Articles – Page 269 – Religion Online

Religious Freedom: Tensions and Contentions

When the 200^th anniversary of the adoption of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution arrived on December 15, the nation appeared more interested in the William Smith trial than in singing Happy Birthday to freedom. But celebration is very much in order, beginning with a word of gratitude to the authors of the Bill of Rights for the First Amendment, which begins with a concern for religious freedom. Lest we assume, however, that the framers had their priorities straight, it should be noted that the First Amendment was not initially first. In debating the amendments to be sent to the states for ratification, the Congress considered and then rejected three other amendments, including one that would have established terms for changing the members' salaries.

The ten amendments include what columnist David Broder describes as "some of the clearest, leanest prose ever embedded in a legal document," beginning with the two religion clauses: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." Broder also notes that the First Amendment contains "some of the simplest and least equivocal directives and prohibitions ever framed." But the language is hardly unequivocal. Those first two clauses have generated a large body of case law precisely because they embrace a tension between the right to the free exercise of religion and the prohibition of an established religion.

In recent years the courts have been especially sensitive to the establishment clause, and in doing so they have greatly narrowed the definition of free expression. Washington Post writer Haynes Johnson offers this description of the religion clauses: "Americans forever after would enjoy the right to worship, or not, as they chose; [and] ... government could make no law to establish an official religion" (italics added). By assuming that the "free exercise" clause refers to the right to worship, Johnson, perhaps unconsciously, regards "religion" as something people do either in private or in a sanctuary, mosque or temple. Confining religion to a private space has the effect of making secularity the "established" belief system--and in this sense violating the "no establishment" clause and truncating the "free exercise" clause.

William Buckley, who first achieved fame with his book on the antireligious environment at Yale University, recently addressed the issue of secularity in a lengthy and carefully nuanced essay on anti-Semitism in the National Review. Acknowledging the difficulty of identifying anti-Semitism, Buckley nevertheless boldly concludes that he has found anti-Semitism in the writings of some of his colleagues on the political right as well as among those on the left such as Gore Vidal.

National Review Editor John O'Sullivan points out that Buckley's essay is "ten times as long as the average cover story," but says the topic was important and sensitive enough to dictate printing the entire article. It was a good decision. As one of the chief figures in American conservatism, Buckley is well situated to address a topic which has unfortunately been introduced into the 1992 presidential campaign by Republican candidates David Duke and Pat Buchanan. Buckley's careful treatment is especially valuable because Buchanan and conservative writer Joseph Sobran are among his close friends. Much of his article focuses on whether it is possible to criticize the state of Israel without being labeled anti-Semitic. Buckley believes it is, but he argues that Buchanan and Sobran have gone beyond such criticism.

The essay will no doubt become an important guide in the public debate on Israel and its critics, for it outlines the complexity of an issue that touches upon politics, human rights and religion. In a concluding, section Buckley turns his attention to the religion clauses in the Bill of Rights, which, he believes, provide a second point of tension in our current concern for properly identifying anti-Semitism. Buckley quotes from an essay by Irving Kristol published three years ago in the National Review, because, he admits, Kristol is Jewish, and because "I cannot surpass him in lucid social analysis." Kristol points to the "tension that is now building up between Jews and Christians," a tension that "has very little to do with traditional discrimination, and everything to do with efforts by liberals among whom, I regret to say, Jews are both numerous and prominent to establish a wall between religion and society, in the guise of maintaining the wall between church and state."

Two hundred years after the adoption of the religion clauses, Kristol argues, the prevailing liberal mind-set is far more concerned with avoiding religious establishment than in encouraging religious expression. Specifically, Kristol says, "the major Jewish organizations proceed from the correct proposition that legally and constitutionally we are not a Christian nation, to the absurd proposition that we are in no sense at all a Christian society." Even though the overwhelming majority of Americans are Christians, these Jewish organizations insist that Christians' religion "be a totally private affair, one that finds no public expression and receives no public deference. Such insistence shows a lamentable ignorance of history, sociology and psychology."

Kristol offers a devastating critique of the liberal Protestant organizations that have been "more keenly interested in social reform than in religious belief." Lukewarm Christianity, Kristol suggests, is more attractive to Jews because they assume, incorrectly in his view, that social-minded religious people will be less likely to produce the sort of anti-Semitism "our Jewish ancestors experienced for centuries in Europe." He thinks this is a faulty assumption because vicious anti-Semitism is not Christian anti-Semitism, but neopagan (Nazi and fascist), Muslim fundamentalist, Marxist, or "simply nationalist chauvinist anti-Semitism of a kind one now finds in Japan (of all places!) or Latin America."

It disturbs Kristol that "American Jews are utterly unprepared for this new world, in which Christians wish to be more Christian without necessarily being anti-Semitic." Since this society is largely Christian, Kristol would have Jews accept this reality and, instead of being fearful, turn to their own faith. Jews who view with alarm the signs of Christian revival do so because, Kristol says, they incorrectly believe that if and when Christians embrace their own faith with greater fervor, this will be harmful to the Jews. It won't, he insists, if his reading of history is correct--that it has been perversions of faith, not authentic revivals, that have led to anti-Semitism.

Buckley, a Catholic, recalls that when he was a teenager he took pride in announcing that he would skip Friday chapel at his Protestant boarding school and walk five miles with several other students and one faculty member to attend mass. "I found the experience other than self-isolating: I think I actually got something of a kick out of it, as many Catholics did during those decades when, for instance, they would politely decline to eat meat served to them on Fridays."

In this experience he finds common cause with Michael Kinsley, who has written: "There is a majority culture in this country. It is Christian, white, middle class. Jews and nonbelievers (I am both) are outsiders to some extent in that culture. So are blacks, homosexuals, Orientals, and so on." Kinsley adds that this is also a society committed to protecting the civil rights and economic opportunities of minorities, and it is crucial that the battle for minority rights continue. "But does final victory require eradication of the majority culture? And is every manifestation of that culture an insult to those who aren't fully a part of it?"

To be in the minority, or to be an "outsider" from the mainstream, is not all bad, Kinsley concludes. "The enormous literary contribution of homosexuals, the prominence of Jews in courageous social causes of all sorts, the creation of jazz by blacks, all derive in part from the discomfort of being outside the majority culture."

The framers of the Bill of Rights could not have anticipated the rich pluralism of contemporary America, but they gave us a framework in which pluralism is something to cherish, not to fear. We must be vigilant in protecting minority rights. But we must also be careful not to read the "no establishment" clause so as to restrict all public expressions of faith and hence dilute the meaning of "free exercise."

The "free exercise" clause applies to all faith groups equally and should not be seen as a threat to those that are in the minority--precisely the groups that the "no establishment" clause was designed to protect.

Kids’ Stuff: Media Fail the Test

"Lately I haven't had time to read the papers, as I have been building a mouseproof closet against a rain of mice. But sometimes, kindling a fire with last week's Gazette, I glance through the pages and catch up a little with the times." That's how E. B. White opened a short essay in Harper's magazine in October 1938. White predicted with chilling accuracy the way the proliferation of information via television can diminish our lives rather than enrich them. "I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky." A speaker at a recent Nashville conference on media and the family quoted that passage of White's (discovered, I later learned, on an Internet collection of quotations) and suggested that television was rapidly becoming a disturbance.

Television was very much in its infancy when White wrote his essay. He recalled having attended "a television demonstration at which it was shown beyond reasonable doubt that a person sitting in one room could observe the nonsense taking place in another." Nevertheless, the experience was striking enough ("By paying attention I could see the whites of a pretty woman's eyes") to convince White that television was "tremendously important -- more so than the ebb and flow of armies."

We have clearly failed the test that White described. We have allowed market forces to control television and the rest of our modem communications media -- to such a degree that the lowest common denominator of interest prevails. A free society rises or falls on the exercise of a collective responsibility. When we fail to respond to the needs and vulnerabilities of our citizens, we revert to the law of the jungle, permitting only the powerful to determine how we shall live.

Anger over the absence of responsibility surfaced at the Nashville conference, but the usual media industry voices were heard as well, pushing, as is their custom, individual rights over community responsibility. After attending the conference I decided that the obsession with individual rights -- the right to make money or to write, say or do what I please -- should be exposed for what it is: a form of fundamentalism that accepts one worldview as absolute and rejects all others as encroachments on the true faith.

My insight was reinforced when I saw Kids, a movie that follows a group of young teenagers through a day and night of sex, drugs and violence. Kids is director Larry Clark's first movie, but it is not his first venture into depicting the empty hedonism of young teenagers. In 1971 he published a book of photographs of young people in his hometown of Tulsa "shooting up, having sex, messing around, playing tough guys," as one writer describes it. His film continues that theme in a style of a photographer with a convincing script. The picture is unsparing in its depiction of a group of children without any interest other than getting enough sex and drugs to keep them out of touch with reality. (One particularly despairing sequence centers on four young boys who look to be around 11, sitting together on a sofa, smoking dope.)

Telly, a central character, prides himself on his ability to seduce virgins. Two of his conquests are shown at length, complete with a piteous plea from one girl who cries, "It hurts." Jennie, one of Telly's earlier victims, discovers that she is HIV positive. She wanders about the city, looking for Telly to tell him about her condition. At one party she takes pills that leave her barely awake. Stumbling into a bedroom, she finds Telly engaged in his latest conquest. She watches for a time and then falls onto a sofa. The film ends when a friend of Telly's finds her asleep and rapes her.

This is raw stuff when it involves adults, and is ugly and horrifying when it involves children. Which brings us back to the issue of responsibility. The rating board of the Motion Picture Association of America correctly gave the picture an NC-17 rating, the designation for pictures forbidden to anyone under 17. That rating has its economic cost to the filmmakers, since most theaters and major video chains refuse to handle NC-17 films.

Kids, made as an independent production, was first shown at the Sun ance Film Festival, where it elicited some praise and some disgust. Miramax Films, a subsidiary of the Disney company, obtained distribution 'rights to Kids, fully aware that it would probably be rated NC-17 and thus be unreleasable by Miramax since Disney will not distribute an NC- 1 7 picture.

Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who run Miramax, entered Kids in the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and began an extensive campaign to convince critics that Kids is an important work of art that should be given the more profitable R rating, which allows parents to take their youngsters to the film and also opens up the video and cable television markets. (R-rated films on cable's various movie channels are easily available to children of any age who know how to program their VCRs, or whose parents don't care what they watch on cable.)

Critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times, a cohost of a popular television movie review program, emerged as a major supporter of Kids after interviewing director Larry Clark at Cannes. Before the film opened in Chicago, Ebert wrote that Kids is "a blunt warning for kids engaging in risky behavior, and a wakeup call for their parents ... Watching Kids is fascinating, yet depressing. The movie has an unstudied authenticity that convinces you it knows exactly what it's talking about."

True, it is a well-made film. But what responsibility does the community have to prevent this graphic film from being available to children? Ebert quotes Clark: "It's not for all kids under 17, but it's for some kids under 17. I want people to see the movie. I want parents to go with their kids. But the kids have to be able to get in. Because this movie shows things that are a reality in this world." To which I must respond, "Get real, Larry." A rating doesn't distinguish between "some" and "all- kids. Ebert made no effort to challenge Clark's notion that "some" kids will see his movie with their understanding parents who will then take them down the street for a milkshake and a heart-to-heart chat about AIDS.

Ebert and Clark seem to feel that Kids is a training film for kids -- that it will discourage them from misconduct. I haven't heard that argument used for movies since the early days of pornography when hard-core pictures were preceded by a warning from a man wearing a doctor's smock about the terrible things viewers were about to witness.

Miramax made a final effort to move Kids out of the NC-17 category through a screening before the appeals board (made up of industry representatives and two religious advisers). High-priced defense attorney Alan Dershowitz was brought in to argue that children would benefit from seeing Kids, but the appeals board upheld the original rating.

In defiance of the system under which Miramax had sought the R rating, the Weinstein brothers have refused to accept the NC-17 rating, and have released the film through a company they formed for the sole purpose of distributing Kids. The company is called Excalibur (to evoke King Arthur, a longtime Disney favorite?). Then, in a final bit of cynicism, ads for the film carry the line: "Warning: No one under 18 will be admitted without a parent or legal guardian." To the casual observer this may look like corporate concern for the young, especially with that ominous use of "warning," but it is in fact the same limitation (with a year's difference in age) the MPAA provides for the Restricted rating which the MPAA refused to give to Miramax.

In England the government runs the rating system, which has specific age levels as to suitability and is backed up by local police enforcement. The U.S. system of industry self-regulation is preferable to the English system, but a voluntary regulation system can survive only if its participants act in a responsible manner and abide by the rules they set for themselves.

Changes in Attitude: the Lost World of the 1950s

In a study of "the forgotten virtues of community" journalist Alan Ehrenhalt looks at three Chicago-area cornmunities between the 1950s and the 1990s: a Catholic parish in the city, an African-American section of the South Side, and the suburb of Elmhurst. The thesis of his book, The Lost City, is that three major shifts in attitude have t en place since the 1950s. Understanding these changes can help us grasp movements in our culture, especially the rise of the Religious Right and its impact on the politics of 1996.

The first change Ehrenhalt identifies is a new attitude toward choice: choice today is universally considered a good thing; the more choices we have, the better. Second, authority is inherently suspect; we think nobody "should have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave." Third, sin is regarded as a social, not a personal, matter.

In the '50s, Ehrenhalt argues, the number of choices available were limited, and when a choice was made the choice of a spouse or a vocation, for example-people were much more likely to remain loyal to their initial decision. Commitment was a virtue greatly honored, even when the choices made proved to be less than ideal. Manufacturing plants were reluctant to move to new areas for purely economic reasons.

Authority figures were not always loved in the 1950s, says Ehrenhalt, but they were still presumed capable of offering guidance. And, according to Ehrenhalt, who is the editor of Governing magazine, sin was still a viable category which referred to personal wrongdoing, the violation of a biblical code. The Ten Commandments were commandments, not suggestions, and they were frequently posted in public school classrooms.

Ehrenhalt presents one especially startling example of how different the world of the '50s was from that of today. He notes that in Elmhurst in the '50s one organization "stood far above all others as a symbol of fellowship and civic pride-the Jaycees, then known officially as the United States junior Chamber of Commerce ... the nerve center of the new suburban generation."

It was the Jaycees who revived the moribund Elmhurst Fourth of July celebration, with a parade, a fireworks display, a freedom flame pageant, and an Iwo Jima tableau. They held a soapbox derby, and bused children from school to the circus on a Friday afternoon each spring. In December the Jaycees launched a "Put Christ back in Christmas" campaign, crusading against the "Xmas" vulgarization and the creeping secularism it represented. In the winter of 1953, there were "Put Christ back in Christmas" stickers and signs all over Elmhurst -- on postal machines, on bushes, on every tree sold for the holidays anywhere in town. Residents were urged to send only cards that had a religious theme, and merchants were pressured to place biblical scenes in their stores windows. The Boy Scouts were enlisted to distribute 8,000 pamphlets door-to-door, explaining the significance of the crusade.

Religion, specifically the religion that resented the vulgarization of "Xmas," was as much a part of the culture as the soapbox derby and the Fourth of July parade. This was the decade in which the words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. President Eisenhower, who had never been a church member until he decided to run for the presidency (he quickly became a Presbyterian), summed up the religiosity of the period when he said: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief -- and I don't care what it is."

Forty years later, secularity, not religiosity, is the dominant sensibility in public life. Putting Christ back into Christmas may still be a challenge to American churches, but today if anyone were to propose such a task to the Jaycees, they would respond with the bemused disbelief a city council would express if asked to sponsor an Easter sunrise service in city hall. We called it "religion in general" in the 1950s, and though it was merely a pious veneer over the culture, it nevertheless represented a very different sensibility from that of today.

In the past 40 years Americans have come to understand that they are a people of many religions and beliefs. This embrace of pluralism has been led by liberals whose benchmark belief has been tolerance. The American Civil Liberties Union has been in the forefront of fighting for tolerance and has served as the watchdog for signs that the nation's historic and numerically dominant faith-Christianity-is receiving preferential treatment. Not only do the Jaycees no longer push the cause of Christ in Christmas, but the baby Jesus himself has disappeared, along with his manger, from department stores and city property. Christians are still the dominant religious group, but it is no longer considered appropriate to proclaim one's religious faith in public settings. Ethics and morality have been cut off from their religious sources.

The Religious Right represents one response to these various developments. It seeks in some respects to return us to the ethos of the 1950s-an ethos of commitment, respect for authority, and concern for individual sin. It also seeks to restore public displays of religiosity.

The Religious Right arrived on the political scene in concert with the triumphs of political conservatism. The political revolution that brought conservatives to power began in its modern form in 1960, when Barry Goldwater failed is his attempt to gain the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Four years later Goldwater was the nominee, and though he lost the election to Lyndon Johnson, the conservative movement began to assume control of the Republican Party. By 1980 the movement was strong enough to choose a conservative nominee for the president. The term "moderate Republican" has become, except in isolated instances, an oxymoron.

The rise of the Religious Right was fueled by three major Supreme Court decisions which altered traditional patterns of American life. First came Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed segregation in the public schools; second came the last in a series of cases banning prayer in public schools, Engle v. Vitale (1962); and third was Roe v. Wade (1973), which opened the way for legalized abortion.

In 1964 Jerry Falwell was a Virginia pastor who insisted during the civil rights controversy that religious people should stay out of politics and focus entirely on spiritual matters. But by 1980 Falwell had been converted to political action. He founded the Moral Majority, the precursor of today's Christian Coalition, formed by Pat Robertson. Robertson lost his own bid for the presidency in 1988, but as in the case of Barry Goldwater in 1964, out of that loss came a movement. Today the movement is spear-headed by the Christian Coalition.

The strength of the coalition may be measured in part by the fact that every major Republican presidential candidate wanted to appear at its re cent annual meeting. Neither the Republican presidential nor vice-presidential nomination will be decided without support from the Christian Coalition. The coalition holds the kind of veto power that bigcity mayors, African-American leaders and labor unions hold in the Democratic Party.

One response to this movement rooted in "traditional religious values" would be to dismiss it as a return to the Know-Nothing populism of the 19th century. That would be a mistake. As John Diggins points out in The Lost Soul of American Politics, the public longs to recover a sense that its members live under the guidance of a transcendent moral center, and they want to utilize such a center as an anchor from which they can exercise their democratic freedoms.

Jewish and Christian traditions have shaped who we are as a people. Embracing a narrow specificity, however, is an inappropriate way to celebrate that tradition, and such narrowness is the fundamental flaw in the Religious Right. When the Religious Right speaks of morality, it has a very parochial view in mind, a morality derived from an evangelical Protestant worldview with a heavy emphasis on a literal and at times apocalyptic interpretation of scripture.

The best response to the Religious Right, therefore, is to acknowledge that it is correct in believing that secularism does not deserve to be our enforced national faith. But a fundamentalist and parochial Christianity is not the answer to our quest for a moral center. In seeking for the lost soul in politics we need to respect the passions and commitments of the various religious traditions in this land.

Pentecostals on Motorcycles

Book Review:

Riders for God: The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang

By Rich Remsberg. Univrity of Illinois Press. 240 pp

Our oldest son went cold turkey in an inner-city detox center. He had been an alcoholic and an abuser of other drugs for 14 years. After he had gone through some ten days of delirium tremens and withdrawal, the executive of the center, a charismatic and a recovering alcoholic, told him, "You’ve got to find a new playpen and a new set of playmates or you can’t stay sober."

When Steve, a motorcycle expert who loved to ride, asked, "Yeah, and where would someone like me find such people?" she introduced him to an Alcoholics Anonymous motorcycle gang that had a genuine commitment to spiritual practices. With their support and counsel Steve never used alcohol or any other drug -- except for the caffeine in lots of coffee again. When he was killed in an accident seven months later, he died with a clear bloodstream. Though his life was cut short at age 29, he had obtained sobriety and radically changed his life. I will never forget the influence the Visions Motorcycle Club had on Steve or all they did for him, and later for us at his funeral and in its aftermath.

I brought this history to my reading of Rich Remsberg’s book on the Unchained Gang, a Christian motorcycle club. I love this book. The best parts are the transcribed interviews, which make up most of the text, and Reinsberg’s sensitive photographs. In the transcriptions we meet Pastor Larry, Shalom, Chico, Nancy, Randy, Mary, Paul, Sparky, Gabby and Harley, all members of the Ellettsville House of Prayer, a Pentecostal congregation made up of Christian bikers and others near Bloomington, Indiana.

Wittgenstein says that people are not a riddle to be solved but a mystery to be astonished at. I can think of no better approach to this book. The worst mistake readers could make would be to dismiss the pious language of these people as slang bromides rather than see them as the reflection of serious practices.

Riders for God makes clear the sharp lines dividing the world of hard-core bikers, known in the biker universe as the "one-percent world," from Christian groups like the Unchained Gang. The former is a world of anger, violence, intimidating resistance to conventional society, drug use, a desperate search to belong and the virtual enslavement of women -- physically, psychologically, sexually and economically. The Christian world of the Unchained Gang, though not without its own problems -- such as persistent sexism -- constitutes a leaving of "the old ways." It involves "walking the talk" (faithful living) and "talking the walk" (witnessing).

The faith of the Christian bikers is deeply felt. These men and women speak often of their lives before they found Jesus. They report their loss of feeling through extensive drug use, their profound sense of alienation, their rejection by the wider culture even before their biker days, and their radical resistance to convention. Feelings are a big issue. Shalom says that when she was in the biker world she had "an iron plate in my chest." Paul had things "locked up down there." Chico talks of his "hardened heart," of the "shell that was around my heart" that kept him from ever crying. "And now. . . it’s like the Lord, he just squeezes on that heart, and when he does, then the tears."

To begin to feel again; to experience tears; to acknowledge even to display -- vulnerability; to dissolve anger into an acknowledgment of the hurt and alienation of one’s life; to be able, in the case of the women, to redefine oneself as a competent and strong person, equal to all in Christ; and, in the case of the men, to express affection to other males and acknowledge own one’s vulnerability: all these are part of what it means to be in Jesus. Chico says: "I have never felt this good about anything or myself as I do now.

For these Christian bikers, faith has come at a high price, but it has radically changed their lives. They testify to the ways God began working with them long before they knew it. God brought them through wrecks, violent episodes, abusive relationships, broken families and households and long-term and highly destructive drug use. They now live their lives in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Theirs is not a knowing about God, but a knowing of God. It is a faith of the heart. Mary calls it "a personal relation with God" versus "religion." It is her "shield in the Spirit." Paul describes it as a faith that is "walked, lived."

The Christian bikers’ language, which might be dismissed as hackneyed, must be seen in the context of their lives and practices. When Paul says that "without faith nothing works" and that "the Lord has been teaching me trust," or when Mary, Nancy and Pastor Larry talk of the change in their desires, or when they testify to how they overcame the craving for alcohol and other drugs, or when Shalom tells of living "the old lifestyle" because "we didn’t know how to live the other one," these are testimonies of people who have known a world where life is hard and vicious even when "self-chosen." They know what it means to have been lost and to have been found. Their conviction that God actually does have a plan for their lives and that God will give them the strength and the energy to live it is based on hard experience.

The Christian bikers’ spiritual lives cannot be reduced only to believing and feeling, however. The Un-chained Gang is clearly a practice-based community. Worship, prayer, witnessing, Bible reading, altar calls, healing, prison ministry and especially ministry to those still in the one-percent biker world are only a part of a wider ministry of practice. They anoint bikes. Mary maintains that she does ministry through her bike, that "from the time she put the fish and the dove on the back of that trunk it has just started to attract people. I can take it anywhere and it finds me somebody to minister to." She also speaks in tongues and sings as she rides the bike. "It’s wonderful, it’s just awesome.

The Unchained Gang members know they are not perfect and are in deep need of God’s ongoing work in their lives. The group practices "correction," as in the case of Shalom who had a relationship with Gabby (not yet a member of the gang) while she was still married to another man. They took away her patch -- a symbol of membership-for a time and kept her on a kind of probation. She later admitted that she "was wrong in what I was doing." She acknowledges that the church was "exactly biblical" in its action. But she adds that she did not appreciate the gossip and the falsehoods that circulated about her, and she did question whether the group would have done to a man what they did to her.

Sexism is an ongoing problem with the gang, according to Nancy and Shalom, though they believe there is a lot less of it in the gang than in the one-percent biker world. Still it is there. Some men use the ministry of the Unchained Gang to "shirk responsibility" to their wives and children. A double standard still holds. For example, men go to minister at meetings of the one-percent biker world, but the club does not allow women to attend those meetings. One member of the Unchained Gang was especially manipulative of women, but still "glued himself to the club" and "got a patch." His later ejection from the gang for his treatment of women came much too slowly for Shalom and Nancy. Their critique of sexism sparkles with a concrete wisdom. Nancy: "What I need is a wife." Or Shalom: "Men are wimpy when it comes to dealing with other men.

An interesting conversation occurs between Nancy and Shalom about the biblical teaching that the man is the head of the family. They are quite clear that this does not mean that the husband is the boss. They understand it, rather, to mean that the husband is responsible for the household. They both believe that the Bible is their rule book, but they emphasize that "the Bible says that the man should love his wife like his church." Both indicate that if a decision had to be made that a husband and wife couldn’t work out, then the husband would make the final decision. But both state that this has never happened in their marriages, that they just "don’t go there." Not only that, they "can’t see it really happening."

Such views are radically different from those of the one-percent world. There, in situations of imminent violence, such as when one gang may be at war with another, shootings do occur. In such cases a different relationship between the men and women takes hold. "If you stand to question him, you could probably have a bullet through you [sic] head before the question’s over," says Shalom. "So that’s not a real iffy, debatable kind of thing. That’s the way it is out there in the one-percent world. It was then, and it is today. There are wars going on. They are very serious -- people are getting killed. Clubs are being taken over." Nancy adds: "And the men are usually informed, because they have their little meetings that the women don’t get to go to. So that’s why you learn to do whatever he says. If I were at that meeting, I wouldn’t need him to tell me what to do." I like Nancy’s comment, but I cannot help wondering how many times violence -- both in and outside of the biker world -- is a means for oppressing women.

Remsberg’s use of transcription is exactly right. Merely summarizing or analyzing the bikers’ words would be far less effective.

But the book does have its failings. A serious one is the very limited attention it gives to what these Christian bikers do for a living. The world of work is too central to people’s lives to be given such short shrift. Remsberg candidly tells us that he is not a believer, and for the most part he stays away from judgments about the gang’s religious commitments. The most glaring exception to this occurs in his postscript, where he writes, "Christian bikers, for all of their controversial beliefs, dramatic worship, and uncommon aesthetics, are searching for fulfillment of the most basic human needs: love, structure, and spirituality, the same as anyone else. These are things that give meaning to a life."

Here Remsberg wrenches the bikers out of the rich particularity of their lives and plops them down in a generalized pop Enlightenment framework. I wonder how, after living with these women and men for two years, he could come to such a gutted understanding of their lives.

The transcriptions themselves reveal people who claim Jesus as their Savior who redeems them from Satan and the sin of the world they know. Jesus is also their Lord who is now reshaping and transforming their lives, protecting them from the continual temptations of Satan and his grip on the world and providing them with the strength and power to walk with the Holy Spirit. These are people who have lived violent lives and now see themselves as "warriors" for Christ. They have given up their former violence in order to engage in "spiritual warfare." To reduce the rich particularity of their lives to the bland categories of fulfillment, love, structure and spirituality is a violation and distortion.

I would not make so much of this if it weren’t an example of how the church so often deals with class divisions -- inappropriately applying middle-class language and practices to working-class people. By conveying the rich faith language of the biker Christians, Remsberg shows us we have much to learn.

Indigenous Ministry in the Context of the United States

Nothing is more clear in the mission of the church in the United States today than that ministry must be indigenous and must take with the utmost seriousness the particularities of this culture. The reasons for this are not only that ever more diverse cultural groups are moving into the United States, as important as this clearly is, but because indigenous ministry has not been given the centrality it deserves all along. Why this is so is a complex question and not the subject of this paper. Suffice it to say that only in a time when the country faces a new immigration and when "otherness" finds academic credibility do we suddenly discover that "we" are diverse and require contextualization.

Edward Said observes that a culture is a system of discriminations and exclusions. One may question why such previously silent voices are now receiving attention. Perhaps it because of emerging power among such voices and/or because the dominant voices are losing power in a world that has "suddenly become global." Certainly it relates to massive changes occurring at both the global and local levels.

Whatever the case, this interest becomes the occasion for the church to give attention to a matter always basic to the proclamation of and witness to the gospel. Indeed it is basic to the Incarnation itself. In the Gospel of John "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." The word "dwelt" translates the Greek word skenoo, meaning literally "pitched tent with us." This is clearly an encultural event, The Word takes on ethnographical residence. It is the Word, and it is encultured.

What follows here is an overly simple, but useful way to look at the United States in terms of three very broad cultural formations, each one housing no little diversity itself. My format is to describe and to compare each of them. The foci I have selected for description/comparison are chosen for their specific relevance for mission and ministry.

The Cultural Right, The Cultural Middle, and The Cultural Left

The Cultural Right. The United States can be seen as an enormously complex culture that involves three large subcultural components. The largest of these is the group of U.S. Americans who are most traditional. Whether urban or rural, they tend to be local in orientation, territorially rooted, communal in relationships, conventional in morality, traditional in their values, socio-morally conservative in family and social life, and politically moderate. In terms of social class they inhabit the lower half of the income, education, and occupational structure. (Sample, 1990, and Vanfossen,1979.)

In ethnicity all of the minorities in the United States are well represented in this large population aggregate. A majority of African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, and the largest plurality of Anglo-Europeans can be described as cultural right. Because of the large percentage of college-educated Asian Americans who have immigrated to the United States, the proportion of traditional people in this group, especially Koreans, may not be as high. To be sure, the ethnographic make-up of these traditional subcultures will be quite various, but traditional people of whatever ethnic group do share some common characteristics which are very important for indigenous mission and ministry. Faithful and effective work by the church will pitch tent with the rich particularity of each of these traditions. (Weiss, 1988; Garreau,1981; and Mitchell, 1983.)

On the cultural right one other distinction needs to be made between "the respectables" and the "hard living. "By respectables I mean the hard working, church going, patriotic, family-oriented people who find in respectability hard earned compensation for not realizing the dominant culture's valuing of winning and achievement, on the one hand, and their own rightful claim of dignity, on the other. By hard living I mean that sizable but smaller group on the cultural right who have given up on respectability. The larger society has a variety of names for them: poor white trash, underclass blacks and Hispanics, and so on. These are the people who struggle with employment, abuse drugs, experience household instability, and have histories of violence, either as victims or perpetrators or both. (Sample, 1993; Mitchell, 1983; Howell, 1973.)

The cultural right is important for indigenous ministry for at least two reasons. The first is that respectables constitute the most committed church people in the society if this is measured in terms of attendance, participation, giving, and service. The challenge of indigenous ministry is as formidable here as anywhere because of the education and professionalization of the clergy, on the one hand, and the increasing accommodation of the mainline church to the business and professional classes on the other. Secondly, in terms of the commitment of the church to the poor, the cultural right is where the poor are with the largest number of them being respectable in orientation, followed, of course, by the hard living.

The Cultural Middle. The people of this life style group most manifest the values of the dominant culture. These are the career oriented, business and professional people who seek out achievement and success. Profoundly utilitarian and individualistic they tend to be highly rationalized in Max Weber's sense of that word. Their social relationships beyond the nuclear family are closely related to business and career.

Because of the crossfire of competing claims in settings where they have to make decisions, a given in the locations and requirements of their work responsibilities, they tend to be situational and consequential in their approach to ethics. With their generally high levels of privilege and affluence they tend to be politically conservative and supportive of national defense, minimal welfare, and free enterprise economics, although these stands may be moderated among those most committed to the church and thereby influenced by its social teaching.

Career ladders typically require geographical mobility and hence an uprooting which begins when they leave home to go to the university. As a result traditional values play largely a nostalgic role or are relegated to the private sphere. The powerful goal orientation of this life style produces its special kinds of crises: stress, burn-out, failure, emptiness, loneliness, boredom, living too much in one's head, the unemployed self, life cycle traumas, and the distracted forfeiture of retirement, among others. While important gender differences can still be found in these characteristics, I suspect that these will be largely overwhelmed in the structural and institutional exigencies of career settings, still over represented by males, unless more basic changes are afoot from sources not yet evident. (Sample,1990,99-138; Mitchell,1983:11-14.)

As I intimated above a significant public/private split sharply characterizes this lifestyle. Certain dimensions of living simply do not get met in most of the jobs of the cultural middle. The result is that a lot of pressure is placed on the private sphere, where this is not squeezed out by the demands of career itself. For the cultural middle the church inhabits this private sphere and can play an extremely important role in "completing" life. This, of course, brings its own challenges to a more encompassing understanding of the faith and further poses the issues of indigenous ministry. (Roozen et al,1984.)

Throughout most of the history of the United States a strong self-denial ethic characterized the great majority of the population. This ethic continues to remain strong on the cultural right especially in terms of family. On the cultural middle this self-denial ethic can be seen around issues of career and, of course, family, but heuristically the ambiguity of the cultural middle on this question can be interpreted by distinguishing those more influenced by tradition on the "right side of the middle" and those more influenced by recent developments on the "left side," especially the developments following World War II among baby boomers who came of age during the 1960s.

The Cultural Left. The coming of the boomers brought a strong inner-directed, post materialist, self-fulfillment ethic. Some thirty-plus million boomers were strongest in their expression of this ethic and were its primary carriers. I call them the cultural left. These boomers reacted against the self-denial they found in their parents and the wider society with its more restrained conformity and the delay of gratification for the sake of long term gain. Cultural left life styles became more expressive, less instrumental, and more focused on the here and now. (Yankelovich,1981; Roof and McKinney,1987:40-71; Sample,1990.)

As is well known the boomers dropped out of church in unprecedented numbers. Alienated from and distrustful of established institutions the boomers, and especially the cultural left, walked away from mainline churches by the millions. More conservative churches, drawing their memberships from the most traditional people in the society, were least affected by these movements and some of them continue to grow. While some boomers are now returning, significant numbers have not and the difficulties of reaching them are well recorded in evangelistic and church growth literature.

When they were young they were called the "now generation" as an attempt to capture this more expressive lifestyle oriented to the intrinsic values of immediate experience. This 'now' orientation moderated as the U.S. economy worsened; and as they moved toward middle age, the cultural left boomers began a search for more structure in their lives. This search remains, however, an inner-directed one. While nothing will homogenize life styles in the United States like a child and a mortgage--both now increasingly characterize boomers--the cultural left will continue to be "different," and will not "come around" to meet the expectations of other lifestyle groups.

The politically liberal cultural left has perhaps made its greatest impact on the wider society with its socio-morally permissive views and practices around sexuality and its views on the relation of the genders. The impact of this on the baby bust generation is clearly evident. Born in the twelve years following the boomers (1965-1976), this younger generation is much more cultural right and middle in lifestyle, but nevertheless seems to continue the socio-morally liberal views and practices of the boomers although not their more politically liberal ones. (Roof et al,1993; Howe and Strauss,1992.)

In sum, the United States can be usefully pictured as a cultural continuum of right, middle and left with the first of these representing the most traditional and hard living people, the second the business and professional careerists, and the last a recent cultural formation of inner-directed, self-fulfillment oriented baby boomers now entering middle age. What is quite clear is that a single approach to mission and ministry will not touch the people of such different lifestyles, not to mention the even richer diversities of ethnicity within each of the larger formations. In the remainder of this discussion I will illustrate directions indigenous ministry will need to take if it is to pitch tent with the varieties of people increasingly characteristic of the United States. My focus will be differences in thinking, in approaches to faith, and in practices. These, of course, are not exhaustive, but are rather illustrative of the work before us to witness to the faith in indigenous ways.

Orality, Literacy, and Electronic Orality

Traditional Orality. Perhaps the first thing to examine is the radically different ways these three groups think and engage the world. The cultural right is basically oral in its approach. While most of them can read and write, nevertheless they tend to think in proverbs, stories, and relationships. This is, of course, not a primal orality in the sense of a culture without a written language. I call it a traditional orality to suggest that it occurs among more traditional people albeit in a culture that has not only a written language but electronic media as well, to which I shall turn presently. This traditional orality contrasts sharply with business and professional people who tend to think more conceptually and discursively, especially in their occupational lives. Cultural right people do vernacular; cultural middle people do discourse. (Ong, 1982:31-77.)

The growing accommodation of mainline churches to the middle class and the higher educational levels of clergy make indigenous ministry even more difficult. Moreover, seminary education, like higher education generally, misfits people for work on the cultural right. Academic jargon, professional tastes, the logic of what constitutes significant argument, the focus of interests in recreation, leisure, and even subjective reverie constitute major barriers to communication, on the one hand, and make it difficult for clergy to serve in such settings, on the other. Meanwhile, cultural right people wonder what in the world has happened to the clergy. Were they not so loyal, they would have left long ago.

Think for but a moment about the problems posed by indigenous ministry. Oral people think in proverbs; in higher education such things are called cliches and old bromides. Oral people think in stories; in higher education the pressure is on to make the point. Oral people learn through apprenticeship; in the academy--when such things are a concern--the talk is about praxis. Oral people are more concrete life based in their engagement with the world; higher education makes one more introspective and oriented to one's subjective interiorization. Oral people are more practical in their thinking; the theoretical and categorical character of discourse distances professionals not only by their jargon but by the abstract caste of their levels of generality. (Ong,1982:31-77.)

Indigenous ministry and mission on the cultural right will require witnesses who find local traditional people mysterious and interesting, who are prepared to understand orality as a "language," and who are prepared to become "multi-lingual."

The Literate Middle. If the cultural right is more oral, the cultural middle is more literate. The kinds of things we do in seminaries are closest to the thought forms, if not the political commitments, of this business and professional group. The life styles of trained clergy are most congruent with the cultural middle, who find in their forms of life the tastes, the manners, and the fashions more in keeping with own training and careers. It should not be missed that this is a form of indigenization. The problem, however, is that it is often an outright accommodation to and a baptizing of middle class life. Still, the use of discourse, the high levels of education, the interest in understanding the faith, and the prizing of a thoughtful appropriation of the tradition of the church can be found among the cultural middle. (Ong,1982:78-138.)

The very fact of its more literate expression poses significant issues for the mission of the church. The fit between clergy and this lifestyle, on the one hand, and the commitments of such business and professional people to the popular intellectual currents of the times, on the other, promote problems of a syncretistic accommodation rather than an authentic indigenization.

In its accommodation to middle class society the indigenization becomes more difficult because the wholesale framing of the church may be in such congruence with the cultural middle that the distance between Word and world is lost, with the result that a healing, redemptive, transformative Word cannot touch the deepest hungers of people for life, for trust in God, for hope, for a righteous justice.

I think especially of the difficulty of proclaiming a gospel of grace in an achievement culture, of the difficulty of breaking through the popular forms of Enlightenment bourgeois commitments: the individualism and loss of community, the confidence in rationality and often of a life-depleting and hollowing kind, the belief in some common core of universal religion that obscures the profundities of the particularities of Christian life, and the faith-destructive idolatries of the nation state.

Add to these long term complexities the more recent challenges of a consumer ethic, the peripheralization of religious life, the privatization of core meanings and commitments, the growing subjectivization of belief with attendant losses of distinctively Christian practices and the waning passion for justice and peace, and the issue of communicating an authentic Word becomes challenging indeed.

With respect to the cultural middle the opportunity is to move from accommodation to indigenous ministry. I see three basic moves that need to be made. The first is a heavy critique of key commitments of the Enlightenment. These commitments abound in popular form in middle class life. Reclaiming traditioning, denting individualism with a more compelling understanding of human social life, calling into question easy universalities, demonstrating the inadequacies of rationality, relativizing the claims of science, and placing the nation state in a socio-historical context as a means to demystify its transcendent claims seem to be key dimensions of this critique. Second, the connection between Christian belief and faithful practices needs to reestablished. That practices are irreplaceable modes of knowing and crucial to the formation of feeling are ideas that have lost currency in the United States. They deserve a renewed, functional implementation in the church. Finally, the rational efficiency of the cultural middle involves a repression of the spirit. With their focus on introspection and their preoccupation with their own interiority middle class people are more than capable of seeing and understanding such dynamics. The release of this kind of power in their lives could provide a new grounding of meaning and purpose and the faithful strength to address issues of social justice looming so massively before the church today. (Lyotard,1984; Milbank,1990; Hauerwas,1991; Placher,1989 ;Devaney,1991.)

Electronic Orality. A distinctively new turn in patterns of thought, learning and participation is now occurring on the cultural left. If the cultural right is oral and the middle is literate, then the cultural left can be characterized in terms of electronic orality. While this form of thinking and communication is persuasively present among people under fifty in the society, nevertheless the initial carriers of it were the boomers.

Walter Ong observed this phenomenon more than twenty years ago. He noted that industrial societies had gone through a sequence of electronic stages from telegraph, to telephone, to sound pictures, to television, to computers and so on. On the basis of these technological changes we are moving from a literate society to an electronic one. While this new society is based on writing, print and technology, it represents a radical departure from a literate culture formation. More than that, a basic change in the "nature" of human beings is taking place. Ong maintains that the senses are socio-historically and culturally organized. He calls this organization of the senses the sensorium, and is convinced that a new formation is in the making. Subsequent events suggest that he is correct.

In three books Ong provides a number of characteristics of electronic orality: shared experience, simultaneity, spontaneity, dialogical in approach, open-ended, participative, short term, a preference for variety of choice, team work, ecological sensitivity, and a growing cosmic/global interest. As I look back on some 500 workshops in church settings in the last ten years. I can remember hundreds of complaints about the way boomers are different: their departure from the church to participate in gatherings like Woodstock, Farm Aid, Live Aid, etc., their interest early on in rap groups, and later seminars, their open-ended approach to truth as "true for me at this point of my life," their penchant for short-term events and sound byte focus, their insistence on a range of options the church did not usually provide, and a deepening commitment to the earth, nature, and environmental concerns. (Ong 1977:298-302;1967.) Over the years one of the exercises I have enjoyed most in workshops with church groups is to watch them rethink the format of worship using these characteristics as criteria.

This may be one of the biggest challenges that indigenization faces. What are the implications for preaching for example?

What does it do to Christian Education? Does such a form violate worship as such? Does electronic orality represent a form, so powerful in itself that issues of commitment are lost? Can such a form of life carry a tradition or is it, underneath, the deception of consumer culture preying on the created needs of the vulnerable young? Or, is it threatening because it is new? Because it requires change in the church? Because it misfits those of us who have built our own faith around literate practices and cannot or will not change? The next twenty-five years will tell us much. I am struck by the fact that the church is growing fastest in those parts of the world where electronic orality has not taken hold. In fact, the church is growing where traditional orality is strongest. The young people of these countries are deeply interested in the youth culture of the United States. Is this a harbinger of things to come?

Whatever the case may be, the situation the church faces today in the United States is one of large populations characterized by three cultural formations: a traditional orality among those in the lower half of the class structure, a literate establishment, and an emergent electronic orality powerfully present among the people least attracted to organized religion. We turn now to the ways in which these large groups address issues of faith.

Faith Language of the Heart, Explanatory Theology, and the Mystical-Therapeutic Journey.

It will no be surprise by now that these three large cultural formations will approach faith in radically different ways. Having discussed these in another context I will not simply replicate that here, but rather report on more recent work I have done in this regard. (Sample,1990.)

Faith Language of the Heart. Following Robert Schreiter(1985) I call the cultural right orientation to belief, folk theology, meaning by this that it is very biblical, oral, narrative, proverbial, testimonial, and usually characterized by an active believing and feeling. This folk theology is characteristic of both the respectables and the hard living. Their differences occur around practices of church attendance more than around issues like orality.

Recent work has led me to focus on what I call a faith language of the heart. My interest is to demonstrate that such faith language is oral not literate, relational not conceptual, proverbial not propositional, narrative not theoretical, and stated in vernacular not discourse. More than that, its concern is not primarily cognitive, except as a world view serves other interests. That is, it deals first of all with questions of need, survival, and coping. As a result, the concerns of cultural right people will be around trust rather than explanation, assurance rather than comprehension, survival rather than coherence and coping rather than consistency. (Mitchell and Cooper-Lewter,1986.) Second, a faith language of the heart has belonging and identity at its core. These, too, will take precedence over cognitive claims as such. Some may contend that this is not true of fundamentalism with strong propositional and dispensational theory. Such departure from a faith language of the heart as I describe it, however, is more characteristic of elites among fundamentalists and is not true of the great majority. (Ammerman,1987.)

With respect to indigenization important work can be done by the church in translating biblical faith, the tradition of the church, and contemporary theology into a language of the heart which addresses the life issues of the cultural right. The heavy cognitive emphasis of mainstream theology is simply not contextual in terms of this large population in the United States.

Important work needs to be done with the cultural right on the social issues of the day. Faithful mission with traditional people no more means mere accommodation to their lifestyles than to those of any other group. What is required, however, are more contextual approaches to social ethics, for example, which the church has hardly considered. Ethics is far too preoccupied with academic questions and virtually excludes the central issues of the moralities of flesh and blood people. The focus on highly abstract discourse of most ethicists has little or no influence upon or simply misses the lived reality of about half the membership of the churches.

Explanatory Theology. On the cultural middle the expression of faith becomes more explanatory in expression. Previous studies have shown that middle class people tend to think and know their faith more than to believe and feel it as people in the lower classes do. Such expression grows, at least in part, from the fact that cultural middle business and professional people find themselves in positions where a great deal of explaining goes on in promoting products, explicating a diagnosis, prescribing a solution and so on. Moreover, higher levels of education train them to think in discursive ways. It is hardly surprising, then that they should bring these practices to the expression of their faith. (Sample,1990:123-138.)

Indigenous ministry will pitch tent with such practices. Approaches to mission and ministry will respond to the questions that cultural middle members inevitably bring to the faith. As I suggested above, I see two tensions in this relation of the Word to the world of the cultural middle. The first is a framing of Christian faith in popular world views derived from the Enlightenment. The second is an emptying that occurs in the rationalized practices of the Enlightenment that tend toward a mind-body split, dualistic and reductionistic forms of thinking, and a linear rationality that misses a profounder ecological reason with deep ties to emotion and to explicit valuing. An indigenous ministry will come in the form of explanatory theology, but it will be one which challenges the Enlightenment assumptions and the self- and community-depleting forms of popular intellectual life. Basic to this work is a politics of gender and a critique of masculine cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative structuring presently dominant in business and professional life.

The Mystical-Therapeutic Journey. Cultural left faith claims widely employ the metaphor of journey, which I have characterized as journey theology. This approach is process and developmentally oriented, tends to privilege and have great confidence in the "natural," views the world--indeed, the cosmos--as profoundly inter- and inner-connected, and finds voice in a mystical, therapeutic and experimental spirituality, which usually avoids the institutional church. (Sample 1990; Roof 1993,61-148.) Doubtlessly, this journey theology is, in part, a reaction to the rationalization of life in the dominant culture. Like the dominant culture, it is highly individualistic, but it is expressive rather than utilitarian. It tends to be naive about the collapsibility of world religions, Native American spirituality, and, in some cases, magical practices into some common core of truth (an Enlightenment legacy except for a "syncretistic," unscientific, humanistic sorcery). It relies on a popular "true for me" logical "escape," the nihilism of which is hardly every fully addressed. And, in a profound accommodation to a consumer ethic, it adopts a 'pick and choose' attitude toward religious commitments and practices. (Johnson 1993:31,13-18.)

At the same time, the cultural left displays a pervasive spiritual hunger, an appetition the churches have hardly touched. Moreover, this spirituality finds a varied reception among a great mass of people under fifty years of age in the United States. An indigenous ministry will take such popular expressions seriously. The question is what kind of tent the proclamation of the Word will pitch. My own conviction is that a renewed engagement of the mystical and spiritual disciplines of the church which seek embodiment in an electronic orality offers a direction that needs to be explored. Such direction will certainly not be without critique, especially of the failure of the cultural left to see the role of tradition in any form of life and the consumer captivity of 'pick and choose' faith which turns believers into Romeos of religion.

At the same time, among the cultural left can be found a smoldering social compassion. A church committed to social justice and peace--one that takes material stands against the inequalities, the racism, the sexism, and the heterosexism of our culture and combines these with an informed spirituality--has the best chance of manifesting a faithful indigeneity on the cultural left.

Obviously, none of these efforts to contextualize the faith in the United States can occur in one's head alone. The embodiment of faithfulness in practices is essential to a church based in the Incarnation. The last section of the paper will address this concern.

Indigenous Practices

Much of what I have already done is focused on practices. The ways people think, believe, function, and just live are forms of practice. In this section I will add to what has gone before in order to fill out something more of the indigenous practices of the people of the United States.

Tradition and Practices. As we have seen cultural practices in thinking are oral, narrative, and relational, and their religious expression takes form in a faith language of the heart. In addition, cultural right practices are much in evidence in resistance--especially to experts and other outside-agenda bearing agents, including clergy--in story telling, in apprenticeship learning, factional conflict, in fussing and griping in contrast to the literate practices of critique, in being more gather-oriented than goal-oriented, in their commitment to folklore, and so on. (de Certeau 1984:29-42.)

In the space I have remaining I want to focus on one practice specifically as an illustration of indigenous ministry on the cultural right not only because it suggests the kind of indigeneity needed, but also because it represents an important corrective to an external practice typically imposed on them. I think specifically of the Marxist view of praxis which has been proffered to the cultural right, especially the poor. The problem with praxis is that it has a strong theoretical moment which is external to traditional people. It is worth remembering here that Marx was an Enlightenment thinker and had very little use for traditional people. My point is that more traditional people do not do theory and praxis but rather do tradition and practices instead. This means that an indigenous approach to social change will be one that pitches tent in the day to day tradition and practices of the cultural right rather than trying to bring in strategies and tactics from the university or corporate America, or a Marxist tradition.

The typical prejudice of modernity is that traditional people cannot change, an incredible misjudgment considering the thousands of years in which tribal groups inhabited the world, and the massive shifts that occurred in that period of time. Moreover, traditional people in the last century have perhaps endured more uprootedness and fundamental change than those with the security of the corporation, the university, and the affluence of Marxist revolutionaries who write books instead of shoot guns. Further still, Richard Flacks has established that the major social movements tend to be those of people who believe that traditional values are under attack and then engage in actions to defend those values and, in turn, bring about large scale change. (Flacks 1974:60.) Finally, it helps to remember that in such lifestyles the traditions of the past serve the integrity of the communal present, a fundamental source of indigenous change when creative selectivity from the rich resources of the past and a contextualized social ethic provide legitimate rationale for the faithful engagement of new challenges. the practices of a people.

Practices in the Territories of Unused Life. The practices of the cultural middle are quite different. Lacking a keen sense of a tradition, as modernity is wont to do, their actions are more situationally relevant and utilitarian. Practices are more goal oriented, and rationalized efficiency comes to dominate life. Sacrifices of the present serve long term gain. Meanwhile, a kind of management "cool" captures feeling in a restrained cathexis in the service of the advantage of the corporation, one's position, and the career.

No doubt such practices have served the institutional church well, and the key leadership among the laity and the clergy tend to manifest these procedures. One cannot help but wonder also how much these habituated methods strangle life in the Spirit, reduce faith to rationalized ideas and mere belief, rein in the emotional range of religious experience to the instrumental service of distant linear gain, and feed misogyny, racism, and hatred of the "disreputable" poor by the projection into them of the unclaimed and unanswered repressed dimensions of middle class life.(Ehrenreich 1989; Rubin 1976.)

Indigenous ministry dare not deepen these captivities. The point of contact for ministry here is precisely that of the territories of unused life, of a church that opens the doors to an unknown world. The point is not to trivialize the future but to sacramentalize the present, to claim a multidimensional, environmental framing of life that belies the reductionistic linearity of gain seeking. The direction for practice is in

intrinsic acts of ministry and discipleship fed by an expressive worship that forms emotions and that reconstitutes the self in community. The church itself will need to repent of its incessant round of instrumental meetings designed to achieve goals of efficient rationality, and to seek instead a life in the Spirit that deepens the interiority of middle class people while redefining the world as a new creation in Christ, a setting for mission.

Cultural left Practices. At one time one could presume that people had a basic commitment to the church. From this commitment a deeper relationship could be formed. Today the problem is just the opposite with the cultural left. A relationship must first be built, and then a commitment can be developed. An indigenous ministry thus begins with practices already at work in order to make contact. The practices of boomers and especially the cultural left tend to focus on experiences that are intrinsically valuable, emotionally expressive, relationship building, and societally conscious. They typically are drawn to programs that offer options for participation and that are short-term in duration. Church programs that reach them are those that provide opportunity for hands-on mission, that utilize their capacities, that help them find their own ministry. and that deal with the faith in a way that demonstrates its relevance to down-on-the-ground issues of every day life. These along with the mystical-therapeutic spirituality and the characteristics of electronic orality discussed above constitute an array of practices that characterize the cultural left presently. Indigenous ministry will begin with these, at least initially, as a point of contact to build a relationship from which a deeper commitment can be formed.

Conclusion

The indigenization of ministry in the context of the United States is long overdue. Major differences exist between three large cultural groups with each of these representing significant ethnic differences. The mission and ministry of the church requires sensitivity to very different ways of thinking, of expressing the faith, and of lifestyle practices. These differences have major implications for theological education. for the witness of the church, and for the teaching of missiology.

Notes

1. See Tex Sample, U.S. Lifestyles and Mainline Churches ( Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990). On social class the best integration of research and theory I know is Beth E. Vanfossen, The Structure of Social Inequality(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1979).

2. For a fuller breakdown of U.S. lifestyles that specifies more fully the range of diversity, especially that of ethnic groups, see Michael J. Weiss, The Clustering of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). For a regional view of North America see Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (New York: Avon Books, 1981). On 'respectables' or 'belongers' in his language see Arnold Mitchell, The Nine American Lifestyles (New York: Warner Books, 1993),9-11.

3. Tex Sample, Hard Living People and Mainstream Christians

(Nashville,Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1993). See also Mitchell, 6-8, on 'sustainers.' For the language of 'hard living' I am indebted to Joseph T. Howell, Hard Living on Clay Street(Garden City, N.J. Doubleday and Co., Anchor Books, 1973).

4. On the cultural middle see Sample, Lifestyles, 99-138, and Mitchell, 11-14, on 'emulators' and 'achievers.'

5. See David A. Roozen, William McKinney, and Jackson W. Carroll, Varieties of Religious Presence (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984).

6. See: Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981); and Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 40-71.

7. See Roof et al., A Generation of Seekers (San Francisco: Harpers, 1993). For a recent study on the baby bust generation see Neil Howe and William Strauss, "The New Generation Gap," The Atlantic Monthly (December, 1992), 67-87.

8. I am indebted here to Walter J. Ong. See his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), 31-77.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 78-138.

11. Very helpful critiques of modernity can be found in Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1984); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991); William C. Placher, Unapologetic Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1989); and Sheila Greeve Devaney, Theology at the End of Modernity (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International,1991).

12. See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy; Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 298-302; and The Presence of the Word (Minneapolis" University of Minnesota Press, 1967).

13. See my Lifestyles, 45-56, 83-98, and 123-138. I am indebted here to Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985), 85-87, and 87-91.

14. My interest in a faith language of the heart was first initiated by Henry Mitchell and Nicholas Cooper-Lewter, Soul Theology: The Heart of American Black Culture (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986). On fundamentalists see Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World

(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), esp.47-51.

15. See Lifestyles,123-138.

16. Ibid. For a more recent update of the spirituality of boomers see Roof, A Generation of Seekers, 61-148.

17.Benton Johnson, et al., "Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for Decline," First Things (March, 1993),31, 13-18.

18. See especially Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29-42; Guida West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg(eds.), Women and Social Protest( New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Katie C. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988).

19. Richard Flacks, "Making History vs. Making Life--Dilemma of an American Left," Working Papers for a New Society (Summer. 1974), p.60. Quoted on Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 180.

20. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1989); Lillian Rubin, Worlds of Pain (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

Justification by Faith: The Lutheran-Catholic Convergence

At the heart of the 16th-century Reformation movement was the experience of "justification by faith" in the life of an Augustinian monk. Martin Luther's quest for a God who was gracious, not simply a stern judge, led to the answer, "By grace alone, by faith alone." Out of pastoral concern for the terrified consciences of people who were buying church indulgences to cover their sins, Luther articulated a corollary conviction about the source of salvation: "Not by such 'good works."'

For Luther, the experience of being justified by faith was "as though I had been born again." His entry into Paradise, no less, was a discovery about "the righteousness of God" -- a discovery that "the just person" of whom the Bible speaks (as in Romans 1:17) lives by faith. Justification has to do with saving righteousness on God's part. Such justification is received in and by faith.

The emphasis on justification by faith became common coin among the Reformers and their confessions. Thus in 1561 the Belgic Confession declared, "We rightly say with Paul 'that we are justified by faith alone' or 'by faith without works"' (Rom. 3:27; Gal. 2:6). The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England say, "We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings."

Luther's challenge to the Roman Catholic Church brought forth bitter condemnations by each side against the other, condemnations that to this day inform the perspectives of Lutherans and Roman Catholics. Yet this year Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians issued an official proposal for a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. This declaration, which was approved in August by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and endorsed in July by delegates to the Lutheran World Federation (it will be studied by other member churches of the LWF as well as by the Vatican), calls for seeing the old condemnations and anathemas "in a new light." Indeed, it declares that the old condemnations no longer apply. The Reformation breach on these points has, apparently, been healed. What has brought such a change about?

First, a little history: In the 16th century Protestant and Catholic positions on justification became polarized and soon escalated to include other doctrines, including the authority of the church; scripture and tradition; good works; merit and indulgences; the mass; and sin and its effects in human life. The papal bull excommunicating Luther in 1520, titled Exsurge Domine, reflected the language of the Psalms: "Rise, 0 Lord," let your enemies be scattered, for a wild boar is ravaging the vineyard of the Lord. The decree called on Luther to recant some 41 errors -- including the assertion that to burn heretics is contrary to the Holy Spirit -- or face punishment. Memory of this bull, which Luther burned, persists powerfully in Protestant consciousness. Catholics are far less aware of it.

A colloquy between three Protestant and three Catholic theologians at Regensburg in 1541 attempted to bridge the disagreements by speaking of "double justification." The proposal was, of necessity, quite technical. First, it was said, there is "inherent righteousness" in a person, the infusion of charity, by which a person's will is healed. But one should not rely on this. Assurance of salvation comes only in "imputed righteousness," that given to a person because of Christ's merits. Good works merit rewards, now and in the life to come, but not as "human works." Rather, they are "done in faith" and come "from the Holy Spirit" -- though our own free will is "a partial agent." This combination of assertions seemed to give something to each side, but neither Luther nor the authorities in Rome found it satisfactory.

A few years later the Council of Trent met to counter the Protestant Reformation and to reform the church of Rome. Between June 1546 and January 1547 it addressed the topic of justification. Church discussion on grace and faith had gone on for centuries, and the council did not aim to settle all the old debates. But in view of the Protestant challenge it had to speak as never before on justification. The council's decree made faith "the beginning" and "foundation and root of all justification "-- but to faith was added hope and charity (as in 1 Corinthians 13).

One sentence near the end of the Tridentine decree (chapter 16) suggests both Trent's convergence with and its distance from the Reformation position: "Far be it from Christians to trust or glory in themselves and not in the Lord [cf. 1 Cor. 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17; Jer. 9:23-24], whose bounty toward all is so great that he wishes his own gifts to be their merits." Protestants could rejoice at the main clause ("not self but the Lord"). But the clause beginning "whose bounty" allows for merits on the part of saintly believers -- something which, Lutherans felt, undermines trust in God alone for salvation.

It was the regular practice of the Council of Trent to attach "anathemas" to every decree. This usage went back to biblical examples of condemning false teaching with use of the term "anathematize," which means "cut off' or "separate." In Galatians 1:8-9 Paul says, regarding anyone who preaches a "gospel" differing from what the Galatians had received from Paul: let that person be anathema, "accursed" or "cast out." The fathers at Trent set forth 33 statements of erroneous teaching, each statement ending, "let him be anathema" who speaks thus. For example, if anyone teaches that faith "is that trust alone by which we are justified," then "let him be anathema." However, no individual, not even Luther, is ever mentioned by name in any of Trent's anathemas.

Luther spoke in 1537 of justification as the "first and chief article," which cannot be "given up or compromised," for on it "rests all that we teach and practice against the pope, the devil, and the world." Lutheran writings refer to "the scholastics" or "our opponents" (so Melanchthon in the Apology of 1531); later, it is "the papists." By the time of the Formula of Concord (1580) the controversies included "theologians of the Augsburg Confession," some of whose views were rejected.

There are numerous instances of coarse language by Luther, his Catholic opponents and the pamphleteers of the day, not to mention the inflammatory woodcuts (the cartoons of the period) which, for example, showed a seven-headed Luther. Luther described his critics as asses and saw the devil at work in them. Catholic polemicists implied that there was excessive womanizing in Protestant Wittenberg and that Luther was drinking and jesting to the moment of his death. At Trent it was reported that Luther had been poisoned to prevent him from recanting his teachings on his deathbed.

But anathemas and condemnations are more than personal insults; they are assertions of a doctrinal identity that marks one group off from another in a division between right belief and heresy. They are more serious than invective, stinging as that may be, for they set up official barriers between churches.

How has it become possible in 1997 to achieve a Joint Declaration on the controverted doctrine of justification? What allows old anathemas to be transcended?

It is not, for Catholics or Lutherans, a matter of amnesia about the past or of writing off long-held beliefs. In fact, memories embedded in anathemas may take on a life of their own and make differences stated in the past even sharper and more divisive as the years go by. Nor is it simply "modern times" or tolerance or a farewell to theology that has made the Joint Declaration possible.

The ecumenical movement has been, of course, a major impetus. For a century or more Protestants initially, and then other Christians too, have taken up classically divisive issues. Lutherans involved in such discussions, in the Faith and Order movement and elsewhere, have constantly set forth justification by faith, though sometimes without even using the terminology.

Biblical studies have also made an important contribution toward ecumenical agreement by offering a fresh examination of old impasses. Treatments of "righteousness" in the Hebrew scriptures and new proposals about expressions like "the righteousness of God" have provided insights that go beyond past sticking points. God's justifying righteousness has come to be seen not only as a divine gift (Rom. 3:24-26) but also as an attribute or quality of God (Rom. 3:5), a power exercised by God to justify and save (Rom. 1:16-17). Paul's letters have been studied from many angles, including apocalyptic eschatology (see Rom. 1:17: God's righteousness "revealed"--the verb is apokalyptein) as have been Old Testament verses such as Genesis 15:6 (on how Abraham "believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness"; cf. Gal. 3:6; Rom. 4:3, 9) and Habakkuk 2:4.

Attention has also been paid to the changes wrung on "the just by faith(fulness) shall live" (Gal. 3:11; Rom. 1:17). Scholars now widely agree that the statements in the Epistle of James about faith and works are not made in opposition to Paul but represent an attempt to defend Paul's teaching against a misunderstanding of faith as simply intellectual belief.

Biblical studies among Catholics were one factor among many leading to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and the statements from these sessions were the most important impetus for Roman Catholic dialogues with other Christians. The council itself said little about justification, but it set a mood that made discussion of this old point of division inevitable. To be mentioned also are the work of theologians such as Karl Rahuer in his Theological Investigations, and specialized historical studies, often by Catholics like Hubert Jedin, Otto Herman Pesch and Vinzeng Pfnür, on the Reformation period and the Council of Trent. Pesch, for example, compared Luther and Aquinas on justification in an effort toward dialogue in systematic theology. Rahner's essays, Christocentric and stressing grace, allowed one to speak in Catholic theology of those justified as yet "sinners," in that humans are never fully delivered from the deleterious effects of the fall.

The first international Lutheran-Catholic dialogue (1967-71) touched on justification. The most detailed work on justification by faith was carried out in the United States in bilateral talks between 1978 and 1983. The seventh volume of "Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue" (published in 1985) is remarkable for its common statement, without separate Catholic or Lutheran comments. It provides a one-sentence affirmation about the gospel and speaks of our entire hope of justification and salvation" resting on "God's promise and the saving work in Christ," as "our ultimate trust."

The common statement includes a list of convergences. On "works" it says, "Justifying faith cannot exist without hope and love; it necessarily issues in good works. Yet the justified cannot rely on their own good works or boast of their own merits as though they were not still in need of mercy." A concluding declaration invited all Christians to consider what Lutherans and Catholics can say together.

Work on the anathemas and condemnations continued in Germany. The Protestant-Catholic study commission arose out of Pope John Paul II's visit to Germany at the 450th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession. It has produced four volumes of essays on whether the statements of the past need still divide the churches. The project, chaired by systematic theologians Wolfhart Pannenberg and (later Bishop) Karl Lehmann, included scholars from Reformed and United churches, as well as Lutherans and Catholics.

The 1997 Joint Declaration reaps the harvest of all these cooperative ventures. The aim is not to break new ground but to summarize what was agreed upon in previous dialogues. The declaration summarizes, therefore, a common understanding by Lutheran churches and the Roman Catholic Church. Seven topics, the focus of anathemas and condemnations, are then explicated. In each case, what "we confess together" is first stated, and then aspects of Catholic and of Lutheran teaching are noted; but differences -- for example, in language and "theological elaboration and emphasis" -- are said not to "destroy the consensus regarding basic truths" of salvation.

For example, the declaration confesses "that good works -- a Christian life lived in faith, hope, and love -- follow justification and are its fruits." Catholics go on to speak of such works as are "made possible by grace and. . . the Holy Spirit"; people are responsible for their actions, reward in heaven is promised biblically, but "justification always remains the unmerited gift of grace." Lutherans speak of "growth in grace and faith," with effects in Christian living; eternal life is, biblically speaking, "unmerited 'reward,"' a fulfillment of God's promise to the believer.

The seven controverted areas taken up by the declaration are 1) sin and human passivity in receiving justification; 2) interior renewal, that is, the way God not only declares persons justified but also makes them righteous, independent of human cooperation; 3) justification by faith alone; 4) the justified person as sinner; 5) law and gospel; 6) the assurance of salvation; and 7) the good works of the justified person.

The simul justus et peccator theme of topic number four -- the notion that the Christian is simultaneously saint and sinner -- was probably the most difficult area of discussion. While there is one set of theological issues regarding sin prior to justification (the sin that prevents humans from "attaining salvation by their own abilities"), Christians have also hotly debated the degree to which sin still exercises power in the lives of the justified. Lutherans have spoken of the saint "in Christ" as still a sinner, while Catholics have spoken of the "concupiscence" that remains after baptism, but which is "not 'sin' in the proper sense," since it no longer separates the justified believer from God.

Concupiscence is a somewhat old-fashioned term for what might be termed "lust." Paul admonished believers not to let sin reign, which happens when we obey the "passions" or "desires" (Rom 6:12, 13:14). Important here is the difference between life when sin dominates and when sin is dominated by Christ, with whom the believer is united. The Joint Declaration puts a strong emphasis on baptism, in which "the Holy Spirit unites one with Christ, justifies and truly renews the person." But because the justified are "constantly exposed to the power of sin," they must "constantly look to God's unconditional justifying grace."

The Lutheran understanding of the Christian as "at the same time righteous and sinner" is set forth, as is the Catholic view that "all that is sin 'in the proper sense"' is taken away in baptism, though "an inclination (concupiscence)" toward sin remains. Such complex topics will be the subject of specialists' scrutiny.

Those less curious or informed about theological intricacies might want to approach the declaration through the biblical material treated in the opening sections. English Bibles do a disservice by translating the Hebrew root sdq and the Greek dikaioun and related terms using vocabulary from the Anglo-Saxon ("right" and "righteousness") or from the Latin ("just," "justice," "justification"). The entire field of righteousness/justification must be taken up to get a sense of the biblical meaning. The term connects with "justice," as is realized in liberation theology, as well as with themes of judgment in both testaments.

The Joint Declaration concentrates on the theme of righteousness/justification as "chief' among the various ways in which the gift of salvation is described by Paul. God's power for salvation involves righteousness revealed and justification granted, in Christ, through faith. It means forgiveness, liberation, acceptance into communion with God, union with Christ and receiving the Spirit.

Protestants and Catholics will have to judge for themselves how well the declaration succeeds in stating "a consensus in basic truths," and whether it makes the case that the 16th-century condemnations do not apply -- even though they remain on the books as "salutary warnings," to which teaching and preaching must attend. Memories of division written into authoritative statements of faith are so powerful that centuries later they can continue to shape a community's perceptions. Hence the lifting of statements of condemnation when they no longer apply is a necessary part of reform and progress.

The Cost of Reconciliation

Book Reviews:

Reconciliation: Restoring Justice. By John W. de Gruchy. Fortress, 255 pp.

A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness. By Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Houghton Mifflin, 208 pp.

How was it possible for 40 million South Africans to avoid a disastrous civil war and create a new society that raised the hope for peace among long-alienated peoples? Those familiar with the country believe that the answer is twofold: a rigorously negotiated constitution shaped around human rights and citizen participation in political decisions; and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that walked the narrow boundary between exacting vengeance on the agents of the regime and granting them immunity.

It has become almost fashionable in South Africa to dismiss the TRC for failing to produce the "reconciliation" side of its announced mission. Can the word "reconciliation" be used with theological, ethical and political-empirical integrity? John de Gruchy and Puma Gobodo-Madikizela’s books give strong answers to that question.

De Gruchy, a University of Cape Town theologian, looks at the roots of "reconciliation" in biblical and historical theology and measures its meaning against South African history. Nobody else has written so precisely and profoundly on this topic. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, an astute, sensitive young clinical psychologist, records and reflects on her 46 hours of prison interviews with Eugene de Kock, who headed the Vlakplaas prison as a secret police officer, and who more than earned the nickname "Prime Evil."

Gobodo-Madikezela was open to the possibility that underneath de Kock the murderer she might discover de Kock the human being. To read her book is to understand the cost in time and spiritual-moral struggle exacted of anyone who walks down the long road to reconciliation between the agents and the victims of gross, politically legitimated cruelty.

Gobodo-Madikezela served on the Human Rights Violations Committee of the TRC. To those who accuse the TRC of "healing the wound of my people lightly" (Jer.6:14) one has to say, with her, that remembering the awful wounds of genocide is a better beginning to reconciliation than is forgetting them. Members of the TRC know that reconciliation is a long-term, multigenerational project for South Africans. They know, too, that only growing economic justice will allow the ordinary South African to experience some tangible rectification of the economic exploitation that marked the colonial and apartheid eras.

De Gruchy takes a long look at the original uses of the Greek term for reconciliation, katallage. by Paul and subsequent theologians. His definition of the word is straightforward "a process in which there is a mutual attempt to heal and overcome enmities, build trust and relationships, and develop a shared commitment to the common good." De Gruchy believes, with Bonhoeffer and liberation theologians, that reconciliation is first "an action, praxis and movement before it becomes a theory or dogma, something celebrated before it is explained." It is first a gift of God and then a social task. God’s gift of reconciliation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus gives us the courage to struggle for human forgiveness and repentance in our relations with our neighbors.

Among modern neighbors the lack of reconciliation especially threatens Christians and Muslims. De Gruchy’s chapter on "Reconciliation and the House of Abraham" alone is worth the price of the book. Though the three great Abrahamic religions have much in common, they also have non-negotiable differences. Christians believe that Jesus is the Word of God; Muslims say that only the Koran is. Notes De Gruchy, "For Muslims it is inconceivable that God, in any sense, could suffer on behalf of sinful humanity."

The test of social Justice is whether, despite profound differences, life-together triumphs over death-together. A Muslim in one of de Gruchy’s UCT classes expressed surprise that Christians no longer celebrate the Crusades. It is time for all three of the Abrahamic religions to reject the idea of killing in the name of God.

De Gruchy’s eloquent book is deeply grounded in both theology and South Africa’s recent history. The power of the book lies in its sustained, intimate linking of concept and context just as Bonhoeffer once remarked that no one had the right to sing Gregorian chants without praying for Justice for the Jews. In Nazi Germany, de Gruchy insists that fellow Christians reflect on the connection between Pauline theology and the work of the TRC, whereby victims, perpetrators and bystanders in the apartheid era learned to listen to each other in many painful public hearings. Real empathetic hearing of a neighbor’s story of officially imposed suffering is an indispensable step towards reconciliation.

A touching incident in de Gruchy’s academic work underscores the role of empathy in healing. A doctoral student, Ginn Fourie, discussed with her committee her proposal for writing a dissertation on the 1993 Heidelberg Tavern Massacre. In that event, four young members of a militant wing of the Pan African Congress sprayed bullets around the tavern, killing and wounding many. In a TRC hearing the four applied for amnesty on the grounds that their deed was politically motivated. Fourie wanted to research the motivations of the four. Why had she chosen this subject? She answered, "My daughter Lyndi was killed in the massacre, and I want to find out whether or not we can become reconciled to each other."

"There was a deathly silence in the seminar room by the time Ginn Fourie had completed her story." De Gruchy writes. "When at last the silence was broken a conversation began that took our hitherto academic inquiry to a deeper level than we had ever previously been. Our discussion about reconciliation was no longer theoretical, but neither was it purely emotional or ‘romantic theologizing.’" Professors and student were forced to think about reconciliation "as a costly process and a painful journey"

A Human Being Died That Night is a moving documentation of that journey. Like Robert Lifton, who interviewed the Auschwitz medical doctors, Gobodo-Madlikizela approached de Kook with fear and trembling. She wondered whether it really was possible to empathize with someone who had killed and tortured hundreds of apartheid enemies. If she was able to touch the human being slumbering under the surface of "Prime Evil," could she resist being drawn into sympathy with him and then into excusing his behavior?

Gobodo-Madikizela says that some of her friends and colleagues did not think that she should spend any time at all with de Kook. But the TRC had taught her that South Africa is a community "still learning to talk to itself, a community in which mistrust has become second nature." How could such a country approach genuine reconciliation if the alienated refused to talk to each other?

As her conversations with de Kock I proceeded she could see that he "was a desperate soul seeking to affirm to himself that he was still part of the human universe." On one occasion she Instinctively touched his hand. "you know, Pumla," De Kock remarked, "that was my trigger hand you touched." When she awoke the next morning, Gobodo-Madikizela found that her hand was paralyzed. "In touching de Kock’s hand I had touched his leprosy and he seemed to be telling me that, even though I did not realize it at the time, I was from now on infected with the memory of having embraced in my heart the hand that had killed, maimed, and blown up lives." The experience taught her something about vulnerability and resistance to evil. Through repetition the psyche can get used to the doing of evil, but at the beginning, one’s very body does not want to cooperate.

I am struck by two particular contributions Gobodo-Madikizela makes to the ethics of political reconciliation: One is her conclusion from the TRC hearings that forgiveness and repentance must not be separated In theory or in practice. "Forgiveness usually begins with the person who needs to be forgiven. This means that there must be something In the perpetrator’s behavior, some ‘sign,’ that invites the victim’s forgiveness. The most crucial sign is an expression of remorse," she writes.

De Kock’s life sentence (220 years) gives him plenty of time to express remorse. But his sorrow for his life as an agent of his apartheid masters is laced with resentment at officials who denied that they authorized his atrocities. Their instructions to him often came in the smooth wrapping of words like "neutralize," "remove" and "eliminate." "How we did it was not important. The results were. They [officials] wanted to see results. They wanted to know that we were rooting out what at the time we called terrorism." He sees himself as the scapegoat of high-level politicians who never asked for amnesty from the TRC. Like a certain American Vietnam veteran, he was bitter that "my country sent me to do evil and then blamed me for it."

Like de Gruchy, Gobodo-Madikizela knows that reconciliation, in both its theological and its messy political form, is a hard, complex, long-range process. De Gruchy would surely admire her conclusion:

The real subject of my visits to the C section of Pretoria Central Prison [was] to understand the inner mind of evil, to follow its thought processes, and to expose myself to its human face, stripped of media stereotypes and the easy distance of hatred. Connecting on a human level with a monster therefore comes to be a profoundly frightening prospect, for ultimately, it forces us to confront the potential for evil within ourselves.

The Uses of an Ecumenical Seminary

I remember the day in 1955 when, as a newly arrived graduate student, I talked with Professor H. Richard Niebuhr about my academic trek leading to Yale Divinity School. When I told him that I had graduated from North Carolina’s Davidson College and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, he exclaimed, “Ah, the royal road for Southern Presbyterians!”

The denominational educational road was well traveled in those days. For many theological students of the 1980s, it is still a good route. But some could serve their denominations better if they chose a more ecumenical path -- or so I want to argue here.

My argument is directed to students from all the denominations, to those who send them to seminary, and to those who by word and deed influence their choices of seminaries. I address myself to national church leaders; to leaders of dioceses, synods, presbyteries and conferences; and to leaders of congregations -- all those who have a special stake in and special responsibility for strengthening a particular church and a particular denomination.

I speak as one who has a special interest in the strength of a particular ecumenical seminary, but also as one who knows that he, too, has both a stake in and responsibility for the life of particular churches. Theologically, I know that the Christian community encompasses far more than the Presbyterians. And institutionally, I know that the vitality of my school, New York’s Union Theological Seminary, has a deep connection with the vitality of the denominations themselves.

Conventional wisdom often suggests to ministerial candidates that three years in a denominational seminary are professionally and pragmatically essential for their future careers. The formula goes, “You need to know the church that will ordain you.

Yes, one does. But where will one come to know it? For some the answer is in the ecumenical seminary.

“I never felt more a United Methodist than I have here,” said one of our recent students at Union. I have heard similar remarks from students at Yale, Harvard and University of Chicago divinity schools.

At such a seminary, Lutherans, for example, see their church allegiance illuminated and enriched by their dialogue with Baptists and Roman Catholics. In a way often impossible in a denominational setting, they become critically conscious of what is unique to their heritages. In classroom and dormitory, they confront the varieties of Christian experience, and they must think through their reasons for believing in the truth of their own traditions.

To be sure, the trend in denominational seminaries these days is away from the huge predominance of students from the one tradition and toward a broader representation of students from other denominations. A Presbyterian seminary, for example, may have 30 to 50 per cent of its students coming from non-Presbyterian churches. There is a great difference, however, when (as at Union) the largest denominational student group (which happens to be Presbyterian) totals only 17 per cent of the student body. In such a school, no particular group comes close to being in the majority. This sense that “everyone is a minority” profoundly marks the culture of an ecumenical seminary. Everyone has reason to search for some justification of his or her own ecclesiastical particularity.

Contrary to what some church leaders have assumed about educational results in the ecumenical setting, our students do not emerge as adherents of some homogenized set of lowest-common-denominator beliefs. Nor is denomination-hopping common. Rather, our students graduate as thoughtful loyalists holding to the affiliations they arrived with. In this tendency they are often following the pattern of faculty members who have remained vigorous contributors, professionally and personally, to the lives of their respective denominations.

A variation on the conventional wisdom appeals to the anxieties of students about their career prospects: “You need to get to know the people who will be your colleagues in the ministry for the rest of your life.”

Yes, one does. But the question is who those colleagues will and ought to be. In ecumenical seminaries students naturally seek out peers and faculty members of their own denominations for shared worship, discussion, study and action. They take on fieldwork in congregations or other organizations of their own faith traditions. They take courses not only in general church history but also in their own denominational history, theology and polity. But with every step of their educational trek goes a company of diverse companions who alert them to the diversity of the Christian movement itself. Their colleagues of the future include these adherents of other traditions.

It is a pragmatic as well as a theological point. To identify one’s future colleagues as the members of one’s own denomination is not only narrow; it is unrealistic, especially for the life of a local parish minister. Unless they are totally sectarian, the ministers of any American town or city meet one another, learn from one another, recognize their need of one another, and develop collaborations accordingly. Only in this way can they have a perceptible impact on such pastoral-prophetic local issues as how sick people can get better care, how the homeless can find decent housing, and how the voice of the church can be heard in the din of competing voices at city hall.

For a minister to be a leader -- or even a valuable member -- of these local collaborations, he or she needs to respect, to understand, and to empathize with brother and sister clergy across the spectrum.

Such a minister needs also to perceive the problems of pluralism, as well as its values -- and all this is easier for one already educated in ecumenical encounter. To be effective, a modern minister needs to have moved beyond holding stereotypical views of the “mainline Protestant,” the “Catholic priest” and the “black preacher.” That movement has already taken place for the ecumenically educated, before the first day of the first job in a congregation.

There is a congregational version of this local ecclesial reality. Few thriving congregations today consist wholly of members born and bred in the same denominational tradition. A minister whose career is suffused with a perception of the “great church,” whose thinking bears the imprint of his or her acquaintance with living members of many church traditions, will be a minister who understands and knows how to welcome people searching for a new church home, those who have married into a new denomination, and those who feel that they must turn away from some aspect of their own history.

These ministerial qualities are also essential to regional, national and international denominational life. In view of the multiple challenges of secularism and social change in the modern world, no denomination can afford to fuel its mission with energies and perspectives drawn only from its own historical tradition. Now as seldom before in history, Christians need each other as they confront the issues of war, hunger, oppression and totalitarianism. Denominations need specialists with the talent, training and instinct for knowing how ecumenical collaborations develop, on the most local to the most global levels. It is one service of the ecumenical seminary to offer to the churches persons with just these qualities.

All of this argument comes down to three claims. The first is this: An ecumenical education can help cure us all of our natural ecclesiastical provincialism.

Provinces are places where all humans have to begin. Without some province to call home, none of us is whole in political, social or churchly terms. But our real growth -- our education -- as fully formed persons comes as we connect with people from other provinces, thereby ceasing to be merely provincial.

Only a narrow political persuasion convinces people of any national culture today that they are the representatives of the only true humanity. Only a very narrow sectarianism convinces any Christian that the “true church” is bottled under only one historic label. The great denominational schools of America are among the first to admit this; but few of them are in a position to press their perception of the diversity of the Christian community as systematically, as hourly, as are the great ecumenical seminaries. When 15 traditions crowd into a faculty of 30, when 40 traditions crowd into a student body of 400, there is a rapid critical heightening of the awareness that, among Christians, the parts make up an awesome whole. After three years of rubbing mind and spirit with people from all those other spiritual provinces, students can never again assume that every “real Christian” is just like them. And they will return to their own province not only with a certain sense of security, but with the understanding of education embodied in T. S. Eliot’s line:

the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

[“Little Gidding, “Four Quartets].

A second claim: All Christian denominations can be strengthened by the ecumenical education of some of their clergy. Should all students preparing for the ministry, then, be educated solely in ecumenical seminaries? No, indeed. Applicants for seminary study come from a great variety of church backgrounds these days, some from no background at all. We occasionally meet a student who is becoming acquainted with the faith, the church and the ministry more or less simultaneously. The ecumenical seminaries are probably ill equipped to educate such a person well. For a student who was brought up a Unitarian but has just decided to become an Episcopalian, the case for absorbing the Episcopal “ecclesial culture” in one of that denomination’s seminaries is strong. To understand and serve any particular group of church members, a minister must appreciate the shaping power of the polities, theologies, liturgies and customs that are normative for, that group.

Who are the “some” among denominational students who should most be encouraged to come to the ecumenical seminary? My answer, directed to denominational leaders, may surprise them: Don’t urge your candidates with marginal denominational loyalties to come to our place for three years of M.Div. study. Rather, send us those who are most solidly rooted in your heritage, those who best represent you, those who will bring their strengths, and yours, to us and our strengths back to you.

And my third claim is a corollary: While some students can profit greatly from a full three years at an ecumenical seminary, all ministers can gain much from having a segment of their preparation for ministry there. Even if the ecumenical schools had the capacity to absorb a majority of the 55,000 students in American and Canadian seminaries -- and they do not -- they should not want to do so. But leaders on both sides of this educational network should not foreclose the possibility that, sometime in their careers, all ministers of a church should have an educational experience outside that church.

My year in pursuit of a master’s degree in theology at Yale was for me not just a preparation for further academic study, but, rather, an essential rounding out of my education for the Presbyterian ministry. Nine years as president of an ecumenical seminary have not lessened my loyalty to that denomination.

In sum, my word to church leaders is that the strong students whom they send to ecumenical seminaries will come back to them even stronger. Such ministers will enrich and renew their denominations. And they will provide leadership in the struggle to bring the “great church” into the hearts and relationships of their constituents.

When I accepted the presidency of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Fred Stair, Jr., the president of the other Union Seminary, in Virginia, said to me: “You should remember that the whole church needs that school in Manhattan. You can do things educationally that we cannot do, just as we can do what you cannot do. The truth is that we need each other.”

Bridging The Abyss of Revenge

"For almost 50 years South Korean villagers have insisted that early in the Korean War, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of help less civilians under a railroad bridge near a ham-let 100 miles southeast of Seoul," read a front-page article in the New York Times. "When survivors and victims' relatives told their story, and sought redress, they met only rejection and denial, from the United States military and from their own government."

The story is now hard to deny. The memories of a dozen American soldiers, interviewed by the Associated Press and the persistence of two national councils of churches -- Korean and American -- have brought to light one of the few documented intentional killings of civilians by an American army unit.

Many embarrassing questions accompany the revelation. Why has the testimony of the Korean survivors been summarily dismissed by both their own government and ours? Do only Americans have credibility with other Americans? When AP reporters told the Pentagon about the forthcoming testimonies of elderly American veterans, why did the Pentagon so quickly respond that it "found no information to substantiate the claim"? Soon after the Times report, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced that the department would reinvestigate the matter. The State Department' s new office for war crimes is also looking into it.

Americans are not used to worrying about painful event of half a century ago and are no more eager to admit to wrongs committed in their name than are the peoples of any other country. Nations, even more than individuals, resist admitting guilt. Is there indeed such a thing as collective guilt -- and forgiveness -- in politics? During the past 50 years no people has struggled with these questions more publicly than the Germans. Americans can learn a few lessons from them.

World War I was nearing its agonizing end when Max Weber stood before a Munich University audience to de liver a lecture that would become famous: Politik als Beruf. As if anticipating and trying to prevent the "war guilt" clause of the Versailles treaty soon to be written by the Western allies, Weber raised the question of forgiveness in politics: "A nation forgives if its interests have been damaged, but no nation forgives if its honor has been of fended by a bigoted self-righteousness. Every new document that comes to light after decades revives the undignified lamentations, the hatred and scorn, instead of allowing the war at its end to be buried, at least morally. " Weber went on to accentuate the responsibility of political leaders to focus on the future. But none of the combatants allowed the war to be "buried, at least morally." And Adolf Hitler' s manipulation of German memory of World War I and its aftermath prepared the way for World War II.

Post-World War II Germany, however, has confronted the truth of the Nazi era, decade by decade, in an accumulation of public reminders of its evils -- evils that must be remembered before they can be forgotten. As Kierkegaard said: "Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme direction of memory...When we say we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered." In front of the Weimar train station stand signs nothing that this classic center of German culture is only a few kilometers from Buchenwald. I can think of no place in America where officials have juxtaposed such reminders of historic good and evil. Similarly, as I came to know Berlin during four months residence there in early 1999, I could think of no other national capital that has raised so many monuments not only to the heroes but to the victims. Many a young German is weary of hearing about the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazis. But I cannot forget a 17-year-old gymnasium student who told me, "We have had to study the Holocaust at three different stages in our curriculum. You will hear young people complain that they are fed ' up to here' with Holocaust studies. But my experience is that each new study has gone deeper than the one preceding it. Perhaps we should never stop trying to understand it."

Post-1945 German history convinces me that there is such a thing as repentance in a nation' s life and that political leaders play a major role in cultivating such repentance. But is there also forgiveness in politics? In general, political philosophers and theologians have answered no. They have confined forgiveness to personal relations and church ritual. Yet in recent years public talk about forgiveness has penetrated the worlds of journalism, international politics and theological ethics in unprecedented ways.

To understand this phenomenon one must reflect that "politics" is not only a contest for power but also a process by which diverse persons and interests learn to live together without killing each other. Sir Bernard Crick described politics as requiring "genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people," some of whom may be or have been "genuinely repulsive to us." Decisive for Crick is whether "we have to learn to live with them" as the alternative to learning to kill them. Once people are locked into a history that has included much killing, they have a choice between preparing to continue the killing and preparing to stop it.

Almost alone among political philosophers, Hannah Arendt proposed a reckoning with the past that is a secular equivalent of forgiveness. Politicians who tell their constituents to forget about the past are asking some to forget pain and others to forget guilt. Modern psychiatry has made us aware of the folly of this advice. Traumatic pain and guilt plant a time bomb in both the human psyche and political history. In the Balkans, the Ukraine, South Africa, Guatemala and Germany, dealing publicly has been a major political issue. Until leaders, citizens and institutions do something about this past, their present and future relations are likely to be corrupted by undercurrents of hostility. As William Faulkner put it, men have "learned how to forget quick what they ain' t brave enough to try to cure." "Remember and repent" and "remember and forgive" are better mottoes for the restoration of political health than "Forgive and forget."

At least four major dynamics mark the path to such health:

•Forgiveness begins when victims abandon revenge and perpetrators abandon professions of innocence. We resist doing so. What is more normal than for victims to want revenge and for perpetrators to fear it? Germans feared it in 1918, and the Versailles Treaty justified their fears. Exacting revenge is the perennial temptation of victors -- a temptation they must resist if they mean to build a new, positive relation to the defeated.

The most eloquent recent illustration of a nation refusing to equate justice with revenge is South Africa. As Nelson Mandela explained, "It was very repugnant [in 1993] to think that we could sit down and talk with those people [the Afrikaners], but we had to subject our plan to our brains and to say, ' without these enemies of ours, we can never bring about a peaceful transformation to this country.' And that is what we did. The reason why the world has opened its arms to South Africa is because we are able to sit down with our enemies and to say, let us stop slaughtering one another. Let' s talk peace." Here is a compelling example of the momentous shift from the politics of murder to the politics of life. Under Mandela' s leadership South Africa has granted murderers a right to live that they did not grant to their victims. South Africa has outlawed capital punishment for the strong reason that it repeats the crime it punishes. Breaking that vicious cycle is the true beginning of forgiveness in politics.

In a memorable 1985 speech German president Richard von Weizsäcker paid tribute to the relative generosity of the Western Allies to Germany after World War II. Though he did not say that Versailles had taught the Allies that vengeance doesn' t work in international affairs, that background was undoubtedly in his mind when he stated, "We cannot commemorate the 8th of May without making ourselves aware how much conquest of self the readiness for reconciliation demanded of our former enemies. . . . For this there had to be a gradual growth of certainty that Germans would not once again attempt to correct a defeat with force."

In effect, the bundespraesident was saying that a moderation of the victors' resistance to revenge had to be met by the resistance of the defeated to claims of innocence. The bulk of his remarkable address catalogued the sins of die Nazizeit. His words set a new standard for national politicians who want to serve the future by a realistic remembering of the past. What might have happened to postwar German-American relations had Germans and their leaders practiced their own form of "bigoted self-righteousness" in relation to that Nazi past? Accusations and counteraccusations could have gone on and on. Rotterdam and London suffered, but then so did Hamburg and Dresden. Yes, Nazi anti-Semitism was terrible, but what about American and British racism?

• The public truth about past evil so essential to repentance in politics can be recovered only in a context of public hope for reconciliation and a measure of forgiveness. Theologians sometimes debate whether one can forgive another if that other does not repent. But we should also ask if one can repent without the prospect of forgiveness. Avengers do not much care about relating again to their enemies, but those who forgive want to restore relationship.

In establishing its Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, the South African parliament adopted the formula, "Amnesty for Truth." As the weakest form of a political act akin to forgiveness, amnesty sets aside questions of guilt and legal prosecution. All that the TRC demanded of its perpetrator-witnesses was that they tell the truth about what they had done to their victims. It did not demand that they say "we are sorry," though some did so. Both victims and perpetrators will feel safe in telling their stories, the TRC legislation assumes, if victims are assured that the public will now really listen to them and if perpetrators are assured that they will not be prosecuted to the full extent of new law. For effecting a transition to a new civil society, the truth about the past can be more important than punishment for the past.

Protecting perpetrators and integrating them into the new society, however, was not the chief purpose of the TRC. It gave priority to restoring the dignity of the victims, renewing their membership in civil society, and making a place for them in public history. Lucas Baba Sikwepere, who was permanently blinded by his torture by South African police, said, "I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn' t tell my story. But now it feels like I got my sight back by coming here and telling you my story." As Professor Martha Minow of Harvard comments on this testimony: "Tears in public will not be the last tears, but to know one' s tears are seen may grant a sense of acknowledgment that makes grief less lonely and terrifying." Such tears can nourish a new sense of place in one' s society. They can moderate the thirst for revenge. Will such truth inevitably promote reconciliation? We cannot be sure. After ten years of truth-telling about the Stasi, not all Germans, east or west, believe that truth serves forgiveness. Much depends on whether such truth is intended as a weapon for keeping new neighbors at bay or as the clearing of a public space for the building of new political communities.

• Forbearance; repentance and truth-telling advance a process of forgiveness when they produce new empathy between former enemies. In the politics of conflict, especially the propaganda of war, each side denigrates the humanity of the other. After the firebombing of Tokyo, a Japanese newspaper wrote about Americans, "[They are] utterly lacking in any ability to understand the principles of humanity. .. . They are nothing but lawless savages in spirit who are ruled by fiendish passions and unrestrained lust for blood. . . . Only through the complete chastisement of such barbarians can the world be made safe for civilization." While the Japanese were calling Americans "demons," we were calling them "monkeys." We each designated the other as subhuman, a ploy that is one of the awful weapons of war. As all torturers know, it is easier to kill people when you think of them as subhuman.

Can people who once labeled each other as "unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben, as the Nazi concept had it) recover from this corruption? In his monumental study The Nazi Doctors, Robert Lifton, an American psychiatrist, came to the conclusion that the gruesome "medicine" practiced in Auschwitz was possible only because of the doctors' systematic exclusion of empathy for their victims. So, at the end of his book, Lifton asks himself: Little as anyone ought to sympathize with these parodies of the medical profession, can one empathize with them? Can one identify the humanity in these doctors and acknowledge them as akin to oneself? Lifton' s position is very different from Daniel J. Goldhagen' s thesis -- in Hitler' s Willing Executioners -- that Germans of that era shared a special "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that separated them from the rest of humanity. Would that it were so! How much wiser is one of the last lines of the Von Weizsäcker speech: "We learn from our own history what man is capable of." We are all vulnerable to collaborating in the doing of great evil to our neighbors. The recognition of this truth is one of the things Christians should bring to politics.

Evildoers must be understood as fellow humans if they and their victims are to be restored to the status of neighbors and citizens -- which is the practical goal at which political forgiveness aims. As Gesine Schwan puts it in Politik und Schuld, those who barricade themselves in their own little worlds are inherently unpolitical. Political society depends on trust and some degree of fellow feeling. After deep' fragmentation, the renewal of civil community requires the catalyst of empathy.

• Finally, collective forgiveness requires that one move from apology to reparation. Apologies for past wrongs have become astonishingly common in political, church and other settings across the world. During a visit to Uganda President Bill Clinton apologized for African slavery; in Guatemala he apologized for what the CIA had done there. Tony Blair has apologized to the people of Ireland for Britain' s passivity in face of the Irish famine of the 1840s. Recently the Natal Law Society apologized for the exclusion of Mohandas K. Gandhi from the practice of law in South Africa. Apology seems to have become an international fad.

Are such ceremonial gestures of any use in international relations? They can be, suggests Canadian sociologist Nicholas Tavuchis in his remarkable book, Mea Culpa. A well-crafted official apology can be "a prelude to reconciliation." Tavuchis concludes that "the consummate collective apology is a diplomatic accomplishment of no mean order." Willy Brandt' s gesture of repentance before the monument to the Warsaw Uprising was such an accomplishment, as was Harry Truman' s laying of a wreath before the Mexico City monument to young Mexican soldiers killed in one of the most imperialistic wars in American history. In response to that gesture, a taxi driver told an American reporter, "To think that the most powerful man in the world would come and apologize!"

But if the integrity of apologies is to be sustained, they should be followed by reparations. Think of the contrast between the reparations which the Allies vengefully imposed upon Germany in 1918 and the reparations which the Federal Republic since 1949 has tendered to surviving victims of Nazism. The Bonn Information Office carefully qualified this gesture: "No matter how large the sum, no amount of money will ever suffice to compensate for National Socialist persecution." Much the same qualification was made by President George Bush when, in 1990, he transmitted to every Japanese-American survivor of the internment camps a check for $20,000: "A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories." Above all, money cannot restore a lost life. But symbolic gestures can effect significant healing. They make forgiveness easier to contemplate. At the very least, they make more likely the consent of the victims to the idea of some new political community with the perpetrators and their descendants. Perhaps the wounds will never completely heal; but imperfect justice is better than none.

Weber defined politics as the "slow boring of hard boards." The hardest board of all may be the public facing of evils that a government and its citizens together have inflicted. Yet a nation whose leaders try regularly to protect its citizens from illusions of innocence will be a nation that other countries can more easily trust and even forgive. Contemporary Germany comes close to being such a country. American patriotism would be more honest if we Americans were as aware of the moral shortcomings of our past dealings with African-Americans, Native Americans and the civilians of countries with whom we have been at war as Germans are of the Nazi treatment of Jews, gypsies and Russian prisoners of war.

Speaking of life in a small village, Robert Frost said, "To be social is to be forgiving." The new global village will need that rule, and its companion: to be social is to be repentant. Perhaps it is ethically wrong to believe that evils such as the slave trade and the Nazi camps should ever be forgiven, but it is may be equally wrong to believe that the evildoers and their descendants should be excluded from society rather than restored to it.

Toward a Public Sense of Pastoral Care

My perceptions of the fit between piety and learning in the current world of theological education are conditioned by a recent move from one province of that world -- Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta -- to another, Union Theological Seminary in New York. The opportunities and the problems of achieving the fit are similar in both places; the contexts, histories and accents differ.

There, at Candler, a certain piety -- Methodist -- shapes the educational ethos. Here, at Union, we regularly experience an ecumenical collision of pieties. There, the move toward a parsonage dominates the expectations of most students from their junior year on. Here, students tend to ask a double “I-dare-you” question: “Can you intrigue me out of professional church leadership with your learning? Or into it?” There, ordinary popular doubt centers on the threat of learning to piety, and professors engage in running debates with students on the final usefulness of the scholar to the preacher. Here, doubt moves the other way.

Yet in both places students and faculty participate in the perplexed American religious consciousness of the ‘70s: In a global community whose faiths are many, by what faith shall we live? In a time of disjunction between old and new languages of faith, by what language shall we witness to faith? And in a society whose institutions, seem mostly to threaten personal integrity, can we minister to persons without overhauling institutions?

The image under which many of us carry on our educational work at Union is that of the crossroads. For over a century students have been coming here because they have the fortitude to risk all sorts of collisions: of world cultures in a great city, of religions and churches in an ecumenical cloverleaf, of church and academy in a theological school related to a great university but independent of it. There is almost a touch of masochism in the intentional vulnerability which brings many to Morning-side Heights. Their unverbalized commitment seems to be: “I’ll test my preferred options for truth and goodness over against other options. Better to test out my stance before getting locked into it!”

As any longtime faculty member at Union will tell you, such a vulnerability carries its peculiar burden of challenge and danger for the nourishing of a fruitful conjunction between piety and learning. Male students feel the burden as they learn firsthand how women students are revising the theological language, ministerial practice, and self-understanding associated with a profession too long captive to the interests of men. Liberal whites confront blacks who affirm a version of “old-time religion” that still has more salvation in it for black people than liberals usually expect in their religion. On all sides here, students and faculty undergo the hard disciplines of American church pluralism. At times the otherness of a neighbor stands in for the otherness of God.

At our best, we suffer all this contradiction gladly, in the faith that out of a multitude of human attempts to glimpse, to trust and to obey the Lord of history, that Lord is weaving together a story he means to tell. Like Bonhoeffer, we yearn for unities and integrities that elude the grasp of so many faithful people in the world that one can easily conclude such yearning is pretentious. There is an enormous scope in the expressed ambitions of students who enroll here. Three examples from what they tell us:

I came because I felt the need to tap into the roots of the ecumenical movement and to a more diverse world -- that is, all those things which are centered for better or worse in New York city.

I came because I didn’t want any kind of schmaltzy piety or any sterile intellectualism.

It was important for me to have both a ministerial emphasis and a scholarly reputation.

Students are asking for a complex combination of educational ingredients. A new president senses that “crisis” at Union has always (since 1836) consisted in the threat that some star in its constellation of educational commitments will withdraw from the whole. For example, the field education program, the study of current liberation theologies, and the struggle to keep the school’s budget in balance all pose questions of Christian faith and ethics in their relation to urban-institutional structures. And at stake in the dialogue in ‘our classes, our refectory, the suburban congregations in Westchester, the inner-city congregations of Brooklyn, and the bureaucratic part-time jobs at the Interchurch Center is a central issue: How does one achieve and combine authentic personal spirituality with equally authentic public spirituality?

Nothing in Union’s history or current situation permits any of us to avoid this issue. As Malcolm Warford, our newly appointed director of educational research, said to me recently after interviewing a cross section of our current student body: “Reinhold Niebuhr’s critique of shallow piety and privatized learning continues to be our typical understanding of the relationship between pastoral care and theology. Indeed, most students feel that Union’s location in New York city is in itself a visible symbol of a public sense of pastoral care.”

The phrase is haunting: “a public sense of pastoral care.” It resembles the concern Robert Bonthius surfaced ten years ago: “The Pastoral Care of Institutions.” Piety in the ‘70s has become well known now for its reversion to the personal, but I have to report that few rest easy with that reversion at Broadway and 120th Street. If piety did not protect us from it, vivid fact would do so: New York’s unemployed wander our neighborhood streets too often for us to stop hoping that persons and systems are both to be saved by “Amazing Grace.” (The song is one that we hear gratefully in chapel these days. One reason: a black artist who makes that song alive with herself and with her people.)

The crossroads image, I may add, fits our doctoral work in theology as closely as it fits our work in the M.Div. program. Union has often prided itself on its goal of training the “scholarly pastor.” For reasons at once theological, institutional and professional, we are a place for training “pastoral scholars” as well. That very concept, however, violates the sense of intellectual probity that many of us on the faculty learned in our own university-oriented doctoral training. After all, modern university culture inclines to the proposition that objective truth is one thing; the love that commends it -- in the person of a great teacher, for example -- is quite another thing.

Modern intellectual culture assumes the “fact-value dichotomy” so easily, in fact, that the future relations of piety and intellect at Union will undoubtedly involve some mighty wrestling to keep the two intimate with each other, no matter how insulated some of our university colleagues prefer them to be. Our Christian roots incline us to study a truth worth doing, to learn the Word that meets us in human flesh, to speak the truth in love. A specialized, urban-scientific culture makes such combinations hard to believe in. Our task, in university related theology schools, is to teach, administer, learn, relate and act in ways that make such combinations credible.

III

I may be reading it inaccurately, but the theological axiom behind the quest for a holistic conjunction of truth and faith at Union Seminary is this: A good place to meet the God of Jesus Christ is at the crossroads of theological, sociological and political diversity, because there you are most likely to meet a whole human community. That surmise lies behind the vulnerability of so many persons here to each other’s uniqueness. At our spiritual worst at Union, we revere our diversities to a point of despair over the very possibility of a whole. But at our best, we resonate with the famous last paragraph of Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus:

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

Which is to say that at our very best at Union, we find ourselves listening to words credited to Jesus in his last conversation with Peter:

When you were young, you were able to do as you liked, and go wherever you wanted to; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and others will direct you and take you where you don’t want to go [John 21:18].