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Science and theology have had a long history together. For the most part the relation has been friendly, but the controversy over evolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century led to a cultural change. During the twentieth century most people came to view this relation as one of tension, if not enmity. We owe a great deal to the Templeton Foundation, to the Institute for Theology and the Natural Sciences, and to a few other institutions, concerned individuals, and groups for the renewed respectful conversation we now enjoy..

Let us briefly review the history of this relationship between science and religion. Rather than pretend to a global approach, I will focus on the relation of Western science and Christian theology. Much of this relation has been mediated through philosophy.

Christian theology has two roots. One, of course, was the religious thought of the people of Israel especially as mediated to the Gentile world through Jesus and Paul. The second was the sophisticated thought of that Gentile world, expressed especially in Greek philosophy. In comparison with the modern period, the sciences were still somewhat undeveloped. But such as they were, they were largely incorporated into philosophy. Hence the appropriation of Greek philosophy was also, implicitly, the appropriation of Greek science.

Prior to the Renaissance noone would have thought of a conflict between science and theology. Both were formulated in philosophical terms. There could be tensions between different schools of philosophy, and thus between the different schools of theology and of science associated with them. But no theologian intended to reject the best scientific thinking of the time and few scientists would suppose that their work was antithetical to theology in general.

More important is the fact that Christian theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created a context in which the modern natural sciences took root. They flourished especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a context that would objectively seem unfavorable. In the late Middle Ages Western Europe was not especially cultured, wealthy, or educated in comparison with Eastern Europe, India, or China. Furthermore, the intellectual climate of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was quite restrictive, with the church struggling against schismatics and heretics to maintain its unity and authority. Wars were fought over theological doctrines, and individuals were tortured and killed for theological views that were deemed heretical.

Many historians have pondered what it was about Western thought at the time that, despite the unfavorable context, led to so much energy and talent being directed to scientific inquiry. That is a topic far beyond this lecture. However, we may note that the understanding of God as rational Creator contributed to this climate. If the Creator was rational, it was assumed, then the creation should embody rationally understandable order. That meant that, in order to understand God better, one should probe beneath the surface irregularities to deeper patterns that could be expressed in the purest language of reason, that is, mathematics. This theological motivation was widespread among the new scientists. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw enormous progress in the discovery or regular patterns or "laws" of nature displaying the wisdom and power of God.

The remarkable tolerance of the church toward scientists in a time when it persecuted theological heretics and schismatics so viciously is obscured by the misrepresentation of two incidents. Giordano Bruno was executed, and Galileo was silenced. However, in neither case was the church punishing a scientist primarily for the way the science threatened theology.

To oversimplify, Bruno was executed for his theological heresy – pantheism -- not for his scientific studies and results. Of course, in Bruno's mind these were closely interconnected, so that my statement reflects the later separation more than the situation at the time. Nevertheless, this statement is more accurate than the idea that the church was persecuting scientists for their scientific findings.

Galileo was opposed first and foremost by the leading scientists of his time. These were mostly Aristotelians, whereas Galileo undertook to demonstrate the error of Aristotelian science. Even today scientists are not always tolerant of other scientists who reject their basic assumptions. The church was involved chiefly, not because it opposed science, but because of its strong support of the best science of its time.

Today, we would rightly say that the church should have interfered on the side of Galileo, to insist that his evidence be carefully examined. But even today it is hard for the church to side with the scientific maverick against the scientific majority. Of course, since theology, like science, had employed the best philosophy available, that of Aristotle, the threatening of the Aristotelian worldview threatened theology as well as science. No doubt this entered into the persecution of Galileo. Bu t to think of this as expressing the enmity of the church toward science is profoundly wrong.

Descartes provided the modern materialist worldview expressive and supportive of modern science. He encouraged the mechanistic model of the natural world. One reason he did so was that it strengthened the case for Christian theology. If the natural world is a machine, then there must be a Creator deity. Machines to do no come into being by themselves. Also, any event in nature, that is not explicable in mechanistic terms, is clearly supernatural. And since the human mind or soul cannot be viewed as part of this machine, it belongs to a supernatural sphere not affected by the laws of nature. Descartes thought he could thereby prove the immortality of the soul.

The alternative view he was chiefly opposing is sometimes called Hermetic. This view held that all things had some principle of motion within themselves and influenced one another at a distance. If this was correct, then much of the order of the world could be understood from the nature of the creatures that made up the world and much that seemed miraculous from the mechanistic point of view could be understood in terms of this much richer notion of nature. This Hermetic point of view was associated with the study of magnetism and gravity and was closely connected with alchemy. Much of Newton's early work was done in the context of this approach.

However, Newton accepted membership in the British Royal Society, which was dedicated to the promotion of mechanistic science. Even though that approach was never able to deal well with gravity, it won out, partly because of its great scientific successes and partly because of religious suspicion of the Hermetic approach. Christian theology wedded itself to the mechanistic view of nature and supported the research it inspired. The theological debate was between those who believed that the world was so perfectly constructed that God never needed to intervene in its working and those who believed that such interventions, miracles, occurred. Today we might suppose that scientists would adopt the former position and theologians the latter. But in fact this was not thought of as a debate between scientists and theologians. There were scientists and theologians on both sides. Neither group wanted to restrict scientific research or to challenge its findings.

Cartesian dualism continued to characterize a broad consensus and the common sense of the eighteenth century. The vast majority of people believed that one and the same God created and ordered the natural world and also dealt with human beings in a quite distinct way. Christian theology discussed both modes of God's activity. It was often said that nature and the Bible were the two sources of knowledge of God.

Of course, there were exceptions. Philosophers wrestled with the problems of dualism, some tending to materialism, others to idealism or phenomenalism. But the common sense remained dualistic. In many circles it still does.

The great change in the relation of science and religion came about through the work of Hume and Kant. The dualistic commons sense assumed that our experience gives us an independently existing material world the mysteries of which were being more and more fully understood by scientist. Hume, building on insights of earlier empiricists, showed that sense experience gives us nothing more than sense data. We can know nothing of a material world. Whereas from the material machine one could argue to its divine cause, from the sense data, one cannot. Causal relations are nothing more than regular successions of sense data, and obviously nothing of this sort exists between the sense data we call the world and God!

Immanuel Kant was impressed by Hume's analysis but could not rest with the extreme limitations this imposed. He accepted the conclusion that we cannot move in thought from nature to God. But he proposed that we could do so from our ethical experience. Since Kant, Protestant continental theology has largely given up attention to the natural world and focused intensively and exclusively on the human one. This means that our topic of the science and theology has been given rather little attention in continental theology for two hundred years. Catholic theology did not follow Kant so readily, continuing to rely on Thomas Aquinas. However, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century it did not play a major role outside the Catholic Church.

The English-speaking world was different. Hume and Kant were studied, but they did not overthrow established habits. Common sense still supported the dualism of a material world ordered mechanistically and a human world in which freedom and morality were important. Hence evolutionary theory constituted a great crisis.

This crisis, too, is widely misunderstood. Of course, evolutionary thought is in tension with the creation story in the Bible. But this by itself would have been minimally troubling. The deeper problem was two-fold. First, it undercut the most powerful common sense reason for believing in God. If we suppose that the world more or less as we know it came into being all together, if is hard not to assume that a powerful intelligence was at work. But if it has come into being very gradually through law-abiding steps explicable in mechanical terms, then any remaining role to be assigned to God is vanishingly small. Second, if human beings evolved in this way, then they are part of the material world, mechanistically understood. It seems that freedom and morality must be illusions.

The most extreme response was simply to reject evolutionary theory. For some decades respectable scientists participated in this rejection. For theologians to side with them was not warfare against science, but favoring one scientific over another. However, the general view of evolution gained more and more empirical support. Eventually, only very conservative Christians remained as opponents. Their continuing opposition is what has given rise to the idea that theology and science are inherently in opposition to one another.

However, many theologians took other approaches. One solution, approved, I believe, by Rome, was to agree that the human body is fully a part of this world machine but that God directly creates the human soul and infuses it into the body at the point of quickening. This maintains the dualism and the role of God.

A second solution, the one that has become most influential in Protestant circles, is to embrace Kant's philosophy. This locates evolutionary theory in the sphere of theories of the phenomena, which actually cannot address the way things actually are in themselves. For knowledge of human experience and existence we turn to direct examination of the human phenomena, and it is in this sphere that theology operates. English-language theology thus, in large part, belatedly joined continental theology in walling off science from theology.

Nether of these responses can fairly be described as opposing science. They intend to leave science alone to do whatever it can do. In principle, they suppose, what science finds and asserts cannot affect what theology asserts based on entirely different grounds. There is not much incentive to engage in a dialogue between practitioners in the two fields. Hence the rather intense discussions between them in the early part of the twentieth century were succeeded by near silence in the middle part of the century.

The work of the Templeton Foundation has been impressively successful in renewing conversation. The participants are not expected to challenge one another or to feel that their own discipline and convictions are under attack. On the contrary, most of the discussion sponsored by the Templeton Foundation assumes the mutual autonomy of the sciences and theology and that mutual respect is the prerequisite for useful conversation. Sometimes during the conversation scientists and theologians find that their approaches are not as mutually exclusive as they had thought. Sometimes they find that what they learn from the other is useful for their own purposes. Sometimes they see possible patterns of mutual support.

Another solution was to argue that if human beings are part of the natural world, then the natural world is far richer and more complex that had been supposed. Instead of assuming that the natural world is a materialistic machine, we should assume that it has within it the potential to produce the subjective, purposive life we experience within ourselves. We should assume that this evolved coordinately with the evolution of physical organic structures.

There is a third response that leads to seeking a quite different relation between science and theology. This one called for revision of our understanding of the natural world. This presupposes, of course, a rejection of the philosophies of both Hume and Kant. In one way or another, it assumes, we do have theories about what lies behind the sense data that dominate our conscious experience. Science should, and indeed does, talk about a real natural world, but we are arguing that the assumption that it is best described as matter, and in mechanistic terms, is incorrect. Some of the features of human existence can be assumed to characterize other creatures, especially those from whom human beings evolved.

Those of us who adopt this view, and I should state clearly that I am among them, do not consider ourselves to be against science. Far from it. But we do believe that the seventeenth-century decision to base scientific work on mechanistic materialism has outlived its usefulness. It is time to rethink what has been called the "scientific worldview." The need to do so arises precisely from the success of science. It has now gone far beyond its original subject matter to include the human in its scope. The basic paradigm, which was plausible when science excluded the human from its scope, no longer works. The investigator must assume that he or she is not like the picture of the human that emerges when human beings are subsumed within a mechanistic, materialistic nature.

One place the problem shows up acutely is in physiological psychology. Here scientific theory and philosophical speculation are hard to keep separate. Those who approach matters strictly in terms of standard scientific habits of mind have to explain what they find purely in terms of physical events in the brain. If they acknowledge the existence of subjective states of human experience, they can only view them epiphenomenal. That is they are caused by neuronal events, but they themselves have no causal efficacy. What happens in subjective experience has no effect on the physical events in the brain, and one moment of such human experience has no effect on successor moments. Given this assumption, the research program is to show the effects of neuronal events on other neuronal events and on subjective states of human experience. Of course, such effects exist and can be studied indefinitely. That such explanation is never exhaustive does not count against it as long as the metaphysical model is not doubted.

Nevertheless, there is overwhelming common sense reason to suppose that conscious human decisions have effects on bodily behavior. I decide to write a word and my fingers type it. To say that my conscious experience plays no role is counter-intuitive. Since there is no reason other than metaphysical dogma for adopting this position, it seems to some of us that it should be reexamined. In taking this view, we are supported by some top-ranking scientists, such as Nobel Laureates John Eccles and Roger Sperry.

Once we acknowledge that human experience plays a role in the world, we may acknowledge that the experience of our animal relatives may play a role also. If so, a more adequate science will pay attention to that experience as well. Evolutionary theory will be reformulated to take account of this role.

The reasons for revision arise elsewhere as well. Best known is the collapse of the traditional model when confronted by the phenomena of the subatomic world. The discovery of this world has revolutionized physics, but the changes in worldview for which it calls have still had very little effect in other sciences.

One puzzle for physicists from Newton's day on has been how to understand light, and indeed electro-magnetic phenomena in general. The question has been whether light is best understood in terms of particles, photons, or waves. The effort to understand all of its behavior in either of these categories has proved unsuccessful.

Further, neither the concept of particle nor the concept of wave as they have operated in the context of materialistic thinking has turned out to be applicable. This is clearest with the concept of "wave". Physics has long understood waves on the surface of the water and sound waves. In both cases there is an underlying medium, water and air. The waves are patterns discerned in movements within these media. Since the mathematics used in describing wave motion in these fields work also for light, physicists long assumed that there must be a medium for light also. They called this the ether. However, experiments designed to prove the existence of the ether proved instead that there is no ether. What then is a 'wave' when there is nothing to wave?

In any case, one cannot really affirm that light is a wave, since it also behaves like a particle. No more can one affirm that it is a particle, when it often behaves more like a wave. Some scientists have said it is a "wavicle," but obviously that does not really explain anything.

Although there are some commonalities among those who call for revision in the natural sciences, we also differ in our particular proposals. Mine come from being convinced by the writings of Alfred North Whitehead. I will indicate briefly the alternative to mechanistic materialism that I have learned from him.

Instead of thinking of the world as made up of little lumps of matter moving around in space, we should think of it as composed of events. A pattern of events may have features that give rise to particle images and others that suggest waves. If a wave is an event or a pattern among events, there is no need for an underlying substance.

The next step is to further characterize an event. This depends on the example we take. If we take a large scale event such as a battle, we cannot get very far, just as modern science would not have gone very far if it had stuck to tables and rocks and failed to analyze them into molecules and atoms. Large-scale events are composed of small-scale events, and ultimately of unit events that cannot be analyzed into smaller ones. A moment of human experience is a good example of the latter.

Whitehead analyzes a moment of human experience into the relationships that largely constitute it. There are relations to previous experiences in the personal succession. There are relationships to bodily events especially those in the brain. There are relationships to the environments, especially other people, as well as to the more distant past. Whitehead believes there is also, in every momentary experience, a relationship to God.

It is important to recognize that these relationships bring the experience into being. There cannot first be an event lacking relationships that subsequently enters into relationships. The relationships constitute the event. That means they are internal to the event. The event is largely constituted as a synthesis of many internal relations.

This idea of internal relations is of great importance in the proposed revision of science. A unitary event in a field is constituted by the internal relations at that locus in the field to all the events that have transpired in the remainder of the field. A quantum event is the way the whole world is at that point. A human experience is the way the whole world comes together in some region of a human brain. Of course, a human experience and a quantum event are very different. But they do not belong to metaphysically different orders of being. Both are syntheses of internal relations to the wider world. Both unify these internal relations through a "decision", that is, a cutting off all but one way of doing so.

Between these extremes there are many other levels of actual occasions. The momentary experience of a chimpanzee is quite similar to that of a human, but we assume that the experience of flea is quite different. A one-celled organism is more different still. But all are instances of integration of internal relations to the wider world.

Given this commonality among all events, an evolutionary process productive of complex human experience is understandable. But the bias against attributing importance to intelligent purpose in the evolutionary process is no longer justified. The evidence is that animals do act with intelligent purpose and that this affects the course of evolution. Such evidence should be respected and its role in the process thoughtfully investigated.

The relation of the brain and subjective human experience can also be comprehended. But this perspective does away with the bias against attributing a causal role to human decisions. Just as the events that make up the brain profoundly influence a human experience, so also human experiences profoundly influence the events in the brain. There is no justification for the materialistic bias of so much physiological psychology.

The revised model of reality I am proposing for scientific use resembles the one that modern science rejected at an early date. That model held that every actual thing had a principle of action within itself. The notion of matter was the denial that nature contained any such element of self-determination or self-motion. Matter can be acted on but it cannot act. This has led to a strictly deterministic system of scientific thought. Despite all of its achievements, it is unable to deal with the whole of nature and leads to unacceptable conclusions.

I mentioned that the Hermetic model rejected by modernity also affirmed action, or influence, at a distance. The materialistic model denied this in spite of such anomalous phenomena as gravity. Now experiments at the quantum level seem strongly to favor influence at a distance. Parapsychology has long provided evidence in its favor. The model of events I advocate does not entail influence at a distance, but it leaves the question open for empirical determination rather than rejecting the possibility on metaphysical grounds. That seems to me another gain.

Thus far I have focused on the revision of science through the systematic overcoming of the metaphysical materialism with which its history has been so closely identified. But I speak as a theologian. It is interesting to recall that the original choice of materialism was motivated in part by theological considerations. Would returning to the view that was rejected for theological reasons be detrimental to theology today?

I think not. But it would call for theological revision. This is true especially of the way divine power has been envisioned. If the world is composed of matter, then God is the sole source of motion. The laws of motion are the choice of God. God's creation and law-giving are completely free or unilateral. This fits with ideas of God's omnipotence that were deeply entrenched in Western Christian thought at the rime of the rise of modern science and still widely prevail.

As long as metaphysical dualism prevailed, it was possible to distinguish the nature of the moral law applied to human beings from the natural law applied to nature. The moral law did not force obedience. God pronounced this law, but God gave human beings the ability to obey or to disobey. However, God's control is shown by the fact that God will punish those who disobey by eternal suffering.

Some theologians were not willing to modify the doctrine of divine omnipotence this far. They held that God actually determined human thought, purpose, and action as well as physical events. Hence God is the ultimate cause of sinful acts as well as virtuous ones. This is the official position of traditional Calvinists.

If we adopt a model more like the Hermetic one, neither of these ways of thinking works well. Divine power has to be rethought. We begin with the notion that everything has some power to determine itself and to influence other things. God does not unilaterally determine what happens. If we posit a role for God at all, it will be as one of those entities which are related to internally in the coming into being of actual occasions of experience.

Since inclusion in an actual occasion is the very meaning of causal efficacy, this in no way excludes the causal efficacy of God from the world. But it does exclude the idea of God as the sole actor. Also it excludes the notion of God acting on the world externally, as the materialistic model has required. God acts in, with, and through creatures. God influences but does not control the outcome.

How drastic a revision of theology is required to accommodate this different view of divine power and action? That depends on the theology in question. There have been theologies for which God's total control of all that happens has been central. But there have also been theologies that have emphasized human freedom and responsibility and thought of God's relation to creature, or at least to human creatures, as persuasive rather than coercive. There have been theologies that depicted God's power over us in fully external ways. There have been others that emphasized grace as the internal working of God within us. Clearly revisions of theologies that emphasize creaturely freedom and the internal working of God will be far less drastic.

An important question for Christians is whether the Bible supports or opposes the revisions that are required by the adoption of this model. Since the Bible is an immensely variegated work reflecting the views of many different authors, no simple answer can be given. Nevertheless, I believe that when our reading of the Bible is informed by Jesus and by Paul, we find that it gives strong support to this revision. This does not mean that there are no passages in the gospels or Paul's writings that suggest external divine control. But there are far more passages that suggest that God calls and we respond, that much that happens in the world is not according to God's desire or purpose, and that God works within us in a noncoercive way.

Indeed, in my opinion the notion that the Bible in general teaches that God is omnipotent is quite mistaken. It is a mistake fastened on Western Europeans by the Latin translation of the Bible. Where the Greek translators of the Septuagint used "pantocrator", which means ruler of all things, the Vulgate use "omnipotens", which means having all the power. To rule all things does not mean that the subjects are wholly powerless. To have all the power does suggest that others have no power at all.

There is a further change. In the Septuagint "pantocrator" appears almost exclusively in Job. In the Vulgate, "Omnipotens" appears frequently elsewhere, especially in Genesis and Exodus. It is its presence there that encourages readers to see the whole of the biblical account in terms of this idea. Understandably the Eastern church has never drawn the extreme conclusions that have characterized major trends in the West.

Now a further point is important. There is no word in the Hebrew that actually supports the Septuagint rendering of "Pantocrator" much less the Latin "Omnipotens". In the great majority of instances where the Greek and Latin words are used, the Hebrew is a proper name, "Shaddai." This is one name for deity in the Hebrew Bible alongside Yahweh. No doubt these names go back to a polytheistic time. The Greek translators did not want use any proper name for God and certainly not two different ones. Yahweh becomes "The Lord". Of course, "Shaddai" could also be translated that way, but given the difference they wanted to render it differently. In Job, Shaddai is depicted as exercising extensive control. The substitution of "Pantocrator" seemed to fit. Elsewhere they employed diverse terms and strategies. The Latin translators preferred to translate Shaddai more consistently and took their cue from the Septuagint translation in Job.

The point, however, is that there is no basis in the Hebrew for this move. Shad means mountain, and there may be a rhetorical connection to the myth of Marduk placing mountains on the breasts of the dead Tiamat. Some scholars suggest that the naming of the Wyoming range, the Grand Tetons is the closest analogy we have. Of course, mountains connote strength and endurance, but they do not connote total control. When they are thought of through the metaphor of women's breasts, the connotation is even more remote from omnipotence. Their power is the power of nurturing rather than control.

I am not arguing that there is nothing in the Bible emphasizing divine control of what happens. Clearly there is. I am arguing that the naming of God in terms of this relation to creatures is absent from the Hebrew Bible. I also doubt that any writer of the Hebrew Bible entertained the ideas associated with omnipotence in later philosophical theology. And finally, both Jesus and Paul reinterpreted divine power in the light of divine love.

If I am correct in my reading of the Bible, then the revisions required by the renewal of the Hermetic model support the recovery of primary biblical themes, especially those of the New Testament. There is no biblical reason to resist this revision.

Our topic is science and theology. I have indicated that a change from thinking of nature as matter to thinking of it in organic terms will be beneficial to both science and theology. The remaining question is what effect it will have on the relation between the two.

Especially since Kant, the relation has been one of leaving each other alone. Recent conversations encouraged by the Templeton Foundation lead to interactions based on mutual respect of existing ways of thought in each field. I have proposed that still better would be revision of both.

Such revision would not lead to the disappearance of differences. But it would encourage both scientists and theologians to propose ideas to each other. The Templeton programs have gone some distance toward encouraging science to explore issues important to theologians and thus promoting better thinking in those fields. From my perspective as a revisionist, I support that. But I am equally interested in a new openness among scientists to explore suggestions coming from the side of theology.

For example, Templeton funds have established an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. The idea, as I understand it, is that scientific research on the phenomenon of love will improve the work of theologians. However, I would like to see equal interest in developing this research in a way that would influence scientific hypotheses. For example, if we learn more about altruism among humans, we should also be able at some generalized level to understand relations among other animals better. I suspect that this is already happening, but my interest is in making this purpose explicit. If both scientists and theologians are informed by the same research about love, the relation of the two communities will overlap and become more mutually supportive.

The main issue here is whether scientists will be open to more consideration of the subjective side of the world with which they deal. This was not possible as long as the materialistic metaphysics reigned. Matter has no inwardness or subjectivity. It exists only for others. But the Hermetic model understands that every actual occasion is something for itself as well as something for others. If scientists allow themselves to adopt this perspective, they will be open to what we have learned about subjects, including what theologians have learned.

Let me offer an example of the kind of thing I have in mind. Charles Hartshorne, a philosopher of religion who worked with the model I am proposing, was also an ornithologist. He believed that at a highly generalized level one could find identities between the structure of the experience of birds and the structure of human experience. He was quite convinced that one reason for human singing is that people enjoy singing. This led him to the hypothesis that some singing by birds is also because of enjoyment.

This ran against orthodox scientific assumptions. They posit that birds sing only for functional reasons such as attracting a mate or establishing territory. They point out that no doubt the ability to sing developed because it had survival value.

Hartshorne could grant that such capacities develop for such reasons. This would be true of human beings also. But such capacities as language and music, once developed, can have other uses. What is the evidence that these other uses do not occur among birds?

Hartshorne developed a secondary thesis. If birds sometimes sing because they enjoy it, then birds with more complex songs would sing for greater lengths of time and with shorter breaks between songs. He assumed that birds with very simple songs would soon lose interest and therefore enjoyment. He developed one of the world's best collections of birdsong and tested his hypothesis. The evidence supported his hypothesis.

The happy ending to this story is that Hartshorne was well received by ornithologists. Many of them believed that birds were subjects as well as objects of our experience and that their subjective life influenced their behavior. Their own scientific training discouraged exploration of the implications of such views, but they were pleased that an outsider did so. On the whole, Hartshorne was better received by ornithologists than by philosophers.

Their remains the question of God and science. Would or should belief in God affect scientific work? I am not sure. A science that recognizes that a fuller explanation of what happens requires attention to the subjective side of things could, and I believe generally would, leave openings for the view that God plays a role in that inward reality. For example, once we acknowledge that intelligent purpose plays a role in evolution, we are likely to be open to the possibility that God influences such purposes in some way. Theological reflection about how God works in the world can complement scientific reflection. But I am not sure that it would suggest new research projects. I leave that open to the time when we have traveled together longer and when the understanding of God's role in the world has nothing to do with violating otherwise well-established laws of nature.

We are gathered as a quite diverse group. Yet we sense that what unites us may be more important than what divides us. I propose that what unites us is "realism" in two senses.

First, we believe that we are speaking of a real God. For two centuries, now, this has become increasingly difficult, and increasingly rare, in academic and intellectual contexts. Down through the eighteenth century, the question of God's reality was assumed to be a metaphysical one. Either the word "God" referred to a reality independent of human thought, language, and belief, or else there was in fact no reference. If one adopted the latter position, one was an atheist. But atheism was rare in European society in those centuries. Although much about God could be known, many thought, only by revelation, the existence of God was evident to reason.

Hume showed that once one accepts the empiricist idea that knowledge of what is not our own experience comes to us only through the senses, there is no cognitive basis for affirming God's reality. Kant agreed that there is no way to the reality of God through theoretical reason. Still, through his analysis of practical reason, he justified positing the reality of God. Since then the emphasis has been on the positing, that is, on the human act that grounds affirmation of God, rather than on the reality of what is posited. Theology has become, largely, anthropology.

The linguistic turn in philosophy and other disciplines accentuated this move away from the metaphysical reality of God. "God" is recognized to be a bit of language. Such bits of language have their meaning in their relation to other bits of language, not by referring to any nonlinguistic entity. In this context, the question of the metaphysical reality of God, that is, of God's existence prior to, and apart from, human language cannot even arise.

The Kantian turn to the creativity of the human mind in shaping experience and the linguistic turn to the great importance of language in shaping how we understand ourselves and our world have both made great contributions to our understanding. But from my point of view as a realist, both grossly exaggerate. The world we live in is not in fact created by our minds. We are created by the world. Language does refer to that which is not language.

For our present discussion, the crucial issue is God. In my opinion one of the reasons, a very important reason, for the decline of the old-line churches, is vagueness about the reality of God. It is hard to worship and serve either something that we posit or a bit of language. We may provide all kinds of reasons to continue supporting the church that do not involve the reality of God, but these do not evoke the depths at which Christian faith in its fullness lives.

The most powerful response in the twentieth century was the appeal to revelation and faith. The Neo-reformation movement argued that the God of reason was never the God of Christian faith. That God is known only through God's self-revelation. This was largely identified with Jesus Christ, although, in a secondary sense, at least, the Jewish scriptures were also regarded as revelatory. There was no question but that, for those in this movement, what is revealed is real, although its reality remained obscure to reason.

Hume had made the point much earlier that belief in God must be a matter of faith disconnected from reason. In his writings, this seems cynical. Believing that for which there is, and can be, no rational justification whatsoever does not seem a wise or socially desirable thing in Hume's world. That it was taken up with great success as the rallying cry for the Christian faith in the twentieth century seems remarkable. It certainly helped the old-line churches to regain some of their lost vitality.

Nevertheless, there are inherent dangers in disconnecting religious beliefs from the rest of human understanding and knowledge. The conviction that these disconnected beliefs are true is difficult to maintain. One must appeal more and more to the supernatural. The whole secular educational system makes this more and more difficult. In fact, neo-orthodoxy faded as a real option for most people after the initial excitement subsided, including most members of old-line churches. Sadly, nothing has replaced it as a unifying ground for belief in God's reality.

Radical empiricism provides an alternative to Hume and Kant and all those who follow them. It argues that our relation to that which is not our immediate experience is not exhausted by sense data, or rather that our immediate experience includes relations that are nonsensory. Whitehead provides the most systematic account of these relations. In his account, a prehension is the way in which one actuality participates in the constitution of another actuality. Thus relations to a real world are inherent in every experience. That there is a real world is not something we have to derive from sense data. On the contrary, we can show that sense data arise out of more fundamental relations.

This analysis supports the independent reality of that which is other. Of course, it also shows that that reality is quite different from the appearances given us in our sense experience. It is a world of subjects, not a world of colors and sounds that is the primary reality. Whiteheadian realism is a very critical realism.

By itself radical empiricism, including its Whiteheadian formulation, does not assert the reality of God. It simply reopens the door to that discussion. Once the door is reopened, Whitehead and Hartshorne both find convincing reasons for affirming the reality of God. This is not the place to rehearse the arguments.

The understanding of God whose reality they affirm is quite different from that of much of the Christian tradition. Both Whitehead and Hartshorne thought that their understanding of God is closer to what is embodied in and affirmed by Jesus than is the dominant tradition. Those of us who call ourselves process theologians agree with them. We find that their view also fits with the actual experience of many believers. It cuts through intellectual puzzles that trouble them. It gives sensible guidance for life.

In short it is realistic in a second sense. Although it challenges the dominant models of thought of the modern era, it does so in ways that fit the actual evidence of the sciences. Although it challenges the dominant inherited theology, it does so in ways that release the most convincing features of the Christian faith from immersion in incredible and damaging ideas.

There are many Christian communities that have not gone through this tortuous history. We may say that, in many ways, they are fortunate. But they have also had problems. The reality of God, taken for granted in these communities, is asserted in ways that create intellectual puzzles and conflict with life experience. The doctrines affirmed are sometimes discordant with what the serious reader finds in the Bible. Hence, apart from concern about the dominant philosophical context, the issue of realism, in the second sense, arises here also. Are the doctrines of traditional theism realistic?

What is striking is that reflection coming out of life experience and Biblical study in communities that have taken for granted the reality of God converge so far with the ideas of God that come from those who have wrestled with, and proposed alternatives to, the dominant philosophical views. We know that some in the conservative evangelical community have used this convergence to discredit those who have been engaged in fresh thinking. Understandably, therefore, some emphasize the remaining differences. That emphasis may be needed.

In any case, tensions continue. Conservative evangelicals may remain suspicious of some of the styles of biblical criticism that inform the approach to scripture of old-line Christians. Old-line Christians may feel that conservative evangelicals are slow to rethink some of their social and ethical views in light of the primacy of God's love. Conservative evangelicals may think that old-line Christians are too concerned about philosophical grounding and about shaping Christian beliefs in light of that grounding. Old-line Christians may think that conservative evangelicals do not fully appreciate the importance of the philosophical tradition in undercutting belief in God's reality among thoughtful people in the modern world.

Neverthelesss, our meeting together here suggests to me that these tensions and mutual suspicions are not determinative. They are topics for discussion. I hope and believe that what we share as Christian believers will prove stronger than the divergences that reflect the different paths through which our communities have come to this point. In my opinion, the inherited lines of division may give way to new ones that more usefully point to the issues of the twenty-first century rather than to those of the nineteenth.

Conservative evangelicals who interpret revelation in terms of the love embodied in and taught by Jesus Christ will not be too different from Christians in old-line churches who also understand God in terms of this same love. Both will strive to express that love in relation to other people and, indeed, to all other creatures.

While old-line believers have convinced themselves that the theology they have developed under the influence of radical empiricism and specifically Whitehead and Hartshorne is responsibly biblical, we have known that are interpretation is deeply affected by our philosophy. Hence, in many circles it is suspect, and we are often ourselves unsure as to the extent to which we may be involved in eisegesis. It is a source of profound reassurance when we find that others, not specially influenced by this philosophy, find in the Bible much of what we have found. Their work greatly enriches and strengthens ours.

On the other side, we believe that it is also important to relate our Christian faith to the natural and social sciences, to other religious communities, to the critical political and global issues of our time. We do not see that conservative evangelical friends have dealt as much with these issues as have we. We think that some of the work we have done along these lines may enrich those with whom we increasingly share the kernel of our faith.

There are other ways in which I hope for mutual enrichment. Old-line believers have too often, in recent decades, treated their faith as but one commitment among others. I hope that relating in this larger community will lead us to recover the wholeheartedness that has been better embodied by conservative evangelicals. On the other side, conservative evangelicals may join with old-line believers in a fuller repentance for the crimes committed in the past, and even today, in the name of Christ.

I do not mean in all this to minimize the importance of differences or to discourage debate. A healthy community includes diversity, and differences among those who are part of the same community often generate the most intense debates. I mean only to express my appreciation that we have defined ourselves, under the leadership of Tom Oord, as a single community, at least as a single community of discourse, inclusive of differences. Since our shared commitment to a real God of love is in fact a challenge to much of the tradition as well as to the intellectual and cultural leadership of our world, let us work in complementary ways to make that challenge effective.

1. What is process thought?

There is, of course, no true or false answer to this question. A better question would be: "How shall we use the term, process thought?" We need not all agree, but it is helpful for each to know how others use it.

I use it broadly and narrowly. Broadly, I use it to mean any style of thought that sees events and processes as more fundamental than self-contained entities such as the physical objects we see and touch. We can then, presumably, claim Heraclitus in the West and Buddhism in the East as ancient exemplars. Much Chinese thought has, at least, strong tendencies toward process. Some indigenous people have languages that are more conducive to process thinking than are the Indo-European languages. In the modern West, Hegel may be the first great process thinker.

In the narrow sense, I view these as precursors of process thought. To say that is to identify process thought somewhat arbitrarily with a twentieth century movement that can be traced primarily to Henri Bergson and William James and has its greatest systematic exposition in Alfred North Whitehead. This movement is distinctive by virtue of the seriousness with which it takes, and criticizes, modern science.

2. Process Thought as Speculative Metaphysics

A movement does not have sharp boundaries. Many thinkers reject the most obvious alternatives to process thought without wholeheartedly embracing it. The general intellectual climate of the twentieth century favored analytic to synthetic thought, whereas the movement I name as process thought seeks a fresh synthesis. This can be easily dismissed by such now pejorative terms as "metaphysics" or "speculation." Accordingly, those who have deconstructed alternatives to process thought, from Berkeley and Hume to Wittgenstein and Derida, usually decline to take the positive step of constructing a system based on a process view.

Actually, this disinclination toward constructive work with process thought is very ancient. Heraclitus was probably not much of a constructive thinker. Although Buddhism did produce impressive systems, the emphasis on the emptiness of concepts works against this process. And few Buddhists have brought their process perspective to bear on the reconstruction of modern sciences. They tend to be satisfied when they can liberate us from the hypostatization of concepts. Even among those who have found process categories helpful in one field or another, there is often resistance to generalization and systematization. This, of course, is today largely an expression of the intellectual culture. But it also gains support from the processive way of viewing matters itself. At best any system can only be a stage in the ongoing process of thought. The claim to finality, to have finally gotten it right, is excluded.

Nevertheless, the school of thought I identify as process thought is metaphysically grounded. The idea that process is more fundamental than substance is a metaphysical notion. Because events and processes are seen, at least in this school as in Buddhism, as inextricably interconnected, one is drawn to explore these relationships. A measure of systematic thinking seems almost inescapable.

Whitehead provides the most thorough account of the reasons for developing a speculative system. It is required, he thinks, for the advance of thought, at least today. He points out that the modern world, far from being the age of reason, has intentionally narrowed its horizons. It did so, originally, for good practical reasons. It had a simple model of reality that proved extremely fruitful, and it did not want to spend time discussing it. It could get on with the business of learning about nature by use of that model. Analogous models worked well in the social sciences.

The model was reductionistic, and primarily analytic, from the start. The complex is analyzed into simpler parts for study. The simpler parts are thought of as self-contained, so that internal relationships need not be considered. Research based on this model has amassed huge quantities of information. Even more impressively, it has made possible an enormous amount of manipulation and control on the part of human beings.

On the other hand, efforts to make conceptual sense of the world based on this model were unsuccessful. The common sense proposals that were offered collapsed under analysis. The notions of substance and efficient causality on the basis of which the model was constructed collapsed under analysis. Many thought the model had to be affirmed because it was so brilliantly successful. But it could not be regarded philosophically as metaphysically true. The response was to reject metaphysics. Kant made this move, and he has been the most influential philosopher of the past two centuries. He proposed that the categories of thought ingredient in this model are the only ones of which the mind is capable, but he recognized that there is no basis for asserting that they actually characterize a world other than our experience.

3. Assumption Criticism

Now there is another kind of intellectual activity that has been excluded in this whole modern adventure. It is critical reflection about assumptions. If the basic model of modern thought collapses under examination and cannot be thought of as actually characterizing an objective world, then perhaps a better model could be developed. From my point of view, the failure to consider this possibility has been astounding. Better, it seems to be assumed, to limit the capacity of the mind to analysis or deconstruction than to consider alternate ways of understanding reality! As we all know, in philosophy departments the company of speculative metaphysicians is a small one.

Now we might say, or at least think, What difference does that make? It is a reasonable question. Philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world, has so limited its topics that the results of its work make little difference. Few scientists look to philosophers for help in solving their problems. Few governments turn to philosophers for advice. Religious and ethical life in the public world proceeds with only a little attention to professional philosophers. Of course, there are exceptions, but for the purposes of this paper I must limit myself to generalizations.

If this commitment to avoid reflection about alternative basic assumptions is limited to professional philosophers, then, it may not matter much. But then we must ask, what sections of our intellectual life do make a different to what happens in the world. Perhaps physics is of some importance. Do we find that physicists are open to imagining different models of reality?

4. Alternative assumptions in physics

The answer here is that the situation in physics has been much the same as in philosophy, although I have more hope for the future. Whereas Kant preserved the basic modern model intact because he assumed that it fit the scientific facts, physicists discovered that it did not fit all of them. Below the atomic level, they could not incorporate the new data into the old model. One might wish that they had sought a fundamentally new model. Instead they tinkered with the old. The old model allowed them to think of both waves and particles. They found that in some respects subatomic behavior could be understood in terms of particles, in other respects, waves. Since it is not possible to think of one entity as simultaneously a wave and a particle, we must give up the attempt to order the world even at the phenomenal level where Kant thought it possible. But we can still make predictions and control events. All we require is still more intellectual modesty. The mind should be recognized as capable only of manipulating data and symbols. It is not adapted to explaining or understanding.

I said I have more hope here. This is because there are more influential physicists seeking an alternative today than there are philosophers. Also, they do not lose status when they make these efforts in the same way as philosophers do.

I find the example of David Bohm instructive. He devoted many years to developing a process model to replace the substantive ones that are still in use. He sometimes called his new model holographic since it was based on a radical doctrine of internal relations. In this respect it is highly congenial to process thought. Each entity, instead of being self-enclosed, is seen as fragmentarily containing all the others. Bohm could make sense of many quantum phenomena in this way. Before he died, he completed, together with Hiley, a comprehensive theory that can account for all the known facts in a far less paradoxical fashion than had been thought possible.

Physicists have, on the whole, been respectful of Bohm's work, but very few have adopted his model. Why? They answer that it makes no predictions that they cannot make on the basis of their received models. The fact that it provides a better way of understanding reality does not count in its favor so far as physics is concerned. Physicists once understood their task as being the explanation of natural phenomena. By that measure, Bohm's work counts as a great advance. But in the twentieth century, physics has redefined itself. It is a system of prediction, testing, and control. Bohm does not advance that process. Therefore his theory is not physics.

We may ask, then, what is it? Clearly it is not philosophy as that academic discipline is now defined. Understanding the world is even more remote from philosophy than from physics. It turns out that as we now understand knowledge, a theory such as Bohm's that gives us an intelligible account of the natural world and its relation to the human one makes no contribution to knowledge. So far we have reduced the use of the mind!

Why, then, do I have more hope for physics than for philosophy? Physicists have greater assurance of the acceptance of their discipline. They do not have to prove that they are tough-minded and disciplined. They are the great speculators of our time. Some of their speculations seem to me wild and irresponsible, but that is not the point. Even in their most speculative work, most of them now seek the basis for new predictions more than more coherent understanding. Nevertheless, in that context, alternative models can be considered. And a considerable number of physicists are open to such models, including process ones.

But if you share the modern anti-intellectual mindset, you may still ask, what difference does this make. Are not the majority of physicists correct that only prediction, testing, and control matter? How does understanding benefit us?

That it is possible to ask such questions shows how far we have come on the modern trajectory. There was a time when understanding was an obvious and inherent good. I continue to believe that it is. I also believe that when people are not able to have any inclusive way of understanding the various dimensions of their lives, there is a psychological price to pay. When people learn that intellectuals deny that any such understanding of the world is possible, they are more likely to accept quite irrational ideas and join dangerous cults. As a theologian I know that the intellectual arguments against the capacity of reason are widely used in support of fideism. If reason is no guide to understanding, why not adopt whatever beliefs appeal to you?

However, I will not follow this line of thinking further. If we think that physics can get along and perform its function without understanding the world, then why indeed should it rethink its models? But there are other disciplines in which the results of unquestioned commitment to modern models are quite dramatic in ways that all must acknowledge to be important. Since neoliberal economic theory is now the world's ruling ideology, let us consider that.

5. Alternative assumptions in economics

Basic models are important in all the social sciences, but economics follows with special rigor from its model of homo economicus. That model is unquestionably modern. Homo economicus is a self-contained individual with no internal relations to others. Indeed, he relates to others only through contracts. His two activities are to work and to acquire, mostly to consume. He works as little as possible and acquires as much as possible.

These assumptions determine much of the outcome of economic theory. Strictly speaking we would need a few other assumptions in order to turn economics into a fully axiomatic system. For example, we would need to note that natural resources are, for practical purposes, infinite. But for my purposes it is enough to say that the assumptions I have listed have many practical consequences when governments adopt policies oriented to economic growth on the basis of advice from neoliberal economists, or, indeed, many other economists who share this model.

The practical consequences are most easily identified in terms of what is omitted from the model. It contains, for example, no notion of justice. The goals of the economy are satisfied just as fully when distribution of income is highly skewed as when it is more widely shared. Of course, many individual economists do care about how income is distributed on the basis of ideas about human beings derived from sources other than their discipline. But today it is economic theory, not political theory, that rules political action. Distribution takes a back seat. The world's wealth is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and those to whom we turn for advice in these matters tell us it is none of their business.

Consider another omission: community. Since human beings are self-contained, their relations to one another, other than those of exchange, are ignored. Human community is in fact much more than contractual relationships. Those socialized into economic thinking tend to view these other relationships negatively when they inhibit economic growth. Leaders in "development" in the early decades after World War II often noted the importance of rationalizing the thinking or culture of traditional peoples. They meant that the tendency of people to evaluate proposals according to effects on their extended families and larger communities inhibited growth. That growth required that people move from their traditional villages to industrial centers. Too many people cared more about the quality of life based on human relationships than about the hoped for increase in income. This resistance had to be overcome.

Lester Thurow, one of the most liberal of America's leading economists, has written that the one great success story since World War II has been in agriculture. He means that in that area labor has become more productive. If labor is bad and production is good, this is just the result to be desired. Hence the enthusiasm of the economist. Sociologists who have studied the changes in rural communities, the consequences of farm bankruptcies and of former farm labor moving into cities tell a different story. But it is the economists' account that continues to shape agricultural policy globally.

Another thing absent from the economists' model is the natural world. Originally land was included as a factor of production, but it is now treated as a commodity or as capital. Natural resources can be ignored because they are infinite as long as capital is available to exploit them. This may be the assumption that has been most frequently challenged, and there is more tendency to make concessions on this than on community. However, the model has not been changed, and most economic practice continues to follow from the model rather than from the concerns of others about the environment. It is not surprising that in a world ruled by such a theory, nature continues to be degraded and we head toward ecological catastrophes.

At one level one would expect that a discipline of such influence whose effects are so grave would reflect about its assumptions. But that is to misunderstand the canalization of thought so successfully achieved in the modern world. Economics is defined as the discipline that works with this model. By doing this it can claim to be a science, and its claim is widely recognized. To raise questions about its model would upset all that. In any case it would not be economics and so would not be an appropriate activity for an economist. Actually economists call the discussion of such questions "theology," and for them that is a pejorative word. I, on; the other hand, as a theologian agree that it is a proper, and now even necessary, activity for theologians.

This is, of course, but one more case of defining a discipline in such a way as to exclude reflection about its assumptions. That it is effective can be illustrated from the biography of Herman Daly, my co-author in writing For the Common Good. Daly studied economics at Vanderbilt, and also had a keen sense of the limits of the natural world and the need to respect them as well as a strong sense of justice. He concluded at an early stage of his career that the ordering of the economy toward growth, conceived simply as any kind of increase of economic activity, was a mistake. Yet growth of this kind follows as the desired aim from the model of Homo economicus.

Daly, of course, was not opposed to all growth. Some forms of growth do no hard to the environment and are fully compatible with justice. Some parts of the world and some people in other parts need more goods and services than they now have. But the concern to meet real needs in socially and responsible ways is very different from the economists' commitment to growth as the overarching goal. If this is not the correct goal then economic theory as it now stands requires extensive revision. It would be very difficult to put forward the new theory in the mathematical form of which economists can now be so proud.

Accordingly, although Daly was widely read by the public, there was no discussion of his ideas among mainstream economists. Indeed, in their writings it is difficult to find any reference to him. There are occasional, dismissive references to the ideal of a stationary state society, which obviously have Daly in view, but typically his name does not appear, and no reference is cited.

Meanwhile Daly taught economics at Louisiana State University. Because of his wide reputation he attracted maverick would-be economists to study with him. However, the other economists there did not want their department characterized in such a heretical fashion and began systematically failing his students. Clearly they were not learning to be economists, as the profession defined itself.

At that time there was pressure on the World Bank to do environmental impact studies on its projects. To satisfy the environmentalists that the Bank was serious in making this move, the Bank hired Daly. Daly accepted because the Bank, unlike academic economists, had to pay some attention to the consequences of their policies. Because Daly had lived in Brazil and spoke Portuguese, he was put on the Brazil desk. This did not please the Brazilians, and Daly was "kicked upstairs" to a general research unit where he could not disturb the actual flow of loans.

Years later a friend was organizing an institute for policy studies at the University of Maryland. The friend had strong environmental interests and wanted Daly as his economist. However, the university would not appoint Daly in that role without the approval of its economic department. As one would expect, the department vetoed the appointment.

The story has a happy ending. Outside the community of economists Daly has received many honors. Their ostracism of him has not prevented him from getting his word out. For many years he has been in great demand as a speaker. He holds an honored place in the Society for Ecological Economics, which is quite large, even if few leading members of the economics profession belong. And finally his friend raised special funds to bring Daly to a chair so defined that it did not require the approval of the local economists. I tell the story not so that you will feel sorry for him but that you will see the strength of the resistance to consideration of alternative assumptions. Perhaps the economists are right, and the only place where this can take place is in schools of theology.

6. Alternative assumptions in theology

The chances of reconsideration of assumptions increases if the members of a discipline study its history. This is because historical study tends to relativize everything it studies. We see that the assumptions of physics developed in the effort to exclude teleology from nature, not because there was empirical evidence that purposes played not rules in the natural world but because the medieval preoccupation with teleology was an obstacle to progress. One might then judge that the exclusion of animal purposes from the study of animal behavior today is an obstacle to progress that requires a changed model. But those who do not know their history assume that "science" eternally requires mechanism. That there are courses in the history of a number of disciplines, taught as part of the study of those disciplines, holds promise. But in general these courses are too marginalized to have been effective.

Perhaps the topic in which the study of history and the development of conclusions are most closely intertwined is theology. Work is not theological if it is not intentionally and explicitly rooted in a tradition. The study of the tradition is not theological if it does not raise questions about fundamental assumptions. Everyone must select from the tradition what parts to employ and study. But there must be some acknowledgment of the reasons for that choice and the way one will now relate to that particular past. What authority does it have? How will that be related to other authorities? What assumptions underlie those choices?

Obviously not all theologians pursue these questions with equal vigor. At one extreme, some state that they accept the Bible as the infallible word of God and see their task as expounding its content. Even so, they cannot avoid some further reflection about assumptions. On what basis do they accept this extreme version of biblical authority? Which now available texts do they accept as most likely to accord with the original inspired ones? Why? How will they deal with the innumerable, and apparently conflicting, differences within the Bible. To what extent will they take the historical context into account when trying to understand the meanings of Hebrew or Greek words?

Of course, most theologians make no such extreme claim about any one authoritative text. Their grounds for concluding as they do on the topics they treat are far more complex. They must become conscious of a wider range of assumptions if they are to think responsibly. If they think about their own tradition in the light of religious pluralism, the need to consider the basic assumptions of diverse traditions becomes even more important. All assumptions are relativized still further.

This theological situation has made it easier to get a hearing for process thought in theology than in most other disciplines. Process theologians can share with other critics in pointing out that classical theism developed its doctrines on assumptions derived from Greek rather that biblical thought. This does not make them wrong, but it opens the door to their reexamination. The Greeks considered apatheia a virtue. Most Greek schools sought an inner state that was not vulnerable to hurt by the words or opinions of others. Accordingly they attributed to God a complete transcendence of the suffering of the world. God was eternally, totally blessed, unaffected by anything that happened to creatures. Christian theologians officially adopted this view. God is supposed to be immutable and impassible.

It is rather obvious that the biblical authors did not think in this way. In the Bible God is very much involved in interaction with the world. God has purposes for the world and seems to care a great deal whether they work out. Ordinary ;piety also included prayers with the hope that God heard them and would even be influenced by them. As long as all this could simply be dismissed as naïve anthropocentrism, sophisticated Christians continued to believe that the deeper truth was quite otherwise. Even so, on biblical and pious grounds, some Christians challenged the doctrine of divine impassibility.

Process thought made its own contribution. Previously it had been assumed that in so far as the church followed philosophic reason it would end up with the Greeks. Only by appealing to revelation against reason could Christians believe that God really interacted with them. But process thought argued philosophically for the interaction between God and the world. Once the possibility that reason can support the Bible on this point was recognized, it was easier for Christians to abandon the Greek ideal for God. Most did not become process theologians, but many were freed to adopt a more biblical view that supported a common form of popular piety.

The issue of God's power is an important one for Christians. Process thought leads one to take the view that God is really active in the world. For it, talk of God's power is meaningful and realistic, but God is far from all-controlling. What happens is influenced by God, but no event is determined by God. From this point of view, the doctrine of divine omnipotence must either be drastically redefined or, I prefer, rejected. There is much popular piety that in fact operates in ways that are congruent with this understanding, but it is surprising how rarely it has come to explicit formulation in the tradition.

There are many Christians today who regard talk of God's power in general as unrealistic. They do not in fact look for God to do anything in particular. They may think of "God" as a symbol that does not point to an agent of any sort. Some might affirm Tillich's view of God as the Ground of Being, so that we receive our being from God from moment to moment. God's power has no further effect or influence on the occurrences of history. On the whole, however, those who think in this way are likely to let the traditional language stand, including the doctrine of omnipotence. Omnipotence can be redefined as the power to give being to all that has being.

On the other side are those who do believe that when evil strikes, God must have had some reason to inflict it. They may also express gratitude when good things befall them. They do believe that God causes events to occur as they do. They affirm divine omnipotence quite straightforwardly. They suppose that this is a biblical doctrine that is also supported by philosophical reflection.

From the point of view of process thought, the first position has given up too much of the doctrine of God's graciousness and liberating empowerment. Also, by leaving the doctrine of omnipotence alone, it encourages a kind of thought it does not share. This belief that God is responsible for all that happens in the world and especially in history has done great harm in Western history. It is incompatible with human freedom and responsibility, and it renders insoluble the traditional problem of evil. It is furthermore philosophically nonsensical. Yet the term "the almighty" is the most common substitute for "God" and almightiness is the most common attribute used to describe God in church liturgy and common parlance. "Almighty God" has become almost a proper name.

Given these strong objections, process theologians, more that most others, are motivated to test the widespread assumption that whether one likes it or not, one must recognize omnipotence as a characteristic of the biblical God. As a process theologian, of course, the fact that a doctrine is strongly supported in the Bible is not determinative of whether I accept it. But as a church theologian, criticizing central biblical ideas is a major challenge. Convinced that in any case almighty controlling power is not what is revealed about God in the life and teachings of Jesus, I turn to the larger topic.

What I find is another example of how unexamined assumptions operate – this time in theology itself, where I have claimed there is the greatest openness to examining assumptions.` I checked to see where the word "almighty" appeared in the Old Testament. What I found in my concordance is that the word appears frequently in Genesis and Job, and is rare elsewhere. I will not bore you with details. But what I found in every case is that "almighty" is used as a substitute for the proper name "Shaddai."

The explanation is that in the Jewish scriptures there are two proper names for God, Yahweh and Shaddai. Originally, no doubt, they were understood as distinct deities, but as the Jews became firmly monotheistic, they could not accept that view. Further, the use of any proper name for God was questionable. They solved the problem with respect to Yahweh by substituting Lord. In the Septuagint translation of the Jewish scriptures into Greek, they substituted "pantocrator" for Shaddai. Of course, they would not have done this if, at the time they were working, many Jews had not come to emphasize God's universal rule. Nevertheless, the choice was fateful.

Equally fateful was the choice of the Latin translators to use "omnipotentia" as the equivalent of the Greek "pantocrator." Pantocrator refers to ruling over all. It does not exclude the fact that those ruled over also have some power. Some theologians have argued that this is also the meaning of the English "almighty," that is, "mighty over all." Sadly, most people more in the word as the Latin translators did. Strictly omnipotence means having all the power. It is this notion that has done such damage.

In the New Testament, the English word "Almighty" appears once in Paul in a quote from the Old Testament and a number of times in Revelation. The Greek is "pantocrator" in all cases.

That "almighty" is a substitute for Shaddai is noted in my New Revised Standard Version every time it appears in the text. At least the scholars are being honest with us, even if they are not willing to challenge the tradition by returning to their sources in the text itself. That is good, but most readers do not look at the notes. What disappointed me more was what I found in the "Dictionary/concordance " in the back of my Bible. I looked up "the Almighty". I found two examples given of its use in the Old Testament and one from Revelation. Here was a chance for the scholars to explain the situation. But No! We are simply told that "the Almighty " means "God who is all powerful." There is no hint that the Hebrew original has no such meaning or that this exaggerates the Greek..

I have inquired whether the proper name "Shaddai" has any connotations or probable original meaning. The only answer I have received is that it may have originally meant the "Breasted One." I do not insist that today's translators acknowledge that possibility, but it certainly works against insistence that faithfulness to the Bible supports a strict doctrine of divine determinism.

This too-long account of a superficial journey into biblical scholarship is intended to make only one point. When one has a coherent view that differs from the traditional understanding, one explores questions that have been long neglected. Process thought provides such an alternative in many fields, including my own field of theology. It can raise questions and encourage thought on the part of people who come from other perspectives as well. It will, of course, arouse opposition from those who do not want inherited assumptions examined.

I have limited myself to very simple examples. In theology more complex examples are also present in the understanding of the church, of other religious traditions, of the end or goal of history, and of the self or soul. Let me quickly illustrate with respect to the last of these.

Traditionally the soul has sometimes been regarded as quite separate from the body in a way usually derived from one side of Plato's thought or, in recent times, from Descartes. On the other side, we have been reminded that the orthodox eschatological teaching is the resurrection of the body, so that we should understand psyche and soma as two aspects of one human person. The choice is between dualism and monism.

Process thought has a different position. There is no substantial soul and no substantial body. There is a vast matrix of occasions that are complexly organized into societies. One of these is the flow of human experience through time. We call that the person or soul. Others are organized into societies that are in turn organized into larger societies. One of these would be the body without the soul, another, the body with the soul.

All of these occasions are complexly related to all the others. The most interesting and most complex relations are between occasions in the soul's life and others in the body. The soul occasions are largely constituted by their inclusion of body occasions, but that does not erase their differences. There is an element of self-determination and uniqueness in each occasion as well, and this is especially manifest in the soul occasions. Also the individual occasions constituting body and soul also include occasions occurring outside the body, as parts of other souls, for example.

This makes sense of the Pauline idea that we are members of one another, that we are in Christ and that Christ is in us. It helps us also to appreciate the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and the deconstruction of the self in much modern literature and philosophy. It does not settle the question of what happens to individual occasions or persons beyond their moment of occurrence, but it sets a different context for this eschatological discussion. It also provides a distinctive context for considering the relative importance of gender in constituting human persons.

7. What has this to do with the establishment of a new institute here?

I will answer in terms of why I am enthusiastic about what is happening. In my opinion the world is in serious trouble and is heading for catastrophe. Most fields of thought as presently functioning contribute more to the problem than to its solution. The changes that are required are not minor. They need to be such as to bring the various fields into fruitful relation with one another, so that a holistic approach to responding to problems can replace the current fragmented one. Process thought offers promise both for reformulating the diverse fields individually and for relating them to one another. If there is another equally hopeful option, I am not aware of it.

Although a little work has been done at the periphery of many fields, and a good deal of work in a few, process thought is still marginalized everywhere. It has its best chance of greater acceptance in East Asia, but I do not mean to exaggerate that. The Japanese and the Chinese have hosted international meetings, and next May I expect there will be a larger one in Korea. The success of process thought in East Asia depends partly on its flourishing in the West as well. Its appeal there comes chiefly from its usefulness in integrating Eastern and Western modes of thought.

From the process perspective, the separation of thought and practice is itself a problem. Yet the academic study of the founding philosophers tends to leave matters at a highly theoretical level. The next step is to bring people together to read papers and discuss. Some of those papers have practical bearing. And I consider the efforts to integrate Western and Eastern thought to have such real relevance to the course of events.

We can thus work from the side of theory to establish relevance to practice. I have written critiques of orthodox teaching in biology and in economics in the hope of moving toward practical change. But success has been modest.

Fortunately, there has been some work in education and in psychotherapy that moves in both directions. That work certainly needs expansion and encouragement. Thus far, it has been sporadic. There has been some influence also in management studies, and I rejoice that this institute is located in a school of management. That thinkers in this field have found the value of process thought is an encouraging alternative to attempts by process philosophers and theologians to bring their insights to a field they do not know from within.

I am a strong believer in institutionalization. The existence of a center of some kind gives stability to a program and allows for cumulative achievement. We need more study of institutions from a process perspective, and I hope that some of that will take place here. In any case this can be a context for exploring the practical usefulness of process thinking from the side of practitioners.

I am pleased also that this is happening in Great Britain. As a disciple of Whitehead, I think of Great Britain as the home of the greatest exponent of process thought. But clearly the development of thought here, especially in philosophy and theology, has been in very different directions. Those directions have been influential in the United States as well, but our situation there is more pluralistic; so process thought could survive at the margins, growing on some fronts and losing ground on others. In Australia there is a lively group, and we have established the office of the International Process Network there.

Process thought has also gained a marginal existence on the European continent. Its main problem there is the hegemony of Kant, but Europeans are able to work with and around that to some extent. The greatest possibility of serious influence in Europe is in the East where the aftermath of the long experience with Communism leaves questions that more traditional forms of intellectual reflection do not answer.

I have sketched the present status of process thought. I am happy that it has become in some way a global movement, but it is still peripheral to the mainstream of theoretical and practical life everywhere. We had to laugh when David Griffin challenged us, at the Third International Whitehead Conference, to make the twenty-first century a Whiteheadian one. Nevertheless, it is a serious hope, and what small steps can be taken, I want to take.

One step is to develop and make visible contributions to a wide variety of fields. Currently I am particularly interested in physics, since there is considerable activity on that front. I have read a dissertation that analyzes quantum events in terms of Whitehead's description of the phases of concrescence. It seems to work quite well, and should contribute to growing interest in bringing process thought into that discussion. If process thought should catch on at the frontiers of physics, it might receive more serious attention in other sciences. This in turn would give it new status globally. I do not predict anything of this kind, but it would be one way of taking a real step toward realizing our dream.

Equally important would be to display the value of engaging in practical thought from a process perspective. If management thought broadly should decide that this is the way forward, that would give valuable stimulus to the application of process thought in education and counseling. If we could develop a really fruitful study of institutions in process terms, that could also make a major difference.

At the moment, the place for which I have the most hope for philosophical appropriation and development of process thought is in Hungary. There is a truly brilliant young philosopher there who has translated Process and Reality into Hungarian and organized a group of philosophers around this interest. I look for his personal intellectual leadership and consider the possibility that the Hungarians might develop a philosophy that would be recognized as truly cutting edge throughout the European continent.

For a national development, I look to China. China is now committed to modernization, but thoughtful Chinese already know this is not an adequate vision for the future. It is proving ecologically devastating and socially disruptive. It also cuts China off from its roots in the greatest of world cultures. Process thought has the potential of responding to these needs without turning its back on the best of modernity. At present it is being seriously considered by influential people. Its adoption as the next ideology of a now intellectually bankrupt, but still officially Marxist, party is not inconceivable. Of course, I do not predict this. I will be astounded if it actually happens and will have some mixed feelings about it as well. It may well be that it is already too late to avoid terrible catastrophes in China, and I do not look forward to having process thought identified with that outcome. But it is not impossible.

At an institutional level I think about the university. In my view, the American university is today a disaster. On the one side is the fragmentation of the disciplines and the refusal to engage in assumption criticism. On the other side is the sell-out to the market. There are many great people on university campuses, but as institutions, they have ceased to be places of thought and true learning. I can fantasize that, given the number of ethically sensitive and intellectually acute people still teaching on university campuses, serious interest in reform could emerge across the United States. If by that time process thinkers have produced enough proposals for reform within fields and across them and in the understanding of what educations should be, their voices might be heard. There can be no Whiteheadian century without process-informed higher education.

At a global level, the decline of confidence on the part of the establishment about its economic policies may open the door to hearing from the World Social Forum. In the United States the ideas of the International Forum on Globalization may move from the extreme periphery into the center of the discussion. Process thought, especially that of Herman Daly, has already had some influence there. Certainly the need to critique the assumptions of current economic theory is recognized. A change in the direction favored by process thought is a real possibility.

I hope you do not think I am simply silly to fantasize about so much change. I am hoping that as crises become more acute, more people will become open to deeper changes. But it may not work that way. Crises can lead to cries for law and order, perhaps imposed imperially by the United States. The freedom of thought we now enjoy may evaporate. Assumption criticism will have little chance to develop. The deity of wealth may be unchallenged.

What the response will be when the crises become worse depends in part on the availability of attractive alternatives. This is a matter both of theory and of examples. For the present, developing alternative and making them visible is what process thinkers can contribute. The chances anything we do will make a real difference in world history are small indeed. But they are well worth pursuing.

I. The Global Crisis

When I chose this topic for the opening CPS seminar for this semester, I was very much aware of the global crisis that is the context of all that we do. I am convinced that process thought has great potential to help respond to this crisis. I planned to let the particularities of the crisis remain in the background while I spoke of the ways in which process thought could help faith, and especially Christian faith, respond helpfully to that crisis.

I will spend most of the time allotted to me in that way. However, when I realized that by chance the day on which I would be speaking would be the sixth anniversary of such a fateful one, I felt I could not ignore the 9/11 part of the particularity of the crisis. What occurred six years ago was a turning point in U.S. history. Believing the official account that the disaster was the work of fanatical Muslims, many of us hoped it would lead to rethinking an international policy that evoked such hatred from its victims. We were keenly disappointed when the official spin was that it was our virtues that evoked this hatred; so that we could consider our enemies as simply an axis of evil deserving of no human consideration.

A year and a half later, my colleague, David Griffin, began investigating what really happened on 9/11. No one who knows Griffin can question his thoroughness and rigor of argument. He found that the event was an even greater turning point than most of us had imagined, indeed, much greater than even now most Americans are prepared to recognize. Much of his scholarly energy has been focused on displaying the obvious falsity of each of the successive forms of the official story and providing reasons for believing that 9/11 was yet another false flag operation

False flag operations, that is, blaming on one’s enemy acts that one has secretly committed oneself, have long played a role in international relations, and especially in justifying military aggression. In the twentieth century, the Japanese used this tactic against China, the Germans, against Poland, we Americans, against North Vietnam, and so forth. But 9/11 was not just another false flag operation. It was on a scale never before seen. And its victims were, for the first time, primarily civilian citizens of the nation, some of whose leaders were responsible for the attack. It shows that among our leaders there are those who, for the sake of implementing programs and policies to which they are deeply committed, are prepared to act in truly horrendous ways.

We might still say, let bye-gones be bye-gones – that we need to deal with the present situation and not with recriminations about the past. But for two reasons this does not suffice. First, not only have our national and international policies since 9/11 been misdirected by a deceitful story, but also it seems that future policies, whether those of a Republican or a Democratic administration, are likely to continue in this vein.

Second, there is grave danger that there will be another false-flag operation before the end of this administration, this time geared to justifying the attack on Iran to which our vice-president has expressed such strong commitment. I will not speculate on the political consequences of such an event shortly before the next election or the global consequences of a greatly expanded war in the Middle East. I can only say that I live in dread of these prospects. If the American people could be made aware that the announcement that Iran has committed some truly terrible aggression does not necessarily mean that this has actually happened, even if all the newspapers and television stations faithfully follow the administration’s line, the danger would be greatly reduced.

You can tell from these brief comments that I would find it easy to spend my time on current events. However, I will not do that. I will turn, instead, to an equally controversial topic, which I consider even more important. In affirming the thesis involved in my title, I am probably in an even smaller minority than when I call 9/11 a false flag operation. But minorities are not always wrong.

As I enter the last stage of my life, I look with great pain at the changes that have taken place in my lifetime. It is not that I have a romantic view of the 1930s in which I grew up. Quite the contrary. Living in Japan I witnessed the rise to dominance there of the militaristic imperialists. When in Georgia, I was part of a white society in which the Ku Klux Klan was still active. In Spain Franco overthrew democracy. Hitler and Mussolini came to power in Germany and Italy. There was a terrible depression and then an even more terrible war.

If I romanticize any period of my life, it is the decades following World War II. Much happened then that for some time encouraged me to think that the world had turned a new leaf. Nevertheless, as I view the global situation today, I see it as more threatening than that of my youth. The increase of threat stems not from greater viciousness of national leadership but from the earth’s inability to endure more of our exploitation and from the far more destructive weapons now at our disposal. Also, economic globalization has made the situation of human society everywhere more precarious. My disappointment, my near despair, is that the human corruption that expressed itself in the terrible thirties is no less manifest in this new century. It is particularly painful to me that my own nation, from which I once hoped so much, far from leading the world into a just peace and ecological sustainability, has become the greatest obstacle to realizing such a future.

II. The Religious Crisis

There is another change that has occurred in my lifetime. When I was a child there was, of course, much that was wrong with all the religious traditions including Christianity. Nevertheless, I still dare to judge that basically they were salugenic, that is, they contributed to the health of human individuals and communities more than to their sickness. Today I judge that on a national and global basis, the predominant social reality of religion, and I focus on Christianity, is pathogenic, contributing more to the illness of the world than to its health.

This does not mean that the widespread abandonment of traditional religious communities in favor of secular culture benefits the world. Quite the contrary. The world needs a salvation that only religious traditions can mediate. The greatest threats come from the secular substitutes for religious traditions: ethnocentrism, nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and economism. But when religious communities themselves sell out to these idolatries, they become part of the problem rather than the solution. The world needs healthy and health-giving expressions of faith.

It is in this context that I thrust aside my academic cautiousness and propose that faith needs process philosophy. Much of my life I have satisfied myself with more modest claims, such as that progressive or prophetic faith can be better articulated with the use of process philosophy. I believe that to be true, and if I persuade you of that, I will be pleased. However, the fact that I did not qualify the title in this way says something not only about my sense of urgency, but also about my real convictions, and it will be well to confess what these are. I think that the kind of faith I prize is in real trouble today. I think the effort of so many to sustain it without making any philosophical commitments has contributed to the decay. I think that the philosophies to which appeal has often been made usually make matters worse.

I further think that the problem of which I speak is not limited to progressive or prophetic Protestants. It is shared by many other Protestants in various ways. It is also shared by many Catholics and Jews and also by some spiritually minded social activists who do not identify with any traditional institution. Indeed, I believe it is shared by Muslims and even by those whose religious lives have been shaped by the traditions of India and China. So my belief is that there is a widespread problem to which there are not a lot of possible solutions. Process philosophy offers a solution. My real conviction is that at least for us, now, in the current cultural and intellectual situation of the West, it is the solution.

Although I believe that process philosophy can help other traditions, my focus in the remainder of this lecture will be on the theistic traditions and especially on Christianity. With respect to Christianity, I will make an even stronger claim. I have spoken of the present situation of faith, but I do not think that Christian faith got along well without process philosophy in the past either. Its unavailability in the early church led to creedal formulations that have caused unnecessary problems for believers throughout Christian history. The domination of thought by other philosophies led to theological formulations that were profoundly alien to the Bible. Key biblical insights have been lost, and translations and explanations of the text have been distorted. So I really do think that, all along, faith, at least in its Christian form, needed process philosophy in order to express itself well.

III. Faith without Philosophy

To argue this broad claim would require first an argument that, in general, faith needs philosophy. I will make no effort to develop such an argument comprehensively in this talk but simply comment on one example of the effort to express Christian faith without dependence on any philosophy, that of Karl Barth. He understood himself to be renewing the Reformers’ emphasis on scripture alone, but he was more rigorous than they in excluding philosophical support. He was the most important Protestant theologian in the twentieth century. His work constitutes a reasonable test of the possibility of articulating Christian faith without dependence on any philosophy. It had an enormous impact on the mainline Protestant churches. Nevertheless, the style of theology he advocated proved unsustainable. The actual effects of his influence in succeeding generations have been quite contrary to his intention.

Barth offered a theology intended to show that faith in God depends only on revelation. In no way did he intend to reduce the sense of God’s reality and activity prior to and independent of human reception or belief. However, for the most part, those who now carry on his project have given up the idea that Christians can speak of a God who has reality objectively and in relation to all things. "God" has become, among many who follow Barth in his rejection of the use of philosophy, part of the symbol system that shapes the church and the believer’s understanding of reality.

In my judgment, Barth would agree with me that this is not the God of Christian faith. Believers do not put their ultimate trust in symbols as such. Their trust is put in what such symbols symbolize. In the language of many of those influenced by Barth, statements about what is real independently of human experience and thought are "metaphysical," and these theologians hold that metaphysics is clearly disallowed by Barth as by contemporary philosophy in general. Barth’s objection to metaphysics, however, was not to making affirmations about God’s eternal and foundational reality, but to relying on human reason in doing so. He taught that we know the reality and nature of God only as God reveals Godself to us in Jesus Christ. But through that revelation we do know a God whose reality does not depend on our knowing. This fundamental feature of Barth’s thought has proved unsustainable. It has failed to convince his admirers and successors.

Many of Barth’s most influential followers have drawn the conclusion that "God" must be understood as lacking objective reality in Godself. I draw the quite different conclusion that faith needs to renew the enterprise of metaphysics, that is, reflection on the nature of what is real. The many contemporary philosophies that discourage us from doing that are not what faith needs. Faith needs a philosophy that does not exclude metaphysical reflection and whose reflection leaves open the possibility of affirming the reality of God.

IV. Faith with Traditional Philosophy

We owe the rejection of the enterprise of metaphysics especially to David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Prior to their work, theologians made use of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and, in the early modern period, Descartes and Newton. My case for the need for process philosophy depends, obviously, not only on arguing that the effort to develop a theology that makes no philosophical assumptions fails but also that the philosophies that were chiefly employed in the past are, at best, inadequate and, in fact, often distorting.

On this second part of my argument, too, I can deal here only with one example. By far the most influential theological tradition that is systematically philosophical is Thomism. The most powerful contribution of Thomas Aquinas is his insight into Being Itself as the Act of Being. In my opinion any adequate metaphysics today must include this basic insight in some form. Thomas identified Being Itself as the Supreme Being, and this identification enabled him, and most of his followers over a period of centuries, to identify Being Itself also with God. However, his more rigorous followers in the twentieth century, including Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, recognized that Being Itself cannot be a being, even the Supreme Being. This forces the question: Can Being Itself be identified as God? Heidegger said No. Tillich said Yes, although he recognized this is not "the God of the Bible," but the God "beyond" the God of the Bible.

If Tillich meant by this merely that today we cannot think of God in just the way the biblical authors thought millennia ago, his distinction of his view of God from that of the biblical authors would be of little importance. No formulation of a doctrine of God today can correspond exactly with the understanding of any biblical writer. But Tillich meant much more than that. He recognized, with Heidegger, that the difference between Being Itself and the biblical God is fundamental.

Biblical writers understand themselves to refer to One who is like human beings and other creatures in being an individual agent, in short, an entity or a being. The differences between the God of Israel and any creature are vast, but they are the differences between the divine, everlasting, cosmic being and those ephemeral beings that have been created. Being Itself, in contrast, is not a being at all. It is the being of every being, whether divine or creaturely. That is why what it points to is "beyond" the biblical God. It is not that to which we pray, that which we can trust, or that to which worship is properly directed. Tillich’s rhetoric sometimes blurs these differences somewhat, as Heidegger’s does not. But Tillich’s acknowledgment of the fundamental difference between what he calls "God" and his understanding of the biblical God implicitly, at least, gives support to my assertion that this use of philosophy is in severe tension with biblical faith.

It is my belief that faith is properly directed to the biblical God rather than to Being Itself. Accordingly I do not see this derivate of the Thomistic tradition as meeting the need I have identified. Obviously, the Thomistic tradition takes other forms, and what I have said is not a basis for indicating the failure of all of these to meet the needs of faith. In many of these the traditional blurring of the distinction between Being and the Supreme Being continues. But once the distinction has been clearly drawn, I do not see this blurring as a promising strategy.

V. The Crisis of Faith in God

That belief in God is in crisis needs little argument today. I will summarize just one way of noting it. In the Medieval Period and even as late as the eighteenth century the more highly one was educated the more surely one believed in the reality of God. In the latter part of this period, education was likely to make students more deistic in their thinking. That is, they were confident that the sort of order displayed in the world required a creator and orderer. They were also confident that God cared about human behavior and favored virtue over vice. Many were disinclined to think that God interfered in the course of events.

Other Christians were dissatisfied with this form of faith. They believed that God has interacted with creatures during the course of history, at least in that part of history recorded in the Bible, and they believed that the Bible, like nature, revealed God. For these "supernaturalists," real faith was already in crisis because many thoughtful people denied the occurrence of miracles and rejected the authority of scripture.

Today, however, the crisis of faith in God goes deeper. The more highly one is educated, the less likely it is that one will believe that there is God. When we consider the nature of higher education, this is not surprising. It was once primarily a matter of liberal arts, a tradition developed in the Medieval period when universities were closely tied to the church and theology was the queen of the sciences. Today in all academic disciplines, it is unthinkable to suggest that God has influenced any event in nature or history. The only courses in universities in which such a topic is even discussed are some courses in philosophy of religion. God is discussed in theology, but theology is excluded from most universities. Accordingly, one is socialized to think that everything can be fully explained without any reference to God. The more advanced the study, the more emphatic the exclusion of God. This applies even to graduate courses in Bible and church history.

The Bible speaks of a God who is related to nature and history as well as to personal lives. Given our socialization into understanding nature and history as self-enclosed, all that is left is personal life. But that is also subject to explanation without reference to God. Theologians retreated to religious experience as a place where they could introduce some role for God in the world. But today even that form of religious experience that is experienced as experience of God is also discussed with no reference to God’s agency or reality.

VI. The Modern World View and its Critique

This systematic exclusion of God from any role in the world is not an independent feature of the dominant worldview but integral to its basic metaphysics. If reality is to be re-described in a way supportive of faith, this worldview as a whole must be directly challenged. The greatest obstacle to making this challenge effective is the denial by those who operate with the modern worldview that they have any metaphysics at all.

The university is so committed to the exclusion of metaphysics from its purview that it is extremely difficult to raise questions there about basic assumptions. Fortunately, this is less true in the culture outside the university. There challenges are common. They come from persons influenced by ecological concerns, from feminists, from those influenced by Eastern forms of thought, by those interested in parapsychology, and by those who reflect on the implications of recent developments in physics. These many challenges prepare the ground for a systematic assault. Most of these broader assaults are forms of process thought. The most fully developed is that of Alfred North Whitehead and his followers, of whom I count myself one. Nevertheless, the marginalization of all this in the university greatly reduces its role in the wider society.

The alternative proposed over against the dominant modern world view does not necessarily include God. Many of the critics of the dominant world view identify "God" with ways of thinking that they strongly, and often wisely, oppose. Nevertheless, many of the most developed forms of the alternative to the dominant world view are open to some way of thinking of God. Consider Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Henri Bergson, Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, Teilhard de Chardin, and Henry Nelson Wieman, as well as Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. Here I find it striking that the positions that are most fully developed in relation to contemporary science are also the ones in which the critique of the modern world view is most rigorously carried through and in which God’s role in the world is most fully considered. I refer, of course, especially to Whitehead.

Let us examine how the modern worldview excludes God so thoroughly. It does so axiomatically, and it rarely examines the axioms in question, some of which do not stand up well on examination. It asserts, to begin with, that nature is a closed system. That is, every event in nature is to be understood exhaustively in terms of other events in nature. This axiom is part of the Cartesian system. It proclaims that what happens in the world as objectively given to us cannot be influenced by subjective experience.

This is, of course, entirely contrary to our universal experience of influencing the behavior of our bodies. Descartes himself was willing to make an exception here, but in academic circles the axiom has trumped the universal experience that our objective actions are affected by our subjective intentions. It remains the foundational dogma of the regnant understanding of science. The rule of this axiom means that the task of the academic discipline of physiological psychology is not open-minded study of the relation of what happens in the brain to subjective experience. Instead its task is to explain the subjective in terms of the objective. The task of evolutionary biology is not to examine open-mindedly the relation of animal behavior and evolutionary change, but to explain that animal behavior that is not genetically determined cannot influence evolutionary development.

The axiom that excluded any role for subjective experience obviously excludes any role for God. If we define a "natural" event, as one that is free from any influence of subjectivity, and if we assume that every natural event is exhaustively explicable by other such events, then God cannot be introduced into the explanation. For God to affect the course of natural events could only be an invasion of the natural sphere that would violate its laws. Any explanation in such terms would undercut the whole scientific enterprise.

Prior to Darwin, the exclusion of God from historical events was not so settled. Human subjectivity entered into historical events. Such subjectivity might be influenced by God. However, since Darwin it has been assumed that human beings are fully part of nature. The rules governing nature in general finally apply to historical events as well. Human activity and even human thought must be fully explicable by objective, that is, physical factors. Since subjective experience has no causal role, obviously any influence God might be supposed to exercise on it cannot have any causal role. This is as true of religious experience as of anything else. The exclusion of God from any role in history follows inescapably from the primary axiom of the self-enclosed character of nature.

VII. How Process Philosophy Changes This

William James identified the world as pictured by modern thought as a "block universe." The most widespread image has been that of the clock. This world view is properly described as materialistic, viewing complex wholes even living ones, as composed exhaustively of parts that are little bits of matter. "Matter" is nature conceived as lacking any capacity to act or be inwardly affected by anything that happens. Bits of matter, "atoms," change in relative location, but otherwise they are changeless. This world-view is usually presented as deterministic, in that it typically assumes that events are to be explained entirely in terms of antecedent events. It is often reductionistic, since it is strongly inclined to suppose that events at the macro level are ultimately explicable by events at the micro level. It is this materialistic, deterministic, and reductionistic picture of the world that all forms of process thought reject.

Whitehead called his form of process thought a "philosophy of organism." Organisms are not lumps of matter but centers of activity. They are affected by their environment and in turn affect it. They are something for themselves as well as for others, that is, they are subjects as well as objects. Whereas what is thought of as a lump of matter is related to other lumps of matter only externally, that is, in ways that do not affect what it is, organisms are largely constituted by their relations. Oganisms participate in constituting one another in their subjective aspect.

A human being is an organism that can be analyzed into many organisms, which in turn can be organized into many organisms. Cells are organisms of crucial importance to the larger organisms. One of the organisms of which we are composed is human experience. A moment of human experience provides the most accessible organism for our examination. It proves to be an integration of the influence of past personal experience with that of events in the brain and, largely through them, of events in the rest of the body and the wider world. The integration is a creative act that involves also novel elements.

Process thinkers generally understand human experience to be part of the natural world. But for them this means that human experience must be taken seriously when reflecting on the character of the natural world. Instead of assuming that human experience is nothing but the irrelevant by-product of the motion of material atoms, one hypothesizes that in a very simplified form, cellular, and even quantum, events have a basic similarity to human experiences. In Whitehead’s view they, too, are integrations of all the influences of the world upon them. This means that they, too, are subjects being affected by the world and agents, constituting themselves out of what they receive.

I have pointed out that the modern worldview has closed the world to any divine action. In its inception, its authors assumed that a world that is like a clock points directly to a clock maker. The question was only whether the maker intervened from time to time to adjust the settings. Such intervention would be a matter of pushing and pulling atoms into different locations. Increasingly science rejected the notion that the natural world required, or even allowed the possibility of, such supernatural changes.

The influence of God on human beings has not been thought of primarily in this way. People feel called or drawn by God to act in particular ways, and mainstream theologians have emphasized that the way God works on the human heart and mind is persuasive. Believers often feel strengthened by God in responding to the divine persuasion. They sometimes feel judged, but also forgiven and blessed. Sometimes they feel guided. They may believe that their bodily condition is also affected by God, but usually this is mediated by the faith God inspires in them or others. In other words, God is understood to act in them as subjects, not on them as objects.

In the dominant world view the inclusion of human beings in nature meant that all these ideas about God acting in the hearts and minds of believers became irrelevant. Human experience no longer played any role in the world. In the process worldview, on the contrary, the inclusion of human beings in nature opens the door to thinking of God as influencing all things in ways that are basically similar to God’s influence in human experience. It is obvious that this world view opens the door to experiencing the creation in a much more biblical way than the materialist, determinist, and reductionist view that it seeks to replace.

At this point I have sketched my basic thesis. Theistic faith cannot fare well in an intellectual and cultural context in which the possibility that God makes a difference in what happens in the world is axiomatically excluded. Faith needs a context that is open to the possibility that God plays a role in human life and, indeed, in the whole of history and nature. There are many movements of thought today that challenge the reductionistic world view. When they are systematically developed they usually become some form of process philosophy. Many forms of process philosophy generate the openness that faith needs.

VIII. A Pitch for the Whiteheadian Version

Although the "new cosmology" has considerable popularity in the culture, it has yet to make any significant inroad in the university. No academic discipline even studies it. Much less has any academic discipline been reformulated in its terms.

We could, of course, say, so much the worse for the university. The university may be the most conservative institution in Western society. Well into the modern period the universities taught the Greek and Roman classics and excluded the natural sciences. In the eighteenth century, the science of botany was more likely to be advanced by English vicars than by university professors. Indeed, the sciences were often celebrated more by theologians, who saw them as telling us about how God orders the world, than elsewhere in the university. Latin and Greek played a much larger role in these universities than did modern languages.

Nevertheless, as the importance of the sciences became more and more apparent, eventually the universities changed. Academic "disciplines" replaced liberal arts. Laboratories and research institutes became central to the university, and classical modes of thought gave way to the scientific worldview. This led to an exponential increase in the rate of scientific advance. As the dominance of economic thinking replaced that of the church, the sciences in their plurality survived the change by demonstrating their ability to improve technology and contribute to health. However, the close connection between the scientific vision and spirit with the philosophy that undergirded it was lost.

None of this is helpful to faith. But it does indicate that even the university can change. A change in worldview that develops outside it can eventually replace its current one. But since the ethos of the university is established in its academic disciplines, that can happen only as the new worldview demonstrates its usefulness, discipline by discipline.

Today, the most promising field for change is physics. Especially in quantum theory, physicists in general recognize that the dominant worldview does not work. There is openness to other models. When process models are sought, Whitehead’s is the one most likely to be considered, partly because it is the most fully developed and partly because of its apparent relevance to the present state of discussion.

The widespread acceptance of a basically Whiteheadian quantum theory any time soon is not likely, but it is possible. Such acceptance could lead to openness to Whiteheadian influence in other branches of physics as well. It could lead to a more Whiteheadian biology and evolutionary theory, and to a more Whiteheadian approach to human psychology including physiological psychology. Elements of these approaches already exist and have a tiny foothold in the university, but they are still largely ignored. Changes of this sort could affect philosophy of science, and, indeed, some leaders in this field in Europe have already turned to Whitehead. Perhaps changes in philosophy of science could spill over into other branches of philosophy.

The changes I am suggesting would be enormous, and enormous changes usually take place very slowly if it all. I do not expect to see any such shift in my lifetime, but the situation is more promising now than ever before. I am happy to have lived long enough to see even the possibility of such changes.

I do not envision that such changes would lead to talk of God among physicists or biologists or psychologists. Nevertheless, the climate of the university on this topic as well might change. It is important to recognize that God’s exclusion from the university followed from the impossibility of God making any difference in the world. This was based on axiomatic assumptions rather than formulation of explanations that deal adequately with what was once attributed to God. Indeed, in lieu of developing and defending a fully atheist cosmology, philosophical cosmology as such has been excluded from all disciplines. This leaves the basic axioms unexamined.

There has always been the question of the basic order of the world. Scientists assume that everything acts according to "laws." Because the word "law" presupposes One who establishes the laws, philosophers of science now prefer to speak of "law-like behavior." This, however, does not explain why behavior is lawlike. Some of it can be explained as the habits of nature, hence avoiding any suggestion of the establishment of a prior order. But it can hardly be doubted that this universe is ordered prior to the emergence of habits among the various species. Whitehead developed a balanced picture between the habits and the laws that precede and make possible the acquisition of habits by natural species. Today the latter are often called "constants," and there is renewed wonder at how they came to be. The preferred answer is "by chance," but, given their remarkable character, few are entirely comfortable with that answer.

There has always been the marvel of novelty and freedom. In order to maintain the block universe view, the university has had to exclude them along with God. But even those most socialized by the academic disciplines that exclude them are not really able to deny their reality in their own lives.

Whitehead offers a way of understanding not only lawlike behavior but also novelty and freedom. However, his explanation involves God. A university that found Whitehead’s conceptuality helpful in reconstructing its disciplines might be more open to discussion of ultimate questions. Talk of God might not be completely forbidden.

All of this imagining of what might happen in the future, like Whitehead’s whole philosophy, is thoroughly speculative or hypothetical. It is emphatically not intended as a prediction of what will happen. Perhaps the kind of changes for which I hope are in fact impossible. In that case, it is not worth pursuing efforts in that direction. However, the Center for Process Studies was organized on the hypothesis that we should not give up without first trying. My hope is that our work may eventually contribute to bringing into being a cultural and intellectual situation in which a salugenic faith can flourish. It is my hope that once again it would be possible to call, even in our educational institutions, for lives organized around the service of God through the service of creatures. If that happened we might overcome the dominance of addictions to ethnocentrism, nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and economism that now threaten the livability of the planet.

First, let me express my appreciation for the invitation to give these lectures. A lecture series is an occasion to think through some question with considerably more thoroughness than a single lecture allows. One of the questions that has been on my mind for a long time, but has always been pushed to the back burner, is on the minds of a great many liberal and progressive Protestants. Should we continue to follow Jesus today?

This is a question that arises, not for all Protestants, but for liberal ones. That it arises for us is often taken as a reason for rejecting liberal theology. Indeed, the word "liberal" has been given a very negative connotation, and many of the criticisms are valid. Yet for me, no other form of Protestantism is possible. In this first lecture I will explain what I mean by liberal Protestantism as an historical phenomenon. This will show why liberal Protestants must take seriously the question about remaining followers of Jesus. I will conclude this lecture by explaining what I understand it to mean to follow Jesus. In the other lectures I will consider and criticize the alternatives that so many have chosen.

1. Liberal Protestantism

In a broad sense, there have been liberal Protestants from an early point. The Reformers themselves were liberal in their emphasis on the individual believer and individual conscience. They opposed the authoritarian claims of the church of their day and especially of the pope. Their appeal to scriptural authority was liberating, especially because they claimed that each believer could have direct access to the text and to the God who is revealed there.

Some leaders of the Reformation period took another step toward individual freedom. They taught that the same God who had inspired the scriptures now directly inspired individual believers. The major Reformers were frightened by this move, and we have to sympathize with them It is too easy to confuse various impulses and ideas that arise in one’s mind with the guidance of God. The diversity of such impulses and ideas could lead to fragmentation and very questionable behavior. Hence the major Reformers emphasized sola scriptura, that is, only the Bible, against the authority both of the church and of private religious experience.

This emphasis has been prominent in Protestantism ever since, but the appeal to personal experience has also played an important role. The Quakers are heirs of the early impulse in this direction. They have found ways of checking individual idiosyncrasies and have played a truly wonderful role in Protestant history.

The emphasis on personal experience came to the fore in later contexts as well. The later contexts were supplied by the conservative development of sola scriptura. Whereas Luther and Calvin participated in the best historical scholarship of their day, some of their followers put the emphasis on doctrines of divine inspiration that turned the scriptures into supernatural writings. The roots of contemporary Fundamentalism go deep in Protestant history. The results in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that the faith to which people were called was often more the objective belief that the scriptures were completely true than the deeply personal assurance of God’s forgiveness of their sins and the resulting freedom. This context inspired a new protest, one that we call "pietism," which emphasized personal experience and response over against mere belief.

The early pietists did not engage in critical biblical study or directly challenge the literalism of the official teaching. But by shifting the emphasis to personal appropriation of the gospel message, they downplayed the importance of these supernatural claims about the Bible as such and reopened the issue of the value and importance of personal religious experience. They also emphasized the responsibility of believers to share the gospel message both in word and deed. Both the global missionary work of the church and its service to the poor stem largely from the Pietist revival.

The Pietist movement affected both Lutheran and Calvinist churches, but those of us who are Methodists come more directly from it. John Wesley belongs quite directly to the heart of the Pietist movement. For him, as for Pietists generally, the focus was on the personal appropriation of the good news rather than on the supernatural status of the scriptures through which we have access to it. He was an evangelist, taking the message to the poor, and he was also concerned that individual Christians act out their faith through service to the needy.

Probably you are surprised that I speak so positively of "Pietism." By the twentieth century it had acquired a poor reputation. Those to whom the label was applied by that time were often persons who identified Christian experience narrowly and had rigid views of the behavior for which it called. In short Pietism had become a conservative tradition whose emphasis on experience was often not authentic. These characteristics should not be read back into the earlier period.

The father of liberal theology was Friedrich Schleiermacher. He came from Pietism. His was the first theology to be based systematically on religious experience, setting Christianity into the context of a broader understanding of such experience. The emphasis on experience has been a characteristic of much liberal theology to this day. However, the label "liberal" belongs to other streams as well.

Today "liberal Protestnatism" usually refers to Protestant movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that responded to the increasingly secular and atheist character of the dominant forms of European culture. Simply systematizing what one found in the Bible as read through the eyes of the sixteenth century Reformers no longer carried conviction with thoughtful people.

Through the eighteenth century most thoughtful people had believed that the laws of nature and the moral laws both pointed to a creator-lawgiver. The major dispute was whether this God acted in the course of history as well as in creation. But in Great Britain, David Hume showed that knowledge arising in sense experience could give us no basis for belief in such a God. In Germany, Immanuel Kant agreed and argued that it is the activity of the human mind that presents us with an ordered world. Kant’s philosophy changed the context for intellectual work in Europe. The background assumptions that had given some plausibility to Christian affirmations about God through the eighteenth century were gone so far as the intelligentsia was concerned. Affirmations based simply on the claimed authority of scripture were nonstarters.

Kant himself, however, did not give up belief in God. Like Schleiermacher he had roots in Pietism. For him the crucial experience was moral. He sharply distinguished the moral sphere from the cosmological one and justified belief in God based on his analysis of this dimension of experience. Alongside the strand of liberal Protestant thought that based itself on religious experience there has been another, with which it has been intertwined, focused on morality.

G.W.F. Hegel provided a third strand. He accepted Kant’s view that the ordered world is created by the human mind and then pointed out that the way the mind orders the world varies from culture to culture and evolves within individual cultures. This mind or "Geist" moves toward some final and perfected state that has for Hegel the character of the divine. This introduced a tradition that thinks of God as that toward which the whole of reality, or at least of human history, moves. Thus a third form of liberal theology is radically historical and eschatological.

What these strands of liberal Protestantism have in common, then, is not a particular teaching or method but rather a fundamental commitment to participate in the best thinking of their time and to display the truth of Christianity in that context. This does not mean that liberal Protestants simply accepted whatever views were held by the intellectuals of their time. To display Christian truth in the context of the cutting-edge discussion could also be to criticize the dominant secular beliefs. The point is that these criticisms had to be of a sort that those who were engaged in the discussion could take seriously. Orthodox and conservative forms of Protestantism continued to affirm the radical authority of scripture against the new forms of thought in the culture. Those who followed them insulated themselves against the dominant intellectual changes.

To be a liberal Protestant, therefore, means that one never rejects an idea simply because it is not biblical or not compatible with the Bible. One may, however, find insights in the Bible that provide public arguments against the idea and show that thinking more continuous with Christian teaching is better. One is open to all evidence, but one may believe that dominant secular and atheistic interpretations of that evidence are inadequate.

Despite their diversity, all forms of liberal Protestantism affirm that the Bible is rightly studied with critical historical methods. There is nothing sacred about its texts. The truth about the historical Jesus can only be recovered through these methods. There is nothing sacred about Jesus. The history of the church, likewise, should be studied critically, and the negative aspects of Christian history should be fully acknowledged. Similarly, other religious traditions should be studied critically, but with no prejudice against them because of unfamiliar features of their thought or practice. If one remains a Christian, it must be because the best knowledge one can gain about all these matters provides sufficient reason for doing so.

2. Traditional Liberal Answers and the Weakness of Liberalism

I hope this is enough explanation of what it means to be a liberal Protestant. I hope what I have said also shows that for liberal Protestants there has, in principle, always been the question of whether they should continue to follow Jesus or should look elsewhere. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel responded to this question. However, at the time they wrote it did not have the same critical urgency it has today. At that time Western intellectuals had little doubt that Western culture was superior to others. This meant for them that the religious spirit that informed it was superior to the religious spirit that informed other cultures.

Schleiermacher’s primary argument was for the validity and positive contribution of religious experience over secular atheism. After establishing that, he could rather easily argue for the superiority of monotheism over polytheism and of Christianity over Judaism and Islam. Given the assumption of the superiority of Western culture, Hegel’s account of the history of Geist inevitably gave Christianity, which is hardly distinguished from Western culture, a superior role.

It was not until the twentieth century that the question of Christian superiority came to be seriously questioned. Ernst Troeltsch wrote a book defending the idea of Christian superiority, but he later decided that a more honest and accurate view would have to abandon that claim. This brought about a crisis in liberal Protestantism. Troeltsch saw Christianity as bound up with Western culture and thought it the best religious position for Westerners. But he saw that the religious traditions of India and China played a similar role for them. This did not mean, of course, that Western Christians should forsake their faith and turn to Eastern traditions. But it did, for the first time, fully relativize all their claims.

Troeltsch’s view of the close connection of Christianity and culture was all too vividly illustrated in German history. Protestantism in Germany was bound up with German culture. As Germany became Nazi, German Christianity also became Nazi. By undermining the claim that Jesus radically transcends culture, the reasons for Christians to challenge culture were seriously weakened. Thus liberal theology in Germany played a role in opening the door of the church to Nazi ideology.

Obviously, many of the members of the churches were conservative or orthodox rather that liberal, so that blaming liberalism alone is an exaggeration. But many of the liberal intellectual leaders, from whom resistance might have been expected, failed to provide it. The few who did resist turned away from liberalism. Karl Barth was their leader, and his message was that Jesus Christ and the Christian faith radically transcend culture and its intellectual content. They are God’s address to the world, not the world’s effort to understand and approach God.

This neo-orthodox message had obvious importance and won its way. It did not try to eradicate all that had been learned during the liberal epoch. It did not dispute scientific or philosophical findings or historical criticism of the Bible. Nor did it renew any claim to Christian superiority as a religion in relation to other religions. But it relativized all of this in its assertion that our concern is with God’s word and not human words. Insofar as Christianity is a religion, it suffers from all the limitations of any religion as a way human beings try to save themselves. But if we mean by Christianity a hearing of God’s word to human beings, then it is not comparable to any religion. It is not a religion at all. This was clearly a rejection of the liberal program, a rejection that became central to discussion among Protestants for several decades.

Of course, the liberal program continued around the margins. The Divinity School of the University of Chicago, which I attended, was a bastion of liberalism. For me, at that stage of my life, that was crucial. The assertion that God speaks through the Bible in a supernatural way made no sense to me and could not respond to my existential needs. If that had been the only form in which I encountered Protestant theology, I would have given up on Christian faith. I have, therefore, no choice but to face the problems of liberal Protestantism, however serious and difficult they may be.

In any case, by the mid-1960s the convincing power of the neo-orthodox message was giving way to other voices. Partly this was simply the growing incredibility of the implicit supernaturalism and fideism of neo-orthodoxy. But equally important was the impact of liberation theologies, which changed the subject. They focused attention on oppression and the way in which Christianity could be used to support it but also to oppose it. The task was to bring to the fore the grounds of opposition that could be found within it. Issues of truth gave way to issues of justice. This was a form of liberalism, but one that was a radical break from the tendency of earlier liberalism to be in close association with culture. It had learned a crucial lesson from neo-orthodoxy.

3. The Transformation of Liberal Protestantism and the Question of Discipleship

Those of us in the liberal tradition were strongly drawn to the various liberation theologies, but those of us who were white North American males remained outsiders. Our task was to reformulate our liberal heritage in light of liberation thinking but also with a view to rethinking the relation of Christianity to the natural world and to other religious traditions. Of special importance was rethinking the relationship to Judaism in light of our new recognition of the terrible consequences of the deep-seated anti-Judaism of the Christian tradition beginning with the gospels themselves. We found much else of which to repent. Since the liberal form of Christianity had shown its weakness in relation to apostate cultures and had participated in so much evil, the term "liberal" became less and less comfortable.

The new term that has caught on is "progressive." I spoke originally of liberal and progressive Protestants as facing the question I am addressing in these lectures. I want now to clarify my understanding of the difference. I understand "progressives" to be liberals who have broken with the dominant strand of past liberalism but have continued its most basic character. This most basic character I described as openness to developments in the culture and presentation of reasons for the Christian faith without any appeal to supernatural authority.

The most important change embodied by progressives is a shift from a basically positive relation to culture to a basically critical one. Whereas we once saw Western civilization as an expression of Christian influence, we now see its dominant forms and expressions as distortions and corruptions of that influence, and as operating on assumptions that are not acceptable to Christians. Progressives have learned much from neo-orthodoxy and liberation theologies, but we have not given up the liberal quest for truth in light of all the evidence.

Progressives face with all liberals the question whether we should remain Christian at all. If, as a progressive Protestant, I am fully committed to the truth, whether or not it is supportive of my Christian biases, should I in fact continue to follow a Jewish teacher of the early part of the first century whose teaching obviously reflected a very different socio-cultural situation than mine? Are there not better informed and more comprehensive thinkers who can give my life more reliable direction? Given the enormous evils that have been inflicted on human beings and on the planet by those who have understood themselves to be followers of Jesus, is it not a mistake to continue this tradition?

Or, if there is no reason to reject Jesus altogether in favor of some other individual, would it not be better to be equally open to the wisdom of many great teachers? Perhaps I can find those in recent times who have drawn on many sources and integrated these into a richer and fuller system. Or perhaps it is my task and that of others to create our own syntheses.

4. The question in John and the Question Today

We noted in the scripture read this evening that a question of this sort is not new. Whether John’s account tells us anything about actual historical events in the relation of Jesus to his disciples I do not know. But it certainly tells us something about the thinking of the early church. It was then often costly and dangerous to identify oneself as a disciple of Jesus. The question of whether one should follow another path surely occurred to many, and many no doubt chose to do so. But some asked the question: "To whom can we go?" and decided to stay with Jesus.

In the Johannine passage the event is described as follows. Jesus was teaching about himself in ways that offended the Jews. Accordingly many of those who had been following him left. He turned to his close disciples and asked, "Do you also wish to go away." Simon Peter answered him "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life." (John 6:67-68)

Simply to understand the text, we need to ask what is meant by "eternal life." Christians have often understood this as life after death, but this is not John’s primary meaning. The term "eternal" does not function here as meaning outside of time or enduring through all time. It refers to a quality of life, an ideal quality, of course. The Jesus Seminar translates it simply as "real." Peter stays with Jesus because it is Jesus who teaches how authentic life is attained.

Can that be asserted today? Certainly, not so easily! Psychologists have taught us much about ourselves in ways that seem quite different from anything we learn from Jesus. Indian holy men have explored the potentialities of the interior life in a depth and detail quite lacking in Jesus. Most people today who seek to attain greater psychological health or spiritual depth look elsewhere than Jesus. They are not wrong to do so. Nevertheless, I will return to this topic and make a case for following Jesus in a way that is close to the text of this verse.

Before proceeding, one more caveat is important. To follow Abraham, or Moses, or Isaiah, or Jesus, or Socrates, or Buddha, or Confucius, or Mohammed, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Rene Descartes, or Adam Smith, or Hume, or Kant, or Hegel, or Karl Marx, or Leon Trotsky, or Charles Darwin, or Abraham Lincoln, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Sigmund Freud, or Karl Jung, or John Muir, or Martin Heidegger, or Michel Foucault, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Chairman Mao, or anyone else, does not mean that one learns nothing from the others. It means rather that one evaluates what others offer from the perspective of one’s leader. The thought or example of the one whom one follows provides the unifying basis for organizing one’s overall vision and life orientation.

For example, to follow Freud would not exclude learning from other psychologists and even modifying Freud’s views. But it would mean that one would understand other historical figures and also contemporary people and ideas basically in Freudian terms and evaluate and respond to them accordingly. Freudians can learn something from Marx, but basically they will understand Marx in Freudian terms. If they were persuaded by Marx in any fundamental way and began to interpret Freud in Marxist terms, they would no longer be Freudians.

One may also refuse to give primacy to any one perspective and instead seek to put together a new synthesis of one’s own or remain simply eclectic. One may learn from both Freud and Marx without interpreting either only from the perspective of the other. One may integrate what one has learned in one’s own way, or one may simply end up with a multiplicity of insights and beliefs without much concern about how they relate to one another. We need to consider multiple alternatives to following Jesus.

You may have noticed that many names that you might have expected were missing from the list above. I did not mention Paul or Augustine or Francis of Assisi, or Thomas Aquinas, or Hildegaard of Bingen, or Luther, or Calvin, or Wesley, or John Woolman, or Friedrich Schleiermacher, or Karl Barth, or Walter Rauschenbusch, or Reinhold Niebuhr, or Albert Schweitzer, or Toyohiko Kagawa, or Paul Tillich, or Martin Luther King, or James Cone, or Gustavo Gutierrez, or Rosemary Ruether. In one way or another, to follow one of them is a way of following Jesus, since they all derived their primary identity from their devotion to Jesus. The reality is, of course, more complex than this, and I will have to deal with some of these complexities before we are through. But to follow a follower of Jesus is not to forsake him even if other followers of Jesus might disagree about the right way to follow.

To follow Jesus then is to be open to learning from many others but to appropriate what one learns from them from a perspective shaped by Jesus. Much of this work has already been done by other followers of Jesus through the centuries, and one may follow some of these followers as well. To follow Jesus today is to stand in a long succession of followers, and one can appropriate their achievements and criticize their failures and distortions. One may also learn directly from many other sources whether or not other followers of Jesus have already drawn from them. For example, in learning from Plato one follows a long tradition of such learning. But if one learns from Foucault, one may need to do more original work.

As we noted in the case of Freudians and Marxists, in the process of studying another figure, for example, Foucault, one may find that one is now understanding and appropriating Jesus from his point of view, that Foucault’s insights have become the organizing principles for one’s thought and life. One may continue to appreciate the contribution of Jesus. But when this change occurs, one is no longer Jesus’ follower.

One further preliminary. Just as Paul and Augustine and Francis of Assisi intended to follow Jesus, so, one might well argue, Jesus intended to follow Abraham, Moses, and Isaiah. To follow Jesus might then be interpreted as a particular way to follow those he followed. This is a possible relationship. Today some Jews have come to a deep appreciation of Jesus. In the extreme case, a few Jews might decide that Jesus’ interpretation of the Jewish tradition is the key to its deeper understanding. For the sake of observing that tradition fully, they might make Jesus quite central in their thought. Jews for Jesus represent something of this sort.

The difference between this and the Christian way of following Jesus need not be great, but it is still significant. Through Jesus those who follow Jesus appropriate the Jewish tradition of Jesus’ day. But they do so more as a way of understanding Jesus and his message than as the primary goal. Where following Jesus maintains continuity with the earlier tradition they maintain continuity. Where following Jesus leads them to break with that tradition, they break.

5. What It Means to Follow Jesus

If we are asking whether there are good reasons to continue to follow Jesus today, we will need also to ask what is entailed in following of Jesus. Jesus called people to follow him in his lifetime. This was often quite literal. They were to join a band that walked with him from place to place and purchased its food from a common purse. But Jesus had many followers, even in his own brief lifetime, who did not accompany him physically. They were those who accepted his teaching and lived accordingly. Something of that sort is possible today.

But what was the teaching? The synoptic gospels all agree that Jesus’ message was that the basileia theou was drawing near. This was the good news, the gospel, and it had great consequences for how one should live. All the other teaching attributed to Jesus can be understood to spell out the character of the basileia, the persons who inhabit it, the manner of its coming, and its supreme value.

I have retained the Greek, because a particular understanding of what this message means is expressed in any translation. The standard translation is "Kingdom of God." Since Matthew avoids speaking of God and replaces "God" with "Heaven," "Kingdom of Heaven" is the usual translation of Matthean passages. These are certainly possible translations. A basileia was a politically defined region, and many of them were ruled by kings. The Kingdom of God can then be contrasted with the kingdoms of this world. The point is then that it is God who rules rather than a human being. From this notion is derived the idea of the "sovereignty of God" that has played so large a role in Christian teaching and especially in Calvinist theology.

Jesus’ teaching of the basileia of God was heard by the political authorities of his time as a threat to the sovereignty of Rome. To bring out this contrast, the Jesus Seminar has shifted from "kingdom" to "empire." That, too, is certainly terminologically justified. It further heightens the sense of God’s control and, perhaps also, of God’s transcendence. The emperor was quite remote to the people of Palestine.

However, I believe that in making the correct point of the opposition to Roman imperial rule, the Jesus’ Seminar has distorted Jesus’ meaning. Their translations reflect and intensify the Calvinist emphasis on God’s total control. They write of God’s or Heaven’s "imperial rule," thus shifting the focus from the basileia that is constituted by a politically defined region and people to the mode of rule. This they declare to be imperial, suggesting that God controls and compels.

This focus leads to a translation of the Lord’s prayer that I find grating. Instead of "Thy basileia come," they want us to pray: "Impose your imperial rule." Instead of "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," they propose: "enact your will on earth as you have in heaven." Certainly, asking that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven could mean, on someone else’s lips, that we are asking God to assert divine sovereignty and force all to obey the divine will. But I do not find that convincing as an interpretation of Jesus. Does heaven consist of beings who are compelled to do what God wants or of beings who want to act in those ways that God also desires? Surely it is the latter. It is the free love and service of one another that expresses God’s will. That is characteristic of the basileia that Jesus says is at hand.

What we find in Jesus’ teaching is not an emphasis on ruling. He addresses God not as king or emperor but as "abba," which is best translated today as "Daddy." Since I grew up calling my father "Papa," and since the sound there is more similar, I would favor translating "abba" as "papa" if that term were still in use. But in praying to my heavenly Papa, I would not ask him to impose his imperial rule! The term Jesus used in addressing God does not accent authority and rule, certainly not imperial rule and compulsion. The translation of the basileia of God is misleading when it shifts into this conventional mode.

Jesus’ teaching about the basileia of God leaves many questions unanswered, but it nevertheless makes some points very clear. In the basileia theou the structures of prestige and authority in the world are turned upside down. The one who would be first must be the servant of all. Prostitutes enter before the righteous. Children have the advantage over adults. To me this does not suggest an analogy between God and kings or emperors. Further, Jesus points to his table fellowship as a foretaste of the basileia. In this table fellowship it is not a question of who rules and how, but of the inclusion of all. Jesus’ emphasis is on mutual love and care within the basileia rather than on outside control. These indications of the nature of the basileia do not support the language of imperial rule, even if the ruler is now thought of as God.

The same is true of Jesus parables about how the basileia of God comes into being. Consider the parable of the mustard seed. The Jesus’ Seminar translates this as follows: "Heaven’s imperial rule is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field. Though it is the smallest of seeds, yet, when it has grown up, it is the largest of garden plants, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and roost in its branches." I have great difficulty in understanding how any form of imperial rule, even if the emperor is God, can be like a mustard seed. One can understand, however, that something as simple and apparently insignificant as the inclusive table fellowship of Jesus could catch on and become widespread.

This fits with Jesus’ parable of the sower. Jesus understood himself to be scattering seed, that is, proposing ideas and practices that contrasted sharply with those pervasive of the society. Some of these reached receptive ears and took root and produced consequences so that the nearness of the kingdom had greater effect in the world.

The parable comparing the basileia with leaven is translated by the Jesus Seminar as follows: "Heaven’s imperial rule is like leaven which a woman took, and concealed in fifty pounds of flour until it was all leavened." Once again the work of leaven in flour seems very different from any form of imperial rule. Instead it seems that Jesus’ believed that the order of society constituting the basileia, already operating in his ministry, was having a hidden but important effect far beyond what was immediately visible.

Other parables describe the discovery of the supreme value of the basileia. It is like treasure hidden in a field. When someone finds it, he conceals it from others until he has sold everything else in order to buy the field and possess the treasure. I see nothing here that suggests imperial rule of any kind. I do see that the mode of being in community that Jesus practiced and taught can be considered to be of supreme value, worth the sacrifice of everything else.

How shall we translate basileia theou if not as Kingdom of God or imperial rule? How can the translation emphasize the kind of relationships that obtain among the citizens of the basileia and the resulting richness of their life together. It embodies what God wants for human beings but not something God imposes upon them.

There is a tension between what Jesus says about the basileia and the political meaning of the word. What Jesus points to is a way of being together that is already being, at least partially, realized. Although the word basileia does not specify the nature of the government, it points to a politically defined region with its people. In the Lord’s Prayer, the basileia theou for which we are praying would be a transformed world. That means that what is now occurring is not itself the basileia theou, but a foretaste of what that world would be. This foretaste does not require a politically defined region. Hence it may be understood as an expression of the nearness of the basileia.

Since no political society has ever been ordered in the way Jesus proposed, there is no term derived from our past experience that is fully appropriate to that for which we pray, what Jesus called the basileia thou. I have concluded that the best term available is "the divine commonwealth." "Commonwealth" points to the people rather than to their rulers and the manner of ruling. It suggests that they may rule themselves. Although "public welfare" may be an obsolete expression, that connotation still hovers around the word "commonwealth.". The word is in some tension with the idea that a ruling class exploits the rest. Thus speaking of a commonwealth places the emphasis on the relations among the inhabitants and their shared well being. It at least suggests a movement away from hierarchy.

I am proposing "divine commonwealth" instead of "Commonwealth of God" because the "of God" can suggest a possession. A king may in some sense "own" a kingdom, and an emperor, an empire. But the commonwealth belongs to the people, whatever form of government they choose. Jesus is not proposing a theocracy. He is proposing that order of human relationships that God desires for human beings. A commonwealth that embodies those relationships is divine.

The divine commonwealth contrasts with the Roman Empire not only by replacing the primacy of Caesar by the primacy of God, but by replacing all imperial values with those of mutual respect and love, inclusively and universally. Even while the Roman Empire remains in control of the public world, people can already live and relate to one another in counter-cultural and counter-imperial ways. In that sense the divine commonwealth was already realized in the ministry of Jesus.

A final question is of importance as we try to understand what it means to follow Jesus. How did Jesus anticipate the full coming of the commonwealth on earth for which we all pray? Was he at that point an apocalyptic. Could this fulfillment come only by a supernatural intervention? Perhaps, but the parables do not point in that direction. They suggest that the plant comes from the seeds, that what was already beginning in his ministry would blossom in a transformed world. He seems to have expected this change to happen quite soon. If so, of course, he was quite wrong, and we cannot share his beliefs at this point. If he expected an apocalyptic transformation, he was even more wrong.

If following Jesus meant that one judged Jesus correct in all his judgments and expectations, such following would be impossible. I assume that Jesus would be surprised and in many ways shocked by the full range of consequences of his life and teaching. For us this whole history is important in judging what it means to follow Jesus and whether we should continue to do so. Obviously, this distances us from Jesus.

What then does it mean to follow Jesus? It means to hope and pray for a world structured on principles that would turn present society upside down. It means to live now as far as possible from those principles, and that means to relate to others in ways that create countercultural communities. It means to do what we can to influence the larger society to change in the direction called for by these principles. It means to do all this nonviolently and without antagonism to those who oppose our efforts. It means to keep on keeping on even at personal risk. It means to know God’s love and forgiveness in the midst of this life. It means to trust God’s working in us and amongst us. It means to do all this while remaining open to ideas and ways of being of quite different sorts. And it means to share this way of being and thinking with others as good news, the best there is.

This title invites two levels of discussion. First, there is the urgent need to revivify belief in the importance of caring for something beyond the interests of one's self and the groups with which one identifies. Second, there is the need to clarify what the common good may be and how we can act so as to move toward it. I am not sure which of these levels is of greater importance today.

I

Fifty years ago, the former could be more or less taken for granted in the sense that most Americans recognized that, at least for purposes of social policy, they should be concerned for the people of the nation as a whole and that, for purposes of international policy, they should be concerned for the world as a whole. I do not mean that in fact most Americans acted consistently for the common good. I mean only that the basic Christian teaching that we should be concerned for others as well as for ourselves was taken for granted as normative. The major need was to understand the situation well enough to see what the implications of such a belief are and then motivate people to act as they recognized they should.

Of course, the acceptance of the belief that we should act for the common good led to a great deal of self-deception and hypocrisy. We had to think up reasons why enslaving Africans was for the common good. We had to figure out justification for our genocidal treatment of Native Americans. We had to explain how economic policies that supported capital against labor were really for the good of all.

But we should not suppose that the effect of this basic Christian belief was only to stimulate hypocrisy. It also contributed to the abolition of slavery, to a belated and partial humanization of policies toward Native Americans, and to the more balanced approach to capital and labor of the New Deal. Moral beliefs don't govern public actions, but they are not irrelevant to them either.

This basic Christian belief is by no means limited to Christianity. In one form or another it is part of the teaching of all the religions that developed in what Karl Jaspers taught us to call the axial age, the middle of the first millennium before Christ. To many people it came to seem a simple matter of common sense. Accordingly, it survived the early stages of secularization during the Enlightenment. Philosophers explained that it was a purely rational principle. Indeed, it may be that the principle received clearer expression among some Enlightenment thinkers than it had among many Christians.

However, as secularization has proceeded, the idea has lost ground. Today, ethical teachings such as this are rarely regarded as objectively given or derived by reason. Instead, they are understood to be constructed by cultures. Most cultures, or at least the ones that have survived, inculcate socially beneficial behavior within the community. But most give little attention to any notion of a wider good for all human beings or all creatures.

When individuals realize that what they understand to be their moral obligations are simply the teachings of a particular culture, they discover that they are free to pick and choose among them or to reject them all. Individuals can create their own moralities. If someone sees no reason to modify self-interested behavior for the benefit of others, philosophers can provide no reason why they should. One is free from moral restraints to act as one chooses – so far as reason is concerned. Other thinkers will argue that rational, and, therefore, good behavior is, indeed, behavior that is calculated to obtain as many desired ends for oneself as possible. If one happens to desire happiness for someone else, then benefiting that other person is rational and good. Otherwise, not. There is no reason that one should desire the well being of another.

There is, then, no reason that one should care for the well being of one's community over against others. However, there are few who lack this preference. It is natural to identify strongly with the group of which one is a part over against others. Most people get much of their personal satisfaction from the success of the groups with which they identify.

Religious communities are among those whose successes give satisfaction to their members. In a global context of religious pluralism, this has often been a source of destructive competition and even of warfare. On the other hand, we noted that the teaching of the major religious traditions has countered this tendency somewhat. "God" can function as a rallying cry of one religious community against others or as a call to be concerned for all communities and all creatures. Where this latter check on parochial tendencies is gone, a positive interest in the well being of communities alien to one's own finds little purchase. At that point, for example, when the perceived interests of one's country run counter to that of other peoples, it is widely felt to be unpatriotic to care about those other people. Since they oppose us, they are, by definition, bad.

If I am correct that there has been a narrowing of the horizons of concern in the American public, and a franker affirmation of individual egoism and of national self-interest as determinants of action, we need to ask why. Such changes are always complex, but I will life up two factors that I believe to be important.

First, the religious climate has changed. Christianity as a whole has lost status in the culture. It has been sharply separated from the general educational system, and its own, separate, educational system does not reach as many people, and is less effective even for those it reaches, than was the case in the decade after World War II. This is partly because the relatively stable communities in which the churches played a significant role have given way before rapid mobility.

It is true that the decline in the old-line churches has been accompanied by the rise of some conservative ones and of mega-churches. These certainly teach that individuals should be concerned for other individuals. It is less clear that most of them emphasize the concern Christians should have for people of other nations and other faiths, especially for those who do not welcome our values and ways of doing things.

Second, I suggest, the popular understanding of Christianity as it functions in the public arena is now more legalistic than ever. Fortunately, legalists teach that we should act with regard to consequences for others as well as ourselves. But this sort of obligation lies alongside rules of conduct that are not guided by love. The all-determinative importance of love as taught by both Jesus and Paul is largely lost. Since it is love that drives the authentic Christian concern for other individuals and other peoples, this shift to law is part of what weakens our witness. It also confirms the dislike of Christianity in much of the secular culture.

The vacuum created by the decline of Christianity and by its legalistic distortions has been filled by an ethics drawn from the description of behavior. The most influential is the portrayal of human behavior in economic theory. Human beings are depicted as seeking to gain as much as possible while giving as little as possible in terms of money or labor. The description has obvious applicability to how we behave in the market place. Yet even there, there are many exceptions. For example, many people choose work that they find meaningful, sometimes because it involves meeting real needs of people, rather than because it pays more. Many people financially support causes in which they believe even when there is no promise of personal reward. Even in the market we do not function quite in the way that economists regard as rational.

If this model of self-interested behavior oriented to material gain were used only in one academic discipline and successfully countered by models used in other disciplines, the consequences might not be culturally serious. However, this particular discipline has become the most prestigious and influential of the social sciences. The model of human beings developed by the economists now affects the way human beings are understood in other sciences as well, both natural and social. Government policy is affected by this one science far more than any other.

The economic view of the human being has come increasingly to be the one into which students are socialized in universities. Indeed, universities now make decreasing claims with respect to broad humanistic contributions to their students and emphasize instead their contributions to the student's life-long earning capacity. Students who are going to universities to increase their cultural appreciation or become more effective in service are few and far between. We expect students to have practical goals, which means self-interested ones in economic terms.

We are increasingly extending this mentality to and in the church itself. We expect people to "shop around" for a church "that meets their needs." In the face of decline, we conclude that we must "market" what the church has to offer more effectively. Calling on people to sacrifice for the sake of the neighbor, especially the neighbor who may be a competitor, does not fit this market model.

All of this is to say that the church is profoundly challenged to make its most basic message effective. It needs not only to make it clear that God calls us to love the neighbor, including the "enemy," it needs also to help its people make this a reality in their own lives. It does not work to treat the call to love as one law alongside others. Love of others grows only as it is nurtured in a loving community that points also to God's love of all.

In this account, I have omitted the term, "the common good." It is, of course, not a biblical term. But it is meaningful and important. The biblical emphasis is on the love of individual neighbors and the Christian communities. In a context of political powerlessness, that is the appropriate emphasis. But when Christians have some ability to shape the society in which they live, they need to draw out the implications of neighbor love in other ways. Often the best way to show love for individuals is to improve the quality of the communities in which they live. By serving the common good, more are benefited than by trying to help each one individually. By working for the common good, we can express love for those about whom we know nothing as well as for those of whom we have personal knowledge. Since all are of equal value to God, this is important.

II

For those who do care about the common good, the next question is what it is and how it can be implemented. Utilitarian ethicists identified the common good with the greatest good of the greatest number. This is certainly a good approximation. But we are not likely to get very far in promoting the common good, if we think only in this way. The usual formulations of utilitarianism assume an individualism that in principle works against the common good.

The economic theory of which I have spoken operates in this individualistic fashion. Based on its assumptions about human beings, it argues that the greatest good of the greatest number is served best when each person works aggressively for his or her own economic interest. This theory of the coincidence of individual self-interest and public benefit has been of immense importance in shaping the contemporary mind and public policy.

Given two assumptions, standard in economic theory, the judgment that individual selfishness promotes the common good should work. First, we must assume that what human beings most want are increased consumption and possession, on the one side, and reduced effort, on the other. Indeed, we must assume that these are their only significant desires. Second, we must assume that natural resources are in principle, or for all practical purposes, unlimited. With these two assumptions in place, supporters of the theory can show that as each actor in the market behaves rationally, that is, seeks to get as much as possible for as little as possible, resources are used efficiently and there is an increase of the total quantity of goods and services consumed. Since this is the measure of the common good that has been adopted, the case is made.

Note what happens in the pursuit of the common good that follows this model! All truly personal relations are under siege. In pursuit of gain or reduced labor, persons are expected to move where production is cheapest or where wages are best. Clinging to existing human connections is viewed as irrational. Further, all relations are competitive. This is true not only of the relation of labor to capital and of corporations in relation to one another. It is also true of workers seeking better jobs or simply to keep the ones they have. This system may increase the amount of goods and services consumed, but it certainly works against traditional communities and against the formation of new ones.

The destruction of community is manifest when a factory closes and moves. According to the theory, the common good is served when capital is most efficiently invested. Accordingly, if labor becomes expensive in one locale and production can be moved to a place where it is cheaper, a rational management will move production. Since the overall effect will be to increase production and achieve cheaper prices, the common good is served. But we know from many studies that many lives are ruined.

The destruction of community is also visible in the rural area. As agribusiness replaces traditional family farming, goods are produced with less labor. This is a gain in efficiency. The result is to displace most of the former farmers. Hundreds of villages and small towns have disappeared as a result.

If we understand that human relations are important to people, then we will see how doubtful it is that the common good is served by this continual disruption of human community. This is not to deny that having more goods and services often contributes to the common good. I enjoy television and now find E-mail indispensable! These gains are ambiguous, but I give testimony to the fact that for me they seem to promote the common good. On the other hand, my participation in the common good is served far more by living in a community of retired church workers with whom I share many interests and commitments and who care for one another and help one another through the difficulties of aging and dying. We really don't know how our lives would be improved by increased consumption.

We are not so exceptional in this respect. Studies of happiness show that beyond a certain minimal point, increase in goods and services does not add to happiness. People like to be among the more favored members of their communities, so that individuals become happier when their relative standing is improved. But to be near the bottom in a society of low consumption seems to be no worse than to be near the bottom in a society of high consumption. That means that, in general, economic growth does not contribute to happiness. Yet our whole society is organized around that goal!

I mentioned a second qualification of the validity of the theory of the coincidence of selfishness and the promotion of the common good. One must assume the practical inexhaustibility of natural resources. This has been important for economic theory and practice, and economists can point to many instances in which they have been proven correct. Their point is that technology can substitute plentiful resources for those that become scarce. Plastics replace scarce metals, for example. New energy sources replace those that are exhausted.

The issues here are complex. But those who pay most attention to our natural environment see signs of decay everywhere. Soil is washed away, aquifers are exhausted, forests disappear, animal and plant species become extinct, the ocean is polluted, and weather changes for the worse. Perhaps we can find new sources of energy as oil gives out, but their use is likely further to degrade the world. All of this reduces the quality of human life as well as of the created order in general. As prospects of shortages loom, the United States uses its military power to insure its control. To use a notion of the common good that ignores all this, seriously misdirects human efforts.

If individualistic and materialistic thinking had not become so dominant, noone would suppose that aiming at endless economic growth by encouraging self-interested behavior on the part of all was the way to advance the common good. The very idea of the common good implies that we are bound together, that the good of one depends on the good of others and supports their good. Of course, the idea of the common good does not exclude elements of competition. Competition can sometimes bring out the best in people. But surely competition should operate in a larger context of cooperation and mutual support if there is to be any advance of common good.

I find of interest here an experiment that was conducted rather widely a couple of decades ago. In this game, people were given tokens that they could use in one of two ways. If they wished, they could exchange them for one cent each. The other choice was to put them in a pool in which they would be worth 2.2 cents each, but which would then be divided evenly among all players. According to economists, rational players would exchange all their tokens for one cent each. They would still share in whatever other players put in the collective pot, thus maximizing their income. In fact, however, most players divided their money more or less equally, saying that they thought this was fairer. The one exception was a group of first year graduate students in economics, who put only 20% of their money into the collective pot. Two economists commenting on the experiment wrote: "Evidently the run-of-the-mill players are not strategically sophisticated enough to have figured out" that they should have kept all their money for themselves. (For the Common Good, p. 91)

Ironically, however, we notice that it was these unsophisticated people who profited most from the game. In fact, they would have profited still more had they put all their money in the collective pot. The sophisticated economics students got less monetary returns from their more rational strategy. If they had been still more "rational" and exchanged 100 % of their tokens for cash, they would have gained still less. Those groups where an interest in the common good was greatest were the ones who individually gained the most.

My fear is that if the same experiment were repeated today, the percentage of the money put in the common pot would be less. The idea that true rationality is pure selfishness, and that one's self-interest is always to get the most one can for oneself, is becoming more pervasive in our society. But as we see from this experiment, the result is that we all lose.

We have seen extreme expressions of this individualism in our corporations recently. We have long expected corporations to behave in a primarily selfish way, seeking profits for their stockholders above the well being of their employees or the public. But within the corporation we have assumed that cooperation and personal service to the corporation were normative. Now we find that many executives put their personal profits above the well being of the corporation and its stockholders, sometimes in extreme ways. That this "rational" behavior is profoundly contrary to the common good is surely apparent to all.

In case anyone is still not convinced that narrowly self-interested individual behavior, far from advancing the common good, is profoundly inimical to it, let me illustrate its adverse effects in one more way. I spent most of my career teaching in a theological seminary. Like most such institutions, raising sufficient money each year to pay its bills was an ongoing challenge. If one part of its budget was increased, other parts of the budget had to be cut. Our salaries were below average; so faculty had some justification for asking for more. Nevertheless, an increase in salaries either meant fewer colleagues or less money for staff and students.

Now in such a context some faculty are more mobile than others. That is, some could easily find other positions, perhaps ones that paid better; others could not. Those who could most easily move were also those who brought most prestige to the school. Consider two ways they could behave.

One way would be to demand higher salaries for themselves. This would be rational behavior as that is generally defined today. Administrators would be under great pressure to give all money available for raises to these professors, taking advantage of the fact that others had no good alternatives to accepting whatever they were offered to deny them raises. Indeed, that might be considered rational behavior on their part. However, I do not need to describe the result in terms of faculty morale and the loss of faculty solidarity.

We would have to ask whether a professor who got a larger raise in this way would truly be better off in the resulting context of decaying community. I think we all know that, even measured by quite selfish standards, the answer is No. Destroying our social context for the sake of greater income does not enhance our personal well being. Some economic sacrifice for the common good works much better in that regard.

Perhaps I am too long repeating the obvious. At least this is obvious to me, and I think should be obvious to all Christians. However, I state and restate the obvious because we have collectively acquiesced in a system that is based on the opposite assumptions, one that endlessly destroys human community and degrades the natural environment on the grounds that this increases total wealth. Frankly, I am keenly disappointed that the policies that are grounded in this egocentric understanding of human beings are still supported by many Christian ethicists and church leaders. I am glad to say, on the other hand, that other voices have gained the upper hand in important circles.

Let me make the contrast clear in terms of actual choices that have been made and are continuing to be made by people of good will. I will take the field of Third-World development as my example. People of good will agreed, after World War II, that there was too much poverty in these countries and that an increase of goods and services was needed. There were two quite different approaches to improving the economic life of the poor, most of whom lived in agricultural villages.

Mahatma Gandhi favored community development. He thought that the economic condition of the villagers could be improved by introducing what is now called appropriate technology, that is, technology they could easily learn to use and to maintain. The symbol of this was the sewing machine. Others have favored the steel plough, or solar cookers. Community development can also focus on nearby wells and woodlots, which can save large amounts of labor. Sometimes the issue can be better access to markets. Often educating women about contraception and providing elementary medical care are of crucial importance to the quality of life in rural villages. In any case, in community development, what is needed must be the decision of the villagers, and they must have ownership of any new equipment that is provided them.

Improvements of this sort increase the income of the villagers. This leads to expanded consumption. Gradually, small industry should develop in some towns to meet the new needs and desires of the peasants. The villagers will be ready for somewhat more complex equipment. Technological advances will occur organically. But these should be judged by their impact on the land as well as their labor-saving character.

Many NGOs, church related and others, work at this kind of development. It can only be done village by village by people who are willing to spend time living with the villagers. Accordingly, the increase of per capita production and consumption is slow. But this increase is hardly an adequate measure of the full improvement in the quality of life that can occur as the villagers are helped to work together to solve their own problems. The quality of human relations is likely to improve as well as the self-respect of the villagers.

The other form of development aims to increase per capita production and consumption rapidly. In India, it was favored by Nehru, who succeeded Gandhi as leader and was informed by his British education. The symbol was the large steel mill that the Soviet Union gave to India. The World Bank favored large dams that would produce water for irrigation and electrical power. This is, of course, the industrial model.

The standard procedure is to move large numbers of people from agricultural production to industrial production. To pay for the industry, agriculture must produce products for export. Shifting from peasant farming to agribusiness both increased produce available for export and drove peasants off the land into industrial cities. The Green Revolution supported this change. With fewer farmers producing as many or more products, and others available as cheap labor for industry, the overall productivity of workers is quickly increased.

The downside is that this type of development is directly destructive of existing community and works against the development of new forms of community. Villages are flooded or depopulated as the young women and men, finding little to do there, are forced to move to industrializing cities. Traditional values are weakened, with only money offered as an alternative. Although the income in cash in cash of the new workers is likely to improve, the quality of their lives rarely does. Whereas, in the village, the peasants may have some control of their own lives, and they tend to help one another through crises, laborers in factories have very little control of their lives and few systems of mutual care. Self-esteem often suffers. Those left behind are often poorer than ever.

Meanwhile, another segment of the population, able to control the new agribusiness and industry, grows much wealthier. The gap between rich and poor widens. Both agribusiness and the new industries tend to degrade the natural environment. Nevertheless, this is the kind of development to which the industrialized nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization are committed. It is the justification for the North America Free Trade Agreement and of the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.

It is believed that this kind of development can proceed most rapidly through foreign, corporate investment. To encourage this, Third World countries remove barriers to trade and investment, lower their wages and environmental protection, and put their businesses and even their infrastructure up for sale to the highest bidder. This "liberalization" has come to be a central demand of the economic rulers of the world.

According to standard economic measures, the success of a few Third World countries, especially in East and Southeast Asia, has been remarkable. They have attracted huge amounts of investment capital and have industrialized rapidly. Chiefly, it is a matter of foreign corporations producing goods for foreign markets, but fairly rapidly indigenous ownership and consumption also rise. The costs of which I have spoken are paid, but at least in some countries the desired economic growth has also occurred with one segment of the population profiting impressively.

I say this to give a balanced picture. Opinions differ as to whether the people of Thailand, for example, are truly better off now than they were several decades ago, but to whatever extent well being is measured by the availability of modern conveniences, they certainly are. Those who are doubtful point to the deepening misery of the poor, the loss of traditional values and community relationships, the looming ecological crises, and the structural dependence of prosperity on decisions made in financial centers in other parts of the world. From the point of view of serious Buddhists, the new religion of consumerism is a spiritual disaster.

In other parts of the world, there is no ambiguity. In much of Africa, standard development policies have left social and ecological havoc in their wake while largely destroying what industrial production was once there. In Argentina, the modern economy has simply collapsed. In much of Latin America losses have outweighed gains by almost any measure.

Ironically, although much of this havoc has been through the imposition of policies desired by Washington and thought to be beneficial to us, we as a people have not gained. Following the theory faithfully, American corporations have moved their production in large part across the border to Mexico and across the ocean to China and Southeast Asia. The gains of some sections of those populations have been at the expense of industrial workers in the United States. Now a similar movement of work is taking place for clerical and more skilled workers. In this context, American wages have not kept up with inflation, job security has become a rarity, increasing numbers have no medical insurance, fulltime work does not enable families to support themselves, infrastructure declines, and the natural environment suffers. The only incomes that increase significantly are those of the rich. Nearly half of all Americans now have virtually no net worth or have debts that exceed their assets. Half the wealth of the country is in the hands of a small percentage of the population. The federal government has unprecedented debt, much of it owned by foreigners.

True believers in the dominant model tell us that the solution of our problems is to reduce taxes on corporations and the rich, reduce government services to the poor and middle class, improve the climate for business by reducing work place and environmental protections and minimum wage requirements, privatizing public services, and facilitating the investment of capital overseas. One wonders how much more the nation and the world must suffer before we will recognize that the fundamental view of the common good that is taken to justify all these steps is radically erroneous!

I concentrate on theoretical questions, one might say, theological ones. It may be that those who press hardest for the dominant policies are in fact aware that they do so for simple self-interest, not because they really believe that these policies will benefit the people of the nation or the world. It may be that, for them, the theoretical justification is irrelevant. But they would not have been able to dismantle so much of the painfully won gains in the common good achieved during previous decades had they not had the support, or at least the acquiescence, of many people of good will. I include among these most professional economists. I also include many conscientious ethicists. And I include many who look to economists and ethicists for guidance without reflecting much for themselves.

Even today, our government uses moral arguments to press for popular support of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. It tells us that only further liberalization can solve the economic problems of Latin America. Even today, people who should have learned from experience, people who should listen to the misery of the victims of these types of policies, continue to support them because they are told that experts do so. We continue to destroy the common good in the name of serving it.

III

It is my view that people of good will should be able to see that an individualistic and competitive approach to the common good is wrong in principle. They should also be able to see that, after our government and its allies have applied it vigorously for several decades, the ills of the world have increased. But sadly, I know that many still do not agree. Hence, I add a final word.

Even if we suppose that the only considerations that matter are economic ones, present policies are misdirected. The growth at which they aim is costly in economic terms. Today the cost of growth, at least of the growth that is attained by present policies, equals or exceeds the value of the growth itself. We are making enormous efforts, and the result is to stand still even in purely economic terms. If we employ broader social and psychological measures of human well being, our present policies have led to massive losses. On the other hand, if we redirected our efforts we could make genuine economic progress, even if it would be slow, and social and psychological progress could replace the present decline.

Obviously, I need to explain this. First, note that when we are told that we are making economic progress, we are referring almost always to Gross National Product or Domestic Product. No economist claims that this is a direct measure of economic well being, but almost all economists acquiesce in its use as if it measured something economically desirable. This assumption has been challenged from time to time, and this challenge should be vigorously pursued.

So far as the GDP is concerned, governmental expenditures on war in Afghanistan and Iraq count as much as similar expenditures on health or education. You may think that on some other than economic basis, such as security, these expenditures have improved your lot, but economists would not regard this as economic gain. Similarly, when crime increases, increased expenditures to counter it add to the GDP. Economists do not regard this as an economic gain. Indeed, when pressed, economists do not consider government expenditures in general as a contribution to the economic well being of the nation. They focus on the other segment of the GDP, personal consumption. They would approve, I think, if we used just that figure to measure how well we are doing economically.

However, they acknowledge that even that figure excludes important contributions to economic well being and includes expenditures that do not add to such well being. For example, the positive contribution of housework is not included. Yet the cooking, cleaning, home improvements, and childcare that homeowners and parents provide is just as much a benefit, in strictly economic terms, as when the cooking, cleaning, home improvements, and childcare are provided commercially. Part of the increase in GDP during the past thirty years results from a shift from families meeting their own needs to paying for services from others.

To get some sense of what is entailed, consider the change that occurs when a second parent goes to work, usually the mother. The family begins to spend much more money, and all of this is counted as an increase in personal consumption. But half or more of this may be for services that the parents can no longer provide themselves or for needs that arise just so that the mother can get to the job, dress properly for it, and meet other attendant obligations. Sometimes a second car is required. There is also the possibility that the children may need more psychiatric care when they see so much less of their parents, but I will not get into such indirect costs. My point is that there are, here, strictly economic costs of the increase of the measured personal consumption.

Now consider a quite different example of the uncounted cost of growth. Suppose an earthquake causes five billion dollars worth of damage. Nothing is subtracted from the personal consumption figure in the GDP as a result. But when five billion dollars is spent on restoring the destroyed homes and businesses, this is added in. Common sense would suggest that in fact, in strictly economic terms, nothing has been gained. Actually, all the extra costs involved in detouring around broken bridges and arranging for temporary housing will show up as positive contributions to personal consumption rather than costs to be subtracted from it.

Another large area is environmental costs. All of our consumption of scarce resources, such as oil, adds to personal consumption. Nothing is subtracted for the reduction in what is available. Similarly, when we cut down our forests, that adds to personal consumption. The fact that there our forest resources are not diminished. If extracting oil from the earth becomes more and more expensive as it becomes scarcer, that simply adds more to personal consumption. Consumption is not measured by the amount of gasoline purchased or the number of miles it enables us to drive. It is measured only by the cost. As gasoline becomes scarcer and more expensive its use adds more to the personal consumption figure.

Increased pollution similarly shows up as a positive at least insofar as we respond to it. If pollution kills trees, that does not subtract from personal consumption, but if we spend money on gasoline additives or add equipment to reduce this killing, that improves the personal consumption measure. When the air becomes polluted so as to increase asthma, the increased costs of treating asthma adds to personal consumption. When costly steps are taken to reduce this pollution, that also adds.

Now it would seem to make more sense to subtract the economic costs of dealing with pollution and its consequences from the gains that have been made in the act of producing that pollution. The present system treats the costs of restoring the situation to what it was before we polluted to the economic gains made in the process of polluting. In other words, the costs of growth are added to the benefits of growth. If we are seriously interested in aiming at the improvement of the economic condition of a people, then this seems crazy. I think it is.

Let me note that some economists who recognize that personal consumption is not a good measure of economic well being say that it is good measure of market activity and that, for some economic purposes, it is important to measure this. My quarrel is not with measuring market activity and drawing conclusions from its increase and decrease. My quarrel is with selling an increase of market activity to the public as if it were in itself an economic advantage. It may or may not be. That can only be determined by subtracting the costs of the economic activity from the gains it pursues.

Sadly, in my view, very few economists are interested in this project and no governments have yet undertaken it. I have heard recently that it is possible that the government of Canada will do so. But in the meantime we must acknowledge that we do not know just what the results will be.

Nevertheless, the question has seemed important enough to me to press ahead in an amateurish way with some colleagues and especially with the help of my son, Cliff. You can find our results for the United States in the period after World War II in an appendix in the book I wrote with Herman Daly. Although our efforts have had little influence among mainstream economists or governments, groups in ten or more other countries have developed similar measures. An organization in San Francisco has developed our measure for the United States, and it annually reports on what it calls the Genuine Progress Indicator.

, None of the statistics that have been produced thus far have the benefit of the resources of a national government for the collection of the needed data. Little of the work has been informed by the skills of the more prestigious economists. Accordingly, it would be unwise to lean heavily on the exact figures in any of these measures. But it is significant that almost all of these measure show that the cost of growth in recent years equals or exceeds its benefits. Whereas there have been periods in the past when economic growth definitely benefited people economically, this is no longer the case. Surely that is an important fact. It makes no sense to commit ourselves to policies to increase something that does us no good. Surely it is time for us to shift our shared national goal from increasing economic activity to enhancing the common good. Otherwise, what is government for?

My topic allows me to reflect more about myself than about the work of Ivan Illich himself. That is fortunate, since I would have difficulty writing a paper on Illich's ecological interest and thought. Indeed, I doubt that the reading of Illich has led many people to give sustained attention to ecology. Certainly that was not his own focus although he was fully aware of the ecological crisis.

Widespread concern about the ecological crisis arose in the late sixties without any influence of Illich of which I am aware. Nevertheless, the encounter with Illich cannot but affect the way one thinks in general and about the relation of human beings to the natural world in particular. Certainly it has affected my understanding of the crisis and of the way best to respond to it.

To identify the influence of Illich on me requires remembering how I was thinking in the early seventies before I began to read him. The 1960s had been a time of painful rethinking for me as for many others. The Vietnam War, the more intense awareness of the Black perspective, and also the growing understanding of the Native American experience combined to undermine radically my partly conscious sense of "American" virtue. I felt this keenly and painfully, although my sense of identity as an American was already complicated.

Growing up in Japan, attending a Canadian school, and having classmates of many nationalities intensified my sense of identity as an American. The sight of the flag of the United States stirred me deeply, and I felt a special thrill when our ship landed in an American port and I could touch the soil of my homeland. Although I was strongly inclined toward pacifism, I decided it was right to fight for my country in World War II.

I thought of the United States basically as a bastion of democracy that had fought two wars to save Europe from evil forces. I read this virtue back into the founding of the colonies and their revolt against Britain. Of course, I was aware in some peripheral way of the mistreatment of Indians and Blacks, but somehow I saw that as secondary to the main story.

Even so, my identity as an American was complicated by the fact that I knew that I was also a Southerner. Accordingly, when I read about the Civil War, called by Southerners, the War Between the States, I identified with the Confederate armies, experiencing their defeat with pain. Nevertheless, at another level I was glad that there was a united United States, and I identified strongly with that. My Southern identity was further complicated by my knowledge not only that the Confederate armies fought for a hopeless cause but also that they fought for an immoral one. I mention this because I learned early that one can identify with one's people while recognizing their crimes.

In the sixties, this double experience was extended to the United States as a whole. I saw that the European settlement of North America was an imperial invasion and that the expansion over the continent came near to being genocide of the people whose land was being unjustly taken. I saw how fundamental racism had been not only in the South, but also in the nation as a whole. I saw that our relation to the whole of Latin America had long been exploitative and imperialistic rather than protective of the freedom of Latin countries from European empires. I felt deep alienation without ceasing to be formed by my identity as a part of the Euro-American citizenship of the United States. It was then, and still is, very much my nation from which I feel alienated.

I also brought to the sixties a strong identity as a Christian. Until then I had a partly conscious sense of Christian virtue as well. Of course, I knew that individual Christians and the church as a whole had done bad things, but I thought of these crimes as part of the human condition of sinfulness rather than as peculiarly Christian. Beginning in the sixties I was forced to recognize that Christian teaching itself has been responsible at least in major part, for horrendous crimes: the persecution of Jews culminating in the Holocaust, patriarchal domination and exploitation of women, contempt for people of different religious commitments, colonialism, sexual repression, an anthropocentrism that resulted in the devastating exploitation of the natural environment, and much else.

In spite of this realization, I have not been alienated from Christianity in quite the way I have been alienated from the American South or from the United States. This is because, as Christians became more vividly aware of their crimes, they repented, at least at important leadership levels. This means that the churches take seriously their commitment to ideals or norms that condemn these widespread abuses. With some enthusiasm, one can identify with this principle of repentance and with a tradition that repeatedly embraces and embodies it. The Southern states, on the other hand, have not repented for slavery or segregation or their continuing racism. The United States, similarly, has never acknowledged the wrong of slavery or undertaken to compensate those who suffered from it. It continues and intensifies its imperial and exploitative relations with the rest of the world without embarrassment, and it belies its official ideals of democracy and justice in its relations even to its own people. My self-identification as a white Southerner and as an American citizen of the dominant class is more painful than my self-identification as a Christian.

Awareness of the ecological crisis hit me hard toward the end of sixties. Of course, I recognized both American and Christian responsibility for this most profound threat to future human life. This threat still seems to me even more devastating than the cruelty of human beings to one another and to themselves. I entered the seventies with intense concern about this, a concern that tended to separate it from the social and political issues that had dominated my thought in most of the sixties. Initially I connected the ecological crisis chiefly to issues of population and consumption.

Since I am a Christian theologian, I felt it as my primary responsibility to participate in efforts to reorient Christian thinking away from its dualism and anthropocentricism toward a sense of human kinship with the natural world and of God's concern for it. Not because of what I did, but because many other Christians were responding to this, for us, new concern during the same period, the shift in official church thinking and teaching was rather rapid. For once I was on the winning side.

Of course, my real interest was in changing human behavior in the direction of sustainability. I wrote and spoke of the urgency of such change. I suppose I thought that if only enough people shared my perception of the urgency of change in human treatment of nature, they would reduce their rate of procreation and the quantity of their consumption. However, I rather quickly realized that changes in official teaching would take a long time to have any real effect on the thought patterns of most Christians and even longer to affect behavior. Simply describing the crisis and the need for a different attitude toward nature would, at best, have limited beneficial effects.

In the seventies I encountered thinkers who understood that the relation of human beings to the natural world and the ordering of human society are inseparable. They differed greatly, but all deepened my understanding. I will describe the impact on me of three of these: Paolo Soleri, Paul Shepard, and Ivan Illich. The first who affected me deeply was Soleri.

I encountered Soleri because I was working with a few students to identify people who not only recognized the seriousness of the ecological crisis but also had positive proposals about how to respond to it. We came across some of his early writings and designs. Some of us visited Soleri at the Cosanti Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he made a major presentation at the conference we organized in 1972 on "Alternatives to Catastrophe."

In Soleri's case, the impact on me was at a practical level more than a theoretical one. He showed me how closely ecological destruction is related to human habitat. If we spread our habitat out over the countryside, not only do we take land from agricultural uses or wilderness, we also create cities that depend on extensive networks of utilities. Especially we increase dependence on motor transportation, including the private automobile with its extravagant use of scarce resources, and its pollution of the atmosphere. Soleri showed me that a strikingly different, far more sustainable, form of habitat is possible.

He gave me hope in another way as well. My first reaction to the ecological crisis had been to call for frugality and sacrifice. Soleri showed me that simply arguing for smaller homes and lots was not the answer. His proposed way of organizing habitat could not only dramatically reduce pressure on space, resources, and sinks; it could also encourage community and create a far better context for bringing up children. Soleri gave me hope that it might be possible to attract people into a sustainable future rather than drive them to it by guilt or fear.

Sadly, I have to recognize that to date the attractive alternatives have not, by themselves, been effective. The old ways continue and typically grow more unsustainable all the time. Soleri's architectural ecologies or arcologies are viewed as interesting ideas, but there is little disposition to take them seriously as a solution to basic human problems. I now believe change will occur only under great pressure. But I continue to think that if there are positive images of a sustainable society, the requisite catastrophes will not have to be quite so extreme, and that the decisions to which they lead humanity are more likely to be positive ones.

The second great influence on me during the seventies was Paul Shepard. Shepard forced me to recognize that despite all my disillusionment, I still thought, at a fundamental level, in terms of progress. In particular, I assumed that civilization was an advance over pre-civilized life. It took only a little conversation, however, for Shepard to disabuse me of this assumption. Obviously, all the ancient civilizations of which we know were based on hierarchy and war, as well as on patriarchy. Slaves constructed all the great monuments of these civilizations, which so impress us today. Their cost drained resources from the peasants on whose backs these civilizations were built.

In contrast with life in ancient cities, Shepard described a much more attractive existence among hunting and gathering peoples. He taught that since humanity evolved chiefly during the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering, we are all genetically programmed for that lifestyle rather than for farming or herding, and especially in contrast to urban existence. Shepard looked back to a golden age lost to most of humanity long ago, and he sought to find ways of retaining some bits of it in the contemporary context.

I recognized that our distant ancestors, like the few hunters and gatherers who still exist, lived in a far more sustainable way than do we. I recognized that the quality of life among them was far freer and more human than that of the peasants and slaves who constituted the dominant population of the ancient civilizations. Comparison of the hunting and gathering societies and contemporary cities shows even more dramatically the unsustainable character of the latter as well as the dehumanizing experience of many contemporary urbanites. But I could not be quite as enthusiastic about these ancestors as Shepard. The chief reason for my ambivalence, I suspect, was that I recognized my almost total lack of the skills required for survival in such a world. I also thought that I would find life there somewhat boring. Of course, I realized that if I had been born in that context, I would feel quite differently. But then I would be a different person.

Setting all this aside, it still seems to me that not all the changes that have occurred in the course of human history are negative. Even Shepard acknowledged that some of the music we enjoy is truly an advance over what was possible then. I will add an example from the realm of moral sensitivity.

I have been shaped by my Christian faith to think of situations from the point of view of others as well as from my own perspective. These other perspectives include those of other animals. Shepard, because of his personal interest in experiencing some of the values of hunting, decided to kill a bear. He relished the experience of hunting and killing the bear, while relating to it with the respect that even today is shown by some of the remaining hunting and gathering societies. But when I pressed him, he acknowledged that all the respect shown the bear in no way reduced the bear's suffering. Indeed, he thought, imagining the point of view of the bear was not part of the world that he celebrated. From my point of view, learning to transcend ourselves in this way is a gain I would not want to surrender, although I grant that our culture, overall, causes far more suffering to animals than did hunting and gathering societies.

In some respects the overall visions of Soleri and Shepard were at opposite poles. For Soleri, the past is dark. We must orient ourselves toward radical transformation in the future. His urban designs are intended to contribute to the universal spiritualization of matter, which, for him, is the eschatological hope. He has also drawn designs for space colonies that he thinks would advance the process of this spiritualization beyond this planet.

For Shepard, human life was at its best in the remote past. Each stage of change, normally depicted as progress, has been, in fact, a deeper fall into psychosocial disturbance. His book title, Nature and Madness, points to the contrast brilliantly developed in the book itself. Far from spiritualizing matter, the need is to naturalize human beings.

It is interesting that both Soleri and Shepard viewed Christianity as a major enemy. For Soleri, the worship of God the Father directs humanity backwards to the dark past. For Shepard, Christianity is the greatest cause of disaffection with what is given and thus the source of those changes that lead to greater madness. In my view, Shepard's analysis is more on target. Of course, much in Christianity has functioned conservatively and continues to do so. Some Christians seek to idealize a remote past. There are those who identify the eschatological future with a return to the Garden of Eden. But when we view Christianity in the context of the history of religions, what is distinctive is its future orientation. In the structure and content of the Bible, the final fulfillment differs markedly from the original condition. The Jewish prophets are sharply critical of the established situation. Although they often contrast it unfavorably with earlier conditions, they basically point toward a new world. This future orientation is heightened in the New Testament. The conviction is that in Christ God has worked a new thing. The anticipation is that God is bringing a new world into being.

That this eschatological hope, so deep-seated in Christianity, is dangerous has long been clear. It has been distorted into attempts to make the world over in the image of the fallible human actors. But Shepard was as concerned about its purest forms. These, too, alienate people from the given. They are a source of longing for the realization of a more just and peaceful order; and this longing generates a restless dissatisfaction with the world as it is given. This in fact often leads to further madness.

Persuasive as Shepard was, I could not follow him all the way. As I have already stated, despite his impressive evidence of the positive quality of life in hunting and gathering societies, I could not picture myself, or people I knew, as happy in that life. Perhaps we have fallen so deeply into madness that we cannot imagine what it would be like to be sane. I grant Shepard that. But for me the appreciation of those societies and their way of life remains "academic" in the bad sense. I did not want to hunt and kill a bear in order to live in a way more appropriate to my genetic make-up. Furthermore, the ratio of men to bears is now such that encouraging such behavior among men would lead to the rapid extinction of bears.

Indeed, in terms of practical proposals little followed from my changed perceptions. My awareness of the evils of civilization and, especially, of its industrial form was intensified. I felt more strongly than before that we should support indigenous people everywhere in their struggle to maintain continuity with their cultural past. I recognized much more clearly that this was incumbent on us for our own sake as well as for the indigenous people. We have much to learn from them.

However, the prophetic principle shapes me too deeply to go further. I am, probably unalterably, oriented to hoping for a future that differs from anything that has been in the past. I long for a world more just and peaceful and sustainable than the one in which I find myself, and I am committed to do what I can to move toward such a world. Actually, I liked to point out to Shepard that he was himself a product of this prophetic tradition, one of the most radical of late twentieth-century prophets, whose teaching generated deep alienation from the dominant practices and tendencies of our world. It was as a prophet, rather than as a counter-prophet, that I embraced him.

Shepard's weakness, in my perspective, was that his proposals for improvement were superficial in comparison with his analyses of the problem. Sadly, this is true of many prophets. But I hunger for positive vision. Celebrating the hunting and gathering societies of our ancestors did not supply that vision for me. There is obviously no way back unless the human population is reduced by ninety percent or more. I cannot hope for that, nor did Shepard. I do hope that population will decline, but gradually and because of human decisions. The decline I envisage will not lead to the possibility of renewing hunting and gathering as the norm.

I have characterized Shepard as celebrating the original human condition and Soleri as pointing to a distant future very different from anything that has existed thus far. My own inclination is to imagine a nearer future that would respond to the critical issues we now face, especially the ecological crisis. Soleri's arcologies seem to be the kinds of answers we need even though the more ultimate context in which his own vision located them does not seem helpful.

Ivan Illich spoke more directly to my concerns than either of the others. He, too, startled me with his insights. These were based in large part in his celebration of peasant village life. This was far nearer at hand than hunting and gathering societies and fairly recently in the past of many of us.

Despite the impact on me of awareness of the imperialism of the Unite States, of the ecological crisis, of Soleri, and of Shepard, I continued in the early seventies to suppose that it was important to improve the lot of the global poor. By most measures, most peasants were poor. Hence, even though I opposed further economic growth in general, I acknowledged the need for increased consumption among the poor. I took for granted that better education and better health care were important in such development.

Illich opened my eyes to the real meaning of development. We have been systematically attempting to improve the lot of the peasants by bringing them into the modern world. This destroys their communities, their way of life, and their self-respect. Illich gave us the vision by which we could appreciate what we were destroying and see the havoc caused by modernity not only on those we moderns were trying to develop but also on ourselves.

Until I encountered Illich's critique of schooling, it had not occurred to me to oppose the institution of schools either as a part of modern society or as an instrument of development. At most I recognized that schools should be culturally adjusted so that they would cease to educate people in ways that alienated them from their communities and prepared them for nonexistent positions in society. Illich opened my eyes to the problematic character of the institutionalization of education.

This, of course, has immediate practical consequences. Nothing is more central to development programs than formal education. This education is in tension with the informal education in which all societies engage as they transmit their cultures and their technical skills from generation to generation. To oppose schooling is to oppose development, and Illich became increasingly consistent in this respect.

After World War II, well-meaning people in the North almost universally supported development programs in the Third World. The churches took major leadership in this process. In the 1960s Illich did not oppose development as such. He saw that change was inevitable. But he did not want the church to associate itself with any one pattern of change. He was critical both of the "hierarch who wants to justify collections by increasing his service to the poor, and [of] the rebel-priest who wants to use his collar as an attractive banner in agitation." (The Church, Change and Development, page 17.)

The standard debate was between those who wanted to progress by dealing directly with the needs of the poor and those who were convinced that only when the poor gained power could their real needs be addressed. Illich would not take sides in this debate. He thought the church should avoid both directions. The only development in which the church should engage was development into Christ.

During the 1960s the global Catholic Church poured resources of personnel and of money into Latin America. Illich was highly critical especially of the sending of personnel. This was a new phase of colonialism, making the Latin American church once again dependent on the North. The people who came were far less effective than local people might be. The institutions created by external funding were unsustainable. Thus this great development program of the church, however well meaning, was misdirected, often doing more harm than good.

By the seventies, Illich directed his writings much less toward the church. It was the total impact of the North in Latin American that he assessed. However well meaning much of the effort to develop was, its net effects were disempowering of the local people and destructive of their communal life. Development brought its objects into a modern world to which they were poorly adapted and in which they were often poor in a far more degrading sense than had been the case before. Further, Illich increasingly saw that even those who succeeded in the modern world were still impoverished in relation to some of the values of the pre-modern world. If the institution of schooling was required in order to modernize, that certainly did not justify it.

Even more startling was Illich's analogous critique of the institutionalization and professionalization of health care. I had assumed that modern medicine had arrived at an ability to deal with many diseases that afflicted human kind in a way that would be universally beneficial. This seemed to be one unambiguous gift of modernity to humanity. But Illich saw that accepting this gift entailed disempowering people from taking care of themselves at a very fundamental level.

I am not entirely convinced by Illich's brilliant criticisms. I depend on professionals to take care of me and am glad to do so. I think many people around the world want and need this help. Similarly, I think that formal schooling can be beneficial even to traditional communities. Without it these communities are powerless to deal with the pressures of their modern environment. Not to make it available to those who want it seems to me unjust.

Nevertheless, as I envision the future, Illich's analyses strengthen my sense that opposing further economic growth is not the evil it is often depicted to be. You may be familiar with the standard argument. The poor need to consume four or five times as much as they now do in order to have a decent life. There is no way other than revolutionary violence by which resources can be taken from the rich and given to the poor or that growth can be directed only to the poor. Hence, the economy as a whole must grow to four or five times its present size in order to bring the poor out of their poverty. To oppose this is to condemn billions of people to misery.

In my judgment such growth is impossible. The world is already living unsustainably, and we will reach absolute limits long before total economic activity increases that much. In any case, the experience of the past fifty years shows that most of the poor do not benefit, even by standard economic measures, from overall global growth. Indeed, the methods used to achieve that growth typically lead to a deterioration of the lot of many of the poor. Even in instances when their income rises, they are frequently disempowered.

I believe Illich's analysis supports the conclusion that the only form of development that really improves the lot of the traditional poor is community development. In such development, the inhabitants of a village articulate their own goals and implement them. They may be assisted by outsiders, but only in ways that leave them in control. If new technology is involved, it must be a technology that does not make the community dependent on outsiders for its use and maintenance.

Whereas most people respond to such a picture by regarding it as condescending and unjust to the poor, Illich provides grounds for affirming the opposite. Empowerment within traditional communities rather than replacement of such communities by industrial cities is the true way to benefit the poor. Such empowerment involves technology, but not the technology that degrades the quality of human relations in the developed countries. Illich reflected on the optimum technology with an unmatched profundity.

Illich's discussion of transportation makes points that, in principle, are of enormous practical importance. He argues that both animal transport and automobiles have serious negative effects. As human population grows, we cannot afford to share food with large numbers of animals. On the other hand, motor transportation is clearly unsustainable as well as destructive of human community. The bicycle increases the ability of human beings to get around without damaging the environment or weakening human community.

Sadly, at present, the predominant use of the bicycle is considered only a step in the development process. Developing societies still plan for a world of private automobiles. In China hundreds of millions of people use bicycles, but as soon as they can afford cars, they take that next step. Yet it is physically impossible for Chinese cities to handle transportation the way it currently operates in southern California. The effort to do so only adds to pollution, to dependence on imported oil, and to using scarce agricultural lands for urban expansion, while employing funds badly needed for other purposes. It would be far better for China to design its cities around the bicycle in a way that would drastically limit the use of automobiles. What Illich shows us is that this would not be a restriction on an otherwise desirable form of development but an inherently beneficial change.

Here, too, it is clear that a socially desirable community is also an ecologically sustainable one. We should not think of the communities Illich depicts and commends as deprived. We should not see movement in that direction as a step backward, which we would take only because of dire necessity. Instead, he points us to a more human world, which is also far more sustainable. He contributes to the building up of a vision that may draw people into change without the extreme pressure brought about by truly terrible catastrophes.

I have appropriated such insights from Soleri, Shepard, and Illich without advancing their thought. My own distinctive contribution has been in the realm of economic theory, which they have not directly discussed. Standard economic theory assigns no value whatever to human community. It is not surprising, accordingly, that the policies derived from it are consistently destructive of such community. The dominant practice is to measure progress by the quantity of market activity. Total market activity is greatest when the market is global. Accordingly, even national communities are undermined. Power is transferred systematically from governments to corporations. Formal education is needed to serve these corporations. Accordingly, it has less and less to do with transmitting traditional values from one generation to another or teaching youth how to relate to one another and to nature, and to appreciate the values available in the cultural context. It is now supported almost entirely as a contribution to economic growth.

Standard economic theory is totally anthropocentric. The value of anything other than human beings is the price that human beings will pay for it. The policies that follow from this theory are systematically destructive of the natural environment. Defenders of the environment must appeal to concerns that are absent in this theory. Sometimes those in power simply ignore them and give a free hand to those who implement the policies supported by economic theory. The most for which environmentalists can hope is some compromise between supposed economic values and environmental concerns. Repeated compromise in the long run accomplishes little more than slowing the victory of economic considerations guided by the now controlling assumptions..

As long as this economic theory governs the affairs of the world, I fear that there is little chance to preserve the values to which, in various ways, Soleri, Shepard, and Illich are all committed. There is very little possibility of moving toward a sustainable world in which other species can flourish alongside human beings. The economic order itself becomes more and more precarious, with whole national economies collapsing along the way, causing misery for tens of millions of people.

It would be possible to think quite differently about the economy. Economics might ask what kinds of institutions and rules we need to produce and exchange goods and services in a sustainable way that would strengthen human community and regenerate the natural context. If those now trained as economists cannot ask such questions, we need to develop a distinct community of thinkers who do. Some steps in that direction are occurring in the various national societies for ecological economics as well as the international society. But their work needs to be deeply informed by the still-neglected kind of thinking pursued so brilliantly by Ivan Illich. Unless ecological economists think profoundly and wisely about human community, their proposals will still fall short.

In the first lecture I explained why, for liberal and progressive Protestants the question of whether we should turn to someone other than Jesus is a serious, even critical, one. In the second lecture I looked at what happens when people simply drift away from Jesus into the wider Western culture, the option of Gautama, the Buddha, and the alternatives offered by the other Abrahamic traditions. I sketched my reasons for staying with Jesus. Obviously, proponents of these other options would have much to say in response.

In this third lecture I want to do two things. First, I want to talk about live options to which Western Christians commonly turn. When I was growing up the obvious choices were Communism and other Nazism. But today, those options have little appeal. Jesus has survived as a focus of loyalty far better than they. I could speak of American imperialism as an alternative context in which to find meaning, and that would be much more relevant. But the weakness of that as an ultimate loyalty is probably so apparent to a group like this that I will not use my limited time to discuss it. For thoughtful people in our churches it may be that the most common alternative to Jesus is the university. So I have selected that for my remaining example of alternatives.

Second, I want to clarify the nature of Christian discipleship. I am not interested in saying that similar behavior and thinking can have no other sources. I ended my second lecture by talking about a Hindu and a Buddhist whose work is, for me, an inspiration for how we may seek first the basileia thou. I am strongly tempted to claim both Gandhi and Ariyaratne as disciples of Jesus, and in the case of Gandhi, I might meet little resistance from him. Ariyaratne was a disciple of Gandhi, but I am not sure that he was aware of the indirect relation that established to Jesus. In any case, the issue is not whether those who stand in other traditions contribute to the other world that is possible. Some of them certainly do so in wonderful ways. For us the issue is how we can do so in faithfulness to Jesus.

1. Higher Education in the United States

First, then, I turn to the university. Why do I present it as an alternative to Jesus? The initial answer is that those who are most fully socialized into the culture of the modern university are socialized away from paying any special attention to Jesus. The negative role of the university in relation to discipleship to Jesus is a sociological fact that is hardly disputable. This negative role is clearer than any positive role of reorientation played by the university. It does not point its followers to any single authority, but it does point to the collective authority of a certain kind of science and scholarship.

Higher education has not always played this role of opposition to Jesus. The university traces its origins to the Middle Ages, when most universities were established by the church to perform a role in society defined and desired by the church. Liberal arts were central to that role, and the relation of liberal arts colleges to Jesus today is very different from that of the contemporary university.

The change in the relation of higher education to Christianity took place in two main steps. First, the rise of Darwinian evolutionary theory for almost the first time brought about efforts of some Christians to interfere with the scientific teaching to which by the late nineteenth century higher education was committed. The controversy is often misdescribed and exaggerated. The split between supporters and critics of Darwin took place both among scientists and in the Christian churches. The biology teacher, Scopes, whose trial for teaching evolution played so dramatic a role, was an active Methodist supported by fellow church members rather than an anti-Christian scientist. Some scientists testified against him. Nevertheless in the public mind, and widely in the universities of America, the choice was between science and religion. Universities declared their independence from the churches in order that religious prejudices not interfere with their scientific teaching.

Second, after World War II, the norm for advanced education in the United States shifted from the liberal arts college to the university. The former were part of the effort to follow Jesus. Most of them were established by churches for purposes of a humanistic education. Prior to World War II, they undertook to develop character and culture as well as to communicate information. Many of them had direct connections with church bodies. Required chapel was common. Most of what were called universities in that period were liberal arts colleges with some graduate programs and professional schools added. Liberal arts colleges persisted after World War II, but except for the most conservative ones, their Christian identity faded. Required chapel disappeared and even required attendance at convocations. Nevertheless, in my comments about the university as an alternative to Jesus, I am not including liberal arts colleges in general.

2. The Contemporary American University

After World War II the states took over the role of expanding the availability of higher education on a large scale. They expanded community colleges on the one side and graduate programs on the other. The function of higher education became primarily a means of preparing for better paying positions in society. Liberal arts were subordinated to job training. The other organizing principle of the new universities was specialized research. The academic disciplines replaced the liberal arts. The common core consisted of introductions to a diversity of disciplines. Graduate study was canalized by these disciplines and their sub-disciplines. There was an enormous expansion of research. The stars on university faculties became the leaders in specialized research.

At first the study of religion was excluded from the university. If the Bible was studied at all, it would be in an occasional course in English literature or Near Eastern studies. Gradually university faculties recognized that the total exclusion of religion was not necessary. The phenomenon of religion could be studied historically, sociologically, and psychologically without fear of contamination. There was considerable interest among students. What was still disallowed was any study from the point of view of a particular religion, especially of Christianity.

Let us consider what the basic message of the university is to students. One message is that of the importance of the economy and of preparing for competition there. Obviously, there is nothing opposed to Jesus in acquiring the skills needed for a good job. Jesus learned to be a carpenter. However, many of the jobs for which the university prepares one are deeply bound up with the global economy whose consequences for the planet are disastrous. Whereas a liberal arts education may provide some basis for viewing the global economy critically and making judgments as to how one wants to relate to it, very few students in universities are exposed to that kind of reflection. Their normal and healthy desire to prepare themselves to support themselves and their families draws them into a destructive system. In deciding on careers, the only value systems students encounter are those internal to the several professions and the general cultural view that they should find something they enjoy and that will be well rewarded economically.

A second message is that values are relative, so that any choices based on them are idiosyncratic. If one likes Christian values, fine. But any claim that they are the right values is unjustified. Students are not encouraged to contrasting what is with what might or should be. Study and research are focused on what has been, now is, and is likely to be in the near future. They are encouraged to accept that as reality and to adjust to it. They are not encouraged to think that another world is possible.

Fortunately, exceptions are tolerated by the university. Academic students of ecology were among the first to sound the alarm about the loss of species diversity and the declining health of the planet’s ecosystems. Some of them wrote about these matters with great passion. There was no question about their values. Climatologists have led in warnings about climate change in a similar way. Professors of Near Eastern studies may warn of the consequences of policies that ignore the reality. Sociologists may call attention to trends that they deplore without concealing their values.

A third message is that solutions to problems should be left to experts. This is especially problematic because the experts are equipped only in narrow fields and the solutions to most problems cannot be found in such fields. I have mentioned ecological problems. Certainly the solutions cannot be proffered by the ecologists themselves. But to what academic discipline can we turn? Most public policies are now defended in economic terms. But if we ask economists for solutions to ecological problems, the results are appalling. Should we, instead, turn to anthropologists, to sociologists, to psychologists, to political theorists, to agronomists, to chemists, to technologists, to demographers, or to historians? All can make some contribution, but none can provide the wisdom we so desperately need.

A fourth message is that the quest for any overarching view of the human situation, one that might provide a perspective on how to think about the specialized studies offered by the university, is naïve and misguided. It reflects outdated religious interests. The university’s message is that we have learned that knowledge is inherently fragmentary. We should not seek coherence among its various parts. We should cease to ask unanswerable questions about the meaning or goal of life and concentrate attention upon questions whose answers can be found by scholarly research.

Students often turn to philosophy in hopes of finding help in reflecting about questions of meaning and purpose. Some professors still take this function of philosophy seriously and undertake to help the students. However, the dominant forms of philosophy today do not deal with these questions and sometimes explicitly undertake to end such inquiry, treating it as meaningless. When the study of religion was introduced into universities, students turned to these courses for help. However, teachers in this field must be particularly careful to emphasize the objectivity of their treatment of their subject matter. Even if values are studied, the approach is to be value free. And in fact, the subject matter may hardly include the values of those who are studied.

A fifth message that students receive is that tough-minded people understand that they and others behave self-interestedly. Actions that claim to express dispassionate concern for the common good are shown to express deceptiveness instead. Honesty is better achieved by recognizing that one acts only for one’s own interest.

Of course, this is not taught uniformly throughout the university. It is perhaps most explicit and central in departments of economics. But most of the teaching in most other departments tends to support the view that we understand human behavior in terms of the quest of individuals to meet their needs and secure advantages in a competitive context. In addition, students are in fact encouraged to behave that way in pursuit of their degrees. Competition far exceeds cooperation in the classroom. The student understands that there will be further competition for jobs and for getting ahead in one’s work. There is little encouragement to think that another world is possible.

I have focused thus far on the experience of students. But the acceptance of the guidance and leadership of the university, rather than of Jesus, goes far beyond its relation to students. Most thoughtful citizens read books and magazines and newspapers and listen to radio and television broadcasts to get their understanding of what is going on it the world. Obviously, not all the writers and speakers they encounter are on university faculties. Nevertheless, the great majority have been formed in their basic understanding by the culture and ethos of the university as well as by the research that is done there. Accordingly, much of what I have said above about the message of the university to students is also the continuing message of the dominant media to the general public.

Actually I am describing the better aspects of the situation. The general media may present matters as if they were value free, but in fact they communicate primarily the values of their owners and, in many instances, their advertisers. The think tanks that provide research supplementary to the universities are also heavily biased by the sources of their funds and the selection of their leaders. Fortunately, many of the more thoughtful members of our society can recognize these biases and check them against the more objective stance of the university.

For example, in the field of science, thoughtful citizens trust scientific associations closely related to university faculties more than they trust the scientists who work directly for corporations. Unfortunately, even if we accept the idea that science is the dispassionate quest for truth, we know that scientists are also human beings with their social and economic needs. Most of us do not trust the scientists employed by the cigarette companies to tell us truthfully about the consequences of smoking for health, nor the scientists who work for oil companies to give us accurate information about global warming. We cherish the commitment of academics to objective research, and this provides a special authority to the university.

Sadly, the purity of research in the university has been badly compromised in recent decades. Research depends on funding, and the largest sources of funding are the military establishment and large corporations. This affects both the topics of research and its practical goals. It also, inevitably, affects the way in which the results of research are interpreted and presented. We can celebrate the resistance of academic disciplines to these distortions, but we cannot but be sad that the pressures toward such distortions are increasing and the institutions designed to check them are in trouble. We need to be on our guard against attributing to individual scientists and scholars the authority that belongs to their science when it is disinterestedly pursued when their ability to do research depends on funding from sources that are not at all disinterested.

However, my critique is not based on the fact that the university does not live up to its own ideals. This is a problem with all institutions and communities, and has been a terrible problem in Christianity. My concern about attributing too much authority to the university is of another kind.

3. Why Following the University is Dangerous

The university as a whole exaggerates the objectivity of its conclusions. They are in fact heavily biased by assumptions that are not themselves critically considered. To make the case that it is dangerous to follow the university too far, I will need to show (1) that there are such questionable assumptions and that they are inaccurate, and (2) that the consequences of operating with these assumptions are deleterious. Ideally this should be done discipline by discipline. This would, obviously, be a very large task that would greatly exceed what can be done in one lecture.

Nevertheless, the point can be made and illustrated rather simply. In the seventeenth century a worldview developed that took the clock as the model for the natural world. Its most influential expositor was Descartes. This world view won the allegiance of the scientific community and became to basis for scientific work. The progress made by the use of these assumptions was enormous. For a long time, although philosophers found them questionable, there seemed to be no scientific reason to doubt them.

(1) The first reason to challenge the basic model came with the theory of evolution. Descartes had argued that the human mind is of an entirely different order than the material world, so that the freedom and responsibility of human beings was not doubted. However, evolution showed that human beings are part of the natural world. If nature is mechanical, then human beings are part of the world machine. But if human beings are simply part of the world machine then the quest for truth implicit in science is itself an illusion along with human freedom and responsibility generally. Some proposed that if human beings are part of nature, then the Cartesian view of nature is inadequate. However, this idea has had very little effect on the way that the study of nature is pursued in the university.

The second reason to question the Cartesian assumptions about nature came with the inability of those assumptions to account for new developments in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was especially true with regard to quantum theory. It turned out that the basic units of nature do not behave in the way expected of parts of a machine. However, except for quantum theory itself, this fact has had very little effect on how the sciences operate.

To me this indicates that the assumptions underlying the natural sciences in general are inaccurate. Since I do not believe that we are machines, and yet I fully agree that we are part of nature, I do not believe that nature is a machine or is composed exclusively of machines. Since there is indisputable evidence that the entities of which nature is composed do not function as parts of a machine, the inadequacy of the basic model of nature that still operates in most of the natural sciences seems to be clearly confirmed.

(2) But that there are erroneous assumptions widely operative in the natural sciences is not enough to establish serious concern. The argument in their favor is that they work well. Science advances wonderfully, producing new technologies that are truly astounding. This gives it enormous prestige. To challenge its authority, I need to show that the consequences of the inadequate assumptions are deleterious. I propose to do this in regard to evolutionary theory.

A major reason for adopting the Cartesian model was to exclude teleology from the natural world. This was directed especially against Aristotelianism, the dominant science of the Medieval period. Aristotelians too easily supposed that they had explained a natural phenomenon when they described how it functioned, that is what purpose it served. Modern science developed much further by examining efficient causes, that is, what physical causes brought the phenomenon into being.

Because biological phenomena are so easily understood teleologically, modern biologists have been particularly determined to exclude purposes of any kind from the nature they study. This applies to divine purposes, since to explain in terms of God’s purposes is to end the pursuit of the study of efficient causes. But it also involves denying that animal purposes play any role in the world.

Fortunately, it is difficult to persuade people that animals are in no way purposeful in their actions. However, the scientific explanation always moves in the direction of showing that mechanisms can produce analogous actions. Scientists are more comfortable when they can explain apparently purposeful behavior by instincts that are physically rooted in neuronal structures and genes. This procedure can go a long way.

The issue became acute with regard to evolution. If human beings are part of nature, and there is no purpose in natural things, then human beings do not have purposes. This is a bit hard to swallow. It seemed that when scientists informed us that purpose plays no role in the world, they did so purposefully. But the point is still important to most scientists.

If science allowed that purpose plays a role in human actions, then it would be difficult to deny that analogous animal actions were also purposeful. Accordingly, the dominant teaching in the university is that, although subjectively we feel purposeful, purpose plays no role in what actually takes place in the world. Physical events cause the subjective feeling of purpose and also, without any influence from the side of subjectivity, they cause other physical events.

However, biological teaching about evolution guards itself against the intrusion of purposes in another way as well. It asserts that evolution takes place through two factors. There is the random, that is purposeless, mutation of genes, and there is the mechanical selection among the resulting organisms by the environment. The standard formulation allows no place for the animal activity, which it is difficult for common sense to interpret as wholly purposeless.

If in fact we examine what has taken place in the course of evolution, however, we see that the activity of organisms has played an important role. Much of this activity appears to common sense to be purposeful. Biologists typically do not deny this. They simply ignore it. If they are forced to deal with it, they are likely to resort to the doctrine that what appears purposeful in fact is to be explained mechanistically.

My point here is that the insistence that organisms are in fact machines and that purpose plays no role in evolution is not based on empirical evidence. It is based on deep-seated assumptions that force those who hold them to take positions that are profoundly contradictory to experience. They are profoundly dehumanizing. To whatever extent they are taken seriously, they undercut all notions of human freedom and responsibility. This is by no means a harmless consequence of the dominant assumptions still so little examined within the university.

I will illustrate also from the social sciences of which economics is today by far the most important. The assumptions of economics are different from those of the natural sciences, although they overlap. Economics is founded on the assumption that there are individual human beings who behave purposefully. Each individual purposes to satisfy as many desires as possible at the least cost in labor. Individuals are related to one another through market transactions and contracts. The free market provides the possibility of exchanges of goods and labor that always benefit both parties. The value of everything other than human beings is the price that will be paid for it in the market.

There is no doubt that a great deal of what goes on in the world can be understood well with this model. However, a great deal cannot, and the results of shaping so much of what we do as if the model were an adequate account of human beings and their relations is doing enormous harm in the world. We do not have time to discuss this in detail. I will only point out some features of human existence that are omitted from the model and the consequences of the policies that are affected by these omissions.

First, there is no awareness of the personal relationships that are crucial to human well being. I will formulate that in terms of the absence of any notion of human community. The result is that policies based on this model consistently destroy communities.

Second, there is no attention to justice. When governments follow the policies encouraged by most economists and leave the distribution of income to market forces, it becomes more and more unequal. The rich gain not only economic power but also political power, which enables them to influence government to help them become richer.. They gain control over education and the media as well. They have the power to exploit the weakness of the poor, and this power is almost always used for that purpose. The social fabric is stretched to the breaking point.

Third, there is no attention to the natural world. Often this is avoided with an explicit affirmation that its ability to provide resources for the economy has no practical limits. New technology can always find a way. This is simply wrong, as the world is learning to its distress from global warming and the collapse of fisheries, to cite only two of many problems.

4. Jesus and the University

My critique of the university makes clear that I do not believe that the widespread turn from discipleship to Jesus to acceptance of its authority is a wise one. If we adopted the norm of quantity of information, it is obvious that the university has a thousand-fold superiority. But the guidance we need is not provided by information. When this is organized by inadequate assumptions and set in a context that provides no wisdom or vision, information can do more harm than good. When it is manipulated for the interests of an elite class that is not interested in the common good, the situation is still worse. For my own part, I am not at all tempted to turn for guidance from Jesus to the university.

I trust from what I have said before that no one will suppose that I dismiss all that has been learned by the university. That would be absurd. The question that is important for the present discussion is the point of view. Do I view Jesus through the supposedly objective approach of the university as one figure among others who held and taught idiosyncratic and now outdated ideas? Or do I view the university from the point of view of Jesus to ask what I can learn from it that will enable me to contribute to God’s work of bringing the basileia theou? You will understand that my choice is unequivocally for the second of these options. What the university can teach me is vast, but it does not provide the point of view from which that information can be used for the salvation of the world.

Let me provide what may seem a more practical and realistic illustration of the difference. Let us suppose, what is in fact quite unlikely, that Harvard University would decide that it should address the problems of the world Let us suppose that it brought together its leading scholars from a dozen departments to think together about what changes should be made in the current world order. What might we expect this distinguished group of scholars to conclude?

My expectation is that they would call for adjustments in the current global economy to take account of the special needs of Africa and perhaps some other regions. They might call for more international regulation of the oceans. They might support the Kyoto Protocols. They might recommend a more balanced approach on the part of the United States to the Israel/Palestine controversies. They might ask for the restoration of some civil rights taken away from American citizens through the Patriot Act. They might call for moderation in the World Bank pressure for unregulated labor markets. They might call for stronger international work to deal with the threat of global plagues. They might encourage the United States to work more closely with the United Nations. They might even call for a Tobin tax on international financial transactions to finance the United Nations and expand its programs.

I am viewing the prospects optimistically and suggesting that they might support a list of proposals that I would support. It is also possible that they would support the current neoliberal program calling for less governmental control, less restriction on foreign corporations, and total trust in the global market. They might argue for the strengthening of American hegemony to enforce all these policies, and to make sure that the United States would control global natural resources, especially oil. But to make my case I am supposing the best results I can imagine.

Now let us consider the results when the World Council of Churches assembles a far less distinguished group of Christians from around the world to reflect on similar matters. We have some idea what to expect because this happens from time to time. Whereas the Harvard group would take for granted the basic structures of the global economy, the WCC group would question and challenge it fundamentally. They would argue that another world is possible. Whereas the Harvard group would take for granted U.S. hegemony, the WCC group would call for a world no longer dominated by one superpower. Whereas the Harvard group would respond to particular extreme cases of environmental problems, the WCC group would ask for a fundamental change in the way human beings look at nature. In short, whereas the Harvard group would discuss reforms that are not deeply threatening to the powers that be, the WCC group would be likely to call for resistance.

It is my judgment that the reforms that a morally concerned group of elite faculty would propose, even if all were quickly enacted, would not change the course of world affairs in such a way as to avoid catastrophe for the planet. A deeper analysis of the world’s problems can easily show the reality of this threat, but American academicians are on the whole unwilling to enter such waters. They view the world from the perspective of the elite of the world’s one superpower. Nothing in the ethos of the university suggests that they should do otherwise.

On the other hand, the scholarship of the Christians brought together by the World Council of Churches will not compare with that of the Harvard group. From the point of view of the university, much of their analysis will appear unrealistic, even misdirected. No doubt they will make more factual mistakes than the Harvard professors. Nevertheless, I expect of this group much more than I expect from the Harvard group.

The members of the WCC group will come from many countries and view the world more from the perspective of the periphery than from the center. It is true that most of them belong to the elites of their own countries, since it is difficult to bring the really poor together for such meetings. However, most of them, as Christians, understand that they should view matters from the point of view of the masses of the people. They at least make some effort to do so. What they see needed from this perspective is not minor reform of current patterns but a quite different world order. As one who shares their concerns, I earnestly hope they will not abandon Jesus for the university.

5. Following Jesus Today

When one compares the probable conclusions of two such groups, one sees the effects of Jesus. It may not lead to differences about particular facts. But those not influenced by Jesus will view these facts from the secure position of the top. Those influenced by Jesus will view them primarily from the point of view of the bottom. This simple difference has enormous consequences. It has never been more important for the human future that policies and activities be directed by the view from the bottom.

I have been speaking of the need to resist the imperial order in which we, like Jesus, live. A large part of that resistance consists in demonstrating that another order is possible and far superior. The vision of this other order has practical implications for the reordering of the world system for the sake of all of its inhabitants instead of the exploitation of the many for the enrichment of the few. That will require a great deal of reflection. We cannot learn from Jesus all that we need to know in order to propose and implement the needed changes. We have much to learn from the university. But we must learn it as disciples of Jesus and not as promoters of the university’s mentality.

But to follow Jesus is not just, or even primarily, to think about how to make the world more like the divine commonwealth for which we pray. More immediately and more practically for most of us, it means strengthening Christian communities. Such strengthening certainly involves funding and membership, but that is not the main point. To strengthen them in the Christian sense is to help them become more effective embodiments of counter-cultural values.

I have put this in terms of "strengthening" since I believe that most congregations to some extent not only teach but also embody counter-cultural values. We do teach the importance of mutual care and of loving and serving others. We may not think of this as counter-cultural because the influence of Christianity in society has led to the adoption of these concerns by some outside of the church as well as within. However, although it may affect the rhetoric of international policy it rarely affects its substance. And as our society is becoming more secular, these values are fading in favor of the competitive and mutually exploitative relations of the empire.

One reason that the mega-churches have come into being is that they are skilled at organizing to provide accepting contexts for persons whose status in society otherwise depends on competitive success. There are many legitimate criticisms to be directed against some of the mega-churches, but even they also provide signs of the commonwealth’s nearness.

Success in creating communities of mutual acceptance in our churches is certainly limited, and all too often, it is conditional. In some of the mega-churches the cost may be the acceptance of the beliefs of its leaders. In others it may be the following of particular lifestyles. Of course, in smaller churches the conditions of acceptance may be equally demanding. Some people go to bars in order to get the acceptance of themselves as they are that they crave and need. To strengthen the counter-cultural character of our churches in this respect is to make acceptance less and less conditional, to enable members to share themselves and their problems more and more honestly, and to encourage them to think more freely. Needless to say, it is not easy to go very far in these directions.

The success in being a counter-cultural community expressive of the nearness of the divine commonwealth can be viewed especially by the difference between status in the congregation and status in the world. Already in the early church there were times when persons of wealth and social status were given far more attention in the congregation than were the poor. Throughout history the church has fallen short in this respect. Nevertheless, there is within the congregation some tendency to minimize the social and economic roles of the members and to treat people as members one of another in the Christian fellowship. That tendency always needs strengthening. All of us live in the imperial, hierarchical society as well as the church. All of us need constant reminding that status in the world does not determine the worth or importance of the individual in the divine commonwealth. A healthy Christian congregation gives special attention to its members when they are in special need. This is true for rich and poor alike, and it is not connected to the ability of the needy to contribute to the life of the congregation. In some times and places congregations can and will deal with the financial needs of their members. Today most are not able to do that. This is a serious loss that reduces the possibility of modeling the other world that is possible, the divine commonwealth.

The church has, over the years, produced communities other than congregations that are sometimes able to embody the counter-cultural values more effectively than most congregations. I will close with a description of the Christian community in which I am now privileged to live. It is a retirement community, because of that it is much easier to ignore the status that its members once had in the wider society.

The community was established by Congregationalists who gave it the name of Pilgrim Place. Those of us who are retired here are known, accordingly, as Pilgrims. Originally, the community was to provide homes for retired missionaries. Even now about half of the residents have served extensively outside the United States, but this is no longer required. Still, in order to be admitted one must have been engaged in professional Christian work of some kind.

For the most part we come from the liberal or progressive wing of the Protestant church. Recently we have been joined by a good number of Roman Catholic lay people, who have found ways to give their lives in Christian service, especially through the Grail. They find ours a fully congenial context, and we find them a wonderful addition. We hope we will grow in ecumenicity.

I am describing it here, however, in terms of the extent to which it is organized and operated by the counter-cultural values of Jesus. I will consider this under two headings: first, the relations among us in comparison with relations within the hierarchical society; and second, financial matters.

When people enter the community it matters rather little what status they have had in church or society. New Pilgrims are welcomed simply as Pilgrims. Most of us hardly know who they were before they came. Acceptance is essentially unconditional. Once they are here they are fully part of the community. Because there are many jobs that Pilgrims need to do, we hope that newcomers will join in service to community, but we understand and accept the occasional resistance that expectation meets. This is especially true for those who continue to be especially active outside the community. All are free to plot the paths that make sense to them. Nevertheless, the milieu is one of mutual service. And when any have special needs, they can count on others giving what support they can.

We are highly organized in a town meeting with many committees. We appreciate the hard work and leadership that some are willing to give. But leadership is not power over. It is a special form of service to the community. I have never been aware of anyone seeking power over others. As myself one who remains quite active outside the community, I am very grateful to those who are willing to take on the hard work of leadership.

With regard to finances there are possibilities here not available to most congregations. Until recently the pattern was not to consider the financial situation of an applicant for admission until after the admission process was complete. Most of those admitted have been able to pay the normal rent and fees. But a few needed help from the time of admission and in many cases, as time passed, there has been need of assistance. Although Pilgrim Place does not assume the legal responsibility to care for life for all who enter, it is understood that it will do so. Fellow Pilgrims ensure that this will be possible.

This is done in two ways. Those of us who are able are asked for annual contributions to the budget that keep fees from rising as rapidly as they otherwise might. More interesting and distinctive, Pilgrims put on an annual two-day festival shortly before Thanksgiving. This has become a major event for the whole Claremont community with hundreds of non-Pilgrim’s volunteering their services for some period during those two days. Many Pilgrims work all year to prepare for the festival and to engage in activities that make money for it. The net profit has been around $200,000 a year in recent years. This all goes to help those whose resources have been depleted. This is supplemented when needed by interest on an endowment that has been accumulated over the years for this same purpose.

Only two or three people know who are being helped in this way. We are eager that there be no distinction among Pilgrims based on their financial situation. We have been quite successful in this regard.

We believe that in our life together here the divine commonwealth has drawn near. We think that Pilgrim Place not only embodies the values of Jesus in much the way the early congregations did, but we think it also bodies these values forth visibly for the Claremont community. We think that is why so many are glad to volunteer their time to help us. We think it also suggests to many that, indeed, another world is possible.

I emphasized that being a retirement community enables us to go further in embodying the values of Jesus than can most congregations. But I want also to make clear that we, too, have problems and limitations. The early communities of Jesus’ followers were not free of problems! Certainly we are not.

A few years ago we went through and agonizing discussion of whether we should continue the policy of admitting people without regard to their financial condition. We decided that we would have to change. We could support a few who, from the beginning, would be dependent on the community but not many. In admitting new people, we would have to know what commitments we were making.

The problem was especially acute because our policy of accepting people and taking care of them regardless of their financial condition was well known. There were a few instances where, before coming to Pilgrim Place, people gave away the assets that might have made them self-supporting. This was understandable. For example missionaries in Africa might decide that the needs there were so critical that they should give their assets to needy institutions there before retiring to Pilgrim Place. They could do so because their needs here would be met. This might be admirable, but if many followed suit, our ability to take care of one another would come to an end.

I end on this note of realism because it is important that in our efforts to live from the nearness of the divine commonwealth we recognize that there will always be problems and dilemmas. To organize a community according to Jesus’ values in a world that is based on quite different values is always a struggle and never completely successful. But that does not make the effort futile or the results worthless. Another world is possible, and even now we can live in and from its nearness. To do so is to follow Jesus in our time.

As I read the passages of scripture in the lectionary for today, I found myself identifying most with the author of this psalm. Obviously I cannot do so in any literal way, but I doubt that the original author was literal in intention either. He, assuming it was a man, may have thought more literally than I of a heavenly council presided over by the God of Israel. But I am confident that he did not really claim to know the exact content of what transpired there. Clearly he was projecting his own hopes and wishes.

He was writing at a time when the rich trampled on the poor and the powerful on the weak. This was the context of much of the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures. But he could not accept this as simply the way things are. He believed that his God wanted something else. He pictured the God of Israel speaking to the other gods and chiding them for taking the wrong side. Apparently they have been in charge of things. But the God of Israel declares that though they are gods in some sense, they do not have the immortality that they suppose. They will perish. Presumably when they are gone the world will change. The justice of the God of Israel will rule.

Thirty or forty years ago, I might have held this psalm in the background and focused on the passage from Colossians. Here we have the same dramatic contrast of the world of injustice and that of justice. The latter is being realized in the new congregations of believers in Jesus. Jesus himself contrasted the basileia theou with the Roman Empire, characterized by oppression and exploitation. This is usually translated as Kingdom of God, but I like to translate it as the divine Commonwealth. Paul did not emphasize the divine basiliea as Jesus did, but in the lectionary reading from Colossians, we read of the basiliea of God’s beloved son in contrast to the "power of darkness" from which believers have been rescued. Although the congregations of Jesus’ followers no doubt fell short of their ideal of mutual love, those who participated in them knew a profound difference from the larger society. In general, within these communities people were not judged unjustly, partiality was not shown to the wicked, justice was given to the weak and the orphan, the right of the lowly and destitute was maintained, and the weak and the needy were rescued and delivered from the hand of the wicked.. In short, the hopes of the psalmist were realized.

It would be possible to trace the history of the West in terms of efforts to protect the poor and weak. It would be a checkered history. Responsibility for such protection was long in the hands of the church. Gradually in the modern world it was transferred to the state. In Europe and North America and Japan it reached its highest point in the nineteen seventies. In many countries, degrading poverty was virtually abolished. In many countries the role of government was far more to protect its weak citizens than to exploit them. Of course, there was much wrong with the world of the seventies, but the sphere in which the weak and needy were being helped was growing.

In the United States at that time we were becoming conscious of our crimes not only against Africans, but also against Native Americans and Mexicans and many immigrant groups, of our patriarchal oppression of women, and of our share of responsibility for the Holocaust. We were also acknowledging our degradation of the Earth itself. We certainly did not feel that we had arrived. Yet just because of all this recognition of our sins, we could finally have claimed that, in light of Jesus’ message of the divine Commonwealth, we were repenting. In that context I could have picked up a theme of the social gospel at the beginning of the century that in large parts of the world the commonwealth of God was being realized.

Alas, today I cannot view history in that promising light. On some fronts there has been progress, but at deep levels the direction of events has been reversed. The poor have reappeared in most countries, and governments have become instruments of the rich and powerful working to advance their interests, rather than seeking justice for the poor and weak.

In the United States, even if discrimination on the basis of race and gender has declined, class lines and the manipulation and exploitation of labor limit the possibilities for many of the same people. The brief glimpse we had of the possibility of justice for the poor and weak is a fading memory. The rich and powerful have a tighter control over our society, government and its foreign policy, both political parties, business and finance, the health industry, the educational system, the media, and the courts than ever before.

Worst of all, the promise of the early seventies with regard to ecology was not realized. It seemed then that we might truly repent of our profligate ways, our exhaustion of natural resources, and our pollution of our environment, and that we might reorder life in harmony with nature. Congress passed encouraging legislation, and if in successive years we had built on that, real change in our culture and our economy might have occurred. But that burst of legislative activity proved to be, not the beginning of transformation, but the only real step forward that our government would ever take. The most that environmentalists have been able to do since then is to beat back efforts to weaken such legislation as the clean air act, the requirement of environmental impact reports, and the endangered species act that were passed at that time. The crises, about which "alarmists" warned us then, are now upon us, and we have done almost nothing to prepare for them. The "bottom line" still takes precedence over a livable Earth.

In the image of Psalm 82, whatever we claim to do in our churches, as a people we have worshipped the gods against whom the God of Israel speaks in the council. These gods, these powers and principalities, are very powerful, but they cannot save us. Instead, as God says in Psalm 82, they will die. Only the God of Israel will live on.

The assurance that God lives on is our hope. But for what, more concretely, can we hope? The psalmist hoped that God would rise up and judge all the nations. He hoped that this judgment would end the injustices of the society in which he lived. Of course, that would not undo all the past injustices. Today, even more seriously, it would not restore the losses in soil, forest cover, water, and species that have already occurred or prevent the destructive changes in weather that our past actions have already made inevitable. Since, even now, when debates about the fact of global warming is largely over, no nation is considering taking the really drastic actions that might significantly reduce the catastrophes that lie ahead, it seems that we are all too likely to experience judgment for our collective sins. Sadly, those least responsible will suffer most.

Fortunately, elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures the focus is not so narrowly on judgment. There is also the note of renewal and redemption. In the New Testament this note is clearly primary. If the true God is the God of redemption and renewal, what then can we hope for?

Jesus said we could hope for the divine Commonwealth. I described above the experience of his early followers as participating in communities that cared for all of their participants and exploited none of them. I went on to speak of how, as the church grew and became a dominant force in society, the church and later the nation took some responsibility to protect the weak and powerless. I said that in the seventies it was possible to hope that the spirit of Christ was transforming all society, bringing forth repentance for our many crimes and calling us forward to becoming sustainable societies.

My account pointed to a duality or tension in the understanding of the divine Commonwealth. On the one hand, when Jesus said that the divine Commonwealth was at hand, he meant that those who heard him could choose to live from it rather than according to the expectations of the Roman Empire. The communities that Paul brought into existence actualized this contrast.

This did not do away with the factual domination of society by Rome, although it threatened the Roman authorities sufficiently that they crucified Jesus and persecuted his followers. Nevertheless, both Jesus and Paul seemed to expect that, in one way or another, the new order they proclaimed would triumph publicly over Rome. The Christian mission was never simply to be the church. When the church became a powerful force in the larger society, it tried in various ways to affect it.

The tension is then between two images of God’s saving work. On the one hand, God is drawing us out of societies ruled by the false gods or principalities and powers into communities that live by love and justice. On the other hand, God is calling these communities, and each of us as members of them, to participate in the salvation of the world God loves.

Most of my life I have placed emphasis on the second of these foci. My concern for the salvation of the world intensified as my eyes were opened to the danger to the whole planet resulting from human excesses. I addressed the church first, in hopes that the church, by repenting, would helpfully participate in a wider repentance. In some ways I am proud of the church’s response. In many of its institutional expressions it has repented. But the effect of this repentance even on the behavior of its members has been minimal. In the 1970s, a Canadian, Jitsuo Morikawa, made heroic efforts to involve the American Baptists as a denomination in real lifestyle changes. But little followed, and no other denomination even tried.

We Christians, even those who are genuinely committed and worship God rather than wealth, are more shaped in our day-to-day choices by the economy than by the teaching of the church. And in the economic guild and in the great transnational corporations there has been no real repentance. The highly touted globalization of the economy has taken us in exactly the wrong direction.

It is now too late to avoid social disruptions on an enormous scale. Where the earth can no longer support the people, they will move at whatever cost. But there is no place for them to go. And the food surpluses with which we now feed refugees will disappear. Famines will be followed by disease and violent struggle. In many parts of the world, top down order will break down. In such a context, what is the meaning of turning to God? What can we hope from God? What can be our Christian message?

I suggest that this message may now need to focus on the first and primary meaning of Jesus’ proclamation of the nearness of the divine Commonwealth. The effort to work with God for the salvation of the world reached its peak in the early seventies. The door of seeming opportunity then closed. The false gods resumed their domination of the planet. Now they are destined to die, but there is little chance that this will be an opportunity for a new world order of peace, justice, and sustainability. The collapse that destroys them will destroy much else.

What is now possible and will remain possible for those who survive is to live locally and in community with others from the values of God’s Commonwealth rather than of the self-destroying society around us. That was difficult in the Roman Empire. It is difficult in the American Empire. It will be more difficult in the time of trials that looms ahead. But it will provide the kind of joy that is still possible when things fall apart.

The most promising movements in the world today have come together in the World Social Forum. Their slogan is "Another World is Possible." What they mean is much the same as what Jesus meant in his proclamation of the nearness of the divine Commonwealth. For the most part these movements work locally to bring about justice and sustainability for small groups of people many of whom are experiencing already profound threats to their lives and their livelihoods. They have not given up hope that the overall global system may change instead of collapsing, but they are ready either way. They do not despair, although they do not base their hopes on guidance from national and global leaders. They do what they can where they can and adjust to new situations, however negative they may be. This is the life of faith, hope, and love to which we, too, are called.