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On Being Alive to the Arts and Religion: Painting

The themes of religion have provided the content of painting in the West. If you have visited the great museums of Europe or of North America, you have been impressed with this fact. In gallery after gallery, the great themes of religion are the subject matter of the paintings. The Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, and even the Hermitage in Leningrad, display countless paintings of the Annunciation or the Crucifixion or the Resurrection.

This persistence of religious themes may be understood in several ways. In great periods of painting, such as the Renaissance in Europe, the wealthy who could afford to hire artists often subsidized major religious works as appropriate to the scale of their own palaces and as gifts to religious institutions. It is also true that in most of the Christian centuries of the West, painting formed the basis of Christian education. The art of the cathedrals in Europe had as one of its functions the telling of the Christian story in visual ways. Therefore, painting became at once the vehicle for the communication of the gospel to illiterates among the faithful and the expression of the faithfulness of people of immense power and station.

The persistence of religious themes in painting has continued to the present day. In some contemporary painters, these profoundly religious themes may now be expressed in ironic and convoluted ways. Take, for example, the work of the contemporary English painter, Francis Bacon. Bacon reproduced recognizable religious paintings of earlier masters including Velazquez and El Greco and then, with great ferocity, canceled out the authority of the earlier painting with striking symbols of his rage.

The church has been described as the "Mother of the Arts." The artists in several periods of western history did find the church to be a patron. Michelangelo was supported by popes and other princes of the church in the production of his greatest paintings. By the nineteenth century, however, patronized religious painting had become essentially trivialized, as John W. Dixon, Jr., indicates in his book, Nature and Grace in Art (University of North Carolina Press, 1964). The Reformation and Counter-Reformation period saw a decline in the role of painting in the church. Protestant theology came to be defined in terms of confessions, and Roman Catholic theology, reacting as the "Counter-Reformation," came to define itself also in words in the form of defensive statements, such as the conciliar documents of Trent and subsequent councils. The artist, therefore, no longer was permitted to contribute to religious imagination by the creative work of painting and found himself limited to illustrating the "complete" statement of the religious traditions contained in confessions and in creeds. In this sterile atmosphere, only two supremely great artists emerged: Rembrandt van Rijn, a Dutch Protestant, and El Greco, a Catholic Spaniard. By the nineteenth century, religious art had become, by and large, official art and had been reduced to the level of mere illustration.

God is not left without witnesses, however, and the urge to create religious statements and the evidence that the power of the gospel still gripped persons outside of systems led to the fact that a great body of religious art was produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries outside of official religious circles. Examples of this are to be found in the works of an outrageous character named Paul Gauguin. One of the most powerful paintings of all time, as far as religious themes are concerned, is his famous painting of "Jacob Wrestling With the Angel." The scene is in a Breton field, and costumed Breton maidens in their characteristic headdress surround the field in which the angel wrestles with Jacob as cows nearby graze in bucolic indifference. Gauguin painted himself in the righthand corner of this painting looking slyly at himself, the artist. What are we to make of this? In the vivid brightness of a Breton summer day, Gauguin is saying that the decisive moment of faith happens wherever we live and work in our time and not in some distant time. The Angel of the Lord wrestling with each of us Jacobs is not an abstract idea but a neighborhood event.

The painter is an artist who attempts to translate to canvas (or in some other medium) something of the power of his perception of the world. The painting may not have specifically religious subject matter but may be expressive and in that expression reveal something of the grandeur and misery of the human spirit. Paul Tillich, the famous theologian, used to say that expressionism was the highest form of religious art. That is to say, expressionism had the power to communicate forcefully the images and the feeling of the artist; therefore, the great German expressionists, such as Emil Nolde, whose "Head of a Prophet" is one of the most powerful statements of the haunting and mysterious sense for Christ of modern art, evoke in us a response that is not the response of immediate and instant recognition. The painter, such as Nolde, is not after the reproduction of a certain tradition of physical features or of characteristic expressions of our Lord (such as the highly stylized expression of the Buddha in the East). The expressionist is after that moment of insight that attacks the viewer and forces the viewer to come to terms with the artist_s vision and the power of that vision.

Tillich reminded us that paintings are not simply photographs or photographic reproductions of events—reproductions that exhaust themselves in their presentation. Tillich suggested to us that when the artist, thinking deeply about his own experience, translates that experience onto canvas, his experience is mediated to us and affects us in ways no one can either imagine or fully understand. The story is told that someone seeing the famous French painter, Auguste Renoir, painting in a field, approached the painter and making small talk, asked, "With what do you mix your paints?" And the artist turned and said, "With brains, madame." The artist who paints religious themes in ways that are religiously powerful might be saying to an auditor, "I mix my paints with faith."

One of the interesting things to do the next time you visit a great gallery is to ask yourself as you move from painting to painting, "What is religious about this painting?" I think you are likely to find three types of religious paintings. The first will be the painting that is specifically religious in its subject matter. It may be a painting on a biblical theme. It may be a painting that is easily identifiable by the subject matter, by the theme itself, as clearly "religious." The question one has to ask on contemplating a painting of that specifically religious subject matter is this: "In looking at that painting and thinking deeply about it, is there something happening to me that makes me a different person for having participated in that art experience?" Thinking deeply about Rembrandt van Rijn_s etching, "The Return of the Prodigal Son," one sees specifically religious subject matter, an identifiable theme, and a story that is well known. But what is different in this experience? With enormous economy of line and with great care for the power of the human form, Rembrandt tells the story of the Prodigal in ways that we have never heard it or seen it before. The entire force of the story is made visual by the contemplation of the hands of the father on the shoulders of the son and the feet of the son as he kneels before his father. The economy of line and the economy of the parable itself are fully described in the form of hands and feet in the act of forgiveness and supplication.

A second type of religious painting would be a painting of non-religious subject matter, but a painting that moves the viewer deeply to contemplate the human situation for one_s own need of help from beyond human resources. An example of this type of painting might be one of the famous clowns of Georges Rouault, the recent contemporary French painter. Rouault saw in the clown the expression of the essential loneliness of the human spirit. Painted smiles and gay exterior costumes hide the poor Pierrot, the sad clown, the unhappy ego, that otherwise is attired in gaiety. This is a painting of non-religious subject matter, but the intention of the artist is to draw us out of ourselves, to require us by contemplating the painting to ask a religious question, "Who am I?"

A third type of painting that you will encounter in a museum is a painting that is devoid of all subject matter as we normally understand it. This is a so-called "abstract" or non-representational painting from the schools of modern painting that thrived at the beginning of this century and into the present time. These paintings are enormously decorative, are often large (especially those from the so-called New York School), and frequently represent dissonant and jarring geometric and optical patterns—patterns that startle the viewer and force either contemplation or rejection. In a very profound sense, these paintings break us open to the religious questions of our time. Is the artist helping us to understand the ways in which our society has, in fact, lost the personal dimension? Are we, as suggested by the paintings of Jackson Pollock, simply random events in a world of random and meaningless events? Sometimes these paintings express the discontinuity of modern religious experience, the loneliness in a world that knows no limits and that overwhelms our ability to speak meaningfully of its shapes and forms. The artists_ paintings express that formlessness and shapelessness.

One must not expect the artist always to be "religious." Religious themes may be handled irreligiously, and non-religious themes may e profoundly religious in their intention. What is exciting about religion in art as expressed in painting is the endless evocation of profound human feelings and the interaction of those feelings with great religious symbols and themes.

On Being Alive to the Arts and Religion: Film

The only unique art form to emerge in the twentieth century is the motion picture. While painting, sculpture, drama, poetry, and the her arts have been familiar throughout the centuries of western civilization, only the motion picture is unique to the technologies of recent past. It is the most complete art form, if one is to judge the variety and complexity of its elements. It is supremely a modern art form, since it is dependent upon the development of technologies of film production and transmission. Television, the most recent technology, is dependent for the most part on film and still has not liberated itself from film. Technology is the framework in which the filmmaker produces art, precisely in the way in which a painter uses canvas and paints and a writer uses pen and paper.

The most powerful element of the motion picture film is its sense of immediacy. The filmmaker creates a mood that critics have called "virtual presence," that is, a sense of the reality of an event that is created in the perception of the viewer. Because of motion, lapse of time, mobility of the angle of vision, and the intimacy of the close-up, the viewer has a sense of presence that is much more tense than in any other art form. There were stories told during World War II of primitive people seeing films for the first time and sowing stones and spears at the screen. While it is often a public relations gimmick, having a nurse in attendance during a horror film is not all that strange. The images of the film have the power to overwhelm normal reactions.

It is precisely this sense of immediacy that gives the film as an art form a unique place among the arts as a religious gesture. More than other arts, the film is able to present an existential experience, that is, to make it possible to enter the personal, religious experience of the actors and the events on the screen. When the Hanafi Muslims objected to the exhibition of the film on the life of the prophet Mohammed in March, 1977, they were reacting in ways that had deep resonance in Muslim experience. Images are so powerful that they may also be used to blaspheme or to ridicule the religious sensitivity of people. Therefore, in Islam, representations of Mohammed are considered objectionable. For Jews and Christians, similar problems present themselves.

The question is this: Is it possible to make a film with religious subject matter and not be idolatrous or careless? W. H. Auden, the late poet, once suggested that to portray Jesus on film was to risk making him appear to be either a charlatan or a clown. The imagination has no difficulty dealing with the incredible images of the biblical stories, the physical miracles, the healing miracles, the Resurrection, and other powerful episodes. The immediacy of the film, however, tends to make these events appear contrived and even mechanical.

F. D. Dillistone, former Bishop of Liverpool, once suggested that artists dealing with biblical subject matter have two ways to go. First, they may create a story about Jesus "in the light of experience." This is essentially what a biblical movie does. A film like The Greatest Story Ever Told is a film about Jesus in the light of experience. But, suggests Bishop Dillistone, an artist may also produce a film based on human experience in the light of Jesus. In the former, the viewer is an objective observer. In the latter, the viewer is a participant. In the former, the film is about Jesus. In the latter, the film is about the viewer.

Like all art forms, a film may be merely decorative and entertaining. That is a proper and useful role for film to play. But when religious issues are dealt with as decoration or entertainment, then a moral-critical question is involved. It is a matter of serious consequence for theologians when a film based on religious subject matter is made, because more people will be likely to view that film than have read the New Testament in all history. Thus, the theologically untrained and maybe hostile filmmaker is put in a position of having an enormous impact on the religious education of millions. On the other hand, a sensitive filmmaker, understanding the authority of the person of Jesus, may make a profoundly reverent film about Jesus. Pier Paolo Pasolini_s The Gospel of St. Matthew has stood the test of time as a good representation of the Matthew story of Jesus, although Pasolini himself was an atheist.

But possibly the more profound religious films are those that deal with basic human dilemmas and questions of meaning and purpose, but do not specifically announce themselves as religious films. Films that deal with human experience in the light of Jesus invite the viewer into a world that is immediate and available, not exotic and closed. So questions that impinge upon our contemporary personal experience of selfhood, community, racism, sexuality, good and evil, and meaning may form the structure for films of great religious power.

In the history of film, some of this latter group might include films like The Pawnbroker (1964), which deals with the restoration of feeling in a death camp survivor who had decided that he could survive only by suppressing all feeling. The film deals with this struggle and the suffering that it requires. The film Nothing But a Man (1964), invites us to come into the private world of a young black worker who tries to make a home for his family in a world that is hostile to his hope. The films of Ingmar Bergman, notably Scenes From a Marriage, invite us to live through complex human relationships and to sense our own humanness in that process.

At one time, it was assumed that a religious movie was a film with biblical subject matter. Early in the days of motion pictures, church people were extremely wary of the motion picture. The industry broke down that hostility by producing enormously popular biblical epics. One wag suggested that sex was introduced into films in the biblical setting. The context made the difference. I still vividly remember seeing Claudette Colbert_s milk bath in that famous scene in the first King of Kings. The film was shown in the church gymnasium on Sunday night. "Bible and bubble bath" was the formula. But stories about Jesus and other biblical events have only one dimension of power. They are ultimately illustration and not convicting.

There are three modes of speech in the New Testament. The first is preaching (kerygma). This is the straightforward proclamation of the gospel. The second kind of speech in the New Testament is teaching (didache). This is the narrative detail of the gospel story—the who, what, where, and when. But the third type of New Testament speech is revelation (apocalypse). This is the speech of the parables and the imaginary descriptions of the future. It is "revealing" speech. It is speech that does not point (like preaching) or describe (like teaching), but embraces. The film is the art form that is most likely to embrace and overwhelm the viewer. It deals with our experience in the light of Jesus. It invites us to understand ourselves. A famous novelist once suggested that after reading a certain book he felt not that he understood more, but that he was understood. The film has the power to assure us that we are understood, that we are actors and not merely passive observers.

We need to be careful in all experience of art that we do not expect to be instantly adequate critics. Criticism is the art of separating the more or less good from the more or less bad in art. To be critical is to have a sense of taste and discrimination, to be able to judge authentic and inauthentic art, and to share your judgments with others in helpful ways. All experience is subject to this kind of criticism. It is incumbent upon Christian folk to become articulate critics. The seeing of many films is one way to develop these skills. But another way is to let us be guided in our intentional film-going by knowledgeable and thoughtful critics. The National Council of Churches Communications Commission publishes a monthly film review and criticism newsletter called "Film Information." This is an excellent way to keep informed and to be guided on discretion and usefulness in your film viewing.

Film is available in every town these days. Film societies and school courses are near you. Your own church could easily experiment with films as a way of opening the human issues in religion to full understanding and care in the community. It is even possible to make films inexpensively. Being alive in the late twentieth century will mean being alive to film.

On Being Alive to the Arts and Religion: Music

Of all the arts, music is the most available and the most universal. It springs out of the very speech and soul of a person or a community. It uses the most universal instrument, the human voice, and sounds created by earthy things like catgut and skin and wood and brass. Its tenderness and its profundity begin with the songs for infants sung by parents, and its power is manifested in the chants of priests of all cults and sects incanting prayers for the benefits of the gods.

The ancient Greeks understood music as something related to tie very structure of the universe. The "music of the spheres" was literally thought to be the sounds that were created when the concentric spheres of the universe rubbed against each other, and the music thus created was thought to be almost unbearable in its beauty and purity. Plato commented on this in The Republic, and the idea is perpetuated in the popular Christian hymn, "This Is My Father's World," in the stanza, "All nature sings and around me rings/The music of the spheres." As far as we can tell, music has always been an important element in religion, and for basic reasons such as this sense of its cosmic authority.

But what is religious music? We have the same problem here that we have when we try to understand the relationship of religion to any art form. Is there something that makes an art form, religious? As Paul Tillich used to suggest, a work of art may have religious content or subject matter and be quite irreligious in its form. Or the reverse may be true. A work of art may have no apparent formal religious content, but its style may be unmistakably religious. So we are forced to deal with the impact and force of what is, rather than with a preconception of what ought to be, in describing religious music.

It is clear that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach is religious music of extraordinary power. Bach (1685-1750) was a deeply pious person, informed by Lutheran theology, and professionally involved in the production of weekly church services based on the lectionary of the church year. His integration of text and music is as perfect as one can imagine. To those who love Bach, all religious experience ultimately is mediated by his genius. Alec Robertson once said, "To sing the chorales of Bach is for the disbeliever to experience the suspension of disbelief." I remember a fellow college student who was converted to Christianity during the singing of the St. Matthew Passion in the college glee club. It is ironic that Bach's music, so completely biblical and evangelical, is now performed in secular environments such as concert halls. It is evidence of the fact that God is not left without a witness in the world even if the church itself has turned to another evangelistic agenda and style.

Most of us today are primarily aware of the hymn as the dominant form of music in religious life. But this has not always been so. As a matter of fact, the hymn as we know it is a fairly recent element in piety and worship in the church. While it was prominent in German pietism in the post-Reformation period, and was particularly important in the Calvinist Reformation (where Psalm texts dominated), the modern hymn book is heavily influenced by the 19th-century tradition of the English hymn. There were earlier forms of congregational singing. We know, for example, that there were hymns and spiritual songs in the biblical church, and later, the rich traditions of chanting and polyphony developed. But the phenomenon of the rather exclusive use of the hymn book is a recent development.

The hymn book has tended to be an official collection of all right religious songs. Like the New Testament, it has something of the authority of a canon, a collection of acceptable writings.

But, alongside the hymn book, there is an important movement of more popular religious songs, echoing the musical styles and themes of the present, and not the metaphors and rhythms of an earlier century. Some church musicians are attempting to open up the church to these more contemporary sounds and songs. They sense that the church is the place where the fresh air of religious experimentation and vitality ought to be present, alongside the more acceptable and more traditional. Since much traditional hymnody is based upon paraphrases of great biblical texts, the power of those hymns is somewhat lost on a generation that is unfamiliar with those texts. But the symbols of power and human aspiration that move our society today may be available for religious music, especially for the young. In the troubled sixties, some powerful folk songs emerged into the religious vocabulary of church music. The great song of protest, "We Shall Overcome," is now well established as a powerful religious statement. Others you may remember include "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," "Gentle : On My Mind," and "Suzanne." It was in this period that some fine old evangelical songs caught the imagination of young persons: "Amazing Grace" and "Ain't Goin' to Study War No More." The black gospel style of music represents new vitality that is seeking a place in the life of worship of the church.

Being alive to music in the church means being willing to risk change. But we are cautious about changing our comfortable ways of understanding life. While we may have an intellectual grasp of the gospel, we may have an emotional problem about allowing its style to overcome our comfortable prejudices. We know what religious art is, what religious music is, what religious architecture is. But our problem is simply this: What we deem religious is our taste or our historically conditioned understanding. To stand exclusively on that understanding is to deprive ourselves of a whole new world of religious experience.

Tradition in religion is a formidable force. One recalls the fact that when Beethoven's First Symphony was first performed, a Vienna critic wrote imperiously, "This will never do!" Today Beethoven is still vital and fresh, but also familiar. Our critical problem is similar. Can we be open to the new, the vital, the fresh in music, and let it have a chance to become the familiar?

If we were to take an imaginary tour through church history and visit pious worshiping communities all the way back to the New Testament times, the overwhelming impression we would have would be the awareness of the incredible diversity and infinite variety of styles and customs. Because religion has to do with ultimate and basic issues—life, death, hope, love, community, family, and God—religion's language and symbols tend to be unshakable and timeless. But these issues are also issues of extraordinary vitality. They do not change, but our ways of perceiving and talking about them change. The theology and arts of the church are the changing speech about unchanging issues. For that speech to be useful for evangelism and outreach, it must somehow share in and appropriate the art forms of the culture in which it finds itself. So we celebrate the diversity and complexity of church life through the arts even as we celebrate its unity in diversity by keeping our attention fixed on our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Being alive to music in religion is one of the most important elements of a sensitive Christian experience. Because musical experience is so available to us in our culture, we ought to have a wider and more rich encounter with music than we now have. What can you and your church do to invite this power into your experience?

On Being Sideswiped by Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch's art has an insistent quality that requires viewers to take account of their private worlds. His artistic and spiritual journey covered a lifetime. While many artists of that period are now assigned to comfortable niches, this strange Norwegian continues to speak to us in startling ways. That is why the exhibit of his work now on display at The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is such a stunning event. To view his work is to be sideswiped unexpectedly by an emotional experience. Those of us who thought of Munch as ‘just another expressionist" will now have to rethink our categories. Here is an artist whose work overwhelms all categorical statements about him. That, after all, is a definition of genius.

Munch (1863-1944) was a member of an extraordinary circle of artists and writers who were active in the last years of the 19th century and into the time between the world wars in Europe. Strindberg was a close friend. His paintings were exhibited in important shows in Europe early in the century and on equal terms with Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, whose public acceptance has been secure. His own work exhibits a fascination with themes assumed to be very modern—alienation, hysteria, loneliness, sexuality. And no painter has more thoroughly explored the experience of death. But infused in this somber view is a graphic vitality and affirmation of life that saves the work from desolation.

The program of Munch, developed very early in his career, is to probe in visual and symbolic ways the tensions between outer and inner worlds. His work is hard to classify with other painters and takes on a uniqueness. Appearing to be influenced by Impressionists or Expressionists, the surface of his paintings is actually indifferent to his sense of the symbolic power that persists throughout the work. Even in his earliest work, elements of the later Munch are evident. His evocative realist painting, Morning, Girl at the Bedside (1884) shows a sense of the diffusion of light and his fascination with interior and exterior space. Light, space, color, form—the tools of all artists, in his hands become informed with symbolic power. These elements take on signification and are used like musical themes throughout the mature Munch years. Living as he did in the land of the midnight sun, it was appropriate that he use the sun as a part of the symbolism of melancholia. The frequent use of the midnight sun, light in darkness, is a reminder to the viewer of the landscape of a private loneliness.

Munch's paintings reveal increased psychological intensity as he moved from realism to symbolism. But the structural themes remained. A persistent device was the emphasis upon angularity of world and consciousness. In his urban paintings and in his seascapes, bridges and streets seem to careen off the frame, accentuated by the rational horizontal lines of a row of buildings or a shoreline. One has the sense both of rationality and acceleration. In these frames appear solitary persons, faceless, interior selves, victims of the velocity of the exterior truths and the private nightmares. The Scream (1893) is the most famous of these statements. The impact of the diagonal line of the bridge (linking two mysterious masses) and the swirling lines of a dark abyss (suggesting a precipice) contrast sharply with the blood-red horizontal line of the sky. The figure in the foreground, alienation heightened by two shadowy figures beyond, partakes of the vertigo in its own form. One almost hears the scream.

Remote bleakness in his landscapes heightens the sense of melancholia. In these Norwegian environments, deepened by the long twilights, human emotions are exaggerated. Munch's Melancholy, Yellow Boat (1891-92) uses the tension between the diagonal (the seashore) and the horizontal (horizon) but provides a provocative brightness in the boat (which parallels the horizontal) and in the bright dress of the woman on the pier. The jealousy of the figure in the right lower corner is manifestly evident. But this is no soap opera, although the somewhat Victorian theme may provide some suggestion of that. In Munch's hands, the theme has a psychological intensity that is conveyed not merely by the conventional story, but by the visual impact of images as symbols.

The dark, melancholic environment may be an interior environment, as in the evocative Night in St. Cloud (1890). Again, a single figure occupies the space of the painting. Note that his solitary forms are seldom dominating the painting but are frequently subdued or located off-center. In this case, only the barest shadow, almost indistinguishable from the furniture, suggests the lonely vigil. The brightness of night outside contrasts ironically with the darkness inside! In this deep darkness, the night light casts a shadow on the floor of the room, forming a symbol of the double cross. It is assumed that the painting represents Munch reflecting on hearing news of his father's death. Certainly the painting provides vivid associations with death. A solitary boatman, the unlit lamp, formal dress, and the coffin-shaped reflection of the window all convey powerful impressions of the feeling of death's presence.

Munch lived and worked in one of the most intense periods of art in history. After a long period of classicism and formalism of a variety of types, artists in the late 19th century sought to break out of conventional molds and find fresh ways of speaking. The Impressionists returned to nature for the source of art, trying to catch experience on the wing. So Monet eschewed studios and endeavored to put on canvas not the form of things, or even the essence of things, but rather the experience of things. His later paintings are almost all color, intense and magical. Post-Impres sionists and Expressionists pressed this quest further, outraging the accustomed tastes of Victorian canons.

The artists of the time inherited "untroubled communal myths"—family solidarity, the authority of the state, the idealization of women, the dominance of men. Munch's paintings arise out of this context, but they are interpreted through an intensely private experience. It is this private dimension of his art that creates the stress in it. Munch does not challenge the communal myths. He experiences them in anxious and existentially frightening ways. Victorian views of sexuality, for example, tended to idealize women at the same time the culture was fascinated with the theme of harlotry. Munch's personal vision was deeply affected by this dichotomy. His women possess a somber beauty that transcends the merely formal statements of the period. Their inaccessibility

becomes for Munch an occasion for terror. The woman as vampire, draining the life-blood from the artist, or the woman as Mile, Corday, the assassin of Marat, are for Munch symbols of the unresolved experience of the mystery of sexuality. This becomes yet another dimension of his alienation and loneliness.

Probably the most powerful yet subdued expression of this dilemma is his The Voice (1893). The woman is pictured in a constricted but expectant pose, her hands behind her back yet her torso leaning toward the viewer. Tension is heightened by the couple in a boat in the background, the persistent theme of an outer order. The vertical pattern of trees reflecting the pose of the woman and the bright shaft of the midnight sun reflecting on the lake create an erotic mood. The title of the painting is defied by the painting itself. The painting is soundless, but it speaks of a powerful and troubling element in Munch's own self-consciousness. The viewer is drawn into Munch's own experience of troubled sexuality.

During his long career, Munch returned over and over again to the themes of his early paintings. He reworked earlier paintings, often reproducing them in drawings and prints. Viewed over a lifetime, his work is an attempt to find the most efficient language for his statement about life. A series of self-portraits represents an amazing psychological history of an artist. The early formal works suggest brilliance and self-confidence. They progress through periods of energetic vitalism, veer toward a kind of madness, and finally are resolved into a powerful statement of steely dignity. Self-Portrait between the Clock and the Bed (1940-42) restates the themes of earlier works. We note the expressive and powerful colors, the economy of line, the equivocal pose of the artist—half at rigid attention and half stopped—and the symbols, now terrifyingly direct. Munch stands between the clock and the bed, the inexorable statements of his own impending death. His paintings surround him. His gaze at the viewer is direct, not asking for pity but requiring shared experience. Even the tensions and velocity of his earlier works are now resolved in a simple statement. No vertigo induced by the velocity of diagonal lines but the overwhelmingly direct statement of the finality of death is the experience of the viewer. The interior vision and the public vision are now fully expressed in a work of art by this troubling soul.

A rule of thumb for lay persons seeking to open themselves to the arts is this: be persistent in trying to see everything that the artist is saying. Being patient with art is the price of being changed by art. Munch especially requires this care. But more than most major artists of the last century, he is a modern man. R. G. Collingwood once suggested that the work of the artist is to "tell us the secrets of our own hearts at the risk of our displeasure." Munch's vision is an honest, modern vision of the interior distress of European men and women. It is profoundly religious in its seriousness and its intensity. It is questioning art, probing the secrets of human consciousness with and seeking through symbols and images to awaken honesty in others. To the Christian, the question asked by Munch is "What must I do to be saved?"

The Church’s Stake in the Arts

A peculiarly western habit of thought is the notion we have inherited from the Greeks that we cannot understand objects, ideas, or observations until we have separated and classified them. This process of classification has enabled us to become extraordinarily successful in technological matters. In fact, it is the whole basis of scientific-technological work. On the other hand, this method has also had seriously limiting effects. The idea that events can be isolated or set apart in classifications or categories has led to the breakdown of the unity of knowledge and experience and to general reliance upon technological models in all endeavors. In social sciences, politics, and even in the humanities, we have seen the questionable results of the conversion of knowledge into technique. For example, the language of war categorizes certain experiences under the terms body counts and megatons, as if the substitution of categories makes either humane or manageable the events that otherwise would be unspeakable. In totalitarian societies, to recall a phrase of Arthur Koestler, the definition of the individual is "a multitude of one million divided by one million."

Of course, some scientific theories reject the idea of isolation and category, and we have heard of field theories and other environmental ways of dealing with events. In our time the ancient science of ecology is enjoying a recovery. After centuries of technological and careless exploitation, we now understand how interrelated the isolated events really are.

The separation of religion as one category among other human enterprises represents an example of this problem. Religionists themselves are serious offenders here. We hear speech that is of the "religion and" variety: religion and art, religion and ethics, religion and politics, religion and psychology. Categorically, working from definitions that are undistributed, such a device may be possible. But it begs the only important question: Is religion a basic phenomenon or is it a category among the varieties of optional phenomena? Is religion over against art, ethics, and politics, or is religion the primary understanding of our world that expresses itself in art, ethics, or politics?

This is not an idle question. The way one approaches this question and responds to it will determine whether religion is a derivative or primary experience. It will determine whether religion is part of a unified field or an element, disposable or not, in a series of isolated experiences. It will determine whether the arts, the sciences, and the humanities are integral or utilitarian to religion. If the arts are over against religion, then we presume them to be decorative embellishments of an already determined reality. (In this sense, all forms of totalitarianism perceive the arts to be utilitarian.)

I propose that the more helpful understanding of the relationship between the arts and religion is in the suggestion that religion, understood etymologically, is that form of human expression that seeks to tie all things together and to provide an environment of meaning to the otherwise randomness of events. In fact, the word religion is a derivative of the Latin res ligatae, "things bound together." The arts are, in this sense, profoundly similar in intention. Therefore, as is often suggested, the arts have a religious function as well as a history of functioning in religion. For some disbelievers, art is elevated to religious status. For some believers, art is the language of religion.

In any event, when we talk of the church in these matters, we must assume that the church is neither religion nor art, but the institution in and through which the Christian perception of religion is manifested, nurtured, and proclaimed in the world. In this sense, both religion and art may be misused and misappropriated by the institution called the church. In history this has been a continuing struggle. Each great reformation has reasserted the priority of religion or art or ethics or science over the institutionalized expressions of the church itself. Paul Tillich called this "the Protestant principle." The church becomes opaque to the source of its power by obscuring or by manipulating phenomena for its own purposes.

What is art? The history of this question is available to you in other places. For our purposes here, let me suggest the definition of Suzanne Langer. (Her major book is Feeling and Form, published by Scribners.) Her helpful and practical suggestion is that art is simply "expressive form." That is, the otherwise random events of experience are bound up (res ligatae) and reshaped into forms that bear emotion and communicate power and meaning. Art is the process of expressing in concrete forms human emotions and aspiration, ranging from the simple joys of being to the most complex metaphysical expressions. A work of art is a concrete thing, an event that helps the participant bridge personal experience with that of the artist or the group of religious values expressed therein. In a profound way, if one accepts this definition, there is no such thing as "art"; there are only the things we make to tell our stories as human beings and religious persons. Sister Corita Kent once said in a poster, "We have no art here. We only do the best we can."

When one then moves from the definition of art as expressive form to the question of the church_s stake in the arts, the connection seems apparent. Unless religion is merely the abstract statement of propositions and conditional arguments (as it was in several periods of positivistic religion), then the language of the church will inevitably and necessarily be the arts. Expressive form is the context of the church_s speech. Note that the Langerian model is not formless expression nor expressionless formality. Both of those extremes are with us in the church. In some so-called experiential worship, the emphasis upon spontaneity and expression leads to an incomplete and embarrassingly disoriented event. The permanent question in Christian religion is the question of the object of worship, and this forever excludes the random and unfocused expression of feelings without attention to the object of adoration. On the other hand, in some severely structured formal worship, the expressive power is lost because the worshiper is more concerned with the right performance than with the expression of the sense of events.

Expressive form means a lively sense of the basis of art itself, namely, that human beings create, make, devise, and celebrate through common and earthly forms the expressive power of religious sensibility. You have heard persons say, "It_s just a symbol." Is it not true that symbols are among the most powerful events in our experience? And is it also not true that symbols are the statement of expressive form? So the sacraments of the church are primary formal expressions—that is, art—of the essential statement of the Christian myth. The breaking of bread and the drinking of wine with one_s attention upon the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth becomes the expressive form of the central nondiscursive, noncognitive, but humanly powerful act of religious faith.

The church_s stake in art is not therefore a question of utility; it is a question of the church_s very existence. The church_s understanding of the world, of God, of creation and redemption, is fundamentally a story (an art form) and not a metaphysical abstraction. That story is concrete and its very concreteness is its offense to those who want events organized so that they can manipulate them. The emphasis upon story in the church_s self-consciousness is revealed in its liturgy, its cathedrals, its music, its worship, and its piety. To the extent that the church loses the story, it loses its very soul.

Elie Wiesel (in the preface to his Gates of the Forest, also in Souls on Fire, a collection of his stories) tells a story about a famous Hasidic rabbi who is said to have gone to a place in the forest, lit a fire, said a prayer, and told a story. His successors gradually lost the place in the forest, could not light the fire, and forgot the prayer, but they could still tell the story. I like this parable because it reminds me of the primacy of the story as the basic art form of the tradition. It leads me also to comment that for some the story is forgotten, but the place, the fire, and the prayer are still intact. These are the folk who have managed to substitute the forms of religion for the source of religion_s power. For them, art is ultimate. For the church_s tradition, art is the varying and changing expressive statement of the endlessly powerful and grasping story of God_s way with his people—then, now, and in the age to come.

A helpful theory about the relationship of the church and art was set forward some years ago by John Dixon. It was his view that the Reformation/Counter-Reformation period broke the unity of the church and the arts by making the arts subject to the written word—that is, one formal expression became normative for official religious expression. The Word was exhausted in words. Art is always involved in the concrete, the incarnate, the Logos, the structure of things, the Word. Under the pressures of the religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fractured church turned to the arts a embellishers of the words that had severed the Word into sectarian and polemical forms. The artists became illustrators, embellishers, and decorators, and thereby lost I their authority to be involved along with speech, tradition, and doctrine in the shaping of Christian religious experience.

We live essentially in the time of the fallout from that divorce. With the exceptions of Bach and Rembrandt, whose expressive forms illustrate the way the story may be told equally powerfully in religious and artistic ways, much church art subsequently has been oriented to performance rather than oriented to the church_s sense of identity. While this statement may be less true in some forms of evangelical worship, it is generally true of all modern church experience. The choir functions as if it were the chorus in grand opera. Hymnology is stuck in the strict hymnic conceits of the nineteenth century. Instrumentation is largely limited to the pipe organ. The paucity of imaginative and innovative use of the arts of music is obvious. Less obvious, but nevertheless crucial, are the paralysis of architecture, the sterility of visual art, and the near absence of any form of creative expression of newer concrete forms, such as motion picture.

The church_s stake in the arts is nothing short of the church_s stake in its own future. The church_s speech (liturgy) is necessarily expressive form (art). The church_s prayer and praise (piety) is necessarily expressive form (art). If one were to "do theology" in this context, one would be using a range of communication far wider than the conditional argument or the syllogism of classical logic. The church_s story is a story of concrete images. The telling of the story needs concrete forms. The whole point of the Incarnation in Christian experience is the assertion that scientific language is inadequate to express the power of the event of God in Christ. Therefore, the stuff of ordinary experience is shaped into expressive form and the story is told in ways that confound and convict but never "prove."

R. W. B. Lewis tells of a friend who was once asked if a certain character in a novel by Henry James was a Christ-figure. He replied that the problem was not whether Milly Theale is a Christlike figure but whether Christ is a Milly-figure. The question puts us into the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation and into the question of the religion/art event as expressive form.

The implications of this for church practice include a new sense of the participatory style of liturgy, an emphasis upon the freshness of statement, the continual working out of the expressive forms of church understanding, and the rejection of all forms of performer and spectator mentalities. It may also preserve us from the temptation to think of the arts in the service of the church and encourage us to think of how the Christian gospel is to be proclaimed in expressive form with power and faithfulness.

The Authority of Hope

In his remarkable collection of Hasidic tales, Elie Wiesel tells of a young couple discussing their marriage announcement with the rabbi. The announcement indicated that the wedding would take place in Berditchev (Poland) on a certain date. The Hasidic rabbi, with that peculiar wisdom of the Hasidim, edited the announcement. "The wedding will take place in Jerusalem," he said, "but if the Messiah has not come, it will take place in Berditchev." That is the authority of hope.

Like other great words, hope has come upon bad times in common speech. It is generally used in relation to a hopeless situation. It finds itself being defined by its opposite. "Where there’s life, there’s hope" is really a statement of resignation. When all else fails, we can at least hope for the best. The New Testament, however, uses the word in an active sense. The word is translated "the joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation." In the Septuagint, the verb has the meaning of trust, and the noun means "that in which one confides or flees for refuge." Rather than last resort or resignation, hope has the authority of joyful and active trust in the coming shape of events.

Jurgen Moltmann has reminded us of this active notion by a vivid metaphor of religious life. He suggests that some Christians are fossils, located properly in museums, locked into the past. Other Christians are chameleons, located in nature, changing colors with the changing environment. But Christians, according to Moltmann, are those whose lives are conditioned neither by history nor environment alone, but are lived out in active hope, the "great experiment" that places its confidence in the promises of God in Jesus Christ.

How have we missed this? The Bible itself is an eschatological document. Its last words address the future: "Come, Lord Jesus." The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is an eschatological feast, a festival of joy and expectation. We celebrate that feast "until the Lord comes again." Other generations have required different themes in theology. Ours, for example, is certainly no Age of Faith. Confidence in tradition has been challenged. Ours is not an age of dogma. Theology today is thematic and not systematic. But our times are ripe for what Moltmann calls "the experiment hope." That hope is confidence in the belief that the word of God will yet manifest itself in Christian presence and obedience and that faithfulness to that vision will significantly alter God’s initiatives in this period of history.

Hope is the joyful and confident expectancy in a future ordered under the love and justice of God. Ours is a time when the future looms for most as more of a threat than a promise. Ironically, it is the promise to the deprived and hungry and hopeless peoples, but a threat to those who are complacent in comfort and plenty.

When I was in seminary, eschatology was either a mistake (Schweitzer) or a rationalization (Dodd). But those judgments were somehow to miss the real point of the matter. The New Testament church was incurably eschatological, and its whole sense for life was conditioned by that style. It is not so much an attitude attributed to the self-consciousness of Jesus, nor to misplaced ontology; it is a sense of the way one lives a life. It is as simple as this: a person with no future is a person with no present. The promises of one’s future are the visions that control the shapes of one’s present. That is why liberation theology is so attentive to eschatology. One is freed in the present precisely to the degree that one is liberated by a vision of the future. Rage, anomie, despair, and anxiety are the characteristics of a person or a community deprived of hope. The most terrifying form of dehumanization is the denial of meaningful time to a person, denigrating their past and foreclosing their future.

The theme of freedom from bondage, consistent throughout the biblical tradition, is operating at an increasingly articulate level in our time. The joyful, confident trust in the reality of a different future for his people drove Martin Luther King, Jr., into the arena of social change. He challenged the church and the state to live by their eschatologies and to provide meaningful freedom for black people. It is the trajectory of hope of a homeland that empowered a whole generation of Jews to seize their present in the state of Israel. Ironically, it is hope that drives the Palestinians to acts of terrorism in defense of their dreams. It is hope, kindled in American schools and universities, that empowers black Africans in their struggles for a liberated present.

What is overpowering in the historical particularity of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is the sense of the significance of history and the conviction that history is an arena of positive social change and liberation.

One’s hope for the future shapes the present. We all know this. Some of you have lost your confidence in the future and may feel doomed to serve out your ministry in routinized ways. You all know friends in your parishes who have died to their futures and who choose a variety of scenarios to act out their days. When a certain governor of Georgia announced some years ago that if black and white children sat in the same classrooms "blood would flow in the streets of Atlanta," he was determining the present behavior of his citizens. When, at the same time, church folk in Georgia actively looked with longing and trust to the image of children of all races sitting in the same classrooms, their vision of the feast without end conditioned their present and drove them into positions of advocacy and political action in behalf of their dream.

The sixties were the battlefield of hope and despair for so many of our generation and of the youth. Troublesome and tragic as those times may have been, what we confront today is a generation which has given up on idealism. Martin Kaplan comments on "I’ve Got the Music in Me," a hit song of 1975: "Muzak ideology: Cooling all rage, substituting easily won aims for those foolish dreams that make us struggle, cry, endure, and perhaps prevail." Of this generation of young people, Kaplan says, "Instead of doubt, irony, inquiry, and foolish dreams, the dreams that made their older brothers and sisters cry, they have chosen the rewards of privatism, self-fulfillment, personal gratification, individualistic autonomy, and the burgherly hearthside virtues of coping, acquiescence, and accommodation. They are the real flower children of the seventies; their ontology is clear and crisp: ‘Yoko and me, that’s reality" (Martin Kaplan, "The Ideologies of ‘Tough Times’," Change Magazine, August 1976, 28-29).

Crafted out of the experience and rage of his own generation, Kaplan’s analysis of the end of foolish dreams is also applicable to the suburban burghers of the church itself. The timid experiments in social action, the easy decisions to "cool it," the obsessive attention to maintenance, these point to the captivity of the church. While you may dismiss this as special pleading by a church bureaucrat, let me give you a bit of trivia about church funding. The United Methodist Church is a one-billion-dollar operation annually. That makes it one of the largest social enterprises in the country. Of that one billion dollars, only 5 percent is directed to the World Service programs of the denomination. The rest is raised and spent on maintenance and program in the local, conference, and jurisdictional levels. I am not suggesting that all of that expenditure is maintenance, but a great deal of it is. And are there not some eschatological implications in that discovery?

Now eschatology is anchored in the history of the church and therefore the past is a part of our present-future understanding. Sometime ago, Julian Hartt suggested that the Christian person is a person living between the past and the future in the creative tension of the present. But that tension is often broken. Some persons choose to live primarily in the past. They suffer from the sickness of nostalgia, and their present becomes intolerable because "it’s not the same anymore." Some choose to live only in the future. They are susceptible to the sickness of longing. To state the matter practically, monarchism suffers from nostalgia and Marxism from longing. Nostalgia leads to the excesses of the politics of the right and longing to the excesses of the politics of the political left. Only those who have the nerve and hope to live in the tension between our past and our future may have the satisfaction of a significant present. Christianity is a life style that identifies itself with the patriarchs, saints, and faithful believers in all times and with joyful expectancy to the future of God.

The authority of hope is also profoundly related to the recovery of a meaningful past in the church. Note that Gutierrez and Moltmann and the other theologians of liberation and hope ground their work in the momentum of the life and thought of the church. We live in a time that likes to think of itself as the "now generation." That indicates that this generation has disinterest if not contempt for the past, including the Christian past.

Edward Fiske, education editor of the New York Times, recently described a meeting in the temple of one of the new eastern religious cults and listened to a convert explain why he had chosen his ascetic style of life. When the reporter pointed out that the explanation amounted to a classical exposition of the ideals of medieval monasticism, the young devotee replied, "What do you mean?" He was clearly unaware that the Trappists of Kentucky, or for that matter anyone else in western civilization, had ever pursued such ideals. What is puzzling is not so much the man’s ignorance, but the fact that he was unaware of a tradition that could enhance his own experience.

That is the principal role of the past in Christian terms. The mere knowledge of the past is not saving, but the possibility that identifying oneself in the mighty procession of saints, knowing of their political and spiritual journeys, assessing their wisdom and their rationalizations, provides an authority to faith that makes hope possible.

It is one of my more ascerbic reflections these days that we may be entering into a new dark age. There are terrible signs about us that education has failed to educate. Testing shows serious declines in student ability in reading, writing, and mathematics. Visions of history and coherence are swallowed up in specialization and technological myopia. When a sense of wholeness is lost, the possibility of ethical decision making is seriously limited. This is one of the visions I have for the church’s schools and colleges. They may become once again islands of humanities and grace and style and learning in a new dark age that is characterized not by ignorance but by paralyzing and unassimilated information.

What is the content of our hope? It is the Christian story. It is the affirmation that God is at the end of our history as at the beginning; in fact, God is with us yet. It is the confident statement about the intentions of God that all might be one in Christ, that love and justice will dominate political decisions, that all persons will be liberated from the bondage of sin, seif-centeredness, racial pride, arrogance, and despair. It is the summation of all our dreams and aspirations, the themes of all our hymns, the content of all our prayer. It is, at last, the content of being a Christian person united in purpose with others in the church of Jesus Christ. It is believing in Jesus Christ.

Kosuke Koyama, whose fascinating book Waterbuffalo Theology I commend to you, has written elsewhere about these matters in a metaphor of hands. He recalled the hand of Buddha, "soft and open, with beautiful curves. . . . There is no feeling of pain or agony revealing a lack of discrimination in mercy." He recalled seeing the hand of Lenin, in his tomb in Moscow, "formed into a fist, the symbol of determination. . . symbolizing ideological righteousness, closed." Then, recalling a crucifix, Koyama noted that Jesus’ hands are neither open nor closed. "He is neither like Buddha, attractive and merciful, nor like Lenin with his confident ideological fist." He is in agony, he is beaten, he is defenseless, "he is crucified in weakness."

For Koyama, Christian belief suggests that God’s hands are neither open nor closed. The future is not a disinterested matter nor is it a matter of closed ideology. The future for Christian belief has to do with crucified hands. These are hands that get in the way of relative and closed systems that are determined to condition the future of history. Jesus is not simply truth, but his truth is fully revealed in his loving-kindness and that loving-kindness is our future as Christian believers and political persons. "All the promises of God find their Yes in him," suggests St. Paul. Come, Lord Jesus.

Reality and Resonance: The Church Turns Toward Worship

Despite neglect in the recent past, there are signs that the church is again turning to explore the faithful forms of its public worship. For what is this act of obedience but the exploration of the outskirts of the terrible mysteries of God?

Holiness is a category of experience in religion that has had rough going in recent times. We have been so sure of the immediate needs of obedience to the gospel that the reality of God in our lives has seemed to have been exhausted in our doing. Some efforts have been made in recent theology to design a vision of the world in which God is absent. But absence is not hiddenness. The obscurity of God is a vivid religious fact of our time. A chapel in a theological school is a statement of intention that learning and vital piety are but the same act of faith in the reality of God and the new possibilities that are resident in attention to God’s reality.

Holiness and vital piety have to do with a certain restraint that is proper in a chapel. In Israel, the fathers of our faith were very careful not to build altars or high places carelessly. The problem always seems to have been that the sacred places wailed something in or wailed something out. Franz Kafka tells the story of a synagogue which was a refuge for the people while a great wolf snorted and scratched outside. The wolf was Kafka’s metaphor for the terrible and wonderful consequences of meeting God. So careless piety may wail out the possibilities of encounter with God. On the other hand, to be contemptuous of the need for holy space in our lives is to err on the side of self-righteousness.

The solemnity of this moment is measured by the spiritual questions we have and tempered by the hope that the perceived reality of God may here find the resonance that is deep within us, "deep calling unto deep," breaking us open to new life and obedience in the gospel.

Worship is the gesture of faith by which we may be saved from thinking that we already have all the means by which to be responsibly religious. Events of life are too overwhelming for us to be sure that we have explained mystery. The pain that we feel must have some resonance at the heart of things for us to be able to endure it. The bentness of history must have some justification in order to make living into a future worthwhile. The vitality of life itself must resonate with some fundamental vitality in the world so that life does not appear to be merely the inconsequential and random interaction of atoms and molecules.

Reality needs resonance. To be confident about oneself, the world, and God, one needs the assurance of being heard. A great writer once said of the books of a friend, "When I read his writing, I do not feel that I understand, but that I am understood." Worship is the intersection of reality (our perceptions of God) and resonance (the assurance that we are understood).

Flannery O’Connor tells the story of a woman whose record as a religious person was formally impeccable. She never missed church, she tithed, she helped folk, but she did all these things with a sense of duty and heaviness; her burden was the Lord’s. One day, her world began to fly apart. In a fit of rage, she shook her fist at the sky and shouted, "You can’t do this to me!" And a voice came back again and again, echoing across the hills: "You can’t do this to me!" That is resonance. This is a lovely illustration of the context of holiness. In that moment, that space, that speech, that hearing, we learn who we are and whose we are and what we are to do, and what we might become.

There are signs in our time that men and women are turning more and more in the direction of new ways of sensing this resonance. Love, peace, justice, integrity, responsibility—where do these come from? What assures us that they are written into the heart of things by God’s intentions? The psalmist cries, "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God"—not just the things of God, but the assurance of the vitality of God.

The future of worship in the church brings up the question of the purpose of the church. In the Reformed churches, the suggestion is made that the "chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." Modern people tend to react to this with restrained amusement, which is translated into a variety of understandings about worship in the church. Among those forms of response we can identify three major modes: (1) worship as embellished public lecture; (2) worship as therapy; (3) worship as cultic rite.

In the first of these modes, worship has become the setting for preaching. In some traditions, the hymns, prayers, and anthems are spoken of as "the preliminaries," something to be dispensed with before the sermon. I do not wish to denigrate the sermon as an important part of worship, but when the sermon is not only the central intention of worship but may also have lost its power of confronting the worshiper with the gospel, then the purpose of worship is at least seriously obscured. The fate of this kind of worship is often determined by the congregation’s acceptance of the particular values of the preacher. Quite often, the sermon serves as a confirmation of the values of the congregation.

The second mode is a variation on the first. People come to worship to receive a kind of implicit therapy. The pew is a couch. Now, worship ought to have to do with the shaping of lives. But when the purpose of the service is the "stroking" of near-neurotic patterns in the congregation’s life-patterns, then the possibilities of surprise and epiphany are certainly deflected. In the 1950s there was a vast upsurge of worship on this model. Normally in those days it was focused in the sermon, but it resides today in the self-centeredness of much worship of the experimental kind. "Celebration" has become the popular term for this mode of worship. But what is so often missing is the focus of celebration. In Old Testament times, the worshipers of Baal celebrated, but Israel sought to worship in the direction of obedience and faith.

The third mode is to be seen in those traditions where the purpose of worship has become obscured in the rites of worship. Being finite, we need symbols to carry us from the finite to the infinite. When we have found symbols, and become comfortable with them, the symbols become more urgent than the reality for which they stand. In the church today, most of the difficult ecumenical questions have to do with the intractability of symbols.

Now, each of these problematic and pervasive modes of worship has a truth resident inside the formal structure. Preaching ought to be a central act for worship, but its presence must be the Word of God in the midst of the people. Healing ought to be a central fact of worship, but on the most profound level of human need. Ritual is necessary because only in ordered and commonly accepted symbols can a community identify itself as a community. But inadequate models of worship have not healed the anguish of modern men and women. I fear that they have added to the malaise of the church: that is, they promise too much and yet not enough.

What grips most of us in our time is a vast hunger for transcendence. Psychologists report that the most common problems they deal with are problems of meaning. In early psychotherapy the principal problem was neurotic disorder. Later the problem was identified as interpersonal difficulties. But lately, commentators have noted that our psychological disorders have finally reached profound religious depths. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" A vast aridity covers the land. Cynicism is rampant. Hope is dulled. The horizon is no wider than the neighborhood of the self. Beckett’s heroes become moral by simply waiting for something to happen. How are we to be saved from this life of desires turned inward?

The desert saints in the early centuries of the church suffered from what they called "the demon of noonday." It is easy to be a saint in the morning dew and in the evening coolness. But it is hard to be a saint in the direct heat of the sun in the desert. The demon of noonday was the imp that appeared in order to test their obedience in faith, to lull them into thinking that maybe their vocation was wrong, and to remind them of air-conditioned comfort in the cities. We, who are not so modern after all, suffer this demon. He comes to us in various forms. We have a habit of ignoring worship in the comfortable times of the days of our lives because we don’t need it and condemning it in the noontimes because it is difficult.

What we yearn for is some resonance of reality in our lives. The French dramatic theorist Antonin Artaud, in speaking about the French classical theater, which had become formal and aloof from the issues of human hope, wrote, "In the anguished, catastrophic period in which we live, we feel an urgent need for a theater in which events do not exceed, where resonance is deep within us, dominating the instability of the times." Worship is the act whereby the reality of God is made present and the resonance of that reality is heard in our communities and in our personal lives, dominating the instability of the times.

This has not been the case in every generation of Christian believers. The history of Israel and the church is the history of loss and recovery of the reality of God and the resonance of worship. Another way of saying this is worship has more to do with revelation than with religion. It has to do with the dialectic of self and God and not with the accommodation of God to the values of this world, nor is it a celebration of religion (which is adjustment of God to the spiritual advantage of the believer). Worship is revelation—the possibility of the opening of experience to the authority of God and his reality breaking into our world. Worship is proclamation—the announcement of the new possibilities that are constantly inherent in the lively communion of a people with God.

An old hymn by Dodderidge, written for the dedication of a chapel, asks this question: "Will He accept our temples as his own?" The test of worship and of our places of worship in the providence of God has to do with the gift of trust and obedience returned to God, so that, in Dodderidge’s words, on the last day the Lord will look out with joy upon the chapel and say that "crowds were born to glory there."

Flannery O’Connor: Her Vision

Flannery O’Connor was a story-teller of remarkable power.  She was part of the tradition of “southern gothic” writers like Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner.  They found richness in the cultural traditions of the South, its people, its religion, and its humanness.  Many of their characters were strange.  O’Connor writes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

 

Flannery had achieved early recognition as a writer. She suffered in her adult years with lupus, an anti-immune disease that ultimately took her life at the early age of 37. She wrote two novels but her short stories have survived as her principle works. 

 

A Roman Catholic, Flannery’s vision was of a world deeply infused with grace.  In a response to another Catholic writer, Mary McCarthy, who declared that the sacrament of Holy Communion was only a “symbol,” Flannery remarked “If it is only a symbol, then to hell with it.”  We live in a post-Christian  world and so some of us no longer understand the language of religious belief.  Grace is the “unmerited favor of God.” For traditional belief, the sacrament is a “means of grace,” not merely a symbol but a powerful reality. That was why Flannery took exception to McCarthy’s rationalism.

 

She was influenced by the famous Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who was a popular figure in the mid 20th century. Chardin sought to bring together the world of nature and the world of faith.  He postulated an “Omega Point” toward which all nature and mystery ultimately converge in understanding.  Omega, of course, is the last letter in the Greek alphabet, and for Chardin the final unity of nature and grace.  So the title of one of her stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” is an allusion to Chardin.

 

Her literary purpose was to probe the intersections of nature and grace.  In a collection of her writings, she refers to this as the struggle between “mystery and manners.”  She saw modern Catholic experience as Manichaean---the dividing of human experience into areas of absolute good and absolute evil.  That divides human experience into either sentimentalism or obscenity.  For her this division is overcome by awareness of the mystery of grace. The reality of the love of God keeps us from sliding into sentimentalism on the one hand or obscene behavior on the other.   

 

The setting of her stories is a world from which human beings have generally eliminated mystery (grace) and only discover the power of that reality in sudden, startling, and unexpected ways.  Half of her characters are hopelessly sentimental and half are obscene lunatics.  Neither is aware of the presence of grace in the world. 

 

This is not a totally new idea for Flannery.  Other writers have alerted us. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” (Proverbs 29).  Her “omega” point is the Christian idea of “grace.”

 

In “Mystery and Manners,” she borrows a medieval term for interpretation of literature. It is the word anagogical—which means pointing to mystery, pointing to the Divine life and our participation in it.   Her works are not allegorical (one fact points to another) or moral (what should be done). Flannery’s works are anagogical and that is what makes here so frustrating to some and so fascinating to others.

 

She writes, “Writers will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable….To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” O’Connor had a savage wit and her stories are sometimes hard to take. 

 

But there is a moment in her stories when the presence of grace can be recognized.  But it is usually too late.  In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a character named “Misfit” shoots the family grandmother even as she is asserting his basic goodness as a human being.  Her sentimental view of the nature of evil is inadequate as she discovers too late. A case of sentimentalism versus  the  obscene.  

 

Asbury in “The Enduring Chill” returns home from New York convinced he is dying.  He had known an intellectual Jesuit priest in New York so he tells his mother to get him a priest.  Asbury wanted to talk about St Augustine and St Thomas. However a country priest tells him simply and gruffly to say his prayers.  A country doctor finally diagnoses his illness as undulant fever which he contacted while drinking un-pasteurized milk with two black farmhands in a mock sacrament to anger his mother.  The “enduring chill” is a vision of the descent of the Holy Ghost on him as he realizes he will have to live on and not be a martyr to all the ignorance surrounding him. Overwhelmed by sentimentality, Asbury realizes that martyrdom is going to be denied and he must come to terms with mystery.

 

“Greenleaf” is the story of a wealthy widowed farm-woman.  Her tenant farmer is Mr. Greenleaf.  She is bitter about him because she considers him  poor white trash and finds numerous ways of projecting her own superiority when speaking of him.  She and he each have two sons.  But her sons are shiftless and un-promising.  His, however, are college graduates.  Her bitterness becomes focused on a bull that strays into her pasture and won’t leave.  After unsuccessful requests to Mr. Greenleaf to remove the animal, she goes after the bull herself and is attacked and killed.  The sentimental vs. the obscene.

 

“The Lame  Shall  Enter  First” is a story about a social worker who is driven to rescue a delinquent boy by taking him into his home and concentrating all his energies on the task.  The boy is unredeemable and creates terrible havoc in the home.  The ending of the story is the social worker’s frightening discovery that his own son has committed suicide because of his father’s neglect of him.  The sentimental vs. the obscene.

 

There are other stories in the collection.  But I want to tell you about my favorite.  It is “Revelation.”  It has a remarkable touch of humor as well as the O’Connor sense of the contradictions between manners and mystery.

 

The leading character is Mrs. Turpin who is a good woman, a church worker, a friend of the poor and homeless, and a good wife to her husband, Claud.  Her problem is not her goodness, but her habit of boasting about it.  She is proud that she was born white and not black or white trash.  She is grateful that she and Claud, while not rich, have a little of everything and the wit to use it wisely.  She is cheerful about discussing these benefits with strangers.

 

One day she takes Claud to the doctor’s office to have a minor infection on his leg treated.  While waiting to see the doctor, she engages in a long soliloquy about her virtues and sighs about how difficult it is to be such a fine person in a world of the less fortunate.  Sitting across from her is a young girl home for the holidays from Wellesley.  As Mrs. Turpin continues her personal story the girl becomes irritated, scowling at her. Finally, angry at Mrs. Turpin’s continuous self-congratulation, the girl hurls the book she was reading at Mrs. Turpin.  (The title of the book is “Human Development.”)  The book hits her right in the eye and the girl shouts at her.  “You are a wart-hog!  You are a wart-hog from Hell!”

 

Mrs. Turpin’s world crumbles.  She is taken home and treated for bruises but that is not what hurts.  Later she goes out to the pig-pen on the farm and looks at the sky and shouts, “I am not a wart-hog!  There will always be a top and a bottom.”  Drawing herself up to full fury, she makes a fist to the sky and bellows, “You can’t do this to me!” This is the ultimate gesture of a good person who feels double-crossed by God.

 

When her anger subsides, she sees the pigs pulsing with life and the late afternoon sky beautiful in reds and yellows and she experiences a kind of peace.  Then, in the sky, she sees a long procession of people climbing into heaven. Now read Flannery’s own words:

 

“A vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.  There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.  And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.  She leaned forward to observe them closer.  They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they always had been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.  They alone were on key.  Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

 

This is a paraphrase of Matthew 24, Jesus’ parable about who will enter the kingdom.

 

Flannery told stories that catch us off-balance and require us to acknowledge some insight that normally escapes us in our manners, habits, self-centeredness.   Most of her heroes discover mystery at the moment of their death.  A few, like Mrs. Turpin, find themselves in the moment of revelation.  Flannery wrote with a keen eye for the natural world and the ways that grace waits to pounce on her characters unexpectedly. To the reader who is drawn into her own religious vision, she has prophetic and graceful authority. Her focus on repugnant distortions is to call attention to distortions to an audience that has come to see them as natural. In a world where the definitions of love and truth and justice are frequently either sentimental or obscene, Flannery suggests we take a long look at our ultimate view of the world, a view that may just save us from ourselves.  For her that is grace, the persistence of the love of God.

 

 

 

 

The Renewal of the Sense of Wonder in the Church

We live in a time of extraordinary self-consciousness in regard to the church. The issues of the wider society have catalyzed, polarized, and pulverized the rank and file and confused the chiefs. When Pope Paul appointed St. Therese to be a "doctor" of the church, he felt obliged specifically to disavow any connection with Women’s Lib. By and large, great advances have been made in making the church more sensitive to the injustice in our midst, more imaginative in proposing responsible solutions to social and economic disorder, and more democratic in the structures of decision making. These movements toward a more responsible church are to be recognized as great gain and hopeful sign for the future of the institutional style of the church. But, as you all know, these events have been characterized by a certain soberness and a moral earnestness that has left little room for some other important gestures of faith: I speak of joy and wonder. As Arthur McGill has noted, "In an age of anxiety and violence, glory is out of fashion, even in Churches" (Arthur McGill, The Celebration of the Flesh, Association Press, 1964, p. 184).

It is not simply in the liturgical life of the congregations that glory is missing, but theology itself, bending as it so often does to the popular currents of the time, has encouraged this sadness with its nostalgic conversation about an absent, dead, or (at least) missing God. Peter Berger, in his extraordinary little book, Rumor of Angels, notes that "the theological surrender to the alleged demise of the supernatural defeats itself in precisely the measure of its success. Ultimately, it represents the self-liquidation of theology and of the institutions in which the theological tradition is embodied" (Peter Berger, Rumor of Angels, Doubleday, 1969, p. 26). One of the ironies of our situation is the fact that at the very time the church seems to have given up on its hope, an extraordinary resurgence of interest in religion, particularly in the non-rational aspects of religion, is being observed in groups as diverse as Marxists interested in eschatology and "cultured despisers" interested in the mystery of faith. Our generation’s passionate search for relevancy (that golden word) is a reflex of the suspicion we have that we may have lost our way. It is increasingly problematic to encounter transcendence in the excessive intimacy demanded by some current "liturgies" and the special reading of a variety of new orthodoxies. Berger suggests that we should begin to observe what he calls "signals of transcendence" which are breaking through to call out new forms of faithful response in the church.

Wonder is a word that has a great history. It reflects the synonyms of "awe," "fascination," "mystery," and "terror." In Plato, the word is spoken unequivocally. "There is no other beginning of philosophy than amazement," says Socrates in the Theaetetus. Wonder is the appropriate attitude of man toward the divine. Later on, in the New Testament, it is used frequently in connection with miracles and the events surrounding Jesus. (This, by the way, is one reason it is so hard to make a biblical movie. It is difficult to sustain the expressions of wonder for 90 minutes.) Wonder is the attitude of "intellectual amazement"—the beginning of response or reflection. It is not simply the source of philosophy, but of art, and religion. The American poet Wallace Stevens once wrote that a poem should not be a narrative statement but should be "a meteor, or a pheasant disappearing in the bush." Normal speech is inadequate to handle response to such events. But most of us, confronted with a shaking event, a presence undefined and ineffable, but persistently there, a gesture of human love undeserved and graceful, are (what is the expression?) "at a loss for words." The erosion of the sense of wonder in the church is a serious matter. Our expectations are dulled. Our wit and imagination are tarnished. We are in danger of losing our sense of humor. We find it difficult to separate our private and public visions. Our festivals become contrived. Our theologies become footnotes to the current cultural movements. And, as Paul Valery wryly noted, "Everything ends in the Sorbonne."

If I understand what is going on in the culture today, it is an active and experimental search for authentic ways to confront and be confronted by the enormous complexity and beauty and terror of life and the world. Our current desperate (and appropriate) interest in ecology may be a secularized version of the older metaphysical sense of the authority of creation Survival has replaced wonder as the key word, but the most important ecologists are also consummate artists, vide Eisely, Krutch, Carsons, et al. Ecology is the sister of wonder. As Loren Eiseley has suggested, "We have learned to ask terrible questions."

Religion is that human enterprise that "asks terrible (wonderful) questions." And the response is often wordless—the gestures of liturgy and rite, music and poetry, art and science. The recovery of wonder in the church will necessarily take the form of an iconoclasm—the risky business of smashing idols. An idol is a statement about the mystery of things that is opaque to its source. Idols serve a function of making events less mysterious and therefore more manageable. Ranier Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet of the early part of the century, refused to be psychoanalyzed because he suspected that that process, however helpful in itself, would make it impossible for him to write poetry. He preferred to live in the no man’s land of the demons of his subconscious world

rather than rearrange them for an otherwise functional existence. We are in the business of "unlearning of metaphysical terror," to use a phrase of R.W.B. Lewis. The honest-to-goodness fright that is our finite environment has been pretty well housebroken in our modern existence. But we have paid a great price for this. The price is the rationalization of existence, the flattening of wonder, and the ultimate risk of a boredom with life that is reaching epidemic proportions. We obscure the frightening human cost of the war in Vietnam with daily "body counts" that are announced with routine poise by television newscasters who follow with the baseball scores. I had a student who, on encountering Sophocles’ "Oedipus Rex," dismissed the entire drama with the suggestion that the hero had an Oedipus complex. Reductionism and anachronism intersect to produce extraordinary confusion, but the result is the failure of contemporary perception to apprehend the incredible turbulence that is a part of every event and (as the Greeks knew so well) every hero. Robert Browning, describing the authority of the Greek sense of things, wrote:

Aischulos’ bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood

Has somehow spoiled my taste for twitterings!

The banality of much modern religious life in the church is ultimately what wears us down. But there is hope for the church if a sufficient number of its people have enough wit and courage to sense the "signals of transcendence" in our time and to open themselves to their grace. Camus, in The Plague, says, "Even in a time of pestilence (we learn) that there are more things to admire in men than despise."

Where do we turn for the pre-dawn of a new sense of wonder? Berger’s suggestion is that we ponder what he calls "prototypical human gestures" as an appropriate place to begin our theologizing: the argument from ordering, from play, from humor, from terror and from hope. There is so much in church life that has prevented us from the exercise of these graces, and distortions of them dominate our style. Our task as ministers and theologians is to make distortions of the gospel appear as distortions to a people grown accustomed to seeing them as natural. We need to sense what Wallace Stevens has called "engulfing moments"—ecstatic moments, if you will—when we stand outside ourselves and are renewed in the authority of our vocation. This takes respect for events of the most common sort—the care and feeding of uninspired committees in the church who just might come alive. Most of us are better prepared for cosmic events. Our attitude toward the concrete, implacable, and frustrating givens of human community existence is to pronounce the judgment of damnation (a blasphemous interposition with God, by the way) and say "To hell with them!" But ministry, despite the grim landscape in our generation, has within it the signals of transcendence, the possibility that frustration (which is the obverse of wonder) is not the last word, that even abrupt events invite us to that intellectual activity we call wonder.

Robert Frost puts this remarkably well in his poem A Tree Fallen Across the Road:

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood

Throws down in front of us is not to bar

Our passage to our journey’s end for good,

But just to ask us who we think we are

Insisting always on our own way so.

She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,

And make us get down in a foot of snow

Debating what to do without an ax.

Frost loved concrete images. His was a world in which events were continually confronting man with questions. When man takes these events for granted, he will lose fruitful contact with them. Frost belief was in the necessity of man never to forget respect for the hard given items with which he has to work, and the hardest is not stone or steel, but the human event. And behind this lies the promise implicit but real, that there is no other way to joy.

What I am suggesting to you is this: we are not simply called to the task of making the church more relevant (whatever that means) or more disciplined (whatever that means), but more faithful. And that means to me, more sensitive to what in former times was ca1led the "leading of the Spirit." Being less certain of our own strategies and more attendant upon the ineffable. If I understand our traditions in the Christian church, it seems to me that we make the claim that God reveals himself in concrete events, and that these events are not to be taken lightly. This, I take it, is what Incarnation is about. This I take to be what theological education is about Among the most marvelous lines in the Old Testament are these from the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon (18:14-15):

For while all things were in quiet silence

and the night was in the midst of her course,

Thy almighty word leapt down from heaven,

from Thy royal throne, as a fierce conqueror

into the midst of the land of destruction.

May we sense the contours of God’s Word in the little events of time so that we may be interpreters of his hard words and soft in the language of faith.

Ordination and the Unity of the Church

A story has been going around these days to the effect that someone was asked if he believed in infant baptism. "I not only believe in it, I’ve seen it with my own eyes!" That hint of strangeness surrounds popular understanding of the rites of the church, including ordination. Like so many traditions, ordination has felt the effects of a general assault upon uses of the past and the romanticizing of the ministry.

In a recent discussion with a group of seminary students, I was struck by the apparent confusion over the nature of ordination among young persons about to enter professional ministry. There was an uneasiness about the rite because it was deemed elitist, and seminarians eschew elitism in all its forms. Why should anyone have a special vocation?

The misunderstanding is disquieting because it reflects the widening malaise in the ministerium itself. The consequences of this misunderstanding appear to be the fragmenting of the profession itself, the further drift into "Lone Ranger" models of ministry, and a continuing isolation of the ordained minister from a sense of wholeness and place in vocation.

The recent emphases upon the laity as normative ministry have had the effect of heightening clerical anxiety about vocation. But "special" ministers have always been a part of religious social existence. The history of religions clearly reveals the continuous presence of priests or functionaries "set aside" for sacerdotal and other duties. The history of Israel is the history of the struggle between priestly and prophetic ministries, measuring each other, penetrating and withdrawing from each other, and finally, settling on what is essentially a teaching model of ministry. The New Testament church, beset with organizational dilemmas, developed systems of leadership to perfect and continue the prophetic ministry. But the church found itself moving into more clerical (housekeeping) roles. The Reformation, seeking to restore something of the prophetic emphasis, provided the basis of modern understanding by conflating four modes of ministry—priestly, kingly, prophetic, and pastoral—into one problematic, always ambiguous, but powerful model of ordained ministry.

It is the very ambiguity of the model that makes for continued restlessness with the idea of ordination. That ambiguity has heightened in the recent past as the ordained ministry in the several denominations has often become more of a guild and less than a servant people. In The United Methodist Church, until recently, the act of ordination and the benefits of security in conference membership were synonymous. Therefore, guild decisions, often more deeply impacted by economic and survival issues, frequently down-staged theological and ecclesial understandings. As long as pension and job security benefits are more obviously at stake in ordination than vocation, a certain hesitancy of purpose will be felt.

The ministry is commonly understood to be the work of the people of God. The church of Jesus Christ is the community of baptized persons who are ministers in and to the world. All Christians are theoretically in ministry. The use of the word "minister" to describe the limited class of specially ordained ministers is unfortunate. It gives the impression that a member of the people of God has been set aside for the work of ministry in the place of the people of God. That is why earlier (and still useful) terms such as "preacher" or "pastor" may well be more descriptive. If everyone is in ministry, then the minister set aside is responsible for facilitating ministry in general, and for performing designated tasks in behalf of the people. So the Reformation formula suggests that ordained ministry is a representative ministry of "word, order, and sacrament."

This threefold ministry is special in the sense that these are three responsibilities without the presence of which there would be no church. Various historical confessions clearly define the church as the locus of the Word of God, the place where the scriptures are faithfully proclaimed, and the sacraments duly administered. Recall these classical formulae:

This is the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel. (Augsburg, VII)

Particular churches, which are members thereof, are more or less pure, according as the doctrine of the gospel is taught and embraced, ordinances administered, and public worship performed more or less purely in them. (Westminster XXV-4)

The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. (Thirty-nine Articles, XIX)

Fundamental to all these definitions is the recognition that the church requires continuity with its past as it perceives its movement in the present. Conventional wisdom, therefore, grounded in New Testament theology, has given us the special ministry of the people of God that we call the ordained ministry. That ministry is a group of persons who have exhibited "gifts and graces" for this special ministry, either by formal study or other evidence that they are fit and, therefore, specially called into the ministry of word, sacrament, and order.

Each of these elements takes on special significance when one ponders the trajectory of the church throughout time. For all Christian movements, the fundamental role of scripture is unshakable. Therefore, the vocation of ordained ministry includes the critical role of mediating the scriptural tradition in its purity to succeeding generations. This may take forms as diverse as charismatic interpretation (although internally criticized by the scripture itself) and highly sophisticated scientific criticism. What unites all elements of this process is the assumed centrality of the scriptures for church self-understanding and the necessity for the special ministry of study and interpretation as well as proclaiming the word in preaching.

Order in the church, a problem as old as the first New Testament community, is also a necessity. Disorder, the lack of perceived unity, is the greatest threat to the success of the Christian movement. The great ecumenical thrust of the New Testament in the Gospel of John equates unity and credibility (". . . that all may be one, . . . so the world will believe," John 17:21). How can the Christian claim for authority under pressure of the gospel have any credibility when the Christian folk themselves are so terribly fragmented? Now order may be totalitarian, as indeed it has been in some Christian generations and movements. Or order may be highly voluntaristic, as in some quietistic movements. But order for the sake of unity and momentum in the church has from earliest times been critical—and ordained ministry is set aside to provide that visible sense of the unity of God’s people. In its monarchial forms, this unity has taken on demonic shapes. In its representative forms, it has often made visible and personal the shapes of love. The emphasis upon order has less to do with ecclesiastical lock step than with what has been called "representative" ministry. The unity of the church in profound ways lies in the unity of ministry, an assertion that is before us with increasing urgency in the ecumenical movement.

The sacerdotal roles of ordained ministry have also their roots in gospel and order. Gospel and order are guardians of the integrity of the celebrations of the church. The sacraments are to be "duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance." The check and balance of scripture and tradition prevent exploitation or manipulation of the rites in ways that might compromise gospel purpose. The terrible struggles for authenticity in the leadership of worship recall to our minds the conservative wisdom of the church. The character of the priest is deemed indifferent to the validity of the sacraments as long as they are administered "according to Christ’s ordinance." Christ is the guardian of the tradition, not the priest. But the priest is necessary for careful, judicial, and thoughtful administration. In a poem by C. Day Lewis, an aged priest of an ancient cult tells a young priest not to worry about the results of his sacrifice. "Whether or not he enters into it is the god’s affair./ All we can do is make it possible." Ordination is making God’s presence in the midst of the people possible.

We all can recite the excesses of the professional ministry. They are easily and cheaply catalogued. But the survival of the church of Christ is ironically and strangely identified with the survival of the ordained ministry. This is not simply a conservative sociological principle. It has some of that flavor, no doubt. All institutions tend to place more power in the hands of the housekeepers than their rhetoric would allow. But the special kind of "housekeeping" required in the church includes the ever-present possibilities of God breaking into the institution with new power and vitality. Every generation is born again into the New Testament faith. Every act of kindness and gospel intention is a revelation of the God who is at the heart of all things. This is too big a responsibility to let fall haphazardly between the pews.

Rather than "elitism," this is a special kind of vocation not unlike the calling of Israel or the church. In some mysterious way, each vocation to ministry, whether baptism or ordination, is a calling out or a setting aside of the person for a special sensitivity to the intentionality of God in the world. The church has from earliest times reserved the right to test the spirits, to measure fidelity, and to judge the competence of persons called into the special roles. That is why being named (ordained) to this role is so important. It is the act in which the church, through whatever traditional forms have been chosen, submits itself to the judgment of God in calling out and setting aside one of the ministers of the church for this crucial relationship to all Christians.

The ecumenical church is like an onion. The church we inherited at the beginning of the twentieth century was an institution with many layers of skin, and yet it was unmistakably still an onion. As we have faced the question of "onion-ness," (i.e., what is the essential church of Christ?) we have successfully peeled off layer after layer of traditional accretion and custom. We have disposed of many supposedly essential elements, that is, elements that were thought essential, until we found sufficient trust to ask real questions about their integrity. Now, three quarters into the century, we have come near to the heart of the onion itself. And here, we have discovered that the last great question of the unity of the church is the question of the integrity and unity of its ministry. (See A Plan of Union for the Church of Christ Uniting, 1970, Chapter VII.)

Is this merely professionalism? Is it elitism? Is it somehow the attempt on the part of church administrators to carve out for themselves jobs that will be secure? No. The question of ordination is the question of the authority and integrity of the church’s ministry. The gift of ministry, celebrated in the special ministry of those set apart for the care of the household, is of the essence of the church. Without the ordained ministry, the church would quickly become a mystery cult. With the ordained ministry, the church might even become bureaucratic and immobile. With an ordained ministry sensitive to its servant role, the church will see a new surge of vitality and hope.

An ambiguous, curiously archaic, but amazingly flexible institution is ordained ministry. Its elitist impulses and professional temptations serve merely to remind us of its human shapes. But its utility in providing leadership in Christ’s church remains the best evidence we have of God’s plan for the ministry of all Christians.