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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

HOW TO BUILD A CHURCH

The new novel by William Golding, The Spire (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964, pp. 215, $3.95) will undoubtedly attract not only cultists of his Lord of the Flies but many new readers who will interpret the story as a religious message, parable, or myth. It is only on this level that the book makes much sense, for it is no great shakes as a story, the prose often fuzzing what is at best an obscure point.

The setting is, presumably, a fourteenth century English cathedral. Jocelin, the Dean, has a vision for consummating the structure with a celestial spire even though the foundations were not constructed in the first place to hold additional weight. Constrained by an angelic imperative to build the steeple "in the very teeth of Satan," Jocelin must threaten and cajole his builder, Roger Mason, to continue "up stone by stone." From the point of view of the Dean, the spire is an impossible possibility; from the mason's more mechanical perspective, it is just impossible.

The dialectics between a lofty vision of the glory of God and a technical engineering problem, a medieval parable of good versus evil and the contemporary concern for locating the church in the world, the traditional symbolism of the spire, of wood and stone, of Gothic forms, of the building itself as a creative thing and modern man's ignorance of and indifference to such arcane mysteries-all these and other complexes emerge out of the unfolding of Golding's simple but not so simple tale. Part of the power of the story is that the author allows the reader to make up his own mind. Was Jocelin a saint, a visionary religious, a man of faith, or was he a lunatic? Are churches built by compulsive esthetes or by practical contractors? Is the church itself, biblically, theologically, eschatologically, an impossible possibility? What makes a church anyway?

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By coincidence and not design, Golding's novel was followed by the reading of Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Meridian Books, 1963, pp. 156, $1.35). Poorly written from a literary point of view and cluttered with the baggage of pedantic scholarship, Panofsky nevertheless grinds out a suggestion or two that intersect with Golding's story.

Gothic architecture is a stone-and-mortar version of medieval philosophical-theological scholasticism. Two major principles, Panofsky says, underlay both: (1) "the principle of progressive divisibility" (all those arches within arches; all those Thomistic distinctions and subdivisions), and (2) the principle of "acceptance and reconciliation of contradictory possibilities" (the rose window, the wall beneath the clerestory, the nave piers; the classic synthesis of patristic opinions in Abelard's Sic et Non).

Curiously, Golding has almost nothing to say about Panofsky's principles and indeed doesn't give much indication that he really understands the rational symbolism of medieval catholicism in spite of his use of the mason's technical vocabulary. Perhaps his myth presupposes all this, but the modern reader will scarcely guess that behind the spire lies a comprehensive system of philosophy and theology.

Both books raise a question for our own times, the answer to which is not forthcoming from either discussion. What is a church for? Golding's answer, or at least one answer, would be: the glory of God. Panofsky's answer, or the answer of scholasticism, would be: a rational homologue of interrelated parts. Both answers manage to leave out the congregation.

Here is the church,
Here is the steeple;
Open the door.
Where are the people?

Panofsky with all his scholarship doesn't seem remotely aware of any connection at all between medieval scholasticism and the people. Maybe there was none. And maybe that's one good historical reason for the Reformation. Golding, uncommitted and uninvolved in the theological quest, nevertheless suggests that something was amiss in Jocelin's vision when he has the visiting ecclesiastic reprimand the Dean for neglecting the regular worship services of the

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cathedral so that he could devote all his time to the building of the spire.

NEGRO CHRISTIANITY

For many, the phrase "Negro Christianity" is ambiguous and perhaps offensive. But to the author of a recent angry book, it is an empirical description. Joseph R. Washington, Jr., Chaplain and Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa., is out to prove a very specific thesis regarding the Negro and his association with the Christian faith. Some time ago, we published in THEOLOGY TODAY an article by Dr. Washington ("Are American Negro Churches Christian?," Vol. XX, No. 1, April, 1963, pp. 76-86), and now the author has extended his views in a big book, Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Beacon Press, 1964, pp. 308, $5.00).

In recent years, popular opinion and especially Christian and church opinion have associated the Negro's supposedly deep Christian commitment with much of the dynamic of the current protest movement. References are usually made to Negro Spirituals, the statistics of church membership, the oratory of Negro preachers, and the fact that many of the protest leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., are members of the clergy. All of this is taken to demonstrate that Negro Christianity is part and parcel of classical Christianity. Even Gunnar Myrdal has asserted that the "Negro church is an ordinary American church with certain traits exaggerated because of caste."

"Balderdash," retorts Joseph R. Washington, Jr., in effect. All of this is myth without factual foundation. The Negro is not and never has been part of mainline Christianity. He was born in slavery, weaned in segregation, and developed in discrimination. And his church life follows the same sequence. It is of course true that the Negro protest movement has ties with religion, the church, and some clerical leaders. But the dynamic comes not from the Christian faith but from the social situation, philosophical convictions about nonviolence and human rights. For the plain fact is that "the religion of the Negro lacks the following: a sense of the historic church, authentic roots in the Christian tradition, a mean-

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ingful theological frame of reference, a search for renewal, an ecumenical spirit, and a commitment to an inclusive church."

As for Martin Luther King, Jr., he is indeed a Christian minister, but his faith is rooted in "the syncretistical religion of Gandhi" and "his philosophy" is based on the idea of love in the Sermon on the Mount. King's Christianity is incidental to his leadership, and anyway "he does not speak the language of the students" whose spokesman, if any, is James Baldwin. Increasingly, the Negro is becoming disenchanted with the church, and "the great majority of Negro college students, like most college students, are anti-religious in the formal sense." The "challenge" to both Negro and white Christians, as Washington sees it, cannot be properly met until the myth about Negro Christianity is discarded as a possible common ground of religious understanding.

It is instructive to read this book alongside of the equally vigorous apology for the protest movement by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Why We Can't Wait, Signet paperback, 1964, pp. 159, 60 cents). Here much of what Dr. Washington says about the typical emotional Baptist preaching is illustrated. And King of course makes much of the nonviolent weapon "which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it." He admits that at times the movement has gotten out of hand, but he observes wryly that "no revolution is executed like a ballet." Furthermore, the success of the protest movement has been due not so much to the strategy of its leaders as to the unity of the people themselves, for "it was the people who moved the leaders, not the leaders who moved the people."

King notes in the last chapter his reflections regarding the three Presidents he has known. Eisenhower was deeply committed to civil rights himself but was unable to communicate his conviction to others and unwilling to upset the structure of society. Kennedy, at the time of his death, was ready to lead the fight for radical social change. Johnson tackles the issue as a practical political problem to be solved.

It is true, as Dr. Washington intimates, that not much specific or overt Christian motivation appears in Dr. King's writing or thought. Yet one wonders, in the current theological mood, whether nonviolence coupled with direct action is not, after all, an object lesson in "religionless Christianity." A poignant suggestion of this, negative

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and perverse but with a minor liturgical undertone, is offered by Dr. King in an episode which he uses to begin one of his chapters.

More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplemented the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation.

The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: "Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis..."

King himself comments on this by saying: "Not God, not government, not charitably minded white men, but a Negro who was the world's most expert fighter, in this last extremity, was the last hope."

CATHOLIC-PROTESTANT REAPPRAISAL

In many ways, the new climate of free discussion within Roman Catholicism is the most newsworthy and potentially enduring event in recent ecclesiastical history. Judgments on Vatican Council II differ, and it is not yet clear whether the Pauline influence will extend or nullify the Johannine initiative, whether conciliarism and collegiality will markedly modify papalism and curialism, whether progressives can make their voices, and votes, count over conservative power and control. Time will tell.

In the meantime, a whole dimension of open, free discussion has emerged, like a newly discovered continent, for Catholics all over the world. An article such as Professor Swidler's in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY is an index of what is happening. As one moves around theological circles where Catholics are present, a quite fresh and buoyant sense of active participation and belonging on the part of Catholics, who previously were forced to remain aloof, is patent and heartwarming. The much bruited "dialogue" between Protestants and Catholics is perhaps only at the preliminary stage, but Catholics are already talking among themselves, anticipating some of the issues that one day will need thorough ventilation.

For Protestants, an eye-opening example of the new mood among Catholics is the bi-monthly review known as The Ecumenist ("A

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journal for Promoting Christian Unity," published by the Paulist Press and Centre for Ecumenical Studies, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto; editorial offices at 401 West 59th Street, New York 19, N. Y.). Now in its second year, The Ecumenist under the able editorial supervision of Gregory Baum is an up-to-date source of discussion, paying particular attention to Protestant literature and the kinds of traditional Protestant-Catholic deadends that are now being lifted up for reappraisal.

In recent issues of The Ecumenist (which italicizes its modernity by printing its name in lower case as the ecumenist), there are articles on: the Virgin Mary, birth control, Martin Luther, penance, the worship of Catholics in non-Catholic churches, the "Honest to God" debate, the possibility of a common Bible for Protestants and Catholics (every one of these topics indicating that Catholics need to take a good second look at their own previous intransigence).

On a more official level, a similar trend toward reappraisal can be sensed from the edited anthology, Council Speeches of Vatican II, by Hans Küng, Yves Congar, and Daniel O'Hanlon (Paulist Press, Deus Book paperback, 1964, pp. 288, $1.25). Here even the speech titles are revealing, and, for those who have not kept up with the details of Vatican Council II, the fact that such issues could be mentioned out loud by Catholics will seem incredible. Consider: "The Priesthood of All Believers" (Bishop of Bruges), "Sin in the Holy Church of God" (Bishop of Eisenstadt), "Papal Infallibility in the Church" (Archbishop of Smyrna), "Responsible Freedom of the Layman" (Bishop of Manchester), "Holiness of All [not just priests] in the Church" (Archbishop of Montreal), "Evangelical Perfection" (Bishop of Arras), "Bishops and Evangelical Simplicity" (Archbishop of Montreal), "Man's Disorder and God's Design" (Archbishop of Winnipeg), "We Must All Be Converted" (Bishop of Arras), "Not Domination but Service" (Archbishop of Bombay).

POETRY AND PREACHING

There is a continuing and growing fascination with the inner recesses of Samuel Beckett's odd but prolific mind. An improbable combination of Irishman and Frenchman, Beckett is still not well known to English readers except for his now archetypical non-drama

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Waiting for Godot. Along with many recent articles and essays, a small but intensively critical study has now appeared in book form, written by Josephine Jacobsen (poetry critic of the Baltimore Evening Sun) and William R. Mueller (Professor of English, Goucher College), entitled The Testament of Samuel Beckett (Dramabook series, Hill and Wang, 141 Fifth Avenue, New York, pp. 178, $3.95).

Two main emphases in this tightly woven, closely reasoned study pertain by association to the preacher's role and responsibility. One has to do with technique, mainly the use of words, and the other is epistemological, relating to assumptions about the world we live in. The two together constitute what the authors call Beckett's "testament."

In an early (1 93 1) essay on Proust, Beckett wrote: "Style is more a question of vision than of technique." This, we are told, is also true of Beckett and suggests that while the dramatic and verbal techniques are intriguing in themselves, they mirror the ultimate concerns of the author. Beckett's interplay between technique and epistemology involves him in endless experiments with language, with the comic and the tragic, with personal identity, time, and history, with life and death. This, say Jacobsen and Mueller, is the stuff of which poetry is made, and Beckett's work is in essence "a bitter, funny, and terrible poem."

There is the poetry of intensification, in which, by the observation's passionate intensity, the line between prose and poetry has been passed. There is the poetry of antipoetry, in which the poetic vision is implied by the sense of furious deprivation with which the circumstances that spell out its absence are detailed. And then there is the poetry of intimation-that eerie sense of the immanence of an un-spelled revelation, the lines charged with a significance which exceeds their analyzed meaning. The first and the last of these kinds of poetry often employ a verbal music amazingly accurate and nuancé, with passages of sudden motionless beauty, often inset in the most squalid of contexts.

But the "poetry" of Beckett is not mere dramatic or verbal manipulation. It is a way of speaking in images, in imagination, of what we know and don't know about the world we live in. Modern scientific, rational man assumes that, with some obvious areas of mystery, life and the world and indeed the universe are in the main knowable, predicable, and subject to causal explanation.

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Most persons assume that their consciousness is a reasonably accurate perceiver of an essentially ordered world and an essentially predicable one, one in which events conform to strict causal laws. Beckett is in revolt against what he envisages as a scientific position which, up to the early decades of the twentieth century at least, led man to assume that he was moving closer and closer to a knowledge of the world of space and time, that certain causes in the physical world lead to certain effects, and that though certain causal relationships may be unknown to us, they do nevertheless exist. Beckett is in revolt also against virtually our whole literary tradition. A reading of the world's literature, certainly up to this century at least, would encourage the assumption of a reasonably clear apperception of a world of cause and effect.

Jumping erratically from the poetry of Samuel Beckett to the preaching of the modern pulpit, it is tempting for the moralist to suggest that the preacher has something to learn from the poet both about technique and epistemology. Perhaps the preacher will take the hint and learn the lesson, but thus far the evidence that he will, or can, is disheartening. The contemporary pulpit, with too few exceptions, continues monotonously to proclaim words without images and rhetoric without imagination. It would never occur to a professor of English, for example, to study contemporary sermons as a source of significant literary expression. And the preacher's epistemological assumptions invariably result in an analysis of life's riddles and tragedies that sweeps onward and upward toward perfect solutions of the world's imperfections.

Isn't it curious, and alarming, that so little of what Jacobsen and Mueller call Beckett's "testament" applies to preaching and the preacher? The relation of word and vision, of language and epistemology, has for some time now disturbed and excited philosophy, theology, biblical studies, ethics. Come on in, homiletics, the water's fine!

RESTRUCTURING CHURCH AND SOCIETY

As society on both local and continental levels is being restructured right before our eyes these days, churchmen are increasingly reflecting whether the church can or should go along with the corning world revolution, be in advance of it, or resist it with might and main. The impact of racial equality, automation, the war on pov-

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erty, the guaranteed annual wage with or without employment, total medical care, and many other current challenges will change and already are changing the traditional structures of society.

Though there are discouraging evidences that the Christian church lags far to the rear in all these common affairs of humanity, there are voices from many quarters hopefully welcoming the new day as an opportunity for the proclamation of Christian faith. Accents favoring reform are heard in some unlikely but promising places. The most unexpected, as we have noted before, issues from within the Roman Catholic Church. Even an episcopal prelate has, unaccountably, stirred the placid waters of the Church of England. Following up the "Honest to God" debate (some would say "debacle"), another Anglican cleric, Roger Lloyd, Canon and Vice-Dean of Winchester Cathedral, carries the torch one step beyond in his little book, The Ferment in the Church (Morehouse-Barlow Co., 14 East 41st Street, New York, 1964, pp. 124, $1.75). The yeast causing the ferment is described as follows:

It looks as though Christians of today stand on the threshold of great changes in Christendom. The prospect of a new reformation is clearly in sight, and the signs are that the Church of England will be in the thick of whatever battle is to be fought. The storm signals are quite unmistakable. An era of profound spiritual revolution is breaking upon us, and, if it runs its course, it is likely to be as important and disturbing as the Reformation was for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This movement of the spirit has not gone far yet, but it is discernibly in motion and it is gathering momentum. No way of halting it exists, and it might be cowardly faithlessness to try to find one. For it may very well be that this twentieth century reformation is not only of human making, but what the Holy Spirit is now saying to the church.

If it surprises some to contemplate the Church of England in the thick of the revolution, it should occasion no raised eyebrows to learn that some in the World Council of Churches are thinking along similar lines (though there are cynics who tell us the WCC has developed its own vested Establishment). A recent report by Thomas Wieser on "The Missionary Strategy of the Congregation," a research project undertaken by the Department on Studies in Evangelism (cf. Christianity and Crisis, July 20, 1964, pp. 154 ff.), implies a restructuring of traditional concepts of the church and its purpose.

Growing out of high level discussions about unity, evangelism, and

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mission which were widely accepted goals in trying to up-date the church, evidence accumulated over the years indicating that talk and thought on these matters had little practical effect on churches and individuals. The "ecumenical consensus" so dearly won only so lately seems to have been easily adapted to inviolate church structures. Instead of changing things around, talk about unity and mission now go happily hand in hand with "structural fundamentalism."

The commission in charge of "The Missionary Structure of the Congregation" has been unable so far to come up with any definitive statement. But much has been accomplished by trying to make calculated guesses about new revolutionary possibilities in the church. Some of these: (1) the church exists for those who do not yet belong to it; (2) present church structures are geared almost exclusively to the private needs of its members; (3) the church's inertia on social matters is due to the fact that the church is simply not present in the public realm of current affairs; (4) a new freedom is required in order to transcend the compulsion to keep church machinery going at all costs.