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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

THE PARISH: LOCAL AND ECUMENICAL

Sooner or later someone was bound to come right out and say that a Christian need not be a member of a local Church congregation. Peter Berger, the one who dares say so, goes even farther. He says that if the Christian happens to be particularly concerned with a radical faith and social protest, he better not join a local Church for there is little likelihood that such an institution in twentieth century America can ever be much more than a place to worship, pray, and meditate.

Churches in America today, allowing for some exceptions, give little encouragement to alert, intelligent Christians who want to reflect deeply about faith or join a Christian peace corps on the new frontiers of contemporary life. Clergymen preach on Sunday as if what they say is relevant to what people do on Monday-"despite mountains of evidence to the contrary." Adolescents, to take but one example, are aware of being in the midst of a new kind of sexual emancipation, yet the local Church in this matter is "effectively segregated from the real forces of our situation and thus finds itself unable to deal relevantly with this situation." A few years later, the college student discovers that on college campuses for the most part "the religious organizations are all too often the gathering places for the most conformity, the most anti-intellectual, the most prejudiced segments of the student population."

All this and much more can be read in Peter L. Berger's recent paper-back, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (Doubleday, 1961, 189 pp., $1.75). Vienna-born, the author has taught at the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina, and is now Assistant Professor of Social Ethics at the Hartford (Connecticut) Seminary Foundation. His book is mostly a sociological critique Of religion-in-America, following already well-worn trails laid down by Herberg, Marty, and Eckardt. Taking the Prophet's ancient arraignment

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(Amos 5: 21-24) as his text for present-day religion, Berger finds that "the religious institution becomes to the individual a guarantee that the world is as it should be." He calls this the "O.K. world," the world most Americans want to live in. As long as religion supports this world, it is in turn supported. But "religion is symptomatically out of place on those occasions when Americans try to shake off the weight and the pretenses of social propriety."

This sort of analysis has been heard before. What Berger does is to go a step beyond critique to make some constructive suggestions. His giant step forward would involve: (1) recognition and acceptance of the local Church and its clergy as primarily a community center for liturgy and quiet religious meditation, and (2) the creation of a wider, ecumenical parish which might be initiated by the various Churches in any community but would not be identified with them and which would serve as the field of operations for socially-concerned citizens of all kinds.

As to the first point, the Church as worship sanctuary, this is no "let the dead bury the dead" counsel of despair. But we must simply realize that if it's social revolution we want, it will not be found in the local congregation. Something else is being done there and it is no little thing:

"There are many of the aged and the sick and the emotionally crippled in our congregations to whom these radical calls for institutional revolution can mean nothing but a threat to whatever spiritual solace the congregation has been able to give them. There is every reason to speak of the vocation of Christians in industrial society, for instance. But there are some Christians whose one vocation remains to suffer and to face death in faith. It is certainly no minor accomplishment if a local congregation provides the communal support for such a vocation. Such accomplishment is unspectacular and very unrevolutionary, but it is enough to forbid the assumption that only in radical new forms can the Church perform a witness."

What this would mean for our understanding of the Church, the laity and the clergy, the "profession" of the ministry and of theological education, preaching and program, as well as a hundred other matters-all these are only hinted at in the conclusion of Berger's provocative book. He comes out strongly, however, on the other side-the "ecumenical parish" idea where social protest and reform may be more viable. "We are suggesting that Christians may freely choose not to become members of local congregations, not to Identify

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themselves with a denomination, not to join the weekly traffic jam of the religious rush hour on Sunday morning." Such non-Church, Christian vocation would "de-ideologize" the Church's support of the "O.K. world," repudiating the "soft-spoken manners" usually associated with the Church-in-the-community in favor of a new kind of "loudmouthed morality."

CONCERN FOR CATHOLICITY

A Presbyterian minister, William H. Venable, Jr., writing in Monday Morning (November 6, 1961), proposes that Protestants either put up or shut up when they come to the creedal affirmation-"I believe ... the Holy Catholic Church…. Either let us, he says, initiate a crash program of publicity and education on the proper Protestant meaning of the word "catholic," or let us abandon the ambiguity of our present position in which all too many Protestants understand the word in a Roman sense. The author tends toward the latter alternative, the word can be replaced with synonyms such as "universal," and "catholic" in "Its pejorative usage has become so common that its original meaning is nearly lost by now in the public mind anyway." Asks Venable: "Who would grieve over its abandonment save a very tiny minority possessed of extraordinary sensitivity toward such things?"

Well, apparently a rather large group of Reformed Churchmen would grieve. They are at the moment engaged in a world-wide study under the auspices of the Theological Commission of the Alliance of Reformed Churches. The occasion for the fresh look at the controversial concept is not so much Roman-Protestant tension as a concern to break through the current stalemate in ecumenical discussion as it has developed within the World Council of Churches. Preliminary Alliance papers have been prepared both in Europe and in America, and while differences of theological accent are already patent, there is no disposition whatever to relinquish the word "catholic" to the Romanists.

If anything, the Reformed Churchmen are more aggressive than ever to lay claim to "Reformed Catholicity" by which they mean that every Church, local or denominational, must learn to think of itself as the Catholic Church in its own particular place and time. This would imply, on the one hand, a repudiation of the branch or

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fragmented view of Church divisions whereby Orthodox-Roman- Protestant traditions represent three streams which once diverged but may sometime re-unite; and, on the other hand, a positive push toward mutual recognition or, as some would prefer, beyond this toward bona fide unity discussion and negotiation.

On the latter basis, however, the ecumenical prospect is dim indeed if it include Roman-Protestant relationships. It is even unpromising for the Orthodox-Protestant dialogue. If neither Roman nor Orthodox will accept the "branch" theory, they aye not likely to react enthusiastically to the "every-Church-is-catholic theory." Since the Roman-Protestant discussion is hardly off the ground so far as the World Council is concerned, Orthodox claims and desires to cooperate in the Council may deserve more serious attention.

For continuing discussion of Orthodox-Protestant possibilities from the Orthodox point of view in America, there is available a little journal, Orthodoxy, published by the Basilian Fathers at Mount Vernon, New York. The journal is in its ninth year. The current issue contains an article by Henry C. Allan, Jr., on this theme. It reiterates the Orthodox position that Orthodoxy is: (1) unable to accept the "schism within the true Church" theory; (2) unable to accept the "mutual recognition" theory if it involves "full comity" of ministry or sacrament; (3) willing to join inter-Church organizations like the World Council in the interests of Christian fellowship and as a "duty" to witness to others that the true faith has been preserved in Orthodoxy "unadulterated and free from man-made doctrines;" (4) willing to pursue even farther the kinds of mutual co-operation already made real in the World Council on the basis of which "there is every reason to expect even greater results."

TOMORROW'S EDUCATION

In all the talk and panic planning for the coming collegiate population explosion, a little revolution in educational programming and teaching methodology is quietly spreading across the land. So far the two are seldom coördinated, but that will likely be achieved automatically before our eyes before we know it.

For one thing, the scientific and technological advances of recent years put the traditional and proud liberal arts ideal under radical questioning for really the first time. It is popular to date this tech-

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nical breakthrough (or breakdown as the classicists would judge it) with Sputnik I. In the brief interval since that first orbit, the hue and cry in our land for a matching or superior technology have been heard and in many instances heeded in countless colleges and universities as well as in popular and political proposals to "strengthen" American education.

Actually the breakthrough came in the nineteenth century, a hundred years before astronautology. Educationally, the scientific-technical development was either exploited for itself as in countless vocational, engineering, "A. and M." institutes; or it was incorporated into the humanistic liberal arts tradition as a separate or parallel collegiate program. In the meantime the aristocratic (educationally, not economically) centers of liberal, humanistic studies, though often hard put to define their purposes positively, continue to thrive partly, if only negatively, as holdouts against the encroaching technological wave.

As current college campuses get ready to expand, and deans and department heads pirate professors from other institutions to meet the engulfing flood of students, a few, a very few, educators are in the happy position of beginning fresh, without precedent or prerogative, as they sit down to plan a totally new college from the bottom up. One such experiment that has been widely publicized is New College in Sarasota, Florida. With the blessing (financially and ecclesiastical) of the Board of Home Missions of the Congregational and Christian Churches but operating independently and autonomously, New College is situated in a relatively new but rapidly growing population center. Starting with circusman Ringling's former mansion and art museum, President-Elect George F. Baughman can count on a couple of years' preliminary planning before the first students begin to register.

What will happen at New College or elsewhere on the country's campuses may or may not make exciting educational history. But moving closer to a more specialized area, we may ask what, if anything, will be happening in departments of religion as they confront the student explosion and the revolutionary character of our age. Here as in other areas of learning there will doubtless be two possibilities: (1) continue pretty much as at present with "more and bigger and better" as the ideal pattern for development; or (2) attempt a radically new approach which deliberately breaks with much of the

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past in the interests of coping intelligently with our own time. In collegiate departments of religion the first alternative will bear down heavily on the Judaeo-Christian Biblical, doctrinal, and historical tradition with some recognition of social ethics and history of religions. The second alternative would-well, what would it be?

In the advance publicity for New College, Florida, a statement is quoted from John W. Gardner, President of the Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, as follows: "... in a world that is rocking with change we need more than anything else a high capacity for adjustment to changed circumstances, a capacity for innovation." Suppose a new (or already established) department of religion in college were to start out with that idea as a charter, where would it lead? Add to it; (1) recent studies regarding college students' attitudes toward religion (in favor of), the Church (critical of), and salvation (mostly personality integration) as indicated in Jacob, Changing Values in College (1957) and Goldsen (et al.), What College Students Think (1960); (2) the remark of a Radcliffe senior: "I believe in God, but it doesn't affect my life"; (3) the increasing abandonment of the lecture or "I'll-tell-you-while-you-take-it-down" method, as seen in such articles as Nathan Glazer's "The Wasted Classroom" (Harper's, October, 1961); and most ominously but hopefully also promising (4) the new teaching machine technic which for the first time tries to deal with the student where he is and as he moves along at his own rate. (For a ponderous but fascinating look at this uncomplicated monster, see Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning, edited by A. A. Lumsdaine and Robert Glaser, 1961, 724 pp., $7.50.)

Here we want simply to raise the question of what would be the effect of all this upon the teaching of religion in college and university (another installment on this may be forthcoming). But lest classicists of the liberal arts or religious variety wonder what if anything the last mentioned item above has to do with this matter, let it be said to their surprise perhaps or possibly their indignation that at present the Hebrew language is being taught (at Princeton Seminary and maybe elsewhere) by teaching machine. We are also told that there is virtually no limit to the machine's adaptability-provided teachers have the imagination and creativity to "program" their material.

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WHO CARRIES THE TORCH?

Not many are publishing books on their eightieth birthday. One who has is Walter Russell Bowie who is known for a long list of books over the years, for his teaching career at Union Seminary in New York, and most recently as an editor for The Interpreter's Bible. Dr. Bowie's new book is Men of Fire, or as the subtitle has it, "Torch-bearers of the Gospel from Bible Times to the Present" (Harper, 1961, pp. 244, $3.95). If we can all admire Dr. Bowle's continued vitality (he is lecturing at the Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria), we may be allowed to wonder at the curious company of flamethrowers he has assembled in this book of biographical essays.

There are twenty-six "great heroes of the Christian faith" in this Who's Who, ranging from Peter, Paul, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine at one end of the time continuum to Grenfell Schweitzer, Seagrave, and Dooley at the other or contemporary end. In between we find St. Francis, Luther, Wycliffe, Calvin, Knox, Carey, Wesley, Phillips Brooks, and a few others.

Admitting that "no one can presume to write the roll of that long succession" of apostles, martyrs, theologians, and missionaries, Dr. Bowie greatly daring has drawn Lip his own treasury of the saints without attempting a rationale, or for that matter (so far as one can guess from the notes) without bothering to survey the latest or best critical literature on his chosen figureheads.

Take just one example-John Calvin. Here as elsewhere the author has succeeded in portraying in quick strokes the major features of the man and his message. But Dr. Bowie cannot resist indicating in his last paragraph some of Calvin's "great limitations," and these lie obviously takes from a book of some years ago which he quotes with approval. The limitations of Calvin's age were "its fierce commitments, its literal assumptions, and therefore sometimes its terrible intolerance." (One would like to know an age of which such "limitations" would not be descriptive.) "Calvin," we note further, "was more at home in the Old Testament than in the New, an interpreter more of law than of grace."

Curiously, the book which Bowie leans upon has recently been republished in paperback and somehow got into the Book Review Section of the current Scottish Journal of Theology. The book and its author shall remain anonymous, but the paragraph review by the

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British Calvin scholar, T. H. L. Parker, is too delightful and devastating not to be reproduced in its entirety, as follows:

"How does a reviewer deal with a book which he believes starts out from the wrong premises, pursues an erring course, and reaches largely mistaken conclusions? The clue lies in the date of the book. It is the re-issue of a publication of 1931. The first sentence in this review is a measure of the altered climate in Calvin studies. In 1931 one thought of Calvin as the theologian of the sovereignty of God. predestination in its most repellent philosophical form, as the precursor of capitalism and the bourgeois spirit. This book, able enough in itself, reproduces such an outlook. In fact, it must surely have been out of date in 1931. The great Calvin scholars of the past did not write like this. Karl Holl, B. B. Warfield, A. Lang, and the others would never have perpetrated a chapter on his theology in which the person and work of Christ are virtually ignored, and in which his ethics is based on the Ten Commandments. The book therefore represents an archaism; it is a dismal hangover from the nineteenth century."

Dr. Bowle's book has not been singled out, however, simply to indicate its own "great limitations," but to pose a question which the author implies, especially in the last section. How does one determine a man of fire, a torchbearer, a Christian hero? Or to put the question more existentially and less historically or biographically, Who are the contemporary or fairly recent figures who could be labelled men of fire? Bowie, as already mentioned, picks out Grenfell, Schweitzer, Seagrave, and Dooley. All honor. to their names, but between them and John Wesley is there no one of major significance except for Frederick W. Robertson and Phillips Brooks? How account for the complete absence of the nineteenth century liberal theological excitement which one would think Dr. Bowie would find so congenial, so torch relighting and relaying? And how account for the fact that the names in the first part of the book are mostly of theologians in the professional, highly intellectual doctrinal sense, whereas apart from Schweitzer (who is treated mainly as a missionary) theology tends to disappear and vanish?

These questions are not raised to salve a wounded theologian's vanity, for Dr. Bowie may be right. What he seems to be saying is that the flame of faith in our day is more surely transmitted by dramatic Christian action than by theological theorizing. No one is likely to quarrel with that way of putting it, but is that the way to put it?

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RELIGION AND THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

After an eclipse of too-long duration, occasioned theologically by the ascendancy of neo-orthodoxy, the study of religions (in the plural) has staged a comeback. The wonderful world of Frazer's Golden Bough, Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, and the religionsgeschichtliche Schule of Troeltsch and others precipitated upon our own generation much new information and many new questions. This "comparative religions" enquiry, as it was commonly called, suggested two contradictory possibilities: (1) either that Christianity was of relative significance, (2) or that in comparison with "non-Christian" religions it was obviously superior and unique.

Today "comparative religion" has become "the history of religion," and the terminology change implies a changed perspective. The newer phrase suggests both the science of historical study, analysis, and documentation as well as the empirical, phenomenological, non-polemical, non-propagandist approach. Most departments of religion in colleges and universities offer at least one course in history of religion, and in America the most influential primemovers in this direction have been the late Joachim Wach, Joseph Kitagawa, and Mircea Eliade.

One measure of this influence is the recent appearance of a new journal edited by the last two scholars, with Charles H. Lang, known as History of Religions: "An International journal for Comparative Historical Studies" (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 37, Illinois; published semiannually, $5.00 per year). In the Editorial of Volume 1, Number 1, Mircea Eliade guards against a possible peril toward which the history of religion school is moving. Avoiding any polemical point, historians of religion may be satisfied merely to conduct laboratory analyses in religious phenomena. "Like it or not," observes Eliade, "the scholar has not finished his work when he has reconstructed the history of a religious form or brought out its sociological, economic, or political contexts. In addition, he must understand its meaning."

Eliade himself in a score of books and articles has seemed to personify the very position he now warns against. Elsewhere, in his most recently published book, Images and Symbols (1961), he picks up the caveat again, and says: "... we have neglected this essential

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fact: that in the title of the 'history of religions' the accent ought not to be upon the word history, but upon the word religions."

Reasons for the new spurt of interest in history of religions are obvious enough. Asian, African, and so-called "primitive" cultures are moving into new, dynamic world importance. At the same time, Western-Christian culture seems 'to be undergoing a radical change as it confronts and in some instances is challenged by non-Christian and even non-religious ideals. Coupled with this East-West confrontation is the deepened insight provided by anthropology, sociology, and most of all by psychoanalysis into the myths and symbols of a humanity which seems in these ways, if not politically or ideologically, very much united indeed.

Curiously enough such a transparently crucial and urgent situation seems not as yet to have found much place or promise in Western educational research. Elementary courses in history of religion whether in college or theological seminary scarcely fill the bill. Eliade and Kitagawa are doing their best at Chicago to carry on the crusade of research associated with the name of Joachim Wach, but this and the journal under their editorship is thus far a rather specialized discipline, as illustrated for example in the first-issue article "Ainu Bear Festival (Iyomante)." In a few other locations, such as Hartford, and in a very few new places, such as the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, potential gains may be forthcoming.

But there is nothing very revolutionary in this whole area that can match the revolution of our times and the necessity forced upon us to relate East and West in a hundred and one unprecedented ways. The Bollingen Foundation to some extent is aware of the problem and seeks through its publications to make a valuable corpus of literature available. The Ford Foundation has begun a series of large grants to American universities for non-Western studies. Alan Watts has moved from Western Christianity to Eastern Zen and now tries to intercede for each; but, so far as I know, neither the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton nor the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford has the slightest interest in this traffic of ideas.

Long ago Aldous Huxley deplored the fact that the sort of experience induced by the drug mescalin, partly religious, partly symbolic, was not and could not be studied very extensively in any recognized research center. In The Doors of Perception (1954), he

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wrote: "How many philosophers, how many theologians, how many professional educators have had the curiosity to open this Door in the Wall? The answer, for all practical purposes, is, None." Speaking even more bluntly of the whole newly rediscovered realm of the non-verbal, to which both psychiatry and the history of religions have contributed, Mr. Huxley observes: "It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so, the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may be safely ignored altogether or left, with a patronizing smile, to those, whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans, and unqualified amateurs."