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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

HONESTY AS THEOLOGY

The widening public controversy, occasioned by J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, apparently took both the author and his publisher by complete surprise. The book was first published in March, 1963, by the S.C.M. (Student Christian Movement Press, London), and shortly thereafter it appeared in an American edition (Westminster). In the interim, the booklet has sold a half-million copies, and on the basis of quantitative measurements it must be reckoned seriously as more than a tract for the times-it is a turning-point book. "Honesty" has taken on a new theological profile, and henceforth critical discussion of religion, church, and faith will need to presuppose the new posture. As Erik Routley has noted, for a long time it has been assumed by theologians and intelligently alert interpreters that "the only way of defending the faith" was in neo-orthodox categories. Now all is changed, or so it seems.

For those who want to assess the immediate effects of this current classic, a big and fascinating sequel has been edited by David L. Edwards, the Director of S.C.M., called The Honest to God Debate (S.C.M. and Westmintser, pp. 287, $1.85). It contains the publisher's background account, a large selection from correspondents who wrote the author, a sample of book reviews, and a follow-up statement by the author himself.

The public reaction, as gauged by the letters and reviews, was almost equally divided between those who accused the author of dishonesty in the sense that as a Bishop of the Church of England he clearly demonstrated that he could not defend the faith and therefore ought not continue as an official of the church, and those who in varying ways eagerly accepted the new astringent theology as something they had been looking for already.

The theological debate, curiously, has not been very diligent or perceptive. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, pub-

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lished a little pamphlet, Image Old and New, which tended to smooth over the rough places in true administrative style. A more strident, and theological unimpressive, answer by another Anglican, O. Fielding Clarke, called itself For Christ's Sake, leading to the quip that next on the list would be something entitled Holy Smoke! Alasdair MacIntyre, the Oxford linguistic analyst, suggested in an unconvincing tour de force that the Bishop of Woolwich was an atheist, and MacIntyre welcomed this supposed support for his own recent reverse pilgrimage from faith to doubt.

Robinson's own interpretation of what happened and why is by all odds the best part of the book and deserves to be read for its own sake as well as for its hermeneutical precision. He asks: "Why, suddenly, does a particular match cause an explosion? What is there about the tinder that accounts for the flash-point?" The answer, he says, is partly a mystery, but the author implies what is surely true, namely, that his little book just happened to coincide with other converging factors of the same sort. For example, he quotes a "gorgeously irresponsible" but "welcome" outburst by Monica Furlong in the Guardian of January 11, 1963 (prior to Honest to God):

The best thing about being a Christian at the moment is that organized religion has collapsed . . . it is common knowledge that the foundations have shivered, that there are cracks a mile wide in the walls. . . . Stripped of our nonsense we may almost be like the early Christians painting their primitive symbols on the walls of the catacombs . . . there is a new mutation of Christian (as yet only faintly discernible from the inert mass) who is willing and eager to question every item of his faith, who is bored to death with the old cliches, the old humbug, and the great herd of sacred cows, and believes that to disable either his mind or his senses is to dishonor Christ.

Of major importance in settling the dust is the Bishop's careful and reasoned reply to the commonest criticisms against his book. He notes, for example, that he was not trying to pinpoint the "location" of God, "in" rather than "up" or "out." Nor was he trying to substitute one "image" of God for another. He does not deny that a "supernaturalistic" view can be meaningful and useful but only that Christianity does not depend on such a view and may easily today be "discredited with it." In any case, the question of how to think about God is a perennial one, and to imply that one

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way seems more meaningful today than other more traditional ways is not necessarily to discredit them as though there were only one right wav.

So too as to prayer. Many have asked the Bishop, "How do you pray to the ground of your being?" To which he replies: "I do not pray to the ground of my being. I pray to God as Father. . . . I have no interest whatever in a God conceived in some vaguely impersonal pantheistic terms. . . . My sole concern and contention is for the Scriptural revelation of God as dynamic personal love. And it is precisely because I am contending for this (and not for some non-Biblical philosophia perennis) that I am so concerned for its meaningfulness in an age which has decisively turned its back on the picture of the world presupposed by the Biblical writers."

One imagines that the latter point, about the turning away from the biblical world, is really the point at issue with many critics. What Dr. Robinson assumes for his starting-point is for most of his critics rejected or ignored.

THE FUNERAL, DEATH, AND THE CHURCH

Another book of recent date that obviously appeared at exactly the right psychological moment is Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death (Simon and Schuster, pp. 333, $4.95). A withering denouncement of the commercialized funeral business, the orderly chapters of the book document the hard-to-come-by facts and figures in what the author suggests is one grand conspiracy to take the American public for every dollar possible.

Other such diatribes have appeared from time to time, notably Evelyn Waugh's devastatingly funny take-off on Hollywood's Forest Lawn cemetery, The Loved One (1948). But apart from a brief flurry in the press here and there, such anguished outcries have gone unheeded. Now Miss Mitford, saying what many churchmen have said for years, has stirred up the first wide public concern on the whole grim and distasteful subject.

At some points Miss Mitford sledgehammers her points home, and one begins to wonder how it is that the undertakers (funeral directors, morticians, "grief therapists") happen to be such a grasping, unfeeling, stupid lot. There are possibly other factors, theological and symbolic, which help to produce the situation described so

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prosaically in the book and mostly ignored by the author who regards the problem as basically economic.

For example, what are we going to do with the fact that death (and the whole dimension of eschatology as it pertains to individual destiny) has in our day been de-sacralized? Who believes in immortality or resurrection, in either Platonic or physiological forms? When last did you hear a sermon on the subject? Easter? And what is the contemporary theological interpretation of Christ's resurrection?

Death-like birth, marriage, parenthood-is a fundamental transition event within human experience. The primitive mind has always known this and respected the mystery of death as a rite de passage, a journey from one ontological level to another. But how much of theological discussion or Christian instruction is devoted these days to such elemental passageways? Is it the mortician's fault? Or has the church defaulted?

Jessica Mitford sees some hope in the growing number of community Memorial Societies which seek to protect the susceptible and grief-stricken public against the wiles of the funeral director. Here again it is sad to note that the churches have not notably taken the lead. In Lloyd Warner's The Living and the Dead (Yankee City Series, Volume 5, 1959), a book Miss Mitford cites in her bibliography but does not use in her discussion, the sociologist author points to a matter of crucial importance. He observes:

Unless the place of the church and its supernatural symbols increases in importance, it seems likely that the professional role of the undertaker and his use of sacred symbols will continue to grow. . . . It is even possible that in the remote future the church may incorporate the mortician into its system of functionaries or perhaps take over his functions as part of its own duties.

The point here is a double one: the church, and indeed all of us these days, depend completely upon the undertaker to perform the ritually unclean and unwelcome service of preparing the dead for burial-a highly symbolic, necessary, if also disagreeable, human and community "ministry"; and in this service, the church for the most part contributes nothing but liturgical forms and rubrics, comforting (?) words, and pious sentiments. That is perhaps unfair and too strong, but the fact is that the church has avoided the practical problems which have been willingly assumed, for a price,

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by the funeral director. Memorial Societies may be fine, but why shouldn't the church run its own mortuary establishment and re-sacralize the Grim Reaper and all other such euphemisms?

LAST STOP-SILENCE

For every two books that appear at just the right time, there are two others (one a film) that can be cited as overdoing an already obvious point. The Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, is one of the great, creative artists of our time. An agonizing master of film, with an itchy Lutheran conscience, many of Bergman's movies have seemed as appropriate in a class on religion as in a theatre. But not all. His latest, The Silence, is well captioned, for it really says nothing, and perhaps the less said, the better.

There is no story or plot to Silence, simply a clutch of candid camera shots of three drifting souls, two sisters (one a lesbian, the other a nymphomaniac), and a little boy. We don't know who they are, where they come from, where they're traveling to on the train, why the older sister gets sick, why the younger seeks any available physical companion, what the Freudian implications of the dead father may be, whether the child knows or doesn't know what's going on. It is a sort of "happening," non-contextual, non-meaningful, non-consequential.

Confronted with signs in the train printed in a language no one understands, the boy, Johan, asks: "What does that mean?" And his mother, Anna, replies: "I don't know." That is the first snatch of conversation. The last relates to a letter from the dying older sister, Ester, to Johan. All it says is: "Words in a foreign language."

Misunderstanding (or non-understanding) is the clue, if that is the right word, to this picture. The crude, physical sex orgy between Anna and her nameless, silent pick-up is punctuated with the remark: "How nice that we don't understand each other." The attentive hotel servant, a kindly old man in a formal frock coat who looks after the sick sister, speaks an unintelligible tongue, and communication is by sign language. The little boy is a pre-adolescent, neither a child nor a young man (a puer aeternus?); he is taller and bigger than the troupe of dwarfs who are staying at the hotel, yet he is an innocent thrust into an adult world. The sex scenes and suggestions, so direct and blunt as to be offensive even in Sweden,

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are unlovely, embarrassing, inarticulate-they say nothing and mean nothing. The only single note of common communication is a refrain on the radio from Bach.

In one verbal interchange between the sisters, Anna says the "forces" are too strong for Ester's "principles," and that "self-acceptance" is preferable to "attitudes." But in the end there is nothing and silence, as Anna and Johan board the train again, leaving Ester to die. Anna lowers the train window and drenches herself in the pelting, regenerating rain. But Ester's letter to Johan reminds us after all that it (life?) is "words in a foreign language."

Crediting Bergman with mastery of direction and filming, toting up all the negative values of shock and sex-the question still remains whether this penultimate nihilism is an important existential lesson or just empty vacuity. Possibly, since any interpretation is permissible, the theme is simply the loneliness of death. To die is to lie fatally ill in a foreign country peopled with faceless strangers talking in an unknown language. Anyone who has ever been sick in a hotel room far from home knows how forlorn, lone, and lost the experience can be. Occasionally in the movie we look out of the hotel window and see a skinny, spavined horse hauling a wagon full of broken furniture, a kind of death symbol. The hotel servant, for no reason, shows the boy several photos of a funeral with a corpse visible in the coffin, yet he is not able to communicate what this means.

Has Bergman in his most recent movies, as some think, been leading up to the conclusion that death is the final silence, the ultimate indignity, the meaningless negation of life and love? When there is no more family love (Through a Glass Darkly), no more love of God (Winter Light), then there is only the silence of death (The Silence) for there is no more sex-love or even self-love. Next question: will Bergman have anything more to say?

PILGRIM OR PASSENGER?

The second illustration of a theme born too late, and already out of date, is Pär Lagerkvist's new novella, Pilgrim at Sea (Random House, 1964, pp. 116, $3.95). The Nobel Prize writer, known for a whole shelf of novels, some with religious themes such as Barabbas, is here trying to tell a little story, continuing a theme,

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about man's search for meaning in life. The search, in this instance, is a pilgrimage to the Holy City, literally and metaphorically, yet the not very overwhelming point is that man never reaches his goal and must always be on a pilgrimage.

The sea-a universal symbol of life and death-is employed by Lagerkvist as the only meaningful reality even though it is itself ambiguous. "The sea," says Giovanni to Tobias, "knows more than anything else on earth if you can get it to teach you . . . you'll win no rest for your soul except from the sea, which itself never rests . . . it's cruel and hard and ruthless, and yet gives peace. . . . What should you do in the Holy Land when there's the sea-the holy sea?"

This is innocuous enough and has been said by everyone from Homer to Hemingway. Lagerkvist has simply combined an odyssey with an old man of the sea to teach how fluid pre-formal life really is. To do this he has interwoven a conventional tale of a priest carrying on a sordid affair with a penitent who came to church to say confession. The yarn sounds faintly medieval, and the horror of the adultery and sin is stated rather than felt. It is a contrived lesson in which presumably the priest, now unfrocked and sailing aimlessly on the sea, learns that love is greater than faith, or perhaps all he learns is that one must not ask the question about the meaning of life.

Even more depressing is a cryptic piece of business about a silver locket which the woman wears around her neck. The priest believes it to contain the likeness of her true love. Driven by an obsession to see what is inside, the priest steals the locket only to discover when he opens it that it is empty. Perhaps the author is suggesting that under the tarnished tale of an adulterous priest, we are to discern a perverse kind of contemporary beatific vision. Instead of discovering the essence of revelation, as was the experience of the medieval mystic, the contemporary religious experience is ultimately empty.

MINISTRY WITHOUT COMMITMENT?

Speaking of negativities, and that is what this section seems devoted to this time, a full-scale, critical appraisal of seminaries and seminarians is available in Walter D. Wagoner's Bachelor of Divin-

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ity: Uncertain Servants in Seminary and Ministry (Association Press, pp. 159, $3.50). A witty, knowledgeable critique, written with verve and dash, and illustrated with cartoons by James Crane, the book is required reading not only for seminarians and their teachers but for all kinds of church ministers, officers, and workers.

The problems that beset the contemporary seminarian are partly forced upon him and partly of his own devising ("Sociological Thunder and Cultural Lightning," "The Holy Spirit and the Minnesota Multiphasic"). One section of the book, "Two Cheers for the Parish," underlines the current loss of interest in the pastoral ministry and the general falling off of seminary enrollment. The student's decisions between suburb and inner city, preaching and teaching, worship or art-these and more conspire to stamp the seminarian as an uncertain servant.

Behind the critique, and sometimes right on the surface, Wagoner argues for something more honest, more exciting, and especially more committed. Director of the Rockefeller Theological Fellowship Programs, which provide stipends for students to go to seminary for a year's trial run, Wagoner knows America's theological schools inside and out. Deliberately sponsoring uncertain ministerial candidates, he wants the seminarian--once he has made up his mind to take the full course-to be more certain and less prudential.

Speaking harsh words about much seminary preoccupation with the jargon and mystique of scholarship, Wagoner observes:

The hermeneutical situation has aided a tendency to "talk around" the central issues, often in a very sophisticated way. (In all candor it must be said that this situation often goes beyond mere dispassionate analysis of scholars to an ugly form of theological cowardice). . . . Graduate students of religion are capable of talking learnedly and endlessly about the problems of Christianity, without the obligation to take an evangelical position. The B.D. students find this an attractive ground to occupy.

The question emerging from such criticism is whether it is still possible in the face of staggering odds within and without to affirm the great verities of Christian faith and undertake with a will the work of ministry. Wagoner speaks for a growing number who accept all the barbs and brickbats that critics of all kinds level against the institutional church and yet who want to get on with

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the job and take the next step forward beyond the kind of hesitancy that paralyzes so much current discussion about the church and its work.

An angry, impatient cry is beginning to be heard in the land. Writing in The Christian Century recently, a parish minister voiced the lament, coupled with the plea:

It is comparatively easy to diagnose the problem. Many parish pastors are disenchanted. We know what's wrong. But who knows exactly what to do? Who has the prescription? What shape shall the congregations take, and how shall we go about ushering in this reformation? It is about time we stop calling for change and instead do something about effecting the change.

Hopefully, this is the era into which we are now moving. And hopefully, today's seminarians will prove to be tomorrow's true servants.