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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

TURNING THE CORNER

There are a few encouraging signs worth noting that suggest a shift in the recent widespread assault upon the institutional church. For one thing, idol smashing has become boring. Iconoclasts are a dime a dozen. Anti-institutionalists have "shot their bolt" (to use a quaint expression). It isn't just that the pendulum swings, or that optimism inevitably overcomes pessimism. There are actual signs of renewal-within that refute the earlier assumptions about the church's inability to cope with the new age.

Note three unacclaimed and unpretentious paperbacks that could take us around the corner. The best of the three is Grassroots Ecumenicity, edited by Horace S. Sills (United Church Press, Philadelphia, 1967, pp. 140, $1.95). This is a report of six "case studies in local church consolidation." This is not another avant garde secular or urban ministry series of experiments; it has to do with rural and small community parishes in Wisconsin, Montana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. And it is quite unashamedly related to the denominational small-town situation, including Lutherans, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, Methodists, and Evangelical United Brethren.

All the agonizing and frustrating problems of yoking peoples, communities, and denominations into some sort of functional ecumenical fellowship are here analyzed and interpreted. Each case-study suggests a different situation but a similar happy and effective solution. A final chapter lists procedures which other such situations could use in solving their own grassroots problems. This is a heartening study and should be read by all anti-institutionalists.

The second book is not so impressive because it is more hortatory, general, and abstract. It is David S. Schuler's Emerging Shapes of

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the Church (Concordia Publishing House, 1967, pp. 84, $2.00). Although this book promises to discuss "signs of renewal in response to change," it tends to imply what might happen rather than to describe what is actually the situation. It is a summons to the church to heed the challenge which "change" in many areas has thrust upon US. Even so, the book is aimed in the right direction and senses the radical kinds of reconsideration which are required if the church is to rejoin the human race.

The third book deserves an "A for effort" but that is about all that can be said for the claim it makes. It is an anthology of more than twenty sermons entitled Renewal in the Pulpit, edited by Edmund A. Steimle, Homiletics Professor at Union Seminary, New York (Fortress Press, 1966, pp. 190, $3.00). The point of this book is to demonstrate that "younger preachers" have something to say today and that this augurs well for the preaching ministry of the church. The first part of this thesis may be granted-the sermons rate high, the material is excellent, the preachers are earnest and persuasive. The implication of the thesis, that the preaching ministry of the church is being renewed, may be true, but it is not proved by these preachers-not one of whom is a full-time parish minister! The sixteen preachers are all involved in non-parish ministries of various sorts. Fine for them, and good preachers they are! What we have here is a wistful fantasy that what is true of these younger preachers will become equally true for parish preachers who speak to the same congregation Sunday after Sunday. But again, this expectation is properly pitched on the side of reconstruction. It is easy enough to poke fun at preachers and sermons today; it is less common to find an intelligent, hopeful prescription for the ailing pulpit.

THE CHURCH AT THE CENTER

Signs of the times suggesting a more positive attitude to the church as institution should be welcomed but not inflated. A few paperbacks do not make a trend, and turning the corner for the church may be as frustrating as the quest for prosperity after the '29 crash-when the phrase became the symbol of premature false hopes.

The centrality of the church may still be a theological affirmation of primary importance and even a sociological datum of a sort. But

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to be "at the center" can also imply being on "dead center," and often this appears to be the neutral territory the church occupies in so many respects. Consider these random unpromising items.

Religious News Service recently reported two surveys which were put side by side without editorial comment, implying inadvertently more than the results intended. In a survey of ministers' activities, it was found that preaching still rates highest, with pastoral calling in second place. In fifteenth place was participation in community social projects, and in twentieth place was working for interdenominational and ecumenical projects.

The second survey, in the same issue of RNS, reported the findings of a poll in rural communities in Ohio. It seems that more than half believed the church to have only minor or moderate influence upon community decisions. The church does rate high, however, as a fellowship where personal satisfaction in "belonging" is realized; on this level, it is second only to Rotary and Kiwanis. (These items were reported by Frank H. Heinze, Editor of Monday Morning, Nov. 21, 1966.)

A Gallup Poll, disclosed at a meeting of the "Religion in American Life" consultation (January 19, 1967), found that, as a group, churchgoers (both Protestant and Catholic) tend to think about social issues in exactly the same way as non-churchgoers. On Vietnam, capital punishment, integration, open housing, and the anti-poverty program, church people are "right in the middle of the mainstream of American opinion." Mr. George Gallup noted that "on the great moral issues of the day the teachings of the church just aren't being understood at the grass-roots level."

Polls do not make policy, perhaps, but it may be queried whether the current concern for the secular involvement of the church may not have succeeded all too well. But to be in the world ought to mean that the church's distinctive integrity and message are still retained and recognizable. Prophecy must not be reduced to propriety.

The really significant and instructive contemporary example of prophecy and/or propriety is the Roman Catholic Church. In so many exhilarating ways, it has already turned the corner, and Catholics by and large are obviously excited about their new freedom and ecumenical relationships. But every now and then the Holy Father, for reasons of his own, utters a pontifical disclaimer, a caution against too hasty action, a chilling blast against new daring attitudes. Many

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American Catholics have been painfully embarrassed by Cardinal Spellman's Vietnam statement as also by the Pope's pastoral insistence that the Irish prelate continue in his position of leadership in New York. Almost in the same breath, we heard that Bishop Fulton Sheen, TV pro and confessor to the high and mighty, was appointed to new responsibility in Rochester, New York, and of course the news media gave this the full treatment. "Zig-zag" would appear to be the paradigm not only for Protestantism, with its tradition of competitive church views, but also for Catholicism with its tradition of uniformity.

TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT

This is the credo of Dr. Timothy Leary's "League for Spiritual Discovery," the initial letters of which are LSD. In and out of the limelight in recent years, dismissed from Harvard for alleged drug experiments on students, arrested at the Mexican border for importing marijuana, Dr. Leary is now trying to establish centers for his League and secure its recognition as a religion. If he succeeds, he will then argue that LSD is the "sacrament" of this religion.

This is a side of the LSD publicity that is not so well known. But it is important to note that Dr. Leary is himself completely serious about the religious character of psychedelic or mind-expanding exercises of various sorts. In a public lecture on a university campus where he discussed his ideas recently, references to Luther and other "reformers" were liberally sprinkled throughout the talk. Drugs are only one possible way to induce a psychedelic experience, and religions have always encouraged such aids to spirituality as fasting, meditation, prayers, singing and chanting, pilgrimages, mortifications of the flesh, etc. In any event, Dr. Leary insists that what he is interested in is not indiscriminate use of LSD but the enlightenment of the self-conscious with respect to personal identity and creativity. This, he holds, is best achieved within a liturgical context-any liturgy will do.

The League appeals mainly to three categories: young people, protesters, and minority groups. The "drop out" part of the credo implies a defiant contempt for the values and mores of contemporary culture. When Dr. Leary intimated that the younger generation

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ought to make up its own mind and ignore the expectations of a culture organized by an older generation, he received much applause and delighted squeals from his young audience. This is not an appeal for aggressive action but for quiet meditation. And the cultural drop out, whether he's interested in LSD or not, is likely to be deeply disaffected with the world as he knows it.

In the history of mysticism the drop out lure has always been strong for those who are not much in the world in the first place. But if there are signs in our day of a revival of interest in the mystic way, it is to be hoped that it can articulate a more constructive notion for expanding consciousness that will issue in ethic and not merely self-satisfying afflatus.

WHAT'S HAPPENING?

Picasso is reported to have said that "art is a lie which helps us understand the truth." Much modern art, including Picasso's, would seem to many clearly in the area of lie, and for all such it would seem unlikely that a lie could lead to truth. This would be especially so if we couldn't decide what it was the artist was trying to do, and if he refused to tell us. What is the meaning of the painting, the play, the movie, the poem, we ask? And if meaning is not apparent or at least discoverable, truth must be precluded as a possibility.

But suppose "the question of meaning" is not the right question to ask of art, then what? In an interview, Marshall McLuhan blurted out: "People today are not interested in the meanings of things, they just want to know what's happening." This, of course, fits in neatly with his own "Gutenberg Galaxy" theory that the printed page has molded us over the centuries into thinking in linear, homogenized, sequential conventions.

Happenings are "in," especially in the theater and the movies, and "Hoving's Happenings" in New York's parks produced unforgettable, if brief, excitement. At the moment, the most discussed dramatic happening is Harold Pinter's play The Homecoming, but although most agree it is good theater, not many can tell what it means. In a panel of interpreters invited by The New York Times., only Marya Mannes, known for her definite opinions on many matters, and Donald Harrington, the senior minister of the Community

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Church, tried to spell out a series of meanings. To wit: "There are people who are alive and people who are dead. . . . Nothing is what it seems." "What Pinter has cooked up here is a preview of what modern man is coming to-back home to the brute. Motherhood is dead. . . . Women are things…."

But, as might be expected, two other members of the panel, both artists, deplore and reject any studied attempt to find "meanings" in the play. One said: "There is no key in The Homecoming. No door from which Mr. Meaning will emerge. Mr. Meaning is alone, and he resides in your mind." The other observed: "Nothing amuses or bores me more than Broadway's seasonal game: Search For The Meaning. Since most of my friends and associates care less than a whit about this pseudo-intellectual cocktail sport, I find myself untrained to participate in the ritual."

Without pursuing this dramatic discussion further, the implications of "happening" and "meaning" dead-ends for theology are explosive. For years now we have been talking about revelation in history, about the biblical events, the God who acts, in other words, about "happenings." But every biblical interpreter, preacher, or hermeneutical expert operates on the assumption that "meaning" can be discovered and structured. The biblical "happening" like a picture (if not like a lie) leads us to truth or, more correctly, is the embodiment of truth. Theology in its doctrinal forms usually pretends to expound the meaning and truth of faith. Tillich's principle of correlation, for example, is posited on the assumption that it is important and desirable to explain the meanings of things.

But suppose, just suppose, that "happenings" are to be enjoyed and experienced without too much rational attention to meanings. What would this imply for the Bible and for theology? Are there other possible levels beyond the meaning-truth structure which has so dominated Western thought? Could sensation, feeling, association, impression, experience be utilized in the service of biblical and theological thought?

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS TRENDS

We appear, for good or for ill, to be entering in American thought upon a time of religious self-analysis. Perhaps this is a sign of ma-

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turity, or it may be a symptom of disease. In any case, we become increasingly interested in surveys about religious trends, changing attitudes, and developments within the churches. Two readable self-surveys come to mind, and they both deserve careful study.

The first, America and the Future of Theology, is a symposium edited by William A. Beardslee, and includes articles by T. J. J. Altizer, J. L. Moreau, Frederick Ferré, W. A. Christian, Stanley Hopper, Talcott Parsons, Walter Harrelson, Roger Shinn, and several others. It represents a series of papers read and discussed at a conference at Emory University, November 1965, sponsored by Columbia Theological Seminary, Emory, and the Westminster Press which has published the proceedings (paper, pp. 206, $2.25). The topics range over the now familiar spectrum of God-is-dead, language, metaphysics, social science, public responsibility, and so forth. Curiously, little is said about biblical studies or the church, and the general impression is of a theological learned society annual meeting. The papers are all scholarly in tone, the participants have obviously done their homework, and everyone appears to enjoy the intellectual get-together. This is not meant as a negative criticism but simply as a description by one professor about a group of professors.

The second volume is more ambitious and general in its scope. It is entitled Religion in America, and it is the Winter 1967 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (280 Newton Street, Boston, Mass. 02146). Here again we have a symposium, including spokesmen for Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, with such well-known names as Franklin Littell, Langdon Gilkey, Martin Marty, Harvey Cox, Daniel Callahan, Milton Himmelfarb, and Michael Novak. The essays as in the previous volume grew out of a conference convened a year ago by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Church Society for College Work. The topics tend to focus more on social and political factors than on theological issues, and, as might be expected, the reader is treated to an overabundance of generalizations.

Picking out just one of the essays, we may pinpoint the problem, and the peril, of grandiose generalization. Langdon Gilkey's "Social and Intellectual Sources of Contemporary Protestant Theology in America" makes a brave attempt in thirty pages to do justice to such a big title. On the whole, the analysis is well done and discloses facets of American life and thought that illumine our contem-

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porary situation. The emphasis falls on American social innovation and the restless urge, in thought as in history, to move on to the next frontier, or problem, and deal with it in typical pragmatic fashion. In Gilkey's estimate, "American theology has tended to be interested in neither traditional formulations nor systems of doctrine. Those intellectual elements of religion that buttress and preserve the institutional structure of the church-the hierarchial or priestly, the liturgical, and the dogmatic-have been de-emphasized or ignored in America in favor of inward, personal, and activist elements."

Now it may be granted that this may be an accurate description of some periods of American religion, though we are led to believe that it is the trademark of our whole history. In that case, it is untrue, misleading, and tends to perpetuate the outworn notion that all significant intellectual ideas must come from Continental Europe. Have we so quickly forgotten Perry Miller's The New England Mind (1939) which opened up the impressive and sophisticated theological corpus of the early Puritans? How about Jonathan Edwards? The transcendentalists? Horace Bushnell? And what about that remarkable, if now neglected, feverish activity in the nineteenth century, the production of systematic theologies widely used as texts in all the American divinity schools? Hodge, Shedd, and Strong all wrote massive three-volume dogmatics. But there were others who tried one- and two-volume works, Clarke, Dabney, Miley, Smith, Stearns, Finney, Mullins, and, turning the corner into the twentieth century, William Adams Brown. It could be argued that some of these are better left forgotten, but it simply will not do to ignore them altogether and then lament the fact (?) that America has not been interested in dogmatic construction.