biographer’s task: making sense of the unity of a life. Instead, he provides a chronicle of events, for the most part quoting from letters, books and diaries. His over 500-page work is, in a sense, the precise opposite of Wilson’s: heavy on information, but with almost no interpretive schema. Certainly the best Lewis biography prior to Wilson’s -- and quite possibly the best still -- is Jack:C. S. Lewis and His Times (1988) , written by Lewis’s pupil and friend George Sayer. Sayer’s biography has more detail than Wilson’s, disagrees with Wilson on some points, is not as readable or as witty and does not attempt to probe Lewis’s psyche in the way Wilson does.

Wilson’s biography presents an overall interpretation of Lewis’s life and offers critical judgments on Lewis’s writings. Some of those judgments are puzzling. For example, of The Great Divorce -- which has powerful moments but has always seemed to me rather wooden -- Wilson says: "[It] shows Lewis at his very best; it is something approaching a masterpiece." Reflections on the Psalms is characterized as "notably the scrappiest of all his books" -- a judgment I have pondered several times but remain unable to fathom. By far the most peculiar of his critical judgments, however, is the one that is absent. In a book replete with evaluations and magisterial judgments tossed in as throw-away lines, Till We Have Faces -- arguably the most powerful piece of fiction written by Lewis -- is mentioned only twice. Wilson offers no extended comment on the book, even though one of the themes in Faces is related to his narrative thread: namely, the difficulty of coming to know ourselves as we are and the pain such knowledge involves. Indeed, in one of the best books about Lewis, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis, Peter Schakel has offered an interpretation of Faces which Wilson might have used in partial support of his own thesis. Since he offers at least a few paragraphs, and often a few pages, discussing almost every other Lewis book, the Faces omission is genuinely startling. One wonders if this could simply be an oversight; there are some indications that Wilson’s biography was hastily written.

Wilson likes best Lewis’s literary criticism. "For me," he writes, "the most attractive Lewis is the author of English Literature ‘in the Sixteenth Century, a fluent, highly intelligent man talking about books in a manner which is always engaging." Indeed, Wilson’s praise of Lewis’s literary-critical writings is so lavish one wonders whether he play not have overdone it. But along with the praise, Wilson offers insights about the reasons these books are powerful: Lewis’s generosity toward the authors he discusses, the way he finds passages that make them seem interesting; his sense of "wonder and enjoyment" in all he reads; his willingness to take up the great themes that engaged his authors, to put to work in criticism his "creative intelligence." And especially the fact that "the distinction between ‘learned’ and ‘popular’ is one which seems in reading Lewis to be quite false. And one feels this even when he is at his most learned." On several occasions Wilson puts his finger on what is surely one of the most striking qualities in all of Lewis’s writing: he makes his readers want to read what he has read. Moreover, Wilson sees that -- with respect not only to literary criticism but to all his writing -- Lewis’s conversion to Christianity "released in him a literary flow which only ceased with death."

Wilson’s biography also highlights certain events as crucial in Lewis’s personal and literary development, chiefly the death of his mother (when Lewis was nine) and his alienation from his father. Calling the death of Lewis’s mother "the catastrophe of his life," Wilson writes that "in terms of his emotional life, the quest for his lost mother dominated his relations with women. His companion for over thirty years was a woman old enough to be his mother; and when she died it was not long before, like a Pavlovian dog trained to lacerate his heart with the same emotional experiences, he, married a woman whose circumstances were exactly parallel to those of his own mother in 1908 -- a woman dying of cancer who had two small sons."

According to Wilson, Lewis and his older brother Warren were driven by a lifelong desire to return to the days of their youth when as young playmates, before the death of their mother, they could give themselves over to the imaginative life of reading and writing that they dearly loved. In the Narnia stories, Wilson thinks, Lewis yielded to this emotional need. Yet Wilson is guilty of some over-interpretation here, as, for example, when he writes: "We hardly need to dwell on the psychological significance of the Wardrobe in the first story; we do not need, though some will be tempted to do so, to see in this tale of a world which is reached by a dark hole surrounded by fur coats an unconscious image of the passage through which Lewis first entered the world from his mother’s body." Still, the death of his mother must have meant emotional upheaval which may well have marked his entire life. And Wilson quite effectively suggests the way in which the last of the Narnia stories -- with its reunion of parents and children in Aslan’s world -- shows Lewis coming to terms with his past. (Wilson might with equal effectiveness have noted the story of Digory and his mother in The Magician’s Nephew.) In his children’s stories -- though also in Till We Have Faces and The Four Loves -- Lewis does come to terms with the pain of emotional attachment and loss.

Moreover, whatever we make of Wilson’s discussion of the well-known facts, Lewis’s relation with the two women who (after his mother) played important roles in his personal life was, by ordinary standards, quite unusual. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes that he is omitting one "huge and complex episode." "All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged." This is, it seems, Lewis’s reference to his relation with Janie Moore, the 45-year-old mother of Paddy Moore, the cadet with whom Lewis shared a room when he took his military training in World War I. She befriended Lewis in the weeks before he was sent to France, at a time when his alienation from his father, who did not come to see him before his departure for the front lines, was very great. More important still; she came to London to be near Lewis when he was in a hospital recovering from wounds (and while she was waiting for news of her own son, who died in the war) "The experience of being mothered, for the first time in his life since he was nine years old, was having a profound effect on Jack," Wilson writes.

Moore was married, though separated from her husband -- and would remain in that state throughout the years she lived with Lewis. An interesting, albeit unanswerable, question has been the precise nature of their relationship. In later years, when they shared a home, they referred to each other as adopted mother and son. Sayer doubts that they were lovers. Hooper concurs and even holds -- contrary, I think, to the best evidence -- that Lewis’s later marriage was never consummated. Wilson is quite confident that Lewis and Moore were lovers and suggests that "the burden of proof is on those who believe that Lewis and Mrs. Moore were not lovers -- probably from the summer of 1918 onwards." Less persuasive, to me at least, is the claim that this probably continued until 1931, the year in which Lewis converted to Christianity (and would now think a relation with a married woman to be wrong) Wilson’s way of making this point is, however, an instance of a very undesirable trait in his writing: the tendency to assert indirectly and to be glib while seeming to eschew it: "It would be far too glib to suggest that he consciously made the second change, to adopt Christianity, merely to give himself an excuse to abandon sexual relations with Mrs. Moore, whatever the nature of those relations had been."

Late in his life, a few years after Moore’s death, Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham, an American who, while still married, went to England with the intention of meeting Lewis. She later returned again to England with her two sons and eventually divorced her husband. Lewis married her first in a purely civil ceremony in 1956 -- an act of kindness, he said, since the British Home Office was refusing her a permit to remain there. In the fall of 1956 Joy learned that she had cancer and only a short time to live. With some difficulty Lewis found an Anglican priest who would solemnize an ecclesiastical marriage between himself and a divorced woman. Shortly thereafter, Gresham ‘s cancer went into remission and she and Lewis enjoyed three deeply satisfying years of marriage until the cancer returned and took her life.

The bare bones of such a story do not capture the searing intensity that Lewis recorded in A Grief Observed , the short diary-like jottings that he wrote and published after Gresham’s death. Wilson’s prose captures both the strangeness and the poignancy of the marriage, but there are aspects of his discussion about which a reader should be warned. He suggests that Lewis and Gresham engaged in sexual relations prior to marriage (whether civil or ecclesiastical) and before she was divorced from her first husband. This is evidently part of Wilson’s effort to recapture Lewis from those who would turn him into a "plaster saint." "According to an oral memory of Joy’s son Douglas [who would have been eight years old at the time], transcribed in the Marion E. Wade collection at Wheaton College, Illinois, the two of them were already lovers in 1955. Douglas on one occasion came into his mother’s bedroom at 10 High Street and found it occupied by Jack and Joy in a compromising position." Readers should be aware that Lyle Dorsett curator of the Wade Collection and the person who videotaped the approximately seven-and-a-half hour oral history interview with Douglas, has said that the comment to which Wilson is evidently alluding here actually refers to a time after their (ecclesiastical) marriage, when Gresham had come to live in Lewis’s home. Dorsett has also noted that Wilson made only one visit of less than three hours to the Wade Center.

Wilson emphasizes the importance of both women for understanding Lewis; unfortunately he is facile in discussing these two relationships. When he describes Lewis as having had "two liaisons with married women," the reader will certainly presume that "liaison" means "illicit sexual relationship." Yet the only evidence Wilson even offers in the case of Gresham is his disputed claim about her son’s interview. In the case of Moore, where the circumstantial evidence is much stronger and to me relatively persuasive, Wilson himself writes: "Nobody would ever quite know, truly know, what he had shared with [Moore] in those early days." And in another context, asserting that it would be surprising if the relationship had been asexual, he also writes that "no evidence is forthcoming either way."

The story of Lewis’s relationships with these two women is one very important element in Wilson’s interpretation of his life: having lost his mother as a young boy, Lewis spent his life searching for a substitute. The second time around, after Moore’s death, Lewis found himself at a point where he could finally unwind and open up emotionally. He "found a woman with whom he felt able to be completely open about himself’ -- and this not long after the Narnia stories, in which Lewis finally made his peace with the loss of his mother and his alienation from his father. But there is another thread in Wilson’s interpretation -- namely, the debate with Elizabeth Anscombe in 1948 at the Socratic Club in Oxford. Lewis was the president of that society from its founding in 1941 until he went to Cambridge in 1954. (It is worth noting that he continued to participate after the Anscombe debate.) In this context Lewis was known as a sturdy and polemical defender of the faith. The dispute with Anscombe centered on Lewis’s argument against naturalism in Miracles. I doubt that most readers of Wilson’s pages are likely to get a very clear idea of what the dispute was. Indeed, they are likely to conclude that we hardly need a philosopher of Anscombe’s status to disprove Lewis; for Wilson writes that "any dispassionate reader can at once see many flaws in Lewis’s arguments here." Lewis had argued that the deliverances of reason could not be trusted if they were ultimately produced by something less than rational. Anscombe had responded that, however our rational nature came into existence, reasoned argument might be valid even if our reason was the product of nonrational causes.

The debate was a fierce one and many, including Lewis, felt that Anscombe had the better of it. This confrontation, writes Wilson, "had a profound effect on his career as a writer. It was the greatest single factor which drove him into the form of literature for which he is today most popular: children’s stories." This may be difficult to reconcile with Wilson’s statement that Lewis had already begun trying to write the first of the Narnia stories in 1939, but, in any case, he regards its psychological impact as crucial. The encounter "awakened all sorts of deeply seated fears in Lewis, not least his fear of women. . . . [H]e became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch-like dimensions." As a result, Wilson concludes, "Lewis never attempted to write another work of Christian apologetics after Miracles." He came to feel that the "method and manner" of his apologetic works were "spurious," and he turned to "make-believe" as "another way of talking about the reality of things."

It is, to begin with, not fully accurate to say that Lewis wrote no more Christian apologetics after Miracles. The Four Loves -- with its argument that the natural loves cannot flourish if isolated from supernatural love -- is, among other things, an apologetic work. Looked at from a different perspective, Miracles is by no means simply a piece of apologetics. The second half of the book is as deeply infused with Lewis’s imaginative power as almost anything he ever wrote. And Wilson’s theory will have considerable difficulty explaining the fact that when, as late as 1960, Fontana Books published a new edition of Miracles, it included a revised version of the crucial third chapter to which Anscombe had objected. Lewis does not seem to have given up on the argument. We do not, in fact, need Wilson’s theory about the effects of the Anscombe debate in order to explain the shifts in Lewis’s writing. Wilson sees that the children’s stories might have emerged from Lewis’s imagination without the supposed impetus of philosophical disillusion. And the kind of philosophy that was coming to prominence -- logical positivism and then ordinary language analysis -- was bound to seem less engaging to one with Lewis’s long-standing metaphysical interests.

Thus, what is original in Wilson’s biography -- the exploration of Lewis’s psyche in search of a unified understanding of the man and the location of that center in his relationships with women -- can’t carry the interpretive load Wilson places upon it. The threads form an informative and witty narrative, but the facts do not fully persuade.

In 1955 Lewis published Surprised by Joy, omitting, as mentioned above, any discussion of his relationship with Moore. Even were he free to speak of it, he wrote, he doubts that "it has much to do with the subject of this book." Likewise he passes over his father’s death with the comment that it "does not really come into the story I am telling." At several points Wilson flags these omissions as indications of Lewis’s repressed emotional life. Wilson describes the claim that his father’s death does not come into the story as a "preposterous assertion," and he may be right. Yet Wilson’s story line does not account for Lewis’s reticence in 1955. Wilson claims that the great emotional reawakening had already occurred after Moore’s death when the Narnia stories were written. "The children’s books . . . were a sort of sluicing of the system which . . . represented a conversion every bit as deep as the conversion to a belief in the supernatural and the divinity of Jesus Christ which occurred in 1929-1931." These years (when the Narnia stories were written) are years in which, according to Wilson, "the self-disclosure in what he wrote became still more marked and more relaxed." Yet they are also the years in which Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy -- over which Wilson pauses on several occasions to emphasize its reticence about the self. The longer one ponders Wilson’s narrative the more difficult it becomes to grasp its logic.

Two other features of this biography deserve some mention, since they are, for me at least, troubling. One is a matter of tone. I have already said several times that Wilson’s writing is lively, readable, witty and enjoyable. It is also snide and condescending. Very few people are mentioned without that tone of voice creeping through. Hooper is "one of nature’s devotees." Green is "a rich man who had cultivated Lewis ever since he had heard his lectures before the war." J. B. Phillips thought that Lewis’s spirit had twice appeared to him after Lewis’s death. "It would be churlish to point out that in a subsequent volume of autobiography Canon Phillips explained to his readers the nature of these ‘difficult circumstances’ through which he was passing: depressions and nervous breakdowns so severe as to constitute periodic bouts of lunacy; churlish because irrelevant. However we explain the experience, it was an experience." Now this is all rather funny, and I admit to smiling. But I ought not. By remaining aloof from such claims, Wilson teaches us to take them less seriously. One would take Phillips far more seriously -- or take Hooper ‘s reported mystical experience during an audience with the pope more seriously -- if Wilson vigorously questioned them. Letter XI of The Screwtape Letters, in which Screwtape distinguishes between the "Joke Proper" and "Flippancy," is relevant here: "Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. . . . It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it."

Similarly, Wilson very quickly dismisses the questions raised recently by Kathryn Lindskoog in The C. S. Lewis Hoax, asserting incorrectly that her central thesis "has been disproved." In brief, Lindskoog argues that Hooper systematically misrepresented his relationship with Lewis, making it appear much closer than it could possibly have been, and she claims that "The Dark Tower" (a posthumously published fragment of a story) is a forgery not actually written by Lewis. There are other elements in Lindskoog’s web of arguments, some more persuasive than others, some eccentric. But there is nothing there to warrant Wilson’s description of it as "one of the most vitriolic personal attacks on a fellow-scholar . . . that I have ever read in print" -- especially not for a man as widely read as Wilson. Moreover, he clearly accepts several of Lindskoog’s claims: that Hooper could only have known Lewis for a few weeks before Lewis’s death and that he has changed his handwriting over the years so that it closely resembles Lewis’s own.

More disturbing than Wilson’s tone is his attitude toward religion, chiefly in asides which seem to need no argument. Wilson observes that it is not the "rational Lewis" who has continuing appeal; rather, "it is the Lewis who plumbed the irrational depths of childhood and religion who speaks to the present generation." But why should religion (or, for that matter, childhood) be irrational at its depths? Wilson’s assumption, so glibly stated, almost steals by us. Again: Over their Christmas vacation in 1910 the Lewis brothers went to see Peter Pan. According to Warren Lewis, it was a momentous experience for them, and Wilson therefore finds it surprising that the experience is not mentioned in Surprised by Joy. He terms it "one of the Grand Conspicuous Omissions" in that book; "For there was no children’s story more apposite to his life than that of the little boy who could not grow up, and who had to win his immortality by an assertion of metaphysical improbabilities." Speaking of what he regards as ‘unedifying" disputes among the several camps of Lewis scholarship, Wilson writes that it shows us "in microcosm something which is perhaps symptomatic of the religious temperament as a whole, the need to erect images and worship them." As a theory of religion this can use a little work, and one wonders why it is only the religious temperament that displays this touching need.

Near the end of his book Wilson mentions the eight-foot-high stained-glass window of Lewis in an Episcopal Church in California. It might, he notes, seem to be the "ultimate idolatry"; yet, he says, the matter is more complex. "Many perfectly sane religious believers have received insight and help from Lewis’s writings, and it seems a natural progression from here to commemorate him in a window. . . . If people have found it so, it is so." Now my own taste in stained-glass windows runs more to triangles, circles and lambs carrying banners. Nonetheless, like Wilson I can think of some good reasons for a Lewis window. But the way Wilson rests the matter -- "If people have found it so, it is so" -- again fails to take the issue seriously. Wilson’s manner does not take us much further than the words of the song in The Music Man: "How can there be any sin in sincere?" No sin, Wilson seems to be saying with a wink -- but plenty of occasion for gently mocking laughter. Screwtape would, I fear have approved.

Interfaith ‘Prayer:’ What Is It and Should We Do It?

A contemporary reader of the New Testament letter we call 1 Corinthians is likely to be a little puzzled by the amount of attention it gives to whether the Corinthian Christians could cat meat that had been offered to pagan idols. Chapters 8-10 treat this question, though not in a straight line entirely free of digression. By the tune St. Paul completes his discussion he has distinguished three different sorts of eases and has outlined his response to each.

In one case Christians might buy in the market and eat meat that had been offered in sacrifice to a false god. This Paul allows. But in a second, related case this eating might be done at a meal with fellow Christians who, not fully seeing that an idol amounts to nothing, fear that eating this meat involves one in the ritual worship of a false god. In that ease, concern for the conscience of one’s fellow Christian means that one should not eat food that might otherwise be permitted.

Then there is a third case. eating meat at the pagan sacrificial feasts themselves. That St. Paul absolutely prohibits -- and not simply because it might harm the conscience of a fellow Christian whose faith is less robust. No, that Paul forbids because -- just as sharing in the bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper involves communion with the Lord Jesus -- participating in ritual idol worship brings one into communion with powers opposed to the God who raised Jesus and thereby subverts the Christian’s pledge of covenant loyalty.

Pants discussion of the issue is not unsophisticated. At one level he accepts and applies the prophetic critique of the gods of the nations: they amount to nothing, having no real existence. Yet he also recognizes that behind the "nothingness" of the false gods lies real power, evil power whose goal is that we should bend the knee or bow the head before a false god, that we should give a kind of reality to what is nothing. "I do not want you to be partners with demons," Paul says. Although ours is a world in which gods are often not taken seriously -- thus, for example, the newly named archbishop of Canterbury can think nothing of participating in a Druid ritual of induction -- it does not pay to toy with them.

In C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, the Calormenes, who worship Tash, have plotted to take over the land of Narnia, whose inhabitants are pledged to the great lion Aslan. The Calormenes have been helped by some Narnians, who, without actually believing in Tash’s existence, have pretended that Tash and Aslan are one and the same -- and have invoked Tash’s presence. Then one day the sky suddenly clouds over, it becomes cold, a foul smell overpowers -- and a creature with the shape of a man but the head of a bird, with a cruel curved beak, flies over. The grass seems to wither beneath its shadow. Tash has been called for -- and now has come. As one of the dwarfs says: "People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say." False gods must be taken seriously.

What this involves and how rightly to do it is not, however, always easy to determine. So, for example, in a contretemps nearly unintelligible to many, David Benke, president of the Atlantic District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, has been suspended by the Synod for his participation in an "event" (what to call it is part of the argument) at New York’s Yankee Stadium held 12 days after the September11 attacks. At this event, representatives of a variety of religious traditions spoke to and prayed with the assembled crowd in order to honor those missing and dead in the attack. Pastor Benke offered a clearly Christian prayer, having asked those present to join hands and pray with him -- and for that has been suspended. (The suspension is under appeal.)

I do not want to discuss this case itself -- and that for several reasons. For one thing, the Missouri Synod has sometimes applied 1 Corinthians 10 to prayer with other Christians -- even though in I Corinthians Paul clearly has in mind those who pray to and worship false gods. So focusing on the Missouri Synod itself would divert me from what I find truly puzzling and thought- provoking. Moreover, my own view of the matter seems likely to please no one. I doubt that it was really wise for Benke to participate in the event, but the Synod’s (juridical) way of handling his participation seems misguided and heavy-handed. (Understandable, for those who know the ins-and-outs of the Synod’s history in the past quarter century, but misguided nonetheless.) But the ease provides an occasion that ought to provoke us to larger thoughts, and I find myself very puzzled about those larger questions.

For me at least, none of these questions has an obvious answer. Most discussion of "the religions" has tended to reduce all significant questions to just one: that of salvation. Important as that issue surely is, my concern is a different one that ought also, I think, to puzzle us. I am not asking whether all these people, who seem (at least) to worship different gods, will one day all be saved. My puzzles are less ultimate but nonetheless significant. I simply want to think about what they do when they pray "together" -- not only whether we can approve whatever it is they are doing, but also whether we can talk clearly about what they are, in fact, doing. (It is important to keep in mind that I want to think about these questions from within a Christian perspective. I am not developing some general theory about "religion" or asking what we might say from some purportedly neutral perspective. I begin from within the Christian faith and ask how things look from there.)

Suppose we start by remembering that Christians pray to God in and through Jesus. The simplest -- though by no means simple -- case may be that of Christians and Jews (who, though not Christians, are, of course, also not pagans). If they pray with/alongside each other, how shall we think about what they do? Christians pray to their Father in heaven in and with Jesus -- who himself prayed to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. If Christians pray in and with him, they too pray to the God of Israel. Of course, they know Israel’s Lord not only as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but also as the Father of their Lord Jesus Christ. But it makes some sense to say that, praying in and with Jesus, they address the same God -- the true God -- to whom Jews pray.

I recognize, of course, that the matter would (subjectively) look somewhat different if we began not from a Christian but from a Jewish perspective. Jews, after all, are not about to pray in the name of Jesus when they address -- as he did -- the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob. Therefore, even if it makes sense for Christians to think of themselves as praying "to" the God whom Jews also address in prayer, a certain asymmetry does (subjectively) exist and must be recognized and honored. Acts 2:46 makes clear that the first Christians prayed regularly in the temple; nevertheless, it is hard to suppose that Christians could do that today while confessing Jesus as Lord. Still, the case of Christians and Jews is the easiest, the least puzzling, to consider.

If there may be an intelligible sense in which -- at least from a Christian perspective -- Christians and Jews might pray "to" the same God, can we extend this sense any further? To Muslims, for instance? After all, in the language that has become common in the academic study of religion, Islam is -- together with Judaism and Christianity -- one of the Abrahamic religions. Thus, the sacred story that Muslims narrate acknowledges Abraham as their forefather -- indeed, as one who submitted to God’s will and, hence, was a true Muslim. But theirs is the god of Abraham and Ishmael -- not of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is hard to think of Jesus as having prayed to that god and, therefore, hard to suppose that Christians address that god when they pray in and with Jesus. And if we cannot make the case with respect to Muslims, it is surely folly to try with respect to Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs -- i.e. all those "non-Abrahamic" traditions.

This is about as far as I can get, starting from the premise that Christians pray in and with Jesus. It may give us an intelligible sense in which Christians and Jews address the same God, but it doesn’t seem to give us more than that. Is there any other starting point -- still not, I hasten to add, one grounded in some general theory of religion, but one grounded in Christian faith?

O God, the Father of all mankind, I would bring before Thee tonight the burden of the world’s life. I would join myself to the great scattered company of those who, in every corner of every land, are now crying out to Thee in their need. Hear us, O God, and look in pity upon our manifold necessities, since Thou alone art able to satisfy all our desire.

Who are those, I wonder, who "in every corner of every land are now crying out to Thee in their need"? Does the prayer here invite us to think only of Christians scattered in various lands? Or does it contemplate the possibility that all sorts and conditions of people, by whatever name they may address god, are in fact crying out in their need to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Father of Jesus? What Baillie had in mind I cannot say for certain, but the question is worth puzzling over.

"From the rising of the sun to its setting," says the prophet Malachi (1:11) in an oracle of the Lord, "my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the LORD of hosts." For almost 2,000 years, at least some Christian thinkers have taken Malachi’s oracle to mean that wherever genuine sacrifice is offered, it is (objectively, though not, of course, subjectively) made to YHWH, the one true God. C. S. Lewis gives a kind of literary incarnation to Malachi’s statement in the person of Emeth in The Last Battle. Emeth is a young Calormene soldier, a noble soul who has loved the god Tash with his whole heart and who longs to see Tash. Those plotting to take over Narnia, who have claimed that Tash and Aslan are one (and who call this god "Tashlan"), have said that anyone who goes through the stable door will see Tashlan, though they actually plan to kill faithful Narnians who go through the door.

But Emeth says he wants to go through that door, "for gladly would I die a thousand deaths if I might look upon the face of Tash." He does, and later, when the faithful Narnians have gotten into Aslan’s world, they find Emeth (a Calormene who had not worshiped Aslan) there. He tells them his story: How the Lion had met him. How he had thought the Lion would kill him, since he had been a devotee of Tash. But how the Lion had said, "Child, all the service thou hast (lone to Tash, I account as service done to me. . . . Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. . . . But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."

Alongside Malachi’s oracle we need to set another from the prophet Amos (9:7) to Israel:

"Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,

O people of Israel?" says the

LORD.

"Did I not bring up Israel from the

land of Egypt,

and the Philistines from Caphtor

and the Syrians from Kir?"

Amos is the prophet who also says to Israel, "You only have I known of all the families of the earth" (3:2). Yet, although Israel has been specially called by God, Amos suggests that other peoples may have their own callings from that same God. The prophet parallels Israel’s exodus from Egypt with the exodus of’ the Philistines and that of the Syrians. They too have had a history of dealing with the one true God, even if that history is not known to us in the way Israel’s is. They too have had a calling from YHWH. (It is important that we emphasize here that their callings are not from some generic god whom all experience in their different ways. Were that the right way to talk of it, we would be on our way toward a theory of religious experience according to which all people have, some kind of fundamental experience -- call it absolute dependence -- which then gives rise to different ways of being religious. All gods are then fundamentally articulations of the same primordial experience. Tash and Aslan are indeed the same, and we can make no sense of Paul’s concern in I Corinthians, with which I began, about the worship of false gods. On the contrary, I take Amos to be saying that other peoples have their own history of dealing not with a generic god but with YHWH, the God of Israel, whom we can identify rightly only through the story of his dealings with Israel, even though those are not his only dealings.)

I want to be careful, though, not to press the argument beyond my particular concerns here, and the example of Emeth may have begun to do so. I am not, as I noted above, asking whether all these other peoples, who have had their own history of dealing with Israel’s God, will be saved. After all, alongside Amos’s Oracle we must set the word of the psalmist (147:19-20):

He declares his word to Jacob,

his statutes and ordinances to Israel.

He has not dealt thus with any other nation;

they do not know his ordinances.

I am asking simply whether, when the peoples of the world cry out to god in their need, there are Christian grounds for supposing that, at least sometimes, it may be the true God whom they address.

Christians, after all, believe with the psalmist (19:1) that the heavens declare the glory of God. They believe, as St. Paul says in Romans (1:20), that God’s "eternal power and deity" can be and have been discerned in the things he has made. Even Karl Barth, that staunch critic of natural theology, could write: "In spite of all the worldliness and unfaithfulness and ignorance of people, does not God in fact see to it that the knowledge of God is not ineffective that people must . . . know about God and therefore know what they do not want to know or in fact seem to know?" No one can live entirely out of touch with God. Indeed, no one can live entirely out of touch with that God who is the Father of Jesus Christ -- through whom, St. John says, all things were made, and who is both the life and the light of the world. Jesus simply is the light of the world, as John’s Gospel says more than once. Hence, to be a human being is, as Barth puts it, "to stand already, even if with closed or blind eyes, in this light, the light of life." The true God is objectively present to all, even if subjectively unknown.

We have, therefore, grounds for thinking that -- at least sometimes -- the peoples of the world pray to the true God when they cry out in their need. Although they do not fully know that God, he still is present to them and may receive their prayer as directed to himself. Perhaps there is a sense, then, in which a Christian and a Hindu, praying alongside each other, might also be said to be praying "to" the same God -- both directing their prayer to the objectively present God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, though that God is incompletely known to one of those who prays.

The reader will, I hope, recognize the interrogative and tentative quality of these reflections. Granting that quality, I have tried to think through whether and how it might be that Christians and non-Christians could be said, in their shared moment of need, to pray "to" the one (and only) true God -- the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Father of the Lord Jesus. Suppose there is a sense in which that can truly be said. Shall we then conclude that their praying "together" is unproblematic? Hardly. We have not come to the end of our puzzling yet.

Keeping in mind the train of thought I developed above, we might suppose that Paul could, with some theological justification, have told the Corinthians that in those sacrificial rituals the pagans were actually reaching out unwittingly to the true God. This same Paul, after all, as Luke recounts in Acts, could tell the men of Athens that their altar erected "to an unknown God" was, though unknown to them, built for the worship of the God whom he preached. It would have been another matter entirely for him to have joined in their worship of that unknown god -- as if he were not able to identify the One to whom all worship must be directed. So it would be possible for Christians to acknowledge that they and their pagan neighbors pray, in the complicated sense I have specified, "to" the same God. And there might be a sense in which they could pray "alongside" each other, with the Christians knowing that, in the sense specified, all were praying to the same God. But it would be harder to specify a sense in which, even granting all this, they could avoid seeming to deny the Lord Jesus if they were to present themselves as praying "with" their pagan neighbors.

Switch back to the Yankee Stadium event that generated these puzzles for me. What were those who gathered there doing? And do Christians have any reason to draw back from what they were doing? My own (tentative) view is that Christians might have grounds for thinking that they were all, in their shared time of need, praying "to" the same God (objectively present to all though subjectively unknown to many). But to the degree that they thought of themselves as praying "with" each other -- or, perhaps, to the degree that they encouraged others to suppose that they were praying "with" each other -- it was to some power other than Jesus that they were looking as the bond of their union, the power that brought them together "with" each other.

Nor is it terribly hard to identify what that power might have been at Yankee Stadium: namely, "America the Beautiful." I say this hesitantly, not wishing to seem insensitive to those who suffered the loss of loved ones in the September 11 attacks. Still, Christians need to be careful how we react to that evil deed. A "national crisis" is a terrible moment for us all, but it is no time to forget that it is often hard to draw clear lines distinguishing civil religion from ersatz religion -- and from, dare we say it, pagan religion. A national crisis is a time in which to bend every effort and energy to serve the lives of our fellow citizens -- and even, I would add, to defend them by force if need be. Nevertheless, for almost two millennia Christians have made clear, as Justin Martyr put it, that "we worship God only" though in other matters we serve our fellow citizens and those who rule.

We live in a time when Christian congregations have come increasingly to realize that we can no longer count on the surrounding culture to do much of our work for us -- and that to become a Christian may be experienced as a more decisive break from the surrounding culture than it was 50 years ago. Hence, we revive the adult catechumenate, and we make increasingly clear that baptism involves a new birth into the new people of God. We cannot do this in earnest and then revert to the rituals of civil religion the moment some national crisis comes upon us. To be sure, a people -- with the will to sustain itself as a people over time -- needs civic rituals. But Christians need to think about what form they should take -- about the form they may take if Christians are to share in them.

It is no easy thing to be fellow citizens with pagans -- not to say with the pagan that lies buried within each of us. (And likewise, we ought to acknowledge, it may not be easy for pagans to live with us as fellow citizens.) We need to think more, and harder, about how to manage this.

Barth wrote that, because Christ is the light of the world, Christians are eager to tolerate non-Christians, and that this "may have to be for a very long time, even his whole life." But this is not, Barth added, toleration "in the absolute sense." The Christian cannot grant to the non-Christian "a right to be blessed in his own way, for he knows of himself that to his salvation there is no such right even for him. Absolute tolerance towards him would mean not taking him seriously. . . . In effect, then, the Christian cannot leave the non-Christian at peace.

C. S. Lewis’s Visionary World

Book Review

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. By Alan Jacobs. HarperSanFrancisco. 368 pp.

Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles. By David C. Downing. Jossey-Bass, 256 pp.

Revisiting Narnia: Fantasy, Myth and Religion in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles. Edited by Shanna Caughey. BenBella Books, 240 pp., paperback.

The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy. Edited by Gregory Bassham and Jerry L. Walls. Open Court. 288 pp., paperback.

Text:

 

Given the much anticipated release next month of the film version of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one might expect a glut of books on Lewis and Narnia. The books cited here suggest the many angles of vision and academic disciplines from which Lewis’s work generally and the Chronicles in particular continue to receive serious attention.

It has for years been something of a mystery to me that Lewis’s life is of so much interest to his readers; for, truth to tell, not a lot happened in the life. ("I like monotony," Lewis once told Time magazine.) Nonetheless, Alan Jacobs has given us another biography -- which is certainly better than many already available, and which at several places helpfully corrects the pop psychology advanced a decade and a half ago in A. N. Wilson’s eccentric biography.

There are places where Jacobs’s work also seems flawed. His discussion of several theological points is more assured than nuanced, and any biographer today owes his readers some insight into claims of the late Kathryn Lindskoog that a few of Lewis’s posthumously published essays and fragments are inauthentic (and, not to put too fine a point upon it, forgeries). One need not accept those claims, but one must help readers to understand them.

Although Jacobs treats the whole of Lewis’s life and writing, his biography always keeps an eye on the Narnia stories. (Even biographers are allowed to pay some heed to publishers’ marketing concerns.) The question animating his narrative is, as he puts it, "what sort of person wrote the Chronicles of Narnia?" The central theme of his answer turns on the tension (and eventual reconciliation) of reason and imagination in Lewis.

This is not a new insight -- Corbin Carnell treated it more than 30 years ago in Bright Shadow of Reality, whose subtitle was the nicely phrased "C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect," and David Downing also emphasizes it in his new book -- but Jacobs uses this narrative thread to good advantage in uncovering continuity in Lewis’s life. And, of course, it is imagination above all that is on display in the creation of Narnia.

Why, one might wonder, did Lewis write these stories? One thesis, offered by more than one writer, rests on the claim that Lewis gave up entirely his interest in reasoned apologetics after a 1948 debate with Elizabeth Anscombe at a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club. The claim -- proffered by Wilson, for example -- is that Anscombe’s criticism of Lewis’s argument in chapter 3 of Miracles was so devastating that Lewis’s confidence in rational argument was thoroughly shaken, leading him to turn away from reason to a world of imagination. What there is to be said for this hypothesis Victor Reppert notes in a carefully argued essay (in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy), even as he also notes the enormous flaws in it.

If not for this reason, then why did Lewis write the Chronicles? It might be best for us simply to appeal to the Muse, but there are other factors which deserve mention. Reppert notes, as does Downing, the possible influence and example of Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien. Downing also calls attention to the images that had been incubating for years in Lewis’s fertile imagination and that suddenly came to life in the Narnia stories, and Jacobs suggests that we should hardly be surprised when a writer with a long record of concern for moral education turns to writing stories for children.

Jacobs also helpfully reminds readers of what was actually happening in Lewis’s life when he first began to write these stories. He was, for one thing, exhausted from his work and the demands of his everyday life, and when exhausted, Lewis had always turned for renewal to fantasy and romance. Why not write the sort of book he loved to read?

He was also, Jacobs notes, increasingly famous. With that fame, however, came the frustrations of being looked to by many as a kind of "answer man." And he must have remembered how he himself had come to faith -- not simply because he had been convinced by argument but, in large measure, because the Christian faith struck him as a "myth" that had actually become "fact."

When Lewis did put pen to paper, the seven stories of the Chronicles were produced -- even for as fluent as Lewis – in an astonishingly rapid burst of creativity (with the publication of the first in 1950 and the seventh in 1956). There were a few false starts along the way -- especially with respect to The Magician’s Nephew – and readers interested in tracing the course of Narnia’s creation will profit from Downing’s discussion in Into the Wardrobe

In my view we can be thankful that Disney has decided to begin with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe rather than following the renumbering that has been used in the HarperCollins editions of the Chronicles in recent years. Anyone doubting that, at least as an imaginative reading experience, the Chronicles are best read in the order of their original publication will have to come to terms with Peter Schakel’s illuminating discussion in his essay in Revisiting Narnia. He demonstrates, with the skill of an experienced reader and literary critic, that reading the stories in the order of their original publication leaves intact "gaps" which readers gradually fill as they read further in the Chronicles. Some of these are simple and obvious: one has to wait to learn why that strange lamppost should be standing in the middle of a Narnian forest. Others are of deep significance. Schakel notes, for example, how, if one has not first read The Magician’s Nephew, Asian begins as a mysterious (named but unseen and hardly known) presence in Narnia. Only gradually as the stories unfold is that gap filled in such a way that readers can truly be told of Aslan that the longer you know him the bigger he gets.

Indeed, filling in that gap may help to explain -- for this reader, does help to explain -- at least part of what makes the Chronicles so alluring as a work of Christian literary imagination. I myself doubt that the Narnia stories will ever really appeal to the aesthete or the narcissist in each of us; they -- and Aslan -- are far too morally serious and demanding for that.

I am not certain what makes many of the essays in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy particularly philosophical (apart from the fact that they are written by people who teach philosophy), but several of these authors are acutely aware of how painful it may be to have one’s life transformed by Aslan. For example, Bill Davis calls attention to three episodes in which characters learn that while Aslan may be good, he is neither tame nor simply "kind." Eustace is "un-dragoned" only when, his own efforts at transformation having failed, the Lion himself tears away the dragonish skin. Having only just arrived in Narnia, Jill finds that same Lion standing between her and the stream of water from which she very much wants to drink. He refuses to promise that he will leave her alone if she comes to drink -- yet there is no other stream that can refresh her. (The path to the abundant life Aslan offers her is rather different from what one may sometimes hear from television preachers.) And third, and perhaps most poignantly, in obedience to Aslan’s command, Digory relinquishes the desire to pocket a magic apple which could, he suspects, cure his dying mother. If anyone were to read the whole of Lewis’s writings with an eye only to discover what biblical passage he most often cites, one would find, I suspect, that it would be "he that loseth his life shall save it."

The Lewis whose imagination produced these three episodes is the same Lewis who described himself in Surprised by Joy as having been dragged struggling and resentful into faith, "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." He had been drawn toward God by his longing for joy, but when he found God "no slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy." Lewis’s God draws us -- Aslan draws us -- because he is not tame, not to be trifled with. He asks not for a part of our life, but for the whole of it.

This God will, to be sure, make us happy -- happy in ways we could never have imagined -- but he is by no means simply the "welcoming" God so often put forward by Christians today. And the very fact that Aslan continues to entice and allure readers suggests that we ourselves want something more than that welcoming God. Downing’s discussion of the "spiritual vision" underlying the Chronicles captures quite nicely Lewis’s rejection of any "tame god," whose kindness does not rise to the level of supreme goodness -- and, therefore, is not really an answer to the deepest longing of our hearts.

Among Lewis’s most powerful writings are three that came very near the end of his life -- Till We Have Faces, The Four Loves and A Grief Observed (each influenced in important ways by his having come to know and eventually to marry Joy David-man Gresham). Each in its different way invites us to attend to that God whose goodness (like that of the dentist) sometimes hurts, who offers only heavenly comfort (because there is finally no earthly comfort), and who wounds our grasping and possessive nature simply by being Goodness itself. That vision went very deep into Lewis’s personal experience and into the recesses of his imagination. From those recesses came Narnia -- that wonderful land upon which night must finally fall when Aslan says "now make an end." From those recesses came Aslan -- by no means a tame lion, but a good one. It is not easy to portray real goodness. Let us hope that Disney is up to the challenge.

A New Sexual Revolution: The Case for Modesty

It was probably at least a decade ago, while I was teaching at Oberlin, that a young African-American woman -- I'll call her Tonya -- who had been a student in several of my classes told me she was leaving school, at least for a year. I knew her quite well and was in fact her academic adviser, so we talked for a while about her decision. Her reasons were largely personal. Of the black students at Oberlin, considerably more were female than male -- a circumstance that many of the males were quick to take advantage of. If one woman would not give them what they wanted sexually, another would. Tonya was depressed by it all, saw little chance of it changing, and wanted to get away.

I was not about to try to argue her out of it, but I could not resist -- since I did know her well -- offering an observation. "You know, Tonya," I said, "there is a way to solve this problem. It's what we used to call the marriage ethic -- no sex outside of marriage. If you and the other black women were to get together and agree among yourselves to live by that principle, you'd be in control and things would change." She looked at me, laughed (but a little sadly), and said, "Well, it would never work."

Perhaps not. But Wendy Shalit makes at length -- and with wit and learning -- the case for such an attempt. A recent graduate of Williams College, Shalit must, I suspect, have attracted some attention there, since it's clear that she was already formulating this defense of (sexual) modesty during her college years. She writes well, has read widely, has a keen sense for the fault lines in an argument, and is willing to buck the prevailing tides. Although this is in some respects a young woman's book written for other young women, I wonder if we ought not be recommending it to young men. They might learn from it some important lessons about masculine character and conduct in our culture.

Although the argument is, perhaps necessarily, a little repetitive at places, Shalit's case is developed in three stages: "the problem," "the forgotten ideal" and "the return." There are many ways to formulate the problem our culture has created for itself, but one of the simplest is to say that we have lost the capacity for embarrassment. Even that formulation doesn't get it quite right, however. We haven't lost this capacity; we have deliberately subverted it.

Shalit notes that a great deal of sex education to which young children are subjected has as its point the disenchanting of sex -- teaching that "it's no big deal." But it is a very big deal indeed, and the result of this disenchantment has not, Shalit thinks, been good for women. "A society that has declared war on embarrassment is one that is hostile to women." Men know what they want from a woman, and, if it's no big deal, there's no reason they shouldn't get it.

If men are brought up, as today's boys are, believing that girls always want the same thing they do from sexual encounters, and that it's evil and sexist to assume otherwise, then they are that much more likely to be impatient and uncomprehending of a woman's "no." Female modesty gave men a frame of reference for a woman's "no." Without that frame of reference, but instead taught from day one that women are always as ready to receive advances as they are eager to make them, the modern male always takes a "no" as a personal rebuke. That is why women today must link arms, charge down campus in their anti-date-rape rallies, screaming "No means no!"

In such a world, Shalit finds it unsurprising that so many young women fall victim to eating disorders or even to the increasingly prevalent practice of cutting oneself. If hers is in some respects an argument against what feminism has become, she does not -- as some women of her generation have, to the delight of some men -- reject the language that sees women as victimized by our culture. Thus, for example, she takes date-rape seriously and does not want to argue that women must simply take responsibility for their sexuality.

What is needed is a cultural shift that restores female modesty and, along with it, male obligation. "The need is not for nonsexist upbringing, but for precisely a good dose of sexist upbringing: how to relate as a man to a woman." Hers is not so much a question of what the law should require as "the question of what kind of women, and what kind of men, we become." Our culture has tended to tell young women that they must see themselves either as victims of patriarchal oppression or, in order to avoid that, must become more like men. Modesty, Shalit wants to suggest, offers a different and better choice for women who are tired of these alternatives.

What is the forgotten ideal of modesty that we need to restore? It isn't easy for Shalit to define, though it is quite easy for her to illustrate. Coed bathrooms, now so common in colleges and universities, to which she herself objected as an undergraduate, are an apt illustration of the loss of modesty -- all justified, of course, in terms of becoming "comfortable" with one's body. More generally, what modesty does is create a "delay" in the relation of men and women. Through dress and behavior a woman says" wait." She withholds something of herself until she finds a man to whom she truly wishes to give herself -- once and for all. This delay, in turn, inspires a man "to become worthy of her." It transforms lust into love.

Although Shalit does not emphasize the point, we should note also the educational significance of this delay. Such sublimation of desire is, she suggests, vastly underrated by our society. When we do not see desire simply as something to be satisfied or satiated, it draws us on into philosophical wonder. "The world is. . . enchanted. Every conversation, every mundane act is imbued with potential because everything is colored with erotic meaning.. . . Maybe instead of learning to overcome repression, we should be prolonging it." Plato, of course, knew this well, arid we need only read the Phaedrus to remind ourselves that, for him, philosophy, love of wisdom, is sublimated eros. Coed bathrooms are, no doubt, just one sign that most college administrators have not read Plato with the care that Shalit has. The return to modesty that Shalit seeks -- a veritable sexual revolution of its own, as she realizes -- will not be easy. She must, to some extent, take the low road in argument here -- appealing to us in perhaps the only way likely to persuade. Modesty is, she argues, actually more erotic. When nothing is left to the imagination, when there is no delay between desire and satisfaction, when sex is no big deal, sensuality itself is ultimately undermined. "The persistence of sexual modesty challenges and ultimately refutes the equation of the libertine with the erotic, because those who are returning to virtue are doing so for precisely sensual reasons."

But there is more to be said for modesty than just that it will make sex better. Shalit is devastatingly direct in her discussion of the effects of a "divorce culture" on her generation -- even on those who come from happy, intact families. One can never be sure or safe, never confident that one's parents will always be together. How to escape from such insecurity? By taking the commitment of marriage, far more seriously. "Not having sex before marriage is a way of insisting that the most interesting part of your life will take place after marriage, and if it's more interesting, maybe then it will last." Shalit's world, at least, is one in which many unhappy women feel compelled to settle for something less than this. She will not.

The problem, of course, is that it is hard for one person to live in ways that are not touched and shaped by the larger patterns of her culture, and ours is still a culture unfriendly to modesty. Shalit tells us that in 1994 she rushed off to see the new movie version of Little Women, only to discover that our hidden cultural censors, fearful of anything that does not cohere with prevailing orthodoxy, had expunged one of "the best lines" in the story, when Marmee says: "To be loved by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman; and I sincerely hope my girls may know this beautiful experience." Shalit shows how, even in the face of such cultural pressures, a surprising number of young women are reclaiming the ideal of modesty -- and often returning to traditional religion in order to do so. But she realizes that it will be hard for individual women to accomplish much on their own and that what we need is "a real cultural shift."

Society must support a woman's choice of modesty; hence, it cannot be just a "private virtue" or a "personal choice." Shalit seems to have read not only Plato but also Aristotle with care. Good ethics is almost impossible in a badly ordered society. "Perhaps this is where liberalism failed, because it claimed society could be simply neutral about individuals' choices, and it never can."

In the face of our own badly ordered society, what are women with Shalit's insight to do? Shalit advocates a return to what she calls "the cartel of virtue." "In the past, women secured the chances of lasting love by forming a kind of cartel: they had an implicit agreement not to engage in premarital or extramarital sex with men. This made it more likely that men would many and stay married to them."

Shalit is pleased to quote a small newspaper item from the Williams Free Press that -- after her graduation -- in May 1998, Williams College was planning to renovate two dormitories in order to provide separate bathrooms for men and women. "It appears that Wendy Shalit '97, whose article in Reader's Digest condemning the bathroom situation garnered Williams dubious distinction in the national spotlight, will finally be avenged." A small triumph for modesty -- and, if this book gains the readership it deserves, there may be still more.

Cross Meets Crescent: An Interview with Kenneth Cragg

You've said that Christians and Muslims should be trying to work for religious ecumenism. What does ecumenism look like from a Muslim perspective?

It depends on which Muslim you ask, of course, as it would depend on which Christian you asked. The word ecumenae means the whole inhabited world. But we seem to have limited it to Christian togetherness, to Christian mutuality. Couldn't we have an ecumenae of religions?

The ecumenical movement has adopted the position that "whatever is Christian I will try to belong with, in some sense." Can we go on to say, "I will try to belong with anything that is religious"? That, obviously, is vastly more difficult. But a good example of this happened at Temple University, where the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is produced. The journal started out dealing only with inter-Christian issues. Then the editors said, "Why not include Jews? They're part of the ecumenae of Abraham. Why not Muslims?" If you begin thinking that way, soon you ask, "Why not every religion -- Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism?"

The difficulty is that religion is such an omnibus term. Michael Ramsey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, once said, "Not everything religious is desirable." Would we want to align ourselves with the Hinduism that undergirds the caste system or the Hinduism of Gandhi, which repudiates the caste system? To which Islam can Christians relate -- the Islam of Afghanistan's Taliban or the Islam of academics living in the West? But with due circumspection, I think it's possible to relate to those of other faiths. We must do so with patience and modesty, with the honest recognition that the degree to which we can be together is partial, and that each faith has distinctive aspects which can't be reconciled. If we agree to agree, we must at the same time agree to disagree. Otherwise, we may be heading only for some kind of gooey sentimentalism.

 

In the U.S., there always seem to be far more Christians than Muslims involved in Islamic-Christian dialogue groups. Are Christians more open than Muslims to this kind of encounter?

Even those in the two faiths who are articulate and ready for dialogue do have a different kind of calendar. Christianity has had a longer confrontation with modernity than has Islam. Our experience or awareness of the issues now facing us is, consequently, different. Christians are more aware of the need to respond to pluralism.

We have to be patient until Muslims feel they are more ready for dialogue. What I often find is that the Muslim participants in dialogue groups will make a kind of set statement reiterating how they see things. You get the impression that they haven't really taken in the things the Christians have said. But at least they have been willing to respond. Many of the same issues face people of all religions -- ecology the environment, population. In all these spheres we can, to an extent, cooperate. And religions need the criticism that those of other faiths can bring.

 

Aren't many Muslim countries trying to shut themselves off from the West and the West's religion?

There is a very deep-seated resentment of Western power, especially of American power. It's a love-hate relationship, because these countries need Western technology and expertise. People come to the West for education, and some nations, such as Egypt and Jordan, are sustained by American aid. If you feel your culture is under threat, however, or is going to be swamped by what you regard as alien influences, or if you want to have some control over the degree to which another culture influences yours -- then you may develop a mentality of resistance. We see an extreme form of this in Afghanistan. The more people see old securities threatened, the louder they tend to shout. So in that sense, fundamentalism is itself an index of the degree of inevitable change.

 

Is it possible for Muslim countries to develop a non-Western modernity, an Islamic modernity?

Yes. An example is the work of Ismail al-Faruqi, a Palestinian who taught at Temple University. Faruqi promoted the idea of what he called the "Islamization of all knowledge." Faruqi thought that Western science, especially the social sciences, had a harmful influence, particularly on the young. Sociology and psychology take up the subject of religious conviction and put a question mark around faith. They imply that there is no objective reality. According to the social sciences, if we hold religious beliefs it's because we've been conditioned to do so. To combat this mind-set, it's necessary to construct a system of knowledge consistent with Islamic premises -- to make the social sciences consistent with Islamic doctrines. Faruqi developed these ideas in various books, most notably The Cultural Atlas of Islam and An Islamic Formulation of the Social Sciences.

 

What place does fundamentalism have within the full range of Islamic faith and practice?

This is difficult to discuss, because there is no equivalent for the word "fundamentalism" in Arabic. In one sense, Islam is inherently fundamentalist in that it understands the Qur'an to be a literal dictation to Muhammad of a book in heaven. His mental processes or personal preferences are not at all involved in the text of the Qur'an. It is simply the result of a mysterious process of inspiration or revelation that comes down upon him. The orthodox view (with which I don't agree) is that Muhammad was illiterate. That makes the text of the Qur'an all the more God's word, because it couldn't have come from Muhammad. The 13th-century mystic Jalal ed-Din Rumi gives a vivid image of Muhammad's role in transmitting the Qur'an: Muhammad is like a stone lion in a garden. Out of the lion's mouth comes a spout of water. Everyone knows that a cunning plumber has contrived a pipe to use as a conduit to conduct the water through the lion.

In Islam, the more something is of God, the less the human is needed. In contrast, the biblical view is that the more the divine is giving, the more the human is recruited. The biblical prophets are vivid personalities, not ciphers. Each has his own unique style and imagery.

But the Qur'an has been considered a literal scripture from the beginning. This is what accounts for the importance of calligraphy and recitation in Islam. One mustn't make a mistake in recitation, since one is repeating the very words of God. For most Christians, the New Testament is not that kind of writing. We see it as a book about what is antecedent to itself -- the person and work of Christ, the Word made flesh, teaching and suffering among us.

Though the Qur'an does need interpretation, Muslims don't approach it with the kind of almost overconfidence that sometimes marks Christian exegesis of the Bible. A Muslim once said to me, "You play fast and loose with your scripture." That is how Muslims react to our sense that we need to discern what the text could mean -- especially, for example, when we deal with the Gospel of John. We question whether we can accept the text as giving us the actual words of Jesus, as we think the parables do. Why do Jesus' words sound so different in the Fourth Gospel? What is John doing here? Those are legitimate questions for us, questions that are a part of the integrity of our faith. One Muslim has referred to "the liquidity of the Christian scriptures as you treat them." He says it's like the liquidity of capital -- we make it do what we want it to do.

Another factor is that Muslims understand Islam as the final religion, and Jesus as the next-to-last in a long succession of prophets. The Qur'an is the book that perfects and, if need be, corrects all previous revelation, going right back to Abraham. That gives Muslims an enormous sense of finality, which tends to preclude a will to be really critical or even investigative about what they believe.

 

Is there a place for historical criticism in Islam, the kind of criticism Western scholars started applying to the biblical text in the l8thcentury?

Not that kind of textual criticism. But Muslims have a principle of exegesis: the horizontal plain of Muhammad's revelation, which he received over 23 years, from 609, when he was 40, until his death in 632.To understand the text you need to know what Muslims call "the occasions of revelation," that is, when and in what circumstances a verse or chapter come to Muhhammad. The context is the clue to the content.

There's a second very interesting interepretive question that some Muslims will recognize and take up, but others tend to ignore because it's too daunting -- they see it as a slippery slope. The question has to do with the finality of the text. Why does this final revelation come to Arabia in the seventh century of the Christian era? How do we take a revelation there and then into the 20th-century global culture?

We now have all sorts of issues that technology off-loads onto ethics. How do we behave about birth control? How do we respond to the idea of international human rights now that we have the United Nations and the concept of common human values? Can we still hold that what happens in our country is our own affair, and that no others have a right to intrude? Does world opinion have the right to concern itself with how women are treated in Saudi Arabia? The 20th century is very different from the seventh. You can claim that the revelation is final, but it becomes a museum piece unless it continues to apply to your time.

 

How might Muslims -- and Christians-deal with these intellectual problems now confronting Islam?

There are ambiguities in the Qur'an, and passages that can be interpreted in different ways. One can, for example, base the argument for the equality of the sexes on certain Qur'anic passages. And there are articulate and courageous Muslim women -- like Fatima Mernissi in Morocco -- who are making this point. It's important for us not to say, "Look here, the West has Jeffersonian values about the rights of women, values we'd like to see you adopt," but to argue instead from the Qur'an itself, citing verses like the one stating that God has ordained love and tenderness between the male and female in marriage, or that no man has two hearts in one bosom. I take that to mean that polygamy is impossible because no man can love two wives equally.

Even the verse that has been interpreted for centuries as giving men permission to marry up to four women says a man can do so only if he treats them all equally. But what does equality mean in this context? If it means dividing the budget equally between the wives or spending an equal number of nights with each, then it's feasible to marry more than one. But if it means having an equal affection of the heart for each, the proviso is unattainable and the permission lapses. By this exegesis, the verse does not legitimate plural marriage; it requires monogamy. This is the kind of exegesis by which women can have the text on their side. And it's not dishonest to do this. On the interfaith question, the Qur'an contains passages that say God himself ordained human diversity in order that people might compete together to be the best. God has sanctified diverse cultures by giving each a pattern of worship, a ritual to follow. Another verse says that there is no people to whom a prophet has not been sent. Does that make Socrates a prophet to the Greeks? Is the Buddha a prophet? Of course, there are other verses that seem to restrict pluralism. If a text is ambiguous, you might as well interpret it in the ways that seem the best and the most just. That's how reformers work.

 

What do you make of the current U.S. focus on curbing the persecution of Christians in other countries, particularly Islamic countries?

We must,, of course, try to make sure that religious persecution isn't covered up, and we must try to get the facts straight, avoiding exaggeration. I think that the best way to approach this problem is to promote liberty of conscience for people of all faiths. Liberty of soul and freedom to change one's religious affiliation are human rights that should be asserted on behalf of all.

We must be concerned with how Muslim, as well as Christian, minorities are treated in Islamic countries.We must be concerned about the Muslim scholars who are persecuted in their own countries or are forced into exile. We don't want our concern about religious persecution to come across as a Western power's concern about Christians only. We want to dispel the old suspicion that the Christians in the East provide a way for Western interests to gain a toehold in Eastern societies. Christians in places like Egypt and Palestine want to cast their lot with the others of their own societies; they don't want to be thought of as dubious citizens. We don't want to compromise their situations still more by making them seem a kind of enemy in the camp.

 

What about the Muslim minorities in the West?

A big dilemma for Muslims today is that many have lost the shelter of the Islamic state. About a quarter of the world's Muslims live as minorities in places where they must practice Islam as "just a religion," to use a Western phrase. For them, Islam is a system of worship and ethics and a community, but not a source of social and political power.

There is a precedent for this in Islam in the first 13 years of Muhammad's mission. There are passages in the Qur'an where God says that Muhammad has no responsibility except to preach the message. It wasn't until after the Hijrah -- Muhammad's flight from Mecca to what became Medina -- in 622 that Islam became a political force

Now many Muslims find themselves in that pre-Hijrah situation in which the faith began. If we believe in the hand of God behind historical developments, then today's Muslim diaspora -- Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Pakistanis in Britain, Indonesians in Holland, people from many Islamic countries in Canada and the U.S. -- seems a call for Muslims to coexist with those of other religions. Many Muslims are being called to live in varying circumstances, as fellow citizens, voting, getting elected, taking part in local and national government -- but all in the context of remaining a minority, with the psychological uncertainty that all minorities experience.

 

What problems does Islam without statehood pose for Muslims, and what effect might it have on Islam?

I think that this is, paradoxically, a realm of hope for the world and for Islam. Muslims in this condition are forced to interrogate the very core of their faith. How can Islam be true, full and authentic when it lacks one element that historically has been understood as a sine qua non of the faith? Two new journals in Britain are devoted to thinking through this problem: the Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs and the Journal of Qur'anic Studies. The brochure for the latter states that it is open to the free exercise of scholarship in the interpretation of the Qur'an and invites non-Muslims to share in the debate.

The rise of Muslim minority populations makes urgent the question of international law: What is the appropriate treatment for religious minorities? To its credit, Islam has a long tradition of conditional toleration for Jewish and Christian minorities, to whom it gives dhimmi status -- the freedom to practice their religion, and to educate their progeny in it, on condition that they submit politically to the Islamic state. In some places this took the form of a kind of contract: a minority had to submit or forfeit its right to remain in the country. Such an approach is not viable in the modern world, where we have the concept of equal citizenship. The status of minorities must not include political subservience.

The position of Muslim minorities raises the whole question of the nature of religious authority. Can Islam move toward accepting the secular state -- secular in the sense that the state treats equally citizens of any and every tradition, consonant with public order and the common good? There is, of course, always prejudice against minorities on the part of majorities; there are all kinds of ways to put minorities in an inferior position. But the ideal of the secular state -- that all may be what they are, that believers in all faiths are common subjects of the state -- can be argued on the basis of Islam itself, if one goes back to pre-Hijrah times and to the concept of the dhimmi. This makes religion a private affair in terms of how the government views religious practice. But it does not imply that belief is nothing more than a private option. It doesn't require the kind of secularity that means nobody has any belief at all. We need urgently to make this distinction. As Islam recognizes its vocation to be just a religion in situations where it is a minority faith, the quality of Islamic faith in its cohesion and understanding of compassion can contribute to the common good of other faiths as well.

International law requires us to get away from the notion that national boundaries are frontiers across which ideas may not cross. The concept of international human rights from which no country is exempt is consonant with the idea that Shari'a, the large body of legal tradition that informs the Muslim community about how God requires it to live, is in some sense the rule of God.

 

How might Christians counter the view that Islam is a great threat to Western civilization?

This image of a confrontation between Islam and the West is much more prevalent in the U.S. than it is in Europe, and the American media seem to promote it. But we can give the lie to this reading of history. There is an understanding, both Christian and Muslim, that we should keep in mind: With what measure you mete, it shall be meted out to you. In other words, the way you treat another party is likely to contribute to the response that party makes to you. If you are ready to assume a capacity that is positive and reciprocal, there's a better chance that you will find it.

A verse from the Sermon on the Mount is very appropriate to this context -- Judge not and you shall not be judged." Like many of the sayings of Jesus, this could be misread. It doesn't mean that you should never have an opinion. The point is that your judgment is an index to your character. The way we judge has a way of judging us. Our judgments must be based on a perceptive honesty and a wide compassion. When two cultures accuse each other of satanism, the only one who gains is Satan himself.

The openhearted observer of Islam in the West can discern the shape of hope in the increasing willingness of people of the two faiths to come together for dialogue and consultation on the mutual problems they face; in the reevaluation of Islam forced upon Muslims by their minority status in many places; and in the development of the concept of international law and universal human rights. We must do our best to contribute to the fullfillment of that hope. .

 

Mirror of These Ten Years

In the first place, we must admit that it is difficult for a Christian to talk about himself. Not that it is difficult to lay oneself bare (especially in these days of literary exhibitionism). But a Christian ought to know how little interest attaches to him as a person. And he ought to know that it is better to talk about Jesus Christ than about himself. If nevertheless he is led to talk about himself - as I have been here - he must do so not only with strict honesty but above all objectively, in detachment, examining himself without romanticism, as a different object; always aware of the promptings of old human nature and always remembering the warning, "Do not be conformed to this world."

A second preliminary remark, as banal as the first. Obviously, my thinking has developed under two influences. On the one hand, I kept to the same path as before, sharpening and widening my ideas and in general pursuing the native bent of my mind. On the other hand, my thinking changed under the impact of external events, of sociological, political, ideological permutations. This kind of thing influences me the more because I always think "at grips," as it were, with my surroundings - sometimes in protest against what is happening but always taking account of it. I make no claim to being a philosopher or a dogmatician. I can never look at anything sub specie aeternitatis. Whatever I think, do, write as a Christian, I think, do, write it in relation to a specific setting. I shall not say that I am mentally "committed"* (to a particular line or school of thought, for instance), but I am "involved."

Well then, two processes have worked to change my mind. If the first was intrinsic, a matter of development and creation, the second was above all a matter of crises and renewed questioning. So it is mainly the second that I shall speak of. Let me say only a few words about the first.

I

In these ten years I have come to a progressively clearer view of my writings and of the principles underlying them. From the beginning my thinking revolved chiefly around the contradiction between the evolution of the modern world and the biblical content of the Revelation. Step by step I had arrived at two convictions, both negative: on the one hand, that it was impossible to construct a comprehensive "Christian system" applicable to man’s political, economic and similar activities. Of course, from the intellectual point of view it is possible to construct such a system, but it would be totally inapplicable, therefore totally meaningless: it would foster the illusory belief that "we have the remedy but nobody will buy it." Moreover, those who attempt to work out a Christian political system usually do not look beyond the society they live in, thus in effect conferring on that society a Christian blessing; and this is inadmissible.

The other negative conviction I have reached is this: that Christianity does not offer (and is not made to offer!) a solution for social, political, economic problems (or even for moral or spiritual problems!). God in Jesus Christ puts questions to us -questions about ourselves, our politics, our economy - and does not supply the answers; it is the Christian himself who must make answer. Consequently, I have set up the principle of confrontation. We must seek the deepest possible sociological understanding of the world we live in, apply the best methods, refrain from tampering with the resuits of our research on the ground that they are "spiritually" embarrassing, maintain complete clarity and complete realism - all in order to find out, as precisely as may be, where we are and what we are doing, and also what lines of action are open to us. The Christian intellectual is called frankly to face the sociopolitical reality.

This is one demand on the Christian intellectual. The other is that he also develop and deepen his knowledge in the biblical and theological fields. But he must beware of "inflecting" theology for the sake of the "cultural" (that is my objection to Tillich). The only thing that will be of any use is not synthesis or adaptation, but confrontation; that is, bringing face to face two factors that are contradictory and irreconcilable and at the same time inseparable. For it is only out of the decision he makes when he experiences this contradiction - never out of adherence to an integrated system - that the Christian will arrive at a practical position.

So I have steadily deepened this idea, which is meant to prompt every reader to make his own decision, on the spiritual as well as on the political or economic level. The writing I had undertaken in a tentative frame of mind assumed a progressively better structure. The whole of it is a composition in counterpoint. Every sociological analysis of mine is answered (not in the sense of replying, but in that of noting the other dialectical pole) by a biblical or theological analysis. For example, to my book The Political Illusion, a study of politics as actually practiced in a modern state, corresponds my Politics of God, Politics of Man, a biblical study of the Second Book of Kings. To my book on technology corresponds my theologically based study of the great city as the supreme achievement of man’s technology. Etc. But the system and the conclusions to be drawn therefrom will appear only at the end of my work, if God permits me to arrive at the end.

To sum up: in these past ten years I have deepened and clarified my ideas and above all I have applied them more completely.

II

But most fundamental for me in these ten years was a certain crisis in my thinking that produced important results (important for me!) and arose from many circumstances. I shall describe it under four heads: (i) the Algerian war, (2) my relation to the World Council of Churches, (3) my relation to the Reformed Church of France, and (4) the theology of the secular and of the death of God.

The Algerian War. Since 1934 I had belonged to a small group that sought to put the Algerian problem before the French public. We had failed completely. When the rebellion started, I wrote several articles calling on the church to intervene in order that a federalistic solution might be negotiated with the Algerian leaders or a system of double nationality" instituted. 1 had stated publicly that, in my opinion, this Algerian business could not be settled by military means, except those employed in Madagascar in 1947: drowning the revolt in blood, and without delay. But early in 1956 I came to the conclusion that it was now too late for negotiation of any kind, and that the only possible long-run outcome of this war was France’s defeat. I did not think it right to support the National Liberation Front, because its victory would necessarily result in the impoverishment of the French colons, in a dictatorship, and in far-reaching retrogression in every department of Algerian life. In fact I did not see that there was anything I could say or do, because it was already too late to reach a just solution.

It was then I parted company with the majority of French Christian intellectuals. These Christians began to be concerned about the Algerian problem in 1956 - passionately so, especially in 1957-58. Almost without exception they sided with the N.L.F., and they raised protests against the French army’s use of torture (of course they said nothing about the N.L.F.’s use of torture). I refused to sign petitions, to take part in demonstrations, to vote on synodal motions. Besides, it seemed to me that petitions and so on were of little importance. I found myself very much alone and under severe criticism on the part of those who supported the "good cause."

All this led me to think more carefully about the role of the Christian intellectual. His role, it seems to me, is essentially that of a sentinel (Ezekiel chapter 33) who foresees approaching events and gives warning before the situation reaches the pitch of tragedy, takes on a massive character or becomes the focus of passions. There can be no just solution save when the political situation is still fluid, not too acute and as yet unpublicized. Once passions are unleashed, no just solution is possible. I believe that the Christian is able to perceive things that others do not yet consider important. His role is to discern the problem at its birth, and never to howl with the wolves when it has attained enormous, dramatic proportions. Then the Christian must be silent, must pray and repent for all. This view and this conviction were born in me out of the experience of the Algerian affair.

- The World Council of Churches. A second factor that has greatly influenced my thinking is my estrangement from the World Council of Churches. Through experience, I had reached the conviction that the council was on the way to becoming a bureaucratic system, an enormous machine that, the larger it grew, the more it conformed to sociological laws of organization, rather than obeying the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Sadly ironic, I said that Protestantism was doing just about what the Roman church (by developing the Curia) had been doing since the 16th century. I found myself more and more at odds with the W.C.C.’s way of laying hold of and looking at problems. That did not mean that I questioned the importance of the ecumenical movement and of the desire for unity. I simply realized more and more that the old theological differences had less and less sense and that it was only because their theological formulas had become obsolete that the various churches were ready to meet together. But at the same time it seemed to me that a new line of cleavage was appearing: the political line. The true differences within each church were of a political nature and might lead to schisms. The World Council precipitately adopted positions that seemed to me scarcely worth taking seriously: problems poorly analyzed, inadequate solutions, superficiality, lack of sound theological thinking, etc. I have a horror of the reign of false experts!

The crisis came into the open at the Conference on Church and Society (1966). There I voiced my total dissent, because it seemed to me that the conference had not tackled any of the basic problems of our society, had simply affirmed purely purely demagogic theses (for example, those about the so-called underdeveloped countries), had proposed remedies some of which were in fact inapplicable, and had adopted a theology of revolution without taking theological thought at all. So in this respect too I found myself on the fringe of the movement that the generality of Christians were engaged in. And this naturally led to a number of changes in my thinking as well as in my activities.

The Reformed Church of France. The third factor in my change of mind was the Reformed Church of France. I am a member of the council that governs that whole church. In 1957-58 I believed that the church could take resolute steps toward "reform." First, it seemed to me that in a time of rapid social change the church also needed to modify its forms of its ideas of evangelization, ministry, etc. To this end we set up a ten-member "Commission of Strategy," which did a notable piece of work in elaborating a complete plan for revising the church’s structure and forms of expression in the light of the changes in society. But after six years of work our efforts ended in failure - in spite of the fact that we had taken every possible tactical precaution lest we offend custom. We had worked out a plan by which reforms were to be introduced gradually, and we thought that each successive step would be acceptable to the faithful. We were wrong. Some of our reforms were accepted, others so changed as to make them worthless, still others rejected outright. Well, our plan was of a piece; so it must be said that we failed. We came up against a ponderous apparatus (even though we were part of the governing organization), against tradition, against the indifference and apathy of the church’s members.

Second, it seemed to me that the church had to deal with the problem of hermeneutics, for several views on the interpretation of Scripture were developing within it. The "new hermeneutics" is not uniform - J. M. Robinson’s differs from Ebeling’s. Now, the Reformed Church of France was already pluralistic: liberals, Calvinists, Barthians coexisted within it. The new hermeneutics was a threat that forced us to ask how far Scripture could be "demythologized" and reinterpreted and what would be left of the kerygma. We set up a commission representing six points of view to study these questions seriously and to arrive at a confrontation. But, one after another, representatives of the various viewpoints stopped coming to the meetings, until only the three "Barthians" remained.

These two failures so deeply influenced my thinking that I was led to conclude that the church, as church, was incapable of reforming itself, and that dialogue and communication were as difficult in the church as elsewhere -- if not more difficult. Hence arose certain theological reflections. For if the Holy Spirit is present in the church, the church ought always to be reforming itself; and the Spirit will establish communication and true understanding in the faithful. So I asked myself whether God who sometimes turns away, had actually abandoned our church. A question, not an affirmation.

III

The New Theology. Finally, I come to the fourth factor that changed my mind; namely, the "new theology" - the theologies of Tillich and Bultmann (which to be sure were old but up to then had been relatively unknown in France) as well as the theologies of the secular and the death of God. It is not these new formulations themselves that I consider difficult or disconcerting. Moreover, any number of arguments can be marshaled to refute these theologies on the intellectual plane. But necessarily they introduce suspicion -- and I think we must distinguish carefully between suspicion and the spirit of criticism. The latter is altogether desirable. Every believer ought always to be examining the content of his faith, ought willingly to undergo this test; because it is only the faith that is "unprotected" by some intellectual or sociological reinforcement that is true faith in God in Jesus Christ. Historical criticism, for instance, seems to me entirely a wholesome procedure.

But here we come up against something quite different. This "new theology" is an attack on the content of the faith -- an attack not with honestly intellectual weapons but with the appearance of rationality and scientific rigor, thus an attack that is a spiritual aggression. This is exactly what the philosophy of Feuerbach does - and indeed all these theologies implicitly go back to Feuerbach. For when you face a system that attributes everything to the cultural (the God the Bible speaks of is only a curtural expression) and to linguistic structures (the message has no true content -- it only has syntactic structure), your intellectual refutation of it cannot be couched in terms more exact than those adduced in support of the system. The quarrel cannot be settled on that level; and when it has been fought a question necessarily remains: that of a kind of evidence that is beyond philosophy. In other words, we can no longer read the Bible in simplicity of heart, because this theology begets suspicion; we can no longer pray with utter trust in God, because this theology sends us back to our own human nature. So it is a crisis of faith that is joined here. There was a period when Barthianism bade fair to land us in arid dogmatism. Now we are in a period of "dilution," of watering down the expression as well as the content of the Revelation. I personally find myself caught in this crisis, facing it honestly and knowing that God is faithful and will not abandon us even when human folly becomes frenetic.

IV

These various crises have led me, first, to withdraw more and more from politics and from action in the church; second, to become much more radical in all my thinking.

I am convinced that any action we can take, whether in politics or in attempts at church reform, is utterly useless. As to politics, I am now confirmed in the skepticism that came over me after my political experience (as deputy mayor of Bordeaux) in 1944-48. Any action open to us is necessarily small-scale, concerned with details. Which is to say that it will inevitably be nullified by the body society. Ours is a global society which cannot be changed piecemeal. Any attempt to deal with one small part of the sociopolitical problem is bound to be taken over by this society and turned to its advantage. The same goes for the church (at least for the church I know) where a thousand steps need to be taken, the mass of the faithful will consent to take only one. Moreover, the general view is that the church needs merely to adapt itself to society and modern thought - whereas it is just the opposite that must be attempted: so to structure the church that it can live and speak as an unassimilated foreign body in our society. But that is an idea that, so far as I can see, is impossible to realize today, an idea too high for the generality of the faithful.

So I turned away from actions of that kind. That does not mean that I fell prey to resignation or pessimism. (My pessimism is theologically based, and it was already a radical pessimism; but along with it I experience the absolute joy of the redemption and the resurrection!) I simply gave up certain points of view that I considered marginal. I face the crisis - including the theological crisis - for what it is, in the assurance that on the other side of such crises the truth of the gospel is at last proclaimed in truth. I bear the burden of this crisis so far as I can. But then I am led to an even more radical position - to a political radicalism and to a theological radicalism. These words, however, must be under. stood in a sense different from their usual one! By political radicalism I certainly do not mean a leftist or pacifist position. I venture to say that demonstrations contra and Vietnam war or pro Maoism are an absolute anachronism, totally unimportant and without any bearing whatever on the things that are basic in our society. We must get to the roots of our society (technology, political power, psychological manipulation) and attack it there. In a way I admire the hippie movement, but I not believe that such a movement can result in any worthwhile development or action. The hippies, whether they like it or not, are merely a luxury phenomenon in a "great society." The technological society and the power it commands form the infrastructure without which the hippies could not exist. The radicalism I am in search of is much more basic. But I do not know whether it can be formulated nor whether it will require some particular mode of action. In any case, I believew that it is only through complete refusal to compromise with the forms and forces of our society that we can find the right orientation and recover the hope of human freedom.

As to theological radicalism, by that I certainly do not mean any of the theologies mentioned above (death-of-God, revolutionary, secular, cultural, new hermeneutical). In my opinion the radical fault of these theologies is their conformity to the world; that is, to this society. It is because our culture and our science have acquired such prestige, because our technology witnesses to the greatness of man, etc., that this theological movement has developed. In the name of science and of human power, this movement is radical so far as the old dogmas, creeds, etc. are concerned . But this is a radicalism that characterizes the whole society and what is so wonderful about falling in with it. On the other hand, so far as the world and modern society are concerned these new theologies are conformist in a truly radical (!) way.

The mark of the theological radicalism I have in mind is precisely its refusal to compromise with these theologies, which look (but only look) sound and are the expression of the spirit of the times. But we certainly cannot go back to the old, faulty and obsolete formulations; that would serve no purpose, and besides it probably could not be done. It is beyond the crisis that we must find the true expression of the Revelation. Not an expression that is acceptable, adaptive, conformed to the modern spirit, but an expression that is true because, on the one hand, it comes to grips with the problems of our society and its people, and, on the other, firmly upholds the reality of the Revelation in its fullness.

Today my thinking centers on the search for a Credo for the church of tomorrow.

Liberal Learning and the Practice of Freedom

Perhaps the concept of freedom comes closer than any other single idea to summing up what the human enterprise is all about. Social progress can well be measured by the criterion of personal liberty, and the level of civilization may properly be rated according to the range and variety of choices people can make. The democratic ideal is fulfilled in proportion to the opportunity provided for voluntary association, communication, movement, and occupation. Croce appropriately called history "the story of liberty," thus intimating that freedom is the clue to the whole course of human existence. Similarly, the major contribution of the existentialist movement in philosophy, psychology, and theology has been to point out the fundamental role of decision-making in all human experience.

The perennial struggle for freedom takes different forms in different situations and epochs. There are also various ideas about what freedom means and how it is to be achieved. Every generation and every society has its characteristic ideals and problems of freedom. Modern Western civilization arose as men sought to throw off the restrictions of the feudal order and to expand their activities into the wider arenas opened up by commerce and exploration. Centuries later, the struggle for freedom still continues, as peoples who only a few years ago lived under colonial rule now struggle for political and economic independence and for a recognized place in the international community. In a world transformed by urbanization and industrialization, people still fight for greater liberty of movement and for a larger share in the material abundance of the earth. Even in our own country, proud of its long heritage as the cradle of liberty and the land of the free, the issue of freedom, whether in the field of civil rights or of economic opportunity, is still the most fundamental problem of our time.

In no domain is the search for freedom more evident than in higher education. The slogan of "freedom now" is not only the cry of civil rights demonstrators; it is also the watchword of a generation of college and university students seeking for meaning and motivation in their academic work. They are convinced that freedom is their birthright, and they accept the doctrine consistently preached by civic and academic leaders that education is the most important way to secure this patrinomy. Yet many of the most thoughtful and concerned among today’s students are not

convinced that higher education really does sustain and enlarge freedom. They often regard their studies as chores to be fulfilled in order to earn a degree, which is increasingly prerequisite for getting a good place in the professional, social, or business world. They see college life as fostering conformity and dependence rather than freedom, imagination, and creativity.

The issue of freedom is particularly acute with respect to liberal education, the ostensible function of which is to fulfill the ideal of liberty. A liberal education that is not liberating is manifestly a contradiction of terms. That is why students in liberal arts colleges are rightly concerned about the reality of the freedom their education is meant to exemplify and promote. It is therefore important to reflect on the relation of liberal learning to freedom, in order to be clear about what kind of liberation it entails and how its promise can most effectively be fulfilled.

In what follows I intend first briefly to identify four distinct senses in which liberal education is related to freedom, and then go on to elaborate the fourth of these relationships in some detail. The first three meanings of "liberal" in the academic sphere are all familiar and have frequently been treated in discussions of higher education. The fourth is seldom noticed, and yet in some ways is closer to the essence of liberal studies than the other three, and on that account is particularly worthy of emphasis.

Liberal Learning as a Privilege of Freedom

The standard classical meaning of liberal learning is that it is a privilege of freedom. Liberal studies are an occupation appropriate to free men, as contrasted with slaves. They are the prerogative of the gentleman, who is not obliged to spend his time in doing the bidding of others, but who can employ himself according to his own inclinations and in pursuit of his own chosen ends. Such privileges are possible only to those who are not driven by economic pressures to spend their time in making a living. Liberal learning requires leisure; it cannot thrive among people who are preoccupied with problems of subsistence.

The classical ideal of liberal learning arose in the context of a slave economy, and its association with class distinctions persists even today. We are in the habit of contrasting "liberal" with "vocational." Liberal studies are a luxury enjoyed by those who can afford to live the good life because they are not preoccupied with merely earning good wages. If a person needs specialized training for a profession, he goes on to graduate school after completing his liberal arts course. In principle, he thus has the best of both worlds: he can live the good life and also make a comfortable living. His vocational preeminence presumably entitles him to the income and the leisure to pursue the good life for which his liberal education is intended to prepare him.

This goal of liberal learning as a privilege of free men is fulfilled in America and in other advanced industrial societies in the sense that problems of subsistence

have largely been solved. We are affluent enough to devote substantial material and human resources to the cultivation of the arts and sciences without regard to their immediate practical utility. Liberal arts colleges continue to thrive even though the proportion of students served by them is steadily declining.

Nevertheless, in the case of the individual student the idea of liberal learning as a leisure pursuit is quite alien in the contemporary American scene. One cause is the democratic ethos. We are not a class-conscious people, and the notion of one kind of education for the gentleman of leisure and another for the worker is foreign to us. But more decisive is the fact that in American culture, shaped so much by the Puritan tradition, work is more honored than leisure. Correspondingly, education is mainly regarded as a means for occupational competence. Americans are success-oriented, and they value education as the prime road to vocational achievement.

The result of this pressure for upward mobility through education is that all learning, even in the liberal arts and sciences, has largely become vocational in its aim. The most prevalent argument currently offered on behalf of liberal education is that it best prepares the student for graduate or professional school, for executive leadership in business, or for being a wife or mother in a professional or executive family. The leaders in American culture are not like the tiny minority of landed aristocracy who were educated as gentlemen at Oxford or Cambridge so that they might enjoy their leisure and be ornaments of erudition. American managers and professionals hardly know the meaning of leisure. They carry large responsibilities, and they work long hours under heavy pressure. While most would deny that they are slaves, it would be hard to justify the claim that they are free men.

By the same token, the education that prepares people to be leaders in our society can hardly be called a free man’s privilege. Students in the best liberal arts colleges are certainly not practicing the enjoyment of leisure. They are as anxious and pressured as the parents who send them there and as they themselves will be in the years of adult responsibility that lie ahead. For many if not for most college students, studies are part and parcel of their work duty and are largely determined by their vocational aspirations. They compete with each other for position, grades, and honors, just as they expect to do in the business, professional, and social world into which they mean to graduate.

The trouble with this orientation to what is called liberal education is that the student misses the opportunity to engage in the most valuable of all human activities: the pursuit of understanding as an end in itself and not only as a means to ends beyond itself If a person’s life is to be sufficient and satisfying, he needs above all to enjoy intrinsically worth-while experiences and not only instrumental preparatory ones. Unless he develops the capacity for consummatory appreciations, he will go through life anxiously and futilely striving for something that he will never attain.

I believe that the contemporary student generation’s concern for freedom in higher education and their recognition of the slavishness of much of what goes by the name of liberal studies points toward the need to restore the lost element of leisure in the life of learning and to renew the conviction that understanding contains its own rewards. The liberal arts college ought to be a place where there is time for the exploration and assimilation of ideas. Even from the standpoint of utility, in the long run the leisurely pursuit of learning is likely to be more productive of practical results that the pell mell, high pressure accumulation of knowledge that now so largely prevails. In a modern democracy there is no place for a class of educated gentry who enjoy their studies at the expense of the ignorant toiling masses. Nevertheless, we do have the material and intellectual resources to provide educational opportunities not only to prepare every person for occupational competence but also to foster habits of exploration, creation, and reflection as intrinsically valuable human activities. Only learning of this kind can truly be called liberal, and only it can provide a context of ample justification, motives, and meaning for vocational pursuits.

Liberal Learning as a Right of Freedom

In the second place, liberal learning is related to freedom not only as privilege but also as a right. The liberation implicit in the activity of liberal learning is not merely the concomitant of economic and social conditions that allow a margin of leisure, whether to the few or the many. Rather is the freedom of the learner a basic right that it is the duty of the social order to acknowledge, celebrate, and defend. This is the right usually referred to as academic freedom. It is one of the fundamental marks of a free society. In such a society the allocation of time and resources for study is not only an opportunity for the enjoyment of intrinsic values. It is a right upon the exercise of which the health and progress of the people to a large degree depend.

But what is the content of this freedom that the society is obliged to protect? It is the opportunity to pursue studies without reference to the sanctions that normally govern behavior in the society. A free society is one in which provisions are made for transcending and criticizing the existing order. The institutions of higher learning are preeminently designed to serve this purpose. A society can be transformed intelligently only if it enables some people to search for better ways of life than currently prevail.

Schools, colleges, and universities clearly also perform conservative functions. They transmit knowledge, attitudes, and skills from one generation to the next, insuring continuity of cultural life. They serve the other institutions of society in manifold ways, in response to the emerging needs of the times. Consider, for example, the vast involvement of college and university personnel in government contract research, and to a lesser degree in consultative services to industry. Recall also the great influences on the character of research and teaching of the foundations, each with its distinctive pattern of interests and priorities.

The danger in any society -- and ours is no exception -- is that the use of higher learning to serve existing social patterns will take precedence over the critical and innovative functions. Because the institutions of education are dependent for support on the society in which they exist, it is natural that they will respond favorably to pressures to confirm and sustain the existing order and find good reasons to eject or suppress those who are too critical of it. Yet such subservience to social sanctions is contrary to the essential purpose of liberal learning. Inquiry is not free if it is controlled by extrinsic factors. In the academic arena study is free only when the inquirer proceeds entirely in response to the intrinsic demands of his investigation.

This is not to deny a place to studies designed to serve extrinsic interests. The academies of learning exist in large measure to meet the needs of the society that created and sustains them. The great state universities, particularly those that were established as agricultural and technical institutions, as well as the independent colleges and universities, are essential bulwarks of the social order. It is all the more imperative, then, that ample provision also be made for studies that are not subordinate to nonacademic interests, in order that the prevailing conditions of culture and society may not remain without challenge or alternatives. It is important that there be opportunities for the pursuit of the "pure" arts and sciences, without regard to their application to any present problem.

The freedom of liberal studies from subservience to current social demands does not entail that they be irrelevant and impractical. Many students and faculty members are impatient with an academicism the freedom of which is purchased at the price of sterility and uselessness. The liberty of a dream world, created for the entertainment of an intellectual elite, but without responsible relation to the actualities of life, is of no value to a serious and concerned person. Inquiry can be free without being irrelevant. In fact, its chief claim to relevance consists in the pertinence of its criticisms and the power of its vision of alternative real possibilities.

In our free democratic society the colleges of liberal arts and sciences ought to claim and make good their right to freedom of investigation. The full exercise of this right requires that trustees and administrators protect teachers and students against pressures from outside in favor of certain methods and conclusions of inquiry, and that support for teaching and research be kept as free as possible from exerting a controlling influence on academic pursuits. Above all, faculty members, no matter how competent and distinguished, need to guard against the ever present temptation to set themselves up as ultimate arbiters in their special fields, thus stifling any efforts by their students to become truly critical and original. The crucial test of academic freedom is not as much the celebrated A.A.U.P. or A.C.L.U. case as it is the daily practice of the professor in classroom

and office, and the issue there is the extent to which he really welcomes, awakens, and nurtures in his students the unfettered, critical, and imaginative exploration of alternative possibilities.

Liberal Learning as a Source of Freedom

Liberal learning is not only a privilege of free persons and a right within a free society. it is also, thirdly, a source of freedom. It is more than a gift to those who possess leisure and who live within a democratic order. It is one of the fountainheads from which spring the very possibilities of liberation from bondage to nature and from the tyrannies of the social order. Liberal learning is not simply a benefit available to persons made free by the conditions of their communal life. it is itself a creative ground of liberty.

The familiar summary of this concept of liberal learning is, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." From this standpoint freedom is not an antecedent condition, but a consequence, of truthseeking. A person is not merely free to learn, but he is freed through learning. Liberal studies are liberating to the extent that they disclose the truth. The understanding of freedom was the core of Stoic philosophy. For the Stoic, the outward conditions of life -- freedom as privilege and as right -- were of minor importance compared with the inner liberty won by loyalty to the truth. External constraints cannot bind the person who lives in obedience to the natural order of things. Spinoza, too, by word and by his own heroic life taught the way of liberty through joyful acceptance of the truth. Within the Christian tradition, the truth that makes men free has been conceived in terms of personal commitment to Christ rather than of intellectual understanding. In the Buddhist tradition the liberating truth is not mainly a matter of rational assent but of practical understanding of the cause and cure of human suffering.

In addition to its classic and philosophical expressions, the idea of freedom through understanding runs as a leitmotif through the whole history of modern science and humanism. Science was born and has grown out of the conviction that faithful inquiry can release mankind from bondage to ignorance, superstition, and prejudice. By the application of intelligence, man can protect himself against the destructive ravages of nature and hardness her energies to do his bidding. Moreover, it is widely believed that personal and social disorders can be cured and human potentialities can be released through the careful study of man and society.

This confidence of modern man in the power of intelligence to free humanity from its ills and for the fulfillment of its purposes is reflected in the universal commitment to education. It is today largely an unquestioned assumption of people the world over that education is the main avenue to personal and social improvement. People believe that if only they knew more they would be able to solve their problems and attain success and happiness. This freedom through learning is a consequence of obedience to truth. Not everything is possible. For the fulfillment of life there are strict conditions, which it is the aim of study to disclose.

This primacy of concern for truth is what distinguishes liberal from illiberal learning. If one’s eye is mainly on the achievement of desires, he is less likely to attend to the realities that determine the possibility and means of attaining them. The freedom of the liberally educated person is not that of complete autonomy. Such a person does not simply do what passion or pleasure dictate; he is freed from slavery to his own impulses for the sake of richer possibilities of life. His existence is ennobled through submitting to the discipline of truth. Liberal studies thus exemplify the apparent paradox that one can become free only by submitting to a yoke. The paradox is only apparent because it depends on an ambiguity in the concept of freedom. Freedom, in the sense of unrestrained autonomy, is different from freedom in the sense of power for positive fulfillment. Realization of significant ends is possible only through the acceptance of certain constraints that reflect the inherent nature of things.

Unfortunately, devotion to the liberating truth can become an occasion for tyranny. History is filled with the record of people subjecting themselves and others to the truth that is supposed to make men free. Heretics have been shamed, exiled, or killed because they failed to submit to the discipline of truth as interpreted by the guardians of orthodoxy, whether religious, moral, aesthetic, or scientific. Education, including liberal education, for the most part has consisted in the transmission to the younger generation of what the older generation regards as the truth. Students know that their success largely depends on accepting what they are taught and obediently reproducing what their authoritative instructors have presented to them. They are obedient to the truth that makes them free from failure and free to graduate and get a good job or admission to one of the better graduate truth mills that in turn will free them to enter one of the truth purveying professions.

This ready corruptibility of the ideal of truth-serving and the recognition of many conflicting claims to truth has led to widespread skepticism about the concept of truth itself and distrust of those who affirm it. This negative attitude is especially prevalent in academic circles. Scholars honor tentativeness more than certainty, and skill in criticism and analysis more than confident assertion. The more they know the more conscious they are of the complexity of things and the need to limit, condition, and qualify any claims they make.

Thus truth tends either to be absolutized or to be relativized virtually out of existence. In either case freedom disappears. In the former, truth becomes a tool for securing submission and compliance. In the latter, any hope of rational guidance is abandoned and one is left to the vagaries of circumstances and of the autonomous will. Many students in the liberal arts suffer under this eclipse of truth. They either submit to the rule of scholarly authority or they become disillusioned about the possibility of any reliable knowledge and rebel against the absurdity of the whole academic entreprise. Some combine the two attitudes in a cynical conformity based on calculation of maximum personal advantage.

Liberal Learning as the Practice of Freedom

I am convinced that no task is more urgent for our time than the recognition of truth as the fountainhead of human freedom. But we require a fresh understanding of what truth is and how it is related to the liberty of the human agent. Such an inquiry leads directly to a fourth concept of liberal learning, as the practice of freedom. I want to show that we are not faced with the choice between skeptical autonomy and passive submission to an independently existing abstract order of truth, but that the progressive discovery of truth is a constructive achievement requiring the active participation of the creative personality.

The Nature of Cognition

This insight grows out of reflection on the nature of knowledge in the various academic disciplines. It is becoming increasingly clear that human cognition does not consist simply in the registering of data from the world outside. The human mind is not a blank page on which the record of encounters with reality is written nor, on the other hand, is our knowledge the result of purely internal processes of rational reflection. Long ago Immanuel Kant saw that neither of these theories of knowledge would suffice. He understood that knowledge is neither a collection of sense data nor a structure of innate ideas, but a consequence of the structuring by the mind of the data of sense.

Subsequent studies in the theory of knowledge have confirmed the main features of Kant’s revolutionary insight. It is widely acknowledged that the content of cognition depends both on the nature of the experienced world and on the mind of the knower. However, as Ernst Cassirer and other students of Kant have pointed out, he did not offer a sufficiently dynamic role to the mind in the structuring of knowledge. He did recognize the active function of the mind in moral conduct and in the arts, but in the domain of mathematics and the sciences, and even in ordinary language, his view of the forms of intuition and the "categories" of understanding as universal a priori structures was too rigid.

The liberating vision growing out of modern investigations of knowledge is that free construction is a major element in human cognition. It seems clear that the human mind does not possess innate patterns by which the materials of sense experience must be formed. Structures there must be, and the knowing mind must supply them, but they are creations of the free person. Human beings in an important sense make the world they know. "The world" is not simply a reality "out there" as it is formulated "in here." Knowing is a transactiion between the knower and the known into which the natures of both enter. The knower is a creative agent, whose decisions influence the outcome of inquiry. These decisions, however, are not purely arbitrary, for they are made in relation to realities that are also determined by factors other than the human knower.

Each domain of inquiry within the curriculum of liberal education has its own characteristic features with respect to the practice of freedom. Each offers a distinctive approach to the truth that is not a completed product to be absorbed by the submissive subject, but always and in different ways a task to be accomplished and a goal to be won. Knowing is a kind of doing, and the truth is a creative construction. Liberal learning, then, includes a variety of opportunities for the practice of freedom, and the well educated person is one who skillfully and zestfully exercises his formative powers in the pursuit of these various kinds of understanding.

I now propose to show more concretely just how liberal studies entail the practice of freedom, by examining briefly the nature of the knowing process in some of the main disciplines in the liberal arts and sciences.

Language

Let us begin with language, perhaps the most fundamental of all studies because of the fact that speech is so clearly a distinguishing feature of human beings within the whole created order and because it is so essential to the effective conduct of all human affairs, including every aspect of education. Students are apt to think of language study as anything but an exercise of freedom. They are presented with rules of grammar to be learned and long vocabulary lists to be committed to memory. They understand the need for discipline and drill in order to develop habits of speech that will conform to correct usage. Thus, in language they see discipline, but no freedom.

Yet on reflection it becomes evident that language is a product of human construction. The forms of speech are not dictated by instinct nor written in the stars. They are the instruments that human beings have fashioned for purposes of communication. A growing child does not think of language in terms of freedom, because his parents and teachers regularly correct his errors and remind him of the "right" usages. If one lives in a human community, he is not at liberty to speak as he pleases, and the socialization process is designed to impress him with the importance of conforming to the rules.

Nevertheless, despite the appearance and the attitudes generated by years of speech indoctrination, the fact is that language is a human creation. It may not be too much to say that it is the primal creation of mankind. The insistence of the older generation that the oncoming generations speak correctly in itself bears witness to the createdness of language. For if it were a built-in mechanism, operating by natural necessity, there would be no need to insure its preservation and transmission. In reality, it is a cultural construct that must be recreated and sustained by each generation.

When one learns a language, he renews a set of agreements about how certain symbols shall be used for purposes of communication. He tacitly makes a decision to adopt specified conventions concerning the relation and ordering of significant sounds, for the sake of sharing common meanings. He thereby participates in the reconstruction of the world of ideas that is the unique and most precious property of the human species.

The student most readily becomes aware that language is a human artifact and not a natural phenomenon through the study of a foreign language. To learn another language is to play the game of communication by another set of rules. The interesting fact is that the cultures of man contain a great variety of language, all of which appear to serve quite well as a basis for communication. Thus, sound and meaning structures are not dictated by the nature of things, but are fashioned by people to serve their need for common understanding.

On the other hand, languages are not products of pure autonomous activity, since they must do justice to the realities of the world. While the categories of speech are not necessities dictated either by the structure of the mind or by the structure of objects, neither are they generated in independence from the given regularities of the created order. Despite the wide variations in tongues, there are functional correspondences from language to language that reflect certain universals of the human situation.

Language study in the liberal arts colleges should release the student from any sense of bondage to what he may have been taught to regard as the necessary laws of correct speech. He should rather be encouraged to approach this discipline as an opportunity to exercise his creative freedom, through electing to use symbolic forms for the effective sharing of common human understandings about a common world.

Mathematics

In some respects the discipline of mathematics offers an even more impressive opportunity for the practice of freedom. On first thought, no subject of study would seem a less likely candidate for the office as liberator of the human spirit. Mathematics is, after all, the science of making necessary inferences. Conclusions follow from premises by an inexorable logic from which there is no departure. Answers to problems in mathematics are either correct or incorrect; there is no room for individual differences in the conclusions reached. The student of mathematics is taught to be precise in his use of terms and rigorous in his arguments, avoiding the vagueness and ambiguity that play so large a part in ordinary speech, and shunning the intuitive leaps and tacit assumptions that figure so prominently in everyday reasoning. Given these strictures, it is little wonder that many students fret under the yoke of mathematical discipline and seek as far as possible to escape from what they consider the constraining and dehumanizing effects of mathematical study.

This view wholly obscures the more significant respects in which mathematics issues from the practice of freedom. It is now generally agreed that the forms of mathematics are not inherent in the structure of the mind, but are free constructions of the symbolizing imagination. The propositions of mathematics are a priori, in the sense that they do not depend on sense experience for their validation. If they have their source neither in the structure of the mind nor in sense experience, then where do they come from? They are products of the creative functioning of the mind. The thinker adopts an array of undefined terms as the starting point of his system. From these he constructs new terms by the process of definition, and he chooses a set of axioms that state the basic relations and rules of combination that are to hold among the symbolic elements. Having thus posited a basic system of symbols and their relations, he is ready to develop the logical consequence by actually carrying out in a logically consistent manner the operations indicated in the basic definitions.

The extraordinary developments of modern mathematics bear eloquent witness to the power of the free symbolizing imagination. The revolution in mathematical thinking has been as it were a Copernican revolution in reverse; there is no fixed order of objective truth within which man finds his place; man is the center of the mathematical universe and the creator of his symbolic firmament. The proof of this is the ever-growing multitude of mathematical systems -- algebras, geometries, and symbolic logics -- that mathematicians have successfully constructed. The elaboration of theorems by the process of deductive inference -- the part of mathematical inquiry that makes it appear as a discipline of necessity -- is in reality a means of making good the freedom inherent in the choice of the definitions and axioms in terms of which this elaboration is carried out. The study of mathematics becomes a liberating experience when the student comprehends this essential character of mathematics as a discipline of deliberate symbolic construction.

The Natural Sciences

In the case of the natural sciences -- physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, biology, and the like -- it would appear that freedom is altogether excluded. For is not science concerned with the study of the invariant laws of nature, which are wholly beyond human determination? Is not the course of natural events entirely different from the drama of human history? Is it not the aim of scientific methods to eliminate all personal factors, so that a purely impersonal, factual description of natural phenomena may be obtained? Because these questions are so commonly answered in the affirmative, it is largely by courtesy that the natural sciences are included, if at all, within the scope of liberal studies; that designation is reserved chiefly for language and literature, the fine arts, history and philosophy.

Nonetheless, it is the case that the natural sciences, no less than language and mathematics, though in a somewhat different way, are free constructions of human agents. Natural science is not the same as the nonhuman nature of which it aims to give an account. The scientist is not merely nature’s amanuensis obediently reproducing the patterns in which the world’s events occur. Even in natural science "the world" is a human creation. Nonhuman nature plays a part in that creation, of course, but never a solo part. "The world" of natural science is not the world of nature, simpliciter. It is a particular formulation of certain selected aspects of human experience.

The progress of modern science is a consequence of the careful delimitation and specification of those aspects of the world of experienced things that are to be included within the scope of scientific cognition. Scientific inquiry is an exercise in high abstraction. Most appearances of natural objects are excluded from consideration in order that a few properties may be systematically investigated. The world of facts, laws, and theories that results from this process of inquiry is not the real world in its fullness, but an abstract world issuing from the creative scientific imagination.

The structure of the world of natural science is determined by the process of measurement. Certain standards are adopted as a means of assigning numerical value to observed events. In the physical sciences, meter sticks, clocks, and balances are the basic measuring instruments. The deliberate choice of these measures results in a world picture that discloses the length, time, and mass aspects of things. The phenomenal world of the physical scientist is constituted in part by the decision to organize sense experience in terms of these particular measurement operations.

The decision to employ the measurement procedures used in natural science is, of course, made for good reasons. It is neither accidental nor irresponsible. The choice grows out of the need to establish a stable and inclusive community of investigators who can in principle reach agreement on the results of their inquiries. Scientific knowledge is a product of the scientific community, which is not itself given in nature, but is a human invention. The laws of nature discovered by scientists are a consequence of applying certain canons of inquiry, adopted by the scientific community, for the purpose of creating a consistent and reliable organization of sense experience. The realization of purposes is the hallmark of freedom. The scientific community and the world picture generated by it did not have to come into being. Indeed, most cultures in human history have generated no such marvel as the modern scientific movement, and even in our own culture, scientifically oriented as it is supposed to be, most people accept the benefits of technology and use the vocabulary of science but do not in fact choose to abide by the disciplines that alone make scientific productivity possible.

Granted the purpose of establishing a community of inquiry that is in principle universal, through the adoption of reliable standards of measurement, it might seem that the scope of freedom in science would end, and that scientific inquiry beyond that basic decision would become a matter of technical routine. Such is not the case. There are no rules that provide sure guidance in the formulation of scientific principles, laws, and theories. Observation and experimentation do not consist in the registering of facts that present themselves ready-made to the investigator. Good scientific observation depends on wise planning of what to look for, since there is an infinite variety of aspects that can be studied. Similarly, experiments require careful prior instrumentation and design if they are to be productive of scientific understanding. Thus the "data" of science are not merely "given" by nature; they are also made by man. They are responses to questions that human investigators ask, and these questions are formulated by imaginative thinkers. By the power of constructive thought, the scientist creates hypothetical worlds which he then tests by means of observations and experiments.

The facts of science are not hard, cold, inert chunks of objective information lying about in the external world waiting to be discovered and accumulated by the industrious investigator. As the word itself suggests, a fact is something made. Scientific knowing is an accomplishment. It is not a result of merely responding to a ready-made world. It is itself an activity of world-making.

The constructive freedom of the scientist is, of course, not unconditional. The world picture of science is not a work of fiction. Nature gives answers to the questions inquirers ask. But the conditions of freedom are also the source of its fulfillment. The scientific community can create a meaningful, reliable, and universal edifice of knowledge that serves both the hunger for contemplative understanding and the need to control natural energies for human welfare.

The enterprise of natural sciences is one of the great triumphs of the free spirit of man. Far from eclipsing the humanistic element in culture, science is perhaps its most brilliant exemplification. On this account, science deserves a central place among the disciplines of liberal education, provided it is taught with due regard for its essentially constructive character.

The Social Sciences

As compared with the natural sciences, the social sciences present a new set of opportunities for the practice of freedom. Since they are concerned with human behavior, which can only be properly understood in terms of the unique capacity for choice, they inevitably involve the investigator in the problems of freedom. The world picture of the social scientist is a human construct in a double sense. First, it is a view that is in part determined by his choice of observation categories, measurement standards, and experimental design. In this sense his work is analogous to that of the natural scientist. He differs from the natural scientist in the fact that the realities he studies are themselves human constructs. Social systems, unlike stars, molecules, and animals, are man-made. Thus, socia1 science is a man-made system of knowledge about man-made social systems.

Particularly noteworthy is the fact that these two acts of human construction are not really separate, but are intimately interwoven. For, the makers of society to some degree use their knowledge of human behavior to guide their actions as social agents. This dependence on knowledge is increasingly characteristic of modern social planners. Most legislators, jurists, politicians, journalists, and businessmen today draw heavily on the social sciences for a better understanding of social structures, processes, and possibilities. As a consequence, the social scientist, whether or not he intends it, is implicated in the formation of social policy decisions. He cannot enjoy the luxury of speculative detachment from the issues that fact the human community, since the very nature of what he investigates is conditioned by his investigations

The science of economics provides a vivid illustration of this complex interplay of freedoms. Classical market economic theory conceived of economic laws as natural regularities similar to those of physics and astronomy. Human welfare was believed to be best served by not interfering with the harmonies of this given natural order and by using political power only to maintain free market conditions. By a curious semantic reversal, freedom in classical "liberal" economics meant the absence of deliberate human intervention in economic processes. Such economics had no place for freedom either in the formulation of economic ideas -- the liberal faith was a dogma as absolute as that of the most orthodox religion -- or in the control of economic affairs.

Strangely enough, the apparently diametrically opposed Marxist economics -- promulgated as a gospel of emancipation to the oppressed masses -- exhibits a similar twofold denial of freedom. Marxists hold both that their doctrine records the one objective natural truth and that human beings are subject to the ineluctable necessities of the material dialectic.

In contrast both to classical market economics and to Marxism, modern economics within the tradition of liberal learning recognizes the two freedoms that are proper to economic inquiry. The primary freedom consists in the fact that the economic system is a human creation and not a natural phenomenon. The production and distribution of goods and services are matters for deliberate social decision. The rise of "welfare economics," concerned with the formulation of economic policies that foster the well-being of society, and the wide application of these studies in the conduct of government and business, exemplify the exercise of this primary freedom. The secondary freedom in the study of economics consists in the deployment of a variety of models of man and society, in order to gain a wider range of perspectives on the complex events of economic life and to experiment in imagination with new and possibly better ways of directing economic planning. Modern economics is thus clearly a policy science, in which freedom is exercised not only in the creation of a conceptual edifice but also in the formulation of policies for the conduct of communal life.

This same dual freedom applies to all of the social sciences -- both in respect to the conceptual structures of political science, sociology, anthropology, and other behavioral disciplines, and to the deliberate social arrangements and processes studied. To be sure, the social scientist does not ordinarily act directly as a social policy maker. But the fact remains that the objects of his inquiry are consequences of policy decisions, and therefore, that his concerns are with acts of freedom rather than of necessity.

Accordingly, the social sciences may be expected to play an increasingly important role in liberal learning, as it becomes ever more evident that the conditions of human existence are not simply imposed by fate, nor the results of the interplay of blind, impersonal forces, but the consequences of deliberale human action. The human community need not suffer in resigned impotence from the pains of social disorder and inequity. Human beings are free and responsible agents; they play the major role in creating the social world in which they live. The study of the social sciences within the context of liberal learning is one of the major sources of insight for such responsible world-making.

Psychology

The discipline of psychology presents an interesting case of the tension between freedom and necessity in the scientific enterprise. Some behavior~ istically oriented psychologists try to avoid the idea of freedom altogether, both by explaining psychic phenomena exclusively in physical and biological terms and by minimizing the role of theory construction in the process of psychological inquiry. Psychology conceived in this fashion can scarcely be called a liberal study, for it is based on methodological and ontological premises that automatically exclude the possibility of freedom. To be sure, the most rigorous behaviorism is quite admissible in liberal psychological inquiry, provided it is understood as a limited perspective deliberately chosen to make possible a certain consensus in observation statements. Such behavioral studies do not rule out in advance other perspectives that may yield greater insight into the distinctive qualities of human beings.

More humanistically oriented psychologists are convinced that the usual methods and categories of physics and biology do not suffice in psychology, at least at the human level. According to them, freedom is the quintessence of human personality. A human being is essentially a purposeful creative agent. He has the power of real origination. His unique being can never be captured within the abstractive categories that apply to objects. A person is a singular subject, who uses the materials of his inheritance and environment to construct the particular self that he is.

Even within the framework of humanistic psychology the processes of prediction, control, classification, and generalization associated with scientific inquiry are still applicable as statistical probabilities. Human behavior is not without order and intelligibility. But the humanistic psychologist is convinced that the conditioning factors in human behavior do not constitute the full explanation of it, and that the key agency is the free and responsible person as an originative, concretizing center.

From this standpoint, psychology becomes the basic science of freedom -- the empirical discipline most concerned with the liberty of man. Even more than in the social sciences, the student of psychology engages in a twofold practice of freedom. In the first place, he acts as a free agent, fulfilling his unique purposes as a creative self. This immediate conscious awareness of personal becoming is the primary source of data for psychological inquiry. In the second place, as a scientific inquirer he participates in the definition, elaboration, and application of conceptual systems and experimental methods designed to yield reliable and significant interpretations of the primary data. The various clinically and existentially oriented psychologies exemplify particularly well this double freedom, in emphasizing the centrality of freedom and responsibility as the core of personality and in exhibiting a high degree of adventuresomeness and imagination in the generation of theoretical schemes.

The Arts

I have argued that language, mathematics, and the natural sciences manifest a single degree of freedom in symbol- and world-construction (a second degree can be added if the applied sciences are included, involving decisions about the use of knowledge for practical purposes), and that the social sciences and psychology reveal a twofold creative activity, of cultural invention and personal becoming, together with the symbolic representation of these events. I turn now to the relation of the arts to the practice of freedom. On initial consideration it appears that the arts constitute a domain of pure freedom. The composer makes up a composition, the painter designs a canvas or the architect a building, the poet fashions a lyric, and the choreographer creates a dance or the playwright a drama. In each case, the artist is at liberty to present the results of his own constructive imagination. He is subject to no external compulsion, assuming that he works in a free society. This freedom is particularly evident in the modern arts, in which unrestrained experimentation with new forms, unshackled by preconceptions or traditional standards, is expected and encouraged.

One would expect, then, that the study of music, art, the dance, and literature would occupy a central place in the liberal arts curriculum. These studies would seem to be the most effective means for developing skill in the practice of freedom. The curious fact is that with the possible exception of literature, the arts occupy a secondary place in the college curriculum. Part of the reason is the relative impracticality of the arts: few people can expect to make an assured and ample living as musicians, painters, or poets. But there may be a further reason, which has to do with the nature of freedom in the arts. It is commonly supposed, often with some justification, that the artist ~ himself as free to put his materials together in any way he pleases, without reference to any criteria of relevance or standards of excellence. He simply expresses his own impulses, and is under no obligation to explain or justify his productions to anyone else. When the arts are regarded in this fashion, it is little wonder that they are given a peripheral place among the liberal studies.

Freedom in the arts becomes significantly human only when it transcends subjective self-expression. Anarchy and license are not the kind of liberty in which human life is fulfilled. The proper work of the artist is to create significant forms. To do this, he must enter upon a discipline as rigorous as that of any linguist, mathematician, or scientist. Like them, he enters into relations with an objective world, which he seeks to interpret by means of certain invented forms. The forms of the artist are unique perceptual wholes, differing in purpose and in logical structures from the general categories of language, mathematics, and the sciences. Nevertheless, they are modes of response of persons to experienced realities, and they must be judged on the basis of their success in disclosing the qualitative possibilities of human experience. Some works of art are virtually meaningless, in that they do not reveal any very significant relations within the perceptual field. Others are meaningful, in various degrees, by virtue of the intensity and quality of significant feeling they are able to evoke.

The freedom of the artist does not consist on! in the absence of restraints On his choice of aesthetic problems and of his methods of solving them, but even more in his power of constructing aesthetic objects that add to the values of life. The arts merit a central role in liberal studies insofar as they are conceived not as occasions for self-exhibition, studied opacity, and calculated freakishness, but as opportunities for the disciplined attainment of qualitative excellence in the form of singular perceptual constructions.

In the case of music and drama, and in some forms of the dance, the artist may be a performer rather than a composer, and in that event his freedom is less evident than that of the composer. Still, the good performer does not act as an automaton, but he personally appropriates the works he performs in order that he may recreate them as if they came fresh from a composer’s mind. The situation is essentially the same with listeners and observers in any of the arts, who constitute the great majority of students in these disciplines. They neither create nor perform compositions. Yet if they are to understand the arts significantly, they too must enter so fully into the works they study, by becoming familiar with the possibilities and limitations of the materials used and with the processes of transforming them, that they pass beyond passive receptivity to the practice of virtual recreation, through imaginative participation in the artist’s constructive activity. In this manner, the educated layman in the arts is able to enjoy vicariously the constructive liberty of the creating composer and, in certain arts, of the recreating performer.

History

The chief temptation of the student in the arts is to lose his birthright of freedom by dissipating his creative energies in expressive self-indugences. Quite the opposite situation prevails in the studuy of history, where the student if tempted to resign himself to the completed finality of the past. For many people recorded history is only an accumulation of information about events that cannot be altered. Studying about them seems to burden the already overtaxed memory and to imprison one in a bygone world over which he has no control.

While such a view has some semblance of truth, it is substantially at variance with the realities of historical investigation. As in the social sciences, the historian’s subject matter is deliberate human behavior. He aims to understand how people have used their freedom and to describe the worlds people have built for their habitation. In order to comprehend these past events, the inquirer must retroject himself imaginatively into the situations he wants to describe and hypothesize what is likely to have transpired in the deliberations of those who made the significant decisions. In such inquiries the past is no longer dead; it comes alive as the historical investigator attempts to reenact the events studied. Through this imaginative participation in the freedom of others, the student of history enjoys a vicarious liberation in his own being. He enlarges his horizons of sympathy and awareness in being drawn out of his circle of private preoccupation. He discovers that liberty is not mainly an individual possession, but rather a common human possibility that each may help the other to realize. The study of history gives one practice in this activity of sharing.

The historian is also free in another respect. Like the scientist, he constructs a picture of the world. His picture is different from that of the scientist, in that he is interested in unique events and not in general categories and theories. But in history as in science, the world does not present itself in finished form, ready for cognition. Knowing in history is an activity of creation, resulting in a convincing narrative about the past. While the narrative is not a work of fiction, since it must accord with available evidence, it requires a high degree of selectivity and a large measure of interpretation. History is not a plain recital of bare facts. It is an attempt to design an interesting, illuminating, and responsible account of the course of significant events in their mutual interrelations. Such an account is inevitably conditioned by the historian’s scale of values and by his fundamental convictions about human nature. He hopes that these conditioning factors in selection and interpretation will in the long run be validated and corrected by historical investigation, since as a responsible scholar he has no intention of making history to his own specifications. Nevertheless, given the usual fragmentariness of available evidence, the limitations of time and intelligence, and the complexity of human affairs, the historian must assume the responsibilities and accept the risks of history-making.

The study of history thus provides opportunities for the practice of freedom, by participating imaginatively in the decisions of persons who have acted in the past, thereby transcending the narrow confines of one’s own existence, and by engaging in the activity of constructing and reconstructing a picture of the past, in the search for an ever more adequate account of the human drama.

Philosophy

The case for freedom in the discipline of philosophy is equally strong. The plurality of philosophic systems bears witness to the variety of human initiatives that have gone into their making. Philosophers invent categories of interpretation by means of which they hope to make intelligible the many aspects of human experience. No one set of concepts does full justice to reality in its richness and complexity. Hence the tasks of conceptual criticism and reformulation in philosophy are unending. Philosophers have largely abandoned the expectation of discovering a single system of ideas that will contain the ultimate truth about nature, man, cognition, and values. Most philosophers do not regard their statements as providing a full and unambiguous description of the way things are. They see their task more modestly, as one of conceptual cartography, in which the boundaries, interrelationships, and topographical features of various experiential domains are charted. In this activity the philosopher employs his constructive imagination to form categories that relate and illuminate the symbolic constructs used by human creators in every sphere of cultural endeavor, including language and mathematics, the sciences, the arts, and history.

In fact, the philosopher is concerned with three freedoms: first, the elemental liberty of the human doer, which forms the basic data for all philosophic inquiry; second, the freedom of intellectual construction in the organized disciplines, upon which the philosopher also reflects; and third, the inventive activity of philosophical analysis, synthesis, and evaluation itself.

 

Religion

The study of religion presents a similar situation. The day of final authoritative dogmatic theologies has largely passed. Most people no longer believe in ready-made revelations delivered by God to man for unquestioning acceptance. They cannot adopt a faith that requires the surrender of human freedom to the demands of a supernatural sovereign. Yet so entrenched is the concept of religion as belief in authoritative, ready-made doctrines that when that notion is challenged the whole edifice of religion may be rejected, as in traditional naturalistic humanism or the more bizarre "radical theologies" currently in vogue.

Theologies, like philosophies, are creative interpretations of human experience.. In principle they are responsible interpretations, and not merely projections of personal preferences. Faith should not be a substitute for careful thought and patient inquiry, for in the long run nothing less than truth deserves man’s final allegiance. However, the truth apprehended by faith is not that of a static objective order to which the mind of man responds. It is a dynamic reality including man’s own being and becoming, and depending to some degree on his own responsible decisions. As Teilhard de Chardin sought to demonstrate, the fulfillment of the entire cosmic endeavor now requires the conscious free commitment of mankind to the task of creating a universal community of loving persons, in response to the divine purpose that has guided the evolutionary process up to now. One may or may not find such a cosmological theology convincing. The essential point is that any theological perspective must take account of the role of freedom in the shaping of human destiny.

Indeed, religious commitment is a person's ultimate act of freedom. By his faith he determines the meaning he will give to life as a whole, thus creating a framework of value and expectation (that is, of love and hope) in the spirit and power of which all particular acts of freedom are performed.

The study of religion should therefore be the culminating liberal discipline, carried out in continuous interaction with all other branches of liberal study. But note that it can serve such a consummatory liberating function only insofar as the study provides an occasion for the development of the student’s own ultimate commitment, which is to construct and practice a faith of his own. An important part of such development is to participate in the great historic faiths and in contemporary religious traditions other than one’s own. The aims of liberal learning are not achieved when the student simply accumulates ready-made academic information about the faiths of mankind.

Teaching in the Liberal Studies

Active personal appropriation is also the condition for the realization of freedom in every other discipline. Studies in language, mathematics, science, art, history, and philosophy are not made liberal merely by recognizing and calling attention to the creative factors in these disciplines and in the human activities with which they deal. Studies do not liberate when the student is constrained to absorb knowledge about the cultural and scholarly creations of others. He fuffihls his birthright of freedom only when he actually engages in works of cultural creation and of constructive scholarship, that is, when he makes his world rather than receiving it ready-made from the hands of others. Language is a liberal study only when the student actively enters into the making and renewing of speech covenants and into the construction of analytic categories for linguistic inquiry. Mathematics is a liberal study only when the student actively engages in the construction and deductive elaboration of postulate systems. Similarly for all the other disciplines. In short, the student is emancipated from academic servility only as he has the opportunity in a real though often rudimentary fashion to be a practicing linguist, mathematician, scientist, artist or art critic, historian, philosopher, and theologian.

In such liberal learning, the common image of the instructor as an authoritative source of knowledge to be acquired by the student must be abandoned. The instructor himself should be an inquirer and not a mere purveyor of information. He should exemplify in his own scholarly work the constructive dimensions of learning, and help his students to recognize these dimensions. Above all, he ought to encourage his students own creative efforts by providing them with opportunities for the active pursuit of understanding. The instructor must shun the temptation to impress his students with his scholarly prowess, in the guise of demonstrating how creative inquiry proceeds, when in reality he is purchasing self-gratification at the cost of their passivity and vassalage. Ideally, the teacher and student should participate in a joint venture in constructive inquiry, each at his proper level of skill and insight, but both through essentially the same enterprise of responsible creation.

In the foregoing analysis I have tried to show that each discipline offers opportunities for the practice of freedom and thereby contributes to the fulfillment of human beings as creative agents. The disciplines differ in the nature of their constructive elements. In every case the inquirer deliberately selects certain intelligible forms that define the perspectives of his particular discipline. In no case are these forms purely arbitrary, since they are designed to render experience in the real world intelligible and significant, though in different ways. The world of scholarship is wholly man-made but not without regard for the regularities and relationships in the created order.

The scholar’s practice of freedom is a continuing dialogue, involving besides himself other persons (especially within his discipline community) and nonhuman beings in the environing world that he seeks to understand. His participation in that dialogue is the measure of his responsibility to truth. Because he is himself a creative agent living in community with other such beings, truth not only makes men free; it is also what free men make. For, in disciplined inquiry responsible men construct a world in truth.

This practice of freedom is the crowning liberty of liberal learning. Learning is no privilege for free men if it only fills the hours of leisure and comprises no intrinsically valuable endeavor. It becomes a privilege by virtue of the opportunity it affords to engage in the uniquely human activity of world-making. Nor can academic freedom be urged as a right except on the basis of the inherent worth of the activity of inquiry and the incalculable dignity of the creative investigator. In like manner, learning is not a source of liberating truth if truth is conceived as a finished structure of reality to be passively registered by the mind of the learner. Persons are emancipated from illusion, prejudice, and irrational passion and given power for productive achievement only as they recognize and accept their role in the creation of their world and the truth that expresses it.

Colleges of liberal arts and sciences can and should be prime exemplars of all four of these freedoms in the modern world. They should be places where students may come to understand the joy of learning for its own sake. They should be communities where inquiry is untrammeled by any extrinsic pressures or special interests. They should be fountainheads of knowledge that remove the shackles of superstition and bias. But all of these liberties are consummated in the fundamental freedom of the scholar and the student who zestfully undertake the work of world-making through the disciplines comprising the academic curriculum.

The Christian Gospel and the American Way of Life

When I was in Germany in the early 1930's I became acquainted with a New Testament scholar who was at the same time a Nazi. As a student fresh from the halls of Union Seminary, I was completely baffled by the mentality of this man. His knowledge of the New Testament was not only technically competent; it was accompanied by religious passion and theological sincerity. Yet I could not fathom how anyone could be so intensely devoted to the gospel and be a Nazi at the same time.

In my memory he stands as a vivid illustration of the fact that what a man allows the Bible to say to him is profoundly influenced by the situation in which he finds himself. A powerful ideology had taken control of the consciousness of Germany. This man was cut off from other ideas. He could have lost his job and been thrown into a concentration camp for defending an unpopular point of view.

Therefore, something more compelling than his own scholarship easily dictated what he was able to think and say. Circumstances had arisen where it was almost impossible for him to allow himself to grasp the real import of the New Testament, because that would have been too dangerous.

Surely the predicament of this German scholar illustrates a principle which goes far beyond his own situation. In a sense, it is always too dangerous for men to grasp the real import of the New Testament -- any time, anywhere, in any society. This is because the gospel always lays bare elements of tyranny which society regards as necessary for its own security. It lays bare the hollowness of every quest for earthly power, prosperity, and triumph. It gives the lie to our feverish boast that we are "only trying to defend justice." It debunks every human virtue which falls short of the humility of love. In a stubborn, inconvenient way, the New Testament holds out against all ordinary definitions of power, success, and righteousness.

Therefore, it is a dangerous thing for anyone to try to look at American life in the light of the gospel. To be sure, men do not get thrown into jail here very often just for preaching. But in cynical moments one might suspect that this is partly due to

The Christian Gospel

The fact that we preachers have failed to make clear the real nature of the book we have on our hands. The New Testament is a highly subversive document. If it is taken seriously, it prevents people from giving unqualified devotion to current definitions of the American way of life. And precisely because the pulpit is still so free, even a comparatively timid preacher is without excuse if he tries to conceal this fact.

We can best manifest our loyalty to American traditions of religious and political liberty by exercising the God-given right of looking at ourselves in the light of his Word. Let us pass over, as too familiar, the reflections which come to mind when we tally up the newspaper accounts: dope-addiction among adolescents, bribery of college athletes, the power of organized crime, the corruption of government officials. I agree with those who declare that the only long-range remedy for such moral disintegration is a return to faith in God. But I get weary of hearing the declaration repeated because there is so little likelihood of increasing our national understanding of the gospel by representing it as a sort of emergency supplement to the police force.

Certainly the extent of our moral disintegration is connected with a religious disintegration but we cannot even come in sight of a radical religious recovery until the churches and the people of this country begin to do penance for the way we have tried to pour the new wine of the gospel into some peculiarly American bottles.

Many of the proposed alliances between Christian ideals and American ideals that we hear about today are actually a threat to both, for they fit perfectly into the pattern of all fanaticism. The fanatic knows, at some level, that he is living a lie. And because his case cannot bear scrutiny in open debate, he is compelled to ward off the threat of exposure by means of catch-phrases, righteous indignation, and sanctions. Indeed, within one set of premises many of our home-grown fanatics are virtually irrefutable, and they possess specialized forms of information and power which can make their total case seem plausible. If you grant that the greatness of our nation is to be judged primarily in terms of its standard of living, its efficiency, its military power, then everything else follows. So long as moral and religious considerations are left out, their case is consistent and impregnable. Strangely enough, however, most Americans are not crass enough to leave out such considerations -- at least when they are speaking in public. That is where the inconsistency enters in; and that is where the defensive rationalization has to begin. The advocates of a case which makes sense in terms of pure power. politics want at the same time to claim that they are following faith in God and preserving the ethical foundations of democracy.

A recent letter in The New York Times reads, in part, as follows:

"Our nation was founded and brought to greatness by men who had an unquestioning faith in Go...[But] signs of a collapse of conscience in these United States are to be found everywhere_.If we are to survive as a great nation we must turn again toward the ideals and the simple faith that made us great. We must reaffirm our faith in the dignity of man and in the rightness of our democratic way of life under God."

So far, so good. But then the writer continues:

"I do not propose to offer a solution to the vast problem now confronting our country. But I do suggest that a start in the right direction might be made in our schools and colleges Today an entirely false concept of academic freedom is turning our colleges into booby traps for young and impressionable minds. Evil and alien influences are brought to bear upon youths who lack the maturity

and understanding to discriminate between philosophies, and to winnow the good from the bad. Too often today the American way of life -- from a belief in free enterprise to faith in democracy -- is belittled by our professors. The time has come to have done with such corroding nonsense."

Precisely because this letter is by no means fanatical in tone, it well illustrates the conjunction of ideas which is so widespread -- and so dangerous. The author begins by talking about faith in God, the dignity of man, and the rightness of our democratic way of life. But he ends by attacking those methods whereby alone young men can learn to discriminate between good and evil philosophies. Undoubtedly he is not aware of any inconsistency. Yet how can faith in the dignity of man be expressed by choking the growth of critical intelligence and independent judgment? How can confidence in the superiority of free enterprise be expressed by shutting off open debate? Above all, how can religious faith be restored by associating it with national pride instead of with Christian penitence and forgiveness? The letter as a whole makes one feel that the author is a sincere man of high principles. That is part of the tragedy of our country and our churches today. So many fine people have fallen unconsciously into forms of religious confusion and moral duplicity which are just as bad as those they are trying to fight.

Nevertheless the fact remains that there can be no return to faith in God so long as he is regarded as a sort of confirmatory appendage to the American way of life. Actually we are confronted with a clear-cut choice. Either the New Testament is to be supreme, and we are to judge our nation in the light of its standards of righteousness and spiritual greatness, or the so-called American way of life is to be our substitute religion, and the church is to be its mouthpiece. In the latter case, our situation is not unlike that of the Nazi professor, where men hear only those portions of the gospel which seemingly confirm their national aims and assumptions.

The mentality we have been examining, then, is not really an ally of Christian ideals. Neither is it an ally of the democratic way of life. Those who proclaim their allegiance most loudly are seldom to be found in the forefront of movements which implement democratic principles in racial and economic relations. On the contrary, they regard such movements as dangerously liberal, and then they lump liberalism with communism.

In the recent book, Civil Liberties Under Attack, one of the authors mentions the case of a government official with an impeccable record who was placed under charges because unidentified informers asserted he "advocated the Communist Party line, such as favoring peace and civil liberties," and "his convictions concerning equal rights for all races and classes extend slightly beyond the normal feelings of the average individual"1

Now why do we find this widespread panic, this unconscious dread of genuine democracy, among those who claim to be its guardians? There is no single nor simple explanation. Perhaps our actual situation in the world is precarious enough to drive some people -- especially those with extensive possessions to lose -- into a defensive form of hysteria and a search for scapegoats. But why the need for scapegoats? Part of the answer is that many of our one-hundred-per-cent-American patterns of life are flatly incompatible with democracy, and we don't want to admit it.

Democracy stands or falls on the attitude toward the person. The question is not merely whether he is free, in a technical sense, to vote, to work, to speak and to worship. The question is also whether he is looked upon as a responsible, spiritual being instead of a cog in a social machine. Who could read the recent article in Life magazine about corporation wives without seeing in it an example of how the genuinely personal gets stifled? Here the suitability of a man's home life, his wife and his children must be judged in terms of how efficiently they function in tooling him up for another day's work. The wife is to engage in "reading and music and that kind of stuff" so that she will seem cultured when she meets her husband's associates. The suburb they choose to live in, the size of their car, and their circle of friends must properly reflect his status; and they must change, with exquisite timing, as he moves up the ladder. The article goes on to say that "roughly half of the companies on which Fortune has data, have made wife-screening a regular practice and many others seem about ready to do so. 'Successes here,' says one official, 'are guys who eat and sleep the company. If a man's first interest is his wife and family, more power to him -- but we don't want him.' 'We've got quite an equity in the man,' another explains, 'and it's only prudence to protect it by bringing the wife into the picture.' "2

Surely we miss the point if we simply rant against the corporation. The corporation is, willy-nilly, part of a wider pattern. And the wider pattern is nothing less than a creeping, totalitarian religion. It is a religion because it dictates how a person shall find security, self-esteem, standards of value, and reasons for living. It is totalitarian because, although one has some mobility within the pattern, one has lost the basic freedom of departing from the pattern itself. All of us are caught in it to some extent; that is why so many of us have to disguise its real character by talking about individualism, free enterprise, and democracy; and that is why so many of us have to go looking for scapegoats. We don't dare look at how standardized, collectivized, and conformist we are. If we can find a scapegoat, we are spared having to face ourselves.

Yet this substitute religion -- which is the most potent factor in the lives of many Americans -- is not only irreconcilable with Christianity, it is not even a worthy form of humanism. It undercuts all the valid reasons for "reading and music and that sort of stuff." It destroys the basis for real friendship by making uncalculating appreciation of others almost impossible. It forces men who are presumably capable of having respect and affection for their wives and children as persons, to view their loved ones as economic functions.

Significantly enough, the article in Life says nothing whatever about the young executive, or the young wife, who might have convictions which run counter to prevailing views on economic and political questions. And I am quite ready to believe that they no longer exist. Yet what has happened to the bold iconoclasm on which the democracy of this country was founded? What has happened to the independent thinking of the individual? In business, in the entertainment field, in journalism, young men will tell you that their exercise of independent judgment and their advocacy of "democracy" must fall within prescribed channels, it must be associated with "safe" political and economic doctrine -- or else. Or else they might just as well look for some other sort of work. The same thing is becoming increasingly true in our colleges. Are the churches next on the list?

In the light of all this, we should be profoundly afraid for the welfare of our country. But we should be more angry than afraid, and more resolved than angry. It is not too late to win the battle against a creeping, totalitarian religion which has arisen within the most respectable centers of our national life. We must wage the struggle as strenuously as we fight against communism and all other external threats to liberty, and for precisely the same reason. What is at stake is not simply the welfare of America, but the hope of the human spirit throughout the world. Thank God, there are still plenty of people who really believe that the integrity of personality comes first in a definition of democracy and that the rightness of our economic and political policies must be judged by this standard.

But if the strength of this ethical conviction is to be restored, it must be based upon a recovery of the core of our religious heritage. That means we must disentangle the Christian gospel from every attempt to ally it with economic selfishness or national pride. The church can play its part in keeping alive freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and freedom of worship only if it uses them to the hilt. It must care more about truth than about expediency, and it must fear God instead of men. Are we not embarrassed, as Christians, that the armed forces have moved faster than the churches toward solving the problem of racial segregation? We are truly ludicrous when we run behind secular agencies, instead of ahead of them, in the struggle for democracy. If we love our country, if we care deeply about its potentialities for true greatness and service, we must oppose at the political level and by political means those who are ruining it while they stridently claim to be defending it. And at the religious level, if we love the church, we must oppose every movement which tries to interfuse its teachings with hatred, self-righteousness, and reaction. Everything precious in Protestantism is threatened wherever liberty itself is threatened. We are thoroughly aware of the enemies outside the gates. But if we are slain, it is just as likely to be by enemies within, who profess allegiance not to Stalin or the Pope, but to "Christian, i.e., American-way-of-life, freedom."

Surely the words of Lincoln are applicable to our situation: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew_.[For] we shall nobly save or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth."3

 

FOOTNOTES

1. Saturday Review of Literature, Jan. 12, 1952, p. 8.

2. Life, Jan. 7, 1952, pp. 32 if.

3. Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message of Dec., 1862.

Ghostly and Monstrous Churches

Since 1960, more than 100 books on the endangered congregation have been published in this country. These books, like game wardens guarding vanishing species of animals, seek to save the churches they see lumbering toward extinction. Powerful stories are told about churches struggling through crisis toward an ultimate cure.

Throughout the 1960s, a “ghost” motif shaped the more popular studies of the parish. During the ‘70s, the ghost image gave way to the concept of the church as “monster.” Ghosts are different from monsters, and the prevalence of one image over the other at different times says much about the two decades.

Each image presents a quite different understanding of the world. Ghost stories are animistic, while monster stories are mechanistic. In ghost stories the body soon wastes away, freeing the anima -- the soul -- to power the narrative. In monster stories the body, not some disembodied spirit, provides the force. When the body is destroyed, the monster dies as well. If the monster is to be resuscitated, as in Hollywood sequels, the body has to be found and revived. Both ghost and monster convey the drama of life, but each carries it in a different direction.

In the ghost-oriented 1960s the local church was generally seen as an inert body which actually inhibited the expression of Christian life. The opening lines of a report for the 1968 Assembly of the World Council of Churches capture something of the exasperation of many then concerned about congregations: “How can we build a church which will not stand in its own way, whose organizational structures are not forever contradicting what it says on the mystery of the church, whose budget does not make a mockery of what the church teaches?” Studies of the ‘60s generally asserted that the present body of the congregation must die in order that the true church might live. The ancient gnosis that the body is a tomb -- soma sema -- therein received a new interpretation: the soul of the church is imprisoned in the congregational body.



A critical contribution to this outlook was The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, written by Gibson Winter in 1961. To Winter, the American Christian community was imprisoned in enclaves of suburban congregations bound by middle-class, not Christian, values. In the same year Peter Berger flayed the congregations in The Noise of Solemn Assemblies. While foreseeing that future parishes might serve as caretakers for the less venturesome of members, Berger felt that vital Christian engagement with the world would instead occur in “supraparochial” contexts. What happens to the local church body thus discredited is seen throughout the World Council of Churches’ “Studies on the Missionary Structure of the Congregation.” In these studies, the traditional form of the congregation fades away, virtually ignored. Persons content with the traditional form were accused of the jawbreaking sin of “morphological fundamentalism.” To escape the structure, the church had better turn itself inside out: a phrase used to title Hans Hoekendijk’s 1966 book on this topic.

If the congregation as spirit were to leave behind the body what would it become? The studies of the ‘60s argued that its life should be defined in terms of what it inhabited, rather than in terms of what form it took. To “inhabit,” as ghost story buffs know, means to haunt. The faithfulness of the disembodied congregation requires it to inhabit, or to haunt, the secular structures of the world. Called to participate in God’s mission to all creation, the congregation is to escape its own body and to attend the other forms of human society. The most widely circulated documents concerning this missionary structure of the congregation were Colin Williams’s Where in the World? and What in the World? Designed as study books, these works led both laity and clergy into the plot of a church that sought to inhabit worldly structures.

Some studies refer to the manner in which the church might enter the economic and political structures of the times, but the primary locus of mission in these works was the urban community. Unlike the books of earlier decades that treated an urban context as at most, an environment outside the church walls, the ‘60s literature perceived urban society as the pervasive ethos of the congregation itself, providing its nurture and ordering its structure. As disembodied spirit the church “haunts” the houses of the city, in the spiritist sense of haunting: to link and help people in crisis.

Neither ghost nor church, however, becomes totally identified with the context it is haunting. While inhabiting the world the congregation does not lose its identity. Robert Spike’s In But Not of the World was an early recognition of this transience, but George Webber’s God’s Colony in Man’s World was a more thoroughgoing analysis of how a congregation converted to the world nevertheless remains distinct from it. The phenomenologist van der Leeuw describes this peculiar status of the disembodied soul: “The departed is still l’homme mort, but he is at the same time the ‘other,’ the stranger.” Later on in the ‘60s Gerald Jud represented this transience in his Pilgrim’s Process: How the Local Church Can Respond to the New Age. And George Webber, defying the different metaphor that dominated writing about congregations in the 1970s, has recently written Today’s Church: A Community of Exiles and Pilgrims, which advances even more radically than his earlier books the concept of disembodied transience.



A major shift in image -- from ghost to monster -- occurred in the years around 1970. Why this happened at that time is a complex and somewhat tangential subject, but several factors can be mentioned briefly. In part the shift reflected the growing difficulty of national church bodies in sustaining agencies and studies whose arguments portrayed the dismantling of the very local church whose contributions maintained these national offices. The authors of such studies, convinced of the need for radical transformation, had at the same time become increasingly frustrated and reluctant to invest further energy in a church that responded in remarkably few instances with basic and sustained change in parish structure.

It grew evident, moreover, that those denominations which in the 1960s supported the ghost-story argument were losing both membership and financial support, while less ecumenically inclined bodies were growing in members and financial strength. For these and other reasons, ghostly literature about congregations virtually ceased as the ‘70s began. Only hardy unregenerates like George Webber today remind the church of a mission in which its body dies.

In the narcissistic climate of the 1970s the local body of the church was restored to full life and prominence. The health of the parish was an essential concern of books that began to appear. No longer was congregational structure viewed as something that must be sacrificed to enable the mission of the church. This structure was seen as the very vehicle by which that mission may be carried out. “Some enthusiasts,” reports C. Peter Wagner (who serves as a sort of doctor for ailing congregations), “feel that with church growth insights we may even step as far ahead in God’s task of world evangelization as medicine did when aseptic surgery was in-troduced.” Whereas the parish literature of the ‘60s located the saving activity of God primarily in the world at large, and required the congregation to respond with organizational imprudence, the books of the ‘70s found God’s salvation manifested first in the lives of individuals, and required that congregations be groomed with “consecrated pragmatism” to become organizations fit to incorporate these lives.

In this shift of images, the monster story replaces the ghost story. We tend to think of monster stories as the perishable schlock that runs in third-rate movie houses, but the monster myth is in fact a more basic, abiding part of Western culture. The Frankenstein story, for example, is now more than 160 years old, and it in turn drew on medieval and even more ancient tales. The subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus, signifying its tie to a Roman version of the Prometheus myth which portrayed the Titan as stealing not only fire from heaven but also life itself. The monster is a classic metaphor for virulent life that has been given a material body.

In the monster story, a body is recovered or discovered. This body is then brought to life by scientific techniques; and the body has uncommon size or proportions. Finally, the monster may become an unexpected menace. These features seem to characterize both monsters and the image of the local church in the ‘70s.

Whereas earlier studies view the body as the grave (soma sema), ‘70s books instead disclose the body in a grave, consigned for disinterment. That which is unearthed is the physical, material organization of the congregation.

“Bury The Parish?” was the title Browne Barr gave a 1967 Christian Century article, revealing a fresh understanding of the local church that neither killed it off nor permitted its former irrelevance. A second hint of change in metaphor occurs in a critique of the ghost literature, Can These Bones Live?, published by Robert Lecky and Elliott Wright in 1969. Thereafter the question mark disappeared from the titles of works regarding the parish body; speculation gave way to sure discovery, and a decade after Gibson Winter’s entombment of the suburban church, books such as Christ’s Suburban Body by Wilfred M. Bailey and William K. McElvaney and Robert Hudnut’s The Sleeping Giant called for the recovery of potency in the resources of present church structures.

“After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue,” says Dr. Frankenstein, “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” After recovering what had been left for dead, the doctors of the parish sought to give it new life. C. Peter Wagner cites their qualifications for this difficult task:

. . . for some reason or other, a scientific approach has not been used widely among Christians for understanding God’s work in the world with more precision. But church growth tends to do just that.

As a matter of curiosity, none of the members of the faculty of the Fuller School of World Mission -- where church growth theory has been generated to date -- has his doctorate in theology or philosophy as such. Rather, faculty members combine such academic fields as civil engineering, education, social ethics, linguistics, agriculture, and anthropology, where scientific methodology is a prominent part of the training [Your Church Can Grow].

Using “scientific” methods, the doctors of the parish bring new life to that body. Among their more suggestive titles published between 1969 and 1976:

To Come Alive; Your Parish Comes Alive; Ways to Wake Up Your Church; Arousing the Steeping Giant; Your Church Has Real Possibilities, and A Process of Local Church Vitalization. The most Frankensteinian title of them all is James Glasse’s Putting It Together in the Parish.

These works on vitalization generally prescribe the organizational analysis of the parish and the development of planning processes by which that body gains new life. Through the use of behavioral sciences and organizational development, the congregational body is probed and prodded. Its power is traced and mobilized; its organs analyzed and activated; its members recognized and energized. All of these techniques presume the immanent vitality of parish structure and the likelihood of life if the proper techniques are employed. “The principles of success are all here!” proclaimed the cover of one of the most widely purchased of books on local church vitalization.

Monsters are larger than life. Their myth discloses not only the resuscitation of the body, but also its enlargement. Frankenstein’s monster is eight feet tall, supposedly to permit its creator greater ease in linking parts, but also to heighten its numinous nature. That which is revived must also grow, if it partakes of ultimate power. To deny growth of the body is to deny that power:

Back in the 1960s, most of us remember all too well, many had even begun to question whether the church should grow. . . . For a while it became fashionable in certain circles to proclaim that we now live in a “post-Christian age. Some overhang from the 1960s still persists like a pesky cough after a head cold. But by and large, church growth has edged up toward the top of the agenda in churches across the board [C. Peter Wagner, ibid.].

The dominant theme of congregational inquiry in the ‘70s was church growth. More books on that topic have been published than on any other. A recent survey of persons who study the congregation professionally found more whose research involved church growth than any other subject. Though there are no statistics on conferences and consultations held throughout the decade, observers note that the issue of growth was one of the most popular topics for such gatherings.



The type of growth proposed by the fountainhead of the movement, the Institute for Church Growth, is not to be undertaken to the detriment of other aspects of Christian life and witness. In fulfilling these aspects, however, the movement asserts the necessity of aggressive enlargement of congregational units. Anything less than doubling parish size in ten years is given faint praise. At a time when the average American congregation carries a dubious list of 400 names as members, and gathers only 75 worshipers on Sunday, church growth literature provides as templates the case histories of churches which each contain several thousand souls. Like monsters, churches need to be “big enough” for their parts to work. “A growing church is big enough,” says Wagner, “when it is effectively winning lost people to Christ, when it provides the range of services that meet the needs of its members, and when it is reproducing itself by planting new churches.”

To gain gigantic stature the body needs compatible tissue. Some growth advocates stress the importance of homogeneity in church membership if that body is to develop. In their observations the attempt to integrate persons of different classes and cultures works against growth in the long run. “Typically during the period the congregation is integrated the general health of the institution is not the best,” says Wagner. Heterogeneity in a congregation, he notes, is not a higher moral undertaking; it is rather a deterrent to the development of theology and ethical behavior made clear by a common cultural idiom [Our Kind of People].

After its monster is given life, the narrative of Frankenstein shifts from one told by his scientist creator to that told by the monster itself. In the latter story we learn for the first time that the monster has emotions and intelligence. But, repulsed by its strange appearance, people flee, frightened and defensive. Instead of benefiting the world, the monster becomes its menace. It turns on its creator, its contemporaries and itself.



Like the Frankenstein story, late 70s literature fastens upon differences and resulting conflict. Conflict among Christians was not an unexamined subject in the 1960s, but it more often described the generalized tension among Christians of different theological and social persuasions. Only in the ‘70s was the issue localized in “church fights” involving contention in specific congregations. The latter books analyze the patterns of controversy that develop between a pastor and people, or among parties within a parish. Polarities within a local church are regarded as inevitable, and ultimately destructive, but also, if recognized in time, as points of creative entry into a deeper understanding of the nature of common life and discipleship. If these tensions, however, are not addressed, the congregation, like the monster, becomes more demonic, insensitive both to human need and divine blessing.

In a decade that pictured the local church as a physical body, it is not surprising that some books used metaphors of body disease and medical treatment. In 1976, Browne Barr issued his Well Church Book, a series of essays on the parish designed to give it “new heart, new being.” C. Peter Wagner, moreover, provided a full diagnostic tool for the body in Your Church Can Be Healthy, which identifies eight different diseases of local churches. As monster the congregation needed formulas to bring it to life; next it needed antidotes to remedy its inherent evil.

The symbols that surround the local church are far more complex than our Christian iconography suggests. Images such as ghosts and monsters accompany our more official symbols. Mythic patterns, moreover, are strikingly evident in the analysis of what pastors call the “personality” of their parishes. Each local church also has an identifiable worldview that is informed by a particular genre of world literature. In our monotheistic outlook we Christians overlook the power of sacred figures other than our own in congregational culture. When a congregation is spirited, for example, we assume that spirit to be Christ’s and do not consider it may be some other conjuring. To be the Body of Christ means in part that the church is incarnated in the symbolic tissue of all humanity. What Christians need to determine is whether the name of Christ is merely a baptizing of the images they incorporate in their church bodies, or whether Christ effects through these bodies not just a sign, but a love for all humanity.

The Secular Relevance of the Church

1. The great bulk of the people in the pews do not really believe in "the church." They believe in religion. They believe in the voluntary, inchoate fellowship of worshippers whose lives should, all other things being equal, set an example of the best that America offers. But they do not believe in the church as the bearer of a radically new orientation toward the world, as a revolutionary power that penetrates the world in order to help it become attentive to its own purposes. They do not see themselves as the special people of God who have a secular task to perform for his whole people.

2. This is not to say that the majority of the laity are not loyal churchmen. They love and respect the church they understand, and what they understand about the church is due, in no small degree, to the halfhearted, truncated doctrine of the church they have received from the clergy and from the cultural image.

3. These people are the "friendly enemies" of the mission of the church. They are dangerous in the sense that their ignorance of the meaning of the church weakens everything it does in the world. And even when this ignorance is dispelled by "Christian education", they will not tolerate a church that gives up spiritual things to mix itself up in the business of the world. They will not break through the walls of their socioeconomic ghettos and chummy coteries to contact and enter into dialogue with the unconventional or alienated people of the community. Their role in the American churches today is extremely ambiguous. For that reason it is not inappropriate to call them the "friendly enemies" of the church in its secular posture.

4. The church is like a huge moving van lumbering down a narrow road. A U turn, even if it were desirable, is not possible without jackknifing. The only way to turn around or to move in a different direction is to take one of the secondary roads to the right or to the left. In either case, those roads must be reconnoitered. Someone must know what problems of maneuvering and what obstacles lie along the way. That task belongs to a small group on motorcycles who will not only have the courage to probe unknown routes but will be bold enough to take over the wheel and steer in a new direction.

5. "The power of God,’’ writes Charles West, "the reconciling work of Christ, operates not in a church which meets on Sunday morning and perhaps once or twice during the week, not on the edge of the world, but in the middle of daily life, and thought." In our situation this must be the task of small groups, perhaps of one core group of laymen who become the agents of the congregations infiltration of the world.

6. And to be quite candid, if a group of laymen is repudiated by a congregation that will not permit it to act in the name of the church, such a group would best continue its work outside the local church with, however, denominational recognition and support if at all possible.

A Reconnaissance and Intelligence Force

7. Any congregation that is committed to Christian action in its community needs to have at its center or very close to it, a group of men and women prepared to be -- to use military language -- the reconnaissance and intelligence force of the main body. While a "reconnaissance and intelligence group" must welcome all who would join it, it must be conscious of its own integrity and maintain its own disciplined group life and service.

8. There are three stages by which a congregation develops and employs a central core of laymen for this task -- calling, training, and deployment. Let us now describe them in turn.

9. When we speak of calling we are not referring to the customary methods of "adding members to the church’’ by appealing to their religiosity. We have under estimated the power of Christ to make his first contact with people through other means. In many cases people who have known little concern for the church as a "religious enterprise" will be called to this work of the congregation. More precisely, many of them will not know what religion is about unless it has to do with loving involvement in the world at the points of injustice and need.

10. This is not to say that these people should be appealed to on the basis of activistic "do-goodism" rather than the Word. It is rather that the Word and the church will be interpreted to them as God’s will for the freedom of man to live a human life, to fight against the demonic forces of his own nature that seek dominion over social as well as personal life, to order his life by structures of love and justice relevant to the conditions of society. The church is held forth to these people as the militant company of those who are called not out of the world but into it to affirm and bless worldly life and to help to structure it according to justice, freedom, and the loving service of one life to another.

11. What kind of training is needed to prepare a core group for the task of reconnaissance and intelligence in the world? The first thing to be said is that the training of this group is not a once-for-all, isolated experience. What is needed is a program of "continuing education" that will be tailored to fit the particular congregation and situation, and will be flexible enough to meet the needs of lay theologians in various stages of development. This may have to be group training, but a great deal will be lost if special attention is not given to each individual and the secular vocation and cultural activities in which he or she is involved.

12. Secondly, it should be obvious that the actual involvement of the laity in ministry is the primary occasion for learning about the ministry itself. The deliberate movement toward the world is a learning experience. The very fact that we do not know precisely what engagement with the world means, that in most situations we have not even identified the enemy, means that laymen must "learn as they go."

13. Thirdly, a body of facts, general information, and technique must be gathered together from laymen themselves. One of our problems is that we have not asked the laity to make available for the mission of the church what it already knows about the world in which it lives, which is so often a world different from the one the parson preaches about. A sociologist who had been invited to address a denominational study conference on community power structure said: "This is the first time the church has asked me to make a contribution out of the knowledge and skills of my own profession. I’m usually called on for money or asked to give a Saturday afternoon to painting the Cub Scout room or repairing furniture in the Ladies Parlor."

14. No amount of printed resources, filmstrips, and lectures will ever be a substitute for the strategic information laymen possess, often unconsciously, about the real world. Not all laymen, of course, are aware of what is going on around them. Frequently they express astonishment that secular information is relevant to the purposes of the church.

15. But once laymen understand what the church is about and the intelligence it needs for mission, they will share important information and educate one another. Knowledge about individual community leaders, the history and development of a town, the way decisions are made in its institutions and social groups, the deals being made in the world of politics and business, the norms and values in the arts and sciences, the presuppositions and operational concepts of the professions -- this is grist for the mill of a core group which has the responsibility of planning strategy for the mission of a particular church in an American community. Laymen have this knowledge. In one sense, training has to do with encouraging them to recall it, share it, and analyze it theologically.

16. Undergirding this kind of practical information and savvy there is undoubtedly a place for a more formal and systematic study program. Basic theology for the laity, the nature and mission of the church in an urban society, social ethics, ecumenics, and approaches to Christian social action are some of these.

17. Lay training for mission, however, is not an armchair exercise. Theology and social ethics are developed in the field, in the task of reconnaissance, and in the little skirmishes that every good reconnaissance group sooner or later runs into. News should be made, not simply reviewed by the church. There is a necessary rhythm of formal study and "action research" that together comprise the training program of the core group and may hopefully spill over into the congregation in the form of conferences and forums.

18. Let us be clear that this is not a matter of gaining more knowledge about everything that has to do with worldly life. What we already know and what we discover needs to be ordered in accordance with the Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of man and society. It needs to be organized and shared in such a way as to assist in the task of what may be called a sociotheological analysis of the world. It must be directed to the specific objectives of a given church in a given community and not canned in a denominational manual or disseminated haphazardly as general information of religious interest.

19. Finally, we must speak of deployment, because it is the stage in which action really begins and it is our main interest here. Deployment refers to a strategy of Christian action implied by what Hans Ruedi Weber and others have called "the scattered church," And it is certainly true that through the vocational life of the laity the church is already scattered in the world. When we speak of deployment, however, we are implying a more deliberate and delicate approach to the world; one that does not depend primarily on the individual decision of each person to bear witness in his own place, but upon the decision of the core group to maintain, through one or more of its members, an outpost in some sector of the community that is the objective of corporate action. Indeed we may speak of corporate action itself as the strategic deployment of the church in the structures of society.

20. A few congregations have actually assigned laymen to community organizations that needed help or to which the congregation felt a need to be related. This is, in the narrow sense, what we mean by "deployment." lt. is the strategic infiltration of areas of need and centers of decision-making in the community for the purpose of mission.

21. A reconnaissance and intelligence group, to recall air military analogy, does not deploy itself for carrying on private surveillance of the enemy or engaging in little individual wars here and there. It operates by an agreed-upon plan of scouting the terrain immediately before the main body and reporting back in order that the combat team might move forward and secure the next objective.

22. Like all analogies, this one has the disadvantage of raising problems which are not intended. W are not suggesting that the church has a series of "objectives," which by attaining brings it closer and closer to the total occupation of the territory of the secular. This may be the strategy of the Communist Party. It is not the strategy of the church. Such an interest has already been barred from our consideration, What we are saying is that particular objectives of Christian action require some technical information, "inside" contacts, some deployment of a core group which opens the way for the congregation to achieve its ends.

23. The field of secular vocations which has been the primary focus of the scattered church discussions, is certainly not eliminated by this action-oriented approach. Laymen need to be helped to understand the meaning of work in our society and to plan together about how the gospel can become relevant to themselves and to others on the job. If laymen have been encouraged to do this by a core group, and if they share their problems and receive advice in conversation with other members, this too is deployment.

Influencing Decision Makers

24. The organized groups and decision-making centers of a community have not received enough attention as possible areas for the planned dispersal of the laity. In our great urban communities, rapidly becoming the normal context of American life, the influence of the church in many important collectivities may decide whether the public good or selfish interests will prevail. In some cases, such as in a community planning body, this influence -- initiated perhaps by several members of a core group may well be overt, The church will openly advocate certain measures with regard to zoning or relocation through its representatives. Here it participates along with block clubs, the merchants’ association and other groups.

25. But it is not necessary that every instance of deployment have as its objective the manipulation of power factors to achieve some policy goal. If only the church’s conventional image is changed from a self-centered, indifferent institution to that of a deeply concerned observer of public affairs -- by simply being in the places where policy is being hammered out -- this alone is warrant for deployment in the structures of the community,

26. We must realize the variety and complexity of Christian action when it is dealing with power configurations. In many cases a labor union, the local Chamber of Commerce, a realty board, a mayor’s commission, the P.T.A., or some community organization may be the key to the solution of some local problem, or the means by which "the secular relevance of the gospel" can be made manifest.

27. Because of their exposed economic position -- except when they are working for conservative causes -- laymen have not usually been involved in really rough-going Christian action. But this may be more the fault of their ministers than of the laity. We have not known well how to inspire, train, or deploy laymen for sophisticated and effective social action. Ministers alone cannot carry this responsibility of the church. A core group of courageous laymen, working with the clergy and, most desirably, representing a majority of the churches in a community, needs to be deployed in the right places, learning the facts and pulling the right levers. With quiet resolve, with love even for those they oppose and concern for the human values at stake, such a group can make the difference between a community in which the church is merely a cultural parenthesis and one in which it is a factor to be reckoned with.

28. With the rapid development of metropolitanism few American communities will escape the concomitant problems of residential segregation, deteriorating public schools, physical and social planning, and a host of other problems that will have to be solved by the people who move most decisively and swiftly.

29. As Robert Christ, the minister of the Seventh United Presbyterian Church of Chicago, has said, "Mission does not just happen." It requires a group of people an intelligence and reconnaissance vanguard that will also provoke a fire fight when it is strategic. It needs laymen who are called by God for the purpose, trained with all the wisdom and sophistication experience can give, and who are willing to take the risks of using the forms of power available to them to do the works of love.

30. The church has always been afraid of the prophets who believe that God has revealed to them the course it should take and want to assume command for its execution. And properly so. There is one leader of the church -- one Prophet, Strategist, and Commander -- and that is Jesus Christ. It may be too much to assume, however, that the main body of American Protestantism is under his direction today in terms of its mission. Faith in him has not ceased in the church. The word is still preached --occasionally with power to deliver. Men, women and children continue by the grace of God, to come into a deeper knowledge of themselves, of the meaning of life, and of his claim upon their own lives.

31. But as for the church in its secular vocation, as for its concern for justice and freedom, as for its witness to the judgment and grace of Christ in the affairs of the world, we may well question such a church exists in most American communities today. And to the extent that it does not exist we may well wonder whether Christ or the gods of false secularism command and direct the church in this sector of its life. If there are prophets among us who know the way back and are ready to lead the church to obedience -- let them speak and let us follow them.

32. There is indeed a danger of pride and self-righteousness in developing a group of elite Christians who, by virtue of superior knowledge and commitment, presume to renew the church. And yet it may be that whatever the danger of the core-group concept, it must be courted in this generation if the church is not to surrender to the principalities and powers that have declared their absolute autonomy apart from the Lordship of Christ.

33. It may be assumed that God is calling some men and women to a radical new relationship to the world. A relationship characterized by reconnoitering the frontiers of the secular where, both in the name of the church and outside of it, the gospel can be declared in new ways and with a new display of its power to build and transform to plant and to uproot, to burn and heal.

II. The Faithful Use Of Power

34. "The politics of change, whether seen as orderly revolution or as an armed upheaval, is not choosing abrupt change over a more desirable evolutionary change. The unwarranted introduction of the evolutionary idea into social and political thinking has been a deceiving curse. Societies do not evolve. They do not obey unconscious laws of their own nature. They are the deliberate creations of men. They change when men decide to change them. The changes are not always wise or even understood by the changers, but what happens is the outcome of conscious, purposeful action." Nicholas von Hoffman

God’s Active Power

35. Christians take for granted that the God who has revealed himself through Jesus Christ is active in the world through the power by which he sustains, uproots, and transforms men and nations. By his sovereign will and purpose, by his manifest power, he judges and redeems, restrains and directs, the processes of human events.

35. Against every attempt to pick God out from the husk of the world, as one picks the kernel from a nut, against every effort to eject God from the cockpit of his world, the Christian church makes this confession of his living presence and his sovereign power. By his word and will, the world is created, judged, and redeemed, and this is not "once upon a time," but in this place and at this time and for all time to come.

37. The black banner headlines in the morning paper speak of the power and action of God as surely as do the words of the prophets and the New Testament witness. Notwithstanding the fact that there is no easy formula for knowing how and to what immediate ends God is moving in the restless flux of happenings, the Christian confesses that the hand of God is behind, within, and against whatever transpires in the universe. He seeks, therefore, to discern, through the binoculars of faith what it is precisely that God is doing to accomplish that which pleases him and then to join him at that place and time with the human instrumentalities at his disposal.

38. It is difficult for us to believe in the living God. Most of us read the newspapers like unbelievers because, despite all the Easter sermons, we have restricted God to the period during which the Bible was written. But the history of our time is no less the stage upon which the drama of salvation is played out than was the history of the fifth century B.C. or the first century A.D. Accordingly, the Christian does not doubt that God is moving with power in the world today -- the world of African nationalism, thermonuclear politics, metropolitan planning, and space exploration, The Christian’s problem is rather to discover when, where, and how God is moving with such decisiveness as to create a crisis of decision for the church and to summon it and its resources into the struggle.

Age of Collective Action

39. One of the basic characteristics of present reality is the great shift of power from the individual to the group, and the pressures accompanying it. John R, Commons observes that we live in an "age of collective action." Few decisions of importance to the lives of individuals, few events, occur in the nation that are not conceived and carried out by organized groups.

40. The various groups and organizations that make up the American power structure are governmental, military, business, industrial and corporations; plus all of the voluntary and philanthropic organizations, such as: The National Association of Manufacturers, the three largest farm organizations, the AFL-CIO, the political parties, the press, radio, and T.V. associations, the League of Women Voters, the various health and welfare organizations, the veterans groups, the hundreds of philanthropic foundations, the National Education Association, the scouting groups and the national recreational and travel organizations. And these groups through their subsidiary bodies reach into every city, town, village, into every home, church, and school in the nation, and they largely determine the ethos of American society.

41. These countless collectivities give us our images of ourselves, our impressions of others, our prides and prejudices, our myths and traditions, our tastes and preferences, our values and attitudes about everything from loyalty to God and country to kindness to dumb animals. They give Americans their peculiar folkways and mores, their public behavior and private opinions, the patterns of their social skills and know-how about everything, from building a family fallout shelter to performing the latest dance step. The decisions that a man makes about where he will live, how he will furnish his home (the women’s magazines, of course, will make this decision in co-operation with the furniture manufacturers), how he will discipline his children, what radio and TV commentators he will listen to, what newspapers and magazines he will subscribe to, and what organizations he will join in his community -- all of these daily decisions are, to an inestimable but unquestionable degree, influenced by the legislation, education, and plain ballyhoo daily propagated by these groups and the power centers that control them.

42. Now the church has demonstrated a naive and moralistic approach to this social reality. It has often assumed that it could eschew power and still its "social concern" would be influential. "A kind word, a warm smile, and a hearty handshake," wrote one spokesman in a national Protestant magazine, "is more effective for church strategy in race relations than all of its social and political action programs." This is a typical Protestant response to the question of how God is acting in a crisis situation and what is the church’s responsibility for power.

43. In American society today we must take two facts of life with utmost seriousness. First, the reality of socioeconomic structures of power that institutionalize and "regularize’’ decision-making in every area of modern life. There may be ways of bypassing these structures. But let us not be deceived. Political, economic, and social organizations and interests have a way of disguising themselves within the "nonpolitical," informal ways decisions are made.

44. Second, the necessity, in most instances, of consolidated policy and corporate action to effect change or to influence the social system to any considerable extent. We are using the words "policy" and "political" broadly, as any decision by any group or organization that can be calculated to influence the attitudes or actions of people outside of itself. In this sense, for instances, the decision of the Masters Barbers’ Association to open neighborhood shops until church time on Sundays is just as surely political policy as an ordinance passed by the city council.

45. Yet many church groups conduct programs of "public affairs" as if persons are autonomous units, isolated from the influence of power entities in their communities and able to regulate their behavior under all circumstances by dint of sheer moral will.

46. A group of Presbyterian elders who were also realtors in a Pittsburg community were asked by their pastor to open the way for a cultured Negro family to purchase a home in their neighborhood. After a lengthy discussion in which they consulted Scripture, prayed, and generally agonized over a decision, they summoned their minister and reported: "Our duty is clear. We know that as Christian men we ought to give the word that would make it possible for this man to find a house here, but, God help us, we cannot do it. Most of us have spent a lifetime building up our businesses. The reprisals from the realty board, the banks, and certain other groups would be more than we could take and stay in business. Not only our businesses but families would suffer all kinds of threats and social ostracism. We just can’t do what we know we ought to do as Christians."

47. The call to obedience always is a call to deny oneself and to suffer with Christ. No one can relieve these men of the guilt and shame of their unfaithfulness to what they saw as an imperative of the gospel. Only Christ himself can absolve them. And yet, no one can fail empathically to brood over the realities of this situation, the inevitability and rigidity of the institutional sanctions to which these "good" men were pitilessly exposed. To expect people lightly to make choices without respect to the contexts of power in which they have to live and work is to delude ourselves with pious hopes. The church has a responsibility here to demonstrate a corporate fellowship of love and power that is able both to uphold these men in forgiveness and to point the way to an obedience for which the church itself is willing to suffer. Unless the church can be responsible enough to the reality of an organized society, and faithful enough to use the economic and cultural power of its own to change the situation, it cannot be indignant if most laymen, much less of people outside the church, find it impossible to do what they feel morally obligated to do.

48. It is greatly to the misfortune of the churches that they have helped successfully to restrict the province of religion to the socialization of children, affability, and the sphere of individual morals and beliefs. Many other groups are not so handicapped. The spheres of their power interests impinge upon some of the crucial areas of a person’s life. When the requirements of participation and the definitions of life situations that are promulgated by these groups are not seriously challenged, middle-class religious institutions are no match for them.

49. In so far as people in our culture act in segmentalized roles are defined and required by organized groups able to apply social and economic power, the church that makes no demands upon its members, gives them no stronghold from which to fight, and is afraid to use its own institutional power when it is necessary is simply eliminated from the struggle. It leaves a power vacuum to be filled by other organized interests.

50. The church would hopefully determine under what conditions and to what ends it would defer to other groups. It is precisely because it regards the secular seriously that the church will be aware of the structures of collective power and will seek to change them and to take some share in the determination of individual and group behavior in the critical spheres of modern life.

51. There appear to be no real alternatives. It is a question of fishing or cutting bait. It is not a matter of the church’s trying to do what political parties and great corporations are better equipped to do. That would be both impossible and undesirable. It is simply a matter of the church’s doing what is possible for it in each situation; to use faithfully the modicum of power it can generate and call a halt to the retreat from the firing line and the pious pretension that God works only through the weak and powerless.

Consolidated Policy and Corporate Action

52. Let us be clear about the fact that individuals can and do "change the world." At a strategic time one man with an idea and enough determination and skill to see it through, can accomplish much even under a rigidly totalitarian system. From Moses in Egypt to Vinoba Bhave in India -- neither of whom, we might note incidentally, was Christian -- God has chosen occasionally to use a single individual to accomplish great reforms. This truth should make the church exceedingly careful never to sever the nerve of individual action. We should consider, however, if it is not also true that God has more often used two or three or twelve or ten thousand, and if, in an organized, power-wielding society, it is not a matter of urgency that Christians consolidate their positions and undertake united action on certain issues of public concern.

53. By consolidation of public policy we refer to a unified conception of some long-range goals, some immediate objectives, and the specific means by which to seek them. It has finally to do with agreements about what the church ought to do in the society, when and how, and the allocation of resources and the co-ordination of forces to put proposals into action. Again the matter-of-fact, cold-blooded way we have stated these policy questions does not mean that they have to be cold and mechanical either in consideration or execution. These things cannot properly be programmed for an IBM machine. We are talking about people -- meeting, planning, working, in the mission of the church in the real world in which we live today and must live, with millions of new and unfamiliar peoples, in the future.

54. By corporate action, we refer simply to "acting as a body." This may involve the official, authorized action of a congregation or of a delegated group in behalf of a congregation; or action by a group of churches or by that delegated body that is able to act in their behalf. It will be clear, therefore, that by corporate action we mean to imply action as an organized power group which may not be able to deliver all that it promises in the way of effective power, but which has, nevertheless, some of the resources and some of the institutional weight of a corporate entity behind it.

55. This rather naked description of church corporate action should not frighten us merely because of the words "organized," "power," and "institutional." Every church and every assemblage of churches has institutional characteristics, power, and organization. The important ethical questions concern not their existence, but how they are put together and used. These questions cannot be ignored by the Christian church if it intends to be relevant in the world to which it has been sent.

56. Nor does corporate action exclude individual action or action in collaboration with other individuals or groups outside the church. When laymen are asked to take responsibility in certain community groups and to report back to the congregations as in the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., or as the Church Federation of Chicago sends representatives to the Citizen School Committee which provides a list of candidates for the school board, this is a kind of corporate action, carried out by individuals.

57 Corporate action does not mean that "everyone agrees and everyone goes." It can mean quasi-official representation. It simply means bringing to bear upon a situation as much united power as can be organized, with the result that something is moved or inhibited outside the acting group. It is unrealistic and injurious to the effective witness of the church to suppose that we cannot act without unanimity or without clearing with whole constituencies.

58. Let us hasten to insist that this is no invitation to power-hungry people to join in an amoral play of power politics within the churches. We must be aware of our pretensions and of the temptations to infallibility. But the mission of the church in today’s world is a serious business. It demands savvy, skill, and faithfulness to use power in such a way as to rout the wolves without killing the sheep. The church will not save the world. But if it has any message for modern man, if it has any place for him to stand and fight against the demoralizing and tyrannizing structures of a culture that has been severed from its true secular responsibility to serve human need, then those Christians who know this must speak and act. They cannot falter before the hard decision to employ responsibly the power and prestige of the church to help it become the catalyst by which the culture can fulfill its obligation for the humanization of the life of man,

59. Let us confess that no Christian nor organization of Christians is wise enough to know precisely what God is doing in every situation. But this much we can say with confidence: at every point of suffering and wrong, in every situation where man is being divested of his essential humanity, the judgment and the grace of God is operative through some human agency. The church of Christ is not called merely to be a spectator to this drama of reconciliation. The church must make decisions about "what is going on" even when this is not clear. It must be willing to fight, even when most of its members prefer to go fishing.

60. The responsibility of the church for power does not mean bidding for sovereignty over the structures and institutions of society. It means penetrating them in such a way as to be able to instruct the world concerning its purpose of serving human need, concerning its original foundation and the end toward which it moves. It means so energizing these structures and institutions, within their own provinces and with the spirit appropriate to their own function, that they can act as the true creatures of God they are. To perform this task today requires the faithful use of power. This ministry is not forbidden to the church by its Lord. For the church does not serve obsequiously -- a flunky, bowing and scraping with hat in hands -- but rather as the sophisticated English butler who has more brains, is more of a gentleman, and has more resources for helping his "master" become a real man than the master can muster for himself.

61. If God is a living God, he is acting in the world through the existing apparatus for getting things done. The organized church is a part of this apparatus and the institutional power it possesses has the legitimate function of placing it in the spheres where God is at work. This power is far from being a sinful possession, a hindrance to the reconciling activity of God. Rather, power is his gift to the church in order that, with a due sense of humility and a prudent appreciation of its demonic possibilities, it may be used faithfully to the glory of God.

62. It makes no sense for the church to disclaim power or to refuse to use it responsibly when occasion demands. It is, in the sociological sense, the ability to affect another person, through one’s own action or inaction. As Walter Wiest has said, "Power is strikingly reminiscent of the definition of the ‘neighbor’ in the Christian sense, as anyone whose welfare is affected by what I do or fail to do."