96 - Our Life in God's Light: Essays by Hugh T. Kerr

Our Life in God's Light: Essays by Hugh T. Kerr
Edited by John M. Mulder
Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1979. 352 pp. $12.50 hardbound. $7.95 paper.

Warning: this is an in-house review of an in-house book by an in-house writer. Though I may be setting new records in the annals of marginality and delinquency on the staff, you will see my name listed on the masthead of THEOLOGY TODAY, whose Assistant Editor edited this book and whose Editor wrote it. That means that I am either their boss or they are mine-I do not even know much about the polity of this board-and cannot be expected not to have some sort of bias or interest. Such a complication works both ways. It may mean an uncritical criticism of a book, because on such premises one is not allowed to be harsh. Or, more likely, it may mean that the reviewer believes the readership must see him holding on to his integrity by revving up his critical faculties and savaging the book.

Enough self-consciousness. You know that I know that you know the dangers of playing such games. We have really only one task before us: to appraise this book, its author's achievements, its editor's approach. For the most part, encomia are unnecessary, since Our Life in God's Light includes Kerr being seen favorably in men's light. John M. Mulder in an essay on the journalist as evangelist, James I. McCord on the editor as teacher, and John A. Mackay on "on the road" are understandably lavish about How Great Kerr Art, and, as if that were not enough, F. W. Dillistone adds a moving essay about an editor on the move "as Pilgrim." With appropriate blushes and ahems, Kerr also writes a final and pleasing Respondeo. For good measure Elsie Anne McKee appends a bibliography of Kerr, one that is so long and inclusive it must incorporate writings Kerr himself must have long forgotten and no one may ever look up. These are all evidences of loving care and grateful recognition, and I find them in place. In the midst of this all it was refreshing to find Kerr himself playing the game of playing the game. "As Seward Hiltner, my colleague and an esteemed member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY would say, 'Enough of this mock modesty and editorial masochism."'

Enough. This book selects from the editorial pieces with which Kerr jabbed and graced THEOLOGY TODAY, which is turning out to be the monument to a theological era. By all accounts it should not be around any more. Its early shape was born of an attachment to something then loosely defined and tightly bounded by the name Neo-Orthodoxy. By the mid-sixties that movement is supposed to have spent its life, and the waves and erosions of radical thought were supposed to have chipped

98 - Our Life in God's Light: Essays by Hugh T. Kerr

away at all relics and landmarks. Yet Kerr's journal survived and found new things to say, as these essays show.

Never yet have I heard of a potent journal that was not in some respect or other a projection of some fuss-budgeting, worrying, prodding editor, some visionary who also cares about whether the lights get turned off at night, whether contributors are appropriately thanked and budgets respectably met. Kerr has been THEOLOGY TODAY'S continuity man and much more, but if taking thought for tomorrow and being anxious about today is part of his make-up, it does not show in these essays. What do they tell us about the life and times of Kerr and his journal?

Pace the post-neo-orthodox radicals, the mumblers of early non-verbal counter-culturalism, the group-gropers and navel-gazers of the seventies, he and the journal survived, and that is an achievement. In a polemical age, one looks for a mean streak in the editor. People care about viscera and psychic splatterings, and expect it from the Bill Buckleys and Hugh Hefners and I. F. Stones or other year-in-and-year-out packagers of editorial visions. Let one of them be civil and compromising, and our age gets bored and turns away. I do not expect to stop reading Buckley and Stone, but am grateful for a Kerr who is able to combine his convictions with civility. He keeps doing so with enough continuity that one almost begins to suspend disbelief in the eternal and in eternal values simply by being engrossed with the record of his durable and patient achievement.

Second, he is a delineator and discriminator in a time when discriminations are not easily peddled or proffered. Let 900 people be murdered or let them commit suicide in a cult, and soon we hear that membership in such an intense group is precisely the same as being Born Again at a Baptist revival or becoming a member of the order of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Let "The Way" cult be fabricated as a new kind of Unitarian Fundamentalism, and it will escape criticism, because, after all, we do not reject Thomas Jefferson and William Ellery Channing, do we? Let the more extravagant charismatics build their "spontaneous" movements around male-authoritarian submission models, and they can go unremarked upon because, once again "after all," are not all truly religious people totalitarian-minded or enthusiasts at heart? Must not true belief produce intolerant true believers?

All the while Kerr keeps saying "No!" He writes: "So, what is the message? In my view, it is the gospel-the good news that God redeems us in Jesus Christ. That is what the Bible says; that is the voice of the Christian tradition; that is the testimony of convinced Christians in every century." But to Kerr there are no theological or logical reasons-only psychological ones-that lead receivers of this message to persecute or exclude or willfully misunderstand others. He can assert the positives of faith and even engage in criticism without failing into the pits of theological hatred or needing to express the narcissism of those walking wounded who see flashier theological movements and celebrity parades ostensibly and ostentatiously passing them by.

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The organization of this book is a bit controversial and jarring. One gets chronological hiccups from time to time as a sequence jumps from the vastly differing world of 1974 to 1954 to 1964 and back. I might have preferred chronology to topicality (or mere randomness?) as a mode of organization in order to trace the hand of Kerr and the unfolding of the journal through those years. Yet the staccato and upsetting mode in its own way confirms the continuity, the cantus firmus of faith and the steadying hand of editor Kerr.

Kerr has no thesis to propound but only a message to spread. He does that without a pointer or a megaphone, without billboard or jabbing commercials, but only with patient spiralings back toward and ever closer to the message and its subject. As a professional historian-teacher-editor-writer-journalist who has spent not one waking hour in twenty years over the cursed term "journalist" in the title, I let myself conjure the image of someone who has felt stigmatized by that designation. Once one gains empathy for those who feel that way, it is easy to come to therapy here. Any title that Kerr wore so gracefully and durably cannot be unpromising. He makes others proud to be or to have been editors or journalists. But, better than that, he has not been only the professional's professional. As the essays in this book show, he has broken barriers so that others in the believing community have learned to be expressive and critical without being mean, civil without wavering-but to stick the point, the message.

I cannot picture Kerr's inquiring mind slowing or the pen not flowing. But on the day of this review let me, as a colleague and beneficiary and, I am embarrassed to say, an enchanted would-be critic, add my thanks to that of four contributors to this book. And, almost wearied by the scope of activities and interests here displayed, let me add a word to him: "Take the rest of the day off."

But come back tomorrow.

Martin E. Marty
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois