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Theological Table-Talk
By E. David Willis

DEVOTIONAL SURPRISE

Admirers of the late C. S. Lewis are constantly surprised at the wide variety of writers who influenced him. Of one of these men Lewis said, "The Divine Sonship is the key-concept which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he was never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems closer or more continuously close to the Spirit of Christ Himself." The man in question is George Macdonald, a Scottish pastor, novelist, and poet. All the more remarkable is that Macdonald's years, 1824-1905, encompassed a period when some of the worst devotional literature in the history of the church was being written and against which many Christians are still correctly reacting. Macdonald's poems, if one is to judge from the volume just re-published which bears the unpromising title Diary of An Old Soul (Augsburg, Minneapolis, 1965), are of unusual interest and help render Lewis' exaggerated praise somewhat intelligible.

The volume of poems is a collection of devotional sonnets, one for each day of the year, which are reminiscent in form and fervor, though not in quality, of Donne's sonnets. Their imagery is richly biblical; yet their great strength is the way they use commonplace events to express the poignant, joyful struggle of one who prepares himself for death and for whatever is beyond it. These reflections of an old soul are strange language for those who are schooled in the American way of death; for in them we have a grateful celebration of life lived, persistence in illness, candid fear of death, and confidence in victory over the ancient harvester. Thus, the entries for January 27 and 28:

Yestereve, Death came, and knocked at my thin door.
I from my window looked: the thing I saw,

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The shape uncouth, I had not seen before.
I was disturbed-with fear, in sooth, not awe;
Whereof ashamed, I Instantly did rouse
My will to seek thee-only to fear the more:
Alas! I could not find thee in the house.

I was like Peter when he began to sink.
To thee a new prayer therefore I have got-
That, when Death comes in earnest to my door,
Thou wouldst thyself go, when the latch doth clink,
And lead him to my room, up to my cot;
Then hold thy child's hand, hold and leave him not,
Till Death has done with him for evermore.

Even those whose cup of tea is definitely not devotional literature will find something in these poems worth taking note of, a curious combination of ferocity and gentleness, of the lion and the lamb, so well expressed in the thought for May 26:

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;
I think thy answers make me what I am.
Like weary waves thought follows upon thought,
But the still depth beneath is all thine own,
And there thou mov'st in paths to us unknown.
Out of strange strife thy peace is strangely wrought;
If the lion in us pray-thou answerest the lamb.

CANDID LOYALTY

Protestants have good cause to eye apprehensively the movement for renewal and reform in the Roman Catholic Church. A sluggish and inflexible adversary has in the past made it deceptively easy to be negatively sure of our identity-"That is what we are not!" But now with the currents which the Second Vatican Council has both acknowledged and reinforced, the Protestant pastor has to be careful of the company he keeps lest one of the un-separated brethren wants to know where Luther said such-and-such, wants to discuss the doctrine of justification by faith, or wants seriously to engage in other potentially embarrassing dialogue.

It is not only the Protestant clergy, however, who have been graciously put on the spot; the Protestant laymen must sit up and take notice of the activity of the newly articulate Roman Catholic

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laymen. These Christians are creatively restless, now that the word had gotten out again that they are not called to take a back seat in the church. During their years, indeed epochs, of respectful silence, the laymen and laywomen have been absorbing the traditional theology which is now the object of some rebellious and independent thought. The curious thing is that some of the brighter and more aggressive of these Roman Catholic laymen are able to use much of that traditional training as a tool of transformation; they are theologically well enough equipped to put pressure where reform is called for in the church which they continue fervently to love and serve.

A cross-section of such young leaders, in all their exuberance and honesty, is apparent in The Generation of the Third Eye: Young Catholic Leaders View Their Church, edited by Daniel Callahan (Sheed and Ward, New York, 1965). Callahan, associate editor of Commonweal and author of several volumes especially on the Roman Catholic laity, has put together here a collection of self-portraits by authors whose average age is thirty-two. This choice could have resulted in autobiographical excess; that is the danger of the generation with the third eye (Courtney Murray's description of it) for introspection. As it is and with few exceptions, the portraits are simple, honest, and quite naturally directed towards the reform of the church. "Those who have given themselves wholeheartedly to bringing about a renewed Church," Callahan explains, "are not much interested in speculating on their unconscious motives, much less in spending their time wondering whether they are deceiving themselves. But someone has to put the hard questions…. In the past, it was the non-Catholic who cast a critical eye on the Church. Now it should be the Catholic himself who does so-not for the sake of the status quo, or for the sake of reform, but simply in order to insure that the truth is being sought without fear" (The Generation of the Third Eye, pp. 12-13).

The questions thus raised are not only about those things which need renewal; they are asked about the reform movement itself. "Is it, for instance, possible that much of what we call 'reform' is actually a 'failure of nerve'? … Why could this [the deploring of rationalistic inclinations of the past in favor of an emphasis on mystery, encounter, and commitment] … not be looked upon as a failure of nerve-a retreat from reason into mystery; from clear and distinct ideas to

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muddy (but rich) experience; from rational choice to commitment?" (Ibid., p. 11) This is a hard question constantly to face when one is committed, as the authors in the volume all are, to the renewal movements in the church. But it is a sign that they have enough confidence in the ultimate rightness of their undertaking and in the perpetual strength of their church that they can render this service of insistent honesty. Even when one is realistic about the enormously ingenious conservatism which still abounds in the Roman communion, the presence of an articulate and evangelical laity is a sign of the great potential for reform which exists within the Roman Catholic Church today.

MALE ANONYMITY

Most prominent among the Roman Catholic voices worth listening to if the Protestant wishes to fit himself with good equipment regardless of the shop from which it comes is, of course, that of Karl Rahner, the Jesuit theologian of Innsbruck, Austria. The pastoral immediacy which permeates even his most technical theological work has made him a natural source of teaching to support the essentially pastoral form of church renewal envisaged by John XXIII. This scholar strives to make theology accessible to men and women of all vocations in the church, because of his conviction that in the fullest sense no one Christian but all members of Christ's body have a responsibility for the nurture of each other. Theology for Renewal (trans. by C. Hastings and R. Strachan, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1964) is an example of Rahner's theology made accessible.

Beginning the chapter entitled "Men in the Church" with what is refreshingly obvious ("It is not entirely self-evident that there is anything theologically and humanly meaningful to say on the subject of 'men in the Church'"), Rahner goes on to an illuminating analysis of the peculiarities which belong to being a man and at the same time being a member of the Christian church. Although in relation to salvation itself there is no difference between the sexes, still the sex difference runs throughout every dimension of life. This means that the church should not expect, or even try to educe, the same expressions of piety from men and women. "A man simply does not get the impression that a long prayer is always better than a short

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one. He is apt to be sceptical (even, and indeed especially, when he is genuinely devout) when we clerics talk about God and divine things as though we were the good Lord's privy councilors. In particular, he often has the impression today that the God with whom we seem to be concerned simply doesn't exist: the God who always comes to the aid of a good man; who likes his people to live good little bourgeois lives; whose chief concern is not to have revolutions, which he regards as necessarily attacks on his own overlordship; who lets us clergy keep his accounts for him, and sees altar and human government ('throne' used to be the word) as on a level. The man of today is in danger, at least, of going irreligious on religious grounds; or, to put it better, of wanting, on religious grounds, to be religious only in an anonymous sense" (Theology for Renewal, p. 75).

In this passage Rahner is speaking about the man who is a believer, a member of the church, and not of the secularized men who are rightly the concern of the vast bulk of present theological tracts. Or is he? Perhaps much of what gets analyzed under the general rubric of secular behavior of men today really is partially a reticence about things religious which may be as much masculine as it is "post-Christian." What if we were unwittingly measuring men's "Christianness" in our churches by criteria actually appropriate to women (most national laymen's denominational organizations not excluded)? This is not to violate the latest orthodoxy by suggesting that secularism is not fundamentally a gracious fact of our time. But it is to point out how carefully one must distinguish between those who are indifferent to religion, those who are indiscriminately religious, and those who for religious reasons want to be religious only in an anonymous sense.

For the scholar, Rahner has a chapter in which he reminds the intellectual that "according to Pius XII there needs to be a public opinion in the Church. To form it and provide a voice for it is the special vocation of those laymen who are intellectuals" (ibid., p. 89). In the pursuit of this vocation, "The progress of an intellectual Christian in the spiritual life consists largely in the fact that his life compels him to go back to the sources to a greater extent than other people. This kind of return is progress. All that is needed is not to be afraid of it. The better your communication with the source, the more abundantly the water will of itself flow" (ibid., p. 93).

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NOW BUT HOW

Getting no response from his "Hello," Daisuke Kitagawa was told instead to greet the African children about him with "Freedom!" The reply was immediate, "Now!" From many such incidents, Kitagawa, long a member of the World Council of Churches' Department of Church and Society, builds up an imposing case, more convincing than novel, that ". . . there is afoot a militant racism all over the world that is uniting the members of colored races against the members of the white race in retaliation to the white man's past discrimination against them. This racial solidarity or alignment among colored peoples tends to take on an anti-Christian note. Christians must take the phenomenon seriously not as a threat to the white race or any other race, but as a threat to the ultimate unity of mankind and the world peace, and even more, as a threat to the integrity of the Christian church. We must, by God's grace, squarely look at this phenomenon-racism and counter-racism of this generation-not as members of any particular race but as members of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, in which all are bound together by their common loyalty to the Risen Christ." (Daisuke Kitagawa, Race Relations and Christian Mission, Friendship Press, New York, 1964; p. 29.)

When it comes to forms of witness in such a situation, Kitagawa admits that what we should do, namely not take the matter of race too seriously, is what our society does not permit; the more we are preoccupied with our neighbor's race, the more difficult it is to deal with him as a person. Is the church, then, to relax that racism may abound? By no means! Her professional ministry is to stay in communication with all groups in society, her membership as a corporate unity is to include people from all segments of the populace, and all churches in a given society are to combine in an institutional framework in which this constant conversation among all peoples is provided for (ibid., pp. 175, 176).

Such a description of the church's task sounds increasingly anachronistic as tides of racism rise on all sides; it has the ring of what must presumably go into a book on the problem written by a churchman and staff member of the Council. The one ideal which binds together the several proposals is the recognition that the church as institution has something to do with keeping communi-

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cation going among people. It is just this institutional orientation which is the subject of a great deal of criticism, prophetic and otherwise, on the part of those who are as involved in the problem of race and revolution as Kitagawa.

Much of the debate hinges on what is meant by institutional, whether only existing corporate structures or corporate structure as such. As far as it goes, Kitagawa's institutional orientation is not wrong but only too general, just as those who exalt a non-institutional church-whatever on earth that may be!-move most competently among generalities. When the church takes new forms to identify with the struggles of men, has she not merely changed-but never lost-her institutional character? No one in his right mind can have any illusions about the frequently ponderous, ineffectual, and seriously compromised forms which the church takes today. But it would seem equally obtuse to ignore the fact that the alternatives are not between church and institution but are among various forms of church as institution. While far from wearing out his hand patting the institutional church on the back, George Younger, pastor of the Mariner's Temple Baptist Church in New York, rightly recognizes that "the truth of the matter is that the institutional life of the Church is a necessary part of its existence. No social organism can come into being without taking some form as an institution in society. The task of the Christian fellowship is not to deny its institutional nature but to see that this, like the life of the Christian, is used to bear witness to God's rule and judgment and loving grace. Like its members, the institution itself must live its life in the world as a service to its Lord" (George Younger, The Church and Urban Power Structure, Westminster, Philadelphia, 1963; p. 80).