1 - The Simple Gospel

The Simple Gospel
By Hugh T. Kerr

IT MAY seem perverse in a time of so many conflicting theologies to speak of the simple gospel. We imagine we have outgrown Harnack's "essence," as well as his masculinist language. Reducing Christianity to "the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" sounds hollow today. Those who keep in touch with hermeneutical discussions would smile at Barth's well-known summary of his dozen volumes of dogmatics. During his American visit, when someone asked him to epitomize his massive theology, he is supposed to have replied: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." There is another version of the episode: he drew from his pocket a U.S. coin and pointed to the motto "In God We Trust." The question asked of Barth is typically American. We want to make complicated things simple. But the answer, in either version, seems somehow frivolous.

But there are times, and perhaps this is one, when it is salutory to be reminded that we may make the gospel more complicated than necessary. What follows is a sort of personal advocacy on behalf of the simple gospel, but with one concluding proviso. Sometimes we can dare to be autobiographical, following Frederick Buechner's defense that "the story of any one of us is in some sense the story of us all" (The Sacred Journey, 1982, p. 6).

I

In an open elective on "Theology as Critical Insight," which I've been teaching for the past few years to a mixed group of thirty-five seminarians, my hidden agenda involves a not very subtle effort to break through conventional notions of theology as an intellectual, rationally discursive, sequentially structured system of truths and beliefs. Using films, slides, and art objects, I try to lure the students into "seeing" and "hearing" the Word as well as reading and writing it.

The course is an "open elective" in the sense that there are no prerequisite requirements as is the case with most courses in today's theological education. I don't happen to believe that students must take this before they take that. The lock-step prescribed curriculum, in my view, is mostly designed to protect faculty prerogatives. I think you can

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begin to study theology, the Bible, church history, ethics, and pastoral care anywhere, wherever you happen to be at the moment.

I can afford to buck the system because of my emeritus status and my present designation as a "Visiting Lecturer." I'm not pushing for promotion or tenure, and so I can welcome a mixed group of seminarians at various levels of their theological education, and I tell the class at the beginning that I'm glad of the diversity because I think we learn best from each other as we learn together how to interpret and communicate the Word of God. This means that the senior or graduate student has no automatic advantage over the first-year or second-career student. Asian and African-American students are encouraged to participate on their own terms. I don't want students to tell me what they think I expect them to think; I want them to tell me what they think.

All this is by way of preface to say that I sometimes provoke the class to define the Christian faith in the simplest possible terms. At the conclusion of one class session, for example, I distributed a duplicated handout about an unusual church service in New York, suggesting that we discuss at the next session whether we could accept the implied definition of what it means to be a Christian in today's world. The report told about a Wednesday lunchtime worship service in lower Manhattan at the Mariners' Temple Baptist Church where several hundred clerical and office workers meet each week to sing, pray, and listen to a brief homily by the pastor, the Rev. Suzan D. Johnson. Since the service is at noon, everyone gets a free brown bag lunch prepared by several older members of the regular congregation. One attendant at these services said: "This is my midweek pickup; it helps me through the afternoon and Thursday and Friday."

The brief homily ended with an affirmation about the risen Christ: "God gave us Jesus to suffer and die for us. On the third day, he rose and declared 'I'm not dead! I live.' " And then the preacher, looking at the people, said: "There is someone in Police Plaza who needs your love. There is someone in City Hall who needs your love. Jesus rejoices in you. He lives, and he lives in your good deeds. He lives in your love."

Well, the response from the class at the next session was ambiguous. Some thought it was a powerful sermon, but some were reluctant to settle for this as a definition of what it means to be a Christian. So, I trotted out some familiar texts, such as "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream" (Amos 5:29); "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly?" (Micah 6:8); the sheep and the goats of Matthew 25; Jesus' conflation of all the commandments into love of God and love of neighbor (Mark 12:29-31); Paul's reductionism about faith, hope, and love (I Cor. 13:13); and that curious definition of the apostle James, "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God … is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction" (Jas. 1:27). And all the time I'm asking myself whether we can pack all the theological baggage of the centuries into such compact spaces without doing historical and

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intellectual violence to the Christian faith. But let one further illustration on behalf of simplicity be mentioned.

II

For several weeks, the top best-seller, according to The New York Times, carries the beguiling title All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1988). The author, Robert Fulghum, describes himself as a philosopher of ordinary things, a former folksinger, salesman, cowboy, artist, parish minister, bartender, and teacher of drawing and painting. He lives, at the moment, on a houseboat in Seattle. The book, which is a miscellany of musings, grew out of the author's attempt at a simple credo expressed in the title.

The original version was read into the Congressional Record, published in the Kansas City Times, in "Dear Abby," and Reader's Digest. Paul Harvey and Larry King read it to millions on their radio shows. The brief text is as follows: "Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and milk are good for you. Live a balanced life-learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup-they all die, So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned-the biggest word of all-LOOK" (pp. 6-7).

The author's apologetic for this simplistic credo asserts that, for him at least, "wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday school." And as a sort of introduction to the book, he says that "everything you need to know is somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living."

Yes, but … and here is where the proviso mentioned earlier demands attention.

III

The first thing that must be said about any simplified or essential creed is that this is where we end up, not where we begin. Harnack's definition followed upon his big three-volume work on the History of Dogma. Barth's Sunday school epitome presupposes a dozen volumes of theology. Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, two obvious contemporary witnesses to the apostle James' definition about orphans and widows, have understood their ministry as existing side by side with the classic Catholic tradition. Martin Luther King, Jr., knew that the verse from

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Amos, which he often used in his public speeches, does not stand alone but emerges out of the whole prophetic corpus. Suzan Johnson must know that going to Police Plaza to help someone in need is not the whole of Christian faith, but that it is an implication of a wider, more extensive belief system. I can provoke my students and even play with them a little about defining the faith because I've been through the whole bit myself, and I know that my faculty colleagues are covering the gaps for me.

And all those biblical texts we cited belong within the whole canonical context. When Jesus summed up the commandments, he assumed his hearers already knew about all the other commandments, and that his summation encapsulated "the law and the prophets." No one joins a church or chooses to live a life of Christian dedication and commitment because it's simple or easy. No one wants to register for a cause that defines itself in religious or moral platitudes. Only those who have been through the mill of doubt and despair, as well as of faith and hope, have earned the right to speak of kindergarten and Sunday school theology. Perhaps that is part of what Jesus meant when he said that unless we become as little children we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.