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No Faith Is an Island

Traditionally, the period of Lent has been a time for "turning inward." We examine our lives, our faith, our degree of dedication or lack thereof, and we determine to make amends in various ways. Lent is thus always in danger of being overly individualistic. Accordingly, it may be worthwhile to remember, as Lent begins, that whatever individual faith we seek to refine or redefine is always faith with communal roots.

John Donne reminded us several centuries ago that "no man is an island entire of itself," and that consequently we are all involved in one another’s destinies. This is eminently true not only of our physical lives but of our believing lives as well. We do not believe by ourselves, as individuals in isolation; we believe as part of a community of believers, whether the community is a Benedictine monastery, a communist cell, a Protestant congregation, a Jewish minyan or a Hindu ashram.

To be sure, we must personally appropriate the faith of the community to which we belong and make it our own, and in this sense Luther was right in insisting that everyone has to do his own believing just as everyone has to do his own dying. But we need to remember also that the faith we personally appropriate is the faith of the community, and this means that even the most internalized, existential act of personal commitment will bind us into a communal relationship of shared belief with others.

Even if the faith I appropriate were somehow brand new, never before conceived, the product of no apparent community save my own internal dialogue with myself, if I really believed it to be true I would perforce share it with others; and thus, whether I directly willed it or not, a new community would be created around it.

So faith and community are inextricably joined together. Community can only be created around a faith; faith, can only be creative within a community. Let us therefore reflect on ways in which the community nurtures and strengthens the life of faith.

First, the community is the place where the faith of the individual can be tested against the faith of the community. The community has a long history; better still, it has a memory, which means that it can put its history to use. The individual has a short history that needs frequent checking against the community’s longer history. When an individual Marxist offers a new and exciting twist to the dialectic, party members can say, "Wait a minute! That’s just what Bakunin thought, and look where it led him . . ." When an individual Christian, wanting to preserve Jesus’ uniqueness, pushes his divinity so hard as to deny his humanity, there is a communal memory to remind him, "That’s docetism, the oldest heresy of all. It nearly destroyed the early church and you’d better see where it leads before you use it to destroy the contemporary church as well."

In situations like these, the individual may be genuinely convinced that Bakunin or the docetists were right, and thus feel constrained to break with the community if the community cannot be changed. But the decision will at least be an informed one, taken in the light of a wider range of experience and wisdom than the individual alone can possess.

But, by itself, such a view of community can lead to timidity and rigidity, the community finally being cast in the role of the preserver of orthodoxy, whether the orthodoxy be Marxist or Christian. So the community must also be a garden for heresy, or at least for the testing of new ideas. It must play a second and opposite role, as the place where the faith of the community can be tested against the faith of the individual. Any community that is truly a community must be able to suffer fools gladly and even to embrace the heretics that threaten its peace. Since communities are almost always careful and conservative, they need the leaven of fresh ideas, along with new interpretations of old ideas, and these are contributions that only the most venturesome within their midst are likely to offer. This is how communities stay alive and grow. High medieval Christianity needed a Francis of Assisi, and fortunately recognized the fact. Late medieval Christianity needed a Martin Luther, and unfortunately did not recognize the fact. Marxism always needs fresh prophets to save it from Stalinist aberrations, and sometimes it does, and sometimes does not, recognize the fact. Communities become rigid and frozen without the input of creative and often irrepressible spirits.

A crucial question for the Roman Catholic community today, for example, is whether or not it can respond creatively to the challenge of individual voices as diverse as those of Hans Küng and Daniel Berrigan, and adapt its communal life to the demands for change that they place upon it. The very choice of such individuals symbolizes the intricacy of interrelationship between individual and communal faith. Some Catholics insist that both men are heretics, to be suffered within the community only if they mute their voices; others say that they represent more authentic versions of the faith than the various beliefs and practices they are challenging, and that it is the institution rather than the individual that is heretical.

The community contributes to the life of faith in a third way, by being the place where the burden of doubt can be shared. Faith always involves risk. Some risks, shouldered only by the individual, are too overwhelming and can only be destructive. In such cases, the community can be the place for "the bearing of burdens," the place where things too heavy to be borne individually can, at least during crucial moments, be borne corporately.

It need not be a sign of individual weakness -- rather, it is a sign of communal strength -- when an individual can say of the forgiveness of sins or the inevitability of the victory of the proletariat or whatever, "Look, that part of it just doesn’t make sense to me right now. It did once, and I hope it will again, but for the moment the rest of you will have to do the believing for me." Such individuals can expect that at some future time they in their turn will be called upon to do the believing for others during the others’ times of darkness or indecision, for "the bearing of burdens" goes both ways. Sharing of that sort is not to be interpreted as an exposure of weakness but as a gift to be treasured.

Fourth, the community contributes to the life of faith by being the place where faith can be celebrated and embodied. Most faiths are minority faiths, held by only a small portion of the culture in which they are located, and to proclaim them is usually a case of "singing the Lord’s song in a strange land" (Psalm 137), whether "the Lord" is the one described by Mark or by Marx. But one can sing in a strange land only so long before one begins to doubt the appropriateness of the tune. There must also be times of singing in chorus with those who not only know the tune but who likewise believe the words to be true.

And the words must be not only celebrated but embodied. If the message of the community is that love is at the heart of things. then the community must be a place where that love is embodied, since it will often be scorned by those outside. If the vision of the community calls for production "from each according to his ability," distribution "to each according to his need," the community itself must be a place where the vision is a present reality and not just a future hope; else the vision may die for lack of concrete realization. The community is a place where the faith can be celebrated and embodied, where its members may draw assurance that their faith is a future possibility for all because it is a present reality for a few.

This indeed is the whole meaning of liturgy. There is no community that does not create liturgies, actions that dramatize its convictions and help people to participate in the faith. they share by acting it out. People who share the same commitments often share the same meals, and the breaking of bread together is a liturgical action, both expressing corporateness and re-creating it, whether the occasion be a peace march, a family meal, or a eucharist in an upper room or in a cathedral. Communities gather to remember, in the sense of recalling the past, but also (as Daniel Berrigan has put it) to re-member themselves, to be built up again in their various parts (or members) so that they are more significantly whole than they were before.

Finally, the community contributes to the life of faith by being the place where faith is energized to turn outward. Communities cannot remain ingrown, concerned only with their own inner life. They must thrust their members out into the "strange land," into the arenas of life not populated by the community. This is only another way of saying that any community -- Marxist, Christian, etc. -- is a missionary (i.e., a "sent-forth") community, whatever the term used for that outward-turning posture. Individuals are often timid about turning outward, and they need the support and the on-the-scene presence of the rest of the community if they are going to share with others the faith they already share among themselves. The community then, is not only a base to which the individual can return but also a companion on the outward venture.

So one "sings the Lord’s song in a strange land," but one is not called upon to sing a solo. A duet can become a trio and finally a chorus. And the size of the chorus is limited only by the willingness of others to join in the song.

No one can ever be forced to make music. But everyone can be invited.

Drinking from Our Own Wells



Query: Who wrote:

A Christian is identified as a follower of Jesus, and reflection on the experience of following constitutes the central theme of any solid theology. The experience and the reflection alike have for their subject a community that under the movement of the Spirit focuses its life on the proclamation of the good news: the Lord is risen! Death and injustice are not the final word of history. Christianity is a message of life, a message based on the gratuitous love of the Father for us.

Pope John Paul II, in a pastoral letter on spirituality?

Query: Who said:

Laborers . cannot wait any longer for their dignity to be recognized really and fully. . . . They have a right not to be deprived of the little they have by maneuvers that sometimes amount to real plunder. They have a right not to be blocked in their own desire to take part in their own advancement. They have a right to have the barriers of exploitation removed. . . . They have a right to effective help, which is neither a handout nor a few crumbs of justice. . . . There is always a social mortgage on all private property. . . . And if the common good demands it, there is no need to hesitate at expropriation itself.

Gustavo Gutiérrez, describing how workers need to take things into their own hands?

Something strange is going on. The first quotation is actually the initial paragraph and normative theme of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s new book on spirituality, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (Orbis, 1984), and the second is a slight condensation of two paragraphs of a speech Pope John Paul II gave to Indian peasants in Mexico in 1979 (quoted in John Eagleson and Philip Scharper, eds., Pueblo and Beyond [Orbis, 1979], p. 82).

What is so strange is that in a recently launched, widely orchestrated attack -- emanating both from Rome and the Peruvian hierarchy -- on Gutiérrez’s presumably ‘errant” version of liberation theology, he is accused of not saying the things he does say in the first quotation, and of saying the things that the pope says in the second. And there is heavy irony in the fact that the charges have been launched just when the publication of Gutiérrez’s new book makes them even less accurate than they were before. The stakes in this controversy are high, not only for Gutiérrez but for all Christians who are committed, as he is, to a theology created from the standpoint of the oppressed. As a result, the only way to do justice to the significance of We Drink from Our Own Wells is to look first at the recent re-articulation of the charges against Gutiérrez and liberation theology, and then to examine the book in their light.

These charges are not new. Ever since 1971, when A Theology of Liberation was first published in Spanish (the English translation was brought out by Orbis early in 1973), the themes of Gutiérrez’s writings, his person and the entire “theology of the people” that he is articulating have been subjected to a barrage from the theological and political right. The themes of liberation theology were not invented by Gutiérrez. They are our authentic heritage from the Hebrew prophets, the Gospels and the early church (see, for example, Charles Avila’s Ownership: Early Christian Teaching [Orbis, 1983]; they are themes that were anticipated in part by developments in the papal “social encyclicals” from 1891 to the present, and by the Vatican Council’s 1965 pastoral constitution “The Church and the World Today.” Many of these ideas were episcopally appropriated in the documents of the conference of Latin American bishops at Medellín in 1968, three years before Gutiérrez’s landmark book appeared -- especially those on “Justice’’ and ‘‘Peace,’’ in the composition of which Gutiérrez played a part as one of the official periti at the conference. In them we find clearly articulated such themes as the importance of the communidades de base (“grass-roots ‘ Christian groups); Jesus as the liberator from hunger, misery, oppression and ignorance; the refusal to separate Christian sanctification from “temporal’’ tasks; challenges to capitalism (as well as to Marxism); the theory of “dependency” on inhuman economic systems; the need for liberation from neocolonialism; the need for “conscienticization” ; the need for the church to support the downtrodden; the correlation of peace and justice; and the reality of “institutionalized violence.”

As the implications of such commitments began to filter into the experience of the Latin American church, a number of conservative bishops under the leadership of Colombian Archbishop Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, worried by what they perceived to be a swing to the left, began to organize for the next bishops conference, ultimately held at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. Hoping to repudiate such themes and restore the church to its proper track, they saw to it that so-called “liberation theologians” were excluded from the Puebla meetings, and sought to turn episcopal teaching in ‘‘safer” directions.

But they were unsuccessful. The Puebla documents not only did not “condemn” liberation theology, but gave new support to many of its central concerns. Not even the opening papal address contained the salvos against liberation theology that the conservatives had hoped for (despite erroneous impressions to the contrary given by the New York Times), and the Puebla documents, though a mixed bag, gave ongoing support to the major concerns of this theology, particularly in the emphasis on the need for the church to make ‘‘a preferential option for the poor.



One might have expected the Puebla posture to signal an end to the battle, but the barrage has continued. The latest round of charges is distinguished not by any new content, but solely by the fact that it comes from high places. The focal point is an article by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the March 1984 issue of the journal 30 Giorni. Ratzinger’s position in the Curia makes it clear that he is not simply speaking for himself, but in the name of the Vatican, which has been carrying on an undercover investigation of liberation theologians. The main thrust of his attack is to propose a distinction between “true” liberation theology (which, of course, the church has always affirmed), and ‘‘false” or ‘‘errant” liberation theology (which, of course, the church in the interests of truth must denounce). Gutiérrez is described as a proponent of the latter, as are Jon Sobrino and Hugo Assmann.

Not even this mode of attack is new; it was the approach taken by López Trujillo before Puebla, both through his network of communication with other bishops and in his Liberación o Revoluciön?, published in 1975 (English translation: Liberation or Revolution? [Our Sunday Visitor, 1977]). The basic distinction that is pressed in all of these attempts to separate “true” from “false” liberation is that the former is based on gospel values, while the latter is overly dependent on Karl Marx and a Marxist analysis of the world, especially in relation to Marx’s theory of class struggle.

Most of the other charges, both from Rome and from the Peruvian bishops, are variants or amplifications of this initial one. The alleged subordination of the gospel to Karl Marx is illustrated, for example, by charging that “false” liberation theology concentrates too much on a few selected biblical texts that are always given a political meaning, leading to an overemphasis on “material” poverty and neglecting other kinds of poverty; that this leads to a ‘‘temporal messianism” that confuses the Kingdom of God with a purely “earthly” new society, so that the gospel is collapsed into nothing but political endeavor; that the emphasis on social sin and structural evil leads to an ignoring or forgetting of the reality of personal sin; that everything is reduced to praxis (the interplay of action and reflection) as the only criterion of faith, so that the notion of truth is compromised; and that the emphasis on communidades de base sets a so-called “people’s church” against the hierarchy.

The overall suspicion, in other words, is that somehow Christian faith has lost its ‘‘transcendent’’ element, that It has been “reduced” to “horizontalism” at the expense of ‘‘verticalism,” that it has become nothing more than ‘‘ethics” (and left-wing ethics at that), that ‘‘social analysis” has replaced theology, that revolution has replaced revelation -- and that Karl Marx is the source of all the difficulty.

As one who has been immersed in Gutiérrez’s writings for more than a decade, I consider the charges preposterous. The clearest rebuttal, however, is not exasperation but simply firsthand exposure to the writings themselves, along with a look at the quality and spiritual depth of his own life and of Gutiérrez’s personal commitment to the poor. The new book is especially helpful in this regard, but before turning to it a word must be said about the specter of Karl Marx and the way Gutiérrez deals with the theme of class struggle.

It is clear that Gutiérrez, like almost every contemporary theologian, pays attention to Marx; no responsible modern thinker could fail to do so. It is also clear that he makes use of some of Marx’s analytic tools, particularly the notion of “class struggle” -- and it is primarily for this that he is being attacked. But it is neither clear nor true that Marx provides the world view or the overarching ideology that informs Gutiérrez’s position. Here is where a shift that faults the whole procedure occurs in the attacks. Those attacking Gutiérez assume that using any of Marx’s comments on society automatically brands one a ‘‘Marxist,’’ in the sense of accepting the whole Marxist position -- its materialistic view of history, its scorn of religion as an opiate, and all the rest. This is clearly nonsense.

What actually happens with Gutiérez and others close to him is something like this: they turn to the social sciences for help in understanding the dynamics of the world in which they live; among those they read is Marx, who describes a world in which a ‘‘class struggle’’ is going on. They look at Latin America (so different from North America) and see that what Marx described is actually taking place: there is a ‘‘class struggle” going on, and it is being waged between the tiny ‘‘class’’ of the extremely wealthy, who oppress and exploit the rest, and the huge “class” of the desperately poor, who are oppressed by the wealthy and powerful. Marx, they discover, did not invent “class struggle”; he merely reported that it was taking place. The struggle would be there even if Marx had never appeared on the scene. Liberation theologians find plenty of descriptive material in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Luke, for example, to underline the injustice of the patent discrepancies between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed. Indeed, it is their attempt to hear this long-neglected side of Scripture that draws the unfair charge that they are reading ‘‘selectively.’’

Now what does Gutiérrez do in the face of the very obvious fact that there is a struggle going on between classes, initiated not by the poor but by the rich? He reaches two very clear and, it seems to me, irrefutable conclusions: “The class struggle is a fact, and neutrality in this matter is impossible” (A Theology of Liberation, p. 223).

What are Christians to do in this situation? Since, as Gutiérrez points out, neutrality is impossible, those who seek to remain aloof from the struggle (as many Christians do) are actually giving tacit support to those possessing unjust power, often maintained through guns and torture. One must, therefore, side with the poor and the oppressed, a theme Gutiérrez has been affirming and living for many years. Why “taking sides” in the struggle should be considered foreign to Christian faith is hard to fathom. Surely “taking sides’’ is what the bishops at Puebla called the church to do when they stated that it must make “a preferential option for the poor.” For centuries the church has made a preferential option for the rich, and the rich have found no cause for dismay. The decisions on behalf of the poor at Medellín and Puebla did not implicate the church in “taking sides’’ for the first time, but simply in “changing sides” as the result of a new reading of Scripture and of the human situation.



It is out of this way of looking at the world that one makes the “first act’’ of Christian living, as Gutiérrez calls it: commitment to and with the poor. Theology is the “second act,” which Gutiérrez defines as “critical reflection on praxis in the light of the Word of God.” And it is this kind of reflection that is being expounded in We Drink from Our Own Wells. If there is a “mere horizontalism,” a “collapsing’’ of faith into politics, a “materialist” reading of Scripture or an overt or even covert dependence on Karl Marx in Gutiérez’s thought, here is where one could expect to find it. (The notion that the concerns of the ‘‘people” automatically set them against the “hierarchy,” as Cardinal Ratzinger and others charge, can be quickly disposed of by pointing out that the book is dedicated to two bishops, characterized by Gutiérrez as amigos definitivos, “friends forever.”)

The title may initially seem elusive to those who are not, like Gutiérrez, steeped in the literature of spirituality. The phrase comes from Bernard of Clairvaux’s De Consideratione, in which he indicates that we must all think, pray and work in the place from which our own spiritual nourishment comes. For Gutiérez, “the experience that comes from the Spirit” is found in the midst of the Latin, American people’s struggle for liberation, a struggle in which God’s gifts of faith, hope and love make people. disciples. ‘‘This experience is our well,’’ he writes. It provides the living water that both purifies and energizes.

The structure of the book illustrates both the methodology and the content of his approach. Part one briefly sets a context: spirituality in Latin America -- a spirituality that covers every dimension of human life and is by no means confined to the political -- in a situation of hostility and death resulting from poverty. Gutiérrez dismisses as inadequate any spirituality that is available only to a few, thus dividing Christians into two classes, as well as any individualistic spirituality that leads to privatization and a turning away from the world. True spirituality encompasses all life (a favorite theme in Gutiérrez’s writings), and involves solidarity (i.e., community), prayer, martyrdom -- a part of Christian living foreign to contemporary North Americans -- and a recognition that now is the time of salvation. Such spirituality involves the people, especially the poor, in struggle -- a struggle about which the psalms, the prophets, the gospel and the epistles are full of words of encouragement and hope.

The middle and longest section of the book takes us into the “second act” -- i.e., reflection on the situation in Latin America “in the light of the Word of God.” By means of intensive Bible study, Gutiérrez here sets out the main aspects of spirituality as the communal following of Jesus -- i.e., “the spiritual journey of a people” (as the subtitle describes it), not just of individuals.

The three aspects of this journey are the encounter with Christ, walking according to the Spirit, and searching for the Creator; Those who continue to demean Gutiérrez’s orthodoxy should at least acknowledge that this is a clearly trinitarian formula. Throughout this section of the book, Gutiérrez bases his argument on the Gospels and the Pauline epistles (especially Romans 8 and Galatians 5). as well as on the thought of St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila. The Pauline section is particularly helpful in distinguishing the various meanings of “flesh,” “spirit” and “body.’’

Having grounded his discussion of the communal nature of the Christian journey in Scripture and the history of- Catholic spirituality, Gutiérez returns in the final section to the contemporary world, offering a preliminary sketch of the spirituality needed for struggle within the societies that he has described. He develops five characteristics of such a spirituality: conversion, with its requirement for solidarity; gratuitousness, as creating the atmosphere for efficacy; joy, which seeks victory over suffering by going through the school of martyrdom to Easter victory; spiritual childhood, which emphasizes being “with the poor and against poverty”; and community, which must emerge out of the dark night of injustice and solitude.



Even a brief summary of the highlights of this rich and fruitful book shows how far off the mark are the critics who assert that Gutiérrez’s theology is nothing but a cover for politics, and that it has discarded faith in God, Christ and the Spirit. Those who are looking for the insidious presence of Karl Marx as normative for the “second act” will look in vain; he is not cited even once. Gutiérrez’s major sources are the Bible (almost 400 references, chiefly from the New Testament), Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross, John Paul II, Archbishop Oscar Romero and the Puebla conference of the Latin American bishops. Those who reply that this must be a “new phase” in Gutiérrez’s thought will be unable to sustain the charge. As Gutiérez himself affirms, these emphases have been present from the first; a rereading of A Theology of Liberation will not only uncover a section titled ‘‘A Spirituality of Liberation,” but another 400 biblical references with which to wrestle. And there is still another book, not yet in English -- a series of talks given to laypeople in 1981, El Dios de la Vida (“The God of Life”) -- that deals successively with the God of the Bible, the Kingdom of God and the relation between action and contemplation. From the beginning, liberation theologians have stressed spirituality.

But there is a second reason for offering a running outline of the themes of We Drink from Our Own Wells, which is to invite our own reading of the text. The book is important not only, and not mainly, as a theological event that disposes of a series of threadbare charges still being directed against its author. It is important simply because for anyone, whether in Latin America or elsewhere, it powerfully and beautifully provides a guide for “the spiritual journey of a people,” a people of whom we too are a part. No one can read the biblical section without personal profit and spiritual enrichment, nor encounter the five proposed dimensions of a new spirituality without realizing how needed they are in our own lives, our own churches, our own society.

Realizing the gifts he brings us, I find it both dismaying and disheartening to see Gutiérrez once again under attack by heavy theological artillery from within his own church. Not only Catholics but all of us need his words, his witness and the example of his life. What is currently happening to him is not simply an intramural Catholic affair, but something that is important for the rest of the Christian family, and for all the poor and oppressed peoples everywhere who have found in Gutiérrez someone who not only speaks for them but stands with them. Many of us have been nurtured by this man; our faith has been deepened by encounters with his writings and his person. During our moments of anguish about the relevance of our faith to a parched world, he has encouraged us to keep working, to keep praying, to keep evangelizing, to keep acting, to keep drinking from our own wells so that we can all draw living water. We need his help in finding those wells whence the power of the spirit pours forth. We are all deprived when he has to turn his energies from struggling for the poor in order to defend himself against attack. We must work, hope and pray for his release from such constraints, so that he -- and we -- can turn with renewed commitment to the holy tasks of justice and love.

We began with the first words of Gutiérrez’s book. We can do no better than conclude with the last:

Spirituality is a community enterprise. It is the passage of a people through the solitude and dangers of the desert, as it carves out its own way in the following of Jesus Christ. This spiritual experience is the well from which we must drink. From it we draw the promise of resurrection [p. 137].

1984: Orwell and Barmen



When George Orwell published a novel about totalitarianism in 1948, he arrived at its title by simply reversing the last two digits of that year, so that the date became 1984. Ever since, 1984 has been more than just a date; it has been a symbol. Orwell’s book describes a hideous world of thought control, informers and torture. The essential government propaganda industries, Newspeak and Doublespeak, exist to make syntactical and logical sense out of three slogans that dominate the book and the world it describes: “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

Many people believe that 1984 describes life in the Soviet Union, and Big Brother does bear a resemblance to Uncle Joe Stalin. Others see it as a description of the German Third Reich, defeated by the Allied armies even as the book was germinating in the author’s mind. Still others, myself included, view it apprehensively as an exaggerated version of tendencies that are further advanced in our own society than we want to believe.

But if the year 1984 is an Orwellian symbol, for those of us within the Christian family it is a symbol of a different kind as well. As we have recently been reminded in a variety of commemorative celebrations, 1984 is also the 50th anniversary of the Confessing Church in Germany’s Barmen Declaration, issued in May 1934, well into Hitler’s second year in power. This declaration was one of the very few corporate challenges to Hitler and to what the Nazis were doing in Germany.

The juxtaposition of Orwell’s book and the Barmen anniversary is important, for if we are to stand against those evidences of the Orwellian world that we already see, important resources for doing so will be found in the stance, Conviction and courage of the creators of Barmen. If we affirm Barmen, we will be forced to challenge almost every aspect of the Orwellian universe. If we are concerned about the possibility of drifting into a 1984 world, then Barmen provides a timely warning, for its tragedy was that it came too late. Hitler had by that time so consolidated his power that the only witness against him still possible in Germany was that of martyrdom. The telltale signs had not been taken seriously enough soon enough. That we are not yet living within the crudely totalitarian and oppressive atmosphere of Orwell’s world, but are aware of some subtle signs that we may be moving in its direction, makes it vital that we reflect on the meaning of Barmen, in order to learn to speak and act while there is still time.

By 1934, Hitler’s increasing control had made Germany look very much like Orwell’s society. In the face of that control, most of Germany had capitulated: the business communities, the universities, the cultural groups and the churches had almost without exception bought into the Nazi vision. Some Christians continued to resist -- Franz Jaegerstetter, Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bishop Lichtenberg and Father Alfred Delp, to name a few -- but the church itself was increasingly taken over by the “German Christians,” a group that affirmed Hitler as a new Messiah, accepted Nazism’s anti-Semitism. and was willing to follow the dictates of the Nazi Party. It was largely in reaction to the excesses of the “German Christians” that another group, called the Bekenntnis Kirche (the Confessing Church), was formed, chiefly out of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. The Barmen Declaration was the work of this group, written at its initial synod in Barmen in May 1934. The fine hand of Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who was still teaching in Bonn at the time, is evident throughout, and the document is a good case study of Barth’s contention that theology and politics go hand in hand.

On first reading, however, the declaration seems neither political nor ‘‘dangerous.’’ It seems strongly theological, massively biblical and centered in concern for the church. Such a reading, however. is wide of the mark. In the Germany of 1934, there was no way to make the kind of theological affirmations contained in the document without being extremely political. We can see this clearly by considering the two sides of the initial proposition: its affirmation and consequent negation. The affirmation read, “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

This is good, solid Christian doctrine, doctrine that most church people could easily affirm, with no expectation that it would get them into trouble. But we must notice the strength of the verbs, and their cumulative force. The affirmation’s power is meant to move people beyond hearing to trust, and trusting is taking what is heard with sufficient seriousness to bank one’s life on it, to make an act of faith. Trusting means remaining faithful even when the evidence goes the other way. It includes the need to obey, which involves not only an inner commitment but an outer deportment. To obey is to follow through on trust, being willing to take the consequences. The signers of the Barmen Declaration knew that the costs might be high. Realizing that this was not a fair-weather agreement they acknowledged the need to hear, trust and obey “in life and in death.” To “hear, trust and obey” is to put one’s life on the line.

How so? Because to affirm certain things means to deny Certain others. The declaration’s negation, following immediately upon its affirmation, makes this clear: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and beside the one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”

That still doesn’t sound very “dangerous.” The word “Hitler” occurs nowhere in the statement, nor in the entire Barmen Declaration. But nobody living in Germany in 1934 could fail to see that the reality of Hitler had called forth the entire document. What Hitler had claimed and gotten from the German people was precisely the acknowledgment that the truth for them was found “apart from and beside the one Word of God” -- in the Nazi Party -- and that it was in “other events and powers, figures and truths” -- in the Nazi ideology, rise to power and leaders -- that Germany’s salvation was located. “Blood and soil,” racial purity and anti-Semitism were to be accepted as truths. Consequently, to say yes to Jesus Christ (as the affirmation does) meant to say no to Adolf Hitler and all that he represented (as the negation does).

The same point is succinctly made by the title that Martin Niemöller gave to a book of sermons published during this period. He called it Christus ist Mein Führer, Christ is my “Führer” or leader. The use of the word “Führer” was not inadvertent, since everybody in Germany referred to Hitler by that title. To say that “Christ is my Führer” was also to say “Hitler is not my Führer.” The consequence for Niemöller was seven years in Dachau.

Theologians frequently resort to foreign phrases to make a point (a sin to which I am about to succumb). They call the kind of time that brought forth the Barmen Declaration a status confessionis, a ‘‘confessional situation,” in which the church, in order to be true to itself and its message, must distinguish as clearly as possible between truth and error. There are many times, particularly if public policy is concerned, when Christians may disagree. But there are some issues so fateful that no dissimulation or compromise is possible. The signatories of the Barmen Declaration clearly felt that they were living in a time when no one and no church could any longer say, “We affirm both Christ and Hitler.” They had to proclaim, in effect, “The discussion about supporting Hitler is now closed. We have rendered our verdict. There is no longer a basis for negotiation.’’ Either/or, not both/and.

It can be argued that situations of such clarity are rare and should not be prematurely or artificially invoked, for they can lead to terrible acts of spiritual judgment and pride. But there has been another status confessionis in the church since the time of Hitler. The issue has been apartheid, the forced separation of the races in South Africa. Until 1982, members of the various Reformed Churches in South Africa had managed to take all sides of the issue. Many argued that apartheid was consistent with the Christian gospel; others declared that it was not. Some said that the issue wasn’t clear, and the rest said that the debate was none of the church’s business. But the injustice and destructiveness of apartheid finally became so obvious that, at the urging of South African churches that are members of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the latter body, meeting in Ottawa in August 1982, formally declared apartheid a heresy. As a result, it is no longer possible to affirm both the Christian faith as proclaimed by the Reformed Churches and apartheid as well. It is another instance of a status confessionis. A clear either/or was reached: either Christ or apartheid, but not both.

As we confront what is happening in our own nation today, we must remember that ours is a religiously pluralistic country, quite different from the Germany of 50 years ago. During the Vietnam years a number of us gathered to explore the possibility of creating a kind of “confessing church” in our own land and issuing our own counterpart to the Barmen Declaration, expressing the need to say an unequivocal No to our government’s foreign policy. We decided not to do so, largely because we were already working closely with many people in the Jewish community. Rendering our witness in the christological terms of Barmen would have cut us off from them, and that was a price we were not willing to pay.

Today, as we explore the possibility that a status confessionis may be approaching for us, in which a Yes to Jesus Christ would mean a No to many of our government’s policies, we must find ways to work in concert with Jews who share our concerns, rather than apart from them. When Christians say that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” meaning that since nothing else can command our total allegiance, the state and the government are not Lord, they are saying what Jews declare when they give assent to the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.” We must find ways in the public forum to close ranks with Jews -- and indeed with all other persons of good will -- to speak unitedly about our common concerns. It is one of the shortcomings of the Barmen Declaration that its creators did not see clearly what was already happening to Jews in Germany, and thus failed to address the most obscene of all of Hitler’s policies.

Is there a status confessionis for us today? Probably many would support the notion that in extremely perilous times -- Orwell’s 1984, the Germany of the 1930s and the South Africa of the 1980s -- when issues of right and wrong emerge with stunning clarity, there is a place for unequivocal stands. But far fewer would agree that we are even remotely close to such extreme times in the United States today.

Because Christians disagree about our domestic and foreign policies, the notion that we could take any one position along a spectrum of points of view and either baptize or anathematize it would strike most people as theological imperialism of the worst sort. I might privately believe that my position was the “only” truly Christian one, and I might publicly do all I could to persuade people of its truth, but I would be unjustified in seeking to unchurch or to deny the name of Christian to those who disagree with me.

Or is that too benign a scenario? Are we actually facing, or close to facing, a status confessionis? I believe that there are at least two kinds of issues forcing Americans closer and closer to the kind of decision demanded of Germans during the 1930s: when saying Yes to God forces one to say No to certain policies and demands of one’s nation and its leaders.

The first of these is the issue of nuclear weapons. I sometimes fear that just as Germans today look back on the early 1930s and say, “How could we have been so blind as not to have seen the peril of Hitler?,” so people of a later generation (if, indeed, there is one) will look back on us and say, “How could they have been so blind as not to have seen the peril of nuclear weapons?”

The Roman Catholic bishops have given us a starting point in their recent pastoral letter, which contains an implicit logic that all of us together need to push even further. They argue that there is no situation in which the use of nuclear weapons could be morally permissible. But if to use such weapons is wrong, it must also be wrong to possess them, since possession tempts powerfully toward use -- whether by deliberate decision, technological accident or human error. And if it is wrong to use nuclear weapons and wrong to possess them, it must also be wrong to manufacture them, since manufacture inevitably means possession, and possession almost inevitably means use. The bishops’ letter does not push that argument to its conclusion, reasoning that, for the moment, possession may be provisionally justified if it is used as a basis for sincere negotiations to reduce and finally eliminate all nuclear weapons. If such acts of good faith are not soon forthcoming, however, the bishops might be forced to press the argument all the way, arriving at a status confessionis requiring an unequivocal No to nuclear weapons in the light of our faith.

The World Council of Churches, at its 1983 Vancouver Assembly, approved a report on “Confronting Threats to Peace and Survival” that does seem to push the logic all the way and declare a status confessionis. The report is “commended to the churches for study and appropriate action,” without in any sense binding them. But the very structure of the section on “nuclear arms, doctrines and disarmament” recapitulates the structure of the Barmen Declaration -- first an affirmation of Jesus Christ and then a consequent negation. The first lines of the section follow:

It would be an intolerably evil contradiction of the Sixth Assembly’s theme, “Jesus Christ -- the Life of the World,” to support the nuclear weapons and doctrines which threaten the survival of the world. . . .

We believe that the time has come when the churches must unequivocally declare that the production and deployment as well as the use of nuclear weapons are a crime against humanity and that such activities must be condemned on ethical and theological grounds.

Nuclear deterrence, as the strategic doctrine which has justified nuclear weapons in the name of security and war prevention, must now be categorically rejected as contrary to our faith in Jesus Christ who is our life and peace. Nuclear deterrence is morally unacceptable because it relies on the credibility of the intention to use nuclear weapons: we believe that any intention to use weapons of mass destruction is an utterly inhuman violation of the mind and spirit of Christ which should be in us . . . [David Gill, editor, Gathered for Life (Eerdmans, l984), p. 75].

Such an unequivocal stance is risky. But the Confessing Church’s 1934 stand was also risky. Risk is part of the authentic Christian vocabulary and lifestyle.



But we have not yet finished with Barmen’s challenge to us, for there are other things happening today requiring our response. And we have not yet arrived at Orwell’s 1984, but certain present trends could, if left unchecked, slowly but inexorably lead us into such a world. The Barmen Declaration came too late; we must not replicate that tardiness.

The signs and portents indicating that we may be on our way to an Orwellian society cluster around our doctrine of national security. Already, in many other parts of the world, in the name of “national security’’ all acts of dissent or challenge are summarily dealt with, their perpetrators tortured, imprisoned or killed. Let us use the Orwellian slogans cited above as a way of indicating items on the horizon that, if unchecked, could gradually assume center stage.

Recent events in the United States remind us of 1984’s slogan that “WAR IS PEACE.” When the United States recently engaged in the military invasion of another country, Grenada, our president repeatedly called it not an invasion, but a “rescue mission.” He emphatically insisted on this distinction during a news conference, chastising reporters who had been so short-sighted as to describe it as an act of war. No, he insisted, it was a rescue of medical students, an act of peace and charity (even though, as we discovered when the government-imposed censorship was lifted, the medical students had been in no danger).

Similarly, we are constantly told that we are not engaging in war in Central America, or taking any part in the fighting there, even though our own CIA has mined harbors in international waters -- an act of war (and a violation of international law) if ever there was one. The government’s rhetoric is no more convincing in this case than in its dubbing of missiles of first-strike nuclear capability as “Peacekeepers.” All this is Orwellian doublespeak. Our nation is beginning to tell us that war is peace.

We are also increasingly reminded of 1984’s slogan that “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.” We are told that if we speak too much, debate too much and question too much, those very expressions of freedom will make us vulnerable to the enemy, and will thus lead to our enslavement. Consequently, such freedoms must be held in check. A good example of this is a 1983 piece of White House-initiated legislation mandating that all public officials who have had access to classified materials and who want to comment on public affairs, either now or in the future, must obtain governmental clearance for their remarks ahead of time. The provision applies not only while they are in office, but for the rest of their lives. This gives a powerful new weapon to those in public office who want to forestall informed, knowledgeable criticism of their acts. What could be more threatening than such a law to the healthy discussion and critique that should characterize a democracy? And even though the public outcry against it caused enforcement of the legislation to be put on hold, it was not rescinded, and thousands of public officials have already agreed to abide by it.

The 1984 slogan that “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” also finds echoes in our time. We, too, are told that a government must not let its people know too much or they will be in danger of losing their dominance in the world. One of the most disturbing recent examples of this attitude has been the Reagan administration’s unprecedented refusal to let the press cover the invasion of Grenada. For four days we experienced total news management and governmental censorship. Only after a free press was finally admitted to Grenada did we learn that many of the statements issued by the White House during those four days had been incorrect. News favorable to the administration’s position was shared, news unfavorable was either suppressed or falsely reported. The censorship made it impossible for citizens to assess, criticize or support the administration’s actions from an informed standpoint. Those four days gave us a preview of the kind of society Orwell envisioned. I am still amazed at the relative lack of public outcry in the face of such manipulation. Furthermore, the tactic portends a scary future: since it “worked” so well this time, the administration may well reason, why not four weeks of censorship the next time we might decide to engage in a ‘‘rescue mission” -- perhaps in Nicaragua?

As I was drawing the above parallels I stopped to ask myself, “Isn’t this all rather paranoid? Aren’t these parallels overdrawn and even slightly hysterical?” But just when I had almost persuaded myself that some blue penciling was in order, another sequence of events occurred that convinced me that my tone, rather than being more muted, should indeed become more bold.

This course of events began with an address by President Reagan at Georgetown University. The president complained about the way Congress was meddling in his attempts to carry out foreign policy, challenging his decisions publicly and even withholding funds from activities he thought were essential. While he conceded that there should be debate before decisions were made, he felt that once the administration had embarked on a policy, everyone should close ranks behind him. No more criticism, in other words. Then, a high-ranking State Department official proposed that if members of Congress disagreed with the administration’s policy, they could send private letters to the White House or State Department, but should not voice their criticism publicly.

Shortly after this, it became public knowledge that our government was directly involved in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, that the president had personally endorsed the project, and that it had been carried out without proper notification to the congressional committees that are entitled to be informed. All this had been happening while Reagan and his spokespersons were insisting that there should be no public disagreement with administration policy. The actions being undertaken were illegal, but no one was to object.

Finally, when the facts were known and Nicaragua quite appropriately filed a brief with the World Court, where there could be a judicial hearing under international auspices, the administration responded by announcing that for a period of two years it would refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court in any matters pertaining to Central America.

Such a posture is the beginning of what appears to be growing rapidly into a totalitarian mentality that says, “We are above the law. We are not accountable to our own government or to a world court. We need not tell people what we do, and we will accuse those who challenge us, even in Congress, of making us weak and destroying our ability to stand tall. Give us a blank check.”

In the face of all this, we come back to the Barmen Declaration. Barmen’s claim is that there is only “one Word of God which we have to hear, and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” For Christians, that Word is Jesus Christ. For Jews it is the God of Sinai, the God of the prophets, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jews and Christians can affirm that they are calling upon the name of the same God. And in the name of that God, we must protest today, as the signers of the Barmen Declaration did yesterday, when the leaders of a government begin to say, “Hear, trust and obey us. We’ll tell you what to think. We’ll decide what information you should have. If we withhold information, it is for your own good. If our public arguments don’t make sense, be assured that there are reasons behind them that we can’t really share with you.” When government officials begin to say such things, as ours clearly have, then that is the time for challenge, because when a government does that, it is beginning to play God over our lives, and the taste of such identification is a very heady thing. It is becoming identified with what Barmen calls the “other events and powers, figures and truths” that are trying to elicit unquestioning and docile loyalty.

As that begins to happen in our time, our response, like the Barmen response, must be No, because we have already said Yes to the one Word of God whom we have to hear, trust and obey, in life and in death.

Speaking About Israel: Some Ground Rules

The recent Palestinian demonstrations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and Israel’s handling of them, have pushed to the forefront a series of questions most American Jews and Christians would prefer not to face. Can Jews criticize the state of Israel without being perceived as disloyal? Can Christians criticize the state of Israel without being perceived as anti-Semitic? How can Jews and Christians talk creatively and honestly with one another about the state of Israel?

We all live with these questions, though we are reluctant to discuss them openly. If we are to face them and move beyond them, Jews and Christians must be clear and honest about their expectations of each other. I want to test the waters for this discussion by setting out what I see as a number of preconditions for responsible discussion, beginning with what I think Jews have a right to expect from Christians.

1. Christians must unequivocally affirm the right of the state of Israel to exist and prosper. What a forbidding state of affairs that such a condition need even be mentioned! Do Americans demand from Germans such an assurance when we are working on the provisions of a trade agreement? Must Denmark’s survival be made a precondition for export negotiations with the Dutch? Yet the survival of Israel is so precarious, and threatened from so many directions, that Jews are entitled to be assured that whatever Christians say is not meant to weaken Israel and make it more vulnerable to attack. This is particularly true when Christians take up the cause of the Palestinians -- obviously a justice issue worth discussing.

2. Christians must disavow Armageddon scenarios. The Christian articulators of these scenarios support Israel not because that state has an inherent right to survive but because Israel plays a central role in the apocalyptic projections of a world ruled by Christ, a world in which there will be no more Israel, no more Judaism and no more Jews. The issue is important since Armageddon theology has been affirmed not only by fringe groups but by Ronald Reagan. Jews must be assured by Christians that they are more than pawns in Christian eschatologies illicitly extracted from Ezekiel or the Book of Revelation.

3. Christians must understand why Jews equate the state of Israel’s survival with Jewish survival. Jews would regard the destruction of the state of Israel as virtually equivalent to their own destruction -- a tragedy of even vaster proportions than the Holocaust. A tragedy greater than the Holocaust? Can one imagine such a thing? Christians need to realize that every living Jew can imagine it, and can be daily threatened by its possibility. For Jews, Jewish destiny and Israel’s destiny are forever linked.

4. Christians must understand why Jews of the diaspora are reluctant to criticize the state of Israel publicly. In the face of overwhelming tides of criticism from Israel’s enemies, Jews living elsewhere are surely entitled to think, ‘Israel needs more critics?" And when so much of the criticism is angry and false and openly anti-Semitic, it is natural for diaspora Jews to have no interest in swelling the negative chorus. They are also understandably reluctant to criticize Jews who are on the battleground when they are removed from the immediacy of physical combat.

There are surely other things that Christians must understand to enter the debate about Israel, and Jews can state them more poignantly and compellingly than any non-Jew can. Let that topic, then, be one of the subjects of our dialogue.

1. Christians should be able to criticize this or that political action by the state of Israel without automatically being labeled anti-Semitic. For a Christian to be a friend of Israel cannot mean giving Israel a political (or military) blank check, saying in effect: whatever you do, we will support you, or at least not oppose you. And yet it is one of the painful facts of American political life that Christians often find that political disagreement with Israel’s policies is interpreted by Jews as at best a political betrayal, at worst an instance of subtle or not-so-subtle anti-Semitism. When such Jewish voices are raised Christians have a right to hear other Jewish voices countermanding them.

2. Jews should understand that Christian disagreement with certain political policies of the state of Israel entails a theological as well as a political judgment. I am not proposing here to theologize about the state of Israel. but about discussions of the state of Israel.

Early in my theological work I learned from extended exposure to Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah that the worst sin is that of idolatry -- giving uncritical allegiance to human constructs that can never he worthy of uncritical allegiance. And the greatest candidate for idolatry is always the nation. I learned from the Hebrew prophets that no nation -- Assyria, Babylon. Egypt, Persia or Judah - - is entitled to uncritical allegiance. I learned in the Hebrew Scriptures that the First Commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me," is not only first numerically but first because the other nine flow from it. That belief has been an axiom throughout both my theological life and my political life (two entities that I am unable to separate) One reason I am sometimes perceived as overly critical of my own nation is the perennial temptation in the United States to assume that our nation enjoys God’s special favor, and that any criticism of it is unworthy and unpatriotic. Nothing has more reinforced my conviction on this score than the recent case of a lieutenant colonel, a rear admiral, a CIA chief and a president conspiring to set themselves above the law, and insisting that we citizens should let them lie to us for our own good. That is idolatry.

If from the stance of Hebraic prophetism I have seen and continue to see idolatry in my own nation. I have seen it also in the Germany of the 1930s and 40s. and I see it today in South Africa (and in the Soviet Union, Chile and El Salvador, to name only a few other countries) The common factor in the posture of these governments is that the state is placed above criticism: one is disloyal if one criticizes it.

The prophetic tradition issues one large No to such an attitude. And it is not part of the prophetic tradition to say that there can be criticism of all states save one, Israel. To be sure, there are widely varying degrees and kinds of idolatry in the states I have mentioned. But whenever, and by whom, the principle that the state is above criticism becomes a guiding axiom, there, especially, must criticism be made.

I do not want to be misunderstood on this point: I am not urging people to hold a magnifying glass over the state of Israel looking for things to criticize, while applying less exacting standards elsewhere. But I am saying that in the ongoing critique we must make of all political constructs in the name of the First Commandment, it may sometimes be the case that our critique will be directed at the state of Israel.

My point may be clarified further by emphasizing another insight from the prophetic tradition: the place where the magnifying glass should be held is always over the nation of which one is a citizen. The basic critique. the initial critique, is always self critique. I am amazed at how faithful the Hebrew Scriptures are to this fact; judgment after judgment is piled up against the various political actions of the Jewish nation. I am even more amazed that the critique is put not on the lips of the Jews’ enemies but on the lips of the Jews. most notably the prophets. And I am most amazed of all that these unf1attering descriptions are preserved hr us not in the annals of the Jews’ enemies, but in the sacred Scriptures of the Jews themselves. Those are staggering and exceedingly impressive realities, reminding us that we are not to locate the "evil empire’’ only somewhere else; we must first of all see it within ourselves. So Christians need to hear Jews say that critique of every nation, even Israel, is a part of the prophetic tradition that Jews and Christians share, not a deviation from that tradition.

3. It follows from the prophetic tradition that Jews should speak critically of Israel’s political policies, if injustice is being done. Such a plea may sound insufferably arrogant to Jews, who scarcely need instruction from Christians on how to behave Jewishly. So let me indicate some of the things it might mean.

First, the prophetic tradition lays upon us all -- Jews as well as Christians -- an imperative to speak against injustice wherever it is found, even -- nay, especially -- when it is found within that political configuration we most admire. It is in relation to those things we most admire that we must be especially on guard against idolatry.

Second, it is a sign of great health that there has always been tremendous internal criticism within the state of Israel, and never more so than in recent weeks. There, if anywhere on earth, it is true that if there are two Jews arguing, there are three opinions. The vigor and sharpness of Israel’s internal debate should be a model for every state on earth, encouraging all of us to say in our own situations whatever needs to be said.

Third, we should note that there are Jews outside of Israel who do lament certain Israeli policies and who work to change them. How they do this is their business, not mine. All honor to Elie Wiesel, who says, "When I want to criticize Israel, I go to Israel" -- and who goes to Israel frequently. All honor to those who make their critique within Jewish periodicals or at Jewish gatherings. Christians need to remember that Jews pay a price for this. I once told a Jewish activist that it was painful to be accused of anti-Semitism whenever I offered even a mild criticism of some action by the state of Israel, and he replied, "You think it is painful for you, on the outside? What do you think it is like for us, on the inside?" Let us note with gratitude then that in these past weeks many Jewish voices have been raised, some for the first time, to deplore the recent beatings and killings of Palestinians.

Fourth, there is no inherent reason why people in Israel should listen to, or take seriously, the admonitions of the goyim. What have we ever said to them in the past that has been a blessing? Consequently, when there are specific policies in the state of Israel that need challenging, the challenging words are far more likely to be heeded when they come from Jews than when they come from Christians.

In all of our discussions about Israel, we should keep in mind the words of Howard Singer of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. "Jews," he consoles us, "are not really as defensive as they appear. But they know that true critics, like true prophets, are those who criticize with love."

Love is our only valid passport into the territory of discussions about Israel. If there are occasions when we Christians feel compelled to speak critically of Israel, we must speak with love so that we do not give aid or comfort to those who seek by their criticism to bring about Israel’s demise or weaken its place in the forum of world opinion. Let not any of our words, in tone or content, bring aid and comfort to those who deny Israel’s right to exist. Let our critique of Israel spring from our love for Israel, from our desire that Israel be all that it is destined to be, both for its sake and our own, so that new meaning can continue to be given to the venerable description: "a light unto the gentiles." Israel’s light is one we will always need.

Reinhold Niebuhr: His Theology in the 1980s

The editor offered a subtitle: "Why Am Still a Niebuhrian." After due reflection, I declined the offer. In my seminary days, the self-styled "Niebuhrians" were not above carving Niebuhr’s offhand comments in stone in order to crush their opponents in dormitory debates, often betraying rather than emulating their mentor, and their contemporary counterparts frequently seem indistinguishable from them. ("Thank God," Reinhold Niebuhr may never have said but should have, "that I am not a Niebuhrian.") Disclaiming the title will not necessarily save me from stone-carving of my own, or otherwise betraying my teacher, but at least it will relieve him of responsibility for my sins. So this essay is a celebration of the teacher, not a justification of the pupil.

In that spirit, I offer six reflections on Reinhold Niebuhr’s contribution to the 1980s.

1. The first of these is Niebuhr’s own posture, which I shall describe as that of a pessimistic optimist. (The phrase at least has a Niebuhrian ring in recalling one who wrote about "tamed cynics" and "impossible possibilities.") Against the conventional wisdom that Niebuhr’s theology is pessimistic, lacking in hope and therefore immobilizing, I propose that, whatever its provisional pessimism, his theology is ultimately optimistic, hope-filled, and therefore energizing. He reminded us of the tragedy of the human situation, but he also reminded us that faith takes us (as he expressed it in the title of one of his finest books) Beyond Tragedy. He rang the changes on sin more eloquently than anyone of our time, but that dissection, set forth with particularly telling power in the first volume of his Gifford Lectures, was followed by a second volume in which his acknowledgment of the power of the gospel as grace made it possible for him to speak of "the agape of the Kingdom of God [as] a resource for the infinite development towards a more perfect brotherhood in history" (The Nature and Destiny of Man, II [Scribner’s, 1943], p. 85)

Niebuhr’s optimism is not optimism about human achievements but about divine achievements that can transform the destructive character of our human achievements. The word about sin is the penultimate rather than the ultimate word of the gospel, which witnesses to the power of God, in both judgment and mercy, to provide by grace the resources we cannot provide for ourselves. Pessimistic optimism.

2. Niebuhr similarly insisted that mystery and meaning are intertwined. He was as aware as anyone that we cannot "prove" the truth of Christian faith. (The only empirically verifiable doctrine of Christianity, he noted on more than one occasion, is the doctrine of original sin.) But he also believed in an "indirect" vindication of Christian faith -- namely, that "it makes more sense out of more facts" than any of its alternatives. We do find pointers to meaning in our lives -- in acts of human love, in the way justice can be partially achieved even through structures of injustice, in a life of perfect sacrificial love that ends upon a cross. But those partial meanings are always encompassed by mystery -- love, justice, atonement: mysteries all. Acknowledgment of mystery, however, is not capitulation to meaninglessness; while we do not have full meaning, neither are we left with total mystery.

Thus wisdom about our destiny is dependent upon a humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power. Our most reliable understanding is the fruit of "grace" in which faith completes our ignorance without pretending to possess its certainties as knowledge; and in which contrition mitigates our pride without destroying our hope [ibid., p. 321].

3. Niebuhr likewise refused to separate the world of faith and the world of politics. He lived with equal skill in both worlds, and had unequaled skill in bridging the gap that lesser folk create between them.

As a person he was incessantly embroiled in politics -- on the local, state, national and international levels. But he simultaneously lived the life of theologian, ethicist and church person, demonstrating that politics uninformed by the judgments of faith, and faith aloof from the human struggle, are twin seductions to which we must not succumb. He certainly never did.

The connection is equally manifest in his writings. When he offers a book-length "vindication of democracy and a critique of its traditional defense," he does so by employing the biblical imagery of "the children of light and the children of darkness." When he reflects on the meaning of the Kingdom of God, in The Nature and Destiny of Man, he does so in the light of the human struggle for justice. When he describes the immersion of Christians within the political process, he does so in terms of the "push" of duty and the "pull" of grace, noting that while a sense of civic responsibility can thrust us into the process, we need the resources of divine empowerment to draw us beyond what we might otherwise not dare to attempt or be able to achieve.

4. What, then, of the possible lines of connection between Niebuhr’s thought and the very "political" liberation theology of the 1980s? The lines of connection, I believe, are particularly helpful to those of us in North America.

Niebuhr’s analysis of social sin in Moral Man and Immoral Society prepares us for the concept in liberation theology of "systemic evil." His constant use of Scripture as a resource for mounting attacks against contemporary injustice prepares us for Pablo Richard, Severino Croatto, José Miranda and a host of others. His use of -- and dismissal of -- much of Marx’s social analysis prepares us for the same kind of discriminating use by Gustavo Gutiérrez, on whom not even all the power of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has been able to pin the label "Marxist." Niebuhr’s lifelong prophetic commitment to exposing the sins of American imperialism prepares us for similar themes in the writings of those who view us from "the underside of history." His insistence that personal faith and politics go together prepares us to hear (from the very beginning) about a "spirituality of liberation." And so on.

This is not to suggest that Niebuhr was the first liberation theologian (an honor that probably belongs to Jesus de Nazareth) , but simply to suggest that as we North Americans confront liberation theology in its properly indigenous forms -- whether in Asia, Africa or Latin America -- the similarities to Niebuhr’s thought are a help rather than a hindrance in that encounter. With whatever quarrels he might have with certain aspects of liberation theology, it is unthinkable that he would have repudiated it, as some of his self-styled followers are doing today in his name.

5. Niebuhr’s most important contribution to the 1980s may be his consistent recognition of the need for self-criticism. He is unsurpassed in his ability to dish out broadsides against positions with which he disagrees, and anyone who wants a lesson in the art of godly polemics can go to no better source. But what is often overlooked, especially by contemporary "Niebuhrians," is that the keen eye of the critic is turned on the beholder just as unsparingly as on the beholden. Those who rejoice in Niebuhr’s fulminations against Stalinism, or Russian betrayals of human dignity, usually hear him with only one ear, and fail to listen with equal seriousness to his insistent reminder that the sins we see so clearly in others are likely to be the sins we most subtly replicate in ourselves. Rule Number One in reading Niebuhr: when you find yourself agreeing with a paragraph beginning, "On the one hand . . . ," do not stop reading until you have read another paragraph, perhaps several pages later, beginning, "On the other hand . ."

I will say only in passing -- since it is a comment on a passing fad -- that recent attempts to make Niebuhr into the guru of neoconservatism leave me both sad and angry, for I believe they betray both the man and his thought, particularly on this crucial point of the need for self-criticism. In one of his last writings, Niebuhr describes "the guiding principle" of his mature life in relating religious responsibility to political affairs, as a "strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges" (Man ‘s Nature and His Communities [Scribners, 1965], pp. 24-25). Perhaps that is one statement that should be carved in stone.

We need to remember today that whatever else he was, Niebuhr was "the troubler of our [national] conscience," rather than the composer of Te Deums in praise of capitalism. Niebuhr’s message to a generation that has become idolatrous in its worship of "the American way of life" is his reminder that "we must fight their falsehood with our truth, but we must also fight the falsehood within our truth."

6. Finally, Niebuhr provides us with a marvelous example of the integration of life and thought. One of the contributions of Richard Fox’s Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography will be its reminder that Niebuhr was not just a great analytic thinker or brilliant essayist from whom we can extract nuggets of theological wisdom. Fox acquaints his readers with the Niebuhr who was a preacher, perhaps pre-eminently a preacher; the Niebuhr who was pastor as well as professor to generations of seminary students; the Niebuhr who was (as a Jewish friend of mine put it beautifully) "a holy man."

To be sure, he was no more exempt than the rest of us from the anger and impatience that define us all, and he acknowledged how hard it was to accept the limitations brought about by his stroke and the consequent diminishment of his energies during his last 15 years. But he also acknowledged that what kept him going was the Pauline recognition that "if we live we live unto the Lord, and if we die we die unto the Lord; so, therefore, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s." That was not just a truth he enunciated; it was a truth he embodied.

Niebuhr’s contribution to the 1980s will be not only the brilliance and the sharpness of his thought, but also the authenticity and integrity of his life. We need to learn from his prayers in Justice and Mercy (edited by his wife, Ursula M. Niebuhr, and, unhappily, out of print) , as well as from his analyses in The Nature and Destiny of Man (in print, one hopes, in perpetuity) Since it is wholeness that we seek, Reinhold Niebuhr can be pre-eminently helpful in our quest, not only as guide but also as exemplar.

Leonardo Boff: Theologian for All Christians

The Vatican’s recent lifting of the "silencing" of Brazilian Franciscan theologian Leonardo Boff for writings deemed injurious to the faith means that his voice and pen once more have their full power. This happy outcome provides an occasion to examine the broad sweep of Boff’s writings -- not only those that got him in trouble. Whatever Boff’s ongoing difficulties with Rome may be, he is an important theologian for all Christians, both Protestants and Catholics.

A review of Boff’s writings does not make him seem like a "dangerous" theologian. Christology . . . grace . . . stations of the cross . . the Lord’s Prayer ... St. Francis -- what could be more appropriate subjects for a Catholic theologian? But Boff’s unyielding insistence on a theology with two eyes -- relating the gospel to the contemporary scene -- finally overstepped the presumably appropriate boundaries.

In 1981, not caring to quit while he was ahead, Boff published a collection of essays, Church: Charism and Power (Crossroad, 1985) , which, in the original Portuguese, carried the exquisitely descriptive subtitle, Essays in Militant Ecclesiology. There is a message here for theologians who want to stay out of trouble: if you must write, don’t write about ecclesiology; and if you must write about ecclesiology, don’t write militantly. Boff did. And he got into trouble.

Boff’s troubles actually have their roots in his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in Germany under a fellow Franciscan, Bonaventura Kloppenburg. Interestingly enough, his other Doktorvater was Joseph Ratzinger, present prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. When a summary of Boff s dissertation appeared some years later as a chapter in Church: Charism and Power, Kloppenburg -- who, in the interval, had become an ardent foe of liberation theology -- wrote a long review charging Boff with heresy.

Understandably startled by this about-face on the part of his former teacher, Boff sent a copy of the review and the book to Ratzinger -- his other former teacher -- asking for advice. Ratzinger suggested that he reply to Kloppenburg’s charges, which Boff did.

That, one might have presumed, would have been the end of the matter -- save, perhaps, a series of exchanges in some learned theological journal. It wasn’t.

In May 1984, Boff received a six-page letter from Ratzinger, detailing charges against him and summoning him to Rome for an accounting. Ratzinger charged Boff with distorting old doctrines by reinterpreting them in new contexts. Boff’s language lacked "serenity" and "moderation," and, more substantively, he employed "ideological" perspectives from history, philosophy, sociology and politics that were not fully enough informed by theology. Thus, Ratzinger asked, is Boff guided by faith or by "principles of an ideological nature"?

Ratzinger was deeply disturbed by three areas of Boff’s book. He first accused Boff of suggesting that Jesus did not determine the specific form and structure of the church, thus implying that other models besides the Roman Catholic one might be consistent with the gospel. A second charge was that he is cavalier about dogma and revelation. Boff responded by acknowledging that dogma is needed to protect against heresy, but not in the same way in all times and places. It is ultimately the life of the Spirit in the church that protects faith against encrustation in "timeless truths" that can only negate spiritual progress. Ratzinger feared that such a doctrine of the Spirit would legitimate the theological whim of the moment.

Finally, Boff is charged with being unnecessarily polemical and disrespectful in his comments on the church’s use and abuse of power. Boff certainly does not mince words, and in one place even offers a kind of Marxist analysis of institutional church life, citing "the expropriation of the religious means of production" (forgiveness, sacraments and so forth) as means by which the clergy deny power to the people. Such excessive concentration of power, Boff believes, leads to domination, centralization, marginalization of the faithful, triumphalism and institutional hubris -- an extensive laundry list of aberrations from which not even the Sacred Congregation itself is exempted. In the notorious Chapter 12 -- the precis of his dissertation -- Boff offers an alternate model of power for the church -- a model based on the "service" of a living, changing church in which theological privileges are not concentrated in the few, but shared among the many.

It is clear that the congregation’s main fear with Boff is not Marxism (as it is with many other liberation theologians) but his central emphasis on the Holy Spirit, which could challenge the validity of present ecclesial structures. (One is reminded of a comment by Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini during a debate at Vatican II, when, after a number of speeches about the Holy Spirit, he responded, "We don’t need the guardianship of the Holy Spirit; we have the hierarchy.")

Boff met with the Sacred Congregation in Rome in September 1984. Though the curtain of secrecy is drawn over such meetings (one of the abuses that Boff had criticized in his writings) , Boff emerged from the encounter smiling, believing that he had made the point that, when dealing with liberation theology, the church ought to consult people directly involved in the struggle, rather than relying solely on European theologians who, as he told reporters, "look on poverty from the outside, from a position of security, in a paternalistic way."

One reason that Boff may have escaped censure on this occasion is that (in a move indicating that Franciscans know how to combine the wisdom of the serpent with the gentleness of the dove) he had chosen as the theologian to defend him at the closed-door proceedings His Eminence Cardinal Alois Lorscheider, head of the Brazilian hierarchy -- neither a person nor an office that the Sacred Congregation would instinctively care to challenge.

Boff seemed to be home free. He wasn’t. Some months later the unexpected order came, consigning him to "silence" for "an opportune period."

Through this analysis we hope to nourish faith in the strength of the Spirit that is capable of awakening the dormant heart of the institutional Church, encouraging the living presence and the dangerous yet powerful memory of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ [p. 48].

It would be difficult to overstress the richness of this powerful and clearly written book. Even a look at the table of contents will make the point. The initial essays (1-3) are clear, positive statements about pastoral practices in the church. The next three (4-6) are critiques of current Roman Catholic institutional practices, which, with the change of a word here and there, describe Protestant ecclesiastical sins with devastating accuracy. After a transitional essay "In Favor of Syncretism" (7) , there are three informative and challenging essays on the "base communities" (8-10) , and then three concluding essays (11-13) that profoundly explore an alternative way to view the church as "A Sacrament of the Holy Spirit" with "Charism as the Organizing Principle."

Church: Charism and Power is only the most recent of many books. For more than 15 years, Boff has been among the most important -- and prolific -- contributors to the developing theology of liberation in Latin America.

In 1972 he provided the first substantial Christology from the new perspective, Jesus Christ Liberator (Orbis, 1978) , just one year after Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation brought Third World theology to the attention of the rest of the world. That year was a bad one for freedom of expression in Brazil, and Boff worked with certain external constraints in saying what he wanted to say about the liberating work of Christ. This caution was overcome in an epilogue, added to the English translation in 1978 when the Brazilian political climate had become less repressive. This exciting 31-page essay situates the mission and message of Jesus in a socioeconomic setting that illumines the earlier pages.

Another large book, Liberating Grace (Orbis, 1979) , appeared in 1976, exploring many facets of the traditional doctrine of grace in both social and individual terms. Hoff sees grace at work in the midst of a situation of dependency and exploitation, and his whole approach gives special meaning to the first word of the title, "liberating." (The combination of "liberation" and "grace" is considered to be so dangerous that one North American writer subsequently cited the book as "among the most significant Socialist or Marxist titles" to come out of Latin America.)

One of Boff’s most powerful books is Way of the Cross -- Way of Justice (Orbis, 1980) Written in blank verse, it is a series of meditations on the stations of the cross, a traditional exercise of individualistic Catholic piety that Boff transforms into a communal exercise as well. He effects this transformation by offering meditations on each of the "stations" of Jesus’ original journey along the Via Dolorosa, all of which are followed by second meditations reflecting on the meaning of the station for Jesus followers in today’s world. The practice exemplifies Boff’s conviction that theology must have "two eyes," one looking to the past "where salvation broke in" and the other looking toward the present "where salvation becomes a reality here and now." The "way of the cross" focuses on the historical Jesus, but the "way of justice" focuses "on the Christ of faith who continues his passion today in his brothers and sisters who are being condemned, tortured and killed for the cause of justice" (p. viii) The parallels between what Jesus suffered then and what his followers suffer today are acute and heartrending. The book has intense power, and will surely become one of the spiritual classics of our time.

Another book dramatizing Boff’s contention that "devotional" literature and the world of the nitty-gritty cannot be separated, is The Lord’s Prayer: The Prayer of Integral Liberation (Orbis, 1983) The word "integral" is the key. "Integral" means "whole," "entire," "complete," and Hoff insists that the Lord’s Prayer gives no support to a merely "spiritual" liberation divorced from the world of poverty and hunger. The book attacks "reductionism," whether as "theologism" or "secularism." Praying must be done in context: "Prayer is not the first thing a person does. Before praying, one experiences an existential shock." Each phrase of the Lord’s Prayer is then examined in terms of theology’s two eyes. Prayer is always "toward God" and "toward us"; we are not allowed the luxury of separating them.

Hoff has also written an engaging and challenging book about the founder of his religious order, Saint Francis: A Model for Human Liberation (Crossroad, 1982) He is not so naïve as to suggest that we can transplant Francis -- in all of his breathtaking simplicity -- to the complications of the 20th century. But he does believe that important connections can be made. The methodology in each chapter is a clue: after a brief vignette from Francis’s life, Boff carefully analyzes some characteristic of our modern world, and then suggests how St. Francis’s perspective might illuminate that situation. After describing St. Francis as "a model of gentleness and care" (qualities desperately lacking in our culture) , Boff jumps into the fray by dealing with the contribution St. Francis could make to our understanding of "the preferential option for the poor." Another chapter, "Creation of a Popular and Poor Church," indicates what St. Francis could offer to the formation of contemporary "base communities." Throughout, St. Francis contributes to an "integral liberation" -- liberation that is not exclusively "spiritual" or "economic," but both tied together.

The recent lifting of the ban (a month ahead of schedule) may be an olive branch from the Curia, and its timing, coincident with the release of Cardinal Ratzinger’s temperate second "Instruction" on liberation theology (see my article "The Roman Curia and Liberation Theology: The Second (and Final?) Round," June 4-11 Century) , suggests that the aggressive warlock-hunt (as we must call it in this case) against liberation theologians is being placed on a Vatican back burner, if not on hold. There is no doubt that the Vatican’s image suffered as a consequence of a punitive action, suited (if at all) to other centuries than our own, while Boff became an instant folk hero throughout the Third World.

We can be sure, furthermore, that during the time he was forbidden to publish, it crossed his mind that he had not been forbidden to write. The curtailment of outside speaking engagements may even have provided more time than usual to put pen to paper. (When this possibility was mentioned to Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of Boff’s compañeros in the liberation struggle, he replied, "Yes! After one year, four books!")

Even if that estimate should prove excessive (and it may not) , we can now look forward to more writings by Boff than might have resulted if Rome had left him alone. For this, at least, we can render oblique thanks to the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

A Time to be Born

 A 59-year-old woman told a California infertility clinic that she was only 50, and four years later gave birth to a baby girl. The clinic, which sets 55 as the maximum age for patients seeking a donated egg, was fooled by the woman’s relatively young appearance and her falsified documents. At the time of the birth, she was 63. This was her first child. She had given up her job at a bank in order to become a mother. Her husband, 57, provided the sperm for the conception. The clinic charged $50,000 for its services.

Reactions to the oldest woman to give birth are varied. Dr. Willard Gaylin of the Hastings Center, which specializes in medical ethics, told the New York Times he finds pregnancies in women who are past menopause distasteful. "I certainly understand a desire for progeny," he said, " but I do feel we have a responsibility to the symmetry of life and to some of the rules of nature." Dr. David M. Buss, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, took an informal poll among friends and discovered that women reacted to this late-in-life parenting with a hearty "Go for it," while the men he queried "furrowed their brows and said it was repugnant."

Anthropologist Barbara Koenig of Stanford University told the Times that "technology is challengiiig some fundamental assumptions" about the sexuality of older women. Gilbert C. Meilaender, a theologian at Valparaiso University, hesitated to say that it is wrong to bear a child at that age, but feels that "it just doesn’t seem fitting." To Meilaender, the pregnancy "captures our sense that there is a kind of unwillingness or inability to come to terms with what the trajectory of a life really is."

A few days after the story about the 63-year-old mother appeared, 77-year-old actor Tony Randall posed proudly with his new daughter, thereby raising the obvious question: If men can do it, and be proud of it, why can’t women? Newsweek quoted writer Katha Pollitt: "Until we are ready to severely castigate the so-called start-over dads, I think we can’t be too judgmental and moralistic about women who avail themselves of technology that exists." One quick answer to this, of course, is that older men don’t need to make use of medical technology to father a child. And the man’s partner is presumably premenopausal, which means that one parent is likely to be healthy and energetic enough to raise the child.

A theme running through much of this discussion is the sanctity of individual desires. What matters from an individualistic perspective is personal fulfillment, the joy of bringing new life into the world, and the production of progeny. This is the mind-set that says: If science can give it to me, I will take it. Buss of the University of Texas puts it this way: "I believe people should live their lives whatever way they want to." So pervasive is this individualistic thrust in our culture that the burden of proof rests on those who would set limits on the fulfillment of human desires.

Christians don’t have particular biblical texts that deal with the birthing process, though we do have the reminder from Ecclesiastes that "for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die." When the natural seasons and processes of life are interrupted in the Bible—when Sarah gives birth to Isaac in her old age, when an angel tells Mary she will have a child—the intent is to identify a miracle from God, not to argue ethics.

Can older parents offer a reasonable promise of providing care for two decades? Is it fair to the child to have parents who are statistically likely to be dead by the time the child reaches puberty? Of course, a child born to a responsible mother in her 60s will get a better start in life than the child of an 18-year-old crack cocaine addict. Many youngsters can testify that when they were abandoned by teenage mothers, their grandmothers gave them a stable home life. Still, what is the impact of postmenopausal births on the larger community? Doesn’t the happiness of the individual parent need to be weighed against the good of the community?

We might also consider Immanuel Kant’s moral imperative: that we should act only on principles that we can will to be universal principles. (Or, as your mother once said, in her updating of Kantian philosophy: "Don’t throw that candy wrapper on the sidewalk; what if everybody did that?") In this case, we should consider what society would be like if everybody said: If science can provide it, I will take it.

The argument against using reproductive technology beyond reasonable limits turns finally on the definition of reasonable. And who determines and enforces what is reasonable? Governmental agencies already establish some age limits to govern personal behavior. There are, for example, age requirements about voting, buying alcohol and cigarettes, getting a driver’s license, and getting married. But our society has been reluctant to set limits for the practice of medicine, preferring to have the profession set its own standards.

As an alternative to enacting legal controls over reproductive technology, a national commission of scientists, doctors and citizens is needed, a commission that could develop voluntary ethical guidelines. Guidelines could be written that would respect the individual rights of citizens eager to benefit from current and future medical and technological advances, but would also put individual rights in the context of the well-being of the larger community. We have considerable national resources with which to develop these guidelines, including our tradition of justice and fair play, our respect for individual rights and the common good, and—not least—the wisdom of the eloquent writer who left us those eloquent words about the natural rhythms of life: "For everything there is a season."

Moral Wisdom and Sexual Conduct

She is an attractive woman, dark hair pulled back in a bun (the way my mother used to wear hers), probably in her mid-40s. Well dressed, friendly and a bit exuberant, she reflects a sense of happiness and excitement rarely found in a seatmate on a crowded plane traveling to Chicago. I am hunched over my laptop computer, fighting a deadline with an intensity that usually would discourage conversation in this confined torture chamber high above the Rockies.

She wants to talk. I respond politely and continue to type. But she is persistent. So I listen. She is going to Chicago to meet her fiancé, who is flying in from New York. They will spend the weekend together in Chicago. She is a widow, he a widower. They had met several months ago and were now conducting a whirlwind cross-country courtship which would soon, she said with obvious glee, result in matrimony.

We talked about the things she and her fiancé could see and do in Chicago, but we didn’t refer at all to morality, or chastity before marriage, or safe sex, since such matters should not be discussed between strangers. But the subject was on my mind because on the screen in front of me was the uncertain beginning of an editorial inspired by the discussion prompted by Earvin "Magic" Johnson’s dramatic announcement that he is infected with the HIV virus.

I had initially been saddened by his immediate retirement from basketball—a loss to the sport and a much greater loss to him, as the virus leaves him vulnerable to AIDS, the disease from which no one has yet recovered. Which is why I am staring at the screen, trying for some clarity on the matter of Magic and sex as my seat companion expresses her happiness at finding the right man.

The initial adulation for Magic’s "courage" has subsided somewhat, and a few questions are now being raised about his premarriage promiscuity. They are questions, however, that say as much about the inability of our society to deal with complex moral issues as they do about Magic’s infection. Moreover, when he announced that his exposure to the virus came through heterosexual, not homosexual, contacts, he maintained his status as a sports hero—further indication of the uneasiness our society has with gay people. As his fellow sports star Martina Navratilova has noted, Johnson’s public acceptance was guaranteed once he clarified this little detail about his sexual contacts. Navratilova, an acknowledged lesbian, correctly noted that had she made the same announcement, she would not have received such a positive response. "They’d say I’m gay—I had it coming," she said in an interview. Gay sex between committed partners is still out, while heterosexual promiscuity is in—provided, of course, it is practiced "safely."

Magic promises that he will be a spokesman on the subject of AIDS and the HIV virus. He will tell young people to be aware of the importance of safe sex, and always to use condoms when they participate in sexual activities. But it is what Magic has not said that should be the basis of our current national debate. He has not said to young people that sexuality is at the core of their personal identity and that sexual activity is not to be engaged in casually and without commitment.

It is not surprising that Magic has avoided such counsel and has continued to treat his extensive sexual contacts in such cavalier fashion. He is, after all, a product of a liberal culture with no moral compass with which to guide this debate. Our common life has become so thoroughly secular that faced with a danger as threatening as AIDS, we talk of preventive measures, not moral decision-making.

The attractive woman who sits beside me on the plane as I write is unable to see my screen, so she is unaware that she has changed the focus for a piece that has been troubling me for weeks. I wonder, without asking, what decision she and her fiancé have made for this coming weekend. They surely know about safe sex, for as Magic Johnson and others have pointed out, one of the side benefits of his announcement is the public attention now given to the use of condoms. The need for safe sex is out in the open and condoms may soon be advertised on television, sandwiched between the sex-saturated, titillating programs designed to appeal to the same teenagers who are hearing from Johnson that they should practice safe sex.

Columnist Ellen Goodman is one of those liberal opinion-shapers who is at a loss to offer guidance in what she terms the SM. (Since Magic) era. "Most of us realize that premarital sex is here to stay," she writes—not a very profound observation, since it has been here to stay since Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of knowledge. The difference between our current situation and that abrupt departure from the innocence of Eden is the development of a pill that removed the fear of pregnancy, long a barrier to promiscuity. This medical achievement, coupled with the absence of a moral compass within our secular society, has given us the freedom to wander around outside Eden with little regard for the consequences of our sexual activity.

Now with our freedom under threat from a new fear, the best that liberal secular guides like Goodman can offer is a lament that the discussion is polarized around the "moralists" and the "medicalists"— one pushing monogamy, the other praising Magic as "a heterosexual poster child." In groping for an alternative to those two extreme options, Goodman asks us to "clarify our values" and "approve both condoms and caution." Values and caution based upon what principle to guide us? She does not say.

Even more poignant is columnist Anna Quindlen’s promotion of safe sex with the outlandish assertion that she is less concerned with her child’s lifestyle than with her child’s life. Now there is a text for the end of the 20th century, a reductio ad absurdum of liberal secularity’s elevation of individual freedom to ultimacy.

Quindlen was moved to her defense of survival over behavior by Vice-President Quayle’s moralistic judgment against Magic Johnson, and in this she has a point. It is not Magic’s promiscuity that is at issue here. She feels that the moralists—a category meant, I suspect, to encompass most religionists—are not much help in this debate. But those of us in the liberal religious community are also little help because we have been so fearful of the moralist label that we have no moral base from which to enter the debate.

The liberal religious community has felt helpless before the dramatically changing sexual mores of the final decade of the 20th century because we have allowed ourselves to remain trapped between the inflexible moralists on one side and the freedom-worshiping secularists on the other. We officially make noises like the moralists, knowing that such preachments are not effective in the face of secular calls to absolute freedom.

In one of those interesting accidents of timing only a few months before Magic Johnson put human sexuality on the national agenda, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) tried to correct this institutional paralysis over sexuality when it considered a study document designed to confront the inadequacy of both an empty moralism and an arrogant secularity.

The Presbyterian study correctly linked sexuality with commitment and responsibility, and it tried to make clear that there is a distinction between teenage passion (felt by people of all ages) and mature commitment. The inherent ambiguity within such an enterprise is beyond the capacity of the media to comprehend, and as a result the document was pilloried by religious moralists and by secularists, both of whom assume that religion is supposed to condenm and control, not guide and sustain. Confronted with this dual attack, a confused and embarrassed Presbyterian General Assembly retreated from its honest attempt to search for the meaning of a religiously based sexual commitment.

Anna Quindlen is wrong. Lifestyle is life. How we live determines who we are. Mere survival is not sufficient to define a full life. Our religious tradition understands that our sexual conduct is at the heart of who we are. Let’s be honest about this. Moses got the word on the mountain that if the Israelites were going to live in any kind of harmony with themselves and their God, they had to pay attention to the basics.

We are fragile creatures, inherently guilty, because in our self centeredness we can never live fully on behalf of others—which is why we need guidelines surrounding our commitments. Without those guidelines we live only for the moment, giving little thought to possible consequences of our actions.

Which brings me back to the woman sitting beside me on this flight. I have no idea how she will conduct herself on her visit. Her fiancé has children in Chicago, so perhaps they will be well chaperoned. They may have chosen to abstain until they are married, or they may be expressing their love for one another in a more intimate manner. This is a private matter, and certainly not one for me to discuss with my seatmate in these final moments as the plane is landing.

But I do wonder how much longer our society will stay trapped in a futile debate on sexuality limited to the moralists and the medicalists, neither of whom has much sense of the moral wisdom, compassionate understanding and sense of ambiguity available to us from the biblical tradition.

The plane lands and I look again at the rather nervous but excited woman to my left. As I wish her well, I realize that I am also voicing a silent prayer for her future happiness. That is the least I can do. After all, she has helped me meet a deadline.

Politics and the Darkness of Lying

When George Bush announced his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, he told the American people two things that almost no one believed: that race was not a factor in the selection, and that Thomas was the best-qualified person for the position.

There are certain situations in which we are permitted to fudge the truth. We may say that the gift of a necktie is just what we needed even though we have many more just like it at home. But when a president argues for a Supreme Court nominee it is expected that there will be a congruence between what he knows to be true and what he says is true.

The president’s initial announcement set the standard for the hearings that followed, during which, under oath, Thomas told the Judiciary Committee that he had never discussed Roe v. Wade. No one believes that, including the 52 senators who voted to confirm Thomas. As Garry Wills noted in his syndicated column, "Now we have a perjurer on the bench." Wills went on to quote Robert Bork as saying there are only two people in America who have not talked aboiut Roe v. Wade—David Souter and Clarence Thomas. Souter at least managed to evade the committee’s questions on the subject, whereas Thomas said flat out that he had never discussed the case.

Evasions and lies have become de rigueur for Supreme Court nominees. Bork did not lie or evade in his response to questions, and he was rejected for being outside the "mainstream" of American opinion—which means he was outside the preference range of the advocacyr groups who opposed him. Now that this principle has been established, liberal appointees can expect the same treatment from conservative groups.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee endorsed Robert Gates as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, it did so despite Gates’s association with former CIA chief William Casey, som1eone who was not always truthful in speaking to his aides or to the American people. Gates insisted he knew nothing of Casey’s involvement in the Iran-contra affair, though officials below him in the hierarchy suggested otherwise. Questions about Gates’s stewardship and his relationship to Casey were not considered sufficient to prevent confirmation. His experience in running the agency was more important for the senators than the "lesser issue" of truth telling.

Lying has its advantages. I was involved some years ago in a lawsuit filed after our family dog bit someone. An investigator came by our house some weeks after the transgression and casually asked if this was the first time Rebel had bitten anyone. I was unaware that the law automatically condemns a dog for a "second bite," taking the view that once is a mistake but twice is a pattern. Three young boys were looking up at their father as he fielded the question. All of us knew that Rebel had, indeed, been guilty of an earlier transgression. We loved the dog and knew he was high-spirited, but not mean. Both bites, in our opinion, were innocent, not vicious acts. Since truth telling is important in our family—and since I didn’t know about the telling is important in our family—and since I didn’t know about the two-bite rule—I mentioned the earlier incident. The investigator was delighted with the information. Our insurance company eventually settled out of court and we had to have Rebel put to death, an act that neither I nor the boys have ever forgotten or forgiven.

Lying sometimes may help us accomplish an immediate goal (like saving Rebel). But each lie undermines the network of trust on which relationships rely. Lying is wrong, furthermore, because it violates our covenant with God, a covenant that sustains us in our human frailty. Without a moral principle backing our daily intercourse, we are left to function with the utilitarian assumption that if it works, do it; if it feels good, try it. The bottom line, maximum return and cost efficiency become the trinity for those who assume there is no general moral principle by which we are meant to live.

Rollo May, writing in The Cry for Myth, notes that the 20th century was once heralded as the age in which education would enable society to embrace a "religion cleansed of all superstition," by which he meant any belief that went beyond rationality. But, May argues, our age has not been blessed by the anticipated benefits of rationalism. "As a people we are more confused, lacking in moral ideals, dreading the future, uncertain what to do to change things or how to rescue our own inner life."

One of the more memorable quotes from the Watergate era is from the wife of a White House staffer who opened her front door and found herself confronted by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Knowing their mission, she paused for a moment and then stated quietly, "This is an honest house." The answers her husband later proved indicated that their home was indeed one of the few connected to the scandal that could claim that distinction.

Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount is a word for a nation that rewards deception and honors lying: "The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness."

 

Suicide, Responsibility and the Sacredness of Life

Derek Humphry’s Final Exit, a celebration of the right to die—and a guide to how to do it—set off a furious national debate among both secularists and religionists. My recent characterization of the book as irresponsible set off a storm of mail from Century readers, many of whom believed I had overlooked the agonizing decisions facing the terminally ill and their families.

In my effort to argue that suicide is an individual act of selfishness that negates one’s responsibility to the human community, I did slight the suffering of those in their final days or hours when death is imminent and pain is intolerable. Those who have witnessed family members in those final hours, and others who anticipate their own last moments, were understandably disturbed by what they perceived as my insensitivity to the terminally ill.

In discussing Final Exit I did suggest that while there is an obvious difference between "the elderly terminal patient in horrible pain who wants all pain to cease and the despondent teenager whose pain is one of low self-esteem," the difference is finally one of degree. It is on this "degree" that the debate should focus. And when the Hemlock Society produces a book that describes suicide methods in a favorable light, it becomes necessary to label suicide for what it is:

individual self-centeredness. Yes, there is a marked difference between the suicide of a depressed teenager and a family’s agreement that a terminally ill, elderly loved one is ready to exit life with everyone’s best interest at heart.

Complex moral decisions made with the counsel of family, friends and medical professionals are of quite a different order from the lonely judgment reached by someone for whom life is "no longer worth living." A desire to be pastorally responsible in assisting terminally ill individuals must not ignore the religious imperative that human life is the sacred responsibility of both individual and community.

Humphry recently clarified his own opposition to suicide when it is an escape from an unhappy life. He was moved to do so by the suicide of his former wife, a co-founder of the Hemlock Society, Ann Wickett Humphry. According to news reports from Bend, Oregon, Ann Wickett (her professional name) disappeared near Three Creeks Lake on the eastern border of the Three Sisters Wilderness Area. Police found her body several days later after an intensive search by hunters and other volunteers, according to Deschutes County Sheriff Darrell Davidson. (She did not die "in isolation." People looked for her; friends and family grieved over her loss; her horse was left to wander in the wilderness; and her death is now precipitating even further discussion of the cause she had long advocated.)

Humphry said police told him that Wickett had left a suicide note at her home. Humphry also said that while Wickett had had breast cancer, he thought the malignancy has been removed and he was not aware of any recurrence. Humphry and Wickett had collaborated on Jean’s Way, an account of the assisted suicide of Humphry’s first wife, and on a second book, The Right to Die: Understanding Euthanasia. Earlier Wickett had written Double Exit, a description of the double suicide of her aged parents.

According to an Associated Press report, Humphry and Wickctt divorced in 1990 "after a highly publicized bitter separation in which Ann Humphry contended that her husband abandoned her after learning that she had potentially life-threatening breast cancer." At the time of her death she was suing her former husband, "charging libel and slander for comments he made about her mental state."

In a paid advertisement in the New York Times, Humphry described his wife as a woman "of Nordic beauty, enormous talent -- a gourmet cook and often wonderful company, [but] at other times her depressions were so serious that she had to be hospitalized." He added that "suicide for depression has never been part of the credo of the Hemlock Society" and that the society supports "suicide prevention in appropriate cases."

Readers who responded to my initial editorial on Final Exit understandably focused on the pastoral concerns involved with intense physical suffering from a terminal illness. And this is an important consideration in any discussion of how we confront dying. But this pastoral focus must not allow us to overlook the point that, as one respondent wrote me, "conscious decisions to commit suicide are likely to increase as a result of a sort of implicit permission that the very publication of Humphry’s book has given, despite his ‘caveats and warnings."

We will never know how Ann Wickett reached her decision to go into the wilderness of Oregon to take her own life. But we do know that she believed in the principle that suicide is a solution to the pain of life. In her case (assuming she believed herself cancer-free) it was not a terminal physical illness that led to suicide, but an emotional pain that she must have believed she could no longer endure.

The Humphry-Wickett campaign in favor of suicide has opened an important debate. It is one in which the religious community must take the side of the absolute sacredness of life, with a commitment to the principle that the life we are privileged to live is given to us by God. To be responsible stewards of life is not just a suggestion but an obligation. Our eagerness to be sensitive to the special circumstances surrounding terminal illness does not relieve us of our responsibility to God and to the network of relationships we are privileged to share.