Theology Today - Vol 28, No. 4 - January 1972 - TABLETALK

470 - Jesus: The Media and the Message

Jesus: The Media and the Message
By Martin E. Marty

WHEN the editors of encyclopedia yearbooks assign the religion articles for annual review, they usually ask their authors to see whether the year revealed any trends or special shape. Surprisingly, most years do. Looking back, we see that it was around 1968 that the social action cause in the church had contributed to denominational polarization; the story of the year could be told in the language of intra-church conflict. The next year saw a climax of radical and revolutionary activity in the name of religion. Everyone was nervous about reverends and sisters and rabbis running around tearing things down or burning them. The followers of movements well know that 1970 was the year of "the occult explosion." Americans were turning as seldom before, it was argued, to astrology and witchcraft, zen and yoga.

On those terms, 1971 was certainly the year of the Jesus revolution. Look, Time, Newsweek all bannered stories about Jesus and his people. If the public did not see those magazines, it will certainly hear about them as the young revivalists certify their credentials by reference to the attention of these "big three." Television, newspapers, the religious press, and the radio have also done what they could to concentrate on the new flowerings of Jesus power. Any number of publishers have rushed, or are hurrying to rush, into print pot-boilers about the Jesus movement.

Given such senses of comings-and-goings, one feels a bit foolish as he agrees to discuss 1971's movement for 1972's journals. Perhaps the whole thing will have passed its climax by January, and identification with the topic might lead the author and editor to be dismissed as victims of cultural lag. On the other hand, cultural lag

Martin E. Marty, a member of THEOLOGY TODAY'S Editorial Council, is Professor of Modern Church History and Associate Dean of the Divinity School, the University of Chicago. Among his many editorial responsibilities, he is associate editor of Christian Century, co-editor with Dean Peerman of the annual volumes of New Theology, and an editor of Church History and the Journal of Religion. He has written extensively in both theology and church history, and his recent study of the history of American Protestantism, Righteous Empire. The Protestant Experience in America (1970) is reviewed in this issue.

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being what it is, they might be excused a bit longer while an audience of theologians and church people catches up on last year's news-while the rest of the world moves on. Then, one is haunted by the thought: maybe the Jesus trend only began to be publicized in 1971; maybe 1972 will be the big year! Shall we be cheered by the therapeutic word uttered now and then: "Who gives a damn what the media say? Deal with the subject for its intrinsic interest or importance, no matter what its public imagery and your sense of timing may be."

It should be clear from these milquetoastian musings that one cannot easily separate discussion of the movement from the media. Bracket for a moment the claim that the movement is obviously "from the Holy Spirit," which it may well be. That still does not rule out the possibility that the Spirit may employ the media-spirits have to employ something, and that the fate of the movement is inextricably tied to its fate in the media. Why do the adherents find it important to let one know they are important because the press has said so? Would most Americans have been aware of the movement through personal contact? How many freaks do you or your uncle know? Are they not dependent upon the magnification which media provide? Somebody among the Jesus people ought to be worrying about these subjects. Somebody would serve them well by offering to be a public relations expert in reverse, one who will hide them from the press and the camera. In almost any other period such a religious force or sectarian cluster would do what it could to find a crevasse or niche out of view somewhere. From such a place people could carry on creative subversion, do some sorting, get things together, and then sally forth.

Such a luxury is denied everyone in our age. Mao and Che could not hide; their revolutions came to the attention of millions. How can Jesus be hidden from view? So here he is, and here are the people. Decision is called for.

Then there are the Gamaliels: wait it out. If it's from God, it will last; if not, don't pay much attention. The temptation to issue the aristocratic pshaw! is strong; let matters be sifted, and then come back to notify us in a few years.

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This is it! says one crowd. This is the one movement that will not be dropped by faddists, that will not turn out to have been ephemeral. This is more than "this year's hare krishna." How can you intellectuals be so obtuse as to overlook the obvious stirring of the Spirit? This outfit is exempt from contingencies of history; it has the Spirit backing it. Don't raise psychological, sociological, or theological questions.

Never! says crowd number two. These kids-they're always "kids" among the condescending-are bored, affluent, sensation-seeking victims of our time. Jesus is at times surrogate father and at other times substitute lover. The imagery and identifications are sexual. The movement allows an outlet for energies cut off when the militant revolution turned sour. Here today, gone tomorrow.

In the face of these bewildering and conflicting counsels, one is perhaps best served by the attempt to place phenomena like the Jesus movement into larger contexts. Let me try mine today, derived by analogy from a habit of mine developed over the past decade while observing theological trends.

By an accident of history, I have been involved in co-editing an annual review of theological change. It was disconcerting at first to see authors of theological articles each year contradicting, ignoring, and refuting the articles of the year before. Renewal theology, ecumenical theology, hermeneutical theology, secular theology, death of God theology, hope theology, revolutionary theology, play theology followed each other in dazzling sequence. How much of one's mind, heart, and eye should be given to any one of them or their spokesmen?

Before long it occurred to us to do what historians are professionally equipped to do. Live with a cluttered mental attic; run a spiritual antique shop; resist the impulse to throw anything away. Hang on after the avant-garde rejects. Save, shuffle, classify, enjoy the relics. Eventually shapes emerge. One learns to live with contradictions and paradoxes; but what is new about that in theology? Cumulatively it is possible to see all these movements and their spokesmen not merely as examples of Oedipal post-neo-orthodox children out to kill father. More positively, they represent minor contributions to a decades-long attempt to cast theology in a mold

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appropriate to our day, just as Thomism or Protestant scholasticism were to their own times. Given that perspective, one discerns no clear outlines, but sees some clues.

So in the realm of devotion and action, one can greet the Jesus movement with interest and modest hope and can plan to hang on to it when it gets dropped by the media and many of its devotées. See it as part of an effort to style something appropriate in the effective spiritual life. How, then, might it be seen?

One can think of it as another manifestation of what might be called the "creative formlessness" of the time. Why creative? In no small measure because of what it is up against or over against. This shows up in at least three dimensions. They relate to institutions, theology, and experience.

III

That today's youth are anti-institutional is a proposition asserted with truistic regularity. Examination reveals that "youth" includes so much pluralism that few generalizations stand. Many youth are not against the institutions of rock concerts, the cinema, or motorcyclists' clubs. Many do reject those organizations which they believe are repressive, boring, or unreflectively traditional. In that context they have no difficulty finding that the conventional churches are vulnerable institutions; any semi-trained sociologist of religion could tell them that. But that the Jesus revolution is already an institution and will soon be as complex and nuanced as the World Council of Churches goes almost without saying. Before long, sets of heroes will emerge, hierarchies will become visible, and the Jesus-underground press will differ little from the network of denominational periodicals and tracts now being issued by papa's church.

During that brief moment of passage from rejection of the old to the formation of the new it is important to sort out what needs rejection in ecclesiastical institutions and what might serve as models for the new. Here it is possible to see a certain patterning in the rhythms of religious life. The nineteenth century was a period of creative formlessness' of ecclesiological sprawl. A crazy-quilt of denominationally competitive forces developed. Plot outlines were confusing. During most of the twentieth century, from around 1910 until well into the 1960's, Christians of the world and particularly

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in the west busied themselves tidying up their houses. The ecumenical movement was the main instrument for this tidying, though the "rationalized" bureaucratic forms of denominational and parochial life also were part of it.

Today few people look to these forms with hope. They move by inertia. It is time for institutional creative formlessness, something that will be deeper and more extensive than the experiments by the renewalists to develop "emerging structures of ministry" or by the traditionalists to prop up the old. The Jesus revolution is part of that sprawl.

Theologically, something similar has occurred. Neo-orthodoxy and its cognates and heirs, including even secular and radical theology in the mid-1960's, inherited terms, categories, and problems from the period of the Protestant Reformation and even from the scholastic synthesis. Most of the "-ation" words that color theological talk reveal this inheritance. Theologians complained that few people read or understood their work; perhaps this was because both the answers and the questions to which they devoted themselves had little to do with the way people perceive the world around them.

The Jesus people are trying to go beyond and behind this language and to speak in simpler, fresher ways. They stand in the tradition of the nineteenth century primitive gospel advocates in their biblicism, though any historian of primitive gospel movements knows that these, too, develop through history. They acquire the color of the epoch in which they appear. Therefore, the current Jesus movement poses late-twentieth century issues. As this occurs, it is less important to complain about what is happening to established theological categories than it is to ask basic questions concerning the ways word and world do and should relate to each other.

It is in the realm of personal experience, however, that the Jesus revolution is making its strongest impact. Here it links up most directly with other emphases of the time, many of them comprehended in the term "the counter culture." Theodore Roszak summarized all the striving in psychiatrist R. D. Laing's sentence: "We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source

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of the theory." Jesus people will tell you that they resent conceptualization, abstract intellectualization, and theory. They seek the immediate experience of Jesus and they tell the story of their apprehensions of him with urgency, verve, and alas, a predictable and repetitive pattern that may soon induce boredom.

What they are rejecting is again significant. Two generations and more of mainline Christians have played down the role of experience or have routinized it so that it means little to contemporaries. The Jesus movement, Catholic pentecostals, and experimenters with "new religions" and quasi-religious movements unite in their rejection of static, formalized, pew-and-pulpit ecologies, One wonders why anyone thinks that the pattern of non-experience now propagated by most Christian churches is cherished or defended by anyone any longer. The youth are on target here, as before.

Of course, there are problems ahead on all fronts. Carry on conversations with the Jesus people and these problems become evident immediately. They think, they really think, that they can escape history; they really seem to believe that they can sustain innocence and simplicity even though no one before them has been able to, and even though the odds against them have risen today.

Sample: theologically. After the Jesus experience, there occurs at least a minimal measure of interpretation. Who or what did I experience? At this stage the issues of Chalcedon will arise. The experiencers cannot very long remain "Unitarians of the Second Person of the Trinity," as H. Richard Niebuhr might have called them. Soon their reference to God and Spirit have to be enlarged upon. Pounce! You have them there. Is Jesus God? If they want to take their Bible seriously, they have to struggle with ambiguous and complex texts and to qualify the assertion as the church fathers did. Is he man? Few of them want to slip off into bland humanisms of Jesusology, though much of their language bears similarities to that of nineteenth century liberalism's talk about "the gentle poet of the Galilean hills." Sooner or later they have to relate divine and human, and they are back to or have caught up with the Christological and Trinitarian problems that have always haunted Christians. Wish them well; we do need restatement of these.

Institutionally, what does one make of the impulse to find acceptance in the media? Is any establishment more corrupt than that of the media? Why stress that their leaders have Ph.D.'s in

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chemistry, or whatever? Is any administrative bureaucratic structure, as they would call it, more routinized and repressive than the world which produces or lives off Ph.D.'s? Institutionally, too, they have sold just enough of their soul to make their finitude and mortality begin to be visible. Welcome them, then, to the human race.

It is in the realm of the "Immediate experience," then, to which one turns with most hope for the movement. Whatever it is they are going through, whatever socio-sexual-psychological base it has, whatever Jungian archetypes one must comprehend in order to cope with them, something is going on there. Some of it may be water-on-twig on the parched landscape of a Christianity that is too seldom deeply experienced in our culture, marked as it is by Rationalität.

In the moment of transit between the ferment that characterizes the first generation of any religious movement and the second-generational crystallization which nowadays comes a few months later, there is the crucial moment of reflected experience. Perhaps the affective life should not be conceptualized, intellectualized, reduced to abstraction--as Jesus people protest that it should not be. Perhaps for a moment it should be enjoyed. On those terms it is possible for even the most cautious and skeptical Christian observer to be more "pro" than "con" about the Jesus-trend and to wish the responding innocents well. Christians who have been in the habit of reading recipe books might learn from those who are tasting food. Buber's line that God is to be addressed, not expressed, may well be lived out among the new "immediate experiencers." The other gifts they bring to church and world may be meager, but these days even small favors can look large.