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Jesus as Lord, Jesus as Servant

Today it is commonly said, especially by those who endorse a postmodernist creed, that all values and meaning are human or cultural projections. This means, in turn, that all social hierarchies are based on domination by the most powerful groups in various societies. This claim is also made about religious institutions and teachings.

At the core of the Christian life is the fact that people have a Lord, someone to whom they belong and to whom they are obedient. How can people be free if they have a master? How can people be free if they have someone to obey?

Jean-Paul Sartre, like so many in our culture who want to be in personal control of their lives, claimed that the two notions—freedom and God—contradict each other. To be human is to be free, to be autonomous. So the very idea of God reduces people to slavery and is essentially antihuman.

You do not need to endorse Sartre’s claim to recognize the resentment we would feel at having a boss, a ruler or anyone else telling us what to do all the time. How would that be human fulfillment? How could that be self-fulfillment? How could that be happiness? The Christian gospel claims that the spiritual life is to be one of fullness of life and blessedness. How can that develop from a relationship with one who has unquestionable authority over us, especially if we think that blessedness includes a significant degree of self-direction?

So the spiritual life has at its center the question, How can we be free, when we are ruled by a master? I want to approach this question by examining Hegel’s analysis of the relationship between master and slave and then comparing that relationship to Jesus’ treatment of his disciples.

Hegel tells us that in human life there is conflict, with each person seeking to get his or her own way. One resolution of the conflict is the master-slave relation. One person dominates the other completely. From the point of view of one of the people—the master—this is the optimal resolution, for that person’s will is obeyed and hence his personhood is fully realized.

But there is an irony in the situation. The master cannot be truly independent or free. To assert his independence, his mastery, he must have something that is not himself. He must have something to pay him deference, something to subordinate. He has status as master only as long as he has a slave. Thus he does not have perfect independence.

The master tries to keep this truth hidden, to suppress it, by making his control more and more arbitrary, so there is no recourse beyond his will as to how he treats the slave. The more arbitrary his control, the stronger the slave’s dependence, and hence the greater the master’s sense of independence. But clearly this approach is self-defeating; for this consciousness of independence requires the existence of something to subordinate and something that can recognize the master’s dominance.

Another feature of the master-slave relation is the master’s contempt for the slave. By becoming subservient to him, the slave is debased and so is odious. The slave is debased and odious because he really is a person, just like the master. They are essentially the same. Were the slave not a person, there would be no contempt. Why be contemptuous of a river that yields to a dam? Nor do we hold dogs in contempt because they obey us. To call a person a "dog" shows that we have contempt for such obedience when it is exhibited by a person. So the master’s very contempt is an implicit recognition that the slave is a person, and that the relation is an improper one.

The relation is also marked by resentment. The master resents the slave because he needs the slave in order to have the status of master. The slave resents the master because he must obey him. Finally there is envy. The slave wishes that he had power like the master. He envies and secretly admires what the master can do and wants to do it as well. He wants to be a master himself.

It is very clear in the four Gospels that the relation of Jesus to his disciples, though one of dominance and subordination, is very different from the one Hegel describes. Jesus does not gain or hold subordinates by force. He calls disciples—there is an element of choice on their part in becoming subordinate to him. He seeks to confer benefits on them by teaching them. He even performs an act of a servant when he washes their feet. We perceive no resentment or contempt in his treatment of his disciples. Why is this so? What enables Jesus to be a different kind of lord?

Let us approach this by looking at a relation I live with all the time: that of teacher to students. In this relation teachers are in the role of superiors. Within certain limits, we tell our students what to do. What keeps this relation from being that of a Hegelian master with slaves? How can we be the boss and the students not feel or be degraded, or feel resentful? How can we operate on the basis of being boss and not feel contempt for students as underlings?

The relation of superior-subordinate is justified if there are genuine grounds for one to be dominant and the other to be subordinate. If there is some basis for the teacher to command, to lead, and for the student to follow, then there is no violation of personality.

One ground of justification for a teacher’s superiority is that a teacher knows something the pupil does not know. The teacher has some skills, some means of getting answers and some experience which the pupil lacks. The relation is thus based on a difference.

But this is not enough to justify the relation of superior and subordinate. The goal of the teacher must be to enable the pupil to become independent of the teacher. The pupil must eventually be able to learn without the teacher. Many of us teach is such a way that the pupil is dependent on lecture notes and never masters the principles and skills of a field. Some teachers not only fail to do these things but even take a secret delight in their pupils remaining dependent, in remaining essentially inferior to themselves forever.

Each type of relation differs. Doctor-patient, lawyer-client, pastor-congregant, parent-child. Each needs to be looked at in terms of its own particularity. One cannot simply transfer what is true of the teacher-pupil relation to others, or vice versa. There may be similarities; there may be great differences. I only want to make one point: For a relation of superior and subordinate to be different from Hegel’s master-slave relation, there must be some genuine basis for the two roles. There is none in Hegel’s; there is only brute, raw power.

Now what is the basis of Jesus’ lordship? On what does it rest, so that he can indeed be our Lord, can command us, have us depend on him always, without this being destructive of our personality? What makes him a different kind of lord than Hegel’s master?

The foundation of Jesus’ relation to his disciples and to us is that he does not need us. This may sound harsh and false at first, but it is really the basis of his ability to serve us and elevate us. He does not need us in this sense: Jesus is Lord because of who he is, not because he has followers. He is Lord by his own inherent reality. He is Lord because he is the Son of God. It isn’t because of us that he is the Son of God. Hegel’s master is a master only if he has slaves. His status depends on having subordinates. He cannot afford to serve them, for then he ceases to be master. He cannot afford to have them come to any sense of fullness, for any degree of independence threatens his status.

But Jesus is the Son of the Father whether we like it or not. His position, his status, his authority do not spring from anything human. They do not depend even on our acknowledgment. Without a single disciple, he is still the Son of God.

Precisely because he does not need us, precisely because his status does not rest on us, he can serve us. He can wash his disciples’ feet and not thereby cease to be the Son. He can free people of demons and from other ailments, and this improvement in their condition does not threaten his status. He can be free to let people choose voluntarily to respond to his call to follow him; for whether they reject or accept him, he is still the Son of the Father. He can even be slain for us, bearing the awful catastrophe of human evil, without ceasing to be Lord. Precisely because he differs from us in kind, his lordship does not need to reduce our reality. Because his lordship rests on the Father, he is free to enhance us.

Because Hegel’s master does not really differ in kind from his slaves, since both are equally creatures, his lordship is destructive. Hegel’s master must deny the personality of his slaves. He must seek to absorb their reality by making them an extension of his will: "Do this, do that. Give me the product of your labor." He does everything for his own sake, in order to be a lord, in order to have the status of a master.

How different orders and commands are when they are from one who seeks not to deny our person but to enhance it. By his commands and authority Jesus does not seek to deny our person, but to free us. He seeks to free us of the need to have our person established by domination over others. He seeks to free us of the need to gain recognition at the expense of others. The basis of our freedom is that he gives us our status as people destined to share in the life of God, now and always. That is who we are, that is what we are: creatures destined for an eternal happiness. That status is conferred on us. It is not a gift of this world, for it cannot be grasped by an employment of all our talent, ingenuity, strength or wit. It cannot be attained by gaining prestige, power, or status over others. We therefore do not have to compete with each other in order to become ourselves; for what we are to become is not to be gained in the realm of earthly dominance, founded on the standards of earthly success. We can be free precisely because he is free. His lordship is not based on anything earthly. So he can serve us. It is by following him that we can enter the kingdom in which we can serve each other.

Another aspect of Jesus’ power is evident in the way he met his death at the hands of those with authority. In the face of a threat to public order, those with public power and the responsibility for maintaining peace, even if they care about justice, as Pilate did, are sometimes under pressure to sacrifice justice—and with it, all pretense of determining whose views are correct when it comes to life’s big questions. In spite of the faith of the 18th-and 19th-century political reformers such as Voltaire and Marx in the "verdict of history," the arena of political decisions is not likely to be a place where the big issues of life are discussed or decided solely or even primarily on the basis of truth and justice.

So when Pilate washed his hands in public to indicate his personal disagreement with the charges against Jesus, he made it clear that the truth of the matter in the controversy between Jesus and his adversaries had not been settled. His enemies succeeded in having Jesus condemned to death, but Pilate indicated that what they were doing was unjust and did not settle the matter of who was right. Ironically, Pilate, who had tried to get around the controversy by letting Jesus go, is the one who ordered his execution. But at least he made it clear that Jesus was executed not for political sedition, but because of what he claimed to be.

In spite of the sentence passed on Jesus and in spite of his execution, the question still remained, Is what Jesus claimed true? Pilate, who was not a Jew and was something of a cynic, as evidenced by his rhetorical question, What is Truth?, nonetheless allowed the question of the truth of what Jesus claimed to remain in the forefront. In all the confusion of arrest and accusations, in the smell, dust, heat and noise of the crowd, this crucial matter did not get lost. God’s purpose was achieved: Is what this man claims true?

Jesus’ refusal to resist arrest and his refusal to have his disciples fight to save him enabled Pilate to realize that the truth of what Jesus claimed was the real issue between Jesus and his accusers—not sedition or treason. Jesus’ behavior did not allow the threat of a cruel death by crucifixion to deflect the focus of attention. In all the confusion of history and the noise of life around us, this question still comes through today: Is what he claimed true?

Jesus, then, was a particular kind of victim of injustice. To keep the crucial issue in the forefront by a commitment to God was an active, not a passive, role. He faced death and died in such a way that people are forced to face the important questions of life. We are so familiar with Jesus’ trial and death that we frequently miss this feature. We might see it better by recalling the death of Socrates.

Socrates was accused of three things: atheism, leading young people astray and endangering the security of Athens. Those who brought the charges demanded the death penalty. This punishment was ridiculously severe. The jury of 500 citizens would have been happy to close the whole affair by imposing a minor fine. According to Athenian law, the jury had to choose between the alternatives proposed by the plaintiff and those of the defendant. Socrates’ friends begged him to propose a fine and even offered to pay it for him. But Socrates refused. He had obeyed a divine call to awaken his city to its ignorance and its need to search for a truer way to live. He said that he was of course only a minor person in the great city of Athens, no more than a gadfly, stinging a large beast in order to make it take notice of the way it was stumbling along, heedless of its direction. To carry out this mission, he had neglected his own business affairs. Now, as an old man, he was poor. He therefore proposed that the city provide him with a pension in recognition of his services.

The jury had to decide between the death penalty and a pension for services. The majority were so outraged with Socrates for making the situation so awkward that it voted for the death penalty. Everyone expected that while in prison Socrates would come to his senses and admit that he was wrong. The city officials tried to arrange for Socrates to escape, but he refused to cooperate: Either I have been a benefactor and should receive a pension, he said, or my accusers are right.

The jury had not reckoned on the seriousness of this little citizen; it was amazed at his passionate love of truth and at his deep commitment to the well-being of his fellow citizens. By his refusal to back down, even in the face of death, Socrates forced his fellow citizens to face a vital issue. Is the basis of life to go unexamined? Are we just to stumble along? Will the gods allow this to go unpunished? If he had accepted a minor fine, or, when he saw that the authorities meant business, had escaped from prison, people would have been able to slide over these questions and continue to live untroubled but superficial lives.

By accepting a grossly unjust death, Socrates did not allow the people of his city to continue to live the way they wanted scot-free; they could live that way only at the price of the death of a wise, generous citizen who had devoted his life to their betterment. To be his kind of victim is not something that just happens. Socrates’ and Jesus’ deaths differed from those of countless victims of injustice because of the way they conducted themselves. Each of them suffered from injustice in such a way that he caused people to face the big questions of life.

There is, however, a very great difference between their deaths. In Jesus’ death, God takes into himself the consequences of our evil. That is, he does not destroy us for the disobedience that harms ourselves and others. He does not try to win us over with bribes of earthly gain. He simply takes our rejection and turns it into something holy. The word "sacrifice" is made up of the Latin words meaning "sacred" or "holy" and "to do" or "to make." God takes our rejection, rebellion, hatred and indifference that leads to a judicial murder and makes it a holy act. The Father is able to do this because of the way the Son dies—willingly—for our sakes, making it clear in the way he dies that he dies for our sins.

George Herbert in his poem "The Agony" expresses this dual character of a judicial murder that is at the same time a holy action.

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,

Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:

But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and Love.

Who would know Sin, let him repair

Unto Mount Olivet: there shall he see

A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,

His skin, his garments bloody be,

Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain

To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay

And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike

Did set abroach; then let him say

If ever he did taste the like.

Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood; but I as wine.

Herbert tells us that if you want to know what sin is, look at that man on the cross. If you want to know what love is, look at the same place, to that man on the cross. Only God can make a cruel, unjust death into something holy, so that sin, which brings ruin upon us, and love, which redeems us, are to be found in the same place, united in Jesus.

Herbert makes it clear that the rejection of Christ in the crucifixion is not able to defeat God’s love. God raises Jesus from the dead, and the resurrected Lord comes back to us asking for us to receive his love. It is as if God says to us in Jesus’ resurrection: You cannot get rid of me. I keep coming back, even from the dead. Now what are you going to do about my love that continues to seek you?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, recorded some reflections about Jesus’ resurrection. They are to be found in one of his private notebooks, which has recently been printed under the title Culture and Value. In 1937 he made this entry:

What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s resurrection?. . . —If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help and once again we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, what I need is certainty—not wisdom, dreams or speculation—and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence, for it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: it is love that believes even in the Resurrection; hold fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. Holding fast to this must be holding fast to that belief. ... So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be "no wonder" if you can do things that you cannot do now. (A man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently than can a standing man.)

Once again, the issue has been put before us clearly. For all we ever do is to be witnesses. A witness is one who puts the issue clearly. The issue is that we either stand on earth on our own feet or we are suspended from above, attached to the living Lord.

 

Liberation from Illusion

Though Simone Weil (1909-43) is read by many people from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide variety of interests, she remains a marginal figure in the world of theology. This is especially strange considering the large amount of attention theology gives these days to social and political issues and Weil’s own passionate, often heroic involvement in social and political action. She was a spokesperson on behalf of striking workers, a volunteer teacher in night schools for railroad workers, and an active trade unionist. By working in factories and on farms she sought to understand how the oppression of work could be alleviated and the social hierarchy dismantled. She once gave shelter to Trotsky (and is said to have argued him into the ground over the nature of social oppression) , was a soldier at the front in the Spanish Civil War, sought dangerous service in World War II and served with the Free French in London. If personal heroism is a recommendation, as it is in the case of Bonhoeffer, Weil’s credentials are impeccable.

In addition, her intellectual powers and education were of the highest order. She attracted the attention and admiration of André Gide, Albert Camus and T. S. Eliot, who not only wrote an arresting introduction to Weil’s Need for Roots but contributed to the cost of a headstone for her previously unmarked grave. In our own day such writers as Robert Coles and Iris Murdoch have been profoundly influenced by Weil. Her works are substantial in quantity -- about ten volumes -- and beautifully written. Many of her works have had good publishers and translators. Why then is she still at best only on the edges of academic theology?

Possibly because she was a woman and was French. Some women, however, are read by theologians, but Weil is not a force even among feminist theologians. Paul Ricoeur is French, as are many deconstructionists, and they are taken very seriously. Perhaps Weil is neglected because she was not professionally trained in theology or personally acquainted with academic theologians. When she was in New York City for several months waiting transport to England, she spent much of her time in Harlem, because she liked to be with those who suffered, rather than at Union Seminary. In addition, the very first public notice of her was as a mystic, a label that has stuck to her, and academic theologians are not well disposed to mystics. But probably the biggest reason for her marginal status is that she is a truly radical and original thinker whose thought does not immediately factor with academic theology or indeed with any field of study. It requires sustained effort to master her thought sufficiently to connect it fruitfully to the issues theologians, philosophers and social and political scientists discuss.

Unfortunately, Gabriella Fiori’s book, though valuable, does not make Weil’s thought more accessible to academic interests. For this, one must turn to several other recent books. Peter Winch in Simone Weil: The Just Balance (Cambridge University Press, 1989) brilliantly connects Weil’s underlying philosophy to the linguistic philosophical tradition that clusters around Wittgenstein. This not only makes her accessible to philosophers who are interested in such topics as human perception and action, but also adds to our understanding of Weil’s religious vision, and indeed points up the artificiality of drawing a hard and fast line between philosophical and religious concerns. Rolf Kuehn in Deuten als Entwerden connects Weil to the mainstream of philosophical hermeneutics in France and Germany, an area of major theological interest today. Lawrence Blum and Victor J. Seidler in A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (Routledge, 1989) provide the first thorough treatment in English of Weil’s analysis of social oppression, which emphasises the limitations of both Marxist and capitalist theories. Like Fiori, they attempt to connect Weil’s thought to feminist concerns, but with less success. In short, by recasting Weil’s thought into a form that better connects with the way academic theology is pursued, these three books should greatly assist the entrance of Weil’s thought into the theological mainstream.

Fiori’s book is only partially successful as an intellectual biography. It fails to treat several important works, such as the essays "Science and Perception in Descartes" and "Iliad, a Poem of Force," which wrestle with the theme of dominance and subordination. Together they indicate the great integrative power of Weil’s mind, as she links such apparently disparate matters as sense perception and war. Fiori does place various writings in the context of Weil’s life and concerns, devotes a great deal of space to her social and political thought and to her preoccupation with religion during the last seven or eight years of her life, and tries to make connections between the pursuits. Frequently she does little more than paraphrase Weil, though there are instances of critical insight, as in this penetrating summary of a long, complex line of reasoning: "As far as the language of men is distant from divine beauty, as far as their senses and their intellect are distant from the truth, just so far are the necessities of social life distant from justice. It follows that political life has, like an art or science, an equal need for laborious creative invention." In general, however, her treatment compares poorly with Blum and Seidler’s comprehensive and critical treatment of Weil’s social and political philosophy.

Viewed strictly as a biography, Fiori’s book is more successful. She succeeds in bringing "back to life a way of thinking and living" that was Simone Weil. This considerable achievement was made possible by Fior’s conversations with many people who knew Weil, as well as extensive reading, and reliance on the earlier, excellent biography by Simone Pétrement.

Weil is difficult to understand. To begin with, her style is aphoristic, in the tradition of Montaigne and Pascal. Three volumes of Weils works consist of notebooks, not intended for publication, and a fourth work, Gravity and Grace, is a selection from her notebooks. Even the widely read Waiting for God is a miscellaneous document, assembled by an editor. Thus it is not easy to gain a comprehensive view of Weil’s thought. In the extensive secondary literature on Weil, her religious ideas are frequently treated with little understanding of their philosophical, theological, moral and social-political bearing. Fiori is less successful here than Pétrement. who had the advantage of having known Weil very well as a fellow student at the Henri IV lycée and at the École Normale Superieur. Pétrement was also a fully trained philosopher and an accomplished intellectual historian. Fiori, prior to her retirement, was a member of the Italian department of Queen’s University in Belfast.

Fiori’s work has a further serious flaw. Her portrayal of Weil’s religious conversion -- which marked a major division in her life -- is highly idiosyncratic. It appears in a ten-page chapter titled "The Encounter," the last two pages of which consist of a long quotation from one of Weil’s notebooks. The entry, unconnected with the themes around it, bears the heading "Prologue," suggesting it was meant to serve as a prologue to a book that was never written. It appears to describe an actual religious experience, but it bears no resemblance to the account of a religious experience Weil identifies as her own in a letter to Father Perrin, published in Waiting for God under the title "Spiritual Autobiography." At the core of that religious experience is a visitation (as it is technically called) by Jesus Christ

Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say [George Herbert’s poem "Love"] over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.

In my arguments about the insolubility the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God.

Fiori does not treat this core religious experience in "The Encounter," and only in a later chapter does she refer to Weil’s account of Christ’s visitation. She does not tell us why Weil had previously thought that the problem of God was insoluble, nor discuss the fact that Weil said that this experience only "half convinced her intellect" of the truth of Christianity.

Weil’s relation to the Roman Catholic Church has been a vexing issue. In her "Spiritual Autobiography" and elsewhere she explains why she believed she had a divine vocation not to be baptized and thereby to remain outside the Catholic Church, even though she believed in the Trinity, the incarnation, and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and longed to receive the host. She claimed that the Roman Catholic Church was not truly catholic or universal because it did not adequately recognize that divine and vital truth had been and still was available outside the Christian revelation. On several occasions she described this and other views to priests with a view to baptism, but either she was dissatisfied with their responses or baptism was refused. Because she was not baptized, she has been dubbed "a secular saint" by those who admire her life and are drawn to her thought, but who are not interested in organized religion.

Nonetheless, there is serious reason to believe that Weil was baptized. At the time Fiori’s biography was written there was only a rumor of this, reported by Wladmir Rabi in "Du nouveau sur Simone Weil" (Les Nouveaux Cahiers, Autumn 1971) After many years of silence, to spare the sensibilities of Weil’s family, Simone Dietz, who was very friendly with Weil in New York and later in London, where they worked for the Free French, told a meeting of the American Weil Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 1988 that at Weil’s request she herself baptized Weil (as a lay Catholic may do in extreme situations) a few months before Weil’s death. (A videotape of Dietz’s address is in the society’s archives.) Prior to that address Dietz told the president of the American Weil Society, Eric Springsted of Illinois College, that she had baptized Weil. With Dietz’s permission Springsted reported her story to the society in a paper delivered at its May 1984 meeting at the University of Notre Dame. (His paper is in the society’s archives.)

Dietz’s revelation complicates our evaluation of Weil’s relation to institutional Christianity. The fact that she took the question of her baptism so seriously is a strong indication that she did not consider all religions on a par. If she was baptized, it would at the very least undermine some of the extravagant speculation about Weil’s being a secular saint.

One way to situate Weil’s thought today is to describe her as postmodern. The term should not be understood to refer exclusively to deconstructionism, nor to the relativism that is frequently associated with the term, as. for example in the writings of the American philosopher Richard Rorty. Rather, it indicates a rejection of the narrowness of the Enlightenment tradition which until recently propelled Western society intellectually, socially and politically and whose unrivaled dominance is thought by many, from widely different points of views, to have been broken. Weil would not be in the camp of confessional theologians, such as George Lindbeck, nor of those theologians who follow Heidegger, nor of process theologians. Weil had immense respect for the human intellect and the vital importance of the kind of truth that is accessible only to the intellect. She shared with our time a profound awareness of the effect of society -- the production of goods and services -- on the intellect and personality. Much of her writing is focused on liberating the mind and moral sensibility from illusion-producing forces, including the force of "the fat relentless ego" (as Iris Murdoch once put it) At the same time she was a penetrating critic of that so-called master of suspicion, Karl Marx, whose analysis of oppression and liberty she found superficial. She once said it is not religion that is the opiate of the people, but revolution. To believe that those who are weak should attain power, while still weak, is to believe in miracles without believing in the supernatural. She argued that the idea of revolution has blocked sober, hardheaded study of the nature and causes of social oppression, prevented the realization that some social oppression is probably inevitable, and tended to hide the fact that our subjection to the natural world can be mitigated but never wholly overcome.

Weil’s life and thought are also permeated by an awareness of the reality of supernatural grace. This combined with her respect for the human mind as an essential ingredient of a genuinely human life gives her an affinity with Augustine or, better yet, Gregory of Nyssa. The reality of divine grace confirmed and sustained her conviction about the preciousness of human beings and provided her with a standard to judge the way social and political institutions enhance or retard human dignity. What makes Weil unusual is the quality of her insights into how we may live in accord with divine-given human dignity, and the persistence of her effort to live out those insights.

Jesus’ Passion and Ours: To Love Justice Itself

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied" (Matt. 5:6) I misunderstood this text for years, for I did not know what righteousness meant. I vaguely associated it with being good or pure, or with obeying the Ten Commandments. Righteousness is not a central concern of the churches with which I normally associate, nor is it something after which most people I know can be said to hunger and thirst.

But I recently learned to my surprise that the Greek word translated as "righteousness" is the same word that Plato uses. In English versions of his dialogues the word is translated as ‘‘justice." It is justice that we are to hunger and thirst after.

I could not agree more. Wrongdoing is rampant. No prophet is needed to make us realize that. Justice is something we can hunger and thirst for, and it is encouraging that Jesus promised we shall be satisfied.

Plato, however, had an odd way of talking about justice, which has led me to understand what Jesus said in a new way. Plato said that we are to love justice itself. What would it be to love justice itself’? Usually, when we are treated fairly, we do not love justice itself, for we find such treatment pleasant. Our attention is so occupied by the pleasure that we do not attend to the goodness of Justice itself. When we are treated unfairly, we are indirectly aware of the goodness of justice -- we realize that justice matters because of the harm we suffer from injustice. But we do not yet love justice itself. To love justice is to desire to become perfectly just -- that is, to become like or assimilated to what we love.

Many Christians are prone to accept too facilely Christ as the bearer of our sins and evil. In other words, we may not yet have reached the place in our development in which we hunger and thirst after justice. We must come to love justice.

A way to test whether we truly love justice is to ask ourselves whether we heartily desire that the consequences of the evil we do fall directly and solely on ourselves. To do so would be to love justice itself. If we perform this test honestly, we become aware of the fact that we also desire to be saved from justice. We do not want the consequences of the evil we do to fall directly on ourselves and no one else. We are caught in a contradiction -- loving justice and yet fearful of it. We are in a condition from which we can respond to a supernatural remedy.

When we have a passion for justice, then, to be consistent, we must desire that the consequences of all the evil we do fall directly and solely on ourselves. But then we find that justice is too horrible even to contemplate. Nonetheless, to keep returning in our thoughts to this inability fully to desire that justice be exercised on ourselves gives us access to a path that leads us to the cross of Christ. Christ’s passion enables us to love justice with all our heart and not to shrink from the truth about ourselves that justice reveals.

Ludwig Wittgenstein noted: "Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself" (Culture and Value, amended second edition, edited by G. H. von Wright [Oxford University Press, 1980]) Is "filth" too strong? Is it a just evaluation? Does it not fail to take into account our moral achievements, our merits, our greatness, our reality as human beings, which must be respected? Those assessments are all compatible with a self-evaluation that issues in such words as ‘filth." because to love justice passionately leads to such expressions. as any glance at the words used by saintly people about themselves would show.

We can truthfully say it of ourselves, however, because we are loved by one who loves us in spite of our failures to be just. His love enables us to speak truthfully about ourselves because it is the love of one who is wholly just. who innocently suffers the consequences of other people’s injustices, and who as the creative Word of God has the power and authority to identify with every victim of injustice and, as the one who suffers at our hands, grants us absolution from our evil. In our self-evaluation we may truly believe that we are filth because we believe that we can be changed, and in fact are being changed.

The removal of evil can be experienced by anyone. In Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, he explicitly claimed that the Son of Man is present in every human being ("Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" [Matt. 25:40]) We are not able to perceive him in every human being with our sense organs, but we are able to experience the effects of a purity present in each person, insofar as each person bears the image of God. (In Colossians 1:15 Christ is said to be the very image of God.)

I remember seeing a colleague walking past my house one day. He was a colorless person who used to affect outlandish dress in an effort to make himself interesting. I looked at him with scorn and with a sense of superiority, thinking how glad I was not to be like him. Then it occurred to me that we were essentially alike, both creatures, made in God’s image. Our essential status was the same. However great our differences, they did not alter that essential status in the least. My scorn and sense of superiority immediately disappeared. Some of my evil -- my unjust attitude toward another person -- was taken away when I attended to the image of God that each of us bears.

Pascal distinguishes three orders: those of the body, the intellect and the heart. Jesus does not have the greatness of the order of the body, as did Alexander the Great, nor the greatness of the order of the intellect, as did Albert Einstein. According to Pascal, Jesus’ greatness is his humility. He did not measure himself by the cultural standards of his day, as did some others, who scoffed at the fact that he was a carpenter (Mark 6:3), nor by the greatness of the order of the intellect (his education was that which could be gained at the local synagogue school) Some of the creatures made by the Word of God are greater in these respects than the one who is the Word of God incarnate, and that one is not ashamed of his inferiority.

Pascal says that holiness belongs to the order of the heart. Jesus’ greatness is also his ability to make us holy. Holiness is freedom from the burden of evil, and the state of being full of charity. To pay attention to him either indirectly, by attending to his image which we all bear, or directly, by attending to him as portrayed in the Scriptures and by praying, has the effect of relieving some of the burden of evil we carry and enabling our love for others to increase.

Personal piety and social concern, which have been divided for so long in Christianity. will meet when we all come to love justice itself; for then we shall meet in Christ because we shall all realize our need to be relieved of the burden of evil.

Doing Wrong, Getting Sick, and Dying

A sense of culpability in illness and death can provoke much personal anguish. To some extent such anxiety has always been a reality: across time and cultures, people have struggled with the connection between human behavior and misfortune, especially sickness and death. Probably even the most rational or secular individuals have never fully believed that their actions, beliefs, attitudes and values are absolutely irrelevant to their infirmities or approaching death.

Today, however, the problem is more intense. For a number of intriguing reasons, today’s ill and dying persons believe strongly that they have caused their fate, even if only indirectly or subconsciously. At the same time, ironically, they lack moral and spiritual resources to help them handle the responsibility.

Since the turn of this century, psychology, not religion, has provided the interpretive framework for these questions, in what sociologist Renée Fox describes as a "sin-to-crime-to-sickness evolution" ("The Medicalization and Demedicalization of American Society," Daedalus, Winter 1977, p. 11) Problems formerly considered sins that should be dealt with by church authorities are now considered either crimes to be dealt with by legal authority or medical concerns to be cured by the scientific community. Many people feel free to accept or reject a religious judgment that declares a certain behavior immoral. They will change churches rather than behavior. But if psychologists and physicians, now invested with new authority, define the same behavior as psychologically abnormal, sick or cancer-causing, people will eagerly comply with the regimen that the doctors propose. This leads us to tell the sick and dying that they "didn’t eat their bran" or suffer from "type A" personality traits, rather than our acknowledging a more complex combination of factors contributing to their condition.

Freud’s theory of the death instinct seems to support this idea that we bring our own destruction upon ourselves. Torn eternally between eros and thanatos, we have an inner urge to return to an earlier state of inanimate, inorganic existence, Freud claimed. In the end, we each die of our own "internal conflicts," the self-destructive death instinct killing us when our libido has been used up or fixated. This idea captures the moral imagination of later psychology. Kurt R. Eissler, the first Freudian to devote an entire book to The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient (International Universities Press, 1955) , argues that we should view death as a psychological event rooted in each person’s own personality and individual life history – "the effect of an unconscious actively engaged in the preparation of the lethal end." But it is Edwin S. Shneidman, a psychologist specializing in death and dying, who carries these ideas to an extreme: he maintains that we should revise the death certificate in light of Freud’s psychiatric revolution to include the significant role that the deceased’s intentions played in hastening his or her own death (Death of Man [New York Times Book Co., 1973]) Not only can we indicate whether death came naturally, accidentally or through suicide or homicide; we must also judge whether it was intended, subintended or unintended. This attitude reflects a new understanding of human responsibility, leading psychologists to scrutinize and evaluate an individual’s. character, values and goals and, in essence, to make moral use of psychological concepts in assessing the implications of illness. They label overeaters, under-exercisers, smokers, the careless, foolhardy and imprudent as "death-seekers," "death-experimenters" and "death-initiators."

Psychological theories of illness have become powerful means for inducing blame and, over time, have influenced changes in medical explanations of disease. The perception that disease is precipitated simply by a sole bacillus that can be isolated, diagnosed and cured by "magic bullets," as René Dubos (The Mirage of Health [Harper & Row, 1971]) calls vaccines, has come under increasing suspicion. The elimination of so many infectious diseases such as smallpox, the plague, cholera and tuberculosis gave people hope that all diseases would disappear and led them to conclude that factors of personal responsibility for health were negligible. We still want to believe that medicine will uncover and cure the single cause of all disease.

Yet despite medical advances, people continue to fall ill and die -- but now from different types of maladies. Chronic degenerative diseases (cancer and heart diseases) have replaced acute, contagious, single-microbe diseases, and they often progress in a rather unpredictable and poorly understood fashion. Doctors can offer potentially therapeutic interventions, but no absolute cures. They make only tentative, cautious, understated prognoses. The underlying physiological mechanisms and the means to prevent, control or cure continue to evade medicine. It offers only "halfway technologies," measures that can seldom do more than palliate the symptoms of an already-established terminal disease.

Our inability to prevent, control or cure major causes of death has forced us to question the "one-bug" model. Even though scientists have found cures for some diseases, Dubos and others suspect that the mere discovery of specific bacteria did not itself cause their decline. Rather, other factors -- pure food, pure water and pure air -- also played a part. The struggle with the complex etiology of AIDS illustrates the dilemma: the discovery of the virus by scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1983 did not automatically unlock the door to a cure; and having the virus will not necessarily make the carrier ill or cause the patient’s death at any predictable rate. Researchers therefore call the mysterious influences on AIDS "cofactors," and they call forces that seem to exacerbate cancer and heart diseases their "multifactional" origins. "Multifactional origins" might mean anything from the variables of environment to value-loaded judgments about personal habits, behavior, "lifestyle" or even judgments about "the good life and the good society." Some theorists directly link cancer, for example, to a breakdown in close personal relationships or to feelings of loss, anxiety, depression, hostility or hopelessness. For example, when someone we know suffers a heart attack unexpectedly, we find ourselves saying with surprise that the person never struck us as "the kind of person" who would experience heart problems. We have a certain personality type in mind when we make this judgment. Robert Morison goes so far as to argue that Wesleyan or middle-class virtues of cleanliness, prudence and moderation are the significant factors behind high health standards ("Rights and Responsibilities: Redressing the Uneasy Balance," Hastings Center Report 4, April 1974, p. 3)

Achieving good health and locating the determinants of disease and death are far more complex problems than previously believed. We continue to search for natural, external causes but have hypothesized that illness might also arise from problems like character deficiencies, neurotic or aberrant behavior or misguided lifestyles, or from unjust, oppressive social systems that breed poverty, ignorance and brutality or that fail to be fair in distributing scientific cures. We may no longer believe the religious tenet that because we sin we die. But we have replaced this idea with more insidiously punitive moralisms.

At least this is Susan Sontag’s suggestion in Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977) Comparing attitudes toward cancer and tuberculosis, she demonstrates that when naturalistic explanations fail, we blame the patient for the illness. For example, before knowing the physiological cause of TB, society portrayed its victims as excessively passionate, reckless or sensuous. Now we know that psychological excesses and moral faults are unrelated to TB’s causes. Sontag doubts similar societal myths about cancer -- that it is caused by repressing emotions like anger, sexual desire or grief. Such myths suggest that people bear an unfair share of the responsibility for their own illnesses.

Indeed, statistics do show that certain actions can lead to ill health. Voluntary choices like smoking, overeating or failure to exercise can affect the diseases that are leading causes of death. Temperament, character and habits do influence our well-being; good health requires effort and self-discipline. "Over ninety-nine per cent of us," contends John Knowles, "are born healthy and made sick as a result of personal misbehavior and environmental conditions" ("The Responsibility of the Individual," Daedalus, Winter 1977, p. 58) Some suggest that rather than claim a right to health, we consider care for our own health an individual moral obligation or a public duty. H. Tristram Engelhardt even contends that should a smoker get cancer and require treatment that burdens the general community, we can justifiably say ‘4hat he or she acted immorally with respect to the responsibility to avoid cancer and its public costs." Those persons are culpable; let them pay for their treatment, he concludes ("Human Well-Being and Medicine," Science, Ethics and Medicine [Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, 1976], p. 128)

However, sifting out the elements of moral responsibility poses slippery problems. Engelhardt’s statement comes dangerously close to encouraging primitively moralistic judgments; we cannot possibly account for all of a disease’s causes. For example, societal values and the media heighten the glamour and appeal of smoking. Nor can smoking be directly correlated with being generally irresponsible. No one, Daniel Callahan observes, has successfully demonstrated "that smokers are, as a group, generally less responsible, less moral individuals than nonsmokers" ("Health and Society: Some Ethical Imperatives," Daedalus, Winter 1977, p. 31) Also, people who show no signs of certain unhealthy behaviors may still fall ill from the same diseases that ail people with problem behavior traits. "For that reason, if for no other," says Callahan, "it would be impossible to prove that someone’s disease was the result of his culpable willful responsibility."

The discussion raises still more questions. Is it "simply sinful," as Morison says, "for a middle-aged man with a family to smoke cigarettes . . . clearly and willfully increasing the probability that he would be unable [due to illness and death] to fulfill his responsibility to his family or indeed, to society at large" ("Rights and Responsibility," p. 4) ? If people have a right to healthcare and yet are irresponsible in their personal habits and behavior, have they limited their right in any way? Is the individual accountable, and to whom? In general, how much sacrifice of individual health can society demand in the name of general health? Or, on the other hand, how far should society go in using medical means to satisfy personal and sometimes idiosyncratic wishes?

A deeper problem, however, is that mainstream culture does not provide ill people with resources to help them face these questions. They no longer have language with which to express the condemnation that they feel. The liver-cancer patient does not know how fully to account for the possibility of having failed to meet responsibilities or of being guilty for the onset of illness. People lack what Frederick Hoffman calls the "compensatory forces of remorse and penance" necessary to comprehend commission and atonement ("Morality and Modern Literature," in The Meaning of Death, edited by Herman Feifel [McGraw-Hill, 1959]) Moral responsibility for death is thrust upon them. Yet they are directed away from confessional and willed levels of moral development and understanding and are left with a poorly balanced, distorted moral economy: they cannot calculate their proper responsibilities for death as a predictable result of understandable causes. Without a developed ethical sense and a way to account for moral deficiencies, people can no longer prepare for death.

Personal anguish about culpability before illness and death was better managed within the modern medical model, which was developed at the turn of the century. The medical establishment at that time exhaustively explained illness and death in rational, scientific, "morally neutral" terms. Doctors certified that the causes of disease resided in micro-organisms, not in personal, moral or religious factors. This assertion eliminated religious questions of meaning, mystery or moral imperative. People no longer used the concept of divine providence to explain death; they considered religious, spiritual and moral meanings superfluous. They felt blameless and by attributing illness to natural causes, the physician supported that view.

Today, medical explanations no longer remove patients’ culpability. When medical explanations fail, people are left to construct the meaning and moral message of their illness on their own. This process evokes profound anxiety and sometimes oddly punitive responses. Patients may blame themselves for behaving or even thinking the wrong way. Conversely, "good" patients who have purposely not smoked, for example, expect "rewards" for their good behavior, such as being spared heart disease or lung cancer. People who contract one of these diseases become deeply troubled when doctors cannot determine its natural cause; they may develop a vague, haunting sense of moral failure. Furthermore, their sense of justice is upset when, as happens all too often, those who compliantly avoid behavior that might aggravate their illness recover no more quickly -- or in some cases even more slowly -- than others who are less "well behaved." Such an experience is very disillusioning.

Likewise, the church’s rituals for dying have become largely a lost art. The experience of facing impending death forces the individual to reassess her life in wholly unfamiliar moral and spiritual ways, for which she is unprepared and inexperienced. The church’s traditional moments of witness, exhortation, sorrow, pardon, absolution, prayer and silence have been replaced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s renowned five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These are experienced internally and privately, unlike the church’s rituals, which involved close moral and religious scrutiny of one’s relations with oneself, one’s neighbor and one’s God. Without this religious support, people. face death and God with a confusion and dread for which they no longer have words to name or comprehend. Medical ethicist Kenneth Vaux warns that in an age when we relate ill health to misbehavior -- in much the same manner that sin and sickness were once equated -- people need a theology of culture that undergirds our health-policy ethics.

The problems are too big for an easy solution, but the church can certainly approach them more effectively than it has. Theologians and ministers should seriously attempt to retrieve significant historical resources as well as contemporary reflections. New conceptions of our responsibilities for doing wrong, getting sick and dying will come from creative dialogue between moral and religious traditions -- whether buried in Augustine or Freud -- and from encountering people’s experiences with dying.

Augustine can help us construct such a theological response. Although Schleiermacher scolds him and other early church fathers for arguing that sin causes death, Augustine’s understanding allowed him to discuss moral and religious realities that escaped Schleiermacher -- and escape us today. We may find the idea of death as "curse" due to God’s "judgment" abhorrent and alien. Yet these terms, understood in the context of Augustine’s world, reveal his attempt to elucidate deeper issues.

Augustine understood something of what many cancer patients struggle to articulate: that at some level humans bear responsibility for how they live and die. Likewise he understood our dire need for acceptance despite our failings. But his definition of acceptance differs dramatically from those of Kübler-Ross and others, for his entails moral and religious sensibilities. This allows him to speak directly to the fear, despair and guilt we feel regarding illness and death. For Augustine, death demands a "penalty paid in the name of justice and piety," a penalty which can be paid not by humans, but by God. Rather than a passive, narcissistic peace, acceptance entails three rigorous activities: "the avoidance of sin and the cancellation of sins committed, and the award of the palm of victory as the just reward of righteousness" (City of God). Hence a good death is not a human act existentially lived out but an act of faith and reconciliation. It requires the sorrow of repentance, a certain salutary agony of self-denial, endurance in devout faith, and reconciliation with others and God. Through these acts, death, an evil in itself, is turned to good advantage; it becomes a way to true life.

Paul Tillich attempts to describe the same reality in language less foreign to our post-Enlightenment ears. Wflilehe moves beyond Augustine’s traditional formulations, he attempts to retrieve value from the ideas behind them. He maintains that death is a law of both nature and morality. On the one hand, we have to die because we are dust; death is part of the natural order of living. But, on the other hand, "we have to die because we are guilty. That is the moral law to which we, unlike all other beings, are subject" (Shaking of the Foundations [Scribner’s, 1948], p. 70) Even if religion no longer validates a direct connection, people fear and recognize on some level that they have brought misfortune upon themselves by not doing what they should have done or by subverting the rightful order of nature. Although

natural to every finite being, death also stands over against nature. People must, as they stand above existence as free beings, ask themselves, "Is it true and good existence?" And they must demand that it be so. Since this demand is never fulfilled, our awareness of having to die becomes the painful, guilt-ridden realization of the loss of the eternal -- a loss for which each of us is responsible, despite its tragic universality. This explains, if only in part, why cancer patients raise questions about their own responsibility in causing or preventing their illness, and why people have trouble accepting disease and death as simply natural parts of life.

When death comes as more than fate -- when it comes as condemnation -- only one response can suffice: forgiveness. This takes into account the whole human experience; not only fear of extinction, but also fear of judgment and the recognition of guilt, sin and human brokenness. Since we cannot freely realize our dreams and possibilities and inevitably fail to make the most of the gift of life, we can accept death only "through a state of confidence in which death has ceased to be the ‘wages of sin,"’ the "state of being accepted in spite of being unacceptable" (The Courage to Be [Yale University Press, 1952], pp. 169-70) Understanding Tillich’s pithy phrase -- "acceptance without suspending judgment" might lead us to a fuller understanding of the complex association between doing wrong, becoming ill, and dying. The language of acceptance should not lead us to shallow "forgiving and forgetting"; forgiveness involves renewed participation in human community and objective powers of acceptance. Both Tillich and Augustine believe that this comes only through deeply suffering and paying a "heavy price," and undergoing a "tremendous toil," not wholly on our own but through faith. Otherwise, it is "simply a self-confirmation in a state of estrangement" says Tillich (The Meaning of Health [Exploration Press, 1984], pp. 56, 224)

Veatch claims that death is "our last quest for responsibility" (Death, Dying and The Biological Revolution: Our Last Quest for Responsibility [Yale University Press, 1976], p. 11) Now more than ever before, we have more opportunity for such acts as leave-taking, and for directing to some extent the mode and timing of our deaths. Yet paradoxically, numerous factors prevent us from fully taking on this "last responsibility." Time is ripe to begin to reclaim some of the resources that might lead us to a more nuanced formulation of the relationship between moral responsibility, illness, and death.

Marriage Debate

Book Review:

The Future of Marriage. By David Blankenhorn. Encounter, 260 pp.

 

Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die. By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 225 pp., $25.00.

 

It would be hard to find more divisive, jabbing rhetoric on marriage than in these publications by self-described "marriage nut" David Blankenhorn, the founder and director of the Institute for American Values, and the late historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, well known for her testy rebuff of feminism. Those familiar with Blankenhorn's Fatherless America and Fox-Genovese's "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life" will find few surprises.

Fighting what he sees as the vacuous definition of marriage as a purely private relationship of love, Blankenhorn urges readers to work toward resurrecting marriage as a public institution designed to uphold what he believes is the birthright of every child--to have a mother and a father. Fox-Genovese's book, published posthumously by a former doctoral student who is effusive in her praise for her teacher, combines three lectures delivered at Princeton in 2003 with five previously published essays and concludes with a praise-filled eulogy by Princeton professor Robert George. Sparse footnotes for the initial chapters reveal how little Fox-Genovese kept up with literature on families. She drew heavily on her complaint, launched in the 1990s, that the women's movement undermined families, and she argued for reclaiming marriage as an institution that resolves the inherent antagonism between women and men, an institution based on what she claimed are naturally complementary roles of female nurture and male authority.

I found the accusatory tone of these books troublesome and tiresome. Can Christians and Christian theologians do better than this? I think so. Scholars who study religion and the family such as Lisa Cahill, Mark Jordan and Adrian Thatcher tend to search for common ground or at least for greater understanding of the complexities. Heated conflicts still arise, of course. In 2003 Don Browning of the University of Chicago Divinity School, one of the major scholars on the family, termed a Presbyterian report on families as elitist, and Presbyterian ethicist Gloria Albrecht retorted by calling Browning oblivious of economic realities. But by and large those who study religion tend to acknowledge the ambiguity of human action, the complexity of ideals in practice, and the inescapable difficulties in interpreting scripture, history and religious traditions. I also believe there are Christian approaches to the family that would contest the win-lose, either-or rhetoric of Blankenhorn and Fox-Genovese.

"So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings," John Stuart Mill observed, "it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.… The worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground." This is certainly true for marriage debates. Rational argument, while essential, "will not resolve all controversy," notes legal theorist Martha Nussbaum in writing about the move to give full equality to gays and lesbians, "because it is very likely that the resistance … has deep psychological roots." Fear in particular plays a huge role.

Blankenhorn and Fox-Genovese openly confess their fears. The Future of Marriage begins with and repeatedly returns to a conversation with prominent attorney and gay rights advocate Evan Wolfson that left Blankenhorn extremely worried that the "movement for same-sex marriage is going to win." This "potentially lethal threat" inspired him to write his book. He has devoted nearly 20 years to strengthening the infrastructure of heterosexual marriage, and he fears that the rise of same-sex marriage will open a floodgate of aberrations, such as polygamy and group marriage, and will destroy the role that marriage has in bringing women and men together for the sake of having sex and rearing children. Although he says clearly that gay marriage is only "one facet of the larger threat" to marriage, for him the choice is clear: either support same-sex marriage or support heterosexual marriage.

Though Blankenhorn believes his side won the battle in the late 1980s and 1990s over whether marriage is key to children's well-being (many now agree it is), he fears losing the war. When it comes to marriage, he argues, society cannot have it both ways. Either support same-sex marriage or strengthen heterosexual marriage, support the rights of gays or care for children. Countries in which there is strong support for same sex marriage, according to Blankenhorn's reading of two international surveys, display the weakest support for heterosexual marriage. And redefining marriage to include gay and lesbian couples will undermine a basic rule for children's well-being: "a mother and a father for every child."

Fox-Genovese also sees a "campaign to destroy" marriage. She is more upset than Blankenhorn about the demise of social authority, especially the moral influence of the church. She locates the essential purpose of marriage not in bearing and raising children but in overcoming the natural opposition of the sexes. For her, feminism is at least as disruptive of social order as is the rise of gay and lesbian couplings. Just as Blankenhorn insists that he is not attacking homosexuals, Fox-Genovese reiterates that she is not blaming feminists. But it is a slippery slope for both. "Most of the inequalities" of marriage call for redress, Fox-Genovese admits, but she says women's rights (to property, divorce, protection from marital rape and abuse, etc.) have come at an "exorbitantly high price." Insistence on full equality fuels an "uncompromising attack on authority--natural, human, and divine," destroying traditional marriage with "crippling consequences" for families and children. Feminists have taken modern claims about individual rights to a libertarian extreme, she says, with Roe v. Wade delivering the "real blow." White middle-class women in the early feminist movement failed to appreciate the benefits they had through patriarchal gender roles and even through the law of coverture that completely subsumed a wife's rights under her husband's in the 1800s.

Such claims are extreme. But sometimes the problem is as much the emotional tone and manner of the argument as the content. All too often, Blankenhorn and Fox-Genovese belittle and stereotype their opponents. Blankenhorn, for instance, construes the progressive Council on Contemporary Families, founded by historian Stephanie Coontz, as aimed only at promoting divorce and unwed childbearing, a description not borne out if one reads the council's Web site or Coontz's works. The main reason people like Coontz back same-sex marriage, according to Blankenhorn and Fox-Genovese, is that they see it as another way to undermine marriage. Yet in Marriage: A History, Coontz identifies promoting good marriages as a worthy goal, even though she opposes social policy that would enforce this goal and exclude same-sex couples.

Fox-Genovese makes no attempt to understand the multiple strands of feminism extant today. Feminists as a whole, she says, deride all forms of service or self-sacrifice and "consider any view of marriage as sacrament or covenant a self-serving deception" that oppresses women--a gross misrepresentation of many feminist theologians who affirm both marriage and altruism. In Blankenhorn, scholarly analysis gives way to blanket dismissals of other views as "intellectually vacuous," "utterly specious," "morally irresponsible," "nonsense" and "pure flapdoodle." Then he coaxes his "kind reader" to be more benevolent toward his own views.

More serious distortions occur in their interpretation of history, nature and religion. Fox-Genovese complains that "many scholars project upon the past" their own views but falls prey to the same accusation, Neither book offers a history of marriage, but both use ideological interpretations of history and nature to argue for the norm of heterosexual marriage. The first five chapters of Blankenhorn's book mix history, colonial anthropology, neuroscience and cross-cultural analysis to argue that one-man/one-woman marriage is a near-universal institution. Fox-Genovese's historical survey is even more general, organized vaguely to move from Genesis ("male and female God created them"), to a literary analysis of 19th-century novels and the turn to romantic love, to the 20th-century denouement of marriage as a personal choice.

Historical changes that each find disturbing, whether the reduction of marriage to a private relationship in the past century or the increased number of working mothers in recent decades, are described as unprecedented, ominous or cataclysmic. Civilization itself stands at a precipice. Blankenhorn divides history into two sexual cultures--a prehistoric culture of "prostitution, cohabitation, and males as inseminators-not-fathers" and an enlightened culture of marriage where men become nurturing fathers and lifelong husbands. The origins of social fatherhood and marriage "coincide with the origins of civilization."

Fox-Genovese sees marriage as the "fulcrum of civilization, the threshold between nature and culture." From this angle, society is on the brink of a slide into a Hobbesian existence where people are susceptible to "every imaginable sexual practice." Fox-Genovese says same-sex marriage "will decisively contribute to disaggregating all of the remaining social institutions" that protect people from harm.

A similar leap occurs in both writers' interpretation of nature. Blankenhorn believes, for example, that he has found the "biochemical foundations" of the social form of marriage for humans in the female's lack of estrus, her "forward-tilting" vagina and her capacity for orgasm, and in the "unusually large" (by comparison with a gorilla) male penis--all destined to make heterosexual intercourse a more enticing project for humans. "These brain-and-hormone phenomena help to create and reinforce a particular family structure"--the male-female childbearing unit.

Fox-Genovese uses doctrine instead of biological science to ground her position. Sexuality is not infinitely plastic, as some cultural theorists claim. Fixed gender roles are a product of "natural or divine order," recognized by every society except our own as a foundational "biological" fact.

Perhaps most serious for those in religious communities is the use or misuse of religion. Blankenhorn believes that his definition of marriage does not depend on any particular religion. But defining marriage is not so simple. As Emory professor Mark Jordan observes, "Marriage is a topic uniquely suited to disrupt any distinction between secular and sacred." Putting "legal issues over here and theological issues over there" cannot be done. The most we can hope for, he argues, "is to be wary about the confusion of legal and religious issues."

Religion surfaces in Blankenhorn's book mostly to support his views, for example, that a main theme of the Hebrew scriptures is the establishment of patriarchal fatherhood or that the world's great religions share a common marriage heritage that dates back to early Egyptian and Mesopotamian society. Fox-Genovese directly links her adult conversion to Catholicism (she used to be a Marxist) to her impatience with feminism, her "horror at abortion" and her views on marriage, but her references to religion are anything but intellectually informed. One essay is mostly an ode to John Paul II. Scriptures from Genesis, the Gospels and Paul are dropped in mostly as proof texts. Her nostalgia for a "common or shared faith" in society is a longing for a very particular Christian faith and seems ill-informed about the many religions and forms of Christianity now shaping U.S. society.

Does feminism or same-sex marriage really undermine marriage or foreshadow the end of civilization? Radical women and flamboyant homosexuals are easy (and ancient) targets, but neither undermines heterosexual marriage more than an array of other factors, such as financial instability, emotional dysfunction, unfair distribution of domestic labor, widespread divorce, interreligious differences and intercultural conflict. To portray same-sex and heterosexual commitment as mutually exclusively seems more a tactic of fear than one of love and grace.

In debating the family we have to talk about how our deepest fears shape our views. We need to assume greater care for language and rhetoric. We need greater appreciation for the influence of religion and the complexities of interpreting history and nature. And ultimately Christians need solutions to the debate over marriage that are win-win rather than win-lose.

One of the few historical observations on which there is a large consensus is that companionate marriage of the last 150 years--in which the marriage relationship is based on intimate love alone-- has created more problems than it has solved, carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction. A private sentiment of love alone is a precarious basis for long-lasting commitment. Theologians have long recognized this and have sanctified marriage as a social institution whose rules sometimes need to take precedence over individual needs.

On this point there is something to be learned from Blankenhorn and Fox-Genovese. We do need a fuller public discussion of the meaning of marriage. Definitions have become vacuous. Children are often casualties. Marriage is more than a personal choice determined by individual wishes or a legal right that awards benefits. Marriage seeks to secure larger social goods that those on all sides should take seriously--social order, sexual loyalty, lifelong commitment, the contributions of fathers and the shared adult responsibility for slowly developing offspring.

Upholding the social institution of heterosexual marriage, however, is not Christianity's only or even primary conviction. Besides recognizing the complexity of scripture and history when it comes to family values, Christian theology cautions against glorifying marriage and families. The social institution of family is not an end in itself or an ultimate good. It is a fallible institution and a preliminary and vulnerable means to the greater aim of seeking God's realm on earth. As Jewish prophets, early Christians, Reformed Protestants and neo-orthodox theologians have all insisted, social institutions like church, state and family can support common goods, but they can also control, pervert and destroy them.

The gospel presents a more encompassing mandate--a preferential option for the poor, vulnerable and oppressed. Christians must ask who is harmed besides children by the collapse of social institutions and by their tyranny. Centuries ago, widows, orphans and aliens fell outside the shelter of society's familial order. Jewish law and prophets called the Israelites to the obligation to care for them. Jesus asked his followers to care for those who threatened normal religious and family structures. Today those most frequently accused in marriage debates of overthrowing the social order are women and homosexuals.

Whatever legal and public policy solutions are reached in the coming years, Christians need to find a social, political and religious way to secure the well-being of women and children, involve fathers in the lives of their children, and support gays and lesbians who want to establish committed relationships and receive the benefits and blessings that go with this commitment. There is good reason to affirm the value of heterosexual marriage for children and society. But there is no valid Christian excuse for restricting the social goods of marriage to heterosexuals. Striving to reconcile these diverse convictions, Christian scholars just might make what Christian ethicist Sondra Wheeler dubs the "festival of mutual recrimination" in the marriage debate a bit more constructive, even if more demanding.

The Human Web: Reflections on the State of Pastoral Theology

After completing graduate work in religion and psychology, I found myself teaching pastoral care at a seminary. In making that transition I experienced two surprises. The first was the jolt of moving from the academic study of religion and social science to the peculiar discipline of pastoral theology. Although I had had clinical training and professional experience in chaplaincy and pastoral psychotherapy, I had never had an actual course in pastoral care or pastoral theology, nor had many of my courses emphasized pastoral congregational practices. This was not just a personal quirk. The field of pastoral theology is expected to be more oriented toward ministerial practice than other disciplines; at the same time, it has struggled with the ambiguities of its identity. The routine use of the psychological sciences in the past few decades, while helpful, has also complicated the struggle.

The second blow was encountering a student body that was approximately 50 percent women and 50 percent black. Although I had a personal interest in listening to other voices, none of my graduate school courses had required a text by a woman or by a person of color. In a society increasingly aware of the ways in which gender, race, class and worldview shape our ways of knowing, my good intentions quickly proved to be insufficient in working with such diversity.

Both shocks represent significant issues in pastoral theology. It is a field that is still trying to clarify its identity in relation to the academy and the church and its methods in relation to the social sciences. And now it must do so while taking heed of the many new voices that are contributing new perceptions of pastoral care. Both issues deserve comment.

Whereas biblical studies experienced the challenge of modernity in terms of historical-critical approaches to scripture, pastoral theology experienced it in terms of the emergence of psychology and sociology as disciplines. For the past four decades pastoral theology’s toehold in seminaries has depended to a considerable degree on its use of clinical psychology. Pastoral theologians may have felt uneasy about the ethos of pop psychology and self-analysis, but they flourished within it. Whereas in 1939 few theological schools offered counseling courses, by the 1950s almost all of them did. And 80 percent listed additional courses in psychology and had at least one psychologist on staff. For a brief period in the 1960s and ‘70s, Carl Roger’s Counseling and Psychotherapy was a standard text, and the fundamentals of empathic, reflective listening were a staple of introductory pastoral care courses. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Howard Clinebell’s variations on this theme, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling, replaced Rogers as the conventional introductory text. Although the first edition situates modern pastoral care within the long history of pastoral ministry, most of the text is devoted to particular counseling techniques for an array of problems.

The widespread use of psychology has fostered questions about how pastoral theology can be both a genuinely theological and a scientifically psychological discipline. This identity crisis is readily apparent in the assorted job titles. We may teach pastoral care, pastoral counseling, pastoral psychology, pastoral theology, practical theology, religion and psychology, psychology of religion, religion and personality or religion and culture. As these titles indicate, the discipline has been roughly divided between those who emphasize practical care and counseling approaches, those engaged in the critical correlation of theology and the social sciences, and those involved in the social scientific study of religious experience. Meanwhile, among our colleagues the turn to psychology has generated stereotypes of the field as skill- and feeling-oriented and as therapeutically shrewd. Among clergy, this approach has generated a reliance on psychological jargon and counseling techniques rather than on theological language, pastoral mediation and congregational care. On these accounts, there is some reason for critique.

Part of the appeal of psychology has been its ability to bridge the distance between human suffering on the one hand and theology, philosophy and ethics on the other. During my graduate years, clinical training in both chaplaincy and pastoral psychotherapy was one way to bridge the gap between academy and church, although it received no official academic credit. When I began teaching I tried—against the pressures of institutional structures—to maintain positions both in the seminary and in a pastoral counseling center. Without some kind of pastoral practice, I realized, my efforts in theological education were going to become a noisy gong.

I was intrigued, however, by the fact that few of my colleagues in other fields felt the same tug. Why shouldn’t those interviewing for positions in biblical studies, ethics or theology be asked about their pastoral practice? How do other seminary faculty resolve the gap between academic theory and ministerial practice?

Pastoral theology discovered in the social sciences a fresh model of how to relate theory and practice. In many respects, figures like Freud, Heinz Kohut, Elisabeth Külbler-Ross and M. Scott Peck write like sophisticated practical theologians. It was no accident that when a friend in the midst of a marital crisis reached for a book, he bought one of Anne Wilson Schaef’s popular titles. Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying has been recommended more frequently by pastors and chaplains than any religious or theological text. Therapeutic-oriented books have reigned in part because they offer clarification: they translate theories of human nature, fulfillment and anguish into understandable terms. Pastoral theology took up this helpmate both to its benefit and its detriment. Though it avoided theological abstraction and academic trivialization, it was lured toward technique, theological vacuousness and an individualistic, subjectivist orientation.

Most theological educators would still assert that empathic listening skills and sensitive individual counsel are prerequisites for ministry. But significant changes are afoot, symbolized both by the apparent decline in the popularity of Clinebell’s text and the publication of a revised edition of it. Most teachers have added to their repertoire the theories of more recent schools of psychology such as family systems and Heinz Kohut’s self psychology. More critically, the focus on individual counseling and eductive listening has come under criticism from a variety of angles; the prevalence of counseling courses has waned: "pastoral theology" has replaced "pastoral psychology" as the overarching theme; and the notion of care has returned to center stage, with counseling regarded as an important but not comprehensive specialty. Finally, almost everyone acknowledges the limits of the therapeutic paradigm and talks about sharpening our understanding not just of theological paradigms but of the social context as well, through the study of sociology, ethics, culture and public policy. Specialized professions that rely on therapeutic paradigms, such as chaplaincy and pastoral psychotherapy, will be understood increasingly as only two of the manifestations of pastoral theology.

The focus on care narrowly defined as counseling has shifted to a focus on care understood as part of a wide cultural, social and religious context. This shift is evident in a variety of recent publications, among them James Poling’s The Abuse of Power, Pamela Couture’s Blessed Are the Poor and Larry Graham’s Care of Persons, Care of World. Anton Boisen’s powerful metaphor for the existential subject of pastoral theology was the "living human document." Today, the "living human web" suggests itself as a better term for the appropriate object for investigation, interpretation and transformation. Public policy issues that determine the health of the human web are as important as issues of individual emotional well-being. Psychology will serve a less exclusive (though still important) role, while social sciences such as economics or political science will become powerful tools of interpretation.

The world of parish ministry has offered a little-recognized wealth of insight for teaching, and recent congregational studies have also begun to confirm the congregational nature of pastoral care. Aware of the limits of relying on one-to-one counseling and the expertise of the pastor, the pastoral care curriculum has focused increasingly on how congregations provide care and on clergy as developers of networks of care rather than as the chief sources of care. For instance, Roy Steinhoff Smith, professor of pastoral care at Phillips Graduate Seminary in Oklahoma, requires students to work together in small groups in his introductory courses to evaluate their different congregations as "caring communities."

In the midst of this shift, related changes are occurring in pastoral counseling. On the one hand, pastoral therapy has acquired the status of a clinical profession. On the other hand, in part because of its relationship to religion, it does not have the kind of recognition accorded secular therapeutic professions. And despite the notable contributions of clinical pastoral education and pastoral psychotherapy, many chaplains and pastoral therapists have tenuous relationships with seminaries and congregations. As the pastoral theology curriculum in seminaries broadens and as the clinical identity of pastoral counseling solidifies, pastoral counseling training centers will have to address questions about their ministerial, educational and institutional place in relation to the congregation, academy and society. To be taken seriously by other mental health disciplines as well as by insurance companies and governmental structures, pastoral psychotherapy must develop its own evaluative criteria. To be taken seriously by churches and seminaries, it will have to affirm its connections and contributions to ministry and theological discourse.

Maxine Glaz has provocatively observed that the move away from psychology in pastoral theology may be part of an "impetus to avoid issues of gender" Just when women in pastoral theology begin to find feminist psychology an incisive tool for reconstructing pastoral care and theology, she suggests, the "people of a dominant perspective emphasize a new theme or status symbol"

The criticism points to the difficulty of bringing diverse voices into play. Criticism of the individualistic focus of pastoral care has come in part from feminist theology and black theology. Few books in pastoral theology have addressed issues of gender, race and class. Even the recent history of pastoral care by E. Brooks Holifield sees women, slaves and "others" primarily as the objects of care, rarely as caregivers and never as the source of new ideas. Some, like Clinebell, have revised their basic texts to add new sections on "transcultural" perspectives. David Augsberger’s Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures has received wide acclaim. But such books represent—as the authors acknowledge—dominant perspectives. Augsberger’s definition of an otherwise helpful idea, "interpathy," is a good illustration of the problem. He uses the term to encourage entering into a "second culture" with respect for that culture "as equally as valid as one’s own." Many feminists and people of color have pointed out that the subordinates in a society already intimately know the realities of two worlds, that of their own and that of the dominant group. Augsberger’s interpathy is absolutely necessary, but it is a trait relevant for the dominant culture. Those in the "second culture" have been practicing this maneuver for a long time. Their first step, by contrast, is to affirm their own reality as worthy of equal respect.

Despite the pastoral nature of much feminist theology and careful treatments of specific issues in pastoral care such as abuse or spirituality, there is no book by a single author on pastoral theology from a woman’s or a feminist perspective. Such texts are on the way. These problems are less severe for black theology, as a consequence of contributions from scholars with long tenure in the academy such as Archie Smith and Edward Wimberly. Still, wider recognition and reliance upon their work has been slow in coming. On the other hand, because of the limited size of the discipline, women and people of color are closer to the center of the field than is the case in other fields.

What will it mean to bring new voices into play? Women in Travail and Transition: A New Pastoral Care offers an indication. Edited by Glaz and Jeanne Stevenson Moessner, the book includes the work of five authors in ministerial settings and four in the academy. The book aims to nurture intellectual acuity in the midst of pastoral practice. Almost every man who has read this text in my courses testifies that it powerfully illumines women’s lives. Women students want to send multiple copies to their ministerial colleagues, men and women alike.

Emma Justes states that if clergy are unable to travel the route of hearing women’s anger, of exploring with women the painful depths of experiences of incest and rape, or enabling women to break free from cultural stereotypes that define their existence," they should not be doing pastoral counseling with women. When those involved in pastoral care do not know how to recognize the realities of violence toward women, they foster further damage and violence. Pastoral care givers must sharpen their sensitivity to the stress that women experience as wage-earners and homemakers, the economic devaluation of women in the workplace, the health issues of concern to women, and the implications of female images of God for self-esteem.

These kinds of understandings are merely a beginning. The authors of Women in Travail, all white professional women in mainline faiths, invite "companion volumes written by nonwhite, ethnic, non-middle-class women within Western culture and by other women elsewhere throughout the world." No Hispanic, Asian, African or American Indian pastoral care and theology has been published. And no one text deals with the pastoral agenda for men that might include issues such as fear, anger and grief over role changes, vocational confusion or tensions between work and family. Protestant pastoral theology and related clinical associations have all but ignored rich traditions and histories of pastoral theology in Roman Catholic, Jewish, evangelical and other circles.

We cannot predict what difference other stories and traditions will make to general formulations of the field. When we admit that knowledge is seldom universal or uniform, and that truth is contextual and tentative, we discover a host of methodological, pedagogical and practical questions. In some ways, teaching and ministry become harder, professors and clergy more vulnerable. We find that we do not yet have the right texts to assign in our classes or the right answers in the pastoral office.

We do know that we can no longer ignore an author’s or a parishioner’s identity and location. A "living human web" cannot simply be read and interpreted like a document. Those within the web who haven’t yet spoken must speak for themselves. Gender, feminist and black studies all verify the knowledge of the underprivileged, the outcast, the underclass and the silenced. If knowledge depends upon power, then power must be turned over to the silenced. This lesson—that we must hear voices of the marginalized from within their own contexts—is one that pastoral theologians have known all along, but perhaps never articulated in quite this way.

The methods of pastoral theology demonstrate the value of a "thick description" as a fundamental beginning point for all the fields of theological study. Standing explicitly between academy, church and society, those in pastoral theology know intimately the limits of academic exercises, and they know the limits of knowledge apart from context. On both scores, pastoral theology is challenging theology and theological education to reconsider their foundations.

Praising the Triune God: Beyond Gender?

BOOK REVIEW:

Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism.

Edited by Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. Eerdmans, 337 pp., $21.95 paperback.

The 18 authors in this collection ask whether the feminist revision of Christian language changes classical Christian doctrines (especially the Trinity) beyond recognition. The answers vary. Robert W. Jenson says that feminists who want alternative names to "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" are "enemies of the church" and strongly implies that they are heretics. Janet Martin Soskice allows for alternative ways of naming while suggesting that "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" be used as well. Geoffrey Wainwright allows for alternatives, but insists that churches use "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" at key points of Christian worship such as baptisms, eucharistic prayers, creeds and ordinations. In one of the most irenic articles of the book, Thomas Hopko, a Greek Orthodox priest and professor, speaks confessionally of the importance of traditional triune naming for Orthodox churches, without condemning some variation in naming God.

The spectrum of views is sometimes startling: Elizabeth Achtemeier denounces women for divinizing the human when they use female language for God, whereas Hopko holds that deification of the human is a positive outcome of relationship with the triune God. But almost all the authors are reserved about feminist theology. Feminist theology is viewed at best as a strong spice to be used sparingly; at worst, as a poison to the faith.

Is Speaking the Christian God an example of backlash against the feminist movement? Is it inspired by the desire to fortify the bastions of male supremacy? I suspect backlash when angry polemic is joined with distortions and spurious arguments. At least three of the authors cite Jewish or pagan feminists to build up their argument that Christian feminist theology is post-Christian; this is hardly responsible scholarship. Some authors, such as Blanche A. Jenson, are responsible in their methodology, fairly representing the thinking of specific feminists they question. Other authors caricature Christian feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, quoting them out of context without regard for the overall direction of their thought.

Some authors, especially Thomas Torrance, use masculine language for God and humanity so constantly that it is hard to believe that they are willing to give any ground in response to feminist claims for justice. Two of the authors even argue that using feminine pronouns for the divine introduces gender in a way that masculine pronouns do not—which surely reflects the assumption that maleness is normative. It is telling that Letty Russell, whose thought is solidly trinitarian and feminist, is mentioned only three times in passing in this lengthy book, and only one author considers Patricia Wilson-Kastner’s careful work in Faith, Feminism and the Christ. The contributors avoid evidence that does not support their thesis that feminism is dangerous to the church. Only four of the authors are women, and one of them (Elizabeth A. Morelli) does not discuss the Trinity at all. Either there is a male bias in selection of authors, or women theologians who think feminism endangers Christian faith are rare. It seems evident that in Speaking the Christian God backlash is at play to some degree among some authors.

At its best, however, the book challenges Christian feminists to exercise care in the task of language revision. If, as I hope, feminist and inclusive approaches to faith and worship are here to stay, then reflection and refinement are needed. Twenty years have passed since the first inclusive-language worship resources were published; most North American denominational hymnals or books of worship make some attempt at language revision. A sufficient body of material exists to merit reflection and critique as churches continue to inch their way toward more inclusive language. Provisional solutions (such as "Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer" for "Father, Son, Spirit") must be questioned and replaced or augmented by better alternatives. It is right to ask, as do the authors of Speaking the Christian God, whether the faith we are passing on to the next generation is in continuity with the faith of the past, even as it is continually reformed. If we avoid the difficult questions this book raises, we risk undermining our witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But who is Jesus Christ? The question that provoked trinitarian thought in the first place is certainly the most important question to address in relation to this book.

Is Jesus Christ mainly to be remembered as the one who commanded his disciples to call God "Father"? One would certainly get that impression from reading this book. One author after another, in more or less sophisticated ways, advances the argument that because Jesus called God "Father," Christians must always call God "Father," at least when doing something important like baptizing or gathering around the table of the risen Christ.

Under closer scrutiny, the argument that we must call God "Father" because Jesus did is open to question. If we are not compelled in every prayer to ask for daily bread, why must every prayer begin with "Our Father"? How do we know Jesus never called God "Mother"? (He does just that in some reliable early Christian sources.) Why can we more easily call God "a mighty fortress" than a "mother eagle," when both images are based in scripture? Why, in considering Jesus’ parables, do we so often identify God with the prodigal father but rarely with the woman searching for the lost coin? Long traditions of calling God "Father," together with cultural biases that value maleness more than femaleness, are at work.

This brings us to the question of scripture interpretation. Alvin F. Kimel cites Matthew 28 as evidence that Jesus commanded his disciples to baptize in the name of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." Some of the best early manuscripts read "baptizing in my name." Why doesn’t Kimel, in his very scholarly article, admit this evidence? The authors often cite scripture, but, as in this case, do not make their hermeneutic explicit, seeming to apply a very literalistic method without much benefit from biblical scholarship. (Kimel also betrays ignorance of contemporary liturgical scholarship when he uses the term "command," harking back to Reformation understandings of the sacraments as "ordinances" we must obey rather than gifts for which we give thanks.)

The authors are most helpful when they focus not on proof texts from Jesus’ teaching but on our relationship of praise and devotion to the God incarnate in Jesus Christ. As theologians such as Karl Rahner and Catherine LaCugna have observed, the Trinity becomes meaningful as a teaching of the church when it is understood as a confession of the living, ongoing history of God with us. When understood as reflection on Christian faith and history, trinitarian confession is not a relic from the past but a central aspect of Christian identity. The phrase "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" points to the reality of God with us. Although other terms may be used to witness to this reality, revelation has a threefold structure. The doctrine of the Trinity affirms that Christians have come to know God through the Holy One made known to Israel; through the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and through the Spirit who creates and renews the church and the world. Without affirming what the Trinity has affirmed, Christianity loses its identity and its history. For God (who is one) has really come to us as the Holy One of Israel, as Jesus Christ and as Spirit.

Precisely because God really has come to us, rather than remaining aloof from human life, we can be bold to witness in words that express and nurture contemporary faith. Jesus is not only a teacher who lived long ago, leaving commands behind him. Jesus Christ is the one around whom Christians gather Sunday after Sunday in churches everywhere. Though often neglected in liturgy and hymns (and eclipsed in this volume by the Father-Son dyad), the Spirit also continues to work to liberate and transform all people and all creation. And so, shaped by and grateful for the witness of scripture but free to speak our own words of praise, we can use varied metaphors to speak of God. Because the Trinity is a living reality that embraces us, and no mere abstract doctrine, we are not bound by the liturgical formulations of the past. We are free and responsible to offer God praise with the best language we know.

The nature of the language that Christians use to speak to and about the triune God is, of course, a key issue in the debate. Christian feminists often suggest that language for God is by nature metaphorical (not literal or unchangeable). It draws on images and terms from human experience to describe God, who is both like and unlike any human experience. Authors such as Achtemeier and Wainwright agree that terms like "Father" or "Lord" are metaphors, but consider them revealed and irreplaceable metaphors. Achtemeier also argues that feminine images for God in scripture are similes; they only compare God to a female person, whereas scriptural metaphors actually identify God as King and Father. Thus masculine metaphors, unlike feminine similes, are authoritative for Christian worship. Other authors consider "Father" language about God to be analogical, not metaphorical; God can be called "Father" based on likeness to human fatherhood, though the likeness may be incomplete. Still others would prefer to speak of "Father" as a revealed name for God and encourage Christians not to confuse their experiences of human fathers with their experience of God. In these various ways authors support their claim that God must be called "Father" and never "Mother."

The crucial reality that these authors generally avoid is the human process of learning and comprehending. Some of the authors insist that we should not understand "Father" as a literally male term or that we should bracket all our experiences of fathers when speaking of God as Father. Yet in actual fact, children tend to understand terms rather literally until around ten years of age. In the years when understanding of and relationship to God is being formed, children will think literally on the basis of concrete experience and imagine that God is literally male. This can be difficult to unlearn in later life.

Further, metaphors create meaning by associating one experience with another. If we were to empty the term "Father" of human experience, it could not create meaning at all, and we might as well call God some nonsense term and fill it with any meaning we choose. Third, family life in the U.S. is in crisis. In this cultural context it is dangerous to use parental metaphors for God incessantly, while ignoring the degree to which parent-child relationships are problematic. Significant numbers of people are able to receive the grace and challenge of the gospel only when they hear God addressed in terms other than "Father" or even "Mother." It is only wishful thinking to argue that people ought not to associate such terms with their own experiences of parent-child relationships.

Whether "Father" is a metaphor, simile, analogy or name, the term cannot create meaning without some degree of association with human father-child relationships. Constant liturgical use of masculine language for God cannot help giving the impression that God is more male than female, no matter what theologians believe we ought to experience. If we are interested in leading people to a living relationship with the triune God, we cannot avoid the difficult question of whether the language we use actually helps us do that. These authors often ask us to avoid messy questions about how human experience affects the way we hear the language of praise, prayer and proclamation. We dare avoid these questions only if we are more interested in protecting tradition than in nurturing living faith.

The authors are right, however, to point to the danger of projecting our own image on God. If we create our own language for God, are we not in danger of creating God in our own image? If we do not use terms from scripture and tradition, are we not in danger of conceiving a God who only comforts and does not challenge us? A domesticated God who is like us without also standing in contrast to our unloving and unjust ways is surely an idol.

It is fascinating to note that both Christian feminists and their detractors accuse each other of idolatry. Christian feminists often argue that the exclusively masculine God of tradition is an idolatrous projection of male patriarchs, and that those who refuse to revise tradition are fleeing from the prophetic claims to justice. In turn, Garrett Green, Thomas Torrance and other writers in this volume accuse feminists of wanting to project their own image on God. These claims and counterclaims point to the need for a sense of our own limits in speaking of God, whether we are defending or challenging tradition. At times the debate about religious language seems like a pitched battle between political camps of the left and the right. Mutual respect, shared power, dialogue and patience with the process are needed. Yet unless we are all drawn toward something larger than ourselves—toward the One who calls us toward praise, love, community and justice—we will be preoccupied by petty battles and claims and counterclaims. Ultimately, the purpose of trinitarian thought and language is to move us toward lives of praising God and fulfilling God’s purposes for us.

Before the trinitarian and christological debates in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians sang praise in language that was quite fluid while also at least implicitly trinitarian. Liturgical use of "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and the Holy Ghost," and "I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" became more rigid and formulaic in various regions as a result of theological debates. Use of formulas has been required to demonstrate orthodoxy of belief and validity of sacraments. Thus when we think of trinitarian language in worship, such formulas come immediately to mind.

But if the real task of trinitarian language is to open us to the reality of the God made known in Jesus Christ through the Spirit, we may need to go deeper than formulas to find the language of witness, thanksgiving and praise. Consider Charles Wesley’s text "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling." The hymn is addressed to Jesus, who is named as "pure, unbounded love"; the singer prays, "Breathe, 0 breathe thy loving Spirit into every troubled breast." Then love divine is addressed as "Almighty" (the first person of the Trinity) and asked to come to deliver us and to "let us all thy life receive." The hymn ends with the prayer that God (Christ/Spirit/Almighty) will finish the new creation in us that we may take our place in heaven, "lost in wonder, love, and praise." This text may do more to witness to trinitarian faith than a stereotyped doxology does, though hymnal indexes rarely list it among hymns about the Trinity. The hymn expresses a living and transformative relationship with the triune God; it is fully doxological and directed toward lives that glorify God. Wesley’s hymn is grounded in salvation history. It makes no use of traditional masculine language, yet it witnesses powerfully to the triune God.

As this hymn shows, trinitarian faith has been expressed in a variety of ways. Most authors in Speaking the Christian God allow for some variation in imagery for the Trinity, so long as the language of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" remains central. Indeed, many of the hymnals, worship books and feminist theologians that the authors criticize make room for some naming of God as "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" so long as masculine imagery is not overly dominant. Thus one could ask the authors exactly how often and at what points the Trinity must be called "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" without compromising the faith; one could also ask feminists how often and in what contexts one could invoke that naming without supporting male dominance. I believe that the best solution is to balance traditional masculine naming with feminine and nongendered naming, without reserving certain places for masculine language. I assume that this involves a gradual process of education, dialogue and critique in local parishes.

Speaking the Christian God may be of some use to local church pastors and worship leaders who address these questions week by week and evaluate alternative trinitarian naming. For example, Stephen M. Smith reviews some alternative eucharistic texts for the Episcopal Church, texts that speak of God giving birth to creation. His concern that this implies that creation is one substance with God is worth considering. Worship leaders may also want to ponder Wainwright’s critique of "Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer" as a common replacement for the traditional trinitarian formula. Wainwright argues that this revised formula risks confusing the persons of the Trinity, since all persons of the Trinity participate in creating, redeeming and sustaining. He also points out that using the formula "Creator, Christ, and Spirit" risks the misunderstanding that Christ and Spirit are creatures (since the traditional formula functioned to speak of the interrelations of the persons as well as their relation to creation). I would add that "Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer" could hardly be called an evocative metaphorical statement.

Such arguments could help worship leaders to consider whether the language of worship is adequately grounded in the revelation of God as Holy One, Christ, and Spirit. Unfortunately, the authors in this collection almost always turn to "Father, Son, and Spirit" as the only faithful way to name the divine; they do not suggest alternatives that they would accept, even as a complement to traditional naming. They help with the critique but not with the enrichment of contemporary feminist and inclusive naming of the divine.

How can we find words for praise and commitment to the triune God to complement "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit"? Scripture is a rich resource. It offers phrasing such as "the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit" (2 Cor. 13:13, abridged). It also offers a depth of understanding of God as Source, Christ, and Spirit that few churches have plumbed; each church tends to emphasize scripture witness to one person of the Trinity and minimize the rest.

Tradition is also an important source. For example, Jean Janzen draws upon the teaching of Julian of Norwich in a hymn addressed to "Mothering God/Mothering Christ/Mothering Spirit." Drawing on the same source, New York’s Riverside Church baptizes "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Mother of us all." And we must look not only to the past, but also to contemporary experiences of faith to find words to praise the God of Jesus Christ. For this, I recommend the poets, whose task is always to find new words to praise the One whose steadfast love endures forever. Hymn writers such as Janzen, Carl Daw, Sylvia Dunstan, Shirley Erena Murray, Thomas Troeger and Brian Wren express trinitarian praise in imaginative, varied and faithful ways. These writers, whose work appears in denominational hymnals or single-author collections, provide models for complementing the well-worn phrase "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" in our worship and thanksgiving.

I believe that the churches must complement traditional naming of God with feminine and nongendered language. In this way they will witness more clearly to the gospel and withdraw support from the injustice of sexism. Faithfulness to the gospel and continuity with Christian tradition are also at stake, so critiques such as the ones voiced in Speaking the Christian God deserve consideration. So long as readers are alert to the dangers of backlash and methodological distortion, they may find it a useful articulation of questions yet to be adequately answered.

Speaking the Truth to Our Children

Some years ago a young woman who had confessed to cheating on an exam came by my office to say that she didn’t think she should be suspended because she hadn’t meant any harm. I said: "Mary, there’s not an awful lot I can do about it. The institution has certain standards, and I would have thought that you did, too." She replied: "Dr. Robison, I’m sure I have standards. I just don’t know what they are."

She didn’t know it, but she spoke for an entire society. We claim to have high moral and ethical standards, but we just don’t always know what they are.

Soon after he became secretary of education, William Bennett announced that he believed students were being "ripped off" by American colleges and universities. "Most colleges promise to make you better culturally and morally," he said, "but it is not evident that they do so. They are not delivering on their promises."

I found his claim more than a little bit outrageous, so I wrote an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe in which I argued that colleges may do many dumb things, but promising to improve people morally is not one of them. "Our goal, Mr. Bennett, is more modest," I wrote.

It is to provide a climate, an environment, in which the most exemplary values can flourish and the less desirable attributes have a harder time of it. We hope to make our colleges and our society more hospitable to generosity of spirit and dedication to honest and disciplined inquiry.

Any educator knows that few people actually change their ethical and moral values in college. On the campus we work with what we get. In most things we reflect the values of our society.

There is no prospect of graduating young adults who are morally strong, ethically concerned and generously dedicated to the public good unless one admits 18 year olds who already possess those qualities. Frankly, the only realistic goal I see is that we provide an environment in which the best of these inclinations can mature and flourish and the less worthy characteristics do not.

It is wishful thinking to assume that the educational system can assume the responsibility of passing to the next generation the central and binding values, as well as the moral and ethical concepts, that set us free to be who we can be. Schools and colleges can impart civic responsibility, an appreciation of the law, and intellectual and social skills, but there is no consensus in the academic community to support any role beyond that.

The teaching of values in our society is not primarily the responsibility of our schools; it is primarily the responsibility of parents and churches. Perhaps one of the reasons that we are now asking schools to teach values is that we have failed to teach them ourselves.

There is good reason for our ineffectiveness: we don’t know what we want. Though we are eloquent in our discontents, frustrations, allegations of failure and prophecies of doom, we are tongue-tied and inarticulate about what we want.

It is not that we are uncaring—far from it. But people have work to do, livings to make, children to raise, and pressures and demands that sap their energies. Thus, it isn’t surprising that most of us search for a sane voice to put words around those issues that we know ought to concern us.

Where can we find the voice of sanity, clarity, conviction and vision in a society that reduces all messages to sound bytes and bumper stickers, billboards and lapel pins? Who will sound the call for mental work and disciplined choice when so many labels are available to declare choice and position without having to think? Who will make us think, when it is so easy not to?

I have a neighbor and colleague who is an accomplished poet. His constant message to his students is: "First you must find your voice. Without a distinctive voice, what you have to say will not be heard."

Our distinctive voice is in the rich tradition that we have inherited and of which we are the custodians. Only there can we find the substance and language in which to express whatever we have to say.

If we have something to say about the timeless enemies of the human condition—injustice, ignorance, bigotry, exploitation, hunger, war—we will fail if we try to sound like every other voice in the public realm instead of using our language and tradition.

When we buy into the language of the day, we also swallow the values that shape the language. For instance, ours is a society obsessed with the adversarial model of human relations, and we have bought into it. Rare is the sermon without sports metaphors. We talk of winners and losers, we equate worth with winning, and in the end we wind up telling our children in a thousand ways that winning is what matters. Shame on us!

We in the church cannot speak clearly to our age because we have been seduced by its definitions of success. The church’s ideas of success are not markedly different from those of any other institution in our society. Our measures of accomplishment reflect rather than lead—and our children get the message.

I suggest that we turn to the Quakers for guidance, and accept their old and constant charge: to speak truth to power, adding to that charge the task of speaking truth also to privilege and comfort. Then we will have truth to speak to our children.

Ours is a society in which neither end of the political spectrum speaks much truth to anything. The liberals among us seem blindly committed to the limitless possibilities of good intentions. And the conservatives have lulled themselves into believing that good manners are the same thing as social conscience.

But how can we speak truth to power when we spend our energies in fighting the same battles with each other that the church has been fighting for centuries? How can we speak truth to power when we have abandoned the powerful language of our past and acquiesced in trivializing the powerful and revolutionary message of Christ into bumper sticker messages like, "Honk if you love Jesus."?

And who will speak truth to power when the White House itself, with great cynicism, conducts a deliberate disinformation campaign, lying to the American people, the press and the world? It was appropriate, they said, because their campaign was directed against Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi. The implicit message is that lying is OK if it addresses an evil. Moreover, the White House response to the outrage of the press was to call for lie-detector tests to see who leaked the story.

Where is the prophet Nathan when we need him?

Who will speak truth to privilege in a society in which the disparities between the rich and poor grow more pronounced daily? Surely there is nothing on which the message of Jesus is more powerful, clear and direct than that privilege carries responsibility and that wealth is the ultimate seduction.

In which of our churches or colleges does the voice of the rich man not carry more weight than that of his less-affluent neighbor?

Who will say, "Of him to whom much is given, much is required"? Who in a free society will say that conferring privilege is a secular version of grace? Who will set our children free from the myth of privilege articulated by Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof "When you’re rich, they think you really know."

Where is Amos when we need him?

Who will speak truth to comfort when it requires speaking to ourselves? Who will tell our young people that comfort as a goal is unworthy of the Christian tradition and of those who built this nation? Who will tell them that comfort dulls one’s sensitivity to the needs of others? Who will tell them that comfort takes the edge off that Puritan commitment to accomplishment that is their birthright? And who will tell them that comfort is the enemy of stamina and the companion of indifference?

Where are the prophets when we need them?

By speaking the truth to power, privilege and comfort we, by example, speak truth to our children, instilling in them the values of our rich tradition. In the process, we teach them that courage and the ability to make choices are not accidental.

They know that before winning the marathon, one has to start running. They know that, in order to be a great poet, one must first write poems, that great musicians blossom only after years of practice. Why, then, should we allow them to believe that, at some future moment of great ethical and moral choice, they can rise to the occasion if they’ve never had to face difficult choices before? One rises to moments of tough ethical choices only when one has made difficult decisions as a child, a teen-ager, a student. Responsible choices do not come accidentally.

On the day before the Watergate hearings began, Senator Sam Ervin happened to be at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where I was then working. That night I said, "Senator, we all look for a great deal from you tomorrow, it must be a tremendous weight." With no arrogance whatsoever, he looked at me and said: "Son, all my life I’ve been preparing for this moment. I am ready."

Each fall on parents’ weekend at Middlebury, I speak in the chapel. Almost every year when I’m fielding questions, some parent will stand up and say: "My son or daughter is having a very good experience here, and I really appreciate it. However, I’ve looked at your college catalogue, and I want to know why you don’t do more on the free-enterprise system. I don’t think you’re doing enough." There’s a rustle in the room. Not wanting to disturb the pleasant atmosphere of the weekend with a philosophical debate, I simply respond: "Why don’t you leave them alone? They’re going to grow up and be just like you."

Of course, that’s the problem—they’re going to grow up and be just like us. I don’t know if we want that or not. But if we’re to talk about education and values, then let us not pretend that the charge can be laid at someone else’s door before it is first laid at our own.

Stress and Purpose: Clergy Spouses Today

More than two decades ago in The Minister's Wife: Person or Position? (Abingdon, 1966) 1 wrote about a group of nine clergy spouses who met weekly to share their hopes and hurts, difficulties and dreams. At the time none of them worked outside the home, and each one's self-image was linked strongly to the role of minister's wife.

Today those women would tell a different story. Those who remain clergy spouses see themselves as committed laypersons, but their self-image is no longer tied to their husbands' ministries. All of them are employed; one is now a minister herself (she and her husband serve different churches): and three are divorced. Eight of the men left the ministry; three recently returned. This group of nine couples can be viewed as reflecting in microcosm the changes that have taken place in clergy families.

Historically, the role of minister's wife offered the chance for full-time Christian service to women who were forbidden to be ministers. It offered a socially appropriate channel for women's leadership gifts and abilities. Accordingly, books for clergy spouses in the 1940s and '50s spoke of the minister's spouse as "high priestess" the "shepherdess," the "uncrowned queen. " But as women's opportunities increased, so did the vision of clergy wives. Charlotte Ross's book "Who Is the Minister's Wife? A Search for Personal Fulfillment (Westminster, 1980), points out that in more recent times, a higher percentage of clergy wives has been employed outside the home than is the case for the general public. Another book, Donna Sinclair's The Pastor's Wife Today (Abingdon, 1981), speaks of the toll of divorce, citing one former clergy spouse who said, "Every time I prayed, I would see the vision of a back door. Finally I went through it."

While clergy wives have been walking out the parsonage door -- psychologically if not physically -- clergy husbands have been walking in, and their role is still unclear. The usual images of and expectations of "the first lady" of the parsonage are not cast upon "the first gentleman," so in this way, too, the identity of clergy spouses is becoming less determined by traditional assumptions.

Despite these changes, however, the role of clergy spouse continues to be influential in the congregation. Clergy spouses touch members' lives in ways positive or negative, of which the former may not even be aware. They are respected and trusted simply because of their relation to the pastor. And though their position in that role is now more likely to be merely one aspect of their lives, rather than the main focus, the situation is still demanding and frequently stressful for them.

In leading retreats and seminars over the years, I have had an opportunity to keep in touch with clergy spouses' changing perceptions of their position and its effects upon their lives. I recently asked some 200 clergy spouses to write anonymous letters expressing the things they would like to say to their congregations if there were no fear of reprisal. These letters certainly do not represent a systematic survey. Yet they do provide some insight into the current situation and concerns of clergy spouses. Judging from the repeated references in the letters, clergy spouses' three major difficulties are: dealing with unrealistic expectations; loneliness; congregations' lack of a sense of urgent purpose.

Unrealistic Expectations. This concern, the most frequently expressed in the anonymous letters (43 per cent), also ranked first for clergy wives in a study done by David and Vera Mace in the late '70s ("Marriage Enrichment for Clergy Couples," Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 30, 1982). Some of the letters indicated that the problem increases when the spouse is employed. They also acknowledged that it is further compounded by unrealistic self-expectations.

Illustrative of how parish expectations take a toll on clergy spouses are these remarks:

"We are expected to give so much. It's hard to give joyfully anymore."

"I wonder if I can hold up any longer under your unrealistic expectations on me and my husband. I'm not willing to let my children grow up without a daddy. If things don't change, then I doubt our calling. I feel sad."

"I was so used up that I wanted to withdraw. I got a full-time job to escape the hassles. This concerns me. I used to be the positive one, excited about ministry, and now I feel like the negative minister's wife I have never understood "

Clergy spouses who do try to limit their activities at church frequently feel that the congregation does not understand their reasons.

"I'd appreciate your understanding of my working outside (and inside) the home which allows me little time to be involved as you'd like me to be in women's circles. (I'm already going in circles.)"

One of the signs of health among clergy spouses is their growing recognition that many of the expectations they attribute to the congregation are actually ones they place on themselves.

"I know a lot of these pressures are self-inflicted ones "

But this awareness does not in itself solve the problems or alleviate the anxiety -- though it does reduce the likelihood of the anxiety's developing into hostility or resentment toward the parish. The previous excerpt continues:

"Sometimes, though, I feel like I'm going to burst under the stress of it all. It would be so good to be able to share these pressures with you, but I feel like you would not understand some of my feelings. I don't mean to sound negative. You have always shown me your great love. I just feel like I'm in this alone "

Though employment demands a large chunk of their time and energy, clergy spouses tend to expect themselves to do just as much at church as before they took a job.

"I'm still having to teach Sunday school and do the music. I celebrate that God has gifted me, but I resent the time it takes "

Even with the awareness that high expectations are often self-inflicted, many clergy spouses still strive to be a super-spouse, super-parent, super-careerperson, super-church partner -- and they end up being super-stressed.

"I expect superhuman perfection from myself. This comes from the saying that your gift to God is giving your best for God. But what happens is I expect too much of myself."

Being aware of the relationship between parsonage-family dynamics and church-family dynamics can reinforce the demands one already feels. Edwin Friedman, in Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (Guilford, 1985), observes that clergy are simultaneously involved in a "triangle of families," which includes their own family, the congregation itself and family units within the congregation; though each of these families is distinct, their emotional forces interlock. Health (what Friedman terms "wholeness") in one of these families can in turn promote health in the others; but unhealthy dynamics also tend to reproduce themselves. Aware that the negative relationships within the church affect the parsonage family, clergy spouses expect themselves to be ballast in the waves of church family problems. Also, knowing that the dynamics within the parsonage family can spill over into the church, creates pressure -- and can foster a sense of guilt -- when such spillover takes place. Sometimes clergy spouses feel they are drowning, and while parishioners stand on the bank expecting them to walk on water, clergy spouses cannot even cry for help, for that would show too much vulnerability.

Loneliness. My reading of the clergy spouse letters points to an increasing sense of loneliness, especially as they are contrasted with the Maces' findings. Not only was loneliness not a major issue in the Maces' study, but they found lack of privacy to be a major concern -- the third-most important. In contrast, the letters I read reveal loneliness as a predominant concern (privacy is mentioned only twice). This reversal can be explained partially by the increasingly harried schedules of all families. Dual-career families don't stay home enough for their privacy to be invaded, and parishioners don't have time to invade it anyway. We travel in our own fast tracks, and though we may want close relationships, we are too weary to take the initiative.

Loneliness also arises from the fact that images and assumptions are still thrust upon clergy spouses, not only in the parish but in the secular world. When I was recently called for jury duty, the attorney, after asking my husband's occupation, repeatedly prefaced his interrogation by saying, "As a minister's wife, I assume you . . " These assumptions and images affect all of our relationships to some degree, at least initially, and can be a continuing obstacle to attaining close relationships. Wrote one spouse:

"Oh how I wish I had a real friend among you to share all these jumbled feelings and thoughts with. Someone to laugh and cry with. Someone who might understand that I can't and don't want to be perfect -- someone who can need me as a friend. Members are afraid to get too close."

Both younger and older clergy spouses expressed this concern:

This is our first church, and after a year with you, I still feel so lonely. Does everyone feel this loneliness? Does it last forever?"

"I wonder if you will like me. Out of this concern I overextend myself. I'm also concerned that I'm so cautious from being in a parsonage so many years that I over-respond to events and personalities and attach strings to others, blocking relationships. "

"Our entire society has grown away from sharing. But there seems to be a sense of fear to reveal one's heart especially in the ministry -- fear of condemnation."

The loneliness of clergy spouses may reflect a growing problem in society as a whole, but the sense of isolation is intensified for clergy spouses because it occurs in the midst of people and activity.

"Do you ever realize how lonesome (in spite of all the activity) the parsonage can be?"

Lack of Urgent Purpose. The third-most frequent concern voiced in the letters was with congregations' lacking a sense of urgent purpose -- a concern that did not appear at all in the Maces' study. This difference may be a result of the shift in spouses' priorities noted by Bonnie Niswander: "their husbands' ministries are no longer the most important thing in their lives" ("Clergy Wives of the New Generation" Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 30, 1982). This new viewpoint freed clergy spouses to participate in church from a faith-centered instead of spouse-centered stance. It broadened their vision of the world beyond the church, and concomitantly shrank their illusions about the world within the church.

Clergy spouses generally have a strong commitment to the church and high expectations of it as the body of Christ. But the typical parish is just that: typical. It is not likely to be an outstanding example of faithfulness. It will resist movements for change, and even develop countermovements to protect itself from change. Clergy spouses (as do clergy) often experience a disturbing gap between what they envision for the community of faith and the reality they actually encounter.

"After 25 years I feel fewer pressures to do, and more freedom to be. I guess my dissatisfaction now is my disappointment in your expectations of yourselves-not getting the vision of your own greatness, or the power of your own commitment. Sometimes I think the ruts you've entrenched for yourselves are insurmountable. "

The inner whisperings revealed in the letters cast judgment on today's community of faith, its lack of fervent commitment and sacrificial zeal. Even a quiet determination to bring the love of God to a small corner of the world seems to get lost in trivialities. In some letters this judgment is soft-spoken:

"I feel like we need to renew our commitment to others -- to begin reaching beyond ourselves again."

In other letters, intense feelings steam from the pages:

"You stymie the church with your pettiness! "

"Don't expect me to attend the women's group, where you dry your eyes after a program on hunger -- and then vote to stash your bazaar money in a C.D.!"

The level of commitment they see in the church troubles clergy spouses partially because of their loyalty to and empathy for their spouses:

"I see so many uncommitted who are willing to let someone else keep things going in the church. Without being too judgmental, I see my spouse being overworked and underappreciated."

Seeing that "the minister is the only one ministering," or that the minister is "continually bumping his head against a brick wall," generates stress, at the very least, and at times gives rise to cynicism.

The demands of ministry also require family sacrifices, as one letter vividly indicates:

We truly love you, but sometimes I don't think you understand the sacrifice we made to go into ministry. We have essentially rescinded our personal, private lives to share in yours. Our future is not in our hands. Our house does not belong to us. Our salary is public knowledge, discussed and decided on as casually as whether to paint the fellowship hall yellow or white."

When clergy spouses are involved in a church with a sense of purpose, the sacrifices are meaningful; they are a gift gladly given. But when the church seems to be adrift, the sacrifices seem pointless.

Henri Nouwen has said that participating in the church is the most important discipline in developing one's spiritual life. Yet for clergy spouses, the very church they love and which nurtures them is also that which can cause pain and stress. Ambivalent feelings toward the church are understandable but still distressing. Perhaps by acknowledging them and understanding them better, we can reduce our sense of isolation and guilt and prevent these feelings from festering into a basically destructive relationship -- not only for the clergy spouses but for all members of a parsonage family, and for the church as a whole.

Wounds of War

You’re going to Germany? Sweet!" That was how news of my deployment was greeted by more than one member of my Air National Guard unit -- the 181st Fighter Wing of the Indiana Air National Guard.

In the military, the initial criteria for evaluating whether an assignment is a good one include its opportunities for travel and sightseeing. Deployments to training bases like Volk Field, Wisconsin, or Gulfport, Mississippi, are met with yawns or pity Trips to war zones -- the "sand box" -- earn you a measure of admiration. Trips to Nellis Air Force Base (next to Las Vegas) or Tripler Army Medical Center (in Hawaii) are greeted with a knowing grin and a slap on the back. A trip to Germany seemed to fall into this latter category. That is, until I described what I would be doing.

I was one of a small number of National Guard chaplains selected for duty at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. This is the major U.S. Army hospital in Germany where the badly injured troops from Iraq and Afghanistan are taken.

Landstuhl serves as the central hospital for the U.S. military in Europe, and real-life challenges to any world-view show up everyday, some battlefield-related and some not. The first night I was on call, the neonatal intensive care unit beeped me and said it had a "demise." A baby born earlier in the day had died and I was to go and be with the family.

When I got there the father was ever so gently swabbing the baby, meticulously cleaning his child’s body. The father was a veteran of war zone deployments and had taken care of many of his buddies when they were injured. Now he was cleaning the child’s little body, working around the tubes, getting the baby ready for the graves registration people. During the next four hours with this young family I prayed with them, stood outside their door as they had time alone with their child, made phone calls to inform the grandparents (at the request of the parents) and kept vigil with the father, who was reluctant to give up his child.

In the eyes of the world this man was a soldier, and our soldiers are often treated like a Rorschach inkblot onto which we project all of our support for, or anger about, U.S. foreign policy. But that night all I saw was a flesh-and-blood man who had just had his heart split open with grief. Here was a son, husband, brother. Not an instrument for some politician’s ego, not an unwitting dupe in some global scheme he cannot comprehend, not an impervious Rambo, Here was a broken man looking for a healing word from his Christian tradition. Here was a man whose heart was just as broken as that of any other father in his shoes -- or boots. I was honored to represent the church to him, wearing the same work clothes that he wore.

I spent a lot of my time in the psychiatric ward. It was not a popular spot for the distinguished visitors who would regularly tour the hospital. Senators and generals were happy to visit those who had physical wounds; they looked on with pride when the wounded were awarded Purple Hearts. In the psych ward, however, the wounds were of the mind and spirit. The wounds did not have the same kind of clarity as those on the other wards, and opportunities for compassion were less straightforward.

Three times a week I led a "Spiritual Wellness" group on 9 Charlie. When I talked with previous chaplains, it became obvious that my predecessors had followed a variety of approaches. Some would start by reading a story -- rabbinical or biblical or secular -- and simply ask the patients to respond. Others would lead a more traditional devotion. I found myself simply asking a few leading questions, such as "What do you want to be free from?" and "What do you want to be free for?"

The point was to get the patients -- typically between six and 20 at a time -- to talk with one another. When one person talked, that often invited the response of others, and soon they were interacting with each other’s life stories. As one of the civilian therapists, the kindly Father Marc, a retired military chaplain and a Roman Catholic priest, told me, the patients mainly heal each other. Facilitating that interaction is the best we can hope for, especially given the fact that most of them will be on the ward for a week or two at most before they are sent either back to the States or back to duty.

It is hard to generalize about the patients. Many had conditions that would be found in any psychiatric ward anywhere in the world, such as depression or bipolar disorder. Many of them had attempted suicide. Several had been devastated by "Dear John" letters or by marital infidelity. As they talked about their realities, many past issues surfaced, such as physical and sexual abuse, or parental neglect and its accompanying low self-esteem.

In our chaplain training for dealing with tragedy, we are told that the greatest predictor of people having a hard time dealing with a trauma is a past history of trauma. If you have problems before going to war, going to war will often make them worse. And many of these men and women had come from "downrange" -- the universal military term to describe the war zone, whether it be Iraq or Afghanistan. "Downrange" is a term that comes from the firing range -- it is the direction of the targets, the place where the bullets hit.

Even without a previous history of trauma or abuse, the experience of being downrange brings its own devastation. One soldier said that he felt he lost his soul when he had to pick up body parts of his friends after they were blown apart by an improvised explosive device (IED). He asked me if he could ever get his soul back. Another soldier said it is impossible to be a Christian in war. Since many in the group were committed Christians, this comment sent a kind of electric shock around the circle. You cannot kill and love at the same time, he said.

Some agreed with this soldier, while others took great offense at his comment. This was one of the few times that I made an explicitly theological intervention in the group, and put aside my role of group facilitator,

I asked the group to think about a soldier in World War II who crosses a hill and beholds the gates of a concentration camp. He sees the guard standing at the gate, and he also sees the gaunt prisoners in their striped uniforms being led into a gas chamber behind the guard. At this point he has a choice, and I asked the group to reflect on this choice.

Let’s suppose, I said, that our soldier is a Christian. Jesus taught that love is to be a sign of his disciples (John 13:35) and further, that love of enemies is to be the defining feature of Christian love -- the very thing that defines Christian perfection (Matt. 5:43-48). And yet it seems that killing will take place before his eyes, one way or another. Either he will do nothing while the inmates are led to their death, or he can fill his sights with that German guard, pull the trigger and begin stopping the march to the ovens.

In short, this soldier is forced to decide whom to love. Does he love the German guard so much that he does not kill him, or does he love the inmates so much that he does kill the guard? Christians are told to love all people. But sometimes, I told the group, the world -- this world that God created, but a world that is also broken and sinful -- makes us choose whom we will love. Sometimes we are presented with a Sophie’s choice in which none of the options are pure and good. If we want to love the group of Iraqi women with purple fingers fresh from the voting booth, then we will shoot and kill the insurgent who is racing his bomb-laden car toward the polls.

There was silence in the room. A few heads slowly nodded. There was nothing else to say They were not silent out of respect for my rank or position, for that had not stopped them from voicing their own views, at times quite vociferously. Their eyes said, "That’s how it is downrange." No John Wayne heroism for glory, medals and honor. Just simple, terrifyingly hard choices that often have to be made in a split second. No high-minded just war theory juxtaposed against the simple pieties of pacifism. The world sometimes makes us choose whom to love. That’s it.

The brokenness that comes from having to make those heartrending choices is captured in a conversation that I had many years ago with a retired active duty army chaplain. This true southern gentleman was in many ways the stereotype of the gallant, patriotic soldier, a decorated Vietnam veteran who proudly displayed his uniform at our annual conference gatherings. Yet this same man once told me something that left me slack-jawed with surprise. The military uniform, he said, is humanity’s badge of shame.

Few would debate the proposition that war is one of the worst realities that can befall humanity, and from that point of view it is hard to disagree with my friend’s assessment. But then he said something else. If the military uniform is humanity’s badge of shame, he added, wouldn’t Jesus count those who wear it as his disciples? Jesus came for the despised and rejected, the sinners and the outcasts of the world. Those who wear humanity’s badge of shame are, by definition, some of these people, my friend said -- some of those Christ came for.