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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

THE MINISTRY AND THE SEMINARIES

Do professors in medical schools and in law schools criticize their respective professions as unmercifully as theological professors criticize the church and the ministry? It is an interesting comparative question but whatever the answer, it is painfully obvious that seminaries in our day tend to articulate a highly unflattering opinion of the church, the ministry, the theological student, the curriculum, academic standards and scholarship-all, presumably, items of vested interest.

The church, so we are being told on all sides, is irrelevant, the minister has become a professional caretaker, the theological student is ill-prepared in college and confused about his vocation in seminary, curriculum revisions shuttle between training in skills and tightening up of academic requirements, and foundations have dispensed considerable funds to study the various aspects of all these interrelated matters.

So far, there has been a minimum of dialogue among the participants in the controversy. Ministers feel understandably threatened by all the criticism of themselves and the church as institution, professors have, occasionally, an uneasy conscience about accepting their salaries all the while downgrading the churches that support them, and theological students find themselves caught between the crossfire.

A modest but promising venture to get at least the theological professors discussing their own common problems has been recently inaugurated by the publication of a quarterly journal, Theological Education, sponsored by the A.A.T.S. (American Association of Theological Schools, 934 Third National Building, Dayton, Ohio). As the editor of the new journal, Jesse H. Ziegler, points out, "schools [theological] may be located within twenty miles of each other and scarcely know each other's minds on the work to which they are

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committed." The new quarterly is being sent free, courtesy of Lilly Endowment, Inc., to the more than 1700 full-time teachers in A.A.T.S. seminaries, and it is available to others by subscription and $3.00 a year.

The first issue of Theological Education contains major addresses given last summer at the twenty-fourth Biennial Meeting of the A.A.T.S. at Fort Worth, Texas. These articles are of absolutely firstrate importance and deserve to be studied by all who reflect seriously about church, ministry, and seminary. One in particular may be singled out for special attention, namely, George W. Webber's "The Christian Minister and the Social Problems of the Day."

The author of this impressive analysis is a member of the group ministry of East Harlem Protestant Parish and Associate Professor of Church and Community at Union Theological Seminary, New York Dr. Webber quickly sketches in the background: less than five percent of New Yorkers are white Protestants; the traditional Protestant mood has been rural rather than urban; nature manifests God's presence and providence while cities are evil and to be avoided if possible; the church is mainly interested in telling people how to be good rather than how to be truly human; religious education materials invariably presuppose that Christian nurture can only take place within a family-love context ("if we want to teach Johnny about Jesus he has to live in a family where he has been loved") and this scarcely applies to Harlem or any other such metropolitan community; the clergy no matter what their intentions are everywhere regarded as professionals concerned primarily with their own organizations; churches suffer from "morphological fundamentalism" and are unwilling to alter their inherited forms even while discussing such subjects as the renewal of the church; graduates of theological schools may have passed all their exams in church history and biblical criticism and yet not know how to communicate the Gospel.

A basic issue here, as Professor Webber emphasizes, is whether the seminaries can really justify all their recent drive toward academic scholarship and research proficiency in view of the patent irrelevance of most of this for the future life of the church. "This student generation," says Dr. Webber, "is simply not prepared for the ministry through a program of academic study and theoretical reflection."

It was the initial accreditation program of the A.A.T.S. itself that began the trend, thirty years ago, toward higher scholastic standards

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in the seminaries. The next step obviously is not backwards but in the direction of extending the terms "scholarship" and "research" to include, for example, the kind of urban complex in which the church of the future must live and participate.

THE PAROCHIALISM OF THE PRESENT

One of the limiting consequences of a revolutionary age such as our own is to be so immediately engaged with the present moment as to forget or disdain the past. In a way which the great industrialist could not have imagined, many today accept as axiomatic Henry Ford's dictum of the 1920's that "history is bunk." The reaction against the past, particularly the recent day-before-yesterday past, whether identified as colonialism, capitalism, idealism, or whatever, seems to many the best way to get on with the really important issues of the present situation.

So the revolutionary, whether in politics or in theology, frequently takes delight in exposing the clay feet of the heroes of a former age. But in the transformation from yesterday's hero to today's rogue, history itself is often violated. And in another and more profound dictum, the destiny of those who neglect history is to repeat it.

These scattered remarks are prompted by the coincidence of two recent publications, reassessing two contemporary nineteenth century thinkers-Emerson and Schleiermacher. The University of Minnesota Press has been publishing a series of pamphlets on American writers, and Number 41 in the series is on Emerson, written by Josephine Miles, Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1964, pp. 48, 65 cents.) Though the author is not concerned to praise or blame Emerson, he emerges from this literary sketch as a quaint visionary, groping after "that unifying vitality of good," and articulating platitudes and generalities about life, culture, freedom, and truth.

Perhaps we today are incapable of entering sympathetically into Emerson's world of ideas. If so, it is a pity, for the grandiose themes of the 1841 Essays (History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, Over-Soul, Intellect, Art) comprise the stuff not only of idealism but of revolutionary

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ideologies as well. If our contemporary empirical particularity and our linguistic analysis have sharpened our speech, they may have at the same time dulled our eloquence. By the way, isn't it about time for a firstclass theological reassessment of Ralph Waldo Emerson?

The Schleiermacher item is a big, research critique which promises to redress a long-standing wrong committed by the neo-orthodox revolution. It is Richard R. Niebuhr's Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion (Scribner's, 1964, pp. 267, $5.95). Scheduled for more detailed review, this new volume takes off from the recent belittling of Schleiermacher in Barth and Brunner. With the dismissal of "the father of modern theology" as the rascal he never was, a whole dimension of personal religion was lost. Subjectivism and mysticism became bad theological words, and as a consequence no one (with the notable exception of Bonhoeffer) addressed himself in recent years to the doctrine of the Christian life.

With time's relentless moving of the pendulum, a small but vigorous renewal of interest in Schleiermacher is already apparent. This is a good thing, for as Professor Niebuhr observes (in a sentence of which his subject would have been proud), one of the reasons for studying a thinker such as Schleiermacher is that "it forces the imagination out of the provincialism and parochialism of the present and requires us to think the perennial problems and affirmations of Christianity from a standpoint other than that from which we are accustomed to proceed in our problem-solving for the present and in our assessment of the meaning of the theologians of the past."

MAKING THE HOLY COMMON

This is not how we usually define the Eucharist or Lord's Supper. We usually say that the Holy Communion makes the common (or the community of the faithful) holy. But that is an Old Testament way of thinking. For the Jews the holy was set apart and separated from common, worldly things. The common was the unclean. The sacrament of Christ's body and blood, however, celebrates the sanctification of the common, as the Incarnation itself should remind us. Furthermore, the bread and the wine used in this sacrament are not natural symbols as if we were trying to demonstrate some obvious connection between God and his good gifts of

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creation. They are symbols of human manufacture, what we do with God's gifts, and these rather than the fruit of field or vine are sacralized and made holy. So it follows, shockingly for temperance crusaders and alcoholics alike, that "the more evil we think alcohol is, the more reason why we should use it for communion."

When the name of the author of these unconventional notions is revealed, something of our initial surprise is forthwith diminished, for we are quoting from a little book, Liturgy Coming to Life, by John A. T. Robinson, the now-famous Bishop of Woolwich (Westminster Press, 1964, pp. 109, $1.45). First published in 1960, three years prior to Honest to God, this report of a liturgical experiment at Clare College, Cambridge, is a required reading assignment for everyone reflecting on the meaning of public worship.

The title, Liturgy Coming to Life, is deliberately chosen as a double-entendre, for the Bishop wants not only to renew and revitalize worship but also to bring it into our living. The latter goal is sometimes thwarted by the punctilious preoccupation of the liturgists who never get beyond the discussion of worship protocol. Here Dr. Robinson's early experience is to the point:

"When I was at my theological college there was no subject that seemed to me so remote from any living concern for the Gospel and its relevance to the modern world than what was taught and examined as 'liturgiology.' And those of my contemporaries who were most enthusiastic about it only confirmed my worst suspicions. For they seemed to be indulging in a purely antiquarian pastime of the narrowest ecclesiastical interest, from which they emerged from time to time to pontificate on what was 'correct' in the public address of the Almighty. This was deduced entirely by precedent and pedigree, and there was no need to stop to ask whether it bore any relation to what the Spirit might be saying to the churches today."

In trying to bring liturgy into our daily living, to make the common holy, the secular sacred, the Bishop insists that the sacrament has to do primarily with what is done rather than what is said. Liturgy is social action and public works. The bread and wine are brought in from the world and then should be taken out into the world again.

But no matter how persuasively we emphasize the "action," the plain fact is that the congregation thinks of Holy Communion as something to see rather than do, to hear rather than act, and indeed

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this "work of the people" has become a "service" celebrated by the clergy for the people. For example, it is difficult to imagine how the sacramental bread can once more become associated in people's minds with common, everyday butter-and-marmalade bread so that the Holy Meal becomes one with the common meal.

"So powerful is the psychological barrier built up by centuries of thinking of the Holy Communion primarily as a 'service' rather than a meal, that vast numbers of people, I am convinced, are simply not going to 'see' this at all, until they see the Eucharist taken from time to time out of the sanctuary altogether and 'done' on the kitchen table, if necessary with ordinary cups and saucers."