519 - Theological Table-Talk

Theological Table-Talk
By George S. Hendry

PERSONALITIES AND PRINCIPLES

In spite of all the excitement they arouse while they are going on, election campaigns have a way of being quickly forgotten when they are over; and in some respects this is no doubt the best thing that could happen to them. But before the campaign of 1960 fades into oblivion, there is one of its features which is deserving of comment from a theological standpoint. The reference is not to the "religious issue," which was sufficiently ventilated during the campaign and which may be allowed to rest for the time being, but to the fact that the campaign centered much more on the issues that divide them than on the personalities of the candidates. In this respect the election differed from many in the past, and notably from those of 1952 and 1956, when the personalities of the leading contenders played a great and probably a decisive part in determining the outcome. It was the immense personal popularity of President Eisenhower among all sections of the people that swept him into office on both occasions-when the voters turned their attention from the personalities to the policies, they elected a Democratic Congress for six of the eight years of his administration. Indeed, it was said during the recent campaign that if President Eisenhower had been able to run for a third term, he could easily have beaten any of the candidates.

The factor of personality played a much lesser part in the 1960 campaign, despite the greater opportunities provided by the televised debates. It may be, as some suggested, that neither candidate had much personality to project, that neither party could produce a candidate whose personality could cast a spell remotely resembling that of President Eisenhower, and that they were obliged in each case to settle for the second-best. At all events the result was that the public were able to give more of their attention to the policies than to the personalities, and it may be that this represents an advance in political maturity.

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After the death of Stalin some years ago Mr. Khrushchev announced to the Russian people that they had been victims of "the cult of personality." Like some other Russian discoveries, this one came rather late; for it had long been apparent to the rest of the world. And if the Russians had studied the facts of history instead of the Marxist theory of history, they would have known that the cult of personality is endemic in human society. Empires have usually been personal empires; they have been founded and held together by some dynamic or magnetic personality who was able to cast a binding spell over multitudes, like Alexander the Great, or Caesar, or Tamburlaine, or Napoleon, or Hitler, or Stalin. Hitler is perhaps the crowning example of this strange power; how it was possible for a highly intelligent people like the Germans to succumb to the spell of a homicidal maniac is surely one of the puzzles of history. What happened to the Russian people under Stalin is simply that the facts of life caught up with them, and, of course, it is plain for all to see (except themselves) that the death of Stalin has made no real difference.

The democratic form of government might be said to have been devised for the express purpose of protecting people from the cult of personality and the dangers it entails. For the cult of personality means that the conduct of affairs is guaranteed by the personality in control, who cannot, therefore, be called in question or even spoken to. Debate is the heart-beat of democracy; and for this reason the televised debates between the two candidates for the Presidency take on an added significance. Despite certain faults and weaknesses in their format, which received a good deal of criticism, these debates did approximate to a direct encounter between the two candidates on the issues of the election. This is something that did not take place, and could hardly be conceived to have taken place, in the two previous elections. It was reported after the election of 1952 that one of the candidates never even listened to the other on television that on one occasion when he was in a room with some friends and his opponent came on the screen, he immediately got up and walked out of the room. If this report is true (it came from the New York Times), it shows how easily democracy can degenerate.

Democracy, it is sometimes said, is government by laws, not by men. But the effort to subject men to laws, or to contain personalities by principles, is never more than partly successful and is con-

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tinually threatened with reverse. Abraham Lincoln once said that this nation was dedicated to a proposition. But dedication to propositions tends to dissolve into devotion to personalities; and the irony of it is that this nation is now devoted to the personality of Lincoln, while the proposition to which he said it was dedicated has been left standing pretty much where he left it.

The cult of personality has long been a problem in the Christian Church. One of its earliest manifestations occurred in the church at Corinth, where the formation of factions or cliques around leading personalities threatened to overshadow faith in Christ and to disrupt the unity of his body. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, which was occasioned partly by this outbreak, Paul strove to subdue the charisma of the person to the service of the whole body. But this is never an easy task. And one reason is that Christian faith itself looks more like devotion to a person than dedication to a proposition. It holds that persons are of more value than principles, and if a conflict develops between them, better that the principle should be subordinated to the person than vice versa; for the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Yet it would obviously be contradictory to make a principle of the priority of persons over principles.

The problem in both church and state is to maintain the balance between two extremes, a cult of personality which is destructive of principle, and an idolization of principle which is destructive of personality. There is no easy solution.

CONTRASTS IN CHURCH-ATTENDANCE

Americans who visit Europe, as more and more of them are doing these days, can hardly fail to be struck by the big difference in church-attendance: while churches in America are full, churches in Europe are empty. Of course there are exceptions to the rule on both sides, but in general church-attendance in Europe is at a low level in comparison with America. The lowest level is said to be found in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, which seems to have acquired a certain notoriety as a land of sin. It was stated in a recent magazine article on Sweden that although a large majority of the people are nominal members of the state church and continue

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to avail themselves of its services for baptisms, weddings and funerals, only three percent regularly attend public worship-and even this figure may be an exaggeration; for a student who spent a summer at a work camp in Sweden a few years ago told the present writer that when he went to the parish church in a nearby town with a population of about five thousand, there were usually not more than a dozen people there. The position in Germany and Switzerland does not appear to be much better. And even in Scotland, to which many Americans look as the Mecca of Presbyterianism, there has been a sad falling away. A summer spent there after an absence of ten years gave some opportunity to note the change that has taken place. It is particularly noticeable in the rural areas. The country folk used to be conspicuous for their loyalty to the church, and they would travel long distances on foot or in horse-drawn vehicles to attend Sunday services; but now that most of them have cars, church is about the last place they would think of using them to go to. To cite one example, there is a rural parish in southern Scotland with a population of about 200 and a lovely pre-Reformation church, where the present writer used to preach occasionally when he was a young assistant minister thirty years ago. At that time the average attendance was 50 to 60; nowadays it is six. And the minister (who is a Ph.D.) has to act as janitor, cleaner, fireman, bell-ringer, grounds is a man-he escapes having to be organist only by grace of his wife. It seems that the farmers have always some task around the farm which requires their urgent attention on Sunday morning. And for the rest of the population Sunday is the principal day for the indulgence of the national pastime of touring in buses and automobiles, which neither mist nor rain nor cold (always in abundant supply) can abate.

It is hard to account for this difference. Britishers who visit America and observe the high level of church-attendance here are inclined to suspect there is something phony about it. One who was here several years ago went home and wrote an article on "the appalling religiousness of America." No doubt, the boom that occurred during the so-called revival of religion in the mid-fifties was inflationary in character. It is evident that we are now in somewhat of a recession, and if the recession continues, it may not be necessary to continue the duplicate services that were instituted in many churches during the boom; already they are redundant in some cases. Nevertheless Americans continue to attend church in far greater

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numbers than Europeans, and this cannot all be ascribed to the cult of reassurance and other spurious causes.

A comparative study of the different patterns of church-attendance in Europe and America might be a good subject for a doctoral dissertation or a fellowship research project, and if adequately carried out it might elicit information that would be helpful to the churches on both sides of the Atlantic.

KARL BARTH IN A NEW ROLE

Karl Barth, who at 74 is still teaching theology at the University of Basel and completing his massive Dogmatik, has lately been filling an unusual role as deputy prison chaplain. Some years ago he was asked to take the place of the regular chaplain at the Sunday service in the city prison, and he and his congregation hit it off so well together that he has been making occasional return visits ever since. A volume of the sermons preached by him in the prison chapel, together with two or three given at other places, has now been published under the appropriate title, "Deliverance to the Captives."¹ Those who are acquainted with Barth's theological work will wonder how he spoke to such an audience and what he said to them. In an interesting note which is appended to the book the regular prison chaplain reports that when word of what Barth was doing got around in Basel, people there asked the same question, and they felt frustrated that there was no way of finding out except by committing some offense and getting sent to prison. The published volume goes some way towards providing the answer-"some way," because, of course, a printed sermon can never fully reproduce a preached one and must needs leave out some of the ingredients that go into the latter, the preacher's presence most of all.

The two most striking features of the sermons are their ordinariness and their simplicity. They are ordinary in the sense that they might have been preached anywhere. They are not specially adapted to the situation of those who listened to them, which is barely alluded to. The prisoners are addressed as men and women to whom the Gospel is as relevant and as needful as it is to the free citizens outside the prison walls. Then the sermons are simple,

¹ Den Gefangenen Freiheit, Evangelischer Verlag, Zollikon, 1960. The book was printed in the Basel prison.

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not so much in style and language (which by our standards is not always too simple), as rather with an evangelical simplicity. Some people might think that what a congregation of law-breakers need to have preached to them is the law, but those who are familiar with Barth's thought on the Gospel and the law know that this is the last thing he would do. "Not as Moses" (2 Cor. 3: 13) was the text of a sermon in one of his earliest published volumes, and he has hewed to this line more decisively ever since. Every sermon in this book is in its way a proclamation of the good news of God's salvation in Christ and the sufficiency of his grace for all men, even when it is based on a text from the Old Testament, as several of them are. And in every one the good news is proclaimed with a directness and an absence of complexity, which is rarely found, least of all in the preaching of theological professors. Perhaps it is only supreme genius that can command simplicity of this kind. One wonders how many of our American theological heavy-weights could come out of the test as well as Barth appears to have done; the first two names that come to mind (they shall not come to print) leave some doubt.

At the same time, it must be admitted, the reader of these sermons cannot repress the uneasy suspicion that this simplicity may be specious. Once when he was asked why he could not make his Dogmatik as short and simple as the New Testament, Barth replied, in effect, that though the message of the New Testament is simple, an extensive and intensive effort is required to de-complicate our minds before they can apprehend it in its simplicity. In these sermons, however, Barth appears to proceed on the assumption that the inmates of the city prison in Basel have minds of a childlike simplicity. This is an assumption which people who have worked with prisoners will find it difficult to accept.

One other feature of these sermons deserves mention. Each is prefaced and followed by a short prayer, and Barth says he took as much pains with the preparation of these as with the sermons themselves. Here is a rough translation of one that was given before a University Christmas service in 1957:

"Lord our God, thou didst humble thyself to exalt us. Thou didst become poor, that we should become rich. Thou didst come to us so that we should come to thee. Thou didst become a man like ourselves, so as to admit us to share in thine eternal life. All

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this of thy free, unmerited grace. All this in thy dear Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

"We are met here, in face of this mystery and miracle, to worship thee, to praise thee, to proclaim and to hear thy word. But we know that we have no power to do this unless thou thyself settest us free to lift up our hearts and our thoughts to thee. So we pray thee, come now into our midst. Show us and open to us by thy Holy Spirit the way to thee, so that with our own eyes we may see thy light that is come into the world and then may become thy witness in our daily lives."

DEBATE OR PROPAGANDA

The recent performance of Mr. Khrushchev at the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York provided a brilliant example of the methods by which public debate can be turned into propaganda. This is an art in which he and his associates have long practice. The favorite device they employ is to resolve the concrete issues under discussion into a set of abstractions from which certain foregone conclusions can then be made to follow logically. Every matter that comes up for discussion between the USSR and the USA is construed in terms of a struggle between two vast "historical forces," communism and capitalism, and since communism is ex hypothesi good, and capitalism bad, communism must inevitably be in the right and capitalism in the wrong. Two comparisons leap to mind. Students of comparative religion will see a resemblance to the struggle between Ormuzd and Ahriman in Zoroastrianism. To the rest of us there is a clear resemblance to something with which we are familiar-the plot of a western.

The popular appeal of westerns derives not so much from the vigor of their action as from their simplicity and inevitability. They provide a secular substitute for the emotional satisfaction our forefathers used to derive from the doctrine of predestination. All westerns have essentially the same plot. There are two characters, or sets of characters, one good and one bad; and they are always readily identifiable, especially the latter, who not only are bad but look it. The action consists of a fight between them, and it usually involves a good deal of fist-fighting and gun smoke. But the outcome is never

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in serious doubt; we can always be sure that the good guys will win in the end, though of course the suspense is sometimes terrific and they come galloping in just in time-for the final commercial.

Mr. Khrushchev and his partners view the world-situation in much this way; they see themselves as taking part in an enormous western (an eastern western?). Those who stand with them on the side of communism are the good guys, those on the side of capitalism are the bad guys. And there is never any doubt as to their respective identities: the communists are regularly introduced by certain fixed epithets (like Homer's heroes), such as "peace-loving," "industrious," "democratic," while the capitalists are always branded as "warmongers," "imperialists," "colonialists," and the like. If the drama of world history is being played by such characters, there cannot be a moment's doubt of the outcome; it can be deduced from the cast, and Mr. Khrushchev's long speeches are redundant.

The device is employed with such a crude and heavy hand that it is transparent to everybody. Not all are aware, however, to what extent the same device can be, and is, employed, in a less blatant, and even unconscious, way, in other fields than that of international politics. Political partisanship within the domestic realm sometimes manifests itself in western style, especially during election campaigns. It is a convention of campaign oratory that spokesmen for the party in office must maintain the public pretense that the party has a flawless record of achievement and that it has never made a mistake ("Never? Well, hardly ever"), while the spokesmen for the opposition party must claim that they hold sure-fire solutions for all the problems which the administration has bungled. The speakers themselves are well aware that they are acting in a western, but many of the public-perhaps because their brains have been addled by watching westerns on TV-take it at its face value.

Theological discussion also is sometimes conducted in western style. The concrete issue is by-passed, and conclusions arc drawn from an initial characterization of the participants or of the position which they are thought to occupy. On this method it is not necessary to listen to what people actually say; it is enough to label them fundamentalists or liberals or conservatives or modernists or evangelicals or neo-orthodox, and then it is possible to know what they say simply by consulting the appropriate file in the cabinet where the stereotypes of all these "isms" are stored. The conclu-

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sions are all there in the file. The file says that fundamentalism involves the mechanical theory of inspiration and the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, and therefore, if the fundamentalist label can be attached to any man, it follows automatically that he holds those views. Similarly, the file says that liberalism involves a denial of the authority of the Bible, and therefore, if any one can be labeled a liberal (perhaps because he questions the historicity of the virgin birth), it follows automatically that he denies the authority of the Bible. The method greatly simplifies discussion. It all depends really on which side you are cheering.

We know that when the political election is over, campaign orators, who are also experienced politicians, quickly doff their cowboy suits and shooting-irons, and get down to wrestling with the concrete problems of government. And we may suspect that Mr. Khrushchev knows, when he is not acting his western, that solutions to the particular problems of international politics cannot be obtained by logical inference from a set of abstract isms. But we sometimes wonder if those who use the western style in theology are aware of the game they are playing, especially when we observe the odd way in which they sometimes get teamed up with people from other countries who happen to wear the same label as themselves, but for whom it carries a different connotation. At all events it is depressing to note how easy it is for theological discussion to be turned into propaganda, and how much of what is published in books and magazines is like Mr. Khrushchev's speeches a repetitious deduction of foregone conclusions from a set of abstract premises, which evade the actual problems.

THE ROCKEFELLER THEOLOGICAL FELLOWSHIPS

The Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship Program has now been in operation for more than five years, and a report issued from the office of the Director in Princeton, New Jersey, presents some facts and figures which are of interest. The Program was set up for the purpose of recruiting students of superior quality to the Christian ministry by offering fellowships which would enable those who were willing to consider the ministry as a vocation, but who had not decided on it, to spend a trial year at an accredited theological school. The report states that 311 fellowships have been awarded

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since the inception of the Program and that about two-thirds of the fellows (who include a small number of women) have elected to continue their training in seminary and proceed to the ordained ministry in the parish or in some other form.

The choice of the seminary they will attend is left entirely to the fellows themselves; the selection committees have nothing to do with it, nor do seminaries seek to recruit them directly. The choices have ranged over 35 seminaries, but it is striking that 21 1, or almost exactly two-thirds of the fellows, have chosen the "big three," Union, Yale, and Harvard, in that order of preference. No doubt, the great attraction of these schools derives principally from their high academic reputations, and also, perhaps, from their non-denominational character-that is, if it is correct to assume that students who are uncommitted to the Christian ministry are likely to be uncommitted to any Christian denomination. Nevertheless, the great disproportion between the distribution of the Rockefeller fellows among the 35 seminaries of their choice and the comparative total enrollments of these seminaries points up a feature of the Program that may need some consideration. If the question be raised whether the large non-denominational. seminaries provide the best ground for men to test the validity of their vocation to the ordained parish ministry, there are so many subjective factors involved that it is hard to give an answer. It may or may not-be significant that of the fellows who chose the big three, the proportion who decided to continue in seminary is rather below the general average of two-thirds: Union Seminary tops it, with 41 or 42 out of 60 (to the end of the academic year, 1959-60). but the corresponding figures for Yale are 35 out of 68, and for Harvard 19 out of 40. The smaller church-related seminaries have attracted very much fewer of these fellows, but they appear to have been the means of leading a higher proportion of them to commit themselves to the ministry.

The Program was imaginatively conceived and it has made a notable contribution to the problem of recruitment for the ministry. But it is worth considering whether its purpose might not be better served if, without departing from its basic design, the Program could be so modified as to avoid the appearance of placing a premium on indecision and of seeking to promote commitment by means of heavy concentrations of the uncommitted in a few pockets.