Articles – Page 271 – Religion Online

Many Mansions or One Way? The Crisis in Interfaith Dialogue

Has the great dialogue among the world religions stalled, the dialogue that so many of us welcomed so warmly and so recently? Why has the "wider ecumenism," which had offered hope of crossing not only denominational but faith lines as well, begun to sputter and stammer and, in many instances, simply to stop? Why have relations among the ancient spiritual traditions of the human family, which many believed were improving a few years back, turned rancorous and even violent as new outbreaks of separatism, xenophobia and hostility erupt?

To make matters worse, these same faith communities are increasingly divided within themselves, and the rifts are often exacerbated by political tensions. Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims declare each other to be worse than infidels. Jews, both pious and secular, who want to find some way to live at peace with Palestinians despair over the zealotry of the Gush Emunim, who believe God has given their people land on which Palestinians have also dwelt for generations. Christians who work for interfaith understanding have been shocked and perplexed by the attacks of fundamentalists who condemn them as traitors to the gospel but who themselves seem willing to cooperate with non-Christians if their politics are acceptable. Indeed, people in any religious tradition who are committed to dialogue often find themselves upbraided as turncoats by their own brothers and sisters.

Admittedly, the picture is not unrelievedly gloomy. Here and there, small circles of Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians continue to meet and talk and even to work together, but they do so despite the currents that seem to be flowing against them. What has gone wrong?

The most nettlesome dilemma hindering interreligious dialogue is the very ancient one of how to balance the universal and the particular. Every world faith has both. Each nourishes in rite and saga its own unique and highly particular vision. Maybe it is the message of the one true God delivered without blemish to the prophet Muhammad. Or it is the fathomless Brahman from whom all that is and all that is not comes and returns. Or the faithful Son of God dying on the cross. Or the supreme moment when enlightenment comes to the patient figure seated under the bo tree. Or the bestowal of the life-giving gift of Torah on a chosen people. Whatever it is, the particular hub defines the center around which each world faith rotates, endowing it season after season and century after century with its characteristic ethos.

At the same time every world faith, if it is truly a world faith and not a local cultus, also generates a universal vision. Brahman embraces all ages, each drop of water and every savior. The Koran names a God who created all people equal and who decrees that a unified human family should mirror his sublime unity. The dying Christ is raised to life by a God who favors the outcasts and the heartbroken and who summons all tribes and tongues into an inclusive community of service and praise. The Bodhisattva compassionately refuses to enter nirvana until every sentient being can enter with him. Thus each world faith has both its axis and its spokes, its sharply etched focus and its ambient circumference. Further, it is the mark of a true world faith that these two dimensions not only hold together but strengthen and reinforce each other.

The crisis in the current state of interfaith dialogue can be stated simply: the universal and the particular poles have come unhinged. Faced with a world in which some form of encounter with other faiths can no longer be avoided, the ancient religious traditions are breaking into increasingly bitter wings. Those who glimpse the universal dimension advocate dialogue and mutuality; they search out what is common and that which unites. Those who emphasize the particular often shun dialogue and excoriate their fellow believers who engage in it more fiercely than they condemn outsiders.

But we need both poles. I count myself as one of the universalists. Yet sometimes as I have sat in genteel – or even mildly acrimonious -- gatherings of urbane representatives of different faith traditions, under the auspices of the World Council of Churches or the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, my mind has strayed from the conference room out to those jagged comers of the world where other confessors of these same faiths are killing or proselytizing -- or just frigidly ignoring -- one another. I have wondered at such moments whether the dialogue has not become a tedious exercise in preaching to the converted, and I have secretly wished to bring in some of those enthusiasts. Deprived of the energy such particularists embody, a dialogue-among-the-urbane can, and sometimes does, deteriorate into a repetitious exchange of vacuities. It could end with a whimper.

But without the large-hearted vision of the universal that the interfaith conversation incarnates, particularism can deteriorate into fanaticism. And in our present overarmed world, zealotry can easily hasten the moment when everything ends with a bang. So we are left with a paradox. Without the universal pole, no dialogue would ensue. But without the particular, the dialogue dissipates its source of primal energy. Without the cross or the Koran or the bo tree, the religions that were called into being by these sacred realities would atrophy, and along with them the inclusive visions they spawned would fade away too. The paradox of the great world faiths is that they both create a dream of a single human family and threaten that dream at the same time. What can be done?

It seems too formulaic simply to say that the universalists and the particularists need each other, especially since they seldom think they do. Still, I believe they do. There are two salient ways in which Christians who engage in interfaith dialogue have-often quite inadvertently-neglected the hub in their commendable efforts to enlarge the rim. The first way the particular is diminished in dialogue is through the loss of the personal voice. Dialogue often climbs quickly to airy exchanges about "Christianity" and "Buddhism" or one of the other faiths. The dialoguers, who are frequently trained to think in abstract, conceptual terms, are sometimes reluctant to say much about their faith in Jesus Christ, or their devotion to Krishna, or their path toward enlightenment. Even the language of "our" faith or "our" path is often left behind as the talk soars into that realm of discourse (invaluable for its own purposes) one finds in an academic seminar on comparative religions. Soon people are yawning and glancing at their watches.

A certain careful and modest restoration of personal narrative -- call it "testimony," if you will – can help restore some of the life-giving particularity to the dialogue among religions. After all, it is never the religions themselves that converse but individuals who embody those religions. I have seen more than one interfaith colloquium tediously drifting toward death that was restored to life when someone had the courage to speak personally rather than in general terms.

The second way Christian participation in the dialogue has sometimes lost sight of the particularity pole has been by soft-pedaling the figure of Jesus himself. There are many exceptions to this sotto voce treatment of Christ. Still, I have noticed that when reference to Jesus is postponed or downplayed, conversations between Christians and people of other traditions tend to become arid, but when the figure of Jesus is brought to the fore, either by the Christians or --as sometimes happens -- by the others, the dialogue comes alive.

One can of course understand why Christians who believe in the dialogue do not want to push Jesus down other people's throats as soon as the opening gavel has been rapped. After all, Jesus is in some ways the most particularistic element of Christianity, and in an interreligious dialogue one is presumably trying -- at least at first -- to present the less divisive aspects of one's own tradition. The trouble is that not only has this understandable reticence deprived the dialogue of the vigor it needs to survive, but it has also produced another unfortunate consequence: Christians who think of Jesus as a model in other areas of their lives do not look to his example or teaching for direction in the dialogue itself. This twofold neglect of the figure of Jesus-both as a theme and as a source of guidance -- has exacted a heavy toll.

I do not mean to suggest that those Christians who even now are working with great dedication in talks with Buddhists or Muslims or Jews never mention Christology (that branch of Christian theology that deals with the meaning of Jesus Christ).

They do. Often they seek to find some bridge to the other faiths through a "cosmic Christ" such as the one portrayed in the Epistle to the Ephesians, a Christ who is said to be present throughout the universe and who therefore presumably can also be found in the lived worlds of Hindus and Muslims. More frequently, however, the Christian participants have tried to base the dialogue on completely different facets of religious tradition.. Sometimes, for example, they turn to the idea of God the Creator, the mystery out of whom all that is emerges. At other times, they focus on the divine Spirit, present in every person or even in every sentient being. In recent decades they have preferred to explore the experience of faith itself as a universal human experience that exhibits common stages of development through the succeeding phases of human life.

Most recently, they have sought to wrestle -- together with people of other faiths -- with the awful issues everyone must confront today-nuclear war, hunger, disease, the despoiling of the ecosphere -- and to reach into the various traditions as possible sources of values and visions for facing such horrors. These paths to interfaith encounter differ markedly, but they all have one thing in common: they keep the historical Jesus of the Gospels distinctly in the background.

Each of these approaches to the crafting of an adequate Christian grasp of the multiplicity of faiths has its value. Each has advanced the dialogue in some measure. We need to continue to try to work with all of them. Still, I confess that I find these approaches, all of which hold the Jesus-fact in abeyance, not wholly satisfactory. The problem with them is twofold. First, for the vast majority of Christians, including those most energetically engaged in dialogue, Jesus is not merely a background figure. He is central to Christian faith. Not only do the Christian dialoguers recognize this, but so do their Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu and Jewish conversation partners. Wherever one starts, whether with creation, with the omnipresent enlivening Spirit, with the faith experience as such or with something else, any honest dialogue between Christians and others will sooner or later --and in my experience it is usually sooner -- have to deal with the figure of Jesus.

Some might ask, But is it not better to delay so potentially divisive a topic until some more inclusive groundwork has been laid? This may be the case in some instances, but I have never been persuaded by that method. Everyone always knows that the question of who Jesus was and is, and what he means today, will inevitably appear. Until it does, it sometimes feels as though one is -- at least to some degree --engaging in the necessary pleasantries that often precede a genuine conversation but are really not integral to it. When will the other shoe drop?

The second part of my problem with dialogue tactics that play down the Jesus factor is that-surprisingly-it is just this factor that the non-Christian participants often seem most interested in and most eager to discuss. This is not something one is led to expect will happen in interfaith dialogue. But it does. Indeed, it happens so often that it raises serious questions about the other approaches, at least insofar as they try to proceed -- ever so carefully and judiciously, they suppose -- without this central point up front.

Of course, merely suggesting that Jesus be made more central to the dialogue does not solve anything at all. The questions of what role Jesus plays and how he is introduced still persist. This is why I have always been so intrigued by the "many mansions" Jesus speaks of in John 14:2, as well as by John 14:6: "1 am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me," These verses stand only a few lines away from each other in the same chapter of the same Gospel. But they have traditionally supplied both the dialogic universalists and the antidialogic particularists with their favorite proof texts.

Those who look with appreciation on other faiths frequently cite John 14:2 and suggest that the "many mansions" may refer to the heavenly palaces in which Hindus and Buddhists will dwell -- alongside Christians -- in the hereafter. Those who insist that all others must accept Christ or be damned, however, prefer to cite John 14:6 and declare that Jesus alone is the one true way to salvation. What can we say about this curious juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory texts? Could it be telling us about the need to hold the universal and the particular together and about the central place Jesus must have for Christians even in the most expansive interfaith dialogue?

Jesus himself has something vital to teach us about how to participate in interfaith dialogue. At first this may sound quite improbable. Jesus, so far as we know, never met a Buddhist or a Hindu. Islam did not appear until 600 years after his crucifixion. So far as we know, Jesus' interreligious experience was confined to the different sects and movements within the Judaism of his day and to the people, mainly Romans, even he called "heathens. " At first glance, it hardly seems we can learn much from him on this subject.

To be a disciple of Jesus means not to emulate or mimic him but to follow his "way," to live in our era the same way he lived in his -- as a sign and servant of the reign of God. To follow Jesus requires us not to choose 12 disciples or to turn water into wine but to take his life project -- making the coming of God's reign of Shalom real and immediate -- our own. Friendship among the peoples of the world faiths and the nurturing of a sense of "species consciousness" are an indispensable facet of the coming of God's Shalom. There are at least four ways in which the Jesus of the Gospels provides useful guidelines for building such an interfaith consciousness.

The first is that a focus on Jesus moves the encounter from the theoretical level to the practical one. The reign of God is not an abstract ideal; it is a reality actualizing itself in history. Consequently, as soon as this kingdom becomes the focus, we see that religions do not exist apart from their local manifestations. Further, t4ese concrete expressions of a tradition vary markedly from place to place. Except in the minds of textbook writers, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity remain vague abstractions. Genuine interreligious dialogue takes place among persons, and it occurs only when we recognize how a tradition actually works in people's lives.

Such a down-to-earth approach to interreligious conversation is anything but easy. Christians committed to dialogue with the people who live according to other faiths can never be content with the "library" versions of those traditions. Nor will it help to complain that the tangible Buddhist or Islamic movements we encounter today are not the real thing but decadent or politicized corruptions. The example of Jesus' own life demonstrates that any dialogue must take place with actual people. A so-called interreligious dialogue with the Platonic ideals of what this or that religious tradition ought to be in its pure essence leads nowhere.

The second way the Jesus of the Gospels facilitates interfaith dialogue is by reminding us that religion is always a mixed blessing. Jesus, after all, was fiercely opposed by many (not all) of the religious people of his day. His attacks on the misuse of religion remind us that, wherever religion exists, we can be sure that someone is trying to use the gods to dominate, frighten or oppress someone else. Indeed, any honest attempt at interfaith dialogue must face the ugly fact that our century has not only spawned hundreds of new religious movements but that some of those movements are destructive, and some of the most demonic claim to be expressions of Christianity.

Some gentle souls suggest that maybe we should declare a kind of moratorium both on proselytizing and on interreligious discussion. But it is impossible to hope that various cultures and religions could simply leave each other alone. There will always be interaction. Some kind of encounter, even dialogue, is unavoidable. The hard question is how to enter into a genuinely open conversation without losing sight of the need to make judgments and, at times, even to take sides.

This is where the example of Jesus is most pertinent. Jesus was not a model of vacuous tolerance. He did make judgments about the faith of the people he met. In fact, he did so all the time. He argued with some of the Pharisees and excoriated the rulers of the temple. But the key to Jesus' approach to any religious perspective was, "By their fruits ye shall know them. " He, seemed singularly uninterested in the doctrinal content or ritual correctness of the different religions he encountered. He was, however, terribly concerned about the practical outcome of their practitioners' commitments. He once told a pagan Roman that he had not found such a faith as his anywhere in Israel.

Third, Jesus' example reminds us also that the search for human oneness-in-diversity in interreligious dialogue is not only a matter of making judgments; it sometimes requires refraining from judgment. This has its rewarding and even its lighter side. When I was living among Tibetan Buddhists, for example, it took me some time to appreciate the frolicsome way they approach even the deepest tenets of their faith. They sometimes called it the "crazy wisdom." I found that, as a Christian, I eventually had to lay aside the notion that dialogue must always be serious.

The same is true with the so-called primal religions. At a conference in Japan, a pioneer of Christian dialogue with tribal peoples once observed that Western Christians tend to be at ease only with those adherents of other faiths who are as precise and sober as they are. Perhaps we need to place the "theology of play" at the service of interfaith encounter, especially with Buddhists and those who used to be called "primitive" peoples. Jesus often responded to people's serious questions by rattling off a yam, and some of his stories-like the one about the speck in the neighbor's eye and the two-by-four in one's own -- are jocosely hyperbolic. I am sure people laughed when he told them. To insist that dialogue must always be about clear and distinct ideas is to impose a". narrowly Western verbal-doctrinal style. What occurs, then, is nothing but a more subtle form of religious imperialism.

In an interreligious dialogue, this crazy wisdom has an important theological meaning. It implies that the participants realize -- as mystics also do -- that even their best words fall far short of the divine reality, so far short as to be somewhat ridiculous. This insight undercuts distinctions that are very precious to the West: correct/incorrect, secular/sacred, wisdom/folly, purity/pollution. It thus points toward what mystical theology calls the coin - to be opposites.

The fourth way the Jesus of the Gospels helps facilitate interreligious encounter is that he prepares us to expect to find God already present in the "other," including the one with whom we are in dialogue, no matter how strange or unfamiliar that other's ideas or religious practices may seem. Christ meets us in and through the stranger. In fact, if there is one thing that has become self-evident to those who have seriously engaged in sustained and probing conversations with people of another faith, it is that no one remains unaffected. If one does, there is room for doubt whether he or she has entered into dialogue at all.

Dialogue changes those who risk it. It often upsets more than stereotypes and preconceptions about another; it works a sometimes more subtle transformation pf the way I understand and live my own faith. To enter honestly into dialogue is to embark on a perilous personal voyage with no clear destination in view. Unforeseen things can happen. One of the risks is being viewed by one's coreligionists with suspicion or distrust. Another is to find oneself asking questions, perhaps only inwardly, about what one's own faith really means, questions that would never have come up without the provocation of a dialogue. The fearful gatekeepers who have insisted throughout the ages that pure religion can be maintained only in a ghetto or compound have not been entirely wrong. To expose one's tradition to dialogue is willynilly to open it to change, ferment and internal debate. God can and does speak to us through people of other faiths, changing our viewpoint.

Christians have entered into serious dialogue with people of other faiths only very recently. The question of what Christ means in our encounter with others inevitably raises the even more basic one of what Christ means for us as Christians. I invariably return from a conversation with a genuine believer in one of the other faiths with do you say that I am?" But as I listen, I find that I am not putting the question to the other; I am putting it to myself.

Perhaps the most unexpected lesson I have learned in the dialogue with people of other religions is how important it is for me to keep in touch with those of my own faith community who remain suspicious and fearful of that dialogue. This has sometimes proved difficult, and I have often found it easier to converse with universally minded Buddhists or Hindus than with fellow Christians who not only dismiss such people as pagans but also want to dismiss me for not dismissing them as such. Still, I believe the critically important conversation among people of diverse faiths could founder and fail if we -- the dialoguers -- lose touch with our fellow believers who cluster on the particularist side. They remind us that without the radical particularity of the original revelation, we would have no faith to share. We remind them that without the universal dream, they falsify the message and diminish the scope of the original vision.

Multiple specters stalk the human enterprise today. We have reached a point at which strife between nations and religions could lead to the apocalypse. We need more than ever to doxologize the fragile oneness of the whole earth and all its inhabitants. Yet for men and women of faith, the sacred stories by which we hymn the unity of our species and its animal and cosmic neighbors need not be invented. Paradoxically, those stories and symbols are already embedded in the very same traditions that sometimes threaten to tear us asunder. Our task is to claim these reminders of our common destiny from within the disparate sources that first gave them voice.

From Jesus I have learned both that he is the way and that in God's house there are many mansions. I do not believe that these two sayings are contradictory. In fact, I have come to see that only by understanding one can we come to understand the other.

A Christian Observes Yom Kippur

The author, a Christian theologian and scholar, is married to Nina Tamarkin, who is Jewish. Fifteen years ago, they decided to raise their son in the Jewish faith, and to participate in each other’s religion as their respective convictions allowed. In this excerpt, the author describes Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement.

During most of Yom Kippur I nurse a dull headache. We are supposed to eat nothing from just before sundown the evening before (which is called Erev Yom Kippur) until after sundown on the day itself. We refrain from drinking (some people even avoid water), we do not engage in sexual activity and we do not wear leather shoes or belts, which at one time were an expression of finery. So here I am, stifling hunger pangs, a little thirsty (although I do allow myself a glass of water now and then), wearing my only pair of suspenders and canvas running shoes. Sex is the farthest thing from my mind. A grilled cheese sandwich has more erotic appeal.

Why are we doing this? Because there will be no eating or drinking or sex (or finery) in death, and Yom Kippur is about sampling some of the qualities of death so that when we are allowed to live life again, it will taste even sweeter. One rabbi suggests that there is something about the last meal one eats before the Yom Kippur fast that is reminiscent of the prisoner’s final meal before the electric chair. There is some truth in the saying that there is nothing better than a firing squad in the morning to clarify the mind. For some reason (which physiologists may one day explain), fasting does produce a kind of mental clarity, despite the headache.

On Erev Yom Kippur, the evening service begins its long confessional statement with some trespasses almost anyone can identify with. It asks for forgiveness for "the sin we have committed before Thee by hardening our hearts" and goes on to mention "sins we have committed before Thee in speech" and "the sin we have committed before Thee by wronging our neighbor." I can confess these transgressions because I can think of numerous times during the year when I have done them, and it is good to get them off my chest. So far, so good.

But then comes a part of the prayer that puzzled me at first. Unlike any Christian prayer I know, it asks God’s forgiveness for the sin we have committed "unknowingly." Immediately my mind steps back. I know that while on the cross Jesus asked God to forgive his executioners because "they know not what they do." Still, every five-year-old knows that if he can persuade his mother that he didn’t mean to break his little sister’s doll carriage, she cannot logically hold him responsible. The question puzzles me. Why should I be held accountable for things I have done unintentionally and without even knowing it? I am still pondering this dilemma when, a few lines later, the prayer goes on to list sins we have committed "by spurning parents and teachers"; "by denying and lying . . . by bribery. . . by scoffing . . . by slandering."

Now I am finding it hard, even with a relentless searching of my conscience, to remember when I have done these things. And when it comes to "the sin we have committed before Thee by demanding usurious interest," I begin to wonder just what it is that I am confessing. The prayer goes on to detail "being stiff-necked," "talebearing," in addition to "causeless hatred." This section in the service is followed by assurances of God’s pardon, but a few pages later another list of sins appears. Here the congregation confesses, "We have dealt treacherously, we have spoken slander, we have acted perversely. . , we have done violence, we have framed lies . . , scoffed, revolted, rebelled."

When I reached this part at my first Yom Kippur service, I was almost ready to sneak across the street for that grilled cheese sandwich and forgo any further confessing. I may be a sinner, but the sinner whom these prayers were describing was not me. Of course, I did not stalk out; still, being expected to confess things I had never done bothered me. It made it almost impossible for me to enter wholeheartedly into what is, in many other respects, a moving service. It seemed that I was somehow expected to confess -- more than once -- not only things I was not aware of, but long lists of sins that I had never even thought of committing. It seemed unreasonable.

I only saw the logic of unintentional transgressions when a rabbi pointed out to me that during these Days of Awe, Jews do not just repent for their own sins. They repent for the sins of all the people. No wonder I felt wrongly accused. The concept of collective repentance has been, until recently, quite foreign to most of Protestant Christianity. True, in Roman Catholicism there are whole communities of monks and nuns who intercede every day for those who do not have the desire or the capacity to pray for themselves. But the Protestant tradition, with its strong emphasis on the responsibility of the individual person before God, has not ordinarily looked favorably on these practices. As Martin Luther once put it, every person has to do his own repenting and his own dying. No one else can do either one for you.

Eventually, however, contemplating the confessional prayers of Yom Kippur became one of the moments in my encounter with Judaism that most enlarged and enriched my own faith. First, with regard to confessing sins we do not know about and did not do intentionally, in fact, of course, we do often hurt other people without intending to and sometimes without even knowing. Sometimes we learn later how something we did or said wounded someone painfully. But there may be many other times when we do such things and never hear about them, even though the sting still afflicts the other person. This is why I have come to believe that asking for forgiveness for the hurtful things we have done without even knowing them is salutary. It makes us think carefully about what we might have done in the past and remember to be more careful in the future.

But what about confessing things other people have done? Even when I realized this is a corporate confession, the concept continued to pose a problem for me, and still does. My question is quite simple: Can anyone actually repent for someone else? Wasn’t Luther right? Doesn’t repentance require a change of heart by the transgressor, an intention to try to do better? One of the points made by the Protestant reformers was that it was fruitless to have monks and nuns intercede for us -- which was, at the time, one of the main reasons for the existence of the monastic movement. Catholic theology held that the monastics were drawing on a "treasury of merit" stored up by people who did good deeds, transferring a kind of payment to the divine accounts of those in moral arrears. Of course, at the time there were terrible abuses of this practice. Rich people could pay for endless masses to be said for the souls of their departed loved ones and -- eventually -- for their own. Some even thought that if they endowed enough monasteries, they could live lives of reckless violence and promiscuity while the gentle sisters and brothers faithfully intervened for them morning, noon and night before the throne of grace. Luther, who had been an Augustinian monk in his youth, roundly condemned this whole idea. But it is sometimes not entirely clear in his writings when he is condemning a religious practice and when he is condemning its corruption and misuse. Protestants do pray for other people, for their health and well-being, even for their salvation. But they do not repent for them.

Still, I am not fully satisfied with this. It seems to promote an extreme form of religious individualism. One can see how this kind of thinking found its way through later Lutheran pietism to Søren Kierkegaard and then to its atheistic version in Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. Kierkegaard asked that the inscription on his tombstone read "The Single One," and he told his fiancée, Regina Olsen, that he could not marry her because that would dilute his necessarily lonely and direct relationship with God. In one of his finest essays, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber says of Kierkegaard, "It is through, not despite of, the Regina Olsens of this world that we come to God."

I believe, with Buber and against Kierkegaard, that we come to God through the human ties within which we have been set. We are bound together with bonds that go deeper than skin. But I also believe, with Luther, that there are some things we simply have to do for ourselves. And I am still made uncomfortable by the thought of repenting for someone else’s sins or of someone else’s repenting for me. Obviously, this is not just my personal plight. It points to a much larger issue in the whole area of public morality: Can a corporate entity -- a nation, a tribe, a people -- repent?

After World War II, the German Protestant churches issued a statement of repentance for their sins of omission and commission during the Third Reich. They issued it, furthermore, not just in the name of the churches (including, presumably, members who were alive during that period but were now dead), but also in the name of the German people. It was a welcome admission. But just what did it mean? How many people from how many churches had to vote for the statement in order to make it truly representative? Does such a statement, for example, have any validity if it is passed by a closely contested vote? How can the churches speak for anyone except themselves?

These are difficult questions. We sometimes hear that America should formally apologize to Japan for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, just after the end of the war, a group of American Protestant theologians and church leaders issued a statement of repentance. But who would have the moral authority to do it today? Bill Clinton, the president of the United States in 1995, which marked the 50th anniversary of the bombings, was not yet born when the bombs were dropped. Many older people, especially some who were in the military in World War II, opposed any such apology, insisting that the Japanese should first apologize for Pearl Harbor. Whatever the merit of either of these ideas, they run into the same obstacle encountered by those who want America to apologize for slavery, for the murderous displacement of Native Americans or for any of a host of obvious and grave national sins. The question is a very basic one: Who has the authority to make such a penitent apology, and for whom would that person speak?

Other question about the Yom Kippur prayer arises from my uncertainty about who is included in the corporate "we" of the Jewish prayers of repentance. Here the age-old tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism enters again. Are Jews praying that all Jews be forgiven, including the unrepentant ones? If so, who is included in the category of Jews? At a time when the "Who is a Jew?" controversy has made the borders of the community less distinct, this is not easy to answer. But suppose it included all Jews of any category whatsoever, including secular atheists; what about the rest of us? Are Jews on Yom Kippur repenting for everyone, for all of us? This may seem like a tall order. There may be a few million unrepentant Jews in the world who need such intercession, but there are billions of non-Jews who -- if such third-party prayers are valid -- are being spiritually neglected. Isn’t it unfair somehow that a few unrepentant people who are lucky enough to have someone who repents for them (because they are Jewish) should have a more favorable standing before God than those who are not so fortunate? This discussion can quickly get rather silly. But the underlying riddle of the relationship between the corporate and the individual remains.

There are two different but closely related issues here. One is whether I must repent for myself or whether the group to which I belong can repent for everyone who is part of that group. The other is whether a collectivity, be it a nation, a country or a religious group, can repent and gain forgiveness either for itself or for those who are completely outside. As I reflected on these questions, thinking that maybe it was my own upbringing that made them so difficult for me, I was relieved to discover that -- as in many other such matters -- it was not just my upbringing. Thoughtful Jews are concerned about the same issues. On individual repentance, Rabbi Everett Gendler remarks, "The process of individual teshuvah (repentance -- literally, turning around) is so demanding and requires such concentration that I don’t see how we can achieve reconciliation within the groups to which we belong at the same time. Group renewal and mending should be done, but it is so easy to deflect personal teshuvah that we might do best not to try to find justification for it by including corporate teshuvah in Rosh ha-Shanah."

He goes on to suggest that maybe it would be better "to adopt a more frequent process of personal teshuvah all year round [or] on each Sabbath." The issue this rabbi is wrestling with is a troubling one: What is the connection between the spiritual responsibilities of the individual and those of the community?

This may well be an area in which Jews and Christians can help each other. Christians do practice personal teshuvah on a weekly basis but have a weak sense of corporate responsibility. According to Gendler, Jews may have the opposite problem. In any case, what I have learned from my unending struggle with the idea of teshuvah is this: at its heart is the radical idea that people can change. Both Judaism and Christianity, in opposition to the many forms of determinism that dominate our culture today, insist that human beings are created with the freedom to examine their lives and -- with the help of God and of fellow human beings -- mend their ways and alter their courses. We are not totally determined by our genes or our early toilet training, though these and many more factors supply the material we must work with. Our destiny is to be born in one century and not another, with a particular skin color, brain capacity and gender. But what we do with all these is up to us. In the courtroom of Yom Kippur, none of the excuses offered in the courts of this world by creative defense counsels are acceptable. The judge knows we are free and that we can change, if we decide to do so.

I have another issue with Yom Kippur. If we can confess other people’s shortcomings, can we also profit from their virtues? Here, it had always seemed to me we reach a precarious divide between Jews and Christians. Most Christians, although they may be suspicious of vicarious confession, do believe in vicarious atonement: the idea that someone’s virtue or suffering can benefit someone else. Catholics teach that one can draw on the "treasury of merit" stored up for everyone by the righteousness of the saints and that one can benefit from the atoning death of Jesus Christ. Protestants, representing a more individual faith, generally reject the intercession of saints, but they believe that Christ’s blameless life and undeserved death provide the primary source of their reconciliation to God.

For decades I was under the impression that a major theological difference between Jews and Christians ran along this fault line. Jews, I had read and heard (including from many Jews), simply do not believe in vicarious atonement, whereas Christians obviously do. Further, I had been led to believe, while Christians rely on God’s grace for receiving mercy and forgiveness, Jews must demonstrate acts of compassion that outweigh their deeds of selfishness. But now this has become yet another point on which I have had to jettison my old ideas. During the traditional Yom Kippur service, it was once the custom, and still is in many congregations, to retell the story of the so-called ten rabbinic martyrs. These rabbis were killed by the Roman authorities for refusing to obey the prohibitions against Jewish religious practices after the legions had suppressed the revolt led by the Jewish rebel Simeon Bar Kochba in the second century CE. Why is this saga retold? Here is what American Orthodox rabbi Irving Greenberg says on the subject: "In a way, the ten rabbis, like Isaac, were invoked for the sake of vicarious atonement; the merit of their devotion and martyrdom should win forgiveness for their descendants, the living people of Israel."

Today, he adds, the martyrs of the Holocaust are sometimes invoked in the same way. This makes sense. In a tradition like Judaism, which emphasizes the corporate nature of human life, including its reach back into history, why should one not benefit today from the lives of the righteous who have gone before? We profit from those long gone in many other respects. We cherish the music they composed, savor the books they wrote, marvel at the pictures they painted and use the scientific discoveries they made. Why should we not benefit from them on the spiritual level? It must also be said that we still chafe under many of their follies, still mourn the dead of their many wars and are just beginning to clean up the putrid mess they have made of our rivers. But that is another story.

"Yes but," one Jewish answer has been. "But why do Christians focus so much on Jesus, on one man’s merits and martyr’s death?" It is a fair question. My own response is inspired by the French artist Georges Ronault’s vivid portrayals of the crucifixion in his Misérère series. Ronault’s conviction, derived from Pascal, was that "Christ will be in agony until the end of the world." Consequently, he systematically pairs the traditional stations of the cross with depictions of the suffering of ordinary people. As Christ is led to his place of torture and death, we see at every stage a prisoner being led to the gallows, a lonely women in a barren suburb or a poor old man dying alone in a tenement. Christ does continue to suffer, the series says, with all who suffer unjustly in the world. When Christians say he suffered and died for us, we mean that, in some sense, the kind of people Ronault pictures suffer and die for us as well, and whether they are, or were, Christians makes no difference. From this perspective, there is no reason why the ten rabbinic martyrs of the Yom Kippur service should not be included. Might the day come when Jews can remember that Jesus of Nazareth was also a rabbi who was martyred by the Romans?

My understanding of the atoning vicarious death of Christ is not shared by every Christian. Some Christians insist that Christ and Christ alone died for us. But if Jesus Christ was a human being, as all Christians believe, then his suffering cannot be completely severed from all human suffering. "No man is an island," John Donne reminds us, and this includes Jesus. Catholic spirituality has rightly recognized this in the devotion it has encouraged to the sorrows of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The suffering of one person inevitably causes the suffering of others. This insight has become increasingly valuable to me, and it plays an important part in Christian mysticism as well as in feminist and liberation theologies. We are all in this together.

There is another point of convergence between Jews and Christians on the vexed question of grace and good works. At the end of the Yom Kippur service, having prayed for mercy and forgiveness, Jews finally throw themselves totally on the mercy of the court. As Rabbi Greenberg puts it, "This atonement is by divine grace; it is above and beyond the individual’s own effort or merit." I was astonished when I first read this sentence. Martin Luther once ignited a whole Reformation with his preaching of sola gratia (by grace alone). When the hour of decision, forgiving or sentencing finally comes, do Jews cling to the same hope? As Greenberg says: "Many Jews assume that only Christianity focuses on grace and on the merits of another’s sacrifice for their behavior, but in biblical times, temple worship had strong sacramental overtones. . . . Modern Jews would do well to recover the sense of grace that brings us forgiveness even when we do not earn it for ourselves."

This is another instance in which the core convictions of Jews and Christians have been distorted by centuries of polemic. Christians have frequently been told that we believe in justification by grace (or in the case of Catholics, by grace and works), while Jews believe they are justified by adhering to the precepts of the law. Jews have often been taught the same thing, so for millions of ordinary Jews and Christians, this alleged difference has become a hallmark contrast, even a flat contradiction, and has often been presented as an either/or proposition. The truth, however, is quite different.

Maybe the wooden term "justification," with its cold, judicial overtones, has misled everyone. The underlying question is a simple one: How do God and human beings enter into a fruitful relationship with each other? Do we somehow earn the privilege of receiving God’s compassion? Or does God love and forgive us freely, regardless of our merits? Or is there some mixture of the two?

In recent years Catholic theologians, drawing closer to what has been considered the "Protestant" position, have insisted that in the final analysis, no one enters God’s presence except by God’s grace. And Jews, freed from the chafing need to stress their differences from the Christian majorities around them, have begun to reclaim their own traditional teaching on the divine grace that brings forgiveness "even when we do not earn it for ourselves." This whole development is a healthy one. It suggests that the teachings of these traditions on the relationship between God’s grace and human works of justice and compassion simply do not differ as much as we have been told in the past. Jewish teaching does not hold that God’s favor is gained merely by accumulating good deeds. And the New Testament emphasizes that "faith without works is dead." The most recent translations of the Epistle of James, where this famous quotation in found, clarify the matter considerably:

But someone may say: "One chooses faith, another action." To which I reply: "Show me this faith you speak of with no actions to prove it, while I by my actions will prove to you my faith." You have faith and believe that there is one God. Excellent! Even demons have faith like that, and it makes them tremble. Do you have to be told, you fool, that faith divorced from action is futile? (James 2:18-20).

Historically there have been genuine differences between Jewish and Christian thinkers about the meaning of "sin," but also some common ground. Outsiders, and many Jews as well, can get the impression that in Judaism "sins" are specific acts, such as the list of misdeeds confessed at Yom Kippur. But the rabbinical tradition suggests something more complicated. The rabbis drew a distinction between what they called the yetser ha-tov, which is the inner inclination

to do good, and the yetser ha-ra’, the inclination to do evil. Sometimes Jewish stories depict these two urges as arguing inside our heads, pushing us in one direction or the other. The tradition suggests that God, candid self-examination and the firm exercise of the will help the good urges to prevail.

Jews have never attached much credence to what Christian theology calls original sin, which plays an important role in Christianity. They understandably wonder how we can all be implicated by Adam’s fatal bite into the forbidden fruit. But these disagreements are often obscured by biblical literalism and ignorance on both sides. People once believed Adam was a real historical figure, so it is little wonder that our being cursed for his disobedience caused such confusion. But Adam and Eve mean "mankind" and "life." They are the metaphorical representatives of all humankind. The story in Genesis is not about primeval ancestors but about us.

But what does it say about us? Here there are some differences. Christians have said that the story of the fall is about how we invariably try to deny our finitude and escape our mortality ("to be as gods") and end up making things worse. We find ourselves expelled from Eden and barred from returning by an angel with a fiery sword (a favorite theme in Christian art). Christian theologians have therefore thought of sin more as a kind of congenital disability, with specific failings as its symptoms. But it is a disability we somehow have a role in perpetuating, like a fly gets itself ever more entangled in a web the more it tries to get out.

In recent years, some thoughtful Christians have asked whether the term "sin" is still useful when the word is used as a lure to market sexy perfume and rich chocolate. I do not think we can give up the word so easily. Sophisticated modern Christian writers, such as Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, defend its validity, interpreting original sin as a metaphor for our flawed and precarious human condition. Each saw sin, not as the opposite of virtue, but as the opposite of faith and as an expression of the distressing mixture of freedom and fate that keeps prompting us to do things that in our better moments we know are wrong.

Kierkegaard, contemplating human existence psychologically, noticed the sense of vertigo and anxiety that arises when we become aware of our finitude, and how expert we are at deceiving ourselves about it. Tillich, more philosophically inclined, saw original sin as a result of "man’s existential predicament," our haunting sense of "estrangement" from ourselves, from each other and from the mysterious source of our being. It is no wonder that he welcomed existential philosophy and literature as allies of Christian theology. In a more ethical vein, Niebuhr thought of original sin as our tendency to make our own perspectives absolute, to transform our sense of the good into the good for everyone. For each of these influential thinkers, the story of Adam and Eve is not about something that happened in a garden long ago but a powerful symbol of the human situation we confront every day. Whether or not we call it original sin, it remains a stubborn fact of the human condition.

The differing conceptions of sin found in Judaism and Christianity generate somewhat different ideas of God’s forgiveness. Since for Christians sin is more a condition than an act, more an inner flaw than an infraction, God’s grace must penetrate to the core of our being. We must be inwardly transformed. The Jewish tradition teaches that if we are appropriately penitent, God will forgive the transgression we have committed against him, but that even God cannot or will not forgive the misdeed we perpetrate against our fellow human beings. For these we must seek their forgiveness. I think Christians have much to learn from this. Too often they believe that once they have confessed to God, they do not need to reconcile themselves to the other party. But this makes it too easy. Jesus told his followers that if, on the way to the temple to offer a sacrifice, they remember something that has undermined their relationship with a neighbor, they should first go and make peace with the neighbor and only then go and offer the sacrifice. Jesus was never more rabbinical than at this moment.

But I also find something powerfully attractive in the Christian understanding of sin as a tragic flaw, as interpreted by Kierkegaard, Tillich and Niebuhr. They are grappling, as we all do, with something about us that goes even deeper than questions about ethics and morality ("sins"), as important as those questions are. They are engaging a mystery that traces back to the classical Greek recognition of the inescapably tragic dimension in life and to the universal human intuition that, although we know ourselves to be free in some sense, we also wrestle constantly with forces within us and around us that make living a moral life hazardous and enigmatic.

Like a Shakespeare play, Yom Kippur also has its antic interval. During the afternoon service, the congregation listens to a reading of the biblical book of Jonah. I look forward to this part of the service. First of all, the confessing is now over, and like most people present, I think I have had enough. Also, I love the story of Jonah, the recalcitrant Jewish prophet who is sent to call the pagan peoples of Nineveh to repentance. He takes a ship in the opposite direction to escape God’s command, is thrown overboard during a storm, is swallowed by "a great fish," and regurgitated at the very place he was trying to avoid. Still in a bad mood, Jonah reluctantly preaches to the people of Nineveh and -- much to his chagrin -- they repent and find God’s favor.

It is a charming story with all the elements of high camp. Its sheer tall-tale absurdity and blatant caricaturing appeal to the contemporary consciousness. In his pathetic ineptitude, Jonah is a kind of Mr. Magoo or one of the clueless characters Woody Allen plays in his early films. Still, its farcical quality drives home the lesson of Jonah. First of all, it is radically opposed to narrow ethnic particularism. It says that gentiles, even from a nation the Jews hated at the time, are fully capable of living righteously and basking in God’s blessedness. This is a nice touch when one hears it, as I do, with the ears of a gentile. It is also about the paradoxical tension between human freedom and divine providence. Wiggle as you may, it warns, you will not ultimately escape your destiny, even if it requires being ingested by a carnivorous sea creature. Destiny is not fate. Destiny is the framework within which we exercise our freedom and without which freedom would be meaningless. I was born a white male in America in the 20th century, with a certain body type and brain capacity. That is my destiny. I cannot change it. What I do with it is my freedom.

The Secular City — Ten Years Later

Ten years ago this spring the Macmillan Company brought out a slim paperback volume titled The Secular City. The apprehensive publisher chanced a first printing of 10,000 only after being assured by the officers of the National Student Christian Federation, at whose request I had written the book, that at least half the copies could be sold as the preparatory study book for a Christmas conference. On the assumption that I was writing mainly for college sophomores, I had tried to avoid the customary "albeits" and "on-the-other-hands" of academic theology. But, though I wanted to keep the style simple, I wanted to make the content comprehensive. I strove to apply my recent experience in a Berlin evangelical academy and my appreciation of the theology of Paul Lehmann, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the decline of Christendom, the challenge of global urbanization, the racial crisis, the adolescent pomposity of Playboy and the debasement of women in the annual Miss America pageant.

Affirming the Worth of the Secular World

The range of issues, sounds ambitious now, but I was younger then. The Secular City was written during a hectic period of a few months in 1964 while I teaching at Andover Newton, working in a lively new black parish in Roxbury and serving a few days’ time in a southern jail. In the first part of the book I tried to affirm the worth of the secular world while saying some critical things about "secularism." In the last part I vigorously attacked the new "death of God" theology movement. I granted that the word "God" had become inflated by overuse and that we might learn from the ancient Hebrews to lay off repeating it for a while, but I insisted that in his own good time God would reveal to us a way to speak of him and to him, if we remained faithful. For this last affirmation I was called "just a simple believer at heart" by one critic and a "right-wing radical" by a death-of-God man. In other parts of the book I pummeled Tillich and excoriated existentialism. I concluded with a chapter in which I tried to come to terms with Bonhoeffer’s haunting question of how we are to speak "in a secular fashion of God." Now ten years, 900,000 copies, 14 translations and millions of words of criticism later, I do not recant as a mere youthful exuberance the ideas of The Secular City. Repeat: I do not recant.

To be sure, if I were to select a book for which to be remembered by posterity, it would not be this one. Without doubt, if I were to rewrite it today, especially for nonsophomores, I would say many things differently. Even St. Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, seems to have changed his mind over the years from Thessalonians to Colossians. I would qualify the material on anonymity and pragmatism and be a little more critical of the then recently martyred John F. Kennedy. I would try to be less chauvinistic in my pronouns.

But these are minor points. For me the main thesis of The Secular City is as valid today as it was then: the secular, "nonreligious" world is also the sphere of God’s judging and freeing action. Therefore Christians need not waste their energies defending the religious theories or church-society relations of this or that passing epoch. The gospel is not dependent on any of them. Secularization -- the process by which the world becomes world, not church -- need not be fought off as a peril or feared as an enemy, except as it is elevated into a closed world view. The subtitle of The Secular City is "A Celebration of Its Freedoms and an Invitation to Its Disciplines." I still believe that the movement of God in Christ is always toward this world, this seculum, and that the mission of the church and of the Christian is to move in the same direction. I still affirm this freedom and welcome this discipleship (discipline).

Defenders and Detractors

But it is hard to be a symbol. As the years have passed, I have become increasingly aware that what I said in The Secular City began to figure less and less in the discussion. More and more my little book became a kind of mythical standard around which angry raiding parties surged, now attacking, now defending. As I watched the tumult, I was frequently as put off by what my would-be defenders said as I was by what my detractors attacked. For years I tried to ignore this debate -- feeling some sympathy occasionally for the late Marilyn Monroe, who died wishing that people would either love her or hate her for what she was instead of what she stood for. But ignoring my image got harder and harder.

Once at a conference in Mexico I was picketed by a contingent of conservative Catholic students who carried placards calling me a death-of-God priest. When I asked one student what the phrase meant, he told me that he didn’t really know, that the sign had been made by a priest who got his information from the U.S. Embassy. A kind of nadir was reached a few months ago when Deane Ferm roasted me in the pages of The Christian Century as an exponent of secularism and a contributor to the God-is-dead movement. Consequently, after a decade I find myself wishing that people would read their old copies of the little red tome again. Then the newly revived argument could at least proceed along reasonably comprehensible lines. My main intention in this brief apologia is to demythologize me.

Secularization and Secularism

Some genuine issues remain. One key question is whether one can separate secularization as a historical process from secularism as an ideology or world view. Richard Neuhaus, writing in these pages recently, said that we cannot, although he himself manages to distinguish between revolution and revolutionism. I believe that one can and must make the distinction. Secularization means a decline in the public power of religious institutions and a corresponding change in a culture’s self-definition. To oppose all secularization wherever it appears -- in Spain, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Colombia -- because it is seen as inevitably leading to secularism is historically shortsighted and strategically mistaken. Sometimes when churches are shorn of political power and people are shaken out of age-old religious world views, both benefit. The church is freed to become truly the church, and to exercise its prophetic critique of all closed systems, including churchly ones. And the people begin to see that the gods do not decree their misery.

Secularization is not the only challenge confronting the churches in the world today. We also face renascent religions and fanatic ideologies. But secularization is also not merely a passing fancy thought up by a few relevancy-mongers in the mid-’60s. We need to talk about it more, we need to argue from clear premises and with cogent evidence, and as we do so, we must look beyond the American scene.

The Centrality of Christology

Critics of The Secular City who complained that I wanted to bar God completely from the world often found themselves at odds with those who insisted that I wanted to enlist him too quickly in the cause of liberation politics. Again, the issue is still an important one. The paradox seems less baffling, however, when one remembers that the theology of The Secular City is not conventional theism, for which I hold no brief whatever.

Rather it is, or I hope it is, biblical and christological. I believe that Christian theology begins with Jesus Christ -- that point in history where, as Bonhoeffer put it, God allows himself to be edged out of history and onto a cross. The risen Christ remains the crucified one, recognized, not by his heroic powers but by the nail- and spear-marks. I also believe that since our ideas about who God is and what God does must be defined and corrected (not just supplemented) by Christ, the fact that he lived as an outcast and died a death reserved for anti-Roman rebels is not merely a fact of passing historical curiosity. It defines the manner of Christ’s, and thus of God’s, living presence in the world today.

It is Christ who defines the mission of the church too. In The Secular City I contended that the task of the church is to announce and demonstrate and participate in the christologically defined ongoing action of God (missio dei) in the world. I do not recant that either. In fact were I in a polemical mood, I might want to argue that the real "death of God" theologians are those who continue to proclaim something that happened once long ago. A God who is no longer living among the poor and absorbing the scoffs and insults of the keepers of law and custom, who is no longer judging and healing and jarring people as he did then, might just as well be dead: the "deity" of deism, not the Living One. The meaning of the Easter faith is that God is still at it.

If we keep Christology central, the vexed issue of "transcendence," which has been raised in such a confusing way recently, would not be so bewildering. Calvary’s cross means that God dwells for good and forever with those who are hurt and mocked and broken by the powers that be. All theories of God’s transcendence and immanence must be constantly corrected by this brutal fact. Therefore a church which ignores "the least of these" or which tries to effect some kind of neutrality vis-à-vis rich and poor, sated and hungry, has departed dangerously from its christological basis. A politically "neutral" church in our society -- maybe in any society -- is willy-nilly an ally of the powers that be.

Admittedly The Secular City was politically one-sided. So, I believe, is the gospel. The nearer one gets to the cross, the harder it is to uphold a concept of "transcendence" that presupposes political neutrality. We should not be confused by the rhetoric of left or right or center. Though it is not always clear in any given instance who are the hurt and who the hurters, who the wielders of might and who "the least of these," it is clear sometimes; and it is always clear whose side Christians in principle ought to be on. In any case, we should not stand on the sidelines, especially in a world where there are no sidelines left to stand on.

The Tension Between the Gospel and Theism

A few paragraphs back I mentioned the critique of the God-is-dead theologians which I included in the final chapter of The Secular City. But since it is very fashionable to excoriate them today, I now want to say a word in their defense. I believe that they have been badly misunderstood and wrongly blamed for the blatant sensationalizing of their ideas by the popular media. To their great credit, they raised, if sometimes in a confused way, the tension which must always exist between the Christian gospel and all forms of traditional theism. Does God die? As Jürgen Moltmann recently reminded us in The Crucified God, the question of how and to what extent God the Father actually experiences the death of Christ is in no sense settled once and for all. A real theologia crucis, when pursued in a consistent trinitarian manner, suggests that even death does not lie wholly outside God’s own essential being. The phrase "God is dead" was not invented by Vahanian, Nietzsche or Time, but first appears in an old Lutheran Good Friday hymn.

The point is that the One who is supremely revealed as a forsaken, impotent and abandoned lynch-law victim simply cannot be reconciled with the catalogue of divine attributes listed in most forms of theism. The question is whether we must begin with theistic premises and somehow fit Christ in, or begin with Christ and see what happens. I take the latter course, and agree with Moltmann that the gospel must oppose theism as such as atheism. We may be right or wrong, but again the issue is a genuine one. It cannot be resolved by pretending that the death-of-God movement was merely a seasonal fad or by avoiding the painful contradictions between a crucified God and the omnipotent Absolute of theism. The so-called death-of-God theologians may well have been wrong in the way they raised the question. I believe they were mistaken in the answers they proffered. But they were men of passionate honesty and deep concern. They deserve better than the scorn and belittlement they are now receiving.

Living in the City

I have not discussed here the "city" part of The Secular City, although I still believe it holds true. So I cannot agree with Jacques Ellul, who by a strangely selective reading of the Bible argues that God has placed a special curse on cities. If America’s ghettos and gray areas are poorer and more wretched and neglected than they were ten years ago, that is no reason to join the carrot-patch communes or affluent exurbanites who align with Ellul in denouncing cities. It is an even more important reason to love and care for them and -- most important -- to live in them, which I do. To support an urban style of Christian life against the rural romantic piety of most American Protestantism is not to defend the crime-ridden, auto-infested ruins we have heaped up where cities once stood. I will say no more about this point here since even my most vociferous critics have rarely charged that my plea to the churches to love and care for cities was silly or merely faddist.

I have written a few other books since 1965, but they are not the focus of discussion here. They represent an extension of themes found in The Secular City. The Feast of Fools was an attempt to explore the possibilities of a fertile view of human nature advanced by such thinkers as Huizinga, Piper and Hugo Rahner. The Seduction of the Spirit was an effort to recount, with as much candor as I could muster, what actual life circumstances influenced my theology. In it I admitted changes of direction, wrong turns, disappointed explorations, frustrating detours. I do not regret that book either.

Our whole theological scene might be more open and humane if we all made such admissions more often. In any case, as one who has sometimes been accused, perhaps rightly, of moving too quickly with theological trends, the present article should indicate that, this time at least, such is not the case. If the theology of the Hartford Appeal -- with its conventional theism, careful political neutrality and total lack of christological content -- represents the trend of the ‘70s, then I’ll be glad to swim against the tide for a while.

‘A Peculiar Thorn’

April 9 marked the 30th anniversary of the hanging of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Flossenburg. Bonhoeffer’s theology still presents us with what Barth called "a peculiar thorn." His words are frequently cited by all sides nowadays; it was he, however, who said we must learn now to live etsi deus non daretur, to live before God as though God were not. It was he who insisted that we cannot identify Christianity with theism, who spoke of the Jesus who cannot help as the only one who can help. It was he who asked the question I did not answer in The Secular City: how can we speak in a secular fashion of God?

These questions remain unanswered. I cannot accept the answer of the atheists who say that there is no God to speak about. Nor can I accept the answer of the religionists who claim that we can and should simply continue to speak "religiously." Bonhoeffer rejected both these answers. He had no answer himself -- nor do I. I do insist, however, that despite the present flurry of mysticism and spirituality, Bonhoeffer’s question remains valid and urgent. It is no fad.

I would be less than honest if I did not admit that it pleases me that, after ten years, the issues raised by The Secular City still elicit avid response and spirited disagreement. But as we argue, let us seek to be collegial. Let us not lose our sense of humor. My concern in the current theological atmosphere is not with the debate, which I find refreshing, but with a certain rancorous, ad hominem and sometimes uncharitable tone. We can do without that. There have been times in the past decade when, in the heat of polemics, I too have sometimes fallen into name-calling and motivation-questioning. For those lapses I am sorry.

In the coming second decade after The Secular City I will continue to think and write, and I will expect to be sternly criticized and roundly corrected. My hope, however, is that my critics will direct their attacks neither at me nor at what they think I stand for but at what I actually say. If that happens, then the second decade may be as interesting as the first. That having been said, now, as Socrates advised: let us follow the argument wherever it may lead.

Godless Theology

All who believe and think about what they believe are theologians. The theology of all believers is the foundation for every academic theology. But does that mean that Christian theology can be nothing other than a self-related "doctrine of faith," to echo the title Schleiermacher gave his modern theology? Does it mean that only people who are "believers" or "born again" can study and understand theology, and that they understand it because they are already in agreement with it from the outset?

Now, faith is of the essence for Christian theology, because theology does not purpose to be a theory about the Absolute, devoid of any determining subject, and the rebirth to a living hope is the subjective opening up of God’s new future for the world. But that still does not have to mean that theology is only there for believers. God is not just a God of believers. He is the Creator of heaven and earth, and so he is not particularist, in the way that human belief in him is particularist; he is as universal as the sun which rises on the evil and the good, and the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust, and gives life to everything created (Matt. 5:45).

A theology solely for believers would be the ideology of a Christian religious society, or an esoteric mystery doctrine for the initiated. It would be in utter contradiction to the universal God-ness of God, and his public revelation as the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ. It is not theology that has an absolute claim. What does have that claim is the one God, about whom theology talks in human terms. Neither the tolerance required of human beings, nor the situation of the multifaith society in which Christians exist today, can narrow down the universal offer of the gospel, and the eschatological invitation to the new creation of all things through God.

Ever since the 17th century, Pietist movements have repeatedly set up the ideal of a theologia regenitorum, a theology of the regenerate -- the reborn -- in which personal conversion was made the precondition for theology, and theology was turned into a sectarian in-group mentality. But this withdrawal into the devout self and the self-endorsing conventicle abandoned "the wicked world" to its godlessness, and was at odds with the gospel’s missionary universalism. The withdrawal of Christian presence and theology from society’s public institutions may -- as it claims to do -- preserve the purity of Christian identity, but it surrenders the relevance of the Christian message. This Christian relevance is not self-related. It is related to God’s kingdom and his righteousness and justice.

What the church is about is something more than the church. The church is about life in proximity to the kingdom of God, and about the experience and praxis of the justice and righteousness of that kingdom. So Christian theology also has to do with more than Christian self-presentation in public life. It has to do with the presentation of public life against the horizon of God’s coming kingdom. Christian theology is theologia publica. It is public theology for the sake of the kingdom. So it must be aligned and think not just intratextually, but also correlatively too. It has to be both "in accordance with scripture" and contextual.

In resisting the limitation of theology to believing Christians, we therefore ask: Is not every unbeliever who has a reason for his atheism and his decision not to believe a theologian too? Atheists who have something against God and against faith in God usually know very well whom and what they are rejecting, and have their reasons. Nietzsche’s book The Antichrist has a lot to teach us about true Christianity, and the modern criticism of religion put forward by Feuerbach, Marx and Freud is still theological in its antitheology.

Beyond that, moreover, there is a protest atheism which wrestles with God as Job did, and for the sake of the suffering of created beings which cries out to high heaven denies that there is a just God who rules the world in love. This atheism is profoundly theological, for the theodicy question -- "If there is a good God, why all this evil?" -- is also the fundamental question of every Christian theology which takes seriously the dying Christ’s question to God:

"My God, why have you forsaken me?" Dostoevsky splendidly presents the two sides of theology, the believing side and the doubting side, in two of the brothers Karamazov, Alyosha and Ivan. The one submits, the other rebels. The story which Ivan tells to illustrate his rebellion against God is a horrible one. A Russian landowner sets his hounds on a little boy. They hunt him to death, tearing him to pieces before his mother’s eyes. "What kind of harmony is that in which there are hells like this?" accuses Ivan, and replies, "Is there anyone in the whole world who could forgive, and who is allowed to forgive? I don’t like the harmony. I don’t like it because of my love for the world. I would rather keep the enduringly unreconciled suffering. . . . It isn’t that I refuse to acknowledge God, but I am respectfully giving him back my ticket to a world like this. Understand me, I accept God, but I don’t accept the world God has made. I cannot resolve to accept it."

Here Ivan does not simply pose the theodicy question with its indictment of God -- the question why God permits crimes like this. He asks the question about justice -- about guilt and expiation. He asks who could forgive guilt like this, and in doing so he gives Alyosha the word he needs: "That is rebellion. You say: is there a being in the whole world who could forgive and is allowed to forgive? There is someone, and he can forgive everything, all and everyone, and for everything, because he himself poured out his innocent blood for everyone and everything. You have forgotten him. It is on him alone that the building will be built [he means the "harmony" of the "divine world," the kingdom of God]. To him we can cry: ‘Just art Thou, Lord, for all Thy ways have been revealed."’

Protest atheism there -- the theology of the cross here. Rebellion over the "enduringly unexpiated suffering" there -- universal reconciliation through the crucified God here. In the dissimilar brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky portrays himself. Both can be found in every true Christian theology -- rebellion over the God who permits so much meaningless suffering in his world, and faith in the crucified Christ. And conversely, the person who does not believe in God and his justice ends up by no longer rebelling against the "enduringly unexpiated suffering" in this unjust world either, but gets accustomed to it.

Christian faith in God is not a naïve basic truth. It is unfaith that has been overcome: "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief." In the fellowship of the assailed and crucified Christ faith grows up in the pains of one’s own suffering and the doubts of one’s own heart. Here the contradictions and rebellions do not have to be suppressed. They can be admitted. Those who recognize God’s presence in the face of God-forsaken Christ have protest atheism within themselves -- but as something they have overcome. So they can well understand the atheists who can no more get away from their atheism than they can get away from the God whose existence they have to deny in order to be atheists. Christian theology is theology for Christ’s sake, and in Christ it reaches out beyond the alternatives between simple theism and the atheism that corresponds to it.

In the fellowship of Christ the justification of God by way of an "unflawed world," and the calling God in question through the evil and suffering in this world which is so bitterly flawed, are no longer "the last word." So Christian theology does not belong solely in the circle of people who are"insiders." It belongs just as much to the people who feel that they are "outside the gate" (as Wolfgang Botchert puts it). A Christian theologian must not just get to know the devout and the religious. He must know the godless too, for he belongs to them as well.

Horizons of Hope

"In hope we were saved" (Spe salvi facti sumus). Pope Benedict's encyclical Spe salvi, released in late 2007, begins with this quote from Paul's letter to the Romans (8:24). Benedict goes on immediately to speak of redemption: "According to the Christian faith, "redemption "-- salvation -- is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present." Commenting on this encyclical is the German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who has for years pondered a theology of hope.

If we compare Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi, with Vatican II's 1965 document on "Joy and Hope," or Gaudium et Spes (also known as "The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World"), the peculiarity of Benedict's encyclical immediately catches our eye. Benedict's encyclical is intended for church insiders; it is aimed spiritually and pastorally at the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church and "all Christian believers." It limits Christian hope to the faithful and separates them from those in the world "who have no hope."

By contrast, Gaudium et Spes begins with the church's deep solidarity with "the entire human family." This solidarity is described as follows: "The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts." The Vatican II document addresses and responds to the concerns of today's world: human dignity and human rights as well as peace and the development of an international community.

None of these concerns is discussed in Benedict's encyclical, which begins neither with the solidarity of Christians with all people nor with the universal "God of hope." Rather, it subjectively and ecclesially begins with "us": "in hope we are saved." We and not the others; the church and not the world. This is a stark distinction indeed between the believing and the unbelieving or otherwise-believing: we have hope--the others have no hope.

"Faith is hope" is the first heading following the introduction and is the encyclical's primary expression of confidence. What is meant, however, is actually the reverse. "Hope is synonymous with faith." With this formulation, the distinctive character of Christian hope fails away. The encyclical could also have been called "Through Faith We Are Saved." One wonders why Paul and the entire theological tradition of faith and hope have thus been altered.

The encyclical positions itself apologetically in response to modern complaints that Christian hope is "individualistic" and in contrast calls it communal. Salvation has always been seen as a "social reality." "While this community-oriented vision of the 'blessed life' is certainly directed beyond the present world, as such it also has to do with the building up of this world." Yet the section ends with a warning: "Are we perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are overgrown?"

What is lacking in the papal writing? What is missing is the gospel of the kingdom of God, the gospel that Jesus himself proclaimed. What is missing is the message of the lordship of the risen Christ over the living and the dead and the entire cosmos that we find in the apostle Paul. What is missing is the "resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come" as it appears in the creeds. What is missing is the salvation of a groaning creation and the hope of a new earth where justice dwells. In short, what is missing is the hope of the all-encompassing promise of God who is coming: "See, I am making all things new." By limiting hope to the blessedness of souls in eternal life, Benedict also leaves out the prophetic promises of the Old Testament. Christian hope then becomes hard to differentiate from a Gnostic religion of salvation.

The encyclical criticizes the modern world's faith in the idea of progress and human delusions of grandeur. Because faith in progress was finished off by the catastrophes of both world wars in the 20th century, the papal critique resembles the killing of a corpse. The same applies to the critique of the modern Age of Reason and the modern bourgeois and socialist revolutions of freedom. The enthusiasm of the philosopher Immanuel Kant for the Enlightenment is discarded while feudalism and its absolutism that granted no rights is ignored. The corpse of Marxism is subsequently convicted of "fundamental errors." Marx's real error is materialism. "He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil." Late-born anti-Marxism is rarely more smoothly put!

The pope appropriates the "self-critique" of modernity that came to expression in Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's treatment of "the dialectic of enlightenment": "Man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope." That will not convince modern, thinking persons, however, since they have already absorbed this self-criticism, and for it they need no theology.

Supported by the Second Vatican Council, Catholic and Protestant theologians entered into Christian-Marxist dialogue in the 1960s through the Catholic Paulus-Gesellschaft. The participants tried to bring the humanistic Marxists, who were acquainted with evil and knew the power of death, near to grace and the hope of the resurrection. Milan Machovec and Roger Garaudy understood very well the deficiency of the immanent hopes of the modern age, and we theologians, for our part, took up their passion for the liberation of the oppressed and for the rights of the humiliated. The "theology of hope" and the "theology of liberation" arose from a cooperative-critical engagement with the situation of modernity. "Political theology" shaped greater frameworks for the deepest solidarity of the church "with the entire human family."

The statement that "a world without God is a world without hope" is in its simplicity empirically misleading, for a world with God is empirically also a world with resignation and terror in the name of God. Hope depends on the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ, on the God of the resurrection of the coming kingdom on earth. Only this One is the "God of hope." Only this God is expected to be the "One who comes."

The encyclical does well to name "settings for learning and practicing hope." "Prayer as a school of hope" is named first. That is certainly correct. But prayer is just as much a school of faith. What joins hope to prayer? It is watching. In the temptation of Gethsemane, Jesus asks the sleeping disciples only this: "So could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation." Prayer is always linked with waking up to the world of God and the awakening of all the senses. In prayer we hear and speak, in watching we open our eyes and all our senses for the arrival of God in our life and in the world. Praying with Christ belongs to the spirituality of watchful senses by which we "see" Christ in the poor, sick and imprisoned. That watching is the setting for the learning of hope.

Finally, the encyclical names "judgment as a setting for learning and practicing hope." That too is not false. But I want to direct the view of the end toward the beginning. The origin of hope is birth, not death. The birth of a new life is an occasion for hope. The rebirth of lived life is an occasion for even greater hope. And when the dead are raised, they enter into the fulfilled hope of life. The setting for learning hope in life, therefore, is the possibility of starting anew and a new beginning, the true freedom.

Benedict XVI closes with a hymn to Mary, the humble and obedient handmaiden of the Lord, who becomes the mother of all the faithful and is named "the Mother of hope." This is in the Bible, but so too is the other Mary, the Mary who rejoiced in God her Savior: "He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty" (Luke 1:51-53). She takes the song of Hannah from the book of Samuel and praises the revolutionary God of the prophets. Paul saw this God at work in the community of Christ: "God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, the things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.… Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord" (1 Cor. 1:27b-28, 31).

The God who creates justice for those who suffer violence, the God who has raised up the degraded and crucified Jesus, that is the God of hope for Mary, the prophets and the apostles.

Israel’s No: Jews and Jesus in an Unredeemed World

At the center of all Jewish-Christian dialogue is the inexorable messianic question: "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" The messianic hope leads us to Jesus, but it also hinders Jews from seeing Jesus as the expected messiah who has already come. Jesus replies to John the Baptist’s messianic question through his proclamation and his signs and wonders. The Gospels understand his whole coming and ministry in the context of Israel’s messianic hope. Yet it is the very same messianic hope which apparently makes it impossible for "all Israel" to see Jesus as being already the messiah. Because earliest Christology grew up in this field of tension, every Christian Christology is forced to come back to this conflict, and has to struggle and come to terms with the Jewish No. This is the fundamental question at the center of Christian Christology: Is the Jewish No anti-Christian? Is the Christian Yes anti-Jewish? Are the No and the Yes final or provisional? Are they exclusive, or can they also acquire a dialectically positive meaning for the people who feel compelled to utter them?

Martin Buber formulated the Jewish objection to the messiahship of Jesus in his discussion with the New Testament scholar Karl-Ludwig Schmidt on January 15, 1933, in the Jewish school in Stuttgart, and formulated it in such classic terms that it has been continually repeated by other Jews ever since: "The church rests on its faith that the Christ has come, and that this is the redemption which God has bestowed on mankind. We, Israel, are not able to believe this." It is not a question of unwillingness or hard-hearted defiance. It is an "inability to accept." Buber had a profound respect for Jesus, and even for Christianity; but his admission of this inability was determined by a still more profound experience:

We know more deeply, more truly, that world history has not been turned upside down to its very foundations—that the world is not yet redeemed. We sense its unredeemedness. The church can, or indeed must, understand this sense of ours as the awareness that we are not redeemed. But we know that that is not it. The redemption of the world is for us indivisibly one with the perfecting of creation, with the establishment of the unity which nothing more prevents, the unity which is no longer controverted, and which is realized in all the protean variety of the world. Redemption is one with the kingdom of God in its fulfillment. An anticipation of any single part of the completed redemption of the world—for example the redemption beforehand of the soul—is something we cannot grasp, although even for us in our mortal hours redeeming and redemption are heralded. But we can perceive no caesura in history. We are aware of no center in history—only its goal, the goal of the way taken by the God who does not linger on his way.

Schalom Ben-Chorin adopted this argument early on:

The Jew is profoundly aware of the unredeemed character of the world, and he perceives and recognizes no enclave of redemption in the midst of its unredeemedness. The concept of the redeemed soul in the midst of an unredeemed world is alien to the Jew, profoundly alien, inaccessible from the primal ground of his existence. This is the innermost reason for Israel’s rejection of Jesus, not a merely external, merely national conception of messianism. In Jewish eyes, redemption means redemption from all evil. Evil of body and soul, evil in creation and civilization. So when we say redemption, we mean the whole of redemption. Between creation and redemption we know only one caesura: the revelation of God’s will.

So according to Ben-Chorin there is after all one Jewish caesura in the history of this unredeemed world: the revelation of the Torah on Sinai, given to the people of Israel through Moses.

Gershom Scholem, finally, also reiterates this reason for the Jewish No:

It is a completely different concept of redemption which determines the attitude to messianism in Judaism and Christianity. . . . In all its shapes and forms, Judaism has always adhered to a concept of redemption which sees it as a process that takes place publicly, on the stage of history and in the medium of the community: in short, which essentially takes place in the visible world, and cannot be thought of except as a phenomenon that appears in what is already visible. Christianity, on the other hand, understands redemption as a happening in the spiritual sphere, and in what is invisible. It takes place in the soul, in the world of every individual, and effects a mysterious transformation to which nothing external in the world necessarily corresponds. . . . The reinterpretation of the prophetic promises of the Bible which applies them to the sphere of "the heart" . . . has always seemed to the religious thinkers of Judaism an illegitimate anticipation of something which could at best come about as the inward side of an event which takes place essentially in the outward world; but this inward side could never be separated from that event itself.

So can there be an anticipation or "advance payment" of redemption in some particular sectors, before the final, total and universal redemption of the world? Can the Redeemer himself have come into the world before the redemption of the world has become a real happening? This is the question of Christian existence: can one already be a Christian in this unredeemed world, and therefore exist as a messianic person? . . .

The picture which Buber, Ben-Chorin and Scholem paint of Christianity is certainly true to a particular kind of historical Christianity; but it does not fit Jesus himself, nor is it essentially applicable to the authentic acknowledgment of Jesus as the Christ which is prepared for discipleship. For all these writers call in question only what they suppose to be the Christian "concept" of redemption. But in what historical era do we find this concept, which internalized redemption into the redemption of the saved soul? There is no doubt at all that we find it in the historical Christendom which abandoned the real futurist eschatology of the New Testament and internalized human salvation, at the same time banishing the future of God to a world beyond this one, so that redemption is no longer seen in the kingdom of God, the "new heaven and the new earth," but now only in the saving of the individual soul for the heaven of the blessed.

Scholem rightly points to the fateful role played by Augustine in this development. This reduction of eschatology is generally explained by the alleged experience of disappointment over the delay of the parousia. And it is to Albert Schweitzer, the theologian of this disappointment, and to his school of "consistent eschatology" that Buber and Ben-Chorin appeal. But the historical process was in fact quite different. What internalized eschatological redemption was not disappointment over the course of history. It was the political realization of Christ’s messianic kingdom in the Christian imperium of the emperors Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian. If this Christian imperium is interpreted as the "thousand-year Reich," then the saints must reign with Christ and judge the nations. In the millennium, resistance to Christ cannot be tolerated. So in the Christian imperium sacrum there was no justice for dissidents, people of other beliefs—and Jews. Enforced political Christianization solved the problem of the heathen. The mission to the Jews was supposed to solve "the Jewish problem." Later on the Inquisition was designed to solve the problem of the heretics. The appalling "final solution" of the Jewish question was projected by "the thousand-year Reich" under Hitler’s pseudo-messianic leadership. If the church exists in a chiliastically interpreted Christian empire of this kind, then it is bound to interiorize salvation and leave everything external to the Christian emperors: the church looks after people’s souls and their salvation; the emperor claims their bodies, and provides for the welfare of the empire.

This ancient chiliastic political theology has assumed continually new forms in the history of Christendom. But down to the present day, it still dominates all notions about the Christian West, "Christian civilization" and "the age of Christendom." The Christologies that are developed in theocracies like this are anti-Jewish, because these political theologies themselves are anti-Jewish. It is not in the Christologies for Jesus’ sake that we find anti-Judaism, as the other side of the coin. It is in the chiliastic Christologies of empire and domination. . . .

This means that all presentative chiliasm and all "fulfillment" must be banished from the Christology of the church as it exists in the world of history. Jesus of Nazareth, the messiah who has come, is the suffering Servant of God, who heals through his wounds and is victorious through his sufferings. He is not yet the Christ of the parousia, who comes in the glory of God and redeems the world, so that it becomes the kingdom. He is the Lamb of God, not the Lion of Judah. What has already come into the world through the Christ who has come and is present is the justification of the godless and the reconciliation of enemies. What has not yet come is the redemption of the world, the overcoming of all enmity, the resurrection of the dead, and the new creation. . . .

Even the raised Christ himself is "not yet" the pantocrator. But he is already on the way to redeem the world. The Christian Yes to Jesus’ messiahship, which is based on believed and experienced reconciliation, will therefore accept the Jewish No, which is based on the experienced and suffered unredeemedness of the world; and the Yes will insofar adopt the No as to talk about the total and universal redemption of the world only in the dimensions of a future hope and a present contradiction of this unredeemed world. The Christian Yes to Jesus Christ is therefore not in itself finished and complete. It is open for the messianic future of Jesus. It is an eschatologically anticipatory and provisional Yes—"maranatha. Amen, come Lord Jesus" (Rev. 22:20). This means that it cannot be an excluding and excommunicating Yes, not even when it is uttered with the certainty of faith. Anyone who confesses Jesus as "the Christ of God" is recognizing the Christ-in-his-becoming, the Christ on the way, the Christ in the movement of God’s eschatological history; and that person enters upon this way of Christ in the discipleship of Jesus.

The earthly Jesus was on the way to the revelation of his messiahship. This is what people call Jesus’ "messianic secret." The risen Lord is on the way to his rule, which merely begins here, and is by no means universal, and his purpose is at the end to hand over the completed rule to God, who will then be "all in all" (I Cor. 15:28) and will arrive at what Buber calls his "direct theocracy." . . .

If the Jewish No to Jesus’ messiahship is due to inability, as Buber said, and not to unwillingness or ill-will, then there is no reason for Christians to deplore this No or to make it a reproach. Israel’s No is not the same as the No of unbelievers, which is to be found everywhere. It is a special No and must be respected as such. In his Israel chapters, Romans 9 to 11, Paul saw God’s will in Israel’s No. It is not because it says No that Israel’s heart has been hardened. It is because God hardened its heart that it cannot do anything but say No. Hardness of heart is not the same thing as rejection, and has nothing whatsoever to do with a moral judgment. To harden the heart is a historically provisional act on God’s part, not an eschatologically final one. It is an act performed for a particular purpose, as the story of Moses and Pharaoh shows.

We therefore have to ask: what is the purpose? Why does God impose on the whole of Israel an inability to say the Yes of faith to Jesus? The answer is: in order that the gospel may pass from Israel to the gentiles, and that "the last" may be first. "Blindness has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in" (Rom. 11:25). Without Israel’s No, the Christian church would have remained a messianic revival movement within Judaism itself. But because of the Jewish No, the Christian community had a surprising experience. It discovered that the Spirit of God comes upon gentiles so that they are seized by faith in Christ directly, without becoming Jews first of all.

The mission to the gentiles which Paul himself began is an indirect fruit of the Jewish No. Paul emphasizes this to the Christian congregation in Rome, which was made up of both Jews and Christians: "As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the same of their forefathers" (11:28).

It is therefore perfectly correct to say that "we shall only put anti-Semitism behind us when we succeed theologically in making something positive out of the Jewish No to Jesus Christ." The "something positive" is the mission to the gentiles, out of which the church emerged. It is not just a matter of extracting something positive out of something negative—a making the best of what is really in itself bad. According to Paul, it is God’s will which is manifested in the Jewish inability to accept the gospel of Christ. That is why Paul, the Jewish Christian, can certainly deplore the Jewish No, and grieve over his own people (9:2-5), yet at the same time he can also praise the divine Yes which manifests itself out of this No: "Their failure means riches for the world" (11: 12), "their rejection is the world’s reconciliation" (11: 15).

There can be no question of God’s having finally rejected the people of his choice—he would then have to reject his own election (11:29)—and of his then having sought out instead another people, the church. Israel’s promises remain Israel’s promises. They have not been transferred to the church. Nor does the church push Israel out of its place in the divine history. In the perspective of the gospel, Israel has by no means become "like all the nations."

Finally, Israel’s No does not make it a witness in history to God’s judgment, so that it now exists merely as a warning to the community of Christ not to fall away from faith. Just because the gospel has come to the gentiles as a result of the Jewish No, it will return—indeed it must return—to Israel. "The first shall be last." Israel is "the last" toward which everything else draws.

For Paul this was an apocalyptic "mystery": "Blindness has come upon a part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob"’ (11:25-26). For Paul, Israel’s "Deliverer" is the Christ of the parousia, the messiah who will come in the glory of God and whose name is Jesus. The Jewish No, which as Saul he maintained so zealously against the early Christian congregations, was overthrown through a call vision of the crucified and glorified Jesus. That is why Paul puts his hope for his people in the Deliverer, from Zion, who is going io come in visible glory.

Paul does not expect of this Deliverer the Jews’ conversion, and that they will arrive at Christian faith. What he expects is Israel’s redemption, and that it will be raised from the dead: "What will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?" (11: 15). Israel will be delivered because it sees glory; and this will not happen merely to the final generation. Cutting right through the times of history, it will happen to all the dead at once, "in a moment." The apostle’s hope of redemption therefore embraces all Israel at all times. His practical answer to the Jewish No is not anti-Judaism but the evangelization of the nations. For him, this brings the day of redemption closer for Israel also.

The same Christ Jesus is not the same for everyone, because people are different. He has one profile for the poor and another for the rich, one profile for the sick and another for the healthy. Accordingly the same Christ Jesus has one particular profile for Jews and another for gentiles: "For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the Jews to show God’s truthfulness, in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. . ." (Rom. 15:8-9a). According to this, Jesus is Israel’s messiah, the one who finally affirms and fulfills the promises given to it; and he is at the same time the one who has pity on the gentiles and is their savior, the savior who brings them to the praise of God. And in each case he is the one for the sake of the others.

As Israel’s messiah be becomes the savior of the gentiles. In Jesus, Israel itself encounters the gentiles—Israel with its whole history, in a nutshell and in messianic form. That is why Matthew tells the story of Jesus, not as an individual history but as the collective biography of Israel, from the flight into Egypt, the call out of Egypt, the days of temptation in the wilderness, to the story of the passion. Israel’s messiah is at the same time Israel’s representative. In Jesus Christ, Israel itself encounters believers from the nations in messianic form. Because Christ opens Israel to the gentiles, the gentiles for their part are gathered into the divine history of promise and faithfulness toward Israel.

On the other hand, Jesus encounters Israel as the savior of the nations, believed and worshiped by the many from all peoples. In this form—not directly but indirectly—he reveals himself to Israel as its messiah. In the risen Lord of the church of the nations, the peoples look toward Israel and remind Israel of the promise to Abraham and of Abraham’s faith. The only justifiable gentile Christian "mission to the Jews" is the reminder to the Jews of their own gracious election, and its promise for humanity. This is surely what Paul means by "making Israel jealous" for the faith that saves (Rom. 11: 14). The faith that is meant is the faith whose "father" is Abraham (Rom. 4:16), and which Paul proclaims as the justifying, saving faith in Christ. In the name of Abraham’s faith, Christians and Jews can already become one here and now; for, just like Jewish faith, Christian faith desires to be nothing other than the faith of Abraham.

If, then, the Christian Yes has to be looked for in this direction—if it is the Yes which discovers in the Jewish No what is positive, and God’s will—then this must also be the approach of a Christian theology of Judaism in a Christology which is pro-Judaistic, not anti-Judaistic. But this is possible for Christian theology only if Jewish theology tries on the basis of the Jewish No to understand what Buber calls "the mystery" of Christianity. After Auschwitz, that is asking a very great deal. But believing Jews too might nevertheless perhaps also ask the theological question: what divine will is really expressed in the mission and spread of Christianity? Since the name of the Lord is made known to the ends of the earth through the mission of the gospel, then Christians throughout the world pray daily with Israel for the sanctification of God’s name, the doing of his will, and the coming of his kingdom.

Cannot Israel, in spite of its own observance of the Jewish No, view Christianity as the praeparatio messianica of the nations, and thus recognize in it the way which its own hope for the messiah is taken to the nations? The messianic preparation of the nations for the coming of redemption would be without any basis if it did not proceed from the messiah himself. In the light of his future he comes into the present through his gospel, and opens men and women through faith for the redemption of this unredeemed world.

But this vista throws the question back to Christianity: would it not have first of all to be so lovely to look upon that Israel would be able to see it as just such a praeparatio messianica of the world of the nations? The answer requires a profound renewal of the church and a fundamental revision of its theological tradition, for Jesus’ sake.

Anachronism and Adventurism: Recent Mission Trends

Since the early 1960's I have served as a missionary in four Latin American countries, and during that time I have become increasingly concerned about burgeoning missionary activity that is reminiscent of 19th century attitudes and borders on adventurism. Some of those involved in the trend among denominations to send more and more full-time missionaries to foreign countries -- in addition to short-term volunteers being sent out directly by local churches -- seem to be ignoring the enlightened approach to missionary presence that the historic mission boards developed after many years of experience.

Much of what I have observed in recent years flies in the face of what my own experience and training have taught me. I recall that as a missionary couple, my wife, Delaine, and I had to undergo a long process of filling out questionnaires, taking psychological and psychiatric exams and sitting through extensive interviews regarding our own understanding of mission before being accepted by the United Methodist mission board. Once accepted, we were required to have more than a year of language and cross-cultural training before being sent to a mission field.

Back in the '60s, we who are now "old timers" thought of ourselves as a new breed of missionaries, well trained in the language and culture of the host country and determined to help its church leaders dismantle the structures of dependency and paternalism. This attitude was encouraged by the mainline mission boards, which had become sensitive to the revolutionary winds that were blowing through the developing countries, especially the countries of Latin America. We were encouraged to read Richard Shaull's The New Revolutionary Mood in Latin America, Ivan Illich's The Seamy Side of Charity, James Michener's novel Hawaii and other works critical of traditional missionary practices.

When Delaine and I took on our first assignment -- in Argentina -- we found an already well-established national church, with a publishing house, a seminary and other educational institutions run by capable administrators. We accepted our board's requirement that we would work in Argentina as willing servants under national leadership and as supporters of the national church's own mission goals. Tensions developed with some older missionaries who insisted on bringing in funds for a project of their own that had not been approved by the national church. Resistance to that traditional approach to mission finally resulted in their leaving the country. The national church leadership in many Latin countries has become stronger over the years, producing such leaders as Argentina's Jose Mignez-Bonino, a prominent theologian and past president of the World Council of Churches, and Methodist Bishop Federico J. Pagura, until recently president of the Latin American Council of Churches.

My wife and I left Argentina in 1968 but returned to serve another term in 1985. We were 'pleased when we discovered that the missionary force of 20 we had known in the '60s had been reduced by three- fourths. When we returned to the U.S. after this term of service, I could not sympathize with the church people who were quite concerned about the significant decrease in the number of UMC missionaries on the field. Mission supporters in local churches should rejoice over the fact that many missionaries have been able to work themselves out of a job and that the ministry in the national churches is in good hands.

About five years ago I asked a group of national church leaders in Rosario, Argentina, to tell me frankly if they still wanted North American missionaries to work in their country. One pastor replied, "We still have a need for the kind of missionary who is knowledgeable about the historical, cultural, political and theological perspectives of Argentina in general and of Argentine Methodists in particular." Another pastor added that part of a missionary's orientation should consist of "many hours reading Argentine political history and some of our basic ecclesiastical documents such as 'The Missionary Strategy of the Argentine Evangelical Methodist Church."' All agreed that any missionaries, whether long-term or short- term, should be able to adapt to the national church's needs as that church understands them, regardless of any preconceived notions of the missionary role.

Still another pastor remarked, "There is always room for a sensitive and enlightened missionary presence here as an alternative to the invasion of North American sects and religious corporations." The pastors told me that, according to the Argentine Registry of Non-Catholic Religions, more than 2,000 free religious movements, including Protestants and other minority religions, are registered in Argentina -- most of them related to ultraconservative or fundamentalist North American groups. One of the pastors characterized Pat Robertson's daily appearances on radio and TV as "giving our people a lopsided interpretation of the gospel and an ultrarightist political ideology."

Nowhere is the missionary invasion more evident than on the island of Hispanola, where I recently served as a pastor in the Dominican Evangelical Church in the city of Barahona in the Dominican Republic. I didn't have to leave my front porch to witness the almost daily advent of new mission groups that came to canvass the neighborhood. Sometimes I would note at the Barahona dock the arrival of one of the two evangelical "mercy" ships, that frequently showed up there. Once, out of curiosity, I accepted the invitation extended to local pastors to go aboard. While we were there a Bible teacher, with a translator at his side, lectured us on how to evangelize. I was the only non-Dominican in the audience of 30-some pastors. Two of the Dominicans told me that they had come not to hear a gringo lecture in English, but to see if the ship was going to hand out any building materials or foodstuffs as it and its sister ship had done in the past

Within a few days a luxury yacht from England, loaded with both evangelists and state-of-the-art navigational equipment, put in at Barahona long enough for the evangelists to make a three-day canvass and witness. The evangelists told me that they planned to sail through the Panama Canal to carry their message to various islands in the Pacific.

Granted, the situation in Hispanola -- with Haiti occupying one-third of the island and the Dominican Republic the other two-thirds -- is different from that of Argentina. Protestant missionaries first arrived in Argentina in the middle of the 19th century, whereas none reached the Dominican Republic until the late 1920s. Presbyterians, Methodists and Moravians united to form the Dominican Evangelical Church; this church and the Episcopal Church were the dominant non-Catholic denominations in the country until a variety of Pentecostal and other missionary groups arrived on the scene -- and grew at a phenomenal rate. Haiti was the target of the largest influx of missionary groups and voluntary work teams until social unrest escalated sharply in the late '80s and early '90s. Then hundreds of missionaries who no longer felt safe in Haiti began to view the Dominican Republic as a more fertile field.

Three years ago Domingo de la Cruz, pastor of the Pentecostal Church of God in Barahona, invited me to a meeting of the local ministerial association, which was attended by 47 evangelical pastors. De la Cruz told me that there are now more than 100 evangelical churches and church agencies operating in this city of 80,000 and in outlying areas. The evangelical groups include Pentecostals, Nazarenes, the Bible Temple, the Triumphant Church of Jesus Christ, Defenders of the Faith, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Free Methodists, Youth for Christ and Youth with a Mission. Other non-Catholic groups such as Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses exclude themselves from the association. By contrast there are only eight local Catholic priests. Though most of these non-Catholic groups have national leadership, they are highly dependent on parent organizations in North America.

The problems resulting from dependency have been the concern of mainline denominational mission boards for some time. These boards are also aware of the dependency that still confronts national church leaders as well as congregations. I have attended several meetings at which national leaders and mission board executives tried to find ways to make the national churches less dependent on their parent churches abroad. This effort has been extremely difficult due to the great disparity between the affluence of the parent churches and the relative poverty of the churches on the receiving end. However, much of the funding that used to be channeled to national churches through mission boards is now being spent by local churches and judicatories on their own hands-on mission projects. The dependency-creating resources which left the foreign field through one are now coming back through another. Whether or not the organizers of the volunteer projects will be able to help their workers manage their resources in such a way as to minimize dependency and paternalism remains to be seen.

Representatives of still other North American and European religious groups were continually arriving and seeking converts during our time in Barahona. On one occasion a parishioner informed me that "the Four Square people [Los Quadrados] arrived in town today looking for a mission project." The poverty of the people in this part of the Dominican Republic, though perhaps not as acute as in nearby Haiti, is dire enough to make them susceptible to the enticements of the dependency trap. Many of the representatives of mission agencies and volunteers in mission start handing out free items as soon as they arrive -- no doubt with the best of intentions. Some of the local people have been so conditioned toward dependency that they automatically extend a palm up to any foreigner they happen to see. Barahona's many street children often greet foreigners with the one English sentence they know well: "Give me a dollar, mister."

I once attempted to dissuade a man who was standing on a street corner passing out U.S. dollars. He told me that he wanted to help the Dominican people and had decided to come to Barahona to give away his excess wealth. I commended him for wanting to help but suggested that the way he was doing it was only adding to the problem of dependency. Delaine advised him to purchase picks, shovels and wheelbarrows for a group of citizens who wanted to improve their community's dirt road. He decided to do just that -- and the people he wanted to help were able to do something for themselves.

A minimal amount of cross-cultural briefing could help benevolent visitors avoid contributing to the problem of dependency and also avoid getting into the kind of intercultural misunderstandings that often cause a mission project to go sour. One particular example of this kind of misunderstanding comes to mind. One day a volunteer-in-mission group arrived to lay the foundation for a new church in Mella, one of the poorest towns in the Dominican Republic. The foundation they began to install was the size of a skating rink -- for a congregation consisting of fewer than 15 people. The group had brought with them 200 pairs of sunglasses and proceeded to dispense these at the town's main plaza. Sunglasses are a sought-after commodity in this tropical town, and the volunteers were suddenly surrounded by a mob of more than 500 people. The 300 who didn't receive sunglasses became very angry - which, in turn, angered and bewildered the well-meaning volunteers. The volunteer decided to leave town, even though their building project was just getting under way.

Most of the volunteers I have observed in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere have arrived on the field with the desire to work with, not for, the nationals. However, many volunteers lack even minimal cross- cultural sensitivity or knowledge of their own denomination's understanding of mission. Such people are apt to repeat the mistakes of the past. On one occasion a group of American evangelical volunteers traveled to Barahona to spend two weeks "working with the youth." After they returned to the U.S. I asked the president of our youth group what he thought of the volunteers' work. He replied: "They said that they had come to us with a mission, but they took no time to understand our mission. They should have come to share with us. It's as though they felt we had nothing to give them. They spent a lot of time on the beach handing out tracts and lying in the sun. Evidently this made them feel good."

Another group came supplied with their own food and water and worked hard laying blocks for a building, but they kept to themselves and couldn't be persuaded to attend church services or Bible study with the people for whom they were erecting the building. The local congregation wanted the volunteers to be present at some of their meetings, but the group felt that their inability to speak Spanish would make them uncomfortable, so they spent their free time sightseeing. However, some other groups with even less cross-cultural experience developed a close relation with the local people and managed to communicate through sign language.

Of course, one should not overlook the positive contributions of the volunteer-in-mission movement. Many volunteers have helped supply national churches with badly needed physical resources and have been effective witnesses to their faith. Nonetheless, the fear of mission board executives that growing numbers of enthusiastic but poorly prepared volunteers would undo some of the self-sufficiency that had been developed in national churches over the years is not completely unfounded.

In his article "Amateurs Abroad" in the Christian Herald (July-August, 1988) Horace J. Fenton points out that between 1978 and 1988 the number of short-term volunteers in mission zoomed from 6,000 to more than 60,000 serving in 130 countries. In 1988 there were 350 agencies sending out short-term volunteers; one of them, Youth with a Mission, sent out more than 20,000 that year. Fenton says one World Vision volunteer summed up the historical significance of the volunteer movement when he declared that "we're in a transition period between missionary ages.

Whether or not church historians will look back on the present outpouring of missionaries and volunteers in mission as a new missionary age remains to be seen. But mission board executives are beginning to reassess this movement that has been sweeping through both mainline and evangelical denominations and agencies. They can no longer afford to ignore the fact that local churches and regional bodies are upstaging them by sending teams to build churches in the former Soviet Union and volunteers to teach English and evangelize in China and Cuba. Whether those being sent to such countries have sufficient missionary experience and cross-cultural skills is, of course, another question.

The value of the volunteer-in-mission movement may lie not so much in what its volunteers are able to do for the poor as in what this kind of hands-on experience does for the volunteers. In debriefing sessions I have noted some of the statements made by recently returned volunteers. Said one: "I went down there to do something for those people, and their testimony changed my life. I will never be the same because of this experience." Another: "Once you go out with one of these teams, you want to keep going back because you felt God at work over there." One of the hymns that has become a favorite with United Methodists who have gone to Latin America is "Cuando el Pobre." A part of the first verse goes: "When the poor ones who have nothing share with strangers... Then we know that God still goes that road with us."

Some of us "old timers" surely have an obligation to make an appraisal of new trends in mission in terms of our mission experience and the theological and philosophical perspective of the mission board that first sent us to the field. I dealt with 15 or so volunteer-in-mission teams while serving in the Dominican Republic, and I know from this experience that career missionaries should try to prepare the way for such teams and help them become oriented to the situation in which they will be working. Of course, career missionaries probably will no longer be on hand in most of the places where short-term volunteers go to serve. In such cases the volunteers themselves should take on the responsibility of soliciting orientation materials, reading articles on cross-cultural adaptation, and getting in touch with consultants from national or regional mission agencies, missionaries on home assignment or in retirement, and experienced volunteers.

The new trends in mission will probably be on the scene for some time. One observer may be correct in saying that through these trends "God is raising up a new army." If such is the case, criticism such as this cannot do 'any harm. But we old-timers might be able to help the new soldiers in their training.

Passing Through Hard Facts: The Poetry of R.S. Thomas

In Great Britain, Ronald Stuart Thomas has long been considered one of the pre-eminent Christian poets in the English language. In the U.S., however, he is little known. The publication of his collected Poems last year by the University of Arkansas, which ought to have been something of a major literary event, went virtually unnoticed.

But then, Thomas has always had to struggle against secular critics’ prejudice toward explicit religiosity. And his spare, often brutal depictions of the human encounter with God have also puzzled Christian readers, sometimes offending their sense of propriety and orthodoxy. The new collection offers American readers a chance to inspect Thomas’s very concentrated and consistent religious vision and to experience the disturbing power of his religious assessment of our planet.

And disturbing it is. Consider "The Island," from the 1972 collection titled H’M, which nicely illustrates Thomas’s characteristic concerns and technique.

And God said, I will build a church here

And cause this people to worship me,

And afflict them with poverty and sickness

In return for centuries of hard work

And patience.

And its walls shall be hard as

Their hearts, and its windows let in the light

Grudgingly, as their minds do, and the priest’s words be drowned

By the wind’s caterwauling. All this I will do,

Said God, and watch the bitterness in their eyes

Grow, and their lips suppurate with

Their prayers. And their women shall bring forth

On my altar, and I will choose the best

Of them to be thrown back into the sea.

And that was only on one island.

Laid out as a string of facts, accruing weight through conjunctions -- 12 "ands" dot the text -- the piece claims first of all to be a history. The opening line, "And God said. . ." draws us into the history that begins Genesis. It is a metaphysical, not a metaphorical (and certainly not scientific), version of history. The poem is not strewn with the symbolist’s ambiguous images -- something the parabolic structure of so many of Thomas’s poems might lead us to expect -- but is instead coldly descriptive. We read of a church and the material of which it is built; of a way of life characterized by "sickness," "poverty" and "centuries of hard work and patience"; thoughts and attitudes, religious practice and desire; and of the wind and the sea. In the end, we are told that there is more to be looked into, more to be lived and grappled with, perhaps even with these same lines and edges to experience: "And that was only on one island." Nonetheless, what is given in the scope of these 14 lines is a complete history of one community of people as they are pushed against the surfaces of their existence and attempt to live with the God who lurks behind.

Some features of the poem are understandable in light of Thomas’s background. He is an Anglican priest who served the Church of Wales as a parish vicar in several small rural churches before retiring in 1978. Although something of a Welsh nationalist, it is not politics but the land, with its succession of human inhabitants, that has animated his imagination. His last parish, in isolated Aberdaron on the coast, brought him back to the sea which his father had sailed as a merchant seaman. Thomas has described his own delight in wandering among the rocks and along the hills, watching the birds and observing the natural spaces within and against which his fellow citizens have pried out their livelihood. "The Island," despite its unspecified locale and ungenerous elaboration, is firmly moored to the people and places Thomas has observed.

At the center of the purely descriptive life of this particular poem is the church, its building and its practice. It makes its appearance first as something alien to the people, thrust on them as either a gift or an imposition. Despite having a life of its own, the church takes on the life of its people, becoming them even in the inert substance of its construction: "And its walls shall be hard as! Their hearts, and its windows let in the light! Grudgingly, as their minds do." Irrespective of its relationship with God, the church as a physical entity comes to be identified with the people; it is their mode of civilized expression, through which relationships are molded. And all the time it remains just outside their control, and suggests a certain stubborn enmity with them, brutalizing them insofar as it allows itself to become their tool. In the end, the women sacrifice their children on its altars, trusting in a delusion of protection, the responsibility for which is unclear. Civilization, and the church as a kind of vestigial appendage to this uncontrollable human invention -- vestigial at least in modern terms -- are for Thomas an object of subdued, though often angry, reflection.

Surrounding the somewhat recalcitrant materials of community and religious culture are the far less easily mastered elements of the natural world, which in "The Island" is represented by the light, the wind and the sea. All three elements are like assaulting creatures. People protect themselves against the light, both by the gnarled minds they have forged and the buildings they erect. They lose the grasp of their professional ideals and official purposes as the wind sucks out the priest’s prayers -- with no protest offered by the cheated congregation. And the sea, at the poem’s end, is the receptacle for the creative energies of the women. No one curses these elements, nor are they expressive of any thought toward the people they seem to overpower. The natural world resides in a kind of muted and ambiguous dignity beside the repetitive activity of the human community.

But since "the best" of the villagers are "thrown back" into the sea, one wonders if perhaps some deeper kinship, unacknowledged or even resented, is implied between the people and their environment. Thomas frequently dwells upon the continuities, both good and evil, between these often inimical relations. Their hinted common origins, in fact, point to something greater beyond either.

For from out of this natural history Thomas attempts to cull some mark of God’s presence. Within the story of the poem, God is effectively silent. The people speak, both through their prayers and through the visible tale told through their eyes, and the wind gives voice to the forces of the world about them and impinging upon them; yet God has nothing to say. Prayers are not answered, the light is not clearly derivative of its Maker, and the sea does its business without comment or divine elucidation. The poet is forced to ascribe invisible actions to God which, accurate and true though they may be, keep God’s presence veiled. God "causes" and God "watches," God "chooses" and God "does," but all these verbs are ascribed to God only indirectly, within the discourse of the history. God is said to "build a church here," with certain walls and certain windows, among certain people, but this, it becomes clear, is only an elusive attempt by the poet at explaining a bewildering fact of culture. God "watches" the people become bitter in the endless ineffectiveness of their prayers and "chooses" certain children for drowning. Yet here again, we realize, the assertions contain only the seeds of possibility and, most important, do not affect the outcome of the story one way or another.

By the end the reader understands the seeming fantasy of the plot that begins, "And God said." The poet’s imaginary discourse is not an attempt to propel the story into the realm of fable, but rather his only means of articulating an impossible voice. The actual silence of God amid the desperate facts of the community’s life demands imagination. And this divine stinginess is not unrelated to the predicament of the people’s hearts and minds, from which only prayer can bring some kind of undefined freedom, as it flies out into the unknown reaches of the wind.

Though it is possible to blame God as a petty tyrant manipulating the world’s weak, Thomas steadfastly avoids doing so. God silently watches the people’s flailing, but he also somehow defines the people’s origin. It appears that Thomas is proposing something unusually sweeping: God is not some false answer to the human predicament, nor simply the brutal cause of their distress but the very predicament itself. Far from fighting God or grasping at God, human activity takes place within coordinates that are God, and that constitute any activity’s origin, locus and end. The limited geography of the island, circumscribed in its history, too, only points to this encompassing and upholding divine context.

Thomas’s vision of redemption flowers slowly from his descriptive exercises. For in his view, salvation is a statement of the truth and thus there is something redemptive in description as such. In "The Word," from the 1975 volume Laboratories of the Spirit, the figure of Christ alluded to in the title is masked in the simple call to tell the truth:

A pen appeared, and the god said:

"write what it is to be man."

The vital power to describe the truth, according to Thomas, is an act of God for the restoration of humankind. It is also an act which, by its reiteration of hard fact, participates in the truth it describes -- something which, as we shall see, lies at the base of the incarnation.

To have some knowledge of God is to be open to the cruelties of history, to describe what is, in truth, where the truth is painful. And yet all that can be said from such a posture about the purpose of creation is that God is present in it and linked to it. Sin and redemption are facts that remain without logical relation to this knowledge. And so they too, along with God, can merely be reported.

The opening poem in Laboratories of the Spirit, "The Hand," makes this point clearly. Appearing before God without reason or explanation, the hand seems to be of God’s own making. But it is also God’s opponent, wrestling with God for the chance to create. "Tell/ me your name," the hand cries, "and I will write it/ in bright gold . . . The world/ is without meaning, awaiting/ my coming." God is both wary of the hand’s purported mission and unable to oppose it wholeheartedly. "This was the long war with himself/ always foreseen, the question not/ to be answered. What is the hand/ for?" God knows the outcome of this creative emanation, and is saddened by it. "As at the end/ of a dark tunnel, he saw cities/ the hand would build, engines/ that it would raze them with. His sight/ dimmed." Eventually God acquiesces, letting loose upon the world -- or is the world itself created by it? -- the power of his imagination and ingenuity. "‘I let you go,’/ he said, ‘but without blessing./ Messenger to the mixed things/ of your making, tell them I am."’

Tell them I am. It is the final and only articulated purpose God breathes into the fragments of creation. The objects of human and divine fabrication have no meaning beyond themselves but one: to tell of God’s being, even in the midst of obsessive and destructive pursuits.

This is hardly a vision that makes sense of human affairs. Thomas recognizes that there is more comfort in firmer, more intelligible readings of the world, and he refuses to dismiss the value of cultural religion and its explanations. The church, after all, is also capable of truthtelling. "Many of us have/ gone mad in the mastering/ of your medium," he writes in a poem called "Shadows," explaining the difficulty of entering God’s acknowledged purposes.

But he also sees that there are other recourses: Looking at the world as it is, while also making use of the religious apparatus offered in its midst, provides an indirect reward to the inquirer.

I will open

my eyes on a world where the problems

remain but our doctrines

protect us. The shadow of the bent cross

is warmer than yours. I see how the sinners

of history run in and out

at its dark doors and are not confounded.

There is the possibility of self-deception in embracing the church, but it is one mixed with the possibility of survival, which for Thomas is the one great sign of hope’s legitimacy.

For with time, Thomas says, the shadows can take substance. In one poem an 85-year-old man, who has spent his many years beating "black and blue" the land, "warped inside/ And given to watching, sullen-eyed,/ Love still-born," now sits alone in a corner before the fire, with nothing left to dream on but the self-delusions of his past. But because he is "The Survivor," as the poem is entitled he has the chance to face facts and to gain some kind of redemption:

Old and weak, he must chew now

The cud of prayer and be taught how

From hard hearts huge tears are wrung.

As in "The Island," the continuity of people’s efforts in the face of their environment and the unremitting constancy of their unanswered prayer allow at least the possibility of apprehending God and knowing oneself. In "Emerging," a beautiful poem about the effort of waiting upon God, Thomas writes:

In everyday life

it is the plain facts and natural happenings

that conceal God and reveal him to us

little by little under the mind’s tooling.

If only one can wait to pick through to the encrusted core.

But a voice sounds

in my ear: Why so fast,

Mortal? These very seas

are baptized . . .

You must remain

kneeling. Even as this moon

making its way through the earth’s

cumbersome shadow, prayer too,

has its phases.

The natural world’s patience is the model of the constancy required of the Christian. The shape of hope is not detailed, but its possibility -- as vast and unspecified as the "baptized seas" -- depends on our becoming attuned to the shape of the world.

It is in this posture that the light of redemption is finally perceived. The prayer of patience is always answered, Thomas says simply because it is at one with the unruffled surface of what is. Where Christ has specificity in his poems, it is at the end of a long process of encountering the hard and unnuanced substance of the world’s surrounding. This is why reference to Christ is so rare in Thomas’s poems, and why the recognition of Christ’s power is so ambiguous. God’s Son is too much like the world to be either evident or obviously attractive. And yet, he is not wholly obscure, either, to those who pass through the hardness of "plain fact." In his weakness and ordinariness, in the ease of his dismissal by those seeking something larger, in the character of his fragility, which fits so neatly into the world and into what is despicable about the world, Jesus is the Nobody whose prayer can mirror and fulfill the plodding of true prayer.

In "The Coming," God shows his Son the tiny globe of the world, its "fierce colour," its lights and shadows, the filth of its civilization, and its brittle energies. The natural and human objects of the earth are viewed with a dispassionate regard, "as through water," the distance enforcing the integrity of the examination. Christ sees plain fact, as Thomas would say, without illusion or desire. Yet it is this realm that Christ chooses as his own, for no other reason than an impulse, or perhaps because of the echo of his own being heard within the world. As the people wait, he takes his place among them:

On a bare

Hill a tree saddened

The sky. Many people

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For a vanished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs. The son watched

Them. Let me so there, he said.

By conforming so perfectly to the desire of plain people – people who, at any rate, are willing to live out the authentic character of their inevitable waiting -- Christ provides the small mark of God’s presence. "I choose white, but with/ Red on it," writes Thomas in the tiny poem "Song," "Like the snow/ In winter with its few/ Holly berries . . . like Christ/ Comes to us in his weakness,/ But with a sharp song."

It is such conscious "choice" that Thomas seems to believe is the only effective Christian vocation -- consciously taking hold with one’s eyes the cast-out landscape that numbs through its repetition and unarticulated contours, and resting there with it until the spot of suffered color brushes by. As always with Thomas, the heart and the land are one in their capacities -- spirit and fact are inseparable -- and so physical experience has the power to reveal God’s passing. For Thomas, that revelation is no small blessing.

There have been times

when, after long on my knees

in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled

from my mind, and I have looked

in and seen the old questions lie

folded and in place

by themselves, like the piled

graveclothes of love’s risen body

["The Answer"].

It is clear that Thomas’s poetic vocation coincides with this choice for the world’s factual colors to which he points as a means of grasping the possibility of salvation. If his work becomes more familiar to American readers, the distinctive option he offers will also become more keenly appreciated.

From ‘Liberation’ to ‘Exile’: A New Image for Church Mission

For many socially responsible seminarians in the late 1970s, liberation theology was the only show in town, the only show in a culture that seemed unwilling even to consider the social challenges of the gospel. Those of us who were uneasy with the simplistic and politically rote conclusions to which liberation theology gave rise had no other examples to follow. Tired North American denominations offered no parallel to the martyrs and confessors of the church in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Perhaps the notion of liberation itself is becoming tired these days, although you wouldn’t know it from our church presses or seminaries. Liberation is an almost normative lens through which whole churches are asked to see their mission. The themes is sounded again and again in books, articles, Bible studies, meditations and ethical exhortations.

Yet here we are, in the same state as at least a decade ago. Statistics indicate that major denominations—including traditional black churches—have increasingly exclusive memberships, defined along economic, class and ethnic lines. Churches in inner cities and poor rural areas are closing, while those that remain are often composed of commuting members with little interest in the church’s neighbors. The nation’s poor are increasingly unchurched, excluded from or without access to Christian communities.

Why haven’t things changed? In part because although liberation rhetoric has increased in the form of statements, resolutions, protests, pickets and boycotts, church-people are not effectively engaged with social ills or with the poor. Articles and teaching sessions are devoted to social scandals like the increase in hunger, poverty, homelessness and illiteracy in the U.S. Likewise, issues surrounding U.S. foreign policy, aid and grotesque military appropriations are frequently critiqued on behalf of a foreseen new social order that will be founded on liberationist principles. But it is rare to come across material dealing with the practical tasks of reforming communities.

For instance, a recent editorial in The Other Side—a Christian magazine known for its commitment to social justice—made a plea of almost baroque passion for the abolition of prisons. The argument was made according to a classic liberationist reading of the scriptural mandate. Absolutely nothing, however, was said about our violent culture which precipitates the need for prisons. Nothing could be said, for within a liberationist understanding of God’s will there is little room for considering how, short of overturning society at large, Christians should respond to particular social problems. This is rhetorical posturing on a grand scale. In fact, a liberationist outlook obscures rather than clarifies the practical imperatives of Christian ministry within the U.S.

We can address issues like crime and habitual drug use only if we are willing to address the social universe that fosters a complex set of behaviors and expectations. To alter significantly the shape of such a universe is to engage in what can be called a process of "totalistic" transformation, for attitudes and motivations are a crucial part of what needs to be addressed in any attempt at change. Private groups that attempt to provide transitional or new low-income housing to the homeless, for example, are recognizing the need to transform both internal and external environments. They are beginning to offer services above and beyond shelter: training in household management, daily monitoring of lifestyle habits like drug use, directed job-searches, organized support groups and pep-sessions and sanctions on miscreant behavior. Usually such programs have in mind a relatively uncomplicated image of a "responsible" home-dweller or employed person, but in any case they uphold an image of social life according to which people are being formed, and which governs the application of certain formative methods.

These efforts represent only a tiny, voluntary, private attempt at dealing with enormous issues of personal and group change. Yet we are beginning to recognize the necessity of such totalistic transformation—and of changing behavior according to some recognized authority. We are also beginning to yearn for such renewal in our social policy.

However, these insights put socially active Christians and their churches in a dilemma. The liberationist would see the church’s vocation as one of delivering people from the contexts that foster crime and drug use. But breaking the bonds that create such contexts demands a totalistic social intervention that, carried out in the political sphere, verges on the totalitarian. We are seeing proposals to draft young people (read poor young people) into a military style of national service. Linking educational achievement with the right to drive and other rights is already a legislated practice in some places. Evicting from public housing not only individuals accused (not convicted) of drug-dealing and use but also families is becoming accepted policy. Forced relocation and dispersal of poor families into new neighborhoods is being considered in some cities. Enforced contraception for, female teenagers has been suggested on the pages of prestigious newspapers. Massive arrests and police "sweeps" are now regular occurrences in some urban areas where drug-dealing and gang violence are endemic. Due process in the criminal-justice system is crumbling in the face of the need (and call) for a swift and decisive response to crime.

In a country where the state’s incursions into the family sphere is vigorously resisted, a call for a liberating reordering of social structures by the church would realistically demand a Christian alignment with policies many might consider "protofascistic." (This is already taking place with the Christian right in this country, wherever it has sought to pursue a theocratic vision.)

Such an alignment is inconceivable to most progressive Christians. Though some might espouse an overthrow of the American social system, commitment to civil liberties is so ingrained that few could accept the kind of coercive steps necessary to implement totalistic renewal on whatever political basis. This is particularly the case as issues of poverty become increasingly entwined with drugs and violent crime, which in any case demand immediate coercive interaction by some sanctioned authority. Thus liberationist spokespeople are left to issue prophetic calls necessarily devoid of the practical guidelines their commitment to political change would entail.

But the church is not without avenues for faithful response to issues like drug use and crime. Within the tradition of church-state separation in the U.S., totalistic renewal has been the voluntary province of the churches. (In much the same way, religious groups acted as agents of voluntary totalistic reform within the multicultural world of the Roman Empire.) Reaching out and incorporating new members and inculcating in them behaviors and expectations congruent with the vision of the Christian community has been the main activity of the churches’ mission across the centuries. It has been the means for the transformation of many socially marginal groups in the U.S., from poor rural whites in Methodist and Assemblies of God churches to rural and dislocated urban blacks in Baptist and Church of God in Christ churches. These highly self-conscious groups have deliberately, and on the basis of well-articulated evangelical mandates, provided the means for motivational and educational upbuilding. In so doing, they have also been the vehicles for upward mobility, although this has rarely been an explicit goal.

This traditional mission of totalistic renewal has been forgotten in recent years as the character of our churches has reflected a secular culture of economic consumerism. Only the "sects," like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have maintained both the vision and the motivation to seek people outside the economic and educational mainstream of the nation and transform the contours of their social realities within a community of faith.

These groups (along with non-Christian sects like the various Black Muslim groups) have been vilified by the political right for being anti-American and for refusing to accept patriotic values or for resisting participation in the political process. (Similar charges were leveled, until the last generation, against the larger fundamentalist evangelical bodies, whatever their economic status.) They have also been scorned from the left for their seemingly uncritical espousal of economic self-improvement that may or may not be connected to the capitalist system but certainly has done little to challenge it in the political sphere.

Such a balance of distaste might well hint at the coherence and integrity of sectarian Christianity in the U.S., at least as it concerns such churches’ ability to incorporate socially marginal groups into a community that provides the basis and the tools for purposeful and materially sufficient existence. They show themselves to be separate communities, capable of totalistic renewal.

In contrast, liberationism fails to liberate today because of a general inability to understand the church as a community apart from secular society—a separate community with both the clearly defined means and the vocation to evangelize and form new members from among those whom the society at large has abandoned. It makes little sense for churches to work at becoming liberating agents when they refuse to become communities that are themselves inclusive of the people they seek to serve.

Liberation, with its theocratic embrace of the whole of our society’s political structure, has failed as a theme by which to define our church’s mission in this country precisely because it denies the sectarian nature of reform built into this nation’s polity. It is rather the growth and expansion of religious communities, separate but within the larger society, that will engender vehicles for noncoercive deliverance. In this regard, the image of "exile" is far more fruitful than "liberation" in helping the church to understand its ministry.

In most cases, liberationist theologies have taken root in situations that call for freedom from existing government and economic structures. In the U.S., issues of hunger are most frequently linked to lack of money, not arable land, and lack of money is linked either to un- or underemployment or entitlements. Addressing these issues does not necessarily require a complete political restructuring. A religious culture seeking an effective, faithful response to these issues would not pursue freedom from existing government and economic structures, but would manipulate them in order to strengthen an alternative community, a community formed by a coherent set of values that are at odds with the surrounding culture. This response forms an identity of "exile," not liberation. Ironically, the notion of exile is poorly understood by Americans, even though immigration and assimilation are the basis of our vigorous commonwealth. In other parts of the world, exile is both a legal construct and a way of life.

Traditionally the Christian church has internalized its own experience of exile within an alien culture and adopted a spirituality suffused with exilic qualities. For Christians exile has been not only a condition forced upon a small group of people but a state into which everyone was called by God for their human maturation—a place of formation, where attitudes and motivations were molded by a community without earthly roots.

The Puritans struggled uneasily with the concepts of exodus and exile. It was not until evangelical Christianity flourished in the 19^th century that a truly exilic perspective was explicitly linked to missionary outreach and proved capable of expanding the community of churches to include socially marginal groups. The exilic Christian community has always seen itself as a vessel of deliverance—a vessel, not an agent.

The image of exile returns North American churches to one of the central strands of New Testament ecclesiology. Rather than calling for the theocratic transformation of an entire society, much of the New Testament calls people out of an existing society into a theocratic alternative that is to continue in the midst of the larger society until the inbreaking of God’s own action. Rather than positing a dualism of political structures, as within an exodus framework, the New Testament posits a dualism between communities of values within a single society.

The First Letter of Peter perhaps best exemplifies such an exilic ecclesiology, although certainly Paul’s letters and Jesus’ life point to similar visions of the church’s mission. Exilic language, explicitly used in the opening of I Peter to describe the Christian community, revolves around a number of constants. God’s elective love buttresses the more practical elements of the church’s posture. The reality of living within a culture fundamentally at odds with the shape of God’s love creates a yearning for what God has not yet brought to pass.

The shape of such distinctiveness has too often been ignored as a subject of inquiry; it has certainly been avoided as an object toward which to be converted. Since in large measure Christian distinction involves the use of resources like money and time, as well as vehicles of primary regard like Scripture, prayer and extrafamilial commitments, promoting such identity involves a hard confrontation with the values of our secular environment. This in turn points the church to the way of the cross as the social character of exile. Few churches in the U.S. have been willing to push such a foundational self-understanding.

American Christians are part of a political system that depends on their participation. Churches of an exilic character, however, are not merely participants; they are alternative, tolerated communities. By maintaining the integrity of the Christian community in the face of the dominant culture, churches can rediscover the means to embrace new members from the margins of their culture, forming a commonwealth in exile, a distinct and enticing place of renewal.

Exile is a move to that realm where divine liberation can begin to take on meaning, because it springs from the longing of a separated people. If the churches cannot groan, God shall never hear. That is the secret of the exodus, and the moment to which we are called to return. That it takes place long before the parting of the waters is perhaps one reason for our reluctance. But the return into exile is also the movement by which our Lord delineated deliverance. As such, it can hardly be a cause for fear.

Imagination in Religious Pluralism

Even before the arrival of the Europeans to the continent they named America, religious diversity was a reality here. The religious ways of peoples indigenous to this part of the world were themselves varied and alive, and the European newcomers brought with them the religious traditions[1] of Europe. True, in some cases the immigrants set up colonies in which only one of these traditions was to be permitted, but in others small Jewish communities were established in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Also very early in our history slaves were brought to these shores and with them came Islam and African religious traditions, although the system of slavery crushed the practice of these religious traditions as part of its dehumanization of those it chose to buy and sell as working and breeding stock.

So it was, that even before we as a people thought of creating the political reality called the United States of America; even before launching the on-going social experiment in which we now live, religious diversity was one of the many threads from which the fabric of our society was and continues to be woven. One no longer has to go overseas to experience "the Muslim world." Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, DC, and Springfield, Indiana, to name but a few cities, are now squarely within the Muslim world. Sikhs are our taxi drivers, accountants, and dentists. Buddhists are professional basketball coaches as well as our financial advisors or our grocers. Hindus are our doctors, computer programmers and scientific researchers. Indeed, America’s religious diversity is now more visible than ever before. It is not uncommon to see people wearing the distinctive dress of particular religious traditions, or read articles in the newspaper about the celebrations of a variety of religious groups. Or perhaps even more striking is the growing indication of our diversity to be seen in public buildings. In working- and middle-class neighborhoods in and around New York, Boston and Los Angeles and other cities, one walks past ordinary-looking houses which turn out to be small Sikh gurdwaras, or modest monasteries accommodating the priests and prayer halls of small Sri Lankan, Vietnamese, Laotian or Tibetan Buddhist groups. In Pittsburgh, a beautiful Hindu temple sits on a hill as clearly visible a manifestation of our new religious diversity as the domed mosque that rises out of the cornfields along an interstate highway on the outskirts of Toledo. Possibly the best picture of our current situation is to be seen driving along New Hampshire Avenue for several miles in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside our nation’s capitol. Here one will find another Buddhist temple and monastery, a large new mosque and Islamic center, a Ukranian Orthodox Church, a Disciples of Christ Church, a Hindu Chinmaya Mission center, a Ukranian Catholic Church, and a Gujarati Hindu temple. In addition, along this same stretch of avenue, Hispanic Pentecostals, Vietnamese Catholics, and Korean Evangelicals share facilities with more traditional Methodist, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian congregations.[2] The religious diversity of America is not only more physically visible; it is becoming part of our everyday landscape as never before.

How odd, then, that prior to the present generation the experience of so many of our people – especially in white communities -- has been one of religious and cultural homogeneity. It is only now that we are confronting and being challenged by a diversity of religious traditions and cultures which it is impossible any longer to ignore. As the Rev. James Forbes, senior pastor of Riverside Church in New York City reminded the international summit of religious leaders meeting in early September 2000 "We were once strangers in the past, but now we are neighbors in the global village." But what in human terms is involved in being neighbors in our global village? The answer to such a question, rather, has to do with a single word – the word we. Thinking of our world close up, as if it were a village of one thousand, forces us to confront what we mean when we say we. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith was wont to say, the meaning of the word we constitutes one of the most important facts about any people.[3] Is it we Christians, we Protestants, we Americans, we preachers, we human beings? Our we will include different people at different times and we need to signal this in our preaching and liturgies. But, how often does our we include people of other faith traditions, other nations, other races? How often does our we link rather than divide? Our relation with the "other" may move, as Smith suggests, through a number of phases. First we talk about them – an objective "other". Then, perhaps we talk to them, or more personally we talk to you. Developing a real dialogue, we talk with you. And finally, we all talk about us, all of us. This is the crucial stage to which our interreligious dialogue must take us if we are to be up to the task of creating homiletics adequate for a diverse and interdependent world.[4]

There is we language in every religious tradition, for the we issue is not simply a sociological matter but a theological issue, inextricably related to our deepest religious values. Hindus speak of the whole world as a single family – vasudhaiva kutumbakam. Buddhists speak of the sangha, ecclesial community, of the four cosmic directions; Muslims find ways of interpreting the umma, the Muslim community, in a broad and open sense to include all people who have aligned their lives toward God. Jews speak of God’s covenant with Noah as a covenant with all who keep basic moral precepts. There may be isolationists who see the future in terms of widening the distance between we and them. But in every tradition there are also currents of thinking and imagining that are attempts to steer toward a wider we, a we that links rather than divides.

In the Christian tradition, there is the language of the oikos, the household. The Gospel of John (14:2) tells of the household of God in which there are many mansions. It is commonly known that from this term oikos comes the word oikoumene (or ecumene), that means the household of the "whole inhabited earth." It is not surprising that the Christian ecumenical movement found this term expressive of the worldwide extent of the church, a universal household. And yet clearly the "whole inhabited earth" is not Christian[5], or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist. And yet, surely the bard is right.

There is scarce truth enough alive, to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accurs’d. Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of this world. This news is old enough and yet it is every day’s news.[6]

As we have seen, old enough, too is the habit of centuries. Cultures and religions relate themselves defensively to the rest of the humanity, believing in their identity as the service of truth – a conviction that at the same time reserves them from the human whole to which their truth belongs. Indeed, the impulse to the inward conservation of themselves suspects and refuses the pressures of a larger fellowship and, all too confidently – yet not confidently enough – they ‘salute their brethren only’. But surely we cannot have our own humanity unless we confess it everywhere. In the end, the denial of a common humanity is the damnation of our own. Nature leaves no ultimate privacies and now history is strenuously confirming the same lesson.

In the context of our pluralistic yet interdependent world, Benedict Anderson suggests that imagination plays critical role.[7] In fact, Anderson argues, the most powerful mapping of the world and its boundaries is not done by geographical survey teams or the armies of the world. It results from the power of the imagination, which creates and bears for us a sense of community, a sense of we—national, religious, cultural, multicultural. Indeed, as imagined communities, religious traditions are more ancient and more tenacious than modern nation states. Hindus posit the image of a four-petaled world lotus, with India being the southern petal. Muslims have a strong sense of center, spiritual but not "ecclesiastical," anchoring a world community of faith. In a very different way, the Roman Catholic Church has a strong sense of center, so much so that "Rome" and "the Vatican" convey a whole ecclesial order and authority. The Buddhist tradition is highly de-centered, with its imagined communities more ethnic than universal. The Oglala of the Great Plains thinks of themselves as one people among the "Seven Fireplaces" of the Sioux. The Aboriginals of Australia link their imagined community to the land and time they call "The Dreaming".

The body is a common image of the interrelatedness of the imagined community. For both Christians and Hindus, the body is an image of the interdependent whole. In the Christian tradition, the "body of Christ" is the church, one body with many members. The eye cannot say to the hand, nor the head to the feet, " I have no need of you" (I Corinthians 12). In the celebrated Vedic hymn called the Purusha Sukta (Rig Veda X.90), the whole created order – temporal, moral, and social – is seen to be the body of the cosmic person, Purusha, divided up in the primal sacrifice which gives rise to the creation. While the body is a holistic image for community and in that sense is positive, it is also a hierarchical image. There is a head and there are feet. No matter how valuable the feet are made to feel there is hierarchy. An image inherently hierarchical will not be adequate to imagine our interrelations as communities of faith in an interdependent world.

In developing a sense of we that is wider than the we of religion or culture it will be important to have an image of what kind of human relatedness we wish to bring into being. People of each religious tradition have dreams of what the world should ideally be and how we should be related to one another even though we are not all the same. Glimpsing one another’s dreams is an important step in beginning to reimagine the we. Do we imagine ourselves to be separate communities, concerned primarily with guarding one another’s rights in a purely civic construction of relatedness? Do we imagine ourselves to be related as parts of an extended family, or as many families of faith? Do we imagine ourselves to be religious communities competing in goodness and righteousness, as the Qur’an (42:14) puts it? Imagining a wider we does not mean leaving our separate communities behind, but finding increasingly generative ways of living together as a community of communities. To do this we must imagine together who we are.

Many religious traditions have their own distinctive visions of the imagined community of diverse peoples. In the Christian tradition the dominant image of the community coming into being is the Kingdom of God—the world that God intends, the world of which we must be co-creators. The New Testament is filled with images of the Kingdom. This imagined community is not finally the Christian community, but the community of the whole-inhabited earth. In Jesus’ time, as in ours, the term kingdom was intended somewhat paradoxically. Jesus overturned the regal understanding and expectation of "kingdom," for what was envisioned by Jesus was not like any earthly kingdom. This imagined community would not be imposed from above and ruled from on high, but would grow from the smallest seeds, like big bushes from tiny mustard seeds. It would be a kingdom inherited not by the rich and powerful, but by the poor, the widows, the homeless, and the strangers. This community would not secure its identity by dominion or exclusion, but was imagined to be an open house for all the peoples of the earth, coming from the East and the West, North and South, to eat at table together. This imagined community is not off in the future in some heavenly place and time, but among us in community in this very world and within us. It is not some other place, but this place transformed by justice and filled to the brim with peace. The Kingdom of God is much wider than the church; it is the Kingdom of God, not the Christian church. The role of the immediate followers of Christ in bringing this to be is not imagined in grandiose language, but in the most humble domestic language. We—all persons of faith—are to be like yeast in the bread dough, like salt in the food, like a light to the path.

Both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are among the many for whom the image of the household suggests our close relatedness. King introduced his talk "The World House" with these words:

Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: ‘A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.’ This is the great new problem of mankind (sic). We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu – a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest. Because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.[8]

A household gathers together a large and usually complex extended family, with all the diversity of temperament and personality that human beings possess. The imagined community of the household includes both hospitality and mutuality. A household may also have its hierarchies , but they are not the built-in hierarchies of the body. They will be open to challenge and negotiation. There is no household without its arguments, but its foundation is undergirding love and its language, the two-way language of dialogue. Can we imagine the world, locally and globally, as such a household? Can we imagine the diversity of religious faith and tradition as such a household?

The household as an imagined community makes even more proximate the inequalities of the village of one thousand people. The rich will see the suffering and hunger of the poor in the very rooms of our common habitation. The household elicits from us the true recognition that, as King put it, "in a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s sister and brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."[9] To imagine such a household will require what King called a "revolution of values." "A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must be ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind (sic) as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."[10]

Part of the revolution of values is a revolution of attitudes, a revolution of theological attitudes being foremost among them. A household cannot function on the underlying premise of exclusivity, though each community within the household may be exclusive in some things, such as its central rituals. A household cannot finally function on the underlying foundation of inclusivism either, for it will have to be our household as human beings, not ours as Christians, Muslims or Buddhists, to which everyone is welcome. No one community can set the terms for the whole. The underlying foundation of the world household will finally have to be pluralism.

In a household, people meet and live with one another at close range. The Hindu and the Christian know the Muslim and the Buddhist, who rise before dawn for prayer or meditation. Each community hears and overhears the prayers and sermons, the songs and silences of the others. Their privacy is respected. Occasionally there are invitations to join in. There are joint celebrations. Each community also hears and overhears the hypocrisy of the others. As in any household, we come to know one another at our best and at our worst. We cannot sustain our pretensions to perfection.

Whether globally or locally, the household provides the context for understanding one another, not as strangers, but as neighbors. Mutual understanding may well lead to mutual transformation, as each of us begins to catch a glimpse of the glory as seen by the neighbor. And above all, it provides the context in which the commitments of our faith can enable us to join with one another to solve the problems of our interdependent world.

But is this possible interreligiously? Thomas Merton, one of the foremost leaders in interfaith spirituality of our time, in lecture notes jotted down shortly before his untimely death answers in the affirmative. "I am convinced that communication in depth, across the lines that have hitherto divided religious and monastic traditions, is now not only possible and desirable, but most important for the destinies of twentieth-century Man (sic)"[11] John Dunne, another prominent guide in this area, expresses a similar conviction more graphically. "The holy man of our time, it seems, is not a figure like Gotama or Jesus or Mohammed, a man who could found a world religion, but a figure like Gandhi, a man who passes over by sympathetic understanding from his own religion to other religions, and comes back again with new insight to his own. Passing over and coming back, it seems is the spiritual adventure of our time."[12] Such a spiritual adventure is not only a new possibility, but also a new necessity, if we are to be neighbors in the religious diversity of our global village.

This has, among other things, implications for our worship, interpretation of scripture and preaching arising from shared visions of neighborliness in the religious diversity of our global village. Indeed, what we are talking about pertains to the business of interreligious dialogue. But the practical question has not yet been asked, let alone answered: how actually to go about it? This how-to question comes up especially in view of the assertion that in interfaith dialogue one is called upon to enter into another’s experience.

Perhaps religious imagination can provide such a point of entry into the heart of another’s personal faith. In recent years there has been much talk among theologians and religious educators about the necessity of a fertile and active religious imagination. The light of revelation, it has been realized, is received along the conduit of imagination, so that the imagination plays a vital role in the origin and continuing life of all religion. If our religious imaginations become dull and dry, our personal religious lives and our institutional religious practices cannot but lose their vital meaning.[13]

Crucial for the spirituality of the individual and of the community, the religious imagination can also be the springboard from which we can project ourselves into another’s religious world. One of the most scholarly and convincing cases for the central role of the imagination in attempting to converse with a religious classic or tradition alien to us has been made by David Tracy in his The Analogical Imagination.[14] For Tracy, the effort to interpret and converse with a classic, either of our own tradition or of another, is essentially the same as the experience of a genuine work of art. In it we must risk playing a "game,"[15] a game where truth is at stake; the truth of the recognition of our actuality and possibility, a game in which we have to abandon our intellectual control and our own self-consciousness and let our feelings and imagination take over. But what can seem less serious, more private, more the product of subjectivity than the game? Yet an understanding of the actual experience of playing a game yields surprising results. When I enter a game, if I insist on my self-consciousness to control every move, I am not in fact playing the game. Rather I am playing some curious game of my own, where self-consciousness is the sole rule, while all vulnerability and any ability to transcend myself are the forbidden moves in the only role or game I am willing to play.

Pure subjectivity can perhaps account for an inability to play, a refusal to act, an impossibility of ever entering any game other than one’s own self-designated role, the narcissist game where one is sole actor and sole spectator. But pure subjectivity cannot account for the actual experience of playing any game. Rather self-awareness and self-centeredness are lost in the game. In playing, I lose myself in the play. I do not passively lose myself. In fact I actively gain another self by allowing myself fully to enter the game. Thus do I allow myself fully to be played by the game. I move into the "rules" of the game, into the back and forth movement, the experienced internal relationships of the game itself. The game becomes not an object over against a self-conscious subject, but an experienced relational and releasing mode of being in the world distinct from the ordinary, nonplayful one. In every game I enter the world where I play so fully that finally the game plays me.[16]

This game of conversing with another religious tradition, if played with serious intentionality will lead us into an experience in which we find ourselves participating in a reality that perhaps we did not realize existed. Indeed, authentic religious experience, on the testimony of those all consider clearly religious, seems to be an experience of the whole that is sensed as the self-manifestation of an undeniable power not one’s own and is articulated not in the language of certainty and clarity, but of scandal and mystery. The religious person does not claim a new control on reality but speaks of losing former controls and experiencing, not merely affirming, a liberation into a realm of ultimate incomprehensibility and real, fascinating and frightening mystery. Surely this is at the core of all religious worship.

One of the most popular and proven methods of conversing with, of listening to and learning from another religious tradition is John Dunne’s process of passing over, to which we have already made reference. Dunne offers a general description of what he sees, and I personally would concur, as "the spiritual adventure of our time":

Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and apposite process we might call "coming back," coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.[17]

From his more detailed description of this process—and from the way he actually carries it out in his explorations of other lives, other cultures, and religious traditions—it is clear that Dunne’s whole effort pivots on the use of imagination. One enters the feelings of other believers by allowing the symbols and stories of their lives and religious tradition to set off images in one’s own imagination. One then runs with the images, following them wherever they might lead. From this exercise in imagination, one has something to think about—data for possible new insights, new "theory." One then comes back to one’s own religious tradition with these new insights and tests them, perhaps appropriates them, in the praxis of one’s own life.

The technique of passing over is based on the process of eliciting images from one’s feelings, attaining insights into the images, and then turning insight into a guide for life. What one does in passing over is to try to enter sympathetically into the feelings of another person, become receptive to the images which give expression to his/her feelings, attain insight into those images, and then come back enriched by this insight to an understanding of one’s own life which can guide one into the future.[18]

Dunne points out that the possibility of such a passing over to other religious traditions rests on the recognition of the relativity of all beliefs or standpoints. No matter what I already know there is always more to know. No standpoint can be the end point. This relativity, according to Dunne, does not throw open the doors of religious relativism. On the contrary, the very experience of passing over guards against the conclusion that, inasmuch as every belief is relative, one cannot really know anything and must be skeptical about all knowledge, including religious knowledge. Passing over proves that although one never attains a final answer, one can come to more answers, real answers. The imagination is persistently excited; new insights are born; the horizon of knowledge expands. Like all of life, passing over is seen not as a nervous pursuit of certainty but as a freeing, exciting pursuit of understanding: "If I keep in mind the relativity of standpoints as I pass over from one standpoint to another, therefore, I effectively hold myself open toward mystery."[19]

Passing over, although it is mainly the work of the imagination, also requires some hard intellectual homework. Eliciting images from the symbols and teachings of another religion may not be as easy as it sounds. Usually some preparatory work must be done before one can correctly grasp and be touched by very different religious imagery. This preparatory step requires the usual historical, socio-cultural, semantic study necessary for approaching any person or classic of another time or culture. If we are dealing with a myth or doctrine, we will first have to try to grasp the basic contours of its meaning by situating and trying to understand its text, its place within a broader literary work, and its context, its historico-cultural world. We then turn this general grasp of its vision and images over to our imagination, and let our imagination takes us where it will—to new insights, to new images of the world, ourselves, God, to new modes of being in the world, to surprisingly different perspectives on the symbols and beliefs of our own religious tradition.

The course of such an adventure is indeed, an odyssey. It starts from the homeland of one’s own religious tradition, goes through the wonderland of other religious traditions, and ends in the homeland of one’s own. Much depends, if this is true, on the religious tradition where it commences and concludes. Gandhi began and ended in the Hindu tradition. He passed over to Christianity particularly, and Islam also, but he always came back again to the Hindu tradition. A Christian, in accordance with this, would begin and end in the Christian tradition, a Jew in the Jewish tradition, a Muslim in the Islamic tradition, a Buddhist in the Buddhist tradition. If we examine the matter more deeply, though we find that there is a more ultimate starting and ending point; one’s own life. One has to pass over, to shift standpoints, in order to enter the live of Jesus, even if one is a Christian, and then one has to come back, to shift standpoints again, to return to one’s own life. From this point of view all the religious traditions, even one’s own, become part of the wonderland in this odyssey. One’s own life is finally the homeland.

Lives too are the wonderland, especially the lives of figures like Gautama, and Jesus and Mohammed. It is by entering into their lives, by examining the pattern of their lives that one learns the real meaning of their words. Gandhi, for example, called his adventures "experiments with truth." Let us call ours that too, though we may come to somewhat different results. When we pass over to his life, we find that he was led by his experience to a transformation of violence into creative satyagraha, truth force. To pass over to Gandhi’s life we would have to examine our own lives, our own attitude to violence. His was also a profoundly simple life, like that of Gautama given to insight and the sharing of insight with others. Nor are the experiences of Gautama’s life uncommon – a life in the world, then a withdrawal into the wilderness, and then a return to society. What is uncommon is his insight into his own experience, his enlightenment. To pass over to Gautama’s life we would have to examine our own lives, our own withdrawal, and our return. If there is truth in this, it should be possible for us to find a basis within ourselves for understanding even such alien lives as these

Raimundo Panikkar, another veteran guide in the interreligious sphere, for all his occasional mystical evasiveness, clearly holds up mythos as the main data for interreligious interaction, data that can be grasped and felt only through imagination. The creative way his own imagination plays with and learns from the symbols and images of other religions is evident throughout his works, especially in his monumental The Vedic Experience—Mantramanjari.[20]

At the end of the final book of the Christian Bible is another kind of imaginative vision. At the center of this vision is a holy city where there is no darkness, for the glory of God is its everlasting light. The gates of the city stand open in every direction and are never shut. Through them come people from everywhere in the world, bringing into the city the "glory and honor of the nations." John’s vision draws on the earlier imaginative vision of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel (47:7-12), who also saw the city and the temple. In Ezekiel’s vision, a stream is flowing from underneath the main door of the temple sanctum, facing east. Gradually it becomes a great river. Its waters are the waters of life, pouring forth from the temple and bringing life, abundance, and healing wherever they flow. John, too, saw that river, flowing with living waters, though in the city John saw there was no temple, solely God alone. "The angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life...and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." (Revelation 22:1-2) And the water of life is free, "Let any who wishes take the water of life as a gift." It is a beautiful image. There is no temple, only the river of the water of life and healing flowing from the very presence of God. Significantly, Diana Eck confesses that, having crossed over from her home in Bozeman, Montana to Hindu Benares, she cannot read the final chapters of John’s imaginative vision without seeing Ganga Mai, "Mother Ganges" in her mind’s eye. For Hindu sisters and brothers it is the River of Heaven, encircling the divine city of Brahma, flowing from the foot of Vishnu and washing the lunar orb, cascades to the head of Shiva. It touches the earth on the top of its highest pinnacle, sacred Mount Meru, and then generously splitting into four channels to flow in the four cardinal directions, it graciously waters the entire earth with streams of blessing. "The stream of the River of Heaven I know best," says Eck, "flows south into India and even today skirts the sacred city of Benares where pilgrims come to bathe at dawn. But surely the Jordan is one of those streams of the River of Heaven—and the Gallatin as well."[21] Let the Word be proclaimed.

Notes:

1. I find important Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s (The Meaning and End of Religion, reprint, Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1994) distinction of "religious tradition" and "personal faith" as two components of what we normally speak of as a "religion."

2. Diana Eck and students working with the Pluralism Project based at Harvard University, have collected these and many other examples, both in print and photographs, of the physical appearance of the new religious diversity in the United States. These are most easily accessible in the Pluralism Project’s CD-ROM, On Common Ground (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

3. W.C. Smith, "Objectivity and the Humane Sciences," in Religious Diversity: Essays by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, ed. E.G. Oxtoby (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), and p.178.

4. Ibid.

5. In the Office on Interreligious Relations at the WCC headquarters in Geneva, a poster bears the reminder "Oikumene is the whole inhabited earth – Not just the Christian part of it."

6. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 3, Sc. 1, line 214 f.

7. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) investigates the process through which nations imagine themselves and imagine others and argues that it is through imaginative process that nations come into being.

8. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p.167.

9. Ibid., p. 181.

10. Ibid., p. 190.

11. Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973), p.313.

12. John Dunne, The Way of all the Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. ix.

13. See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, David Pellauer, trans. ( Philadelphia: Augsberg Fortress, 1995); Paul D. Avis, God and the Creative Imagination, (London: Routledge, 2000); William Lynch, Images of Faith (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); University of Dayton Review, Fall, 1980: the entire issue studies religious imagination.

14. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossword, 1981). See especially his chapters on "The Classic" and "Interpreting the Religious Classic," which might well be read as a handbook of guidelines on the nature of conversation with other religious traditions and the pivotal role of the imagination in such conversation.

15. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955) is of course, the classic modern study of the ludic character of human existence. Tracy follows Wittgenstein, who chooses the phenomenon of the "game" to understand the experience of language itself, and Gadamer, who uses it for understanding the experience of art. It is relevant to note that in this kind of "game," as distinct from other games, the spectator is necessary to play the game.

16. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp.113-15. It is important to note that in his analysis Tracy emphasizes the attitude of the players. An attitude, as Gadamer correctly insists, is ontologically dependent on the phenomenon of the game itself. It is that reality that determines the attitude of the players, not vice versa.

17. Dunne, Way of All the Earth, p.ix.

18. Ibid., p.53; italics added. In Way of All the Earth Dunne attempts this with the lives of Gandhi, Gautama and Jesus. Other studies in which Dunne carries out his method of passing over: A Search for God in Time and Memory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); The City of the Gods (University of Notre Dame Press, 1978).

19. Dunne, Search for God, p.7, also p.ix.

20. Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). See also the creative way his imagination works with the Hindu symbols of Brahma and Isvara in The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981), pp.97-162.

21. Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 231. Bozeman