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Theological Table-Talk
By Robert P. Montgomery

Press headlines are deceiving. There are other factors provoking unrest on the college campus today besides the vociferous chanting of students demanding "ROTC MUST GO." My ministry for the past thirteen years has been to a university community. The deepest level of student unrest, in my judgment, is the psychic disturbance propelled by encounters other than those promoted by the student Left. These confrontations are with the accumulating new data deposited on the shores of contemporary consciousness. The turbulent waves created by the knowledge explosion have cluttered these shore with many strange shapes of mental driftwood.

The "generation gap" is not a phenomenon peculiar to the sixties. Students have always felt a chasm between themselves and their parents precisely because they are students and thus exposed to the frontiers of knowledge. This gap has widened dramatically in our time because of the knowledge explosion. The psychic disturbance is due to the rapidity of change, not to change per se. An indication of the current sense of alienation is suggested by the fact that 1500 undergraduates at Princeton University voted The Graduate as their first choice of a movie to be "re-run" at our local theater this Spring.

Princeton's first tenured female professor, sociologist Suzanne Keller, drew from this deeper level of turmoil when she noted that "a cultural derailment of major proportions is what we are facing today." Speaking to the first Clergy Colloquium of parish ministers from New Jersey, under the sponsorship of the University's Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant chaplains, Professor Keller ended on the hopeful prophecy that "though we are a changing society, I don't think we are a declining one, only a different society."

In addition to Professor Keller, the Colloquium was addressed on six successive Tuesday afternoons during April and May by Uni-

Robert P. Montgomery is the Director of the Westminster Foundation at Princeton University. He served as Chairman for the Clergy Colloquim m on which he reports in this article. The following University Chaplaincies were involved in the conference: Aquinas Foundation (Catholic), Wesley Foundation (Methodist), Proctor Foundation (Episcopal), Westminster Foundation (Presbyterian), Hillel Foundation (Jewish), Concordia Society (Lutheran), and the Baptist Fellowship.

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versity faculty, with expertise in the fields of genetics, politics, architecture, and Russian intellectual history. All agreed with Keller that our society is experiencing profound changes, but all were less sanguine concerning the direction of those changes.

Architect William Shellman deplored the absence of "the capacity to discriminate quality in architecture and planning." Evidence of this incapacity is evident in two widespread erroneous assumptions: that architecture can "establish right, desirable, or good states of mind" and that design has "the ability to effect social good." Shellman argued that there is no evidence to prove that modern versions of the Parthenon (e.g., Princeton's new Yamasaki designed Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) will insure good Senators, or that imitation Gothic churches -will revive medieval piety. "Neither architecture proper," he insisted, "nor these warmed over second-hand substitutes can secure such ends. If it could influence individuals' minds, why has it done so little in so long a time? It cannot conquer sin or rout evil. It cannot teach faith or democracy or prevent foolish actions or nasty deeds." Architects, like so many other moderns, have been conned into believing, especially under the influence of the sociologists, that man's basic problems are measurable and environmental rather than qualitative and internal. The arts must work against such a constriction of human consciousness, by boldly asserting the dimension of mystery in man's experience. "Men can, in part, understand themselves only by dwelling on what is individual, unique, unlike, and lawless-what does not conform to rule, that has no counterpart, is never symbol, will not behave; that which does not arrive from methods or formulas and yields none; that which is always unpredictable."

The importance of such input into human consciousness was underscored by Shellman in the closing words of his lecture on "Architecture and Politics":

"Unless consciousness does its work successfully, the facts that it presents to the intellect, the only thing upon which the intellect can build its fabric of thought, are false from the beginning. The only firm foundation upon which the intellect can build is an alert and truthful consciousness. A corrupt consciousness provides no foundation at all . . . not only is it the intellect that cannot build firmly, but moral-ethical ideals are falsified and common sanity and physical health are not secure."

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Geneticist Edward Cox infused his lecture with a refreshing expression of concern regarding the ethical problems involved in " genetic engineering." Whether mankind has a future, he noted, is much more dependent on "demythologizing science" than on the gospel. Such demythologizing must be done by scientists themselves if it is to have widespread hearing.¹ It was a hopeful sign to hear a brilliant young geneticist, whose field of specialized research has resulted in his changing the whole genetic message of a full string of bacteria, publicly declare: "I think you could probably make a pretty good case that I shouldn't be allowed to pursue this line of research, at least for the time being, until we start to catch up culturally with our technological or scientific progress." Cox's caution stemmed from concern lest what he was doing was not understood by others, and this might result in the "misuse and misinterpretation of everything I find out by other people."

Science provides data concerning what is being done and what conceivably could be done. Whether either ought to be done is a value question which belongs outside the domain of science. Some of the data of both types was presented by Professors Cox and Keller and appeared to many of their listeners like pages out of science fiction. Cox explained the research in the last few years of an Oxford biologist which raises important questions about man's future. The experiment, conducted with frogs, was to determine whether every cell in the body contained the complete genetic message that originally produced the frog. Without going into the details of the experiment, the result showed that any cell of the body contains the complete genetic tape of the original. The gut cell of "frog A" replaced the genetic tape in the egg of "frog II," and the result was the producing of a new frog that was the exact copy of "frog A." The whole mechanism of fertilization had been by-passed. Though this has not been done with higher eggs, Cox said he "would be really surprised if it takes more than two years before someone has learned to do it because all the biological technical things are there." Should that happen, it would be possible to reproduce as many copies of Raquel Welch or Joe Namath as we wished, by-passing the sexual act of fertilizing a female egg with male sperm. To incubate

¹ Cf. two excellent books in this genre by a physicist-theologian, Stanley Jaki, The Relevance of Physics, University of Chicago Press (1966), and Brain, Mind and Computer, Herder & Herder (1969). Cf. also the Spring issue of Daedalus, 1969, on "Ethical Aspects of Experimentation with Human Subjects."

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a human cell, it would be necessary to plant it in a carrier mother. What new definition of motherhood would this entail?

If we are able to make as many copies as we wish of any individual, which individuals should be duplicated? Who decides? If males and females can be reproduced without sexual intercourse, what is the rationale for sex in such a 1984 world?

Noting that, using an evolutionary hypothesis, certain serious diseases should have been selected against long ago unless they possibly confer some advantage on the person who has them, Cox cautioned against genetic engineering because "we just don't really understand enough about the consequences of selecting against a particular disease, genetic disease, to make any kind of decision to go ahead and do anything…. Until we understand the long term effects of doing anything with the genes in the population, I personally would not want to monkey with anything at this stage. I'd rather learn some more about what the long term effects on doing this are."

Professor Paul Sigmund, of Princeton's Politics Department, warned of the threats to man's future not so much from genetic engineering as from the New Left's threat to liberal constitutional democracy. Speaking on the topic "Civil Disobedience and Law and Order," Sigmund defined contemporary lawlessness as an "erosion of confidence" in the channels available to alter majority rule in the political sphere. The challenge to our inherited system began with the civil rights movement where dissent, in the form of civil disobedience, was usually accompanied by support of the system. Such support took the form of a willingness to accept the penalty for violation of the law. Dissent has escalated on many campuses and now takes the form of a more substantive challenge to the system of representative government sired by John Locke. The use of violence and the subsequent demand for amnesty represent an attack on the foundations of law itself. What such an escalation amounts to, not without some justification, is a growing disillusionment with due process, majority rule, and representative democracy as channels of dissent which in fact give promise of altering the present distribution of power and affluence. The poor, the blacks, and the young question whether the use of such channels accomplishes anything.

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While acknowledging that the majority can be and have been complacent and often insensitive to the intensity of the demands of the disenfranchised, Sigmund entered a caveat against the uncritical support of the New Left (whose Bible is Marcuse's One Dimensional Man) since the alternative to constitutional democracy may be a "self proclaimed elite which announces its right to 'force the people to be free' " (Rousseau).

Calling upon the church to mobilize its moral resources (Sigmund is a Roman Catholic) to challenge the establishment to react positively to the lament from the poor, the blacks, and the young, Sigmund sounded a note of caution ("I shall risk being labeled a reactionary") concerning the role of the church in the contemporary crisis. "The church," he concluded, "has had an interesting role in the turmoil of the 60's and one which has not always been a healthy one-perhaps as a reaction to earlier charges that the churches are too conservative and too much associated with the forces of law and order. You now have had, in some cases at least, a kind of pell-mell rushing to be in the forefront of the forces of change in an uncritical fashion, feeling that perhaps this is the church's role to criticize existing arrangements, which it is. But at the same time there is also this other side that often the 'machine gun padres' that I have run into in Latin America, who urge students to go out and revolt-and some of the apologists of revolutionary theology here as well-ignore, and that is the importance of a kind of tradition of civility and of self restraint, restraint by the majority and restraint by the minority, that is absolutely necessary to make democratic constitutionalism work."

In the concluding lecture of the series, "Contemporary Issues in Higher Education," historian James Billington saw the universities today as the "focus of a new kind of internationalism." He attributed the global generation gap "to a sense of solidarity within one's own generation, greater than the solidarity with one's immediate cultural, religious, or ethnic background. This represents a revolution with tradition that is hard to become acclimated to. The new sense of generational solidarity is carried by the electronic media the way heresy was carried on the trade media in the late Middle Ages. The media make a malaise in one part of the world a highly volatile and imitated commodity in other parts long before it is analyzed or even understood in its original setting. Before the

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demands of one given protest movement are even fully articulated, the style or form is imitated elsewhere."

Out of this global protest-culture have emerged two familiar movements, "the hippies, with their instant esthetics and concept of salvation through hallucination, and the radicals, with their instant morality and a kind of salvation through confrontation."

The former Rhodes scholar, who had just returned from a tour of Japanese universities and had spent the previous summer in western Europe with an assignment to "look into the intellectual origins of the student movement in western Europe," saw the primary source of youth malaise as a product of the technological age. Since the technological revolution is most advanced in this country, the success of the universities here in meeting this problem is of great significance for the entire globe. Better late than never, the American universities, who have analyzed "everything but themselves," are more and more engaged in "a kind of collective psychotherapy."

Billington's own prescription for the university's contribution in restoring some health to the academic communities was four-fold: developing a greater variety of institutional patterns ("every institution need not be a second-rate Harvard"); raising up leaders who can articulate anew the "value, integrity, and necessity of the intellectual life"; recovering a sense of community which can only come into being by a clearer definition of what a university is; and, finally and most important, instilling a dimension of joy and wonder into the pursuit of knowledge. His reflections on the last need seemed to many to point up the nature of the contribution that the community of faith may make to the community of learning.

"There is a great need for the reintroduction of these spiritual qualities [joy and wonder into the whole intellectual enterprise, because there is a sort of creeping aridity in the intellectual enterprise that can only be met by a reassertion of this dimension. . . . One needs one's consciousness extended, and men will invent political fantasies if they are not given some vision by which to integrate the discoveries…. The fact that there is so much work to be done, and that there are so many frontiers that need to be explored, if there isn't a bit of joy and a bit of wonder left in the enterprise, the confidence that is needed to sustain the difficult jobs ahead may fade away. . . . The need which, if met, could perhaps go further than anything else toward revalidating the entire enterprise to many of those who seem willing to give it up,

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is the need to recentralize in the whole intellectual experience the importance of giving tentative answers to important questions rather than definitive answers to unimportant or even trivial ones. It is the increasing trivialization of the whole enterprise against which the students have protested."

The "voices from the university" to which we listened for six weeks underlined for many of us the wisdom of the remark of the Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, "To be able to stammer about God is, after all, more important than to speak exactly about the world." The Secular City and Athens seem still to need such stammerers in their midst.