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Will Success Spoil Evangelicalism?

"We’re in the money!" announces the cover of Christianity Today (June 12, 2000). "How Did Evangelicals Get So Wealthy, and What Has It Done to Us?" the subhead asks. Michael S. Hamilton’s lead article defines the "us" as the parachurch organizations which, by Hamilton’s estimate, have combined budgets of $22 billion. Both he and, in another article, John Stackhouse Jr. wrestle with the meaning and ethics of having such wealth. Still needing to be assessed, however, is what having so much money means not just for evangelical ministries, but for evangelicals themselves.

The importance of evangelicalism in the nation’s spiritual economy is clear when one considers the self-identified religious "preferences" of U.S. citizens. One-fourth are Catholic; slightly less than one-fourth are mainstream Protestant; one-fourth are Jews, Muslims, Mormons, African-American Protestants, Orthodox Christians, "others" and "none" or "no preference"; slightly more than one-fourth are evangelicals.

Evangelicalism includes self-described evangelicals, Pentecostals, fundamentalists, Southern Baptists and conservative Protestants such as Missouri Synod Lutherans, Nazarenes, the Christian Reformed and the Salvation Army. Variations between and among these groups are enormous, of course. Numerous social and economic classes and endless theological diversities are represented. But taken together. evangelicals make up a distinctive and evolving cohort.

Evangelicalism has generated its own chroniclers and critics, and may not need much help from outsiders like me. At evangelical gatherings, which are universally hospitable, I am introduced as "our guest nonevangelical." I have to remind my hosts that I am probably the only person in the room who belongs to a church body with the word "evangelical" in it; that we Lutherans (and Anglicans, etc.) had the original patent on that word; and that many of us are borderline or crossover sorts. Still, I speak as an outsider. Yet outsiders can ask important questions. We would like to know how evangelicalism’s drastic shift in what its self-critics call "cultural accommodation" has affected the lives and souls of evangelicals and the soul of evangelicalism(s).

To launch such an inquiry, I present 11 "from’s" and "to’s" that evangelicalism has traveled -- all of which admit exceptions but, I believe, are substantiable over all. These might form a framework upon which further attention and research -- some of it to build on studies already begun -- can be erected.

• From the religion of the disinherited and ascetic Protestantism to prosperity

What has happened as those who made up what H. Richard Niebuhr in 1927 called "the religion of the disinherited" entered the economic mainstream and rose within and, often, above it? Recently a British visitor asked me to guide his tour of American religion. Knowing that much of historic evangelicalism had represented what the classics called "ascetic Protestantism," he asked me where to find examples of it today. In turn-of-the-millennium evangelicalism, I could show him only "nonascetic" Protestantism.

From otherworldliness to this worldliness

Marxists and capitalists alike used to write off evangelicals for being otherworldly -- advocates of deferred benefits, of "pie in the sky by and by." It would be bad faith to suggest that contemporary evangelicals’ profession of faith in a life to come or in another world is bad faith. But otherworldliness takes on new coloration when those who profess it are among the worldliest citizens around.

• From truth claims based on unpopularity to truth claims based on popular success

The "infusion" (if you like it) or "infection" (if you don’t) of wealth- and success-mindedness has produced a transvaluation of values. At midcentury, culturally beleaguered evangelicals often made the claim that "you can tell we represent the truth, because Jesus spoke of a little flock and Paul spoke of the despised of the world, and we are little and despised." Now evangelicals claim numbers and prosperity as the test of truth. After the 15.9-million-member Southern Baptist Convention recently passed resolutions designed to mark itself off from other churches and cultural elements, the main drafter of the new creed boastfully claimed that it was precisely these resolutions, these creedal elements, that contributed to the burgeoning prosperity of this denomination. In effect: that there are so many of us, and that we are so powerful, must mean that we are faithful and true. That is but one example of many 180-degree turns, flip-flops and about-faces in the evangelical cohort during the time of its prosperity.

• From theories of growth by strictness to growth by advertised benefits

The drastic shift to "We’re in the Money!" evangelicalism is causing social science theorists to review their understandings of how the various evangelical groups market religion. That potential converts make "rational choices" in a religious marketplace has been accepted since Anglos arrived in the colonies in 1607. What was or should be marketed in various cultures remains in dispute. Two decades ago Dean Kelley, in his landmark book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, started a trend by observing that the most strict, world-denying, exacting churches -- churches that called for the most sacrifice at the expense of cultural status -- prospered.

That is hardly the case today Some leftover separatist fundamentalists in the evangelical camp may make strict demands, but one does not get the impression that the people running Bob Jones University, for example, are demanding sacrifice. Students there like the way of life cherished and enforced by the university. The Jonesians are offering education that will lead graduates directly to the market and the world of media. Do the prospering megachurches preach hellfire and damnation, or lead their people out of the world? No. They build racquet-ball courts and swimming pools and offer courses on slimming and investing. Those who offer, not those who demand, prosper in market-era religion.

• From imminent-end-of-the-world action to multigenerational investment

Speaking of otherworldliness, one can observe a dramatic change on the apocalyptic front, as evidenced in the recent millennial observances, Once again, it would be bad faith to accuse premillennialists of bad faith, if by that we mean accusing them of no longer believing in an imminent, catastrophic second coming of Christ. The fact that they produce fiction that tops the secular best-seller lists, almost all of it apocalyptic, suggests that the charm remains. But that fiction is as preoccupied with high-tech artifacts used and cherished by the faithful as it is with the woeful fate awaiting wrong-believers.

Meanwhile, the shift into politics -- precisely by the most apocalyptic and millennial minded -- reveals how cultural accommodation has changed the heart of the teaching. Today’s evangelicalism is known for its concern about the family, the grandchildren, the nation, the media projection of images that will shape the short and long futures. But why bother about the generations if the end is really near?

• From private to public Protestantism in politics

Shortly after midcentury I distinguished between then public Protestantism, aka. "the mainstream" in its characteristic flow, and then private Protestantism, aka. evangelicalism, which was only into soul-saving, separatism and the like. By 1976, dubbed "The Year of the Evangelical," it was clear that some kind of musical chairs game was going on. The evangelicals had switched and, in a way, "won." They had "gone public," if with different nuances of theology and more blunt instruments of practice than Catholics, mainliners and Jews could muster. That the switch has occurred is obvious; how it has been systematically supported remains to be more fully investigated.

• From "traditional" worship to "contemporary" entertainment

At midcentury, Catholics or mainstream Protestants experiments with folk or rock or theater or dance -- any "celebration" that might get out of hand -- was considered to be frivolous, trivializing, even blasphemous by all evangelical groups but the Pentecostal churches, then still disdained within the rest of evangelicalism. Today it is precisely in the most successful and well-off evangelical churches that these forms of "contemporary" entertainment dominate, while the "traditional" more likely gets relegated to the precincts of the mainline, once described as liberal or modernist.

• From disapproving of popular culture to adopting it

When rock was born evangelicals massively opposed it. The swiveling hips, the sexually provocative gestures, the in-your-face costumery and staging made evangelicals regard rock as the devil’s music. Then, realizing that their churches would lose their youth if they continued to relegate youth’s music to the devil, evangelicals encouraged rock groups that changed their often-unintelligible lyrics about human love to some equally indistinct words about Jesus. The postures, gestures, costumes and settings that had been regarded as devilish were now sanctified into a nearly $1 billion annual business.

• From an unadhered-to cultural agenda to new norms of what is acceptable

No one can plausibly accuse the TV and radio preachers, the editors, the savants of evangelicalism, of being simple culture-affirmers. They rather consistently attack the Supreme Court, "the liberals," "the media," the pornographers, the feminists, the pro-abortionists, the homosexuals and the like. But this list is strangely different from the moral agenda that characterized evangelicals a half-century ago.

Back then Sabbath-breaking, drinking, gambling and divorce were the big four morality topics. One no longer hears Sunday-closing legislation proposed from evangelical pulpits. Now that so many women have added work outside the home to work inside the home, the preacher often finds congregants heading for K-mart or the supermarket or Nordstrom on Sunday. The preacher and his sons hurry off to the pro football game. Drinking? Like Catholics and mainline Protestants, evangelicals score alcoholic excess and tout moderation, but teetotalism is seldom urged from the pulpit. Gambling? How can the preacher preach against it when his congregation profits and the local economy is enhanced by legalized riverboat and casino gambling?

Divorce? When the president of your denomination, the members of your family, and your favorite evangelical celebrities divorce at the same rate as their liberal and secular counterparts, you are far more likely to treat the subject as a tragedy than as a sin. Evangelical publishers produce books, mainly for women, on how to live after the tragedy of divorce. We are all sinners, these books say. Your spouse and, to some extent, you as well have sinned, or at least made mistakes, but there is forgiveness, and life goes on.

For now, most evangelicals draw the line at abortion, euthanasia and homosexual expression. Will preaching on these subjects change as cultural accommodation changes, or have evangelicals at last found the absolute lines and boundaries to which they will adhere?

•From antisecularization to religious change

Mainline Protestants made similar accommodations a century ago, when they adapted to the new norms of a culture they had largely shaped. Something similar happened in Catholicism after the G.I. Bill and Vatican II, and after many Catholics moved into the middle class. But the evangelical case has been the most sudden, drastic and disguised.

Sociologist J. Milton Yinger used to argue that what often got called "secularization" was really religious change under the symbols of nonchange. These symbols remain in evangelicalism, notably in adherence to concepts such as "biblical inerrancy" (though not all evangelicals hold to these). Their Jesus has taken on very different cultural guises as he switched from offering comfort in the "religion of the disinherited" to proclaiming "family values."

• From frugality to "supply-side" religions marketing

One need only read the advertisements in evangelical magazines to note this shift. There is a product for every potential customer, and the promise of success if one purchases this or that evangelical product. There is much boasting about the size of funds raised. Evangelical bookstores overflow with self-help books. The last things one would expect to see featured in such bookstores are works on classic themes of Christian faith, such as the Trinity or the incarnation.

As a historian and, marginally, a social scientist, however, I join the Hamiltons and Stackhouses, applying their questioning and criticisms of evangelical ministries to evangelicals and evangelicalism as such. In the March 1999 Atlantic Monthly, Harvey Cox wrote provocatively, and a bit impishly, about "The Market as God." The end of the Soviet Union, of effective radical socialisms and the ideologies that propped them up, and the "working" of the market led to a new situation throughout the West, and particularly here. The move to the victory of the market was made without much ideology. Not many are reading Calvin or Adam Smith or even the more recent Milton Friedman to gain guidance or to legitimate it. But the market’s success has forced us to develop personal and social philosophies relating to it.

There seems little point in wishing for a world in which the market did not prevail. At least for now, it is part of the air we breathe, the atmosphere in which we move. It offers mixed blessings, but blessings nevertheless. Evangelicals and other Christians do often address the downsides of market thinking. Doing so is difficult, since we are all part of the world the market has created, and many of us have helped create the world in which it has prevailed. Theological thinking about the big change is beginning to emerge, but books on this subject remain in the minority among those written by theological ethicists.

Michael Hamilton quotes the cautionary words of John Wesley, who was "present at the creation" of what became evangelicalism. "Wherever true Christianity spreads, it must cause diligence and frugality, which, in the natural course of things, must beget riches!" So far so good. "And riches naturally beget pride, love of the world, and every temper that is destructive of Christianity." Agreed, say the scriptures. "Now, if there be no way to prevent this, Christianity is inconsistent with itself and, of consequence, cannot stand, cannot continue long among any people since, where it generally prevails, it saps its own foundation." If evangelicals can work with that set of assumptions and apply them to their own success, they may well have lessons to teach the rest of North American Christianity, where the moves Wesley talked about have long been in place.

Martin Luther’s Reckless Grasp of Grace

On October 2, 1940, The Christian Century published a W. H. Auden sonnet called "Luther." Its last four lines focused on the central problem which haunts celebrators of Martin Luther on his 500th birthday:

"All Works and all Societies are bad;

The Just shall live by Faith," he cried in dread.

And men and women of the world were glad

Who never trembled in their useful lives.

When I joined the Century staff in 1956 as perhaps its first Lutheran, though not necessarily its first Lutherite, I recall occasions when Managing Editor Ted Gill and I savored those lines. Gill thought they served well to portray the gap between Luther and Lutherans. At the same time, didn’t they also show Auden’s sense for finding just the right word? "How could he have done better than to think of ‘useful’ lives?" asked Gill.

Such lives belonged to German burghers gaping up at their empulpited hero, sure of his charisma, awed by his power, perhaps stunned by their inability to know just what was driving him -- and eager not to let go of those little useful securities on which we all rely. Closing the pigsty gate. Patting the new child on the head. Haggling over the price of wurst. Wondering how the spouse will treat you tomorrow.

Luther’s countrymen were not only interested in keeping the Turk at bay or cutting off revenues from indulgences for the pope. Few of them could have said that Luther’s attraction was his stimulus to German nationalism, though the Reformer and company likely would not have "made it" without that impulse so noted by later historians. Today people look back on Luther as the all-time master of listening to colloquial speech and feeding it back as part of a new literary German, thus honoring both vernacular and high literature. Although his art moved the burghers in the midst of their useful lives, rhetoric and style were not the only attractions.

If they were moved, they were moved only so far. Before his death in 1546 Luther had given up on his fellow Wittenbergers. In world-weary lines he complained of their overindulgence in the beer he also enjoyed, the lascivious costumes they wore at the dances he had encouraged, their swinish gluttony and their neglect of the things of God. Records from the times show that spiritual carelessness lived on in the towns where Lutheran leaders held visitations, and that they had to fall back on legalisms when their gospel did not produce its effects. Useful lives. No trembling.

When Auden later published his Collected Poems he tampered with the lines of his sonnet. Now they read:

"All works, Great Men, Societies are bad.

The Just shall live by Faith . . ." he cried in dread.

And men and women of the world were glad,

Who’d never cared or trembled in their lives.

We lost something when we lost that "useful." Yet there are some compensations. "Great Men" are included now, to be seen as corrupt. Auden knew that Luther turned the mirror on himself, for the Reformer had become one of the "Great Men" and had remained "bad." Yet he cared. To his hearers his gospel was saving, but what could it mean to them if they did not deeply care, or tremble first?

Wilhelm Dilthey recognized a hundred years ago how hard it was to share Luther’s solution if one did not have Luther’s problem. Speaking perhaps too confidently, he went so far as to claim that people of modern times no doubt could not have Luther’s caring and trembling, could not probe with him beyond the dulling scope of useful lives. At best, they would have to seek analogous experiences.

Not that guilt is gone. Yet after Freud, moderns learned to locate that guilt over against father, mother, anyone/thing but God. What good did God’s gracious turn do if God was illusion or, worse, incapable of inducing care or trembling? Guilt may remain in some intellectuals, existentialists and secularized Methodists, thought Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There are enough of them to provide a cohort of potentially God-intoxicated hearers for Luther’s word. Guilt may also come now and then to anyone; even God-focused guilt can attack, but since churchly transactions easily and quickly remove it, it gets translated back to the numbing godless guilt of useful living.

When one turns to the great-great-great-grand-nieces and nephews of the Protestant Reformers on television, the words of guilt and grace are loud and clear, set to Muzak. The surroundings, however, are so plush and promissory that people with useful lives feel no reason to care or tremble. Why pick on them?

First, those who did not care or tremble could take the way of slackness, turning Luther’s gospel into Bonhoeffer’s "cheap grace." The phrase "cheap grace" is so familiar it could fit as a bumper-sticker slogan, but the point remains. Swedish Lutheran Bishop Einar Billing knew that, as he looked out at sluggish Scandinavian cheap-grace peddlers and consumers. There is, he wrote, nothing in Christianity (except perhaps in Orthodoxy) which is more slack than slack Lutheranism. Auden also gave a classic form to this problem when he had King Herod speak up for "standards" in For the Time Being: "Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: ‘I’m such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.’ Every crook will argue: ‘I like committing crimes, God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.’ "

Lutheran churches often got things wrong by turning the cry "The Just shall live by Faith" into the doctrine "Justification by Faith." This doctrine soon became a badge and a weapon. Wearers of the badge were justified because their church taught justification by faith; nonwearers were half-breed Christians at best. The people who had never cared or trembled did not need to care or tremble: somewhere in their fold were custodians of textbooks and commissions on orthodoxy. These assured the believers that God could not get at them, since the formulation was correct.

Still a third way to evade Luther has been to lapse into legalisms. Luther was a great man of law, of Law. The lower-case term got him into trouble because a pathological horror of chaos caused him to lead his followers into maintaining order at the expense of peasants and reformers, as they have done ever since. The upper-case term has been obscured by antinomian Lutherans who fear that by making too much of divine Law they will obscure gospel. Not at all. Luther devoted hundreds of pages to expounding the Decalogue in commentaries, and gave due proportion to God’s law in his Large Catechism, still the best place to get Luther’s accents systematized.

For caring, trembling, nonuseful Luther, needing a gracious God, the Law was no help at all. For a time timid Lutherans censored out of Luther’s Galatians commentary the too strong theme that the Law of God was as much an enemy of the guilty soul as sin, death and the devil. The Law only made things worse. It accused and killed. Yet, let’s make this point deftly and import some Latin: what killed in loco justificationis was actually a positive power of God extra locum justificationis. (I have guilt for having imported a technical point, but forgiveness will be cheap if I justify myself by explaining?)

When one is dealing with or speaking of the theme of justification, or when one is situated before God in the act of being justified, the Law is the negative accuser. Apart from that, however, it is the power of God, as is the gospel; but whereas the gospel is that power "unto salvation," the Law is the power of God unto the care of the neighbor. On those terms Luther showed considerable openness to the secular. He had trouble believing that his favorite secular humanist Cicero might not be found in paradise. "I do hope God will help Cicero and such men as he to the remission of sins -- and if he must remain out of grace, then he will at least be some levels higher than our cardinals, and the bishop of Mainz." I am told, but never given the citation, that Luther once said, "Better be ruled by a smart Turk than a dumb Christian" -- a sign that he believed that the structures of divine ordering moved beyond the circle of grace.

Luther and the earliest Lutherans wavered in their reliance on the gospel and began to rule the church by Law and law. Thus they set a rueful precedent for later Lutherans, who became virtuosos at doing so. Adolescent rejecters of Lutheranism usually remember their ministers and elders as grudging legalists. It astounds them to hear that Luther meant the gospel -- that gospel which he, of course, did not always live up to.

I ask that question as I observe, listen to and participate in the events of this 500th year. Why are there so few young people at the Luther sites, even in West Germany? There they could gawk and gape and revere, as high schoolers are enabled and goaded to do during spring vacation trips to sacred sites in Washington, D.C. Are the young people in American churches grasping, or able to grasp, this hero? Or are they historyless, unable to possess the traditions which still possess them, however vaguely? In an age of probing media, are they and their elders so suspicious of heroes and. saints that they could ignore St. Francis last year, and Luther this year, and Wesley next year? Have we no need or capacity to make templates and exemplars of the stormy souls who lived life on scales which threaten our useful careers?

Before those questions begin to find answers, I push them aside for a second range of reminders. This is a celebration of a person, of highly flawed and unadorable Martin Luther. It is not the anniversary of the Reformation or Lutheranism or Lutheran churches. In 1967 we recalled 450 years of Reformation, dating that event from the posting by nail or by mail of the 95 Theses. The Lutheran churches tried again in 1980, remembering their charter documents of 1530 and 1580. Observers found that these occasions did not grab most of the laity or lead to much reform on the part of clergy. Will a focus on Luther the person now help facilitate the celebrating?

The awesome number of local church services, showings of Luther films, pilgrimages and ecumenical programs; the array of displays in Europe and America; the lectureships and conferences -- these all suggest some promise. They demonstrate the range of talent among historians, theologians and artists. At the same time one must point out that we are not in the midst of a Luther renaissance. That occurred during the midcentury years when a neo-Lutheranism matched neo-orthodoxy in theological circles. Today the Luther scholars concentrate impressively on social history. This year the questions focus on Luther and the East German socialist state, Luther and the Jews (there’s no justifying word for that relation), the peasants, women (he loved Katie but, it is being rumored, was not a modern feminist) and the like. These are urgent issues, and I find myself spending most time on them.

Would Luther recognize himself in these concerns? He gets only one vote on how this celebration is to be brought off, but it should be heard. I once listened to Mahalia Jackson singing and then being interpreted by two semantic philosophers. After each song we would be told what she really meant. She then clomped a shod foot on the floor, exclaiming "Oh, no, that’s not it at all!" What then was it? She would ask the pianist to play it again, and she sang it again. That was "it."

Who dares speak for Luther? Yet he gave us some clues. As far as he was concerned, "The Word did it all. Had I wished I might have started a conflagration at Worms. But while I sat still and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow." Church priorities? Spirituality? Striving for God? "Christians should be taught that one who gives to the poor, or lends to the needy, does a better action than if he purchases indulgences." Or brags about belonging to a movement which teaches justification by faith.

Luther played it again and sang it again whenever he posed for himself and others the notion that they were best, or only, free for trust in God (faith-trust) when they did not rely on trust in themselves. Yet if all this meant that Luther had only a low view of human worth and character, one must also listen for his simul: at the same time, he cried -- now in happy dread before the Holy -- when God looks at the trusting one God sees not the "bad" or "useful" life but the new person. This new person is to be not as Christ but a Christ to the neighbor.

Like Paul, who did not live up to his own Galatians 3:28 projection of a situation in which there "is" neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, Luther did not live up to the gospel he heard. He fell back on his prejudices, his hatreds, his pettinesses. Like Thomas Jefferson, who did not live up to the Declaration of Independence’s lines about equality -- Jefferson did not mean women, did not intend to and did not free slaves -- but who did provide a charter for equality, Luther was often a person of contradictions whose mixed legacy left some things worse.

Yet wherever the presence of God is felt and sensitive souls are open to experiences analogous to Luther’s, on no matter how minute a scale in their useful lives, there is room for a reckless grasp of grace. The old radical of Wittenberg somehow transcended his own bondage to the present and chartered

a strange language and a new grammar. . . . For [God’s] will is, because we are to be new [persons], that we should also have other and new thoughts, minds and understandings, and not regard anything in the light of reason, as it is for the world, but as it is before his eyes, and take our cue from the future, invisible, new nature for which we have to hope and which is to come.

Understanding Evangelicals

Thirty years ago Dial Press commissioned me to write a book on the Protestant experience in America (Religious Empire) for its bicentennial series. I was asked to exclude the "evangelical" half of mainly white Protestantism, since William R. Taylor was to write about it. That his book never appeared does not matter so far as the 18th and 19th centuries are concerned, since Protestantism and evangelicalism were largely one and the same then. Only in the 20th century did the two diverge. Even so, I smuggled figures like Billy 'Graham and some other evangelicals into my account. The two stories cannot really be disentangled.

Still, in the course of the intervening 30 years, evangelicalism has prospered so much and become so visible that sociologists, political scientists, theologians and historians regularly make it their specialty. Barnard College professor Randall Balmer has been among the more prolific, adept and visible of these interpreters and observers -- thanks in no small part to his having hosted the television documentary Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.

Though Balmer's book is not truly "A History of Evangelicalism," it serves well as a reflection on some of evangelicalism's main themes. The book explains many elements of American public life: the nostalgia and resentment that fuel the Religious Right; our complex attitudes toward feminism and femininity; the "sermonic" rhetoric of American politicians; the end-of-the-world language that used to be otherworldly but that now licenses a peculiar worldliness; and the prosperity of competing religious movements.

This kind of book cannot be original throughout, but it can be of service, since most of the public has little awareness of what is common stock in evangelical discourse. Balmer never fails to hold the reader's attention, to seize on the most memorable vignettes to make a point, or to write elegantly. History that helps to explain emergent America is not to be dismissed. And in one section Balmer does aspire to originality -- though, I regret to say, with mixed success.

Balmer's attempt at originality has to do with the influence of Continental (Reformed, Lutheran, Dutch, German, etc.) "Pietism" on the evangelicalism that usually gets traced mainly to Puritanism. My hunch is that he comes from such stock, as does part of my own Lutheran heritage; it would be nice to know that our ancestors played a major part in a movement that contributed to the mainstream. While making his argument, Balmer shows how neglected the story of religion in the middle colonies -- New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania -- has been. New England Puritans and the Anglican South usually get the attention. Balmer's study complements those stories. One hopes he will write a full-length book someday on what here teases us in one chapter only.

The author stakes much on that thesis, however. One or two of the names of Pietists whom he considers influential on evangelicalism may be familiar: Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg and Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, for example. But only specialists will recognize any of the others. Balmer shows how Frelinghuysen influenced Gilbert Tennent, a mainstream evangelical. But he underestimates both the language and the ethnic barriers, since so much of the Pietist influence came in Dutch and German packaging -- languages and cultures that did not count for much among those of English descent. Read Benjamin Franklin's sneers at the Palatinate Germans who were coming to Pennsylvania.

Balmer's choice of words shows that, Tennent aside, he mainly has to content himself with suggestions, teases, parallels and complementarities. Phrases like these dominate: English-speaking evangelicalism and continental Pietism each elaborated "themes associated" with those of the other, and spoke of them "at the same time"; there are "a few scattered references," but the literature is sparse. Even among German Reformed ministers "Pietist tendencies seem never to have been very pronounced; soon Continental Pietism as an identifiable movement within the colonies largely disappeared into the mainstream." It lives today among heirs of Dutch Seceders and in some Scandinavian flowings into the Evangelical Covenant Church and the Evangelical Free Church denominations. Some evangelical prayer meetings look "quite a lot like the Pietist conventicals"; the literature on the two "resemble" and "echo" each other; one "comes to mind" when one deals with the other; the ideas of one "would not be alien" to the other; and both "insisted on" similar themes about the warmed heart and signs of regeneration. If the case could be stronger, Balmer has not made it so here.

The book is rich in insights. For example, Balmer gives four reasons why evangelicals cherish apocalyptic "literalism." First, "it's a lot of fun" to be in a subculture that gives one license for guessing games about such things as the Antichrist and the end of the world. Second, it allows for flights of fancy about the shape of the new and perfect world. Apocalypticism puts evangelicals in control of history and lets them sound as if they know the mind of God. And, finally, it inspires impulses to convert others while there is still time.

Balmer ponders creatively the strange twist by which ascetic and world-denying evangelicalism came to be a main promoter of "prosperity theology" and worldliness. Nonevangelicals who still stereotype evangelicals as crabby world deniers have not looked lately at evangelism's accommodation and surrender to the market, consumerism and worldly goods.

Balmer's chapter on feminism and femininity shows why evangelicals have been nervous about feminism and have advocated female submission, and at the same time have been preoccupied with "a particular kind of idealization of women," especially those who stay at home and tend the hearth. (This idealization appears most frequently in writings by evangelical women who do not stay home and tend the hearth.)

Balmer shows how dualisms about God and Satan, Christ and Antichrist, "we" and "they" color evangelical political discourse. He explores the way nostalgia for a presumably lost hegemony deepens that coloring. "Loss of hegemony can be frightening, and it can provoke a number of responses, from resignation to resentment and condemnation, from anger to action." Mainstream Protestantism has been mainly resigned as it has lost such hegemony after the middle of the 20th century; evangelicalism has been more resentful and condemning, more angry and prone to action as it has lost the dominance it enjoyed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The book's final pages are hurried, and the ending is abrupt. Balmer leaves us on the Duquesne and Notre Dame campuses with Catholic charismatics. That sudden end inspires many questions that Balmer himself is likely to take up in the future. Meanwhile, he has given us readers clues for doing our own fresh observing. Evangelicals should welcome his sympathetic portrait, while others can learn from and enjoy it.

The Sunday School: Battered Survivor

From history, it is said, we learn that we do not learn from history. But for us to learn even that much, there must be some written history. Humans do not have a memory beyond their own mind, and that does not stretch back sufficiently far to be of use for many social purposes, nor does recall touch on physically remote experience. When groups of people stop to think, they turn to the writings of those who have been custodians of the story.

In the case of the national bicentennial four years ago, Americans did not lack resources; there were libraries full of national histories which aimed at covering the whole sweep as well as monographs which touched on nuances, cornices and curlicues of American existence.

Learning from History

Now, admittedly on a smaller scale but by no means a trivial one, American Christians join others in celebrating the bicentennial of an enormously influential invention, the Sunday school. Those who attended one -- and they are legion -- can reach into recall for history. Such recall is not likely to serve them well. C. S. Lewis said that if you do not know history, it is likely that you will suffer from recent bad history. In the case of oldsters, the history of Sunday school is likely to be the memory of earnest teachers struggling to hold the attention of the young back when there were fewer distractions -- say, in the ‘20s and 30s. Middle-agers, or those on the threshold of their middle years, will remember the time when Sunday schools had it easy -- say, in the 50s. Then struggling volunteers at least had the backing of church-building and churchgoing adults.

Neither the ‘30s nor the ‘50s represent enough of the story, however, so the celebrators may be moved to the bookstore or the library. What will they find? The shelves are bleak and bare. Forlorn, almost alone, and hardly beckoning is Gerald E. Knoff’s The World Sunday School Movement (Seabury, $14.50), which does not intend to be more than a history of mainline ecumenical bureaucracies in religious education. Only their mothers could love them, and even they would have a hard time staying interested in the plot of mergers and pages filled with acronyms like WCC/WCCESSA, WCCE, WFDY, YMCA, YWCA, WCC, NCCUSA and more which leap at the eye from the first two pages we opened at random. Knoff has done his job, but it is not the celebrator’s concern.

His bibliography on "general historical background" only adds the telescope to one’s view of a sterile landscape. The titles are either about the context of Sunday school (e.g, Victorianism), or about Sunday schools in particular denominations; or they are aged and never were to the point.

That leaves to be commended to you a "second edition revised and enlarged" of a lively and popular history, The Big Little School: 200 Years of the Sunday School, by Robert W. Lynn and Elliott Wright (Abingdon, $6.95). Since all observers of the bicentennial should read this well-paced paperback, we will not visit its chapters in detail. Instead, it serves as a resource alongside Knoff and other reading in the diaspora of monographs, as a background to the question: What can we learn from the history of the Sunday school?

We can learn from it that histories are few and rare and usually poor precisely because the Sunday school was a protean institution, sprawling, something "up close" to millions, yet in its larger form remote and diffuse, hard to grasp. Until a few years ago there were few histories of the family or of people in various stages of life (like adolescence, or old age); there remain few histories of neighborhood and parish. How many good stories of public education in America can one count? Yet school and Sunday school, neighborhood and family and parish are the institutions which even today, against all odds, do much to shape the individual in society. The Sunday school has been too influential to be graspable or observable from a distance as a coherent whole.

A Protestant Invention

When its outline does begin to come into view, a major feature emerges: the Sunday school was a Protestant invention, an expression of the era when Protestantism was in flower. Robert Raikes -- the Eli Whitney or Thomas Edison of the Sunday school -- had broad humanitarian interests in mind as he began to stir up support for educating the early victims of the industrial revolution. Many of his heirs were preoccupied with social control in their design to shape the young into the mold of the evangelical empire that moved from Anglo-America into all the world for a century and more.

The early modern evangelicals were possessed of a marvelous insight: that religion in their world was at last, and virtually for the first time in history, no longer to be passed through the genes. Piety would not pass through the loins of godly parents to their offspring, as the Puritans thought it would. The seniors had to convert the new generation, their very own Issue. On Protestant soil that meant using emotion, of course; elders resorted to the rhetoric of sensation and set up circumstances from anxious minibenches to summer camps to help them conjure up personal experience to promote conversion. But provident parents also knew that Protestants live by the Word and by words, so they had to teach literacy and place the Bible, or chunks of the Bible for a time called "Uniform Lessons," or memorizable Bible passages and singable ditties like "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know," into the minds and on the lips of the wee ones. They did this with considerable effectiveness for a century and more.

The Sunday school, we learn from reading its history, was a favored outreach of laypeople. Earlier than most Christian institutions it called upon and profited from the talents of women, whom no one trusted to teach adult males -- perhaps out of deference to snippets of Pauline literature and more likely out of patriarchal impulses. So leaders segregated the women in the pastures of the young, a fact that bears its own irony since nowhere else could they have had more influence. But the men dominated the organizations; Knoff’s history of the larger organizations has an index with only a rare "Mrs." or "Princess," a rarer "Clara" or "Ruth" in the bureaucracy. And the denominations caught on to the movement and chopped it up; only the valiant try to come together in interdenominational curricula nowadays.

Working Against the Odds

The Sunday school, then, was an institution without which the church of Jesus Christ could get along for almost 1,800 years, just as it got along without the denomination, the competitive parish, the broad-based missionary movement, the conjured revival -- all of them institutions born in the century of industrial-era inventions, between about 1740 and 1840. Along with those other innovations, it is in trouble today, since they are all overadapted to social forms that no longer have the place to themselves.

The Sunday school survives. Millions attend. Selectively it prospers. Don’t look for much in Canada, say the historians. The United Church of Canada and same of its counterparts are motivated to look for alternatives because so little of the old model is around. In the United States the call for alternatives has come from among churches whose leaders have sensed decline or who have looked for something more creative in new historical unfoldings. On the terrain of conservative Protestantism, especially in the regions and social classes where families remain large and strong and where leaders are motivated to send out fleets of buses to scoop up the young while parents are slugabed, any talk of the Sunday school being in trouble would not be comprehensible.

The Sunday school is in trouble for reasons that Lynn and Wright spell out, plus others that one feels in the bones or can easily pick up elsewhere. The long weekend and the high-rise apartment are symbols of the problems. In the affluent America that developed between 1952 with its Eisenhower-era religious revival and about 1974 with the beginnings of new-style recession, there was an almost unbelievable increase in weekend leisure, much of it at the expense of Sabbath rest. Christians were off at the lake or on to the slopes, and church remained to be neglected back home in the suburb. Sunday school was an almost untransportable institution. The high-rise symbolizes the late, small and often chopped-up family, one not conducive to large and, high-moraled Sunday schools. Television culture did not include Sunday-school-going in its norms and projections. Pluralist America did not have room even for negative depictions of religion on children’s television.

Against all odds, the leaders struggle on. Concerned parents and pastors, lay committees and curricula writers and all their colleagues and cohorts have tried to pump life into the old Sunday school, especially as they have found the alternatives even less effective. The courts ruled Out "released time" from the public schools. The world of television, athletics, apathetic parents, and dragged-screaming-and-kicking kids pretty well eliminated for all but the few the more effective hours-long Wednesday (or whenever) times of religious education.

And still the Sunday school lives on in the larger culture. It is strong enough to be recognized in phrases like "This isn’t a Sunday school picnic, after all." The cartoonists can count on it for fare; we still see drawings of the tots marching in and out of church buildings while Dad, still in pajama shirt, shivers over cigarette and newspaper outside in the car that he can no longer afford to heat during the children’s weekly spiritual pit stop. Virtually all parishes have a Sunday school, and most adult Christians not only can remember how it shaped and misshaped them but also can see reasons to bet on the Sunday school as an agency for the new generation.

Looking for Alternatives

In mainline Christianity the movement for "Christian academies" is not likely to prosper as it does on the right wing. Parochial schools are few, and not spreading. Lots of luck to the stick-to-itive Wednesday educators. Lots more luck to those who find some attentive families intact enough and resolved enough, to be agencies of Christian education in cooperation with parishes that remain intact and resolved as well. A survey of most Sunday schools, however, will show that little formal religious education goes on in most homes. There are too many single-parent families, too many working mothers and distracted fathers, too many assaults on family rhythms from without, and there is too much parental incompetence for Christianity to count on the family alone.

So the Sunday school at age 200 is a survivor -- battered and tired but still a survivor. And anything that survives these days deserves study not only as a near-fossil or relic but as a sign of hope and signal for attention. The Sunday school may seem so weak that it merits killing off, but euthanasia is poor medicine in the present circumstances. The record shows that attempts at removing this opportunity for education have tended to leave nothing in its place. One may argue that weak education and even sometimes maleducation are worse than no education, but one may not argue it seriously in the case of a movement like Christianity which does -- don’t we have to admit it? -- call for winning the young, and teaching and training them.

To speak of the Sunday school as being weak and in trouble is to slight the fact that tens of millions attend it -- also on the soil of mainline Protestantism around the world. To speak in these terms is to speak in general, of a worldwide or culturewide movement. But that language neglects the countless thriving and effective Sunday schools, where gifted teachers use adequate materials in anything but stereotypically repressive or dull circumstances. Children in Sunday school do learn the story that is vital to their existence in faith; they can somehow then become a part of that story. Its plot is or can be biblical, and they are part of that unfinished plot.

Sing It Again

Some songs learned in Sunday school stay with people who later find the phrases availing in prisoner-of-war camps or on hospital beds. Even the sometimes derided rituals of birthday songs and gatherings of offerings teach the gesture of generosity and caring. Many Sunday school teachers have turned off the young, those members of a generation that turns off adults easily. But just as many more have served as models or examples; quick, now, if you attended Sunday school, think back, and some of those teachers will come to mind, Not all imported curricular materials missed the point. At worst they were not worse than the more heavily subsidized lessons in the public elementary schools, which also have obituaries being read over them five days a week.

So if there cannot be three cheers for the Sunday school as a thriving institution or two cheers for its record, let there be at least one cheer for the ways the grace of God lives on in it. Cheer, that is, if there are enough people around who know the chant and the cheer. Before and lest the day comes when no one knows enough to care. And if that day comes, it is possible that the Sunday school will not have been replaced by a creative alternative.

Sunday school, once billed by Life magazine (nonsurviving in its original form) as "the most wasted hour of the week," remains an hour with which creative elders can work. Few can re-create the circumstances of Protestantdom when the culture favored the Sunday school. Not all would want to. But if the culture tilts their way even so briefly as one of the 168 hours each week, it seems foolish not to make the most of that time.

One cheer, then, for the 200-year-old Sunday school. But, as they say in Sunday school, let’s sing it again, this time louder and with feeling.

Friendship Tested

People who resist having friends take on one set of problems. Loneliness and isolation gnaw at those who are incapable of being friends or of being befriended. It would be nice to picture friendship as the arrival of a utopia in which all turned out well -- though that kind of niceness might also induce a killing boredom.

But people who do have friends take on another set of problems. They have egos that collide with other egos, wills that clash with other wills. Their drives will not always match the desires of others within their circles of friendship. They do not stop being agents of conflict simply because they have friends. Anger is in their arsenal of emotions, and it will find its way of jeopardizing friendly relations. One partner may make unreasonable demands on the other, or spend too much time chewing an ear and expecting counsel. We do friendship a disservice if we overlook these problems. One way to begin to address them is by throwing the issues against a screen big enough that we can see them clearly. In this case we will use the simile of divine relations to human connections.

‘Wrathful Love’

I once heard a curious phrase about the love of God. According to the writer, divine love may take the form of a zornige Liebe, a "wrathful love." In this as in all attempts to deal with the strangeness of the divine, the phrase-maker had to settle for an inadequate expression. Of course, we assume that we know how to separate anger from love. When I am angry, either something has gone wrong in me to jeopardize my love and lovability, or something is wrong in you, my friend, and I need the strongest sort of emotion to tell you off or to keep you at a distance. When I am loving, I cannot be angry. And when I am caring, in the way that friends can be, I must suppress my standards and let you do as you please, without letting anything bother me.

Elegantly simple, perhaps, but not true -- at least not so easily. The writer’s attempt to speak of the extremes in God within one phrase falls short of the divine reality, but it points to something of which we all are somehow aware. In biblical faith God is so different from us, and the sacred so remote from our profane feet, that when we violate perfection, God -- in this picture drawn from human emotions -- is wrathful. It is intrinsic in the nature of God to show anger toward that which violates the good. Some of the biblical pictures are so curiously patterned after human action that God comes off looking like a petty tyrant. But most of the time anyone who thinks deeply about it sees reasons for the anger of the Holy.

Such wrath would drive us away from, not to, God, were it not for the fact that under it all, or prior to it, we have sensed that God "is" love. God accepts us when we are outside the range of acceptance. Because we have heard that this is the nature of God, and because we have checked it out, we pay attention when the wrathful side of God is revealed. It does not break our tie with the divine.

On an infinitely more domestic and graspable scale, something like this wrathful love can touch humans during the course of a fulfilling friendship. You would not call another person friend did she not possess qualities that you admire. You count on the friend for affection and for friendship’s kind of love. But because the two of you are, close, you will disappoint your friend more than will someone at a distance. A thousand times she will explain what course of action pleases her most, and each time you are neglectful. Finally your friend "lets off steam." But among friends, being angry is often a more creative emotion than feeling hurt. If we have learned the limits of anger and have found rites for overcoming it, expression of such feelings can clear the air.

Of course, if we bring nothing but temper and irritation to our relationship, the friend may drift away. She has no reason at all to "take it" or to care about its source unless that source is a person liked or loved, important in her life. By finding rites for overcoming anger, I mean that we find ways to ensure that it will not have the field to itself. We know how far to go and when to stop. We are not so egotistical as to think that we have a right to dominate our relations to a friend by setting all standards and absorbing all disappointments. Maybe our friend has a right to a bit of "wrathful friendliness" too, to even the score. By speaking of the rites of anger, I refer also to the fact that creative people can devise means of conversing about the strong emotions that occasionally should erupt between friends.

In the end, anger in the context of friendship plays its part. in the economy of emotions between people who know each other well. Now and then we hear tragic stories of friends who fell out to the point that disappointment led to outrage, and outrage to murder. We are less likely to hear of the channels through which people vent their emotions in ways that will not disrupt the world -- channels that can soon again be passages for caring. Friends have more motives for ending anger than for continuing it; their friendship constitutes a better basis for building on trying experiences than for letting them shatter relations. The same is not true when anger erupts between people who have no previous shared history. Wrathful love has built-in controls. Loving love is sloppy. Wrathful wrath kills. The combination, a curious joining of anger and friendly love, offers alternatives in a world of hatreds.

The Scrimmages of Friendship

Having friends is not a way of avoiding conflict in life; rather, it impels people to find ways to make conflict creative. Some years ago people used to play a game about cloning. When it was believed that we were on the point of being able to change human nature or the makeup of the human race in the laboratory, speculators began talk about the shape that new race should take. What might be done to alter the human makeup? How could humans be changed? What qualities should be screened out of them?

A common answer was that the experimenter would eliminate the element that induced conflict. Thus, if one were to duplicate parents in their cloned offspring while eugenically preventing "unscientific" births, screening out conflictual people would be an experimenter’s most important concern. Then there would be no war, little violence, and little threat to safety. Utopia would be on the way. But no sooner had people written such a scenario than questions began to arise: If you eliminate conflict and all forms of competition, will you not eliminate creativity? Will not the human adventure end? It was impossible to resolve such questions, since the necessary experiments would cause unimaginable and irretrievable changes in all aspects of human life. Interestingly, the answers game-players gave usually told us much about their own values. Those who touted free-enterprise competition protested most loudly. Those who believed in socialist cooperative life felt most ready to make the move.

The difficulty of cloning, and perhaps its permanent impossibility for humans, has led to less speculating of this sort in recent times. But enough has occurred already that thoughtful people tend to agree more now than in the past that the impulse to be in conflict colors life. Whether this impulse is a trace of some particularly vicious strain humans inherited from simian ancestors or whether it is the worst blight of original sin, we seem to be stuck with it as a part of human nature. The trick is to channel it creatively into harmless outlets or to devise rites to control it. And in a world of conflict, being a friend or having a friend seems to be one of the best checks.

The problem is that, for many people, friendship only presents one more combat zone. For friends, never coming into conflict is probably a sign of apathy; people who care deeply about anything in the world are going to disagree and, if they are free, they will express their disagreement. If one friend were to dominate the other so that there could be no voicing of conflict, their friendship would be jeopardized or might change its character until the relationship no longer deserved the name friendship. Yet when friends dispute, they also risk losing each other. Fallen-out friends are central to the story of many a fallen empire of generations-long feuds.

Since we cannot do away with conflict, how do we make it creative; how do we see to it that a more humane circle of friendships emerges? If suppressing and avoiding it are not possible, the best alternative is to anticipate conflict and set up structures for handling it. By speaking openly about the potential problem or by devising little gestures and kidding routines, partners in friendship set up a circumstance for handling disagreements. They have in a way resolved not to let anything break their bond. They might conceive of their arguments or differences as scrimmages for the larger game of life. The coach who has the best interests of a player in mind does not keep him or her from the front lines during practice. Athletes need seasoning, not avoidance.

So it is in the scrimmages of friendship. If two people share a deep bond of like-mindedness or affection, it will survive debate and conflict. And precisely for this reason, friendship is one of the more congenial zones in which people can test the limits of argument. By not expecting serenity every day, a friend avoids the dangers of boredom. By establishing rules and playing by them, the friend outlasts conflict just as he or she does on the squash court or after arm-wrestling. "It’s only a game, however seriously we have to take it while it is in process.

Friendship does represent lower risks than do other relations in which the partners are temporary adversaries. Lovers’ quarrels might lead to sweet reunions, but first they will issue in torrents of words that neither partner ever forgets; they remain in memory and prospect to haunt a love. The intimacy imposed by marriage makes the stakes so high that serious conflict can lead to divorce. The family has enough societal sanction for inducing claustrophobia that conflict there -- as between mothers and daughters in the kitchen or between fathers and sons over life styles -- can blight a personality. There is no escape.

Friendship allows for less intimacy and more freedom. A person does not have to make things work quite so convincingly among friends as with a mate or a child. This means that somewhere in life there is a space between life-and-death combat on one hand and boredom or illusion on the other, a space where people can be true to themselves and their values even as they wrestle with another, and with competing values at middle distance. Here, as so often, friendship, written off as a "second-best" kind of relationship (when compared to family, to love, to organizations for justice), reveals the function which it possesses but which society overlooks.

Revealer of a Darker Side

Being a friend can mean being tested. Those who are sentimental about friendship have not interviewed enough people. They would be surprised to learn how hard it is for many people to rejoice in the good fortune of their friends. One of the most disturbing features about the human heart, its tendency toward jealousy, leaped out at me once in a line by novelist Gore Vidal: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."

We are ready to hear, "Every time an enemy succeeds, I die a little." The people who link animal and human behavior, or the experts on the selfish gene who do not think true generosity exists, set us up to believe, that friends hope only their enemies will have bad times. Why seek friends except for mutual defense and aggression among the band against the foe? On those terms, it would be expedient to hang out only with the apes who can pull their weight, the avengers who have the muscle and courage to do in the outsider who threatens. Any weakness or failure in the band of allies could jeopardize security and life itself.

Flip that over, then: Whatever strengthens the muscle or morale of a friend is to my benefit. Not so, says Gore Vidal, whose blurted confession, some tell me, matches something they have felt all along. I do not know how widespread this emotion is. But after I thought about it, examples started coming to mind. Some years ago I won an award -- what looked like an earning but felt like a grace. From all over the country there came letters of greeting, spontaneous bursts that can make one’s day or one’s life. We are glad for you, dear friend, most of them said. They did not sound as if they wanted me to share the prize with them; I did not suspect them of being friendly now so that I could speak up for them when they were in the running. Other letters were just a tinge more grudging. Not bad, old boy; of course, there were more deserving ones in the running, but the judges were specialists in your field. I join you in being thankful for good luck. What are the reasons for such a response?

Experts on the mind know little about the roots of jealousy and envy, and we do not have to tug at those roots now. For the moment the point we must stress is the testing that friendship brings. One of the ways to enter the human race, to be ready for encounters with enemies, is to have survived having friends. They make the first demands upon us and our emotions because they are close at hand.

Some time ago, a young woman of my acquaintance phoned in tears. As her tears abated, there was still quavering in her voice, and a touch of shuddering in her tone and outlook. Something had gone terribly wrong. As she quieted, she brought up the name of someone I knew to be her best friend. Had Norma, let’s call her, been taken ill? How long had she to live? Was there an auto accident? Cancer? None of that. I breathed more easily. Was, there, then, a misunderstanding, a falling-out? Had one of them slammed the door in the other’s face? Did they need a veteran arbitrator to thaw their frozen relations? All of that, said my friend, she could have coped with on her own.

What, then, was the problem? It turned out that there was a vacancy in their organization. Someone had to move on or move up. My friend sounded as if she felt that she was next in line, ready to win the Most Qualified Candidate of the Year award. Good. She deserved it. Could she live with disappointment if management had the bad sense to pass her up? Yes and no. Why yes? Because they might bring in someone from out of town, somewhere else in the firm. Then why a possible no? What could go wrong?

"They’re also considering Norma. She could conceivably get it."

"So, wouldn’t you be happy? Aren’t you each other’s best friend?"

"Yes, we are best friends, and no, I wouldn’t be happy. Because we are best friends. We wouldn’t be, then."

"Would Norma be over you? Would she be a bad boss?"

"No, she wouldn’t be in the same line of staff, so that would be no problem. I just can’t stand the idea of something good happening to a friend and not to me."

"You mean you’d rather see an unknown outsider or maybe even someone you don’t like have good fortune, while Norma and you share lower rank?"

"I’m afraid that is what I would rather have. That’s how I feel."

"Do you realize how weird this phone conversation would sound to anyone who doesn’t know you but knows that you claim to be Norma’s friend?"

"Let it be weird, then. And we don’t claim to be friends. We are friends. Our friendship has weathered everything except the success of one and the jealousy of the other. I’d rather not put it to that test."

Every time a friend succeeded, she died a little. Someone as close as a friend, someone whose more intimate thoughts we know, holds up a minor to our emotions even when we do not want to look. When something good happens to a successful stranger, that is a remote story as if from another planet. We need pay no more attention to it than to a chart of the bureaucracy in a foreign land or a fictional film about an organization half a world away. But when something good happens up close, unless it directly benefits us, it threatens us. My caller had not seen direct benefit to her in anything that enhanced Norma’s life. She was more preoccupied with herself and her ego than with her bond to another human. So long as neither leaped forward with a success or a grace, they could live a happy and untested life together.

Lest the suspense that flows out of that phone call distract from our larger plot, I should say that both Norma and her fearful friend advanced in their own lines and lived happily ever after. Or will until one of them succeeds again and the other, yet untested, dies a little. In cases such as these, we must learn to view the friend as an agent of testing, a gift in the form of an obstacle, a revealer of our darker side whose challenge makes possible great growth -- but never without struggle.

The Setting of Boundaries

Alongside envy in friendships is another problem: insatiability. Some people can never get enough of the friend. They become dependent, selfish, even overwhelming in their ability to consume a friend’s time and emotions. True friends know that there are times when we ought to withhold marks of friendship for the good of others. But just as in the realm of sex there may be people who evidently cannot satisfy themselves, as in the realm of food there are gluttons, so in human relations some people seem to have an insatiable desire to use up the time of their friends until they use up their friends. They can never bear to be alone, fearing the terror of the night around them or the demons within. Obsessed, they have cut themselves off from casual contact with people. So those who have permitted themselves to become the friends of such people come now to be exploited. The phone rings at any hour: "What are you doing? Can you come over? We’re getting a few fellows over to play cards. You can’t? What kind of a friend are you?" And as the receiver falls, one hears a hurt. Next time the friend calls or sees you, he will do what he can to make you feel guilty, to take or keep you captive: you owe me more hours, he implies. You have no right to a life of your own.

Setting out to satisfy such an attitude is no more helpful than pouring drink down the throat of an alcoholic: the taste only grows. Most people find a natural rhythm in their friendships and locate quiet ways to pass -on signals to others. We do have jobs, families, interests and privacies that need protection from friends, and it is important to guard . these zones and to signal when someone intrudes across their lines. If a subtle code does not successfully limit the friend’s demands on us, we must make clear statements of our needs. And if a friendship cannot survive the setting of boundaries, we must question whether it ever was very deep: Was the friend anything more than a consumer, eating up our time and affections? On the other hand, if we too readily draw the boundaries and allow for no sacrifice or inconvenience, then it may be as clear from the friend’s point of view that no investment in friendship is forthcoming from us. Better say good-bye, she may think, to look for other, better matches.

Friendship is a strenuous form of human activity. Most of us remember having had more friends as children than we have as adults -- or at least we were conscious of such bonds’ meaning more to us then. No doubt that is because children are more free of care and thus freer to cultivate connections than are adults. And perhaps they are also more aware of their friendships, more free to speak about them. "My friend Joey . . . my friend Sheila . . ." These are introductions of a sort that pass out of speech as people grow up and follow more formal lines: "This is my boss . . ." "Professor Smith teaches anthropology." "I’ve wanted you to meet a business associate." Less: "Here’s my best friend; I hope she’ll be a friend of yours, too." Adults are not as free as that.

Friendships That Fade

If friendships freely come, can they freely go? As they are born, do they die? Yes, we must admit, though not without some pain. But not everything in life needs to be clung to the same way. One can experience the passing of some friendships without any pain at all.

If you are in your middle years, see if you can find an address book from college days or soon after, when you first embarked on adult life. I have one such worn leather-bound book, made of materials that will last for ages. It has already outlived some friendships. Scanning it, I notice that not in a single instance was a friendship killed; not in any case did an old friend and I part as enemies. We did not even part knowing that we were parting.

Once upon a time the group of us made up "our gang." We came home from college at Christmas and partied many nights. In summer we might work six days a week, but when evening came there was always time for a date, a hamburger, or a long visit. A few score of us probably thought of each other as friends. Some disappeared for the military and never settled back home. None have the addresses they did 30 years before. Not many married within the group; as friends we had become brothers and sisters, and the attractions that cause people to marry were not strong. We are told that so it is in the kibbutzim of Israel, where unrelated boys and girls grow up as if siblings, and choose spouses from outside their circle. So with us.

Some of the group "succeeded," and we could track them down with Who’s Who or from people who know them. Others failed. I don’t know but that some may have committed suicide, though, as they say, "I should probably have heard." Once in a while when I have spoken in a faraway city someone will come up and ask, "Do you remember who I am?" And my eye retraces the outline of a face to see behind it the firmer lines of a younger face that I knew "way back when." Then it comes to me, and we spontaneously embrace. We turn to others in the circle and babble about those happy times. Everything is very genuine. We are sure that it would be nice to get together again. How are the children, if there are children? How is the spouse? Ow. Oh, I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard about the divorce -- or even the marriage, for that matter. And by the time I am back at the hotel and the old friend at his or her home, our meeting is only one part of the long day. Time to turn on the late-night news. A plane to catch in the morning.

To keep our sanity, we have to remember that even friends are like ships passing in the night; their lights penetrate each other’s zones of visibility, their solitudes touch and greet for a while -- but then they move on. The mind is not able to register nor the heart capable of storing all the positive contacts we have had through the years. We have to sort, to eliminate, to let go and let drop. There are books on my shelves that I once considered friends, books that someday will have to make room for other books. When I first read them, I could not picture the day they would be part of a gift to a library or a donation to an auction. If I could regress to the high school world in which I bought them and could re-create and then freeze the moments that led me to such books, I should be a happy creature. But not necessarily a human being, for our minds are not antique shops in which we can collect literally everything.

Letting friendships fade and die, then, may be part of a natural passage or a call of God. Friends are among the earthly things that may fall with the leaves and get raked or swept away. They may have a sweet smell, but it is like that of decaying leaves, for, with friendship, the odor of autumn comes. There are undying friendships, signals of resurrected life; there are dying friendships that we can restore later in life. And there are, mostly, quietly ending friendships among people far apart. Write someone a letter daily, and you cannot end the pages. Write annually, and there will be ever less to say each year.

The Counsel of a Friend

Along the way you have used each other for advice. That brings up one more problem area in friendships: knowing the limits of the friend as a semiprofessional helper. You can heed the counsel of a friend, but the friend is not a counselor. You can get therapy from a friendship, but friends are not therapists. Counselors and therapists have professional roles to fill. They become expert at what they do by years of study. Their preparation forces them to work out theories of human behavior, theories that can be of help when you present yourself and your specific problems. Through experience they have evolved comparative models by which you can locate yourself. From these few lines it should be clear that, relating to you in their professional capacity, they are highly limited human beings. You cannot capture life in roles, theories or comparative models. That is why counselors and therapists need friends who are not their counselees or patients.

And that is why people with trouble need to remember that friends cannot always be of help in every respect. Friends may be shocked at those creative moments when a therapist does not blink an eye or stop taking notes. "Doctor, I think my problems go back to the years when my father abused me sexually. You see, I . . . uh . . . uh." "Yes, go on?" The doctor has heard it before; maybe she hears it every day. That does not necessarily make you Case 306B, Category Incest. But it means that you are in a flow with which the doctor can cope. She can help you locate yourself in this flow and help you begin to face your problem.

Things are different, if, out of a rather clear blue-gray sky, you unload a problem based on incest on an unsuspecting friend. This friend has never been within textbook range of theory and would not know the incest taboo from a blind date. The friend has never met anyone with your problem and finds the topic disgusting. But rather than show it, he overwhelms you with torrents of shock and sympathy, all designed to help you but all capable of covering over his inexperience and ineptness. He means well, but he does not have the capability to help you to overcome your difficulty.

The therapist -- or the priest, for that matter -- often plays the part of a half-impersonal "other" who represents a larger humanity to the troubled soul. Take the priest: he can put on the robes of the confessional and speak with you about the God who presides over a moral universe in which you both find acceptance. In the act of forgiveness you rejoin the human race and enjoy a new dignity. Then this same priest can step out of his robes, put on a T-shirt, and clean up on you during a few rounds of golf until you think you have no dignity left. A friend can clean up on you, but he or she is not likely to be a successful embodiment of a larger humanity that must affirm you when you do not deserve it.

To observe that the friend is not a counselor or therapist is not to freeze him out of counsel but to see his gift in a special light. Your friend probably has no more experience with your problem than you do, and can receive the shock much as you do. Together you may live with it, and perhaps together you seek counsel. The therapist can say, "You are well on your way to cure; you simply have to experience the acceptance of other human beings." And your friend comes on the scene to be an agent of acceptance. The priest is enabled to say something as shocking as "God forgives you" or "I’ll forgive you" before turning you loose on a world that does not seem hospitable. And the friend creates a haven of hospitality where you can regather your energies for a more open assault on less accepting portions of that world.

"Talking things over" with a friend is one of the most enjoyable and, dare we say it, useful features of our relations. The mental stopwatch of the professional is running all the time. The clock ticks; the hour comes to an end. The priest runs a finger along the margin, and soon the ritual pages of the little black book come to the word "Amen," and the session is over. You go back into the burdening night or, worse, into the sun that forces you to blink in the face of a world that wants to do you in. But a friend, though she may be busy, is not monitoring your relations so closely. There is no next patient or next sinner waiting in the outer office or the next booth. There is, for now, only you. "Yes, I know you’ve told me a thousand times, but sometimes the truth comes through to me the thousand-and-first. So let’s take another run at it. No, I don’t know whether I can help you, but I think that my just being here with you is better than if I left you alone just now." Friendship finds its own distinctive place in a society where most other ties are commercial and programmed.

We might think, then, of friendship as being interstitial and tentacular. The rest of society leaves interstices and gaps, and friendship fills some of them. The rest of the culture offers possibilities for the development of the person, and friendship attaches itself to some of them. Yet in both cases friendship preserves its distinctive character, and prospers best when tested.

Insiders Look at Fundamentalism

A new book, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon: The Resurgence of Conservative Christianity (Doubleday-Galilee, 269 pp., $13.95), reveals the intensity of the power struggle in reactionary Protestantism and the dilemmas of leadership within that faction. Authors Ed Dobson and Ed Hindson, professors at Liberty Baptist College in Virginia, base their reasonably balanced effort to define and locate fundamentalism on a wide reading of secondary sources and present a convenient summary as well as a campaign document.

Definitions first. Fundamentalism, "the religious phenomenon of the twentieth century," is made up of "the militant and faithful defenders of biblical orthodoxy." It is "really traditional and conservative Christian orthodoxy." Also, "Fundamentalism is the spiritual and intellectual descendant of the nonconformist Free Church movement," which is "a very definite strain within the history of Christianity," and displays "a definite set of basic principles held in common opposition to main-line Christianity."

This historical case is full of problems. Certainly Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant mainline Christians would not yield to a 20th century innovation a patent on "biblical" or ‘traditional and conservative" orthodoxy. Nor would they let pass unnoticed the fact that no two of the 19 exemplars cited by Dobson and Hindson in fundamentalism’s "definite strain" would have accepted each other as fully orthodox. To make that point I must list the antecedents they cite: Marcionites, Montanists, Novatians, Donatists, Paulicians, Albigensians, Waldensians, Lollards, Hussites, Savonarolans, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Baptists, Pietists, Methodists, Brethren, Plymouth Brethren, Quakers, Disciples.

What common view of the Second Coming, what central theory of the atonement, what view of the sacraments, what grounding for scriptural authority unites these groups? Of course, none does. The authors, therefore, have to pick one of these 19 as being the most orthodox, localist and Free. Being Baptists, they choose the Baptists, of whom, they say, there are 25 million in 100 countries and more than 100 (often competing) jurisdictions and bodies. "The bulk of today’s Fundamentalists are certainly Baptists, but the majority of Baptists are not necessarily Fundamentalists." That formula leaves us with somewhere between 12.5 million and 25 million true fundamentalists in the whole world. As Dobson and Hind-son make clear, they are fighting over their share of the conservative-minded market on Protestant soil.

Their main American rival is the much larger cluster of evangelicals who, in the views of Dobson and Hindson, seem to have had their chance and blown it. Usually they are sneering and dismissive about evangelicals. But they would also like to woo the more "militant and faithful" into the fundamentalist camp. And they must admit that on paper and purely cognitively, so far as the content of fundamental doctrines is concerned, most evangelicals have these "right."

Like the American Negroes who adopted the word "black" from the enemy and flung it back, or the feminists who accept "witch" and "bitch" as badges of honor, Dobson and Hindson are in a mood and movement that take fundamentalism back as a banner for pride and boasting and wave it in the faces of the, in their view, waning evangelicals. "In dealing with the issue of ecumenical evangelism [Billy Graham style], two terms became the watchwords of fundamentalism: ‘compromise’ and ‘apostasy.’" While they accuse some accusers of making "unfounded" attacks on Graham, the authors delight in reprinting one nine-point and two ten-point attacks on him without bothering to sort out the "unfounded" points.

The authors cite fundamentalists Charles J. Woodbridge, "Dr. Smith," John R. Rice and William E. Ashbrook. Because he worked with non-fundamentalists, Graham was "the greatest divider of the Church of Christ in the twentieth century." He was friendly with Roman Catholics and infidels and critical of the fundamentalists who converted him. He sought the "company and favors of men who hate the gospel he preaches."

As with Graham, so with Ockenga and Carl Henry and the whole moderate evangelical movement. The breach is clear. If fundamentalism’s "definite strain" is nonconformity, "the atmosphere of New Evangelicalism is generally that of conformity to society," whether in theology, philosophy or practice. Style is all.

Ask an Evangelical whether or not he believes there are flames in hell, and after a thirty-minute philosophical recitation on the theological implications of eternal retribution in light of the implicit goodness of God, you will still not know what he really believes. Ask a Fundamentalist whether he believes there are really flames in hell and he will simply say, "Yes, and hot ones too!" [p. 172.]

Evangelicals hold "weak commitments and positions," are guilty of "ethereal theorizing," are "soft" on Catholicism, adrift. "Content to puff on their theological pipes, they seem to be embarrassed to admit any association at all with their Bible-toting cousins from the right." They "walk down the center line of the religious marketplace," and are "guilty of stroking one another’s intellectual egos." They like "understanding and tolerance" and are guilty of a "lack of separatism." They are also guilty, therefore, of provoking fundamentalists (like Dobson and Hindson and hyper-fundamentalists to their right) to stridency. No wonder "the evangelical ship is . . . breaking up at sea."

Dobson and Hindson are quite capable of being self-critical about fundamentalism, and they present one five-page, ten-point passage about fundamentalism’s "little capacity for self-criticism," its resistance to change, "overdependence on dynamic leadership," "excessive worry over labels and associations," absolutism, authoritarianism and exclusivism. But they blame most of these on the hyper-fundamentalists to their right.

Historic fundamentalists would find them compromising, adapting, walking center lines and warning on one of the two main marks -- the other being biblical inerrancy -- of fundamentalism. In their history they give two and a half pages to a peculiar view of the Second Coming, "dispensational premillennialism," which they admit overpowered the opposition in the earlier scramble for fundamentalist control.

But in the mere 18-line reference to the Second Coming in their doctrinal portion, they make it clear that on this particular fundamental they do not want to divide the movement by witnessing clearly, faithfully and militantly to what their fathers insisted was "biblical orthodoxy.""... this doctrine is the most debated and divergent of all the fundamentals (one may choose among premillennial, postmillennial, amillennial, pretribulational, midtribulational, posttribulational, partial rapture, and other views)..." So fundamentalism is also to be taken à la carte, cafeteria style!

If this faction mutes the premillennial debate, it has not yielded so readily on another movement that like evangelicalism and fundamentalism could easily be called "the religious phenomenon of the twentieth century" -- Pentecostalism. ‘While the public lumps the three movements together, these authors know their history: "The earliest and most extreme opposition to the Pentecostal Movement came from both the Fundamentalist and Holiness groups, who broke formally in 1928 because Pentecostals promoted "fanatical and unscriptural emphases." Unfortunately, evangelicals have been "more accepting of the Pentecostal denominations." Admitting that fundamentalists could learn about love from Pentecostals, they conclude that "Fundamentalists, as a group, violently reject the Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement. . . ." But do they leave the door open for future compromise? They do admit that Pentecostalism is based "upon an evangelical doctrinal foundation." As of now, "Most Fundamentalists would not accept the Charismatic Movement as a legitimate representation of Fundamentalism."

An irony pervades this book. While the authors attack the evangelicals who broke with fundamentalism in 1947, they find themselves under attack from hyper-fundamentalist, rigorist separationists who see them seeking respectability and political power -- in short, being exactly where the neoevangelicals were in 1947. Not to acknowledge this attack would be to fail to stake out the turf for their faction. To overacknowledge it is to show that fundamentalism, simple biblical orthodoxy, is as split up as evangelicalism and other contemporary competitors.

The authors choose the middle way and let evangelist David Sproul and historian George Dollar represent the attackers. They even reproduce a nine-point attack on their wing by the (non- Southern Baptist) South Carolina Baptist Fellowship. Those in that wing emphasize numbers, the SCBF charges, above faithfulness, are obsessed with bigness, use celebrities to draw a crowd, employ worldly music, destroy small fundamentalist programs for the sake of their "Super-church" and electronic empires, share platforms with nonfundamentalists, say "Whatever will get a crowd I will do it," and then call the "biblical fundamentalist" a "nit-picker."

The authors’ response sounds like evangelicalism of 1947-1981: "While we appreciate the concern of the extreme Fundamentalists over keeping the Church on the right track, we must not allow them to categorize and label everyone to death. The real fundamentalist majority must lead the movement in the 1980s and thereby prevent the tendency to react to the extreme right." Not a word about orthodoxy or biblical truth; only words about tactics and power.

While having to recognize all the factions, Dobson and Hindson insist that in 1980, "to the surprise of . . . the Evangelicals . . . [fragmented Fundamentalism] did unite and exerted a political influence that shocked the entire nation." They openly admit (pp. 143-44) that politics, not a basic doctrinal impetus, united this once-doctrinal movement.

Politics is the basic issue here. As for the leadership dilemma mentioned above, all these’ groups are competing for a finite cohort of American prospects, a certain number of millions who make up the outer limits of their market potential. To "go soft" on hyper-fundamentalism on one hand or evangelicalism on the other is to remove from prospective converts the reasons to join this brand of fundamentalist movement. But to go too hard on them is to lose political power and to see a potential coalition fall apart.

Dobson and Hindson and their kin and kind have the right instincts, or have astutely read the signs of the times. They have seen the power of fundamentalist minorities, like the Gush Emunim and the tiny orthodox parties in Israel. the Paisleyites in Northern Ireland, the ayatollahs in Iran. Given the right set of circumstances, they can wield majority power. But America is so rich in diversity that there are limits to the numbers of those who will join revanchist and tribal groups. Those who seek power, in the present American circumstances, have to compromise, walk center lines, turn moderate. Not thus to turn is to lose political potential. To turn too suddenly is to lose the rationale for ties to a "definite strain" of fundamentalist rootage. Take cheer, in any case. Dobson and Hindson have a parting flourish of reassurance. "Fundamentalists are not interested in controlling America." They only want to call us back to moral sanity: "We want to see freedom preserved so that the work of the Gospel may go on unhindered in the generations ahead."

Denominations: Surviving the ‘70s

In 1944 the then “undenominational” Christian Century published several articles under the heading “What’s Disturbing the Churches?” Nineteen years later, in 1963, the now “ecumenical” weekly took another turn and had numerous writers ask, “What’s Ahead for the Churches?” By that time, according to Editor Kyle Haselden: the earlier question was no longer apropos. The editors of 14 years ago were bothered that little of anything seemed to be disturbing the churches, which were still riding relatively high after their boom in the 1950s. The question was, how would churches face the idealistic challenges of the era of President John F. Kennedy, Pope John XXIII and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Most authors in the series asked whether the churches would risk many of their resources to deal with political, ecumenical and social issues.

Those who enjoy the cycles or pendular swings in history may be charmed to note that in 1977 the churches are bothered again. Some of them did use resources for the struggles of the 1960s, but they were also weakened by those struggles; many became bewildered by both spiritual and secular changes in that decade. As we reread the essays of the last series, it impresses us to note how low the institutional expectations of most mainline church writers were. But at that time they were less preoccupied than people now seem to have to be with institutional survival as such.

Many American denominations have lived during the past ten years somewhere between Rainer Maria Rilke’s “To Survive Is All” and the graffito “If we don’t survive, we also won’t do anything else.” Not that any of the medium-sized church bodies in America is at the point, of near-extinction; yet statistically only the Southern Baptist Convention and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have much to brag about among the larger groups. Catholicism holds its own so far as membership ticker tapes are concerned, but no one doubts the extent of the crisis reflected in disastrously declining mass attendance and vocations to priesthood and religious orders, to say nothing of the crises of faith and meaning that go with these other declines.

All the churches have survived, and most of them will continue to do so, languishing somewhere between and 3 million. They have little prospect of seeing their graph lines go up radically in a time of decline in the rate of population growth and in the face of numbers of other contrary societal forces. The more conservative churches are still growing, riding the boom in both authoritarian and experiential religion that the mainliners have not quite known how to exploit. The evangelical-fundamentalist-Pentecostal subcultures have expanded significantly since 1962, and their meaning-systems have been drastically transformed while these churches embrace the world of advertising and celebrities, sex manuals and affluence, theological adjustment and new styles of witness. But there is something of a revolving-door character to their parade of accessions, as people convert from group to group. The market potential for conservative religion, larger than anyone predicted, is finite and quite possibly on the verge of being reached. In any case, thoughtful people in these churches where the language of survival has been less urgent -- and such thoughtful people are legion -- are asking questions of meaning which show that they too are “bothered” and have to look at “what’s ahead.”

Modern Inventions

Obscured behind these queries about the relative prospects of various religious factions and styles in America is the tantalizing one: Why bother with denominations at all, as late in Christian and American history as 1977-78? The denomination seems to be a very curious agency, one that hardly merits much attention and concern. Nowhere in the Bible will you find a trace of anyone’s anticipation of this form -- unless negatively in Paul’s questions about Christ being divided, with some followers belonging to Cephas and some to Apollos and some to Paul. Nowhere in 15 or 16 centuries of Christian history will you find serious theological proposals for defense of such forms. They are modern inventions, usually justified on political, economic (laissez-faire, free-enterprise competition) or, among the most conservative, Darwinian evolutionary (“survival of the fittest”) grounds.

Though the word “denomination” began to appear in England before the American experience came to full term, it was the separation of church and state, the disestablishment of the churches, and the voluntary principle in church life which created the void on the spiritual landscape that denominations were invented to fill. No great theological genius devised the form perhaps Thomas Jefferson did more than anyone else to necessitate it, as he sketched out the grounds for the American Revolution. The itinerant revivalists of the First and Second Great Awakenings in America played their part as they called into question the churches of the established order and asked each citizen to decide for himself or herself to “get religion,” and what form to get.

The denomination has served America well. It drained conflict into harmless channels. Replacing the holy wars of the Old World have been religious patterns that left few dead bodies, though competitive denominational missionaries in many a new suburb have come down with ulcers, heart disease, endocrine disturbances, alcoholism arid, as they say, “other specifically Christian diseases” in their scrambles. Without question, the competitive business model, whether or not it has been religiously justifiable, has worked.

Denominationalists added greatly to the vitality of U.S. and Canadian religion, for they helped minimize the anticlericalism that goes with establishment, permitted few believers to relax, and were able to offer something for everyone. Indeed, they still do. There are few ecological niches and crannies in the environment that sonic new denomination cannot be designed to meet. No space exists between denominations in our sociological forms. Start a movement, be anti-institutional, work for “emerging viable structures of ministry,” try to unite all the churches, and you soon find yourself designated a denomination in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. That process gives no sign of diminishing or being ended in the immediate future.

Identity and Issues

Denominational life is rich in paradoxes and contradictions. Denominations were formed to help assure the integrity of each group’s creed and way of life, yet on most vital issues one learns little about what people believe and how they act by learning to which church they belong. This has long been true of the creedally vague mainline denominations, but it is surprisingly noticeable among the professedly more defined conservative ones. Who knows to which denomination Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and other evangelists belonged?

Attend a National Association of Evangelicals convention and watch the delegates talk about what concerns them most. Almost never do they concentrate on the sacramental issues that help constitute them as Baptist or non-Baptist, or on historic Calvinist-Arminian lines that once separated them. Attend a lay gathering of conservatives and you will walk away thinking that their denominations are named the Followers of Corrie Ten Boom, Pat Boone, Francis Schaeffer, Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, Robert Schuller or Ralph Martin.

Denominations were supposed to provide the battlelinies between Christian groups. But today it is seldom that one denomination pitches battle against another. All the real spiritual bloodshed occurs within the communions, as Catholics, Southern Presbyterians, Missouri Lutherans, even Southern Baptists and most certainly Episcopalians have demonstrated in recent years. You cannot tell the players without their programs and can almost never tell them by their denominational names when scraps over Pentecostalism, scriptural interpretation or even church order surface and engross people.

Local Expressions of Faith

A third paradox: denominations themselves generated much of the ecumenical ethos that led many to predict that the denominational form would wither as the ecumenical spirit prospered. Yet while the ecumenical movement is in trouble, the ecumenical spirit never had it so good -- Christians in general are quite at ease with each other on many levels. Nonetheless, denominationalism outlasts all the theologies designed to replace it. The relative declines in status and power of world, national, regional, state and local councils of churches occurred for many reasons, not the least of them being a “new denominationalism” that found people scurrying back to and huddling in their denominational homes in a time when senses of identity were hard to come by.

The nonblack world was told that there was supposed to be something called “black religion,” but to the knowing analyst of the black churches it was dangerous to confuse AME, AMEZ and CME brands of black Methodism, to say nothing of the competitive styles of black Baptist groups.

A fourth paradox: while the denominations survive as some means or other of helping people link up with traditions and find spiritual families, they are grossly undersupported. While per-capita giving increases in most churches each year, the gains do not keep up with horrendous inflation. This factor leads hard-pressed congregations to keep funds close to home, and the bureaucratized church bodies have had to cut staffs and programs as a consequence. At the same time, people have chosen to favor regional and even more local expressions of faith. This choice has inspired them either casually to drag their feet or willfully to withstand some of the appeals from “headquarters.” So denominations are curiously caught between the ideology and spirit of ecumenism and the practice and spirit of localism.

Beyond the Language of Survival

To list all the besetting circumstances around the denominations is to describe institutions that seem to have little future. Few denominational leaders are either celebrities or well-known spiritual guides in their own church bodies; the media have created spokespersons entirely outside the line of appointed and elected officialdom who tend to speak for the churches. People from one denomination do not care much about what goes on in another, and as a result, news of church bodies rarely receives coverage. Paradenominational agencies keep springing up to distract people from the church bodies. “Invisible religion,” the do-it-yourself, customer-oriented personal faith that spreads so rapidly today, leads people to ignore the denominations even when they no longer protest against structures.

Alternative kinds of pension plans and health-care programs liberate many professionals from their mystical reliance on their own denominations.

In short, we have seen one final paradox: that America has been undergoing some sort of religious revival -- let’s leave it at some sort” today, shall we? -- but one that has not led to prosperity for most of the denominations, even though they are the most entrenched means of organizing religious response beyond the local zone. Fourteen years ago almost all the series authors expressed at least halfhearted confidence that each denomination would survive. Then each could move to ask questions about relations between them and, even more, how they would use their resources to face theological and ethical issues.

By now, churches have all heard the message that they will prosper to the degree that they choose to distance themselves from others, arrogate truth claims to themselves, and become aggressive and competitive and triumphalist. Conversely, they are told that they will suffer if they wish to make an ethical impact on the larger society, be friendly to one another, be open-minded and open-ended. Now it may be that the climate will soon change and that just as the latecomers would tool up for the inverted style, people will begin to look for something different. Dean Kelley properly pointed out early in the 1970s that conservative churches are growing -- but not all of them grow, nor do those that grow all do so for the same reasons and at the same pace. Meanwhile, mainline churches struggle to hold their own and often suffer loss, but not all congregations within these bodies experience such loss, and from their experience some of the denominations might take clues for their own future course. Finding the balance between institutional self-preservation or self-assertiveness on one hand and the act of living with open hands and hearts in service of others or to interpret a surrounding world: this seems to be a challenge that will continue to face churches both left and right in the years ahead.

‘Tribal’ Life: What’s Ahead

We who edit The Christian Century are committed to both ecumenical and local ventures, but we also confess to being “institutional church freaks,” observers of and participants in denominational life. As such, we hope that those who do use their treasures and traditions for the sake of others will prosper in new if chastened ways. We will remain friendly critics, puzzled at their survival capacities and hopeful about their intentions. Somehow they tend to serve as “tribes,” forms of more-than-familial life that keep people from being overwhelmed by the blur of generalized religion yet challenge them to look at more than their own backyards and neighborhoods.

Now it is time for us to join readers in listening to people who can give close-up views of the churches’ life and prospects today, to ask both “What’s disturbing them?” and “What’s ahead?”

Religious Cause, Religious Cure

She calls herself “Lord Zealous.” Her religious master on the west coast gave her that name; his “family” insists on helping her forget her real name. She meets with me only because I will call her “Lord Zealous.” Since she is not my daughter, I find this merely embarrassing but not impossible. As we converse on a gray afternoon in my campus study, I learn that she will not read or even open mail from her parents because they cannot bring themselves to address her as “Lord Zealous.” Nor -- and this seems even more painful for all concerned -- will she respond in conversation with them unless they force themselves to use her new name.

“Of course, I am willing to call you whatever you’d like,” I find myself saying, but isn’t ‘Lord’ a strange designation for a woman?”

She is ready for that. “Oh, no, all of us are ‘Lord’ Something-or-other. Our master assigns these names. His every wish is my command.”

During the next hour a familiar-sounding story unfolds. She had been a sophomore at one of the best schools. (They all seem to have gone to the best schools.) No, she had not been on drugs. Her parents had told me that, she had always been an idealist of sorts, and her master promised her that their group would improve the world.

As she talks on about her new life, I glance over her shoulder at that whole shelf of ‘70s books that comment on the new intense religious groups: The Mind Benders; Going Further: Life-and-Death Religion in America; Youth, Brainwashing, and the Extremist Cults, All Gods Children; Those Curious New Cults; The New Religions; Turning East. They had been gathering dust ever since the new religions began looking like the same old thing, ever since they seemed to start declining late in our decade. Now, after the Peoples Temple murders/suicides in Guyana, the shelf has had to be dusted off; the books have seemed relevant again.

I am thinking: I must understand her. We have to keep communicating. So I ask her about her biological family, her old world.

“I don’t hate them, Professor. It is simply that after my New Birth, I became someone completely new, and don’t belong to them any more. And if I see too much of them” -- she was home for a day because they had helped bail her out of some legal scrape her group had gotten her into -- “they will taint me, and might lure me back to the old ways. Certainly you as a scholar of religion, must know what it is to believe something deeply, to belong to the true Community. . . .”

Lord Zealous, it turns out, will talk to me because she sees me as a professor, a scholar, a relative neutral. Her trust level is inevitab1y low, but it is a good sign that she will talk at all. She can tell that I have taken lessons from Spinoza, that here on this campus preserve there must be an effort not to judge or to laugh but to understand. But I am also a parent and a member of a civil society, naturally uneasy about Peoples Temple and other groups that no one quite comprehends. Does she detect my nervousness?

We converse almost as calmly as though she were here to talk about next week’s examination or the virtues of the Chicago Symphony. Yet I know that to say the wrong thing at any point will mean that all the logic and history can summon will go out my Gothic Window into the quadrangle, and Lord Zealous will slam the door. I must understand her. So this professor of religion, this scholar (as she insists on calling me), must call on whatever anthropology, sociology and psychology -- yes, most of all, psychology -- have taught me about absolutism and conformity and fanaticism.

Religious Explanations

The tentative answers those disciplines give come easily to mind: Nothing else works, so she might as well turn to religion. Modernity forces cruel choices on the young, and some of them turn to the most severe authorities for the Big Answer, the shortcut or short circuit, that knocks out other signals. She needs closure and cannot tolerate ambiguity; Robert Jay Lifton would call her a “constrictive type.” Yes, here is nothing but another example of fanaticism seen as “overcompensated doubt.” C. J. Jung taught me that. She shows nothing but an “escape from freedom.” Thanks, Erich Fromm.

Though I don’t want to let go of any insights from the social sciences, all this “nothing but” leaves me a bit edgy, and Lord Zealous has seized on my restlessness: There is a hint of a taunt behind her slightly glazed smile as she keeps reminding me that my community is devoted to scholarship; the history of religion. 1-las religion nothing to say? “You, as a theologian, must understand. . . .”

Yes, of course, I do. And after my young friend leaves me and turns her back again on her family, once more to take refuge in the commands of her master, I rejoin that community of scholars and reflect on the religious context of what has gone on here, just as it has in a hundred other interviews. Our community knows very little about Lord Zealous and zealotry, about the religious impulse. We know that it can be risky. Some years ago, when I was venturing to raise some funds for our divinity school, a colleague offered a rationale for supporting the advanced study of religion. “I’d make the case now just as 20 years ago I would have made it for sex education. Like sex, religion is too dangerous a subject to get wrong.” However, our advanced study has not yet told us much. The week of the Guyana horrors, several thousand scholars met in New Orleans to enjoy the restaurants and to sharpen their scholarly tools. Yet a participant later observed that elevator and corridor conversation left these members of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature almost numb: “No, we just cannot understand how Jonestown could happen. . . .”

No one can. But gradually it dawns on some of us: insofar as the intense groups are religious problems, we should look for some beginnings of religious explanations;. if there are theological causes, there must be the beginnings of theological cures. If the couch can help, so can the confessional. If the language of statistics informs the inquiry, so should the language of salvation.

The Appeal to Absolutism

Lord Zealous was right, and every historian of religion knows it: the idea of putting oneself under a master, of feeling absolute and even fanatic about the cause, is an old one in religion. The sense that Israel was a “chosen people,’ especially called of God, gave that nation strength, but it also legitimated bloodshed. The Hebrew Scriptures are no stranger to the world of Lord Zealous: “So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord. God of Israel commanded” (Joshua 10:40 [RSV], italics added). And the Shi’ite Muslims in Iran today will not let us be content with the notion that only communists or the politically repressed were doing battle with the shah. This round, they insist, was a jihad, a religious war against the modernizer and trampler of traditions.

The members of today’s intense religious groups and not a few members of the larger public like to get even closer to home, rubbing texts like these into contemporary Christian consciousness: “Now great multitudes accompanied Jesus; and he turned and said to them, ‘If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple’ ” (Luke 14:25 f.). Lord Zealous, they tell us, has caught that spirit better than have the namby-pamby compromisers in mainline religion. That is why the intense groups are growing; that is why the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the fundamentalist branches of the born-again movement outstrip the ecumenical-minded folk who let members keep their ties to the best colleges and the lures of a pluralistic culture.

Luke 14:26, a passage tempered a bit in Matthew 10:37 (“He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”), had been a forbidding problem for almost 2,000 years before the master of Lord Zealous called her to follow. The commentators have had plenty of chances to dull its call. “The Saviour, of course,” says one, “does not mean that he who desires to follow Him must hate his parents . . . but . . . if loyalty to Him clashes with loyalty to them he is to treat his loved ones in this connection as though they are persons whom he hates.” Another tells us that the modern Western reader cannot easily recapture the Semitic mind’s comfort with extremist language, that we must learn to know that Jesus is here talking only about preferences and priorities. That is all true, but even after the glossings-over and bluntings of the text, it remains a scandal.

The appeal of absolutism, conformity and fanaticism did not end in the first century. New England’s sick comic-cleric Nathaniel Ward, who styled himself The Simple Cobler of Agawam, set the tone for the New World: “He that is willing to tolerate any Religion, or discrepant way of Religion, besides his own, unless it be in matters merely indifferent, either doubts of his own, or is not sincere in it.” The religious impulse calls people from the distractions of a random world and helps them make sense of things. Religion could be called “Meaning and Belonging, Incorporated”; when those who find meaning around the same vision or the same master link up, they can become dangerously intolerant.

As the cause is religious, so may be the cure. The Bible includes texts that call into question the idea of chosenness and absolutism. These are subversive of the world of Lord Zealous and the intense new groups, each of which is sure that it is the only bearer of the truth. Thus the prophet Amos (9:7-9) thundered against the exclusivism that could accompany the idea of a Chosen People. He hears Yahweh, their Lord, say: “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of. Israel?” While God was bringing Israel up from the Land of Egypt, who did they think was handling the affairs of others; who was bringing “the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir”?

And if the disciples of Jesus were too sure of themselves, they could always listen to the most zealous among them, Paul, who in his best-known chapter, I Corinthians 13, reminded them that “now we know in part.” The German has it better: our knowledge is piecework, patchy, fragmentary. The believers have much about which to be humble intellectually and morally.

The Missionary Impulse

The conversation in my office at one point took a strange turn. Suddenly it became clear that: Lord Zealous was out to convert “the scholar.” So many members of intense groups who collar travelers in airports or shoppers in centers want to interrupt the metaphysical shoplifters of our culture and sell them the Big Answer that comes with membership in their group. As they pester us, we are often tempted to ask for a moratorium on the conversion business until young minds can build defenses against the most exotic and extravagant appeals. Jimmy Durante comes to mind: “Why doesn’t everybody leave everybody else the hell alone.”

Yet Zealous’s master did not invent the impulse to do missionary work, to engage in converting efforts. In Conversion to Judaism Joseph R. Rosenbloom has shown how deep was this drive in Judaism, though it has been dulled in recent centuries. Christianity is a history of mission and expansion, usually by the sword and not infrequently by methods that would make the current masters look mild. Even today, we are regularly reminded, it is the most fanatic and frantic born-againers who most disrupt the families of Jews and other outsiders when they wrench the young out of context to bring them to a new master. Lord Zealous is correct; I as a historian of religion and -- is she rubbing it in as she draws out the third syllable? -- a theologian, must know that. It is in the books.

What is at the heart of the impulse to convert others to the vision and the group? We used to think that it was exclusively the sense of being privy to the doings of a Supreme Being who controlled reality from an unseen world. In the West and especially in the United States, religion always meant transactions with such a Supreme Being. As late as 1931 Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes was saying that “the essence of religion is belief in a relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation.” But by 1961 the Supreme Court found itself having to acknowledge that “a sincere and meaningful belief which occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by . . . God” in the life of others qualified as religion in our civil society. The new master does not claim to speak for a transcendent God beyond, the range of vision. He is the God. Thus did the Reverend Jim Jones ask his adherents in Peoples Temple to think of him.

Ultimate Concerns

What is integral to the religious vision, then, is not necessarily a belief in a Supreme Being. It must, however, include what Paul Tillich called “Ultimate Concern.” Ordinarily this concern comes coupled with impulses to form tight communities, to make total demands on adherents’ behavior. Usually there will be new myths and symbols; the intense groups like the Unification Church are extremely fertile generators of new myths. And even when the Messiah is palpable, even when the leader “tangibilificates” deity, as Father Divine claimed to do, a kind of burdening metaphysical claim accompanies him. He leads adherents into arcane wisdom and superior knowledge about what the meaning of life truly is. That sense, at once so salvific and therapeutic, can also be dangerous.

At this point we do tend to draw on the psychologist to make sense of what novelist Mary McCarthy observed: that religion makes good people good and bad people bad. But the psychology of character does not tell us all that we need to know. Aristotle prepared us for that. “Choice is about things in reference to the end,” so “rectitude of choice requires two things; namely, the due end and something suitably ordered to that end.” We are back, then, to theology, to making some judgment about which “due ends” are humanizing and which are endangering.

By now Americans have learned that disputes over theology are arguments without ends. Some invoke absolute authority to settle them: my friend parts from me with “Well, then, let’s agree to disagree. You do things your way and I’ll do things God’s way.” However sure of themselves the authoritarians may be, they do not usually convince us that theirs is the only true theology. We are able to talk only about the types of religious visions which today can minimize the damages of tribal warfare between religious forces, or of brainwashing or mind control in the intense groups.

To make such judgments about types, it should be noted, is not to suggest that civil authorities have any right to be the endorsing or disapproving agency, or that in the reaction to Jonestown, majorities have a right to go backlashing or would be wise to undertake a binge of repression. Even if the rights were there to do so, it would be stupid policy: intense religious groups prosper when persecution makes them alluring.

What is left, then, is a need for thoughtful people to make some discriminations between and within religions groups, to look for curing impulses that are latent in faiths that so easily can spread disease. On this level, one looks to the scholars for some help, but there are distressing signals on this front. The academic taunters of civil-minded believers are of little help. Many agnostics have come to profess admiration for the days when people really believed, when they cared enough to persecute or form inquisitions or go on crusades. Real belief, in such terms, must be absolutist. Thus Will Durant: “Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.” Durant himself is not nostalgic for the murderous days or groups, but it is not rare to hear intellectuals speak in envious terms of the young who have found something to believe in, or to hear them deride mainline religious groups for seeing their young drift, such churches having failed to demand absolutism and conformity and fanaticism.

Kelley and Cuddihy

Two outstanding examples of misusable observations relate to two books of the 1970s. National Council of Churches staffer Dean Kelley in 1972 produced a best-selling analysis, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. In sociological terms he spelled out why Black Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other intense groups were growing while liberal and tolerant ones were losing position. His book has become a manual of arms or mainline church leaders who think a bit of zealotry and absolutism might help them regain the young.

Last year John Murray Cuddihy came up with a disturbingly ambiguous discussion that he called No Offense. Cuddihy showed how in civil society people had to let their old faith and behavior get ground up and refined. Jews who used to say they were the Chosen People now had to say, “I happen to be Jewish.’’ Catholics, who formerly insisted that ‘outside the church there is no salvation,’ now excommunicated a Boston priest, Father Leonard Feeney, who was guilty of insisting a bit too long on that very theme. And Protestants, who believe that salvation comes in Jesus alone, were asked by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to call off the mission in Jesus’ name to the Jew. Even the president’s sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, who backed off from a rally of would-be converters of Jews on Long Island, and evangelist Billy Graham, who had to correct or retract a McCall’s magazine interview on the subject, were not astute enough to avoid crossfire in the no-man’s-land between the zealots and the civil. Cuddihy’s studiously double-minded book is being used single-mindedly by some academic folk who have tried to turn civility into a dirty word.

Cuddihy thinks that the civil choice in a society where we must not give offense results in henotheism. Henotheism is the belief that there are many gods; that “my god is better than your god,” but yours is good enough. To be sure, there may be a good deal of henotheism in the American environment. Those who prefer the tolerant way of James Madison to that of Jim Jones are willing to be grateful for it. But henotheism can also be dulling to the religious impulse, and most believers will insist that they do not hold it; they cannot hold it. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord. . . . Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .” Must such proclamations and prayers lead to mindbending arid brainwashing, or is there another alternative?

The theological community insists that there can be. Paul Tillich put it abstractly, as was his wont and we do well to quote him before setting forth a few concrete illustrations of an alternative:

In the depth of every living religion there is a point at which the religion itself loses its importance, and that to which it points breaks through its particularity, elevating it to spiritual freedom and with it to a vision of the spiritual presence in other expressions of the ultimate meaning of man’s existence.

Not many of us talk that way. But we are invoking something similar to Tillich when we recall a Pope John XXIII. As pope, he could hardly he described as marginal or fainthearted, so far as Catholic belief and behavior were concerned. Far from being a henotheist, he was ready to state the claims of his church’s truth. But when he received a company of Jews, mindful of centuries of Christian persecution and futile dogmatic debate, he simply greeted them with outstretched arms: “I am Joseph, your brother.’’ The biblical allusion helped him and his guests overleap the centuries and the tired explanations.

Mohandas Gandhi never deserted his historic faith, though he could appreciate the Christ of the Western believers. Martin Luther King remained a firm old-time Baptist gospel preacher, but he could appropriate Gandhi’s nonviolence without surrendering the Jesus his parents gave him -- thanks, in part, to the Tillich about whom he wrote his doctoral thesis. Martin Buber remained a Jew to all but the most anxiously orthodox, yet his I and Thou spelled out terms of dialogue with people of other faiths and of no faith. Dorothy Day is a rather old-fashioned pre-Vatican II kind of Catholic mass-goer who could never quite figure out back in the 60s why her guests -- among them, Father Daniel Berrigan -- were interested in “mod’’ masses. Yet she was so secure in her Catholicism that she could be open-minded, expansive, boundaryless in her dealings with others.

Each of these persons -- and scores of others come to mind -- is likely to be looked back on from a 21st century vantage as one of the universal people of our time. Yet each spent a lifetime ransacking and living into a specific religious tradition. They found meaning and belonging in a truth, a group.

A Game of Inches

Two sets of elites in our society reject their experiments. One does it in order to lump all religion together and dismiss them all. The other does it to call forth the troops from the camps of the compromisers, to do new battle for the minds of the young against the masters of the day by insisting on ultimate absolutism.

The Tillichian vision calls for some discriminations to be made, yet these subtleties are often overlooked. Seven years ago, after the first International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, which then was sponsored by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church as covertly as it is overtly sponsored today, I asked a colleague whether he did not fear that his enthusiastic participation might be used chiefly to give plausibility to a potential new Messiah and a possibly dangerous group. I have long since stopped making such inquiries, both because of a desire not to sound shrill and shrewish -- what business is it of mine? -- and because of the openings I gave him and others of the new mentality: “Well, so I go to a Unification Church conference. Didn’t you attend the Presbyterian General Assembly? Didn’t you go to the Second Vatican Council?” The import is clear: all religions are equally false, equally persecutory at heart. Did I not know about the Inquisition, and about John Calvin’s standing by with assent as Geneva burned the heretic Servetus four centuries ago?

To avoid being tedious in rejoinder, we are reduced to mumbling, thinking, hoping: do such academic colleagues not realize that civilization, like football, is a game of inches? Yes, all religions may be on a kind of continuum, in the fullest theoretical sense. For comparison: a caress and a rape are both forms of sexual activity, but it does make a difference whether society cherishes one over the other. Chess and nuclear war are both forms of conflict; let no nonplayer think that chess is not intense. But it matters very much which of these activities people indulge in. Attempts by the academic community to erase distinctions between levels of intensity, and the “ends’’ of which Aristotle spoke, leave little room for the civility that is one of our society’s almost accidental inventions and one of its most cherished if precarious achievements.

Conviction Blended with Civility

Rather than engage in constant historical apology for the Jews in Joshua’s day or a passage of Jesus ripped from context, and rather than skim past crusades and inquisitions, the historical-minded scholar who is a member of a believing community knows that he or she does well to accept the judgment that religion has been, can be and is rich in absolutisms and zealotry. Claims made on the Almighty often do legitimate the passions; Peter Finley Dunne’s Mister Dooley was right: “A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if he knew the facts in th’ case.” The Lord does know; old Bishop Eunomius of Cyzicus (d. 395) said it so well: I know God as well as He knows himself.”

After the lessons in groveling which the historically aware must make in the field of religion as in any other field, there are other things also to be said. Religion, including biblical faith, has produced awesomely humble characters. Israel’s chosenness was designed not for luxury but that Israel might become “a light to the nations.” So expensive was that call that the waggish prayers of some modern Jews can thank the Lord of the Universe for the inestimable privilege of being chosen as Jews and then move on to ask him to “bestow on us a greater honor yet. Choose someone else.” In regard to the demands of Jesus as Master of disciples, we find his Lordship turning out to be not numbing but liberating: “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). And if many establishmentarian religionists were dragged screaming by the Enlightenment and practical necessity to grant religious freedom, some very firm believers, from colonial Baptists to Jesuit John Courtney Murray in the Second Vatican Council, also kept making the case for conviction blended with civility, commitment tempered with empathy.

Peoples Temple on its scale, and Synanon and Scientology on theirs -- and let us make discriminations in this part of the spectrum, too -- are coming to be stamped on the cultural mind as code words, like Watergate and Vietnam. They are serving to suggest the folly of admiration for fanaticism because it seems so real and intense in a half-believing age. Their critics are expressing the treason of intellectuals who refuse to allow for development in religion, who insist that only bad faith, malgre foi, produces empathic faith. What is needed now and what shows sonic signs of emerging is a kind of commitment that French existentialist Gabriel Marcel called “counterintolerance.” Marcel would guarantee freedom to others, whether they were in his sect or church or outside it. To the extent I hold to my opinion, he remarked, I envisage someone else doing the same. “My awareness of my own conviction is somehow my guarantee of the worth of his.” To do otherwise is to surrender conviction and make belief worthless or, on the other hand, to make myself seem “a servant of a God of prey whose goal it is to annex and enslave.” This for Marcel meant to spread forth a loathsome image of God in the name of absolutism, conformity and fanaticism.

Whether this new stage of believing is to emerge depends in part on circumstances that are beyond the control of the thoughtfully religious. But in an age when a fanaticism linked with cyanide or weaponry has become murderous, we have new motives for finding ways to combine passion with empathy and openness, to help “counterintolerance” emerge without seeing a loss of faith.

One hidden assumption needs unmasking. I have set forth this case without asking whether religion as such is a good thing. Last autumn after I lectured to University of Chicago alumni on the turf of New York’s Harvard Club, one alumnus put forth a creative stinger of a question. He had found that the way to overcome repression and fanaticism was simply to chuck religious belief as such. He had overcome the antievolution ignorance and moral persecution of his parental world in a library in small-town Tennessee. Should we not help others to do the same? The question made sense, given the damages we see in the eyes of Lord Zealous, the corpses of Jonestown, the streets of Iran.

Retrieval of Initiative

Still, I wonder. However much it may be relocated today, religion is not going away, nor is the impulse to believe and belong dying out. The act of being missionary against faith has often involved as much zealotry as has the effort to spread belief. As G. K. Chesterton once observed, to stop believing in God does not mean that people will believe in nothing. The trouble is, they believe in everything. As the historic and often empathic faiths wither, the intense fanatic groups grow up on the vacated soil. And where the new faiths are not sectarian, they may be nationalistic, in a day when quas-religions of nationalism kill their legions.

I cherish instead the notion that if we could understand not only the sociology and psychology of religion but also the religion of religion; if we could get at the roots of conviction in the lives of profound believers in the open society; if we could combine civility with devotion -- if we could do these things, religious forces might retrieve some initiative and offer examples for coexistence in the world of the nations and the military powers. That idea sounds utopian. I am not a Lord Zealous for utopianism. But religious vision ought to allow even the most thuddingly realistic among us to dream a bit, to set forth new “due ends.”

Albert C. Outler: United Methodist Ecumenist

The year 1984, as church people will often hear, is the 200th anniversary of organized Methodism in the United States. One can celebrate it provincially, as the United Methodist church and small Methodist bodies are free to do just as Lutheran churches celebrated Martin Luther last year -- even though both Luther and John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, belong to a larger world. Methodism was expansive and helped shape modern religious response. So it is appropriate that people in the larger Wesleyan fellowship extend the impulse of the movement into our varied traditions and diverse lives.

How to bring that about? If you don’t know furs, know your furrier, the old advertisements used to say. If you don’t know jewels, know your jeweler. If you don’t know Methodism or Wesleyanism, know your Wesleyan, your Methodist. As we cast around for someone who best embodies or exemplifies something of the Methodist movement, one figure came instantly to mind. I interviewed him, urging him to range far beyond the topics of the anniversary year, but to stay very much in its mood. Here he is.

Albert Cook Outler, 74 (retired, Southern Methodist University), is one of the pre-eminent Protestant ecumenists of our years. Since those years often value superficial celebrity over lasting accomplishments, Outler’s name has not become a household word. Yet it is one of the best of the churchhold names, for many reasons. Its bearer, who has no peer as a John Wesley scholar, is a historian with a vast knowledge of Christian theology.

Who’s Who lists the accomplishments that have helped to make him a sage of our time. An ordained minister with four early Georgia pastorates behind him, Outler is a duly educated (Yale, Ph.D., 1938) professor of theology who taught at Duke and Yale before leaving his stamp and seal on Southern Methodist University. The author of numerous books, he is a veteran of the Faith and Order and the Vatican II circuits.

The courtly Georgian, his tongue betraying his origins despite some hardening in the Yale years and some broadening in Texas times, writes, speaks and lives with manifest but unpromoted style. His silver hair is thin, while his waistline remains enviably trim under the gray flannels and tweeds he sports. Imagine him settled back in a study chair or leaning forward in a restaurant in Rome, as we frequently have seen him: senior, knowing and wise, able to listen and to communicate with juniors.

In 1960, The Christian Century exacted some rare autobiographical jottings from Outler. He called, them “The Ordeal of a Happy Dilettante” (1960, pp. 127-29). He too frequently continues to cherish that self-definition, despite its unfitting connotation of the aesthete. I would prefer, for all its risks, the concept of the connoisseur in the sense that Cornelis Verhoeven (The Philosophy of Wonder [Macmillan, 1972, pp. 19-20]) rescues it.

In a down-to-earth conversation, that is, a conversation about actual things, the best partner on all subjects is a connoisseur on any subject, no matter what. This is increasingly true to the degree this person’s knowledge is less pretentious and more specialized, more concerned with concrete things with regard to which a creative approach is important. The wine connoisseur who is a positive bore as a table companion may surprise us on other occasions with magnificent expressions derived from his speciality but which appear to have a much wider application. Anyone who has immersed himself in a certain subject is infinitely more alive to other things than the person who has stopped short at a general education, even though these subjects be completely outside his special field.

Outler, unlike that wine connoisseur, cannot be positively boring even on Christology and tradition, subjects which do not quicken all modern pulses. But like that wine devotee, he can use his specialized knowledge as a secure base from which to surprise us with magnificent expressions on many topics.

Outler can write in abstract terms about Chalcedon or in concrete images about historic moments like the rearing up of Emperor Theodosius’s horse, as he did in his presidential address at the American Society of Church History. The most respected and informed of the Protestant observers at Vatican II he could be trusted to pick the best dinners in town, whether at the houses of religious orders or at commercial establishments. He has kept the company of the well known and the unknown and respected each equally, What others see as interdisciplinary distractions serve to inform his discipline. No one can match his endurance at editing Wesleyan cryptography or his restlessness on the ecumenical trail.

Despite some ailings that come with aging -- “How’s Dr. Outler’s health?” is the first question one is asked after an encounter with him -- he parks his aches at the door when he approaches platform and interview and has chosen not to be a connoisseur of hypochondrias. Instead he exudes cheer and gives the appearance of being healthy.

Picture yourself as one in the middle generation of Christian historians, who has been given a renewed time with Outler. You see him seated, set an atmosphere, and ask or observe what he might pass on to the next two generations.

Start with a surprise “Let’s nominate you the Methodist sage. A sage, we must presume, is a simplifier of life. As the years pass, sages must shrug off the superfluous. What used to bother you that does not any more? What did you once turn to with hope that you now reject?” Score one for the questioner: Outler was caught off guard. It is clear that he is not yet ready to throw away or shrug off anything of worth. Like most historians, he lives happily with a cluttered mental attic and spiritual store room, whose contents he can rearrange in so many ways. Augustine comes to mind, Augustine the accumulator. No, none of the old interests fall away So long as Christ is the organizing center of life and so long as one keeps a Christian curiosity, there will be a repository of options for dealing with the perplexities of life today.

Not pausing, because his conversation partner has asked him not to pause, over the designation “sage” -- “Am I or am I not one?” -- he is able to embody a serenity that has come precisely from his discipline. The study of Christian history has showed him how to achieve without expecting to transcend limits. “I have devoted my whole life to the tasks of clarifying how Christianity relates to culture, and I have not met disappointment, since I early learned that the whole labor does not depend on me.”

Conversationalists play games. Here is one. “The most complex lives are usually those that can best be reduced to an informing phrase. Such a phrase or word summarizes a vocation, a profile, an impact. “I/Thou,” “The Courage to Be.” “Aggiornamento,” “The Responsible Self.” “Creative Fidelity,” “Freedom!” What is Outler’s? After a split second during which his brow furls to spell sheepishness, he recovers: “Is it too corny just to say of me, “Bridge-Builder?” No, it is not corny at all. He can be reassured that his self-image matches the impression others have gained.

“Well, my life has been all bridge-building.” To build bridges assumes that one has firm footings on both sides. Sides of what? “Christianity and psychotherapy, for instance.” Who else was bringing the therapists and theologians together back in 1954, when Outler published Psychotherapy and the Christian Message? “I am still thrilled to see traffic on that very bridge,” he says.

A second bridge was, between Christianity and philosophy, at least in respect to their histories. Graduate student Outler learned this front ancient Origen. Has he conversation partners among current philosophers, or do they dismiss theology and force him to talk solely to those who speak only through books? “There’s less company than there was in the heyday of process philosophy,” he answers. Charles Hartshorne had been helpful then, and metaphysician Paul Weiss was a friend in the Yale years. Outler is eager to see more of Chicago’s Stephen Toulmin, who does adventuring work on reason and the disciplines. Yes, there is less company now: the tone is, for once, a bit wistful.

As for denominational bridge-building, he does not have to spell matters out. Mergers as such interest him less than shared Eucharists across boundaries, mutually acceptant ministries among the formerly competitive and participation in each other’s gifts. No wonder the Methodists chose him to go to Vatican II, and Vaticanologists chose him to represent so much of Protestantism.

Outler has put energies recently into dialogue on a tense and promising front: that between mainliners and evangelicals. One might speak of this front as being at “the right of the left and the left of the right,” for his mainliners care for tradition and his evangelicals are open to other voices. ‘‘No one at these gatherings is called to compromise -- but we do come up with astonishingly fresh formulations.” Some hardlining evangelicals may suspect that Outler is here subverting groups that might otherwise engage in some political takeovers, but have instead stayed around to speak and to listen to the moderate-to-liberal camps. Some hardlining mainliners may surmise that Outler is suspect as one more “neocon” who has gone over the hill and, like other apostates, spends his career taking revenge on his own spiritual past and the colleagues he thinks he has left behind. Neither stereotype works for this subtle and supple mind, and one of his main contributions may lie in helping to destroy such stereotypes.

Christians who want to take no interreligious risks will certainly be put off by the Methodist theologian’s involvement with Dallas’s Thanksgiving Square projects. What could be soft and soupy has instead turned out to show promise as Outler and other Dallas figures have brought together Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu leaders with Christians. “And no one has to be other than what he or she is” in such comings-together.

Entrepreneurs and impresarios come and go; theological bridge-builders need a sustaining philosophy. Outler leans forward when asked about his principle: “Does this sound too formal? I honestly believe that the Logos incarnate does in fact ‘compromise,’ and is, in fact, a sort of bridge.” A prompter suggests the word “mediator,” and Outler permits this, but it was not the precise word he was seeking. “I work with the conviction that all truth is an emergent co-incident with this movement of the Logos between God and man.” What this means needs spelling out, and his life and conversation are exercises in such spelling.

What does this message mean, I ask, for Eileen, who served us breakfast here at Notre Dame today, or for Wally, who keeps the accounts straight, or. . .

“Oh. you mean the people to whom we are preaching all the time.” Outler is indeed preaching all the time. He has never hidden in his study with Origen and the Wesley scribbles. But he is a historian, and historians’ answers are usually complex. What does the tradition teach him about how to speak of this Logos who is active in personal and communal ordinariness?

“Three things. Somehow you have to be gracious. Then you have to show graciousness, and talk about it. It can be talked about. Finally, you call forth from people some sort of response to grace as unmerited favor, to the fact that our lives are gifted.” (Pounce: the mind triggers, “This really is a Methodist!”) Life, Outler goes on, “is not merely fortune or luck, good or bad. When we preach, we tell people that God loves them -- and then we let them go.

The sermon could have ended there, but, like most sermons, this one goes on a moment longer than one expects: “The preacher has to say, ‘I live by grace. You live by grace. We can therefore be thankful. We can love.”’ Why does that sound banal from many lips, but startling from this “dilettante” or connoisseur who has dipped into the finer points of Cyril of Alexandria’s thought?

Dare I press one step further and ask a learned savant to unbutton his vest and risk sounding simplistic by translating all this for children? I, for one, make this a central test for sages. Are they spiritually available -- do they have Gabriel Marcel’s disponibilité -- to children? How would Outler talk about any of this version of the Christian tradition to, say, his six-year-old grandchild during a walk in the woods?

“How would I? I have!” It goes something like this, without apologies for the corniness of family namings. “So many good things happen to us,” he tells the child, “but look twice. Someone who is loving has been fooling around here, bringing excitements and joys even in the midst of the bad things that happen in life. That someone is not just ‘nanna and gaffa’ or ‘mom and dad’!”

“What the child would really like to know is: ‘Am I cared for? Do I matter?”’ The gospel, says Outler, murmurs its “Yes, yes,” to help carry the child through the harder questions and times. “And so,” Outler tells the six-year-old, “it’s a joy for us to be around.” Then comes an afterthought,”... and a joy to be around you.”

Historians need contexts, and Outler has found his in conversations, colleagues and, most of all, the family. Some sages may be hermits, but this one shows that he is not. What about Carla, the children, the other grandchildren? “That’s the most interesting thing of all that happened to me,” the professor sparkles back. “The gift of the family. I have always had an invincible notion that we were all special to each other.’’

Why, the question comes to mind, is this family context so rich with you, but suppressed by many with whom we speak? Outler lets this pass with a confident mumble about “grace.”

“Of course,” he says, “no marriage is pure romance. We think of ours as a ‘negotiable partnership’ at times. But if I have pursued my own ambitions, as she has hers, we have mutual respect, though we do not share all the details of each other’s lives.”

Outler makes no pretense that life is all one “have a good day” smile, and his pleasant expression bears the marks of being worn by someone who cares and has cares. As for his own transits, for instance, “I’ve had a terrible time with retirement, as I watch my school get on with the next chapters to which I know it must turn without me.”

Can the invincible elements of family and professional security and mutuality be taught to new generations? Outler is not sure about how the passage occurs. Through words? He has told students that spouses are not to be their auxiliaries, that they have entitlements of their own. He hopes they will find “negotiable partnerships” if they marry.

Once the subject of transmission comes up, it is natural to ask about passing his approach to Christian thought along to new generations. Must the young comers learn as much as he knows about Origen and Augustine, Wesley and Rahner, in order to be able to simplify creatively? He answers that, of course. he would like to see them knowing more. They will be greatly enriched as they do enlarge their repository of options for the future out of the Christian past. “I have always lived with my own versatility quite happily because I feel there is a coherence in the sources on which I draw, in everything, I always try to center on the source among the resources.”

For this man of tradition, “reconnecting” students and laity with the source means the biblical story and what it says about human existence. He cannot connect people with everything that happened in his favorite centuries, the 20th, 18th, 16th or 4th. Not even the 18th, his first choice; he was, he says, “born in a Georgia parsonage in the 18th century -- the Wesleyan one.” But, he insists, one can reconnect moderns to the primal visions of human horizons in the Bible. If students quicken curiosity and conscience there and in the surrounding world, they are well on their way.

I mentioned the four theological sages whose names come up when you inquire about those who influenced Outler most. Who helps in bridge-building between the biblical worlds and our own? John Wesley. He is editing Wesley’s sermons and did edit more of Wesley for a classic Oxford edition. He works with 14,000 cross-reference cards on Wesley’s sermons, notations from his seasons in the British Museum Library.

Outler has not only dug, he has used what he came up with. Wesley, he says, “got the order of salvation right,” and that order Outler spells out in eight stages. Why, one cannot resist asking, does today’s Methodism so seldom get this order and its consequences right? “There may be more of us who do than you realize. We’ve done what we could, and it wasn’t enough.” More sadness than defensiveness is in his voice.

Origen. “Does that choice surprise you?” The son of the Georgia Methodist parsonage encountered Origen when philosophy pressed hard on his young mind. Origen connected the Bible with contemporary culture, “and it is desperately important that we learn to do so, too.”

Among the moderns, Karl Rahner stands out. “His Christian wisdom is certainly for the ages. What does he mean by ‘God’s self-communication’? We’d be well advised to reflect on that.” Since Rahner has spent more energy than has Hans Kung on relating theological adventure to ecclesial responsibility, it is clear that Outler identifies more with the German sage than with the stormy petrel. “And Rahner’s Spirit in the World (Crossroad, 1968) opens us to a psychology that goes far beyond what Christians usually work with.”

If this historian of theology is well aware of the surrounding world and church today, he has to be concerned about the malaise many currently identify with mainline Protestant life. He knows that many of its local churches and movements are vital. But has he a diagnosis for low morale on the national and international levels’? Instantly, two themes come to his mind.

First, the churches have overbought the managerial revolution. Max Weber’s all-integrating, meshing and enmeshing Rationalität -- my summary, not his words -- dominates. Outler cannot think of a church body that has not put too much hope in expensive and energetic restructuring during the past 25 years.

Bridge-builder Outler will not, however, let the simple antibureaucrat come charging with a lance against “the organized church,” even at this vulnerable point. No romantic simplist, he is on good terms with the elected and managerial leadership of the churches. He simply insists that to look for evangelical reform from structural reshuffling is a diversion. Look elsewhere. Such as?

“Such as networking.” He almost apologizes for a term that sounds faddish, but recovers. “I know that sounds like a slogan, but it is really very apt. Look around and you will see.” He describes spontaneous combustions, voluntary associations, movements which come into being without a charismatic leader or celebrity to whom members swear fealty and from whom they pick up jargon. The good ones of these outlive their founders. They are not “parachurch” rivals to the churches. Their members do not turn their backs on everyone else’s congregation; they live off the church and feed into it. Outler is reluctant to cite examples, since exposure often makes the networks vulnerable to public-relations hype and consequent disappointment or decline.

Outler’s second case against the mainline is that it has not, in code language, recognized the expiration of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment rationalism. (An irony: the evangelicals have not noticed it either, and misfight it in some of their charges against “secular humanism” and adopt it in some of their rationalist defenses of biblical authority.)

Outler cites chapter and verse from Langdon Gilkey, a theologian he respects for having seen the limits of the secular promise. “Funny, the old Fundamentalist and Modernist controversy (which, I find it astonishing to have to say, still continues) takes place between people who never understood the terms of Enlightenment life.” It also lives on in mainline churches when they overbuy the human potential movement or have too much faith in the motivating aspects of purely rational discourse.

Instead, Outler feels, “mainline congregations would be well served if they were told not, ‘You must love’ (which is true and which they’ve heard often enough), but rather ‘You can love’ because ‘You are loved.”’ This message centers on the personal encounter with Jesus Christ. “You are loved. Therefore, you are free to be thankful. You are free to be useful.” Is this a long way from Origen and Wesley and Rahner? Not in Outler’s mind. “We can tell the congregations this, or we can try one more time to say, ‘Pull up your socks, set your goals, you can do it!’ Wise people, however realize how difficult that is.”

Have we missed anything essential? Outler has to mention once more what is going on in Catholicism. to which he has spent years building bridges. “Even Paul VI and John Paul II are not, and knew or know they are not, Pius IX,” says Outler. as if eager to spread cheer and promote stamina among currently frustrated Catholics. The new popes know that they are primi inter pares , firsts among equals. who have to make their way through the theology and politics of persuasion more than coercion. His hopes for the Catholic future are measured, but “the reality is less dreadful” than the impatient might think.

We need a benediction from this Wesleyan: can he find something in the question, “What is the Holy Spirit for us today?’ Outlet chooses the words with care: “The Holy Spirit is the personal presence, the power of God, building and making selves, building and making the church, building and making human community.” And. we might add, building and making bridge-builders like Albert Outler.

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