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The Bicentennial Began Last August
By Paul Ramsey

THE great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber once wrote: "He who does not himself remember that God led him out of Egypt … is no longer a true Jew." And he who himself remembers that God brought him up out of Egypt, and showed him what justice means to the heart of a sojourner, that man remains or becomes a true Jew. No matter what may otherwise have been his racial or ethnic origins, he defines himself and his tasks in terms of the people of the Hebrew Bible.

We can say the same for the people of the New Testament. He who does not himself remember that Jesus Christ saved him and means to send him on Exodus from sin and death is no longer a true Christian.

Thus do men and women in their own "internal histories" belong to the Old or New Israel, even as a first or second generation Chinese or Italian can say with Lincoln at Gettysburg, "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition . . ." etc. He who does not himself remember that eventful dedication of himself ceases to be an American. He who does, is-no matter what boat he came over on.

These words were written while all of us were watching the House Judiciary Committee debate articles of impeachment of the President. We have experienced in this the beginning of our nation's celebration of the bicentennial. Past events have become present events. The tradition of the fathers lives on among us; The Constitution is a commanding presence. Between us there is a cause greater than we are, even when all aggregated together. That girds and protects us, and judges us as well. We have seen what it means to resolve still to be a people together through time. These bonds of our peoplehood were handed down to be handed on through successive generations.

An inscription at the military cemetery at Normandy praises those who gave their lives that we might "inherit justice." What? Whoever heard of "inheriting" justice? Only those who know justice. Only those who know the nature of bonds sufficient to found either civil com-

Paul Ramsey, a member of THEOLOGY TODAY's Editorial Council, is Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton University. He is widely known for his many articles and books in the field of Christian social ethics, ranging from Basic Christian Ethics (1950) to Christian Ethics and the Sit-In (1961), to The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (1968), to two books dealing with his most recent interest, medical ethics, The Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics (1970) and Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control (1970).

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munity or church community, joining self to self and generation to generation in simple piety.

A bicentennial celebration probably could not be planned. Such participation in celebration assumes the present eventfulness of past realities. That, we can see now, is usually, if not always, born out of domestic agony or external challenge. Some vital ingredients of our nationhood began to be evoked among us to an extent never before known, at least not for many years past. We and our representatives in Congress wrestled through the night with a heritage not made by our own hands until it yielded a grain of truth needed for the present hour.

Thus, I suggest, our national celebration got under way. The bicentennial may in some measure have been saved from artificiality, from dead routine, from the commercial hucksters, from jingoists, from fragmentation into many rival local patriotic spectacles. Saved also, I suggest, from embittered idealists (who too often are churchmen) who have lost the thread of anything to praise in our national life, who see only the failed promise of the American Revolution, and who as a consequence look forward only to revolutions yet to come. There can never be a celebrative event if things worth passing on have yet to come. There is then nothing to remember worth the remembering.

The Church's Role to Celebrate

What, then, can we do in connection with the bicentennial to celebrate the church's part in the foundation of this nation? How can we celebrate it, not as an external event remembered from the long ago, but as the presence today of an honored heritage demanding to be revivified again in every generation and transmitted to our children's children? Do Christians on this continent have a living constitution?

Of course, we can set our local, regional, and national church historical societies to work in preparation for 1976. Thereby, all over this country, we could learn more about the journey from past to present than most of us care to know. That would be historical knowledge. Such knowledge is important no doubt in its own right, but it is still not the same as celebrative participation in the past which still lives and bends us toward the future.

What then shall we do properly to praise famous men and our fathers who went before us? When I think of ordinary church-life today insofar as I know it (which is mainly as a layman in a local church where my minister-as I have told him-is a Pelagian who calls me to spiritual "work" even on Sundays when Holy Communion is celebrated), and also when I think of the present shape of Christian theology (where God is mainly the future toward which we move), the question I have just asked myself is an astonishing one. So much so

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that if I am to press the question, I must throw myself into a sort of reverie, a dream-like sleep in which ultimate questions can be asked and answered only hypothetically. How else can one escape what is called the "reality-principle," that is, contemporaneity, with its limitations to only one moment in time? How else can one possibly become a celebrant of the God of our Fathers?

What follows are either disclosures of some sort or other, or the imaginings of a wandering maniac, or else the suppositions are put forward frivolously for the fun of it. Or maybe the comparison should be with what goes on at an Irish wake, where people try to act as the deceased would want them to act, vivify things he would want remembered and honored, and generally enjoy themselves as he would wish,

Having thus blown the breeze into my free-floating imagination, I ask again: "How might we celebrate the religious constitution of this nation and properly praise our fathers who went before us?"

In addition to all the knowledge our church historical societies might turn up and present to us, we could organize in every church devotional study and prayer groups to meet throughout 1976. These groups would study the sermons or writings of past ministers of their congregation, if they are available, and also their lives and those of significant religious leaders in their region. If there were outstanding Christian lives coming out of our churches in periods past who may not have left literary remains, ways could still be found to render these lives accessible to us as exemplars of the cause and present reality between us and our God. Thus it just might be so, that our past becomes present, and we actually have a common future with them.

Next, in preparation for 1976, every member of every congregation could become a disciplined member of a cadre of people instructed, trained, and drilled for only one purpose. These training sessions would for that interval, at least, take the place of sensitivity-sessions, coffee hours, or jazz communions, or even replace for a time the far more important groups studying the plight of migrant farm workers, the problems of our cities, starvation in sub-Saharan Africa, or genocide in Uganda. The purpose of these corps of American Christian people would be to become trained and alert on all occasions to protest and refute everyone who uses the word "Puritan" in its present bad meaning, or anyone overzealous and uninformed in rebellion against his grandmother's religion who therefore continues to contribute to the emptying of Christian elements from this civilization. We sons and daughters of the English and American Puritans have yet to create a culture greater than theirs. But apart from such extrinsic standards for evaluating a religious outlook, my present proposal in preparation for 1976 would be one needed way to remove the stone walls between us and properly praise our fathers who went before us.

My final suggestion came to me in deepest reverie. It is the most

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suppositious of all. Still it might be the thing to do if our churches are founded so that there shall be knowledge of the Scripture and that the Word of God shall be spread abroad in the land.

The idea would be that during the entire two hundredth anniversary year of this nation's birth no sermons shall be preached that are not expository of the truths of Scripture. None shall be occasional, didactic, or moralistic remarks upon the times-one man's opinion among others. To this end, the homiletics departments of all our seminaries shall immediately take this as their goal: that future ministers shall simply be trained in expository biblical preaching. No more use of biblical episodes or parables merely as vivid illustrations of out-looks otherwise arrived at and not arguably the meaning of the text itself. Between now and 1976 Centers for Continuing Education for the Ministry shall suspend all other tasks, topics, or conferences for the duration. This would be necessary if there is any hope of retraining, or training for the first time, the Protestant ministry in biblical preaching in so short a time. Every effort should be made, in calls to the ministry of particular churches, that this shall be the principal question asked, and the only one answered by ecclesiastical authorities, or by anyone recommending anyone for a job.

I confess that this profoundest dream of mine was not made up of whole cloth, or no cloth. The ingredients I composed in my sleep were drawn from a recent rational exercise of mine. I have been working on the ethical writings of Jonathan Edwards for a volume to be issued by the Yale University Press edition of his Works. These include, along with The Nature of True Virtue and The End for Which God Created the World, completed by Edwards himself but published a few years after his death, a third work, Charity and its Fruits. That was a series of sermons preached in 1738 on I Cor., Chap. 13, grouped by Edwards for publication as a treatise but not issued until the second half of the nineteenth century.

These are moving sermons. My secretary, Doris (Mrs. Joel) Nystrom, was so fascinated that she wrote for her local church choir an anthem which she considers Edwardsian. The sermons are also well wrought exercises in conceptual analysis. Edwards the preacher did not leave reason behind; he rather found it to be in need of the highest exercise when scriptural truths were at stake. But it was not his truth or relevance to the times that Edwards powerfully analyzed. Those were the days-perhaps gone beyond recall-when the learned ministry counted for something, not because those men were learned but because they made good the claim to be learned in something unique given into their hands to say forth.

Striking is the standard form of the Puritan sermon to which Edwards faithfully adheres. First, Text. Then, Doctrine. Then, Reasons for the Doctrine. Then, Use or Application. And "Use" may be for Self-Examination, or Improvement, or for Instruction, as the case may be.

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One gets to the preacher's asserted "relevance" only in the last part. Before that he had to unfold something of scriptural importance always and everywhere relevant to human needs. There were Election Sermons, sermons occasioned by local crises, etc. But those occasions did not frame the sermon. The Scriptures did that.

Today we often hear it said that a minister needs the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Equally balanced, you see. That is even said to define the parameters of Christian theology. And that imagery, we know, - does not turn out to mean a real equilibrium between those two sources of the preacher's message. Too often The New York Times provides the substance, and the Bible the illustrations or only familiar or persuasive imagery. For Edwards, however, and our forebears who planted our religion in this continent, the Bible was a sufficient source of spiritual and moral insight, fit to every human need. The "Use" or "Application" came last; but, of course, relevant, practical preachers that they were, "Use" did come forth.

So might we church people celebrate our founding fathers in the faith and the life bequeathed to us by doing the same for at least one year. I know, however, that I must have been dreaming to think we are apt to do any of these things that alone would be to their praise and honor-in the biblical sense, that is.

Still I know that these fanciful musings of mine are those of one whose calling is reflection upon the meaning of the Christian faith in isolation at a scholar's workbench. Mine is not the calling to preach the gospel in the present age. I am, as my teacher H. Richard Niebuhr used to say, only a little finger on the body of Christ. Still I hope that those who are called to the ministry, and I, would agree that go and preach the gospel does not mean the same as that the preachable is the gospel. My musings amount to the suggestion that we seriously try to find out where we are in the present age. This has taken the form of suggesting that we test whether we really mean to honor the Christian faith planted on our continent as more than past event, as living reality presently effectual among us and a most prized possession to be transmitted to future generations. Not unchanged, of course. But if we mean to say that there is more discontinuity than continuity between ourselves as churchmen and those who planted us here, then we have nothing special to celebrate on the occasion of our nation's two hundredth anniversary. Others have cause to celebrate some secular, presently governing, reality, and we with them, but we the churches have not.

Other ideas may come to mind. We could, for example, have a good revival meeting. We might profit from a few New Lights and Old Lights among us. At least in my day at Yale Divinity School, many a young man who came by Greyhound bus from the Bible-belt to get his B.D. found himself upon graduation facing the following bard choice: whether to go back South and try to restrain the fanatics or to stay "up East" and try to wake the dead.

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"We had a good revival meeting," reported a local pastor at Methodist conference. "How many additions to church membership were harvested?" "None." "What? Didn't you 'open the doors' of the church?" "Yup, opened the back door and turned out twenty," replied my father.

"Unfound" Theologians

As many readers know, The Christian Century has going a 1974-75 series of articles, in some way related to its notable series "How My Mind Has Changed in the Past Ten Years" and its less noteworthy series "How I Am Making Up My Mind." They are looking for theologians, ethicists, or people in any other aspects of religious life, in the 25-35 age bracket, to contribute to a series called "The Unfound Generation in Religious Thought."

"Unfound" contrasts with "lost." The idea is that there are voices out there who are not lost but simply haven't been looked for. They are just "unfound." The theological giants are gone-Mackintosh, Barth, Tillich, Brunner, the Niebuhrs. These, and many others at decade ends in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s, told us how their minds had changed. Then came the generation who told us how they were making up their minds in the mid-'60s. These people are now in mid-upper career. The younger people are still unfound. The Century proposes to remedy that situation.

Nice idea. Still one wonders if that probes to the bottom the plight and directionlessness of contemporary theology. I suggest that the problem is not that anybody belongs to an "unfound" generation but that we no longer have "generations"-in the biblical sense, that is.

The Century uses another notion. Martin E. Marty wrote in the lead-off article (Feb. 27, 1974), quoting Ortega y Gasset, that what makes a generation is a "common stamp, deriving from common age." But there can be no theological generations without a tradition of the fathers. A generation that declares it has no ancestors, no heritage to enrich and pass on, thereby declares that it can have no descendents. Thereby it proposes to stand outside the generations, to be not-a-generation. There may be many who are "unfound"; finding them will prove that. But few are of the chosen, that is, those who praise and honor their predecessors in such fashion as to become capable of having children in and for whom those ancestors have a living word.

Theological vitality is rather like any other parenting-in the biblical sense, that is. If there actually was a period in the 1960's when adolescents in America were "alienated" from their parents, it will prove to be the loneliest biological "generation" in human history, for they won't have any children either. Another discontinuity will in-

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tervene, since alienation of parents and children is largely a product of rapid social change.

Hans Jonas uses this as a simple test for whether we live in a "revolutionary" age:

… A good test that anyone can make when his time comes: If a man in the fullness of his days, at the end of his life, can pass on the wisdom of his accumulated experience to those who grow up after him; if what he has learned in his youth, added to but not discarded in his maturity, still serves him in his old age and is still worth teaching the then young-then his was not an age of revolution…. The world into which his children enter is still his world, not because it is entirely unchanged, but because the changes that did occur were gradual and limited enough for him to absorb them into his initial stock and keep abreast of them. If, however, a man in his advancing years has to turn to his children, or grandchildren, to have them tell him what the present is about; if his own acquired knowledge and understanding no longer avail him; if at the end of his days he finds himself to be obsolete rather than wise-then we may term the rate and scope of change that thus overtook him, "revolutionary."1

Of course, one can name voices out there who should be heard from. A new cutting edge, for example, is being given to religious and Christian ethics by a vigorous group of young men and women who today are using the finely honed tools of Anglo-American philosophical ethics. The new Journal of Religious Ethics contains much that should affect the shape of Christian ethical reflection in the future. One hopes that some of this is found by the Century. But white philosophers are in time, the exercise of philosophy aims to be a timeless enterprise. Theological ethics, however, is surely a generational matter-in the biblical sense, that is.

What are we to make of the recent stonewalling of the past in theology? Or of what Jonas would call its "utopian drift"? Or of feminist bowdlerizing of the whole range of theological literature and even of Scripture-language? Or of the fact that Paul van Buren and William Hamilton, both of whom sat at the feet of Karl Barth, couldn't get past age forty without throwing that over as so much baggage? Or of Reinhold Niebuhr's too-early twilight? One may at least raise the question: were these theological revolutions necessary? Or a product in some measure of a faithless generation?

If logically, theologically, or otherwise necessary, if a present quite discontinuous with the past holds the future in its hands, if intellectual excitement and creativity dwell only or mainly among those joined together by some or any age-span, then one thing is certain. The generations are at an end, and church-theology and church-ethics as a science of God's dealings with the generations of humankind are dead. We shall have to wait for renewal by the Spirit of God moving over the waters. One should hope that among the "unfound" the Century will

1 Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed To Technological Man. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, p. 46.

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actually turn up some who may be seeking to articulate and witness to and hand on truth which comes only from being given, which God's people have inherited, and which is real only as inheritance from generation to generation-however obscure or strange that may sound to contemporary ears. If and only if there is filiation with the fathers is there filiation to generations to come.