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Where Are the People?
By Hugh T. Kerr

PEOPLE-RELATED professions, such as teaching, the ministry, and politics, assume the importance of keeping in touch with their constituency. Teachers, preachers, and politicians must know who their people are and where they are. There's an old saying that to teach John and Mary arithmetic, you must not only know arithmetic, you must know John and Mary. The ministry, as with all helping-professions, depends on personal relationships. Politicians know all too well that to get elected, and reelected, they must go to the people-which means they must know who and where the people are.

In a presidential election year, when politicians are so much in the news trying to be everything to everyone, those of us in teaching and ministry may learn something about communicating with our own constitutency. No doubt one reason why the political situation seems so confusing is simply because it is no longer easy to categorize the people as Republican or Democratic, liberal or conservative, rural or urban, north or south or east or west. We are a fragmented, variegated people, jealous of our individual and group independence, suspicious of government for the people, weary of political rhetoric, and unpersuaded by high-sounding platforms.

It may be that political candidates get elected not because of their stand on "the issues" but because they know where more people are than those who get defeated. A cynical comment, no doubt, but no politician can get elected who ignores the public, talks past them, or offers answers to questions no one is asking.

A familiar way of signing off a friendly letter or concluding a conversation is to say: "Keep in touch," or "We'll be in touch." To keep in touch with our clientele, our audience, our congregation, whoever they are out there somewhere-this is surely imperative for those whose reason for existence depends on knowing where the people are.

I

Those of us in theology, religious studies, ministry, and church come under special obligation to be in touch with our people. We think of

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ourselves as in some sense "servants," "witnesses," "apostles" of the truth. Presumably, we speak "from faith to faith" (Rom. 1:16). But alas, all too often we are "unprofitable servants" either by pandering to the public, a sin we readily attribute to politicians, advertisers, and hucksters, or by being out of touch with our people, in which case we may have much to say but no one listens.

Not to know where the people are, to ignore them and pretend they don't exist, or to talk around them while talking mostly to ourselves-this is a subtler form of professional malpractice that deserves some attention. Two significant examples may be noted.

(1)There is a growing awareness at the present time that much of the business of biblical scholarship is simply unrelated to where the people are. The complicated apparatus of historical critical methodology apparently makes little impact on church people or those who might be expected to be interested in the Bible. And many biblical scholars themselves seem not to care since they mostly study and write for other scholars and for the learned societies. Seminarians dutifully learn all about the various critical schools, because that's what their professors are themselves involved in, but those who go into the parish ministry confess that very little of this training gets translated into preaching. There is no discernible wave of expository preaching today and no evidence that enlightened scholarship has illuminated the text so that the Word of God speaks clearly and unambiguously to our times.

The problem is not with preaching, but with teaching. The biblical professors in seminaries and religion departments have become trapped in the critical maze of their own discipline. They talk to and for themselves but for almost no one else. Fascinating as the game may be to the expert, the specialist, and the researcher, it often looks to those on the outside as "the Rube Goldberg school of scholarship," to use Roland M. Frye's caustic figure of speech.

But it isn't only outsiders who are raising questions about the irrelevancy of biblical studies. Several prominent and reputable names within the field can be cited. Walter Wink in his perceptive little tract, The Bible in Human Transformation (Fortress, 1973), speaks of "a chorus of voices raised in the name of God and humanity against a form of scholarship gone to seed." Biblical studies, he suggests, are meant "so to interpret the Scriptures that the past becomes alive and illumines our present with new possibilities for personal and social transformation." But if this is so, then we must say that "historical biblical criticism is bankrupt," and that, in fact, the net result of much study and research is to reduce the Bible to "a dead letter." Included in Wink's reasons for this state of affairs is the separation of biblical studies in seminaries and religion departments from "a vital community" of seekers and believers. It is not at all obvious that biblical studies are "from faith," nor are they addressed "to faith."

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Two others in this "chorus of voices" are James M. Robinson of Claremont, writing on "The Future of New Testament Theology," in Religious Studies Review (January, 1976), and Paul S. Minear of Yale in his brief but provocative essay, "Ecumenical Theology-Profession or Vocation?" (THEOLOGY TODAY, April, 1976). There are others, and the outcry is of such crucial importance that we hope to return to it again in a future issue.

(2) Our second example of religious studies losing touch with where the people are is a somewhat unexpected one. It is embodied in a rigorous critique of "liberation theology" by Jürgen Moltmann, the well-known Tübingen theologian. Moltmann's point is made in response to reading Míguez Bonino's book, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Fortress, 1975), and is printed as "An Open Letter to José Míguez Bonino," in Christianity and Crisis (March 29, 1976). Primarily directed at Latin American and third world liberation movements, the critique at many points applies to other sorts of liberation theologies.

It is ironic, as Moltmann sees it, that while liberationists think they are speaking and acting on behalf of "the people," they are in fact often as isolated as the biblical scholars from a "vital community." There is no question that all societies could use some socio-economic reformation, even revolution. But we must never forget that the "subject" of such liberationist concern is "the oppressed, exploited people themselves." Now what happens when the liberators are out of touch with those who need liberation?

The intellectuals and the students are certainly not the subject. They can at most throw the revolutionary sparks into the dried-up and parched woods. But if the people are not "burning" and do not rise up, the most beautiful sparks are of no use. The sparks then become sectarian candies around which elite circles gather ceremoniously in order to confirm themselves.

Working people who punch time-clocks are not likely to take kindly to students and professors who are free to cut classes, protest, demonstrate, and riot in public for the public. Sometimes, in Moltmann's quaint analogy, the locomotive tears loose from the coaches in its urge to move forward. "It seems more important," he observes, "to maintain a connection with the people than to travel alone into the paradise of the future. It is more important to live and work in and with the people than to relish the classless society in correct theories."

A similar kind of critique can be found in Julius Lester's review of the anthology, The Black Experience in Religion, edited by Eric Lincoln (Doubleday, 1974). Lester teaches Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his review appeared in Christianity and Crisis (March 31, 1975). "Black theological thought," says Lester, "is little more than political polemics in religious language."

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The issue is not racial justice, liberation, or the need for black identity and integrity-all indisputable goals. The problem is that many black theologians are out of touch with their own constituency. They are talking mostly among themselves, just like the biblical scholars and the third world liberationists.

Despite the ardent wishes of black theologians, blackness is not a spiritual value but a psycho-political attitude which has arisen in reaction to white racism. To embrace it is to affirm one's relationship to white society and, unconsciously, admit that one's life is wholly defined by that society. Ultimately, it is to deny that blacks have souls of their own. To reduce the message of the Gospels (which is not social revolution) to black nationalism (and that is all black theology is) is irresponsible.

As Lester sees it, the black "vital community" of religious experience (cf. the Spiritual-"If anybody asks you who I am/Tell 'em I'm a child of God") is being ignored and by-passed by many black theologians. The irony, once more, is plain but painful. Biblical scholars entrusted with communicating the living Word of God, talking mostly among themselves; liberators unable to muster a quorum; black theologians forgetful of the religious experience of their own people. And all three believe they know who and where the people are and what is good for them.

III

Where the people are is, of course, not where they ought to be. Richard M. Nixon was quite happy to accept the mandate of the people, just as they were, without confronting or challenging them in any way. In marked contrast, the biblical prophetic tradition implies that the true prophet not only stays in touch with the people but, in God's name, reminds them of their past and provokes them toward their appointed destiny.

We need many more radical biblical scholars who will translate the Scriptures for the people of today, as Augustine, Luther, and Barth did for their day. We need all the liberationist theologians we can find who will stay in touch with the people where they are and, like Moses, lead them out of bondage, through the wilderness, and toward the promised land.

Staying in touch with the people where they are is not the criterion of gospel truth. As always, we must find that in Jesus, the personification of God's will for humanity. But those of us who are teachers and preachers of the Word made flesh may profitably study that intriguing passage in John's Gospel which anticipates the Cross and reflects the evangelist's concern to italicize the incarnation:

While be was in Jerusalem at Passover time, during the festivities, many believed in him as they saw the signs that he gave. But Jesus, on his side, did not trust himself to them-for he knew them all. He did not need anyone to tell him what people were like: be understood human nature.

-John 2:23-25 (Phillips translation).

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It is not enough just to know where the people are or even, as in politics, to go after and receive their support, acclaim, or mandate. Those in Christian ministry who serve the people must know what people are like because, through Christ, we also understand human nature.