January 10, 1960
Akron
Not all worship is intelligent; all intellectualism is not worshipful, but when one can achieve the splendor of worship without deserting reason and common-sense, then human aspiration reaches a high plateau.
Professor J. Paul Williams of Mt. Holyoke College told the story of the clergyman who advertised his religious service with the following musical jingle (to the tune of LITTLE BROWN JUG)
“Mother knows what’s good for you,
Go to church like she taught you to.
Brother, we’ve an empty pew,
Plainly labeled Y.O.U.”
This is a call to worship, but is it an intelligent invitation?
In a fundamentalist Christian church, prior to the beginning of Easter Sunday worship, an evangelist concealed himself in a coffin placed in the chancel. In the midst of the service, he jumped out of the coffin, shouting, “Resurrection day has come.” Such worship has the strong flavor of melodrama – but is it reasonable?
On the other hand, a scholarly report may be stimulating to the mind as it provokes a dialogue of academic assertions, but may fall to strike the chords of emotion. It is not inaccurate to describe violin music as sound produced by scraping horsehair across catgut which has been stretched tightly over some glued together pieces of wood. But does such a description convey accurately the total experience of hearing a concert master produce from his Stradivarius the creation of a great composer?
Maturity is a growing development of mind and a harmonious fullness of emotional experiences. If worship in some way is an encapsulating of life’s full dimensions, then it will be a strong interlacing of intelligence and feeling, with neither element doing violence to the other.
Therefore, let us consider what worship is and how an ancient definition points to those values in intelligent worship which demand both reason and maturity. These values will be described as discrimination, cultivation, and celebration.
All group experiences change in method and motive. Worship is no exception to this dynamic quality of human culture.
In ancient days in the Near-East, worship had the cultural hallmark of slave and master. The worshipers were bond-servants; the gods were masters. Ancient instructions for worship carry orders. “Is the disposition of men and gods different? No...When a slave stands before the master, he is washed and wears clean clothes; he gives the god something to drink and something to eat and his master is gracious to the servant. If the slave annoys the master or is neglectful...the gods either kill him or injure his nose, yes, and ears.”
Worship in those days had two basic duties.: first, to avoid doing that which annoys the gods; second, to perform those acts which please the gods. In these two requirements may reside some of the origins [of] later ritual practice – cleansing rituals and ceremonial purifications, such as baptism. Even the latterday American ritual of “Sunday clothes” may have faint but related cultural roots in the primitive desire not to annoy the gods with dirt or rags. From the second fundamental of pleasing the gods, may have grown customs of sacrifice, grain offerings and grandiloquent temples and altars.
Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that group worship is one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend.
Amos, 8th century Hebrew prophet of righteousness insisted that morality is essential to honest worship. He doubted that the sacrifice of animals has any religious value for worship. Animal sacrifice was then the customary mode of worship. Among the wealthy, animal sacrifice was a very satisfactory way in which to fulfill religious obligations, for the rich deprived themselves of no necessity when they offered a bull or lamb on the altar of God. Amos shocked them by insisting that God wanted no feast or sacrifice -- “let righteousness pour down as a mighty stream.”
Amos and his successors in the line of the Hebrew ethical prophets, Hosea, Jeremiah, Micah, Isaiah had remarkable, continuing influence on religious practices. They insisted that the tests of religious honesty and devotion were not acts of outward piety, but one’s attitude in all aspects of the conduct of life. Some of you will remember one of Larry Abbott’s favorite stories about the visitor who inquired at the church door when the service would begin. He was answered by a forthright usher, “the service begins when the meeting is over.” Worship was not an end in itself for the Hebrew prophets, but a spontaneous, willing expression of living purposefully in order to achieve goals of uprightness and service.
To worship is to stake a claim on the highest area of human aspiration and to permit the influence of the highest [to] be the ground for interpreting answers to the difficult dilemmas about the origin of life and the regulating of human affairs.
The Apostle Paul asserted a startlingly relevant definition of intelligent worship, particularly as translated by J.B. Phillips in THE NEW TESTAMENT IN MODERN ENGLISH (Romans 12/1 ff.)
“With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give your bodies as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold, but let God remold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves toward the goal of true maturity.”
Paul is saying that freedom is a condition of intelligent worship because inward integrity which resists the pressure of outward conforming influences will help us toward the goal of true maturity. We grow by honest non-conformity.
Who can deny that in a world tense with fears, anxious with our strivings and confusing with buzz and clamor that we need the re-creating power of acts of intelligent worship? A news story from London this week (NYT 1/5/60) quotes a warning that we may be turned into a race of shouting maniacs.
Sir Walter Fergusson Hannay, a prominent physician and chairman of Britain’s Noise-Abatement Society, attributes the prevalence of bad manners and irritated dispositions to “the vacuum cleaners that whine at men’s feet and the jet planes that scream overhead.”
When our spiritual stamina is depleted by noise, fear, gloom, we need intelligent worship to restore healthy imagination, to strengthen our desire to understand, to find safe harbor in emotional storm and to again come to terms with life’s important duties.
One measure of intelligent worship is the power to discriminate. This word is used in its basic sense of “careful distinction” not its current usage which infers bigotry. To discriminate in worship is to discern what words and ceremonies still have inspiring and reconciling power for you.
Because another faith indulges in ceremonies which seem primitive or pointless to us, means neither that we must pursue the path of bigotry nor that we must conclude that the habit of worship is an outworn cult as far as educated people are concerned.
In a free church which provides hospitable atmosphere for experiment in worship, we can seek out those modes of artistic expression and ethical prophecy which will enable us to share the wonder of worship. We need not recite a rosary or bow the knee to images to find emotional pathways to the “Mysterious Presence, Source of All.” All persistent experimenters will blunder more frequently than succeed, but when the worship plan molds feeling, thought and commitment in a poignant or joyful group experience, then the venture in new formula has been rewarding.
Our faith puts greater weight on the side of the optimistic view of human nature. Finding neither relevance nor historical foundation for truth to the doctrine that nature is inescapably depraved and powerless to exert any redemptive power, we are exposed to another hazard -- that of a naive, passive sentimentality believing everything will always be good and sweet in a rose-colored world.
Intelligent worship will discriminate between good and evil, not blink the realities of fears and suffering and never suppress the inevitability of tragedy and death. Only services touched with hope and conditioned by reality will release the imprisoned splendor of high worship.
The life of Albert Camus is a vivid illustration of the need to recognize distinctions. Camus, who died so tragically this week, recognized the dirt, suffering pain and anguish involved in the experience of living. His writings will endure long after most of the literature of our age has been filed and forgotten. When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1957, Albert Camus said, “(MY) generation has had to re-establish, both within and without itself, a little of what constitutes the dignity of life and death.”
Camus had a discriminating phrase which was much like Paul’s appraisal of intelligent worship. Camus said, following a painful re-appraisal of his philosophy, “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”
To cultivate is a second measure of intelligent worship. The Latin root for worship is CULTUS, and the word has two meanings. The first was adoration of deity. The second meaning for CULTUS was the tilling of a field or the care of a human body.
It may be said, then, that the maturity needed for intelligent worship requires preparation or there will be no growth.
Jesus pointed to this when he said in the Sermon on the Mount, (Mtt. 5/23), “If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar and go; first be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”
As one enters worship, one cannot look back in meanness at his fellow or cherish feelings of scorn or hatred. When one does, there is only barren soil. To cultivate a receptiveness for worship, one must prepare, by the inner disciplines of reconciliation with, acceptance of and empathy with the feelings of persons who disturb us. For our self wit [will?] respond to the preparation if the soil is healthily ready for deep roots and new growth. Hate destroys spiritual health.
It was said of the famous philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, that on his daily walks he formed the habit of thinking of his problems while looking at his neighbor’s weather-vane. When the neighbor took down the weather-vane, Kant considered suing, because he claimed that the absence of the weather-vane interfered with his work.
The cultivation of worship is like that. It needs the seed-starter of self-honesty and acceptance and forgiveness of any real or fancied injuries by others.
A third function of intelligent worship is to celebrate. We will not achieve religious maturity until we can raise the songs and voice the praise of the great festival times of man. Festivals of seed-time and harvest may now be but faint memory tracks for city people, but the basic rhythms of the seasons still pulse through our blood.
The conviction persists among many of us that we will not know the deep edge of religious feeling until we are persuaded that the reverent celebration of life has a more profound origin than habit or social pressure.
Our need to refine old ceremonies and intensify the religious meaning for ourselves of the ritual celebrations of Autumn, Christmas, Easter and Spring does not lessen with the urbanization of an industrial civilization. We still need to be washed by the full tides of human emotion, which we feel at the great human crises of birth, christening, adolescence, marriage and death. We will be ignorant of the richness of the human cycle if we fail to perform publically, with ever more appropriate rituals, the swing of the seasons and the pageant of man.
Discriminate, cultivate, celebrate, for as Emerson said, “Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending from we known not whence.”
In 63 BC, a Roman general at the head of conquering [legi]ons triumphed over an independent Israel. But Pompey did not stop with geographical conquest for he wanted the God of Israel as well. The historian, Tacitus, told us that this rude soldier entered the Temple at Jerusalem and insisted that he be escorted into the most sacred place of the Jews, the inner shrine, the holy of holies. Therein no person ever entered, except the high priest, and he but once a year. Pompey had no consideration for the sanctity of the shrine. He went in – he wanted to see and touch the Hebrew god, Yahveh -- perhaps bring Yahveh to Rome, as so many Asian idols and their cults had been carried to Rome by returning generals. Pompey entered the holy of holies, and tore away the veil. There was nothing in the holy of holies – it was empty of any material religious relic or symbol.
Pompey's motives may have been those of a brutal conqueror, insensitive to the awe and love with which the Jews worshiped Yahveh. On the other hand, perhaps this calloused soldier was seeking something he had never found in the Roman world of many deities and idols. Perhaps Pompey was seeking something worth worshiping Perhaps he could not comprehend the Hebrew attitude toward religion, expressed by Jesus, years later, “God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and truth.”
Men have always sought out that which they could worship. Man seems incomplete unless he can express his respect, wonder and love for some superb concept of value – to some idea of God or some concept of purpose, “over all and through all and in all.” William Wordsworth expressed that longing when he wrote,
“I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is in the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
The Meaning of God in Human Experience
April 3, 1960
Akron
The meaning of God in human experience is somewhat of a scandal to many sophisticates but "good news" to most of this believing world. God is a problem for some. For others, God is the strength of life, the coming fulfillment of all golden dreams when the rhythms of the temporal world finally come to a halt.
The reality of God is the great speculation of the human mind and heart. The big question is neither idle intellectual exercise nor undirected emotional expression, although many there are who have speculated unprofitably as well as those who have emotionalized without any direction from reason. In the SYNOPTICON, that great treasury of ideas from the great books of human time, the chapter on God is the largest. If all the books, sermons, dialogues and poems about God were placed end-to-end, there would be enormous testimony to the perennial vitality of the idea of God. But for many, the mass of contradictory conclusions based on differing foundations of evidence total somewhat less than positive assurance.
The teachers and writers have given many names to the meanings of God. The Yahveh of Moses was Aristotle's Prime Mover; what Zoroaster called Ahura-Mazda, Confucius named Heaven; Lao Tze taught The Way and so did St. Paul, but the theologies were more remote from each other in ideas than in time. Buddhism, in its beginnings at least, rejected all speculation about a creator god and emphasized the conduct of life. But the idea of Nirvana in Buddhism has profound implications which make it akin to God. There is a dimension of depth in human experience -- a power people have always recognized as creating and determining the ways of life.
To cite the fact that Jesus called this power, "Heavenly Father" and Karl Marx described it as "dialectical materialism" is to emphasize one of the real dilemmas of human dealing with the idea of God. If God is so variously interpreted in different places and ages, can there be a real, central meaning of certainty?
In the face of this difficulty, one can adopt the attitude of Charles Darwin, who said, "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on the whole abstruse problem. The mystery of the beginning of things is insoluble, and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.... The whole subject is beyond man's intellect, but man can do his duty."
Or, one can endorse another way, illustrated by a story told by a Rabbi in connection with the separation of Judaism into three divisions, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. (GOD AND FREUD, Leonard Gross, David McKay and Co., New York, 1959):
A man, cast away on a desert island, decided to build a city, thus preventing insanity by keeping busy. Using stones and driftwood, he kept constructing buildings. Many years later, he was rescued. Proudly he conducted his rescuers on a tour of the city. "That's my house over there. There's the temple. Here, the grocery store and post office. Beyond that is the other temple."
He was interrupted, "The other temple?"
"Yes," he replied. "That's the one I DON'T go to."
In dealing with the meaning of God in human experience, there is an assumption and a recognition that ideas of God are different -- everyone must tolerate temples in which he doesn't worship -- but the witness of the ages of man testifies that one of the marks of the human being is the search for and expression of ultimate concern, to use Paul Tillich's phrase for religion. The words, "God is our ultimate concern," would have the acknowledgment of most people. "Our ultimate concern is our god," could include everyone, for that which holds our highest allegiance is the determiner of our destiny and our god.
God has meant fear in human experience. Early man knew little of the orderly rhythm of seasons; was puzzled by the erratic durations of sun and rain. Sometimes the powers of earth and sky seemed frightful enemies when the volcanic avalanche roared and the lightning struck. When the floods rage and storms cripple our civilization, even modern man wonders a bit why God permits sudden death and wide destruction. God has meant fear.
God has meant selfishness in human existence. In THE LONG ROAD TO HUMANITY, p. 52, (Yoselof, 1959), Stanton Coblentz made a penetrating observation in connection with the archaeological diggings at Chicken-Itza in Yucatan. When the site of the sacred well was dredged, a strange variety of objects was recovered. There were gold and jade ornaments, beads, bells, discs. Also there were little, human, female skeletons with remnants of tiny sandals still attached to the foot bones. In those cruel days, baby girls had been sacrificed to the rain god, thrown in the sacred well to persuade the god to send the rains. Coblentz comments, "Once more, it seems, man has made the gods in his own image -- an image of deep-rooted selfishness, unreachable except by appeals to physical hungers. One might therefore say that man had unknowingly made sacrifices to his own representation of himself." God has meant selfishness.
God has meant ignorance in human experience. Once people believed in sky gods as the arching heavens, blazing sun and star-lit night awed their sensibilities. Now we know something of astronomy and weather, and do not worship sky/nature deities. If mysteries are to be labeled "gods" only until knowledge and science unveils these secrets, then God is a symbol of man's ignorance.
Freud approached the idea of God as ignorance in human experience differently. He believed gods were created by man's ignorance of himself. Freud believed man created God in the image of man's father because, subconsciously, man did not outgrow his infantile dependence on, and fear of the male parent. Freud thought his theory demonstrated in the Judeo-Christian religions where "god is openly called Father. Psychoanalysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child."
God has meant manipulation and exploitation in human experience. When Paul preached in Ephesus, Demetrius sounded the alarm to his fellow silversmiths. Diana was the principal deity of Ephesus. A considerable portion of the business of the silver-smiths consisted in fashioning silver medals of Diana for sale to pilgrims and tourists.
Demetrius was candid. "Men, you all realize how our prosperity depends on this particular work. If you use your eyes and ears, you also know that not only in Ephesus, but practically throughout Asia, this man Paul has succeeded in changing the minds of a great number of people by telling them that gods made by human hands are not gods at all."
After more inflammatory talk, linking their self-interest with their goddess, the mob of silver-smiths created an uproarious riot in the city. Paul was endangered and only the placating words of the town clerk prevented a great deal of trouble. Paul had to leave Ephesus.
The religion of Diana of the Ephesians was manipulated to protect the economic monopoly of the silver-smiths.
This is not an isolated incident in history. There have been many unholy alliances in the name of religion which have been compacts of exploitation. When Marx called religion the "opium of the people," he was emphasizing this aspect of the meaning of God. Diana has had many relatives.
These less hopeful varieties of the idea of God as fear, selfishness, ignorance and manipulation should not be ignored in evaluating the cultural and historical growth of religion. The blunt words in the Wisdom of Solomon (14 12/21) should be stern reproofs of over-sentimentalized or selfish religion. In commenting on the various ways men have created their gods, that ancient writer notes,
"Because men in bondage to misfortune or royal authority
Clothed sticks and stones with the Name that cannot be shared with others
And then it was not enough for them to go astray about the knowledge of God,
But though living in a great war of ignorance
They call such evils peace."
There should be no surprise in the awareness that man has made images of God and that the idea of God consistently undergoes alterations. Human interpretations of experience are widely different and deeply puzzling. There is a contemporary illustration which may help us with the confusing but compelling idea of God.
Clinical psychologists make extensive use of the Rorschach ink-blot test as a device to assist in interpreting personality difficulties. The ink blots are shaped in indeterminable, but suggestive form in colors which stir the emotions. Each person finds different meanings -- animals, persons, birds, situations. Some people harmonize form and movement. Others see in the blots the images of their own inner conflicts. There is no more uniformity in interpreting the ink blots than there is in the human personality itself. The point is, the ink blots are the same basic fact, variously seen and interpreted by persons who have different wishes, fears and illusions.
The meaning of God in human experience is like unto that. In various times, under differing historical situations, persons of unlike personality have reported their interpretations. The disunity of interpretation should never persuade us that the core of creation is not there. Back of all the interpretations is the basic reality after which the human being has always groped.
There is a story about an old mariner's map (UNIVERSALIST LEADER, date ?) which charted the North Atlantic waters thirty years after Columbus' voyage to the West Indies. Across the great unexplored land and sea masses, the unknown mapmaker had inscribed, "Here be giants, Here be fiery scorpions. Here be dragons."
A few years later, the map came into the hands of the explorer, John Franklin. He scratched out the old warnings and lettered across the map, "Here be God."
What is that reality beyond the giants, scorpions and dragons of our projected image of God? In my opinion it is this:
Man is conscious of being alive in a world he surely did not make; a world he will never understand completely; the forces of which he can never control absolutely; and the purpose of which remains shrouded in ultimate mystery. That this should be without a Creative Power and a Presence seems incredible.
Then, too, the meanings of God in human experience are more vital than fear, ignorance, or self-serving. God has meant other values, too.
God has meant growth in human experience. The poetic lines, "some call it evolution, some call it God," point the way. Change seems to be an indubitable fact of the universe and all that exists in it. The cell divides, the sexes reproduce. The strata of rock move, twist, and erode in the long geologic ages while new continents are born. Living creatures, born helpless, grow in physical strength, many survive to meet the hard test of environment and achieve the maturity of their species. The human personality not only grows physically, but guided by human experience which can be transmitted, fulfilled by human love and care, the child grows into the man holding moral values and high aspirations, There is a primal impulse moving in all things, initiating organic life, growth, change. Something there is which instigates growth. That vital, creative spark is one of the meanings of God in human experience.
God has meant justice in human experience. No one will deny that the mills grind slowly; that wrong sometimes seems "forever on the throne." Yet the idea of God has been strongly yoked to the necessity of moral dominion in human affairs. In his HISTORY OF WESTERN MORALS (p. 63 ff.), Crane Brinton points out there is a relationship between what the gods are believed to be like and what people believe to be good and evil. He illustrated the point by referring to the Homeric myths. "Athena is the patron saint of Odysseus, but Odysseus has to deserve her support, not just by ritual acts, but by being the kind of man Athena approves."
The two-fold proof of God for Immanuel Kant was "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." Perhaps Kant did not know as much as we do now about the social and psychological origins of conscience, but there is a working-out of justice in human history. We finished off the Japanese with the atomic sword -- but it was two-edged, for now we are in dire peril of weapons of our own devising. Just retribution is a certainty. The uprisings in South Africa and the unstoppable march for racial justice in our own land are contemporary confirmations that white man must render justice for the long centuries of colonial exploitation. God is love, but love requires justice and that, too, is one of the meanings of God in human experience.
Mystery is one of the meanings of God in human experience. There are dimensions of depth in this world we did not make and cannot completely control. The cosmos is not chaos. J. J. Cohen phrased this when he commented in his book, THE CASE FOR RELIGIOUS NATURALISM, "God is that quality of the universe, expressed in its order and its openness to purpose, which man is constantly discovering and upon which he relies to give meaning to his life." There is a mystery, both shocking and awe-inspiring, in the awareness that at the heart of things there is a Power -- creating, destroying, preserving, transmuting, sustaining. We are part of this force, always. "A Zen master, asked where the enquirer could find the Buddha, replied, 'It is very much like looking for an ox when you are riding one.'" (The Beacon).
Yet this power -- so vast and wonderful -- impinges on us in intimate ways, too. William Ernest Hocking in THE COMING WORLD CIVILIZATION (p. 97), says, "it is part of ancient wisdom that we are averse to display -- the most powerful, the least self-assertive. In the Hebrew prophets and in the greater mystics, the Almighty is the still, small voice, or in the non-action of the Tao." Hocking points out that it is a clue, to the mysterious and paradoxical nature of God and meaning of God that deity is symbolized in a divine baby, a humble carpenter, a homeless man of sorrows who was disgraced publicly and executed.
This universe is mysterious. Its end, and our enduring place in its cosmic process are puzzles we cannot fathom. Yet one of the great meanings of God in human experience is that there is an eternal harmony to which we can tune our lives.
Shelley is now sometimes described as a poet of an age long-gone whose Romanticism has no place in our realistic, brutal time of pessimism and uncertainty. Yet his lines from ADONAIS seem to capture some feeling for growth, justice, love and mystery which represent some of the great meanings of God in human experience:
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction, which the one eclipsing curse
of Birth can quench not, that maintaining Love
which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality."
Akron
The meaning of God in human experience is somewhat of a scandal to many sophisticates but "good news" to most of this believing world. God is a problem for some. For others, God is the strength of life, the coming fulfillment of all golden dreams when the rhythms of the temporal world finally come to a halt.
The reality of God is the great speculation of the human mind and heart. The big question is neither idle intellectual exercise nor undirected emotional expression, although many there are who have speculated unprofitably as well as those who have emotionalized without any direction from reason. In the SYNOPTICON, that great treasury of ideas from the great books of human time, the chapter on God is the largest. If all the books, sermons, dialogues and poems about God were placed end-to-end, there would be enormous testimony to the perennial vitality of the idea of God. But for many, the mass of contradictory conclusions based on differing foundations of evidence total somewhat less than positive assurance.
The teachers and writers have given many names to the meanings of God. The Yahveh of Moses was Aristotle's Prime Mover; what Zoroaster called Ahura-Mazda, Confucius named Heaven; Lao Tze taught The Way and so did St. Paul, but the theologies were more remote from each other in ideas than in time. Buddhism, in its beginnings at least, rejected all speculation about a creator god and emphasized the conduct of life. But the idea of Nirvana in Buddhism has profound implications which make it akin to God. There is a dimension of depth in human experience -- a power people have always recognized as creating and determining the ways of life.
To cite the fact that Jesus called this power, "Heavenly Father" and Karl Marx described it as "dialectical materialism" is to emphasize one of the real dilemmas of human dealing with the idea of God. If God is so variously interpreted in different places and ages, can there be a real, central meaning of certainty?
In the face of this difficulty, one can adopt the attitude of Charles Darwin, who said, "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on the whole abstruse problem. The mystery of the beginning of things is insoluble, and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.... The whole subject is beyond man's intellect, but man can do his duty."
Or, one can endorse another way, illustrated by a story told by a Rabbi in connection with the separation of Judaism into three divisions, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. (GOD AND FREUD, Leonard Gross, David McKay and Co., New York, 1959):
A man, cast away on a desert island, decided to build a city, thus preventing insanity by keeping busy. Using stones and driftwood, he kept constructing buildings. Many years later, he was rescued. Proudly he conducted his rescuers on a tour of the city. "That's my house over there. There's the temple. Here, the grocery store and post office. Beyond that is the other temple."
He was interrupted, "The other temple?"
"Yes," he replied. "That's the one I DON'T go to."
In dealing with the meaning of God in human experience, there is an assumption and a recognition that ideas of God are different -- everyone must tolerate temples in which he doesn't worship -- but the witness of the ages of man testifies that one of the marks of the human being is the search for and expression of ultimate concern, to use Paul Tillich's phrase for religion. The words, "God is our ultimate concern," would have the acknowledgment of most people. "Our ultimate concern is our god," could include everyone, for that which holds our highest allegiance is the determiner of our destiny and our god.
God has meant fear in human experience. Early man knew little of the orderly rhythm of seasons; was puzzled by the erratic durations of sun and rain. Sometimes the powers of earth and sky seemed frightful enemies when the volcanic avalanche roared and the lightning struck. When the floods rage and storms cripple our civilization, even modern man wonders a bit why God permits sudden death and wide destruction. God has meant fear.
God has meant selfishness in human existence. In THE LONG ROAD TO HUMANITY, p. 52, (Yoselof, 1959), Stanton Coblentz made a penetrating observation in connection with the archaeological diggings at Chicken-Itza in Yucatan. When the site of the sacred well was dredged, a strange variety of objects was recovered. There were gold and jade ornaments, beads, bells, discs. Also there were little, human, female skeletons with remnants of tiny sandals still attached to the foot bones. In those cruel days, baby girls had been sacrificed to the rain god, thrown in the sacred well to persuade the god to send the rains. Coblentz comments, "Once more, it seems, man has made the gods in his own image -- an image of deep-rooted selfishness, unreachable except by appeals to physical hungers. One might therefore say that man had unknowingly made sacrifices to his own representation of himself." God has meant selfishness.
God has meant ignorance in human experience. Once people believed in sky gods as the arching heavens, blazing sun and star-lit night awed their sensibilities. Now we know something of astronomy and weather, and do not worship sky/nature deities. If mysteries are to be labeled "gods" only until knowledge and science unveils these secrets, then God is a symbol of man's ignorance.
Freud approached the idea of God as ignorance in human experience differently. He believed gods were created by man's ignorance of himself. Freud believed man created God in the image of man's father because, subconsciously, man did not outgrow his infantile dependence on, and fear of the male parent. Freud thought his theory demonstrated in the Judeo-Christian religions where "god is openly called Father. Psychoanalysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child."
God has meant manipulation and exploitation in human experience. When Paul preached in Ephesus, Demetrius sounded the alarm to his fellow silversmiths. Diana was the principal deity of Ephesus. A considerable portion of the business of the silver-smiths consisted in fashioning silver medals of Diana for sale to pilgrims and tourists.
Demetrius was candid. "Men, you all realize how our prosperity depends on this particular work. If you use your eyes and ears, you also know that not only in Ephesus, but practically throughout Asia, this man Paul has succeeded in changing the minds of a great number of people by telling them that gods made by human hands are not gods at all."
After more inflammatory talk, linking their self-interest with their goddess, the mob of silver-smiths created an uproarious riot in the city. Paul was endangered and only the placating words of the town clerk prevented a great deal of trouble. Paul had to leave Ephesus.
The religion of Diana of the Ephesians was manipulated to protect the economic monopoly of the silver-smiths.
This is not an isolated incident in history. There have been many unholy alliances in the name of religion which have been compacts of exploitation. When Marx called religion the "opium of the people," he was emphasizing this aspect of the meaning of God. Diana has had many relatives.
These less hopeful varieties of the idea of God as fear, selfishness, ignorance and manipulation should not be ignored in evaluating the cultural and historical growth of religion. The blunt words in the Wisdom of Solomon (14 12/21) should be stern reproofs of over-sentimentalized or selfish religion. In commenting on the various ways men have created their gods, that ancient writer notes,
"Because men in bondage to misfortune or royal authority
Clothed sticks and stones with the Name that cannot be shared with others
And then it was not enough for them to go astray about the knowledge of God,
But though living in a great war of ignorance
They call such evils peace."
There should be no surprise in the awareness that man has made images of God and that the idea of God consistently undergoes alterations. Human interpretations of experience are widely different and deeply puzzling. There is a contemporary illustration which may help us with the confusing but compelling idea of God.
Clinical psychologists make extensive use of the Rorschach ink-blot test as a device to assist in interpreting personality difficulties. The ink blots are shaped in indeterminable, but suggestive form in colors which stir the emotions. Each person finds different meanings -- animals, persons, birds, situations. Some people harmonize form and movement. Others see in the blots the images of their own inner conflicts. There is no more uniformity in interpreting the ink blots than there is in the human personality itself. The point is, the ink blots are the same basic fact, variously seen and interpreted by persons who have different wishes, fears and illusions.
The meaning of God in human experience is like unto that. In various times, under differing historical situations, persons of unlike personality have reported their interpretations. The disunity of interpretation should never persuade us that the core of creation is not there. Back of all the interpretations is the basic reality after which the human being has always groped.
There is a story about an old mariner's map (UNIVERSALIST LEADER, date ?) which charted the North Atlantic waters thirty years after Columbus' voyage to the West Indies. Across the great unexplored land and sea masses, the unknown mapmaker had inscribed, "Here be giants, Here be fiery scorpions. Here be dragons."
A few years later, the map came into the hands of the explorer, John Franklin. He scratched out the old warnings and lettered across the map, "Here be God."
What is that reality beyond the giants, scorpions and dragons of our projected image of God? In my opinion it is this:
Man is conscious of being alive in a world he surely did not make; a world he will never understand completely; the forces of which he can never control absolutely; and the purpose of which remains shrouded in ultimate mystery. That this should be without a Creative Power and a Presence seems incredible.
Then, too, the meanings of God in human experience are more vital than fear, ignorance, or self-serving. God has meant other values, too.
God has meant growth in human experience. The poetic lines, "some call it evolution, some call it God," point the way. Change seems to be an indubitable fact of the universe and all that exists in it. The cell divides, the sexes reproduce. The strata of rock move, twist, and erode in the long geologic ages while new continents are born. Living creatures, born helpless, grow in physical strength, many survive to meet the hard test of environment and achieve the maturity of their species. The human personality not only grows physically, but guided by human experience which can be transmitted, fulfilled by human love and care, the child grows into the man holding moral values and high aspirations, There is a primal impulse moving in all things, initiating organic life, growth, change. Something there is which instigates growth. That vital, creative spark is one of the meanings of God in human experience.
God has meant justice in human experience. No one will deny that the mills grind slowly; that wrong sometimes seems "forever on the throne." Yet the idea of God has been strongly yoked to the necessity of moral dominion in human affairs. In his HISTORY OF WESTERN MORALS (p. 63 ff.), Crane Brinton points out there is a relationship between what the gods are believed to be like and what people believe to be good and evil. He illustrated the point by referring to the Homeric myths. "Athena is the patron saint of Odysseus, but Odysseus has to deserve her support, not just by ritual acts, but by being the kind of man Athena approves."
The two-fold proof of God for Immanuel Kant was "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." Perhaps Kant did not know as much as we do now about the social and psychological origins of conscience, but there is a working-out of justice in human history. We finished off the Japanese with the atomic sword -- but it was two-edged, for now we are in dire peril of weapons of our own devising. Just retribution is a certainty. The uprisings in South Africa and the unstoppable march for racial justice in our own land are contemporary confirmations that white man must render justice for the long centuries of colonial exploitation. God is love, but love requires justice and that, too, is one of the meanings of God in human experience.
Mystery is one of the meanings of God in human experience. There are dimensions of depth in this world we did not make and cannot completely control. The cosmos is not chaos. J. J. Cohen phrased this when he commented in his book, THE CASE FOR RELIGIOUS NATURALISM, "God is that quality of the universe, expressed in its order and its openness to purpose, which man is constantly discovering and upon which he relies to give meaning to his life." There is a mystery, both shocking and awe-inspiring, in the awareness that at the heart of things there is a Power -- creating, destroying, preserving, transmuting, sustaining. We are part of this force, always. "A Zen master, asked where the enquirer could find the Buddha, replied, 'It is very much like looking for an ox when you are riding one.'" (The Beacon).
Yet this power -- so vast and wonderful -- impinges on us in intimate ways, too. William Ernest Hocking in THE COMING WORLD CIVILIZATION (p. 97), says, "it is part of ancient wisdom that we are averse to display -- the most powerful, the least self-assertive. In the Hebrew prophets and in the greater mystics, the Almighty is the still, small voice, or in the non-action of the Tao." Hocking points out that it is a clue, to the mysterious and paradoxical nature of God and meaning of God that deity is symbolized in a divine baby, a humble carpenter, a homeless man of sorrows who was disgraced publicly and executed.
This universe is mysterious. Its end, and our enduring place in its cosmic process are puzzles we cannot fathom. Yet one of the great meanings of God in human experience is that there is an eternal harmony to which we can tune our lives.
Shelley is now sometimes described as a poet of an age long-gone whose Romanticism has no place in our realistic, brutal time of pessimism and uncertainty. Yet his lines from ADONAIS seem to capture some feeling for growth, justice, love and mystery which represent some of the great meanings of God in human experience:
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction, which the one eclipsing curse
of Birth can quench not, that maintaining Love
which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality."
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The Advent of Life - 20th Century
December 13, 1959
Akron
The precious legends and lovely carols of Christmas tide tell us that it was "with gladness that the men of old did the guiding star behold." The advent of life of one baby in the first century made such an impact on Christian culture, that within a few decades after the real event, poets and theologians cherished wonder stories and dogmatized beautiful traditions into miracles. The winter festival of gladness has origins in many lands and cultural ways, but exalted above all in Christian lands in the glory of the advent of the living baby, Jesus. In song we rehearse its beauty, but in sermon today, I would speak to you about some stern realities and controversial aspects of the advent of life in the twentieth century.
One of the great religious issues of our day is the enormous growth in population, the capacity of our world to assimilate the increase and the focus of our world to assimilate the increase and the focus of responsibility for constructive, moral programs which will provide that the advent of life will not snuff out the living and extinguish the values humans hold most dear.
In BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISTED, Aldous Huxley pointed out that on "the first Christmas Day the population of our planet was about two hundred and fifty millions - less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen centuries later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, human numbers had climbed to a little more than five hundred millions. By the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, world population had passed the seven hundred million mark. In 1931, it stood at just under two billions. Today, there are more than two billion, eight hundred thousand of us, and tomorrow, what?"
When the President of the United States forcefully said the matter of birth control policy was a religious matter and emphatically stated, "not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility," he was responsible for numerous waves of political, religious and personal reactions. Politically, the President may have ensured the nomination by the Democratic Party of the Massachusetts senator, Jack Kennedy, by cooling off the political hot potatoes which could have burned Kennedy's chances to a crisp. Religiously, the President was by no means persuasive in convincing all people that the official position of the Roman Catholic hierarchy should be authoritative for the President of the United States, even when election draws near. Personally, his statement and the catalytic agent which caused the production of this sermon.
In this season of carols and candle, when we again sound thee welcome to a baby of long ago, there is a real question of whether there can be too many babies in our world. I would like to offer these propositions: 1) That the whole question is both religious and political; 2) that there is a religious dilemma which confronts both Catholics and Protestants; 3) that the problem which is emerging is not only more complex than the Roman hierarchy asserts, but also is unprecedented in human history; 4) that while any answers are agonizingly difficult, if we are concerned that religion should be good for living, then at the very least we must begin to recognize the dimensions of the issue.
It seems to me that the President was either confused or one-sided when he rejected discussion of the "population explosion" by classifying it as a religious issue only. Because the Roman Catholic Church takes a dogmatic position on a controversial situation is neither reason for acquiescing to their demands, nor assuming that it is not an authentic public issue.
Religious differences and politically controversial matters are seldom mutually exclusive. The principle of separation of church and state has never implied that religious convictions should not confront political questions. Politics is controversial because the social direction of organized parties and governments affect the customs and principles by which people live. The unadorned fact is that this is the stuff of religion, too -- the customs and principles by which people live. Historically, religious attitudes have always molded public laws and attitudes and vice-versa. Furthermore, as one discerning writer to the New York Times pointed out, "If the issue is taken as purely religious, why are the views of but one religious group?"
When the United States hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church strongly opposes the validity of birth control as a matter of public interest, their position is somewhat inconsistent. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has always attempted to enforce its dogmas through the laws and agencies of government. During a period of controversy with King Phillip IV of France, in 1302, Pope Boniface VIII, issued the famous bull unam sanctum. This is the unmistakable claim, never retracted, that the Papacy has supreme authority over civil powers. All worldly powers must be subject to the Pope. As Church Father, Thomas Aquinas said, commenting on this command, "it is altogether necessary for every human being to be subject to the Roman Pontiff."
Now speaking in this vein may seem to incorporate the flavor of intolerance, but if you subtract this possible bias, you will still be confronted with formidable facts. In countries such as Spain, Italy, numerous Latin American nations, pre-communist Poland and other places where Roman Catholics have been a strong numerical majority, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has maintained control over civil life, public education, and suppressed and censored the teachings and public life of other religions.
We are not exempt. In two states of the United States, Massachusetts and Connecticut, the political efforts of the Roman Catholic church have successfully legislated against the release of birth control information. n these two states, if a physician wishes to advise married couples on how to prevent conception from occurring, he will break the law if he does so. It is of no account, legally, how badly this information may be needed for medical, economic or social reasons. If this information is given, the law is broken.
Thus, the President's adoption of the Catholic viewpoint that birth control is a "religious not political affair," quite overlooks the reality that for long years it has been a public and political affair and the Roman Catholic church would have it no other way.
On the other hand, it is a fact that federal funds are financing material [to] health clinics which provide birth control help and information in seven of our states where such information is not illegal. From either side of the argument, the facts are that the issue cannot be restricted to a private "religious" affair, because it is and has been public and a subject of legislation.
Roman Catholic opposition to birth control research and information is well-known. No so well publicized, but more important to us, is the candid proclamation by our own Universalist Church of America, the American Unitarian Association, the United Presbyterian Church, the Lambeth Conference of the Episcopal Church, the Congregational Church and the Methodist Church among others, that family planning is a matter of individual family conscience. In order to plan parenthood, obviously, information to prevent conception must be the subject of research and the information made easily available.
When the Protestant religions present such a united front, is it because they don't like Catholics, or don't like babies, or both? Or is our concern stirred because increasing population presents mankind with difficult choices requiring wisdom and sound policy?
Let's look at the facts of the population explosion:
Not long ago the United Nations published a report, "The Future Growth of World Population." Since 1944, the net population has been increasing at an amazing rate. In 1957 and 1958 alone, 90 million people were added to the world population. "It took 200,000 years for the world's population to reach 2500 million. According to population experts' predictions, it will take a mere thirty years to add another 2,000 million. If fertility remains at present levels, world population will reach the three billion mark in 1962, four billion in 1977, five billion about 1990 and six billion before 2000," (Editorial in THE CHURCHMAN).
Nearly two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus, (1798), formulated his gloomy theory that the human population would always increase much more rapidly than the means of feeding it. Therefore, he reasoned, that when human populations were greater than the supply of food, human populations would always be reduced drastically by famine, war and disease.
The Malthusian law has not been validated. The discovery and exploitation of continents abundantly wealthy in natural resources, North America, South America and Australia, particularly, have served to contradict, or at least postpone Malthus' grim prediction of disaster.
But the continents are all discovered now. In these years of our lives the blessing of medical research, application and new understanding of the value of sanitation, have extended the expectancy of life all over the world. Healthier people are living longer although many millions are still in the ragged edge of starvation and fatal disease. Because so many are stronger, the babies are not dying at birth in such high numbers. They are living and will be the parents of still larger families of healthier, longer-living people. But eventually the birth rate must equal the death rate, because human populations cannot increase without limit.
Food production figures have been somewhat contradictory. But even though world-wide agricultural increases are at present slightly in excess of the net population increase, in the less developed areas where starvation has been the rule, much of the increased production lifts some to the subsistence level, but offers no continuing solution.
Sir Charles Galton Darwin in his book, THE NEXT MILLION YEARS illustrated the fact that increased production alone is not likely to solve the problem of over-population.
Not long ago the Indian province of Sind was desert, mainly; the ground was fertile, but there was no rainfall.
Engineering brought irrigation, the desert became a garden and people who previously had been on the verge of starvation were to be fed adequately by means of this agricultural development. But things did not work out that way. After a few years the consequence was that a larger number of people eked out a bare existence, constantly on the verge of starvation.
There are those who maintain that undiscovered ways of manufacturing good -- using the untapped resources of the sea, developing chemically produced food, or even the late Charles Kettering suggested, discovering a way to nourish ourselves directly from the sun by solving the mystery of photosynthesis.
But even if it were possible to solve the problem of feeding constantly increasing billions of people, the space on this planet is limited. From this point of view, few of us relatively, will want to migrate to the moon, even when this journey is possible technically.
Harrison Brown in his book, THE CHALLENGE OF MAN'S FUTURE, told of the English engineer who surmised that in the future, because of the crowded condition of the planet, everyone will live in skyscraper apartment houses and seldom leave their own quarters. Nourishment would be piped in. Social life and entertainment would be conducted by private and public television units. Does that prospect attract you?
Under such ant-hill conditions, the real values we cherish would have disappeared. Life would of necessity be rigidly regulated. Man would be a unit in a pigeon hole, a punch on a card. The qualities that make life worth living -- creativity, freedom, democracy and the supreme worth of the individual would be no more than vague, historic memories, if that.
It is in the face of these probabilities and possibilities that the question of limitation of population assumes its vital nature.
If we provide under-developed countries with the assistance to save millions from starvation, how can we refuse them the help to limit the tremendous population which will be the sure consequence of better living, if unchecked?
The Roman Catholic position is that necessary research and distribution of information is against the will of God, because it will prevent children from being born. To such a claim, one may ask, "is it the will of God that children should be born for the purpose of starving on filthy streets?"
James Reston, Washington correspondent of the N.Y. Times, summarized the case for population limitations (Thursday, 12/10/59): "The issue is not whether the United States should intervene in the affairs of other countries to tell them what they should do about controlling their population. There is general agreement that it should not."
When food or machinery are given to a country, it's possible the allocation means that the population growth will exceed the capacity of the aid given. "When foreign aid funds are given to wipe out disease, and the death rate is reduced without a commensurate lowering of the birth rate, the net effect may be more human misery rather than less."
Through concerned effort in the last five years, Japan has actually reduced the birth rate from 34.3 per thousand (in 1947) to 17.2 in 1957. Japan now has the lowest population growth in Asia. The effort to limit the birth rate began among the young people, one reporter tells us. They were protesting against poverty. As a consequence, the amount of goods per family has increased and the Japanese home is beginning to approach the standard of the European home. In one specific instance, we see that deliberate limitation of population through birth-control has contributed to individual welfare and national stability.
No one should be forced to limit their family, but those who want to provide a life of minimum decency for a smaller, planned number should have available medically approved, low-cost methods and instruction.
Historian Arnold Toynbee points out, "another world war would destroy civilization.... If a major war is avoided, overpopulation will soon threaten the very civilization that has been saved. Too few people will be left if we have a major war; too many will soon crowd the earth if we do not...."
A cynic has said what we need are wars exactly the right size. There is not much consolation in yielding the problem to Time and Nature. Their solution will not please us. It will be crude, cruel and respect persons no more than Adirondack deer....
Under the pressures of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and our own inhibitions, we have been reluctant to conduct full discussions of this problem -- next to radiation poisoning, the greatest threat to humanity. We need not shy away from the search for knowledge and frankness in debate any more than we should feel abashed to discuss cancer or T.B.
Christmas is the advent of light and life. Creation was the signal to sing joyously of peace and goodwill. Few events symbolize more beautifully the worth of every individual in the scale of eternity. It was not enough that Jesus should be born. There was no room in the inn, but there was in the stable. He had to have space to grow in wisdom and stature.
The advent of life in our century need not fear Herod's might, but a more abundant life for more people will be measured by the values created by persons who are able to rear their young under conditions which make living possible and worth-while. Every mother should be able to speak of the life within her with the same joy and wonder as Mary,
"my soul doth magnify the Lord
And my spirit rejoiceth in God, my savior.
......
He hath filled the hungry with good things."
Akron
The precious legends and lovely carols of Christmas tide tell us that it was "with gladness that the men of old did the guiding star behold." The advent of life of one baby in the first century made such an impact on Christian culture, that within a few decades after the real event, poets and theologians cherished wonder stories and dogmatized beautiful traditions into miracles. The winter festival of gladness has origins in many lands and cultural ways, but exalted above all in Christian lands in the glory of the advent of the living baby, Jesus. In song we rehearse its beauty, but in sermon today, I would speak to you about some stern realities and controversial aspects of the advent of life in the twentieth century.
One of the great religious issues of our day is the enormous growth in population, the capacity of our world to assimilate the increase and the focus of our world to assimilate the increase and the focus of responsibility for constructive, moral programs which will provide that the advent of life will not snuff out the living and extinguish the values humans hold most dear.
In BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISTED, Aldous Huxley pointed out that on "the first Christmas Day the population of our planet was about two hundred and fifty millions - less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen centuries later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, human numbers had climbed to a little more than five hundred millions. By the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, world population had passed the seven hundred million mark. In 1931, it stood at just under two billions. Today, there are more than two billion, eight hundred thousand of us, and tomorrow, what?"
When the President of the United States forcefully said the matter of birth control policy was a religious matter and emphatically stated, "not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility," he was responsible for numerous waves of political, religious and personal reactions. Politically, the President may have ensured the nomination by the Democratic Party of the Massachusetts senator, Jack Kennedy, by cooling off the political hot potatoes which could have burned Kennedy's chances to a crisp. Religiously, the President was by no means persuasive in convincing all people that the official position of the Roman Catholic hierarchy should be authoritative for the President of the United States, even when election draws near. Personally, his statement and the catalytic agent which caused the production of this sermon.
In this season of carols and candle, when we again sound thee welcome to a baby of long ago, there is a real question of whether there can be too many babies in our world. I would like to offer these propositions: 1) That the whole question is both religious and political; 2) that there is a religious dilemma which confronts both Catholics and Protestants; 3) that the problem which is emerging is not only more complex than the Roman hierarchy asserts, but also is unprecedented in human history; 4) that while any answers are agonizingly difficult, if we are concerned that religion should be good for living, then at the very least we must begin to recognize the dimensions of the issue.
It seems to me that the President was either confused or one-sided when he rejected discussion of the "population explosion" by classifying it as a religious issue only. Because the Roman Catholic Church takes a dogmatic position on a controversial situation is neither reason for acquiescing to their demands, nor assuming that it is not an authentic public issue.
Religious differences and politically controversial matters are seldom mutually exclusive. The principle of separation of church and state has never implied that religious convictions should not confront political questions. Politics is controversial because the social direction of organized parties and governments affect the customs and principles by which people live. The unadorned fact is that this is the stuff of religion, too -- the customs and principles by which people live. Historically, religious attitudes have always molded public laws and attitudes and vice-versa. Furthermore, as one discerning writer to the New York Times pointed out, "If the issue is taken as purely religious, why are the views of but one religious group?"
When the United States hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church strongly opposes the validity of birth control as a matter of public interest, their position is somewhat inconsistent. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has always attempted to enforce its dogmas through the laws and agencies of government. During a period of controversy with King Phillip IV of France, in 1302, Pope Boniface VIII, issued the famous bull unam sanctum. This is the unmistakable claim, never retracted, that the Papacy has supreme authority over civil powers. All worldly powers must be subject to the Pope. As Church Father, Thomas Aquinas said, commenting on this command, "it is altogether necessary for every human being to be subject to the Roman Pontiff."
Now speaking in this vein may seem to incorporate the flavor of intolerance, but if you subtract this possible bias, you will still be confronted with formidable facts. In countries such as Spain, Italy, numerous Latin American nations, pre-communist Poland and other places where Roman Catholics have been a strong numerical majority, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has maintained control over civil life, public education, and suppressed and censored the teachings and public life of other religions.
We are not exempt. In two states of the United States, Massachusetts and Connecticut, the political efforts of the Roman Catholic church have successfully legislated against the release of birth control information. n these two states, if a physician wishes to advise married couples on how to prevent conception from occurring, he will break the law if he does so. It is of no account, legally, how badly this information may be needed for medical, economic or social reasons. If this information is given, the law is broken.
Thus, the President's adoption of the Catholic viewpoint that birth control is a "religious not political affair," quite overlooks the reality that for long years it has been a public and political affair and the Roman Catholic church would have it no other way.
On the other hand, it is a fact that federal funds are financing material [to] health clinics which provide birth control help and information in seven of our states where such information is not illegal. From either side of the argument, the facts are that the issue cannot be restricted to a private "religious" affair, because it is and has been public and a subject of legislation.
Roman Catholic opposition to birth control research and information is well-known. No so well publicized, but more important to us, is the candid proclamation by our own Universalist Church of America, the American Unitarian Association, the United Presbyterian Church, the Lambeth Conference of the Episcopal Church, the Congregational Church and the Methodist Church among others, that family planning is a matter of individual family conscience. In order to plan parenthood, obviously, information to prevent conception must be the subject of research and the information made easily available.
When the Protestant religions present such a united front, is it because they don't like Catholics, or don't like babies, or both? Or is our concern stirred because increasing population presents mankind with difficult choices requiring wisdom and sound policy?
Let's look at the facts of the population explosion:
Not long ago the United Nations published a report, "The Future Growth of World Population." Since 1944, the net population has been increasing at an amazing rate. In 1957 and 1958 alone, 90 million people were added to the world population. "It took 200,000 years for the world's population to reach 2500 million. According to population experts' predictions, it will take a mere thirty years to add another 2,000 million. If fertility remains at present levels, world population will reach the three billion mark in 1962, four billion in 1977, five billion about 1990 and six billion before 2000," (Editorial in THE CHURCHMAN).
Nearly two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus, (1798), formulated his gloomy theory that the human population would always increase much more rapidly than the means of feeding it. Therefore, he reasoned, that when human populations were greater than the supply of food, human populations would always be reduced drastically by famine, war and disease.
The Malthusian law has not been validated. The discovery and exploitation of continents abundantly wealthy in natural resources, North America, South America and Australia, particularly, have served to contradict, or at least postpone Malthus' grim prediction of disaster.
But the continents are all discovered now. In these years of our lives the blessing of medical research, application and new understanding of the value of sanitation, have extended the expectancy of life all over the world. Healthier people are living longer although many millions are still in the ragged edge of starvation and fatal disease. Because so many are stronger, the babies are not dying at birth in such high numbers. They are living and will be the parents of still larger families of healthier, longer-living people. But eventually the birth rate must equal the death rate, because human populations cannot increase without limit.
Food production figures have been somewhat contradictory. But even though world-wide agricultural increases are at present slightly in excess of the net population increase, in the less developed areas where starvation has been the rule, much of the increased production lifts some to the subsistence level, but offers no continuing solution.
Sir Charles Galton Darwin in his book, THE NEXT MILLION YEARS illustrated the fact that increased production alone is not likely to solve the problem of over-population.
Not long ago the Indian province of Sind was desert, mainly; the ground was fertile, but there was no rainfall.
Engineering brought irrigation, the desert became a garden and people who previously had been on the verge of starvation were to be fed adequately by means of this agricultural development. But things did not work out that way. After a few years the consequence was that a larger number of people eked out a bare existence, constantly on the verge of starvation.
There are those who maintain that undiscovered ways of manufacturing good -- using the untapped resources of the sea, developing chemically produced food, or even the late Charles Kettering suggested, discovering a way to nourish ourselves directly from the sun by solving the mystery of photosynthesis.
But even if it were possible to solve the problem of feeding constantly increasing billions of people, the space on this planet is limited. From this point of view, few of us relatively, will want to migrate to the moon, even when this journey is possible technically.
Harrison Brown in his book, THE CHALLENGE OF MAN'S FUTURE, told of the English engineer who surmised that in the future, because of the crowded condition of the planet, everyone will live in skyscraper apartment houses and seldom leave their own quarters. Nourishment would be piped in. Social life and entertainment would be conducted by private and public television units. Does that prospect attract you?
Under such ant-hill conditions, the real values we cherish would have disappeared. Life would of necessity be rigidly regulated. Man would be a unit in a pigeon hole, a punch on a card. The qualities that make life worth living -- creativity, freedom, democracy and the supreme worth of the individual would be no more than vague, historic memories, if that.
It is in the face of these probabilities and possibilities that the question of limitation of population assumes its vital nature.
If we provide under-developed countries with the assistance to save millions from starvation, how can we refuse them the help to limit the tremendous population which will be the sure consequence of better living, if unchecked?
The Roman Catholic position is that necessary research and distribution of information is against the will of God, because it will prevent children from being born. To such a claim, one may ask, "is it the will of God that children should be born for the purpose of starving on filthy streets?"
James Reston, Washington correspondent of the N.Y. Times, summarized the case for population limitations (Thursday, 12/10/59): "The issue is not whether the United States should intervene in the affairs of other countries to tell them what they should do about controlling their population. There is general agreement that it should not."
When food or machinery are given to a country, it's possible the allocation means that the population growth will exceed the capacity of the aid given. "When foreign aid funds are given to wipe out disease, and the death rate is reduced without a commensurate lowering of the birth rate, the net effect may be more human misery rather than less."
Through concerned effort in the last five years, Japan has actually reduced the birth rate from 34.3 per thousand (in 1947) to 17.2 in 1957. Japan now has the lowest population growth in Asia. The effort to limit the birth rate began among the young people, one reporter tells us. They were protesting against poverty. As a consequence, the amount of goods per family has increased and the Japanese home is beginning to approach the standard of the European home. In one specific instance, we see that deliberate limitation of population through birth-control has contributed to individual welfare and national stability.
No one should be forced to limit their family, but those who want to provide a life of minimum decency for a smaller, planned number should have available medically approved, low-cost methods and instruction.
Historian Arnold Toynbee points out, "another world war would destroy civilization.... If a major war is avoided, overpopulation will soon threaten the very civilization that has been saved. Too few people will be left if we have a major war; too many will soon crowd the earth if we do not...."
A cynic has said what we need are wars exactly the right size. There is not much consolation in yielding the problem to Time and Nature. Their solution will not please us. It will be crude, cruel and respect persons no more than Adirondack deer....
Under the pressures of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and our own inhibitions, we have been reluctant to conduct full discussions of this problem -- next to radiation poisoning, the greatest threat to humanity. We need not shy away from the search for knowledge and frankness in debate any more than we should feel abashed to discuss cancer or T.B.
Christmas is the advent of light and life. Creation was the signal to sing joyously of peace and goodwill. Few events symbolize more beautifully the worth of every individual in the scale of eternity. It was not enough that Jesus should be born. There was no room in the inn, but there was in the stable. He had to have space to grow in wisdom and stature.
The advent of life in our century need not fear Herod's might, but a more abundant life for more people will be measured by the values created by persons who are able to rear their young under conditions which make living possible and worth-while. Every mother should be able to speak of the life within her with the same joy and wonder as Mary,
"my soul doth magnify the Lord
And my spirit rejoiceth in God, my savior.
......
He hath filled the hungry with good things."
The Weakness of Strong Dogma
August 16, 1959
Akron
The grandeur of man is his freedom. The misery of man is the anxiety of his fearful uncertainty in the midst of his free choices. Man can avoid this misery, this tension of freedom, by accepting strong dogma. This acquiescence to outer authority, however, is an abdication of the opportunity to participate in life's greatest human opportunity -- freedom.
In religion, where shall we place our trust? Who speaks the word of truth? How one answers those questions determines for him the definitions of religious authority.
Dogma has been an essential arch in most of the bridges religions have built across the centuries. The sermon today concerns the definitions, origins, and values of Christian dogma. Most persons in our world yearn for assurance, security, and comfort. They will obey the voice of authority to instruct them as to the proper and acceptable vehicles of faith. But the surrender to authority violates the essential needs of human beings for freedom and responsibility. Furthermore, all the essential principles of liberal religion are based or implied from the condition of freedom.
The large majority of organized Christian churches seem always to return to strong dogma as the requirement for religious fellowship and the condition for salvation. It is now commonplace for local councils of churches, council of church-women and national organizations of Christians to write preambles, or other conditions of membership, on a creedal basis, thus effectively disenfranchising Universalists, Unitarians, Jews and some others from sharing in a united religious participation in the life of a community. It has happened here in Akron; it has happened in many cities of our country.
One of the surprising events in recent American religious history has been the announcement that Congregationalists, traditionally non-creedal, have formulated a creed which will be the dogmatic basis of the merged Congregational and Evangelical and Reformed denomination. While the writers of the creed proposed that this is a testimony, not a test, of faith, it is a creed nevertheless.
Dogma is "a doctrine of theology officially defined and declared to rest on divine authority." The German scholar Harnack once said that dogma is "that doctrine which one must believe in to be saved." (Doctrine includes all teaching, including dogma).
The Roman Catholic theory is that Christ organized the church and committed to Peter, first, and the apostles, the truth which every loyal Christian is required to obey. In the Roman Catholic view, dogma has been formulated and expressed by Church councils, and since 1870, when the infallibility of the Pope on matters of faith and morals was announced, by the Bishop of Rome. The "good" Catholic is expected to conform to the dogma of the rites and sacraments of the Latin Church because there "is no salvation outside it."
The traditional Protestant position, as proclaimed by Martin Luther, is that dogmas have no authority even though originating in church councils or the announcements of a Pope. Dogmas have authority only when supported by the Scripture, asserted the Reformers.
This has been somewhat of a snare to the unwary. As many an abused martyr has discovered, if one interpreted Scripture in a fashion which opposed the announced views of the leading Protestants, Calvin or Luther, for example, the rebel soon discovered that his citations of Scripture would not stay the hand of the executioner. The death of Servetus at the hands of John Calvin, and numerous Anabaptists persecuted by the Lutherans provide ample evidence.
Dogmas which a person must accept in order to be saved originated in the primitive Christian church within the first one hundred years of its existence.
The enforcement of Christian dogma comprises one of the most ghastly testimonies of history. Those of you who took advantage of the opportunity to attend church during Dr. Wolfe's series on Paul know something of the background in which Christianity developed and organized from a wandering, Jewish brotherhood to a religion proclaiming itself as the only true faith by which a person could be saved.
Official scripture and dogma developed primarily because of what were alleged to be heresies, particularly in the second century a.d. Powerful and influential groups of religious philosophers framed the Christian revelation in differing ways of thinking - Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian, Asian. For example, the Docetists, who denied the humanity of Jesus, speculating that Jesus was only a ghostly apparition, were of particular concern to the growing Christian groups. Thus primitive creeds were framed to insure that a believing Christian must testify that Jesus was both man and God, that he died on the cross, was buried and literally rose again.
Out of the struggles against heresy, the old Catholic Church arose with three articles of belief required of the Christian. The believer had to accept the episcopate. That is, he submitted to the authority of the bishop. He had to accept the creed and certain scriptures became official, or canonized. Jesus would have been dismayed and astounded if he knew that his life had been the starting point of unyielding orthodoxy. The rules of the church gradually became more rigid, culminating in the church councils at Nicea in 325 and Chalcedon in 451. The Bishop of Rome gradually acquired more power and prestige. If you were a Christian, and wanted to be saved, the dogmas had to be acknowledged and obeyed.
There were notable exceptions to the growing tide of orthodox conformity. About 200 a.d., Clement of Alexandria was Universalist in his belief that all persons would be saved. Believing that theological propositions should be freely examined, Clement asserted that heresies were helps for discovering truth, because the heretic made a deeper and more searching study than the unthinking believer. While many of the early church fathers struck out against heresies, Clement took the positive approach. Rather than condemning heretics, Clement sought to expound the beliefs he thought to be true in order to persuade those who might disagree with him.
Alexander V.G. Allen (THE CONTINUITY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT) summarized Clement's faith this way, "(Clement's) belief in the inherent worth of the individual soul, as constituted after the divine image, would not allow him to succumb to the thought that men were created practically as animal only, with the possibility of some receiving an immortal spirit in virtue of his own exertions; or on the other hand, that any soul could continue forever to resist the force of redeeming love. Somehow and somewhere in the long run of the ages, that love must prove mightier than sin and death, and vindicate its power in one universal triumph."
But there were too few of Clement's kind. For centuries the persecutions inflicted on the Christians by the Romans during the early centuries of the church have been cited as proof of the truth of Christianity. The fact that the church survived the executions of martyrs is offered as evidence that only a true faith could persist after such ordeals of torture and death.
It may be that the "blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," as the old Christian maxim goes, but if one looks at the historical record with any sort of objectivity, there can be no doubt that Christians persecuted other Christians with far greater ferocity and more horrible consequences than the Romans ever perpetrated on the Christians.
Nothing in Roman annals can compare with the Inquisition of the wars of religion between Catholics and Reformers in the centuries following the Protestant Revolt. The pursuit and execution of German Anabaptists by German Lutherans, the bloody massacre of French Huguenots by French Catholics, the slaughter of English Catholics by English Protestants, the similar mass crime by the English Catholics against English Protestants, the terrible persecution of Dutch Protestants -- all in the name of Christ the Savior -- all these and many more crimes of religious hatred beggar description. Nothing can be compared to the vicious consequences of rigid Christian dogma except the modern murder, slavery and terror of totalitarian governments. [editor's note: inserted in handwriting, 'I am more than half convinced that Hitler and Stalin learned their trade in the Christian archives.']
Strong dogmatists have always proposed and prayed for a united Christian church. The present Pope has hinted that re-union with Rome is possible for non-Catholic Christians. (On Roman terms, of course). But never in all the nineteen hundred years since Paul has there ever been a united Christian church. The Roman Catholic church, even in its centuries of strength, never united all Christendom. The historical fact is that Protestantism immediately fragmented into a number of groups. There are still more than two hundred fifty known organized denominations in our country alone. This may be considered a good thing, an ironic joke, or a scandal, but the fact of widely different organizations within Christian Protestantism is a social and religious fact.
Ancient, medieval and modern history provide a considerable body of evidence that strong dogma will never bring about a united church with a standard belief and common purpose.
It will be proposed in these days, when we are shaken inwardly by waves of uncertainty and anxiety, that strong dogma is needed not so much to provide a united, Christian church, but rather because we desperately need a feeling of certainty about the proposals of religion -- the nature of God and the destiny of man. We have a great hunger for faith, or so it is said. Therefore there are those even in the liberal church who would maintain that a dogma of salvation should not permit radical questions or assertions and teaching and preaching should ignore the contradictions of scientific and natural evidence which point out the inconsistencies or the preposterous nature of the faith of other times. Otherwise, it is feared that the walls of faith will weaken and crumble.
If we hold assured convictions about religion, we will then be comforted in all difficulty and possess inner peace in the face of all unfortunate circumstance, or so we are told.
The idea of the conformity of our middle-class culture has become an over-worked whipping boy, perhaps. However, two things are of constant wonder to me. One is the willingness with which we acquiesce in the colossal extravagance beyond description to prepare for a war which can never be fought. Secondly, the assurance with which the average person will endorse organized religion, while at the same time hastily retreat, or become hostile, if any of the ancient interpretations he professes are questioned in the light of [what] modern man knows about the origins of religion and culture, and what modern man has begun to learn about the impersonal, orderliness of our amazing universe.
No mature person will deny that it is gratifying to feel comfortable and secure about life's ultimate meanings. Strong dogma may provide that assurance about salvation, but there is a high cost to such authoritarianism. Dostoevsky created the classic illustration of the weakness of strong dogma in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.
You may remember that Ivan tells his brother, Alyosha about the Grand Inquisitor of Seville during the Inquisition when every day saw the torturing and burning of alleged heretics. In Ivan's parable, Christ comes again after fifteen centuries and chooses Seville. He arrives the day following the burning of one hundred heretics.
The story about Christ goes, "He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, every one of them recognized Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him. He moves silently with a gentle smile of infinite compassion." The returned Savior heals the sick and revives the dead.
Tall and erect though nearly ninety years of age, the Cardinal Inquisitor arrives, sees the crowd and Savior. The Inquisitor bids the guards seize Christ. The crowd bows in submission to the Grand Inquisitor as the guards lead Christ to the dungeon.
In the evening, the Grand Inquisitor visits the cell of Christ. The Cardinal speaks, "...When, then, hast Thou come to hinder us? For Thou knowest Thou has come to hinder us. I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but tomorrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed Thy feet, tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire."
The prisoner says not a word. The Cardinal Inquisitor goes on sternly, "Didst Thou not often say then, 'I will make you free'? But now Thou has seen those 'free' men. Yes, we've paid dearly for it, but at least we have completed that work in thy name. For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it's over for good? Thou lookest meekly at me and deignest not even to be wroth with me. But let me tell Thee that now, today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing."
Alyosha breaks into Ivan's story, "Is he ironical, is he jesting?"
Ivan says, "Not a bit of it. He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy." He goes on with the Inquisitor's speech, as the Cardinal rebukes Christ, "For now for the first time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was created a rebel and how can rebels be happy? Thou was warned. Thou has had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but Thou did not listen to those warnings; Thou didst reject the only way by which men might be happy. But fortunately departing, Thou didst hand on the work to us. Thou has promised, Thou hast established Thy word, Thou has given to us the right to bind and to unbind, and now, of course, Thou canst not think of taking it away. Why, then has Thou come to hinder us?"
When the Inquisitor has finished his long rebuke, Ivan tells his brother that the Inquisitor "waited for some time for his prisoner to answer him. He saw that the prisoner had listened intently all the time looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old Cardinal longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and kissed him. That was all His answer. The old man shuddered, 'Go away and come no more ... come not at all, never, never.' The prisoner went away."
The weakness of strong dogma is that when you build walls around man you make him less than man. When one excludes the dissenter for his beliefs, no matter how radical those beliefs may be, one is saying that the church is so uncertain about its worth and purpose that it cannot afford to tolerate non-conforming opinion; that it has no conviction of its persuasive power. Robert Frost wrote, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." It's the nature of the universe.
Last Wednesday our family went to the Cleveland Zoo. Obviously the Zoo is splendidly organized and operated competently. The cages are clean and the animals regularly fed. The captive gorillas have automobile tires to play with and quantities of peanuts are thrown to the bears. Beyond question, the gorillas is more protected than in the jungle -- there is no danger he need fear. The antelope are protected from the lurking lion. The sea lions merely have to beg for fish and they are fed.
Yet how many of us would exchange hazardous freedom for comfortable bondage? The most kindly zoo-keeper is not sufficient attraction, even in the area of human religious life. I suspect that comfortable animals would prefer a brief, free life of danger rather than long years of comfortable prison, if they possessed human powers of discrimination.
This is an illustration that hints at the weakness of strong dogma and the strength of a free faith. Of course a free faith is difficult and perilous. There are times when one casts away all the old beliefs and starts all over to find meaning and purpose. But there are beliefs which should be torn right out at the roots. Giordano Bruno, the scientist who was burned at the stake because he would not accept strong dogma, once queried, "If a coat is buttoned wrong, how can you right it unless you unbutton and start over again and take the first step correctly?"
The historic movements of organized religion have been kept alive by the heretics who refused to wear the wrongly buttoned coat of strong dogma. The real radicals, that is, those who have tried to go to the roots of the Christian heritage, have found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke not a quantity of dogma, but a quality of living. Aside from the individual excerpts which can be wrenched out of context, the total impression of these gospels is not an emphasis on right belief, but right doing. In the doing there is implied the principle that the truth will assert and defend itself in a free market of ideas.
In THE SLEEPWALKERS, Arthur Koestler writes stimulating biographical sketches of some of the ancient scientists who made great advances for the human family. Koestler remarks, "the psychological process of discovery is the most concise manifestation of man's creative faculty."
A faith which values life and is open-minded to any truths old and new which contribute to better living is certainly not less valuable than devotion to ancient piety.
But discovery of truth is impossible when strong dogma prevents the reviewing and revising of old truths in the light of new findings. In the gospel of Matthew it is told that the people were astounded at the teachings of Jesus. Why? He taught not a dogma but a doing. In the doing was a principle of truth-finding. "Everyone who listens to this teaching of mine and acts upon it, will be like a sensible man."
One of the principal justifications for the religious organization known as the liberal church is the acceptance of religious truth as continuously changing as a consequence of new reflection on old and new experience. We cannot remain in the "faith of our fathers living still" because that faith was hewed out in the experience of another day and different insights.
Thus, we have no united theological position. We have no dogma you must believe. We make no appeal for loyalty to dogma. Difficult--? Of course. But who ever said seriously that religion should be easy? Freedom from dogma should not destroy or dilute loyalty to religion. Rather, freedom from dogma should breed great loyalty to an institution which professes human values which will result in human betterment.
Of course freedom is perilous. Ferdinand Magellan, the circumnavigator of the globe, said "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." That was a statement of great faith.
Your loyalty to a church of the free-mind principle is justified when the question is asked, "Who speaks for Man?" For the only answer worthy of one human family bound by common origin and common purpose is that "Man in his freedom speaks for Man."
Akron
The grandeur of man is his freedom. The misery of man is the anxiety of his fearful uncertainty in the midst of his free choices. Man can avoid this misery, this tension of freedom, by accepting strong dogma. This acquiescence to outer authority, however, is an abdication of the opportunity to participate in life's greatest human opportunity -- freedom.
In religion, where shall we place our trust? Who speaks the word of truth? How one answers those questions determines for him the definitions of religious authority.
Dogma has been an essential arch in most of the bridges religions have built across the centuries. The sermon today concerns the definitions, origins, and values of Christian dogma. Most persons in our world yearn for assurance, security, and comfort. They will obey the voice of authority to instruct them as to the proper and acceptable vehicles of faith. But the surrender to authority violates the essential needs of human beings for freedom and responsibility. Furthermore, all the essential principles of liberal religion are based or implied from the condition of freedom.
The large majority of organized Christian churches seem always to return to strong dogma as the requirement for religious fellowship and the condition for salvation. It is now commonplace for local councils of churches, council of church-women and national organizations of Christians to write preambles, or other conditions of membership, on a creedal basis, thus effectively disenfranchising Universalists, Unitarians, Jews and some others from sharing in a united religious participation in the life of a community. It has happened here in Akron; it has happened in many cities of our country.
One of the surprising events in recent American religious history has been the announcement that Congregationalists, traditionally non-creedal, have formulated a creed which will be the dogmatic basis of the merged Congregational and Evangelical and Reformed denomination. While the writers of the creed proposed that this is a testimony, not a test, of faith, it is a creed nevertheless.
Dogma is "a doctrine of theology officially defined and declared to rest on divine authority." The German scholar Harnack once said that dogma is "that doctrine which one must believe in to be saved." (Doctrine includes all teaching, including dogma).
The Roman Catholic theory is that Christ organized the church and committed to Peter, first, and the apostles, the truth which every loyal Christian is required to obey. In the Roman Catholic view, dogma has been formulated and expressed by Church councils, and since 1870, when the infallibility of the Pope on matters of faith and morals was announced, by the Bishop of Rome. The "good" Catholic is expected to conform to the dogma of the rites and sacraments of the Latin Church because there "is no salvation outside it."
The traditional Protestant position, as proclaimed by Martin Luther, is that dogmas have no authority even though originating in church councils or the announcements of a Pope. Dogmas have authority only when supported by the Scripture, asserted the Reformers.
This has been somewhat of a snare to the unwary. As many an abused martyr has discovered, if one interpreted Scripture in a fashion which opposed the announced views of the leading Protestants, Calvin or Luther, for example, the rebel soon discovered that his citations of Scripture would not stay the hand of the executioner. The death of Servetus at the hands of John Calvin, and numerous Anabaptists persecuted by the Lutherans provide ample evidence.
Dogmas which a person must accept in order to be saved originated in the primitive Christian church within the first one hundred years of its existence.
The enforcement of Christian dogma comprises one of the most ghastly testimonies of history. Those of you who took advantage of the opportunity to attend church during Dr. Wolfe's series on Paul know something of the background in which Christianity developed and organized from a wandering, Jewish brotherhood to a religion proclaiming itself as the only true faith by which a person could be saved.
Official scripture and dogma developed primarily because of what were alleged to be heresies, particularly in the second century a.d. Powerful and influential groups of religious philosophers framed the Christian revelation in differing ways of thinking - Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian, Asian. For example, the Docetists, who denied the humanity of Jesus, speculating that Jesus was only a ghostly apparition, were of particular concern to the growing Christian groups. Thus primitive creeds were framed to insure that a believing Christian must testify that Jesus was both man and God, that he died on the cross, was buried and literally rose again.
Out of the struggles against heresy, the old Catholic Church arose with three articles of belief required of the Christian. The believer had to accept the episcopate. That is, he submitted to the authority of the bishop. He had to accept the creed and certain scriptures became official, or canonized. Jesus would have been dismayed and astounded if he knew that his life had been the starting point of unyielding orthodoxy. The rules of the church gradually became more rigid, culminating in the church councils at Nicea in 325 and Chalcedon in 451. The Bishop of Rome gradually acquired more power and prestige. If you were a Christian, and wanted to be saved, the dogmas had to be acknowledged and obeyed.
There were notable exceptions to the growing tide of orthodox conformity. About 200 a.d., Clement of Alexandria was Universalist in his belief that all persons would be saved. Believing that theological propositions should be freely examined, Clement asserted that heresies were helps for discovering truth, because the heretic made a deeper and more searching study than the unthinking believer. While many of the early church fathers struck out against heresies, Clement took the positive approach. Rather than condemning heretics, Clement sought to expound the beliefs he thought to be true in order to persuade those who might disagree with him.
Alexander V.G. Allen (THE CONTINUITY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT) summarized Clement's faith this way, "(Clement's) belief in the inherent worth of the individual soul, as constituted after the divine image, would not allow him to succumb to the thought that men were created practically as animal only, with the possibility of some receiving an immortal spirit in virtue of his own exertions; or on the other hand, that any soul could continue forever to resist the force of redeeming love. Somehow and somewhere in the long run of the ages, that love must prove mightier than sin and death, and vindicate its power in one universal triumph."
But there were too few of Clement's kind. For centuries the persecutions inflicted on the Christians by the Romans during the early centuries of the church have been cited as proof of the truth of Christianity. The fact that the church survived the executions of martyrs is offered as evidence that only a true faith could persist after such ordeals of torture and death.
It may be that the "blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," as the old Christian maxim goes, but if one looks at the historical record with any sort of objectivity, there can be no doubt that Christians persecuted other Christians with far greater ferocity and more horrible consequences than the Romans ever perpetrated on the Christians.
Nothing in Roman annals can compare with the Inquisition of the wars of religion between Catholics and Reformers in the centuries following the Protestant Revolt. The pursuit and execution of German Anabaptists by German Lutherans, the bloody massacre of French Huguenots by French Catholics, the slaughter of English Catholics by English Protestants, the similar mass crime by the English Catholics against English Protestants, the terrible persecution of Dutch Protestants -- all in the name of Christ the Savior -- all these and many more crimes of religious hatred beggar description. Nothing can be compared to the vicious consequences of rigid Christian dogma except the modern murder, slavery and terror of totalitarian governments. [editor's note: inserted in handwriting, 'I am more than half convinced that Hitler and Stalin learned their trade in the Christian archives.']
Strong dogmatists have always proposed and prayed for a united Christian church. The present Pope has hinted that re-union with Rome is possible for non-Catholic Christians. (On Roman terms, of course). But never in all the nineteen hundred years since Paul has there ever been a united Christian church. The Roman Catholic church, even in its centuries of strength, never united all Christendom. The historical fact is that Protestantism immediately fragmented into a number of groups. There are still more than two hundred fifty known organized denominations in our country alone. This may be considered a good thing, an ironic joke, or a scandal, but the fact of widely different organizations within Christian Protestantism is a social and religious fact.
Ancient, medieval and modern history provide a considerable body of evidence that strong dogma will never bring about a united church with a standard belief and common purpose.
It will be proposed in these days, when we are shaken inwardly by waves of uncertainty and anxiety, that strong dogma is needed not so much to provide a united, Christian church, but rather because we desperately need a feeling of certainty about the proposals of religion -- the nature of God and the destiny of man. We have a great hunger for faith, or so it is said. Therefore there are those even in the liberal church who would maintain that a dogma of salvation should not permit radical questions or assertions and teaching and preaching should ignore the contradictions of scientific and natural evidence which point out the inconsistencies or the preposterous nature of the faith of other times. Otherwise, it is feared that the walls of faith will weaken and crumble.
If we hold assured convictions about religion, we will then be comforted in all difficulty and possess inner peace in the face of all unfortunate circumstance, or so we are told.
The idea of the conformity of our middle-class culture has become an over-worked whipping boy, perhaps. However, two things are of constant wonder to me. One is the willingness with which we acquiesce in the colossal extravagance beyond description to prepare for a war which can never be fought. Secondly, the assurance with which the average person will endorse organized religion, while at the same time hastily retreat, or become hostile, if any of the ancient interpretations he professes are questioned in the light of [what] modern man knows about the origins of religion and culture, and what modern man has begun to learn about the impersonal, orderliness of our amazing universe.
No mature person will deny that it is gratifying to feel comfortable and secure about life's ultimate meanings. Strong dogma may provide that assurance about salvation, but there is a high cost to such authoritarianism. Dostoevsky created the classic illustration of the weakness of strong dogma in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.
You may remember that Ivan tells his brother, Alyosha about the Grand Inquisitor of Seville during the Inquisition when every day saw the torturing and burning of alleged heretics. In Ivan's parable, Christ comes again after fifteen centuries and chooses Seville. He arrives the day following the burning of one hundred heretics.
The story about Christ goes, "He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, every one of them recognized Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him. He moves silently with a gentle smile of infinite compassion." The returned Savior heals the sick and revives the dead.
Tall and erect though nearly ninety years of age, the Cardinal Inquisitor arrives, sees the crowd and Savior. The Inquisitor bids the guards seize Christ. The crowd bows in submission to the Grand Inquisitor as the guards lead Christ to the dungeon.
In the evening, the Grand Inquisitor visits the cell of Christ. The Cardinal speaks, "...When, then, hast Thou come to hinder us? For Thou knowest Thou has come to hinder us. I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but tomorrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed Thy feet, tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire."
The prisoner says not a word. The Cardinal Inquisitor goes on sternly, "Didst Thou not often say then, 'I will make you free'? But now Thou has seen those 'free' men. Yes, we've paid dearly for it, but at least we have completed that work in thy name. For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it's over for good? Thou lookest meekly at me and deignest not even to be wroth with me. But let me tell Thee that now, today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing."
Alyosha breaks into Ivan's story, "Is he ironical, is he jesting?"
Ivan says, "Not a bit of it. He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy." He goes on with the Inquisitor's speech, as the Cardinal rebukes Christ, "For now for the first time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was created a rebel and how can rebels be happy? Thou was warned. Thou has had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but Thou did not listen to those warnings; Thou didst reject the only way by which men might be happy. But fortunately departing, Thou didst hand on the work to us. Thou has promised, Thou hast established Thy word, Thou has given to us the right to bind and to unbind, and now, of course, Thou canst not think of taking it away. Why, then has Thou come to hinder us?"
When the Inquisitor has finished his long rebuke, Ivan tells his brother that the Inquisitor "waited for some time for his prisoner to answer him. He saw that the prisoner had listened intently all the time looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old Cardinal longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and kissed him. That was all His answer. The old man shuddered, 'Go away and come no more ... come not at all, never, never.' The prisoner went away."
The weakness of strong dogma is that when you build walls around man you make him less than man. When one excludes the dissenter for his beliefs, no matter how radical those beliefs may be, one is saying that the church is so uncertain about its worth and purpose that it cannot afford to tolerate non-conforming opinion; that it has no conviction of its persuasive power. Robert Frost wrote, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." It's the nature of the universe.
Last Wednesday our family went to the Cleveland Zoo. Obviously the Zoo is splendidly organized and operated competently. The cages are clean and the animals regularly fed. The captive gorillas have automobile tires to play with and quantities of peanuts are thrown to the bears. Beyond question, the gorillas is more protected than in the jungle -- there is no danger he need fear. The antelope are protected from the lurking lion. The sea lions merely have to beg for fish and they are fed.
Yet how many of us would exchange hazardous freedom for comfortable bondage? The most kindly zoo-keeper is not sufficient attraction, even in the area of human religious life. I suspect that comfortable animals would prefer a brief, free life of danger rather than long years of comfortable prison, if they possessed human powers of discrimination.
This is an illustration that hints at the weakness of strong dogma and the strength of a free faith. Of course a free faith is difficult and perilous. There are times when one casts away all the old beliefs and starts all over to find meaning and purpose. But there are beliefs which should be torn right out at the roots. Giordano Bruno, the scientist who was burned at the stake because he would not accept strong dogma, once queried, "If a coat is buttoned wrong, how can you right it unless you unbutton and start over again and take the first step correctly?"
The historic movements of organized religion have been kept alive by the heretics who refused to wear the wrongly buttoned coat of strong dogma. The real radicals, that is, those who have tried to go to the roots of the Christian heritage, have found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke not a quantity of dogma, but a quality of living. Aside from the individual excerpts which can be wrenched out of context, the total impression of these gospels is not an emphasis on right belief, but right doing. In the doing there is implied the principle that the truth will assert and defend itself in a free market of ideas.
In THE SLEEPWALKERS, Arthur Koestler writes stimulating biographical sketches of some of the ancient scientists who made great advances for the human family. Koestler remarks, "the psychological process of discovery is the most concise manifestation of man's creative faculty."
A faith which values life and is open-minded to any truths old and new which contribute to better living is certainly not less valuable than devotion to ancient piety.
But discovery of truth is impossible when strong dogma prevents the reviewing and revising of old truths in the light of new findings. In the gospel of Matthew it is told that the people were astounded at the teachings of Jesus. Why? He taught not a dogma but a doing. In the doing was a principle of truth-finding. "Everyone who listens to this teaching of mine and acts upon it, will be like a sensible man."
One of the principal justifications for the religious organization known as the liberal church is the acceptance of religious truth as continuously changing as a consequence of new reflection on old and new experience. We cannot remain in the "faith of our fathers living still" because that faith was hewed out in the experience of another day and different insights.
Thus, we have no united theological position. We have no dogma you must believe. We make no appeal for loyalty to dogma. Difficult--? Of course. But who ever said seriously that religion should be easy? Freedom from dogma should not destroy or dilute loyalty to religion. Rather, freedom from dogma should breed great loyalty to an institution which professes human values which will result in human betterment.
Of course freedom is perilous. Ferdinand Magellan, the circumnavigator of the globe, said "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." That was a statement of great faith.
Your loyalty to a church of the free-mind principle is justified when the question is asked, "Who speaks for Man?" For the only answer worthy of one human family bound by common origin and common purpose is that "Man in his freedom speaks for Man."
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Why the World Didn't End
May 31, 1959
(estimated)
Akron
Hopeless situations have a way of becoming transformed by men and events and signs of promise appear. Many a lost cause is re-discovered. The end of a night of despair is signalled by a glow in the east. "Why the World Didn't End" is a sermon on a religious quality which, when cherished, heals the wounds inflicted by foul events. I speak to you about hope.
Six months ago last Wednesday, Soviet leader Khrushchev delivered an ultimatum to the United States. Denouncing the war agreements which created a partitioned Berlin, he proposed that West Berlin must become a demilitarized, free city, and that the East German communist government would assume Soviet powers, including control and access to West Berlin. Khrushchev insisted that this explosive change in policy would take effect May 27. He further stated last November that should his proposal not be accepted, "there will no longer exist any subject for talks between the former occupying powers on the Berlin question."
Khrushchev's incendiary words as well as the political sensitivity of the divided Germany, are considered ominous threats to peace. The Beacon-Journal's Washington corespondent, Mr. Edwin Lahey took this threat seriously enough that some weeks ago his comments on the issue were entitled, "May 27, The Day the World Ended." The political future of both West and East Germany are believed to be so crucial to each antagonist, that failure to reach agreement or compromise would be the spark which would ignite the planet. One of our boys in service wrote me this week that there was some betting amongst his buddies that Thursday May the 28th would be the first day of World War III.
Because both the United States and the U.S.S.R. have enough weapons of massive retaliation to conclusively and mutually destroy each other's civilization, the world would end in a few terrible hours. There would have been rejection of the homely, rhymed plea,
"Let not the atom bomb
Be the final sequel
In which all men
Are cremated equal."
Although we are by no means in the period when peace can be complacently expected and passively realized, the fact is the world did not end May 27.
Another event did occur on May 27 which had not been expected when Khrushchev launched his ultimatum. On May 27, John Foster Dulles, 51st Secretary of State of the United States, was buried amid the dignity and pomp of a state funeral. Instead of crouching in bomb shelters in the undergrounds of Moscow, London, Paris and Washington as the world ended with a bang, the foreign ministers, including Mr. Gromyko, attended religious services to mark the passing of Secretary Dulles.
In Wednesday's NEW YORK TIMES, C.L. Sulzberger wrote a feature article which, in masterly style, seized upon the overtones and undertones of May 27.
"Certainly the last thing anyone imagined last Nov. 27, when Khrushchev announced a Berlin ultimatum, was that this date would be interred with Dulles.... (The) double funeral, consequently, assumes a curious, dual significance.
"It signifies the passing of a man and it also signifies the passing of a moment. The two, historically, are related. Dulles was aware that unprotected Berlin was held in a tight Russian fist and that, in terms of pure diplomatic logic, it was virtually impossible to prevent that fist from closing around a significant and desired prize. But by rough, unyielding attitudes he managed to prevent that fist from closing -- until he himself was gone.
"There is, therefore, a particular historical lesson in tomorrow. No matter how Khrushchev planned events for Berlin, for Germany or for Europe, they will not transpire as he implacably had hoped last November when Dulles was a vibrant, active man and Berlin seemed a doomed and isolated city safeguarded only by the threat of global holocaust.
"When Herter and Gromyko do honor the memory of Dulles they will also be observing the interment of immediate probability of disaster. There are two coffins at the funeral. One may only hope that when these living statesmen ride back together Thursday to resume their tedious Geneva negotiations, they will be able to make adjustment to this unknown era, thrust upon them by the mere passage of time."
But this somewhat lengthy comment on Berlin, Mr. Dulles, Herter and the others is not intended to persuade you that the answer to Berlin, or any other Soviet-Western dilemma is cheap or easy. It is to point out that the world did not end last Wednesday, and that the Berlin impasse should not be considered unsolvable until many avenues are explored, including the General Assembly of the United Nations.
But more sweeping than individual postponements of disaster is the quality which is integral with our whole religious culture. Now while there is a biblical proverb that "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick," and Ben Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac reminded us "to live on hope, one eats little," the mainstream of the Hebrew-Christian religious tide is a current of hope.
The kingdom of God is the theological framework for the idea of hope. The last sentence in our affirmation is an attempt to fill the theological idea of the kingdom of God into a framework of modern language and idealistic expectation, "we avow our faith in the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively establish the kingdom of God."
Our ancient religious forefathers, the Hebrews, though they wept by the rivers of Babylon, there came the time when they nurtured the hope that the Messiah would come. Their land would be redeemed and their God would reign over all the earth. There were many who claimed to be the Messiah amid the consistently unfortunate political and religious predicaments of the Jewish people about the time Jesus lived.
Whether Jesus cherished the hope that the kingdom of heaven would arrive suddenly, immediately, dramatically, and supernaturally cannot be affirmed with certainty. Some portions of the gospels (MARK Xiii, e.g.) would indicate that he believed in and expected an apocalypse of the nature described in Revelation.
On the other hand Jesus also taught that hope was a present reality -- already here. "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it is grown it is the largest of plants and grows into a tree, so that the wild birds roost in its branches (Matt. XIII 32)
The scribe answers Jesus' words about the two great commandments, "to love God with one's whole heart, one's whole understanding and one's whole strength, and to love one's neighbors as one's self is far more than all these burnt-offerings and sacrifices."
"And Jesus saw that he answered thoughtfully and he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." (Mark 12) Jesus probably meant that the scribe was near to the kingdom in attitude -- that the kingdom was not a matter of fullness of time, but rather development of integrity.
Jesus was sustained in his incisive teachings and courageous actions by the hope that men would respond to right laws of living, that they would cherish high human values and grow in moral stature even as the yeast swelled
[editor's note: pp. 10-12 missing, or excised]
The Millerites were just as wrong as the first century Christians. The adventists of our town and time who predict the immediacy of supernatural cataclysm are equally in error.
Religion may not end the world, but whenever the world is exposed to the imperatives of ethical faith --justice, mercy, integrity, courage, and good-will -- the world is challenged. Progress is made when persons stand together, or proclaim individually, that the kingdom of God is present when kindness and justice are the rules for living.
In the story of the early Christian adventure (Acts 17), when Paul and Silas arrived at Thessalonica they met bitter opposition in their preaching and organized efforts. A riot ensued. [editor's note: this part marked with "Lakeland"] Jason, a Christian who was host to the Christian fellowship meeting and Paul and Silas were hauled before the magistrates. The enemies of the new movement complained, "These that have turned the world upside down are come here also." Religion turns the world upside down!
The hope for man is not found in a Farmer's Almanac of world-ending predictions. The hope is in a religious attitude which will turn the world upside down. The kingdom of God arrives as men gradually change the world and turn upside down the attitudes which cheapen the worth of people; turn upside down the hollow values which ignore real human needs. Judgment is not a fixed date on an other-worldly legal calendar, but a process of human achievement as living values are refined by human experience and human education.
This is the kingdom of God that is within us and within our reach.
The world didn't end May 27, 1959, but worlds are always ending. When Jesus was crucified, his world ended. Or so his disciples thought, for some disowned their teacher and some just ran away. When Joan of Arc was burned to death at Rouen, it was the end of the world for her and those who believed in the supreme authority of her right to obey the voices she heard. I suppose the world of hope that we cherished that the religious vision and the American dream of increasing achievement of human freedom and dignity ended when Faubus nullified the Supreme Court ruling that segregated schools were illegal.
T.S. Eliot's sorry appraisal of our human failure was epitomized in his mournful line,
"This is the way the world ends --
Not with a bang, but a whimper."
But worlds are always beginning. We have a right to say with Arthur Clough,
"Fear not, retire not, O man,
Hope evermore and believe."
The world ended for the disciples, but another world began. Soon the conviction came home to them that lost causes can be redeemed. The new world of Christianity emerged as more and more persons took up the cause for which a man's world ended. Joan of Arc was condemned as a heretic and her world ended at the stake where she joined a great company of martyrs who resisted imposed authority because of the conviction that God speaks to the individual. In less than two centuries the right of the individual conscience had established the Reformation. In 1920, Joan was canonized as a Saint of the church that permitted her burning. Faubus, in this climactic week, is face to face with the most imposing roadblock he has encountered in his heedless, bigoted march. The Little Rock voters have said, "enough is enough." The arbitrary dismissal of teachers is the indignity which even segregationists refuse to stomach. It may not be too soon to hope that a new world, which abides by the law of the land, is being born in Arkansas.
Such signs of the times are milestones on the hopeful road. As new worlds are born, we can understand better the winsomeness of the New Testament writer who wrote the letter to the Hebrews, (11/1), "Faith means
[editor's note: remaining pages missing]
(estimated)
Akron
Hopeless situations have a way of becoming transformed by men and events and signs of promise appear. Many a lost cause is re-discovered. The end of a night of despair is signalled by a glow in the east. "Why the World Didn't End" is a sermon on a religious quality which, when cherished, heals the wounds inflicted by foul events. I speak to you about hope.
Six months ago last Wednesday, Soviet leader Khrushchev delivered an ultimatum to the United States. Denouncing the war agreements which created a partitioned Berlin, he proposed that West Berlin must become a demilitarized, free city, and that the East German communist government would assume Soviet powers, including control and access to West Berlin. Khrushchev insisted that this explosive change in policy would take effect May 27. He further stated last November that should his proposal not be accepted, "there will no longer exist any subject for talks between the former occupying powers on the Berlin question."
Khrushchev's incendiary words as well as the political sensitivity of the divided Germany, are considered ominous threats to peace. The Beacon-Journal's Washington corespondent, Mr. Edwin Lahey took this threat seriously enough that some weeks ago his comments on the issue were entitled, "May 27, The Day the World Ended." The political future of both West and East Germany are believed to be so crucial to each antagonist, that failure to reach agreement or compromise would be the spark which would ignite the planet. One of our boys in service wrote me this week that there was some betting amongst his buddies that Thursday May the 28th would be the first day of World War III.
Because both the United States and the U.S.S.R. have enough weapons of massive retaliation to conclusively and mutually destroy each other's civilization, the world would end in a few terrible hours. There would have been rejection of the homely, rhymed plea,
"Let not the atom bomb
Be the final sequel
In which all men
Are cremated equal."
Although we are by no means in the period when peace can be complacently expected and passively realized, the fact is the world did not end May 27.
Another event did occur on May 27 which had not been expected when Khrushchev launched his ultimatum. On May 27, John Foster Dulles, 51st Secretary of State of the United States, was buried amid the dignity and pomp of a state funeral. Instead of crouching in bomb shelters in the undergrounds of Moscow, London, Paris and Washington as the world ended with a bang, the foreign ministers, including Mr. Gromyko, attended religious services to mark the passing of Secretary Dulles.
In Wednesday's NEW YORK TIMES, C.L. Sulzberger wrote a feature article which, in masterly style, seized upon the overtones and undertones of May 27.
"Certainly the last thing anyone imagined last Nov. 27, when Khrushchev announced a Berlin ultimatum, was that this date would be interred with Dulles.... (The) double funeral, consequently, assumes a curious, dual significance.
"It signifies the passing of a man and it also signifies the passing of a moment. The two, historically, are related. Dulles was aware that unprotected Berlin was held in a tight Russian fist and that, in terms of pure diplomatic logic, it was virtually impossible to prevent that fist from closing around a significant and desired prize. But by rough, unyielding attitudes he managed to prevent that fist from closing -- until he himself was gone.
"There is, therefore, a particular historical lesson in tomorrow. No matter how Khrushchev planned events for Berlin, for Germany or for Europe, they will not transpire as he implacably had hoped last November when Dulles was a vibrant, active man and Berlin seemed a doomed and isolated city safeguarded only by the threat of global holocaust.
"When Herter and Gromyko do honor the memory of Dulles they will also be observing the interment of immediate probability of disaster. There are two coffins at the funeral. One may only hope that when these living statesmen ride back together Thursday to resume their tedious Geneva negotiations, they will be able to make adjustment to this unknown era, thrust upon them by the mere passage of time."
But this somewhat lengthy comment on Berlin, Mr. Dulles, Herter and the others is not intended to persuade you that the answer to Berlin, or any other Soviet-Western dilemma is cheap or easy. It is to point out that the world did not end last Wednesday, and that the Berlin impasse should not be considered unsolvable until many avenues are explored, including the General Assembly of the United Nations.
But more sweeping than individual postponements of disaster is the quality which is integral with our whole religious culture. Now while there is a biblical proverb that "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick," and Ben Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac reminded us "to live on hope, one eats little," the mainstream of the Hebrew-Christian religious tide is a current of hope.
The kingdom of God is the theological framework for the idea of hope. The last sentence in our affirmation is an attempt to fill the theological idea of the kingdom of God into a framework of modern language and idealistic expectation, "we avow our faith in the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively establish the kingdom of God."
Our ancient religious forefathers, the Hebrews, though they wept by the rivers of Babylon, there came the time when they nurtured the hope that the Messiah would come. Their land would be redeemed and their God would reign over all the earth. There were many who claimed to be the Messiah amid the consistently unfortunate political and religious predicaments of the Jewish people about the time Jesus lived.
Whether Jesus cherished the hope that the kingdom of heaven would arrive suddenly, immediately, dramatically, and supernaturally cannot be affirmed with certainty. Some portions of the gospels (MARK Xiii, e.g.) would indicate that he believed in and expected an apocalypse of the nature described in Revelation.
On the other hand Jesus also taught that hope was a present reality -- already here. "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it is grown it is the largest of plants and grows into a tree, so that the wild birds roost in its branches (Matt. XIII 32)
The scribe answers Jesus' words about the two great commandments, "to love God with one's whole heart, one's whole understanding and one's whole strength, and to love one's neighbors as one's self is far more than all these burnt-offerings and sacrifices."
"And Jesus saw that he answered thoughtfully and he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." (Mark 12) Jesus probably meant that the scribe was near to the kingdom in attitude -- that the kingdom was not a matter of fullness of time, but rather development of integrity.
Jesus was sustained in his incisive teachings and courageous actions by the hope that men would respond to right laws of living, that they would cherish high human values and grow in moral stature even as the yeast swelled
[editor's note: pp. 10-12 missing, or excised]
The Millerites were just as wrong as the first century Christians. The adventists of our town and time who predict the immediacy of supernatural cataclysm are equally in error.
Religion may not end the world, but whenever the world is exposed to the imperatives of ethical faith --justice, mercy, integrity, courage, and good-will -- the world is challenged. Progress is made when persons stand together, or proclaim individually, that the kingdom of God is present when kindness and justice are the rules for living.
In the story of the early Christian adventure (Acts 17), when Paul and Silas arrived at Thessalonica they met bitter opposition in their preaching and organized efforts. A riot ensued. [editor's note: this part marked with "Lakeland"] Jason, a Christian who was host to the Christian fellowship meeting and Paul and Silas were hauled before the magistrates. The enemies of the new movement complained, "These that have turned the world upside down are come here also." Religion turns the world upside down!
The hope for man is not found in a Farmer's Almanac of world-ending predictions. The hope is in a religious attitude which will turn the world upside down. The kingdom of God arrives as men gradually change the world and turn upside down the attitudes which cheapen the worth of people; turn upside down the hollow values which ignore real human needs. Judgment is not a fixed date on an other-worldly legal calendar, but a process of human achievement as living values are refined by human experience and human education.
This is the kingdom of God that is within us and within our reach.
The world didn't end May 27, 1959, but worlds are always ending. When Jesus was crucified, his world ended. Or so his disciples thought, for some disowned their teacher and some just ran away. When Joan of Arc was burned to death at Rouen, it was the end of the world for her and those who believed in the supreme authority of her right to obey the voices she heard. I suppose the world of hope that we cherished that the religious vision and the American dream of increasing achievement of human freedom and dignity ended when Faubus nullified the Supreme Court ruling that segregated schools were illegal.
T.S. Eliot's sorry appraisal of our human failure was epitomized in his mournful line,
"This is the way the world ends --
Not with a bang, but a whimper."
But worlds are always beginning. We have a right to say with Arthur Clough,
"Fear not, retire not, O man,
Hope evermore and believe."
The world ended for the disciples, but another world began. Soon the conviction came home to them that lost causes can be redeemed. The new world of Christianity emerged as more and more persons took up the cause for which a man's world ended. Joan of Arc was condemned as a heretic and her world ended at the stake where she joined a great company of martyrs who resisted imposed authority because of the conviction that God speaks to the individual. In less than two centuries the right of the individual conscience had established the Reformation. In 1920, Joan was canonized as a Saint of the church that permitted her burning. Faubus, in this climactic week, is face to face with the most imposing roadblock he has encountered in his heedless, bigoted march. The Little Rock voters have said, "enough is enough." The arbitrary dismissal of teachers is the indignity which even segregationists refuse to stomach. It may not be too soon to hope that a new world, which abides by the law of the land, is being born in Arkansas.
Such signs of the times are milestones on the hopeful road. As new worlds are born, we can understand better the winsomeness of the New Testament writer who wrote the letter to the Hebrews, (11/1), "Faith means
[editor's note: remaining pages missing]
Thursday, July 10, 2008
The Best Use of Long Years
June 7, 1959
Akron University
Baccalaureate Service
In speaking to you of the best use of long years, I am aware that the suggestions offered involve simplicity of living rather than easy answers to the labyrinthine complexity of the problems in the world in which you live. This is not because there is a lack of sufficient awareness of the critical issues, but is rather a cherished hope that you will recognize that there is cause for happy profound living under any conditions.
Consequently, I will not dwell on the immensity of the issues of our world, other than to attempt a brief analogy.
In the ancient scripture of Samuel, the epic encounter of David and Goliath have always served as one of the great “hero” stories. There are two great adversaries today who may be represented by Goliath and David.
Who is Goliath? In a world bristling with weapons terrible enough to have made a Ghengis Khan blanch with horror, we face the continuing threat of war. In a world where under-developed and hungry nations are conscious that perhaps starvation need no longer be the norm and crippling disease the expectation, heedlessly we behave as though all the world were as fat and comfortable as we. In a world where we refuse to face up to the facts of the population explosion, the staggering daily net increase in the number of people in the world, (120,000 each day, 5000 every hour!) even the most ingenious discoveries of agronomist and chemist may prove insufficient to avert a calamitously excessive density of population. In a nation which professes religious virtues and democratic ideals, the somber appraisal of many social studies reveals us to be most strongly motivated by acquisitive, status-seeking goals.
If these hazards, liabilities and other perils unmentioned were considered as one Gestalt – this would be Goliath! Do not underestimate the strength of these giant forces.
Who is David? David is man as a moral, spiritual being. This view of man assumes that because the Judeo-Christian heritage is a source of human society based no justice and mercy, with the individual presumed to be of supreme worth, the ideals of freedom, rationality, and political democracy can be proposed and accomplishment realized gradually. David is the symbol of the totality of the brotherhood of man, the universality of God and the practice of compassionate living.
We too can re-assert David’s passionate question, “is there not a cause?”
But, whether we know Goliath’s vulnerable spot, or whether we have David’s singlemindedness of purpose and accuracy of aim is as yet unanswerable. For as the political economist, James F. Warburg points out (THE WEST IN CRISIS, p. 17) “The fatal weaknesses of Western Man have been his insatiable acquisitiveness and his inability to live at peace with himself. Both are products of a materialism insufficiently restrained by humanitarianism and moral sensibility .... In his endless quarrels, Western Man has reached forever more deadly weapons of murder and destruction.”
Sometimes I think we fit the biting appraisal of Dr. Skinner in Samuel Butlers, WAY OF ALL FLESH (p. 115). “He had the harmlessness of the serpent and the wisdom of the dove.”
With no reflection on the commendable process of group definition of problems and goals, I would submit to you that the modern duel between Israelite and Philistine is the struggle for the mind of man. Furthermore, unless we as individuals prize and cultivate our individual minds, then any social process will degrade our ideals. Unless we are unrelenting in standing forthrightly for individual freedom and human dignity, then the words of Hector (TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, ACT II, SC. 2) would fit us with deadly precision, “’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the God.”
Therefore, I presume to offer advice to individuals. For what avail is social process if too many of us echo the poet’s anguished cry, “where is the life we have lost in the living?” It is said that in a churchyard in Scotland, this rather puzzling epitaph appears on a tombstone,
“Here lies the remains of Thomas Nichols
Who died in Philadelphia, March 1753.
Had he lived, he would have been buried here.”
Is that not a mournful clause for anyone’s obituary, “had he lived?” I suggest to you that in order to endure the pressures upon us in the world where the target is our minds, we need not only defenses against Goliath, but also safeguards against our own over-organization. [Editor’s note: handwritten in margin: “faceless men in the crowd”]
Many years ago a high-school teacher in the Bronx, N.Y. gave parting advice to a graduating class. His advice was simple, but since the time one of his students passed it on to me, I have discovered that profound meanings are involved:
Take a walk
Read a book
Make a friend
Wheels, wings, and time-clock living have conspired to make walking a lost art. Charles Dickens once said, “the sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy; walk and be healthy; -- the best way to lengthen out our days is to walk steadily and with purpose.”
A walk in the cool of the evening or the brightness of the day establishes contact with a reality we tend to neglect. The great poets remind us in Wordsworth’s words that it is better to be a “pagan, nurtured in a creed outworn,” than to become so engrossed in the mechanics of existence that we neglect our vital, organic relationship to the universe in which we “live and move and have our being.”
Goethe proposed that “nature is the living, visible garment of God.”
Shakespeare, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” (Troilus and Cressida).
Bryant rhapsodized,
“to him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms,
She speaks a various language.”
Even skeptical Voltaire once remarked, “Men argue, Nature acts.”
But the value of a walk is not alone for the purpose of communing with Nature. Some persons respond not at all to the loveliness of a flower or the majesty of a wooded hill. “A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And nothing more.”
For the sake of inner honesty a person needs the opportunity to escape the jingle and jangle, mingle and mangle long enough to organize his thoughts. Victor Hugo reminded us, (LES MISERABLES, p. 519), “Meditation is, as well as prayer, a necessity of humanity.”
We need the discipline of being able to live with ourselves. We may not spend the time that Thoreau did at Walden, but like he, we too should now and again listen for the beat of a distant drum. In our own day Peter Viereck has wisely observed (THE NEW AMERICAN RIGHT, p. 114-5), “there comes a time when lasting values are conserved not by matey back-slapping but by wayward walks in the drizzle....”
Then, too, sudden delights are the occasional rewards bestowed when walking on a country road, the city street, or a primitive trail. Helen Keller, whose life is glory, once said “Oh the unexpected joys that meet us just around the corners of life.”
Take a walk.
Read a book. In this season when the pressures of exams, term papers, and reading reports are released, you may look with jaundiced eye on this exhortation. “Read a book. That’s all I’ve been doing for years!” you may say. You might quote with some secret satisfaction that old New England proverb, “Reading rots the brain.” Perhaps a weary student coined that one. Or you might approve Milton’s comment about the one who was “deep-versed in books, but shallow in himself.”
But while these graduating days may be the occasion when you keep up only with Dick Tracy and the stumbling Indians (who seem to be vanishing in the American League), your years will be well-used if you read—the classic, the novelty, the poetic, the bizarre, the “who-dun-it,” the stern criticisms of our follies and foibles and the great prophet minds who call us to become masters over our waywardness.
The O.T. prophet, Habakkuk (2/2) said long ages ago, “Write the vision; make it plain upon the tablets, so he way run who reads it.” Not much has been written clearly enough so that we may read on the run, although it is said of John Wesley, founder of the great Methodist church that he read history, poetry and philosophy while riding his horse on his long years of itinerant preaching. Most books need some single-minded attention. Your life is placed on a long line of social history. If you want perspective, you must go to the books. It is the books which transform the campfire legend to authentic history. If you would know history, you must go to the books.
Furthermore, although we all enjoy escapist reading from time to time, the art of reading is a serious as well as enjoyable pursuit. G.K. Chesterton once observed, (Charles Dickens, THE LAST OF THE GREAT MEN, p. 73), “There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”
So I plead with you in Goethe’s words, “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
Read a book
Make a friend.
If your college years have given you at least minimum blessings, you have made and cemented friendships which will endure all the years of your life. One of the best uses of the long years will be the maintenance, renewal and deepening of those friendships. Socrates spoke wisely when he said, it is well worth while to learn how the win the heart of a man the right way.”
Let me hasten to add that the years will batter you about and some friendships may provoke bitter disillusionment. Ambrose Bierce, one of the most thorough-going of cynics, spoke bitterly when he coined this saying for The Devil’s Dictionary: “While your friend holds you affectionately by both hands you are safe, for you can watch bot his.” Another embittered definition goes like this, “A friend is one who dislikes the same people you dislike.”
In spite of the possibility that the deepest hurts will happen when a friend “does you in,” make a friend. In the fellowship of human beings resides the relationship of deepest meaning and greatest job. If you only take walks and read books you are a solitary exile who has lost perspective.
Dostoevsky writes of this in the BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, when the following appeared in Father Zossima’s diary:
“All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof and hides what he has from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them....”
David’s friendship with Jonathan was far more significant to each of their lives than the spectacular victory over the Philistine giant.
The need for friendship will present difficulties for you peculiar to our age. This is an age of mobility. 25,000 people in the United States move every day. Many of you will shift your homes and occupations to other states, other countries. Today’s child is born in Canton, educated at the University of Akron, marries in Youngstown, moves to Cleveland to Dallas to Phoenix to Detroit to Cape Canaveral.
The opportunities no longer exist for most of [us] to derive the continuing joy of friendship from childhood associations through the adult years. In each of your moves I hope you keep before you the wise words of Hebrew scriptures (“A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such a one hath found a treasure.” So be a friend to have friends, whereever you go.
You may be wondering what this advice has to do with the titanic struggle for the minds of men between the Goliath forces and the David forces. Simply this – in order to be fit for the terrible struggle you must face, there must be moral resources so that you will have convictions disciplined by orderly thought and systematic knowledge. This strength you will need in order to take a political stand, influence political decisions and exert decent, democratic pressure on political institutions. [editor's note: the wording of the next sentence is unclear in the original] It is in the simple profundities of life that there is glow when the motivations which lead people change the world.
The best use of long years is to recognize, in John Ruskin’s words (UNTO THIS LAST) “there is no wealth but life.” In Miss Sackville-West's biography of Joan of Arc (p. 90), Jean de Metz offered to help Joan and asked her when she wanted him to start. Joan answered, “Now, rather than tomorrow, and tomorrow rather than the day after.”
Take a walk –- read a book – make a friend.
Akron University
Baccalaureate Service
In speaking to you of the best use of long years, I am aware that the suggestions offered involve simplicity of living rather than easy answers to the labyrinthine complexity of the problems in the world in which you live. This is not because there is a lack of sufficient awareness of the critical issues, but is rather a cherished hope that you will recognize that there is cause for happy profound living under any conditions.
Consequently, I will not dwell on the immensity of the issues of our world, other than to attempt a brief analogy.
In the ancient scripture of Samuel, the epic encounter of David and Goliath have always served as one of the great “hero” stories. There are two great adversaries today who may be represented by Goliath and David.
Who is Goliath? In a world bristling with weapons terrible enough to have made a Ghengis Khan blanch with horror, we face the continuing threat of war. In a world where under-developed and hungry nations are conscious that perhaps starvation need no longer be the norm and crippling disease the expectation, heedlessly we behave as though all the world were as fat and comfortable as we. In a world where we refuse to face up to the facts of the population explosion, the staggering daily net increase in the number of people in the world, (120,000 each day, 5000 every hour!) even the most ingenious discoveries of agronomist and chemist may prove insufficient to avert a calamitously excessive density of population. In a nation which professes religious virtues and democratic ideals, the somber appraisal of many social studies reveals us to be most strongly motivated by acquisitive, status-seeking goals.
If these hazards, liabilities and other perils unmentioned were considered as one Gestalt – this would be Goliath! Do not underestimate the strength of these giant forces.
Who is David? David is man as a moral, spiritual being. This view of man assumes that because the Judeo-Christian heritage is a source of human society based no justice and mercy, with the individual presumed to be of supreme worth, the ideals of freedom, rationality, and political democracy can be proposed and accomplishment realized gradually. David is the symbol of the totality of the brotherhood of man, the universality of God and the practice of compassionate living.
We too can re-assert David’s passionate question, “is there not a cause?”
But, whether we know Goliath’s vulnerable spot, or whether we have David’s singlemindedness of purpose and accuracy of aim is as yet unanswerable. For as the political economist, James F. Warburg points out (THE WEST IN CRISIS, p. 17) “The fatal weaknesses of Western Man have been his insatiable acquisitiveness and his inability to live at peace with himself. Both are products of a materialism insufficiently restrained by humanitarianism and moral sensibility .... In his endless quarrels, Western Man has reached forever more deadly weapons of murder and destruction.”
Sometimes I think we fit the biting appraisal of Dr. Skinner in Samuel Butlers, WAY OF ALL FLESH (p. 115). “He had the harmlessness of the serpent and the wisdom of the dove.”
With no reflection on the commendable process of group definition of problems and goals, I would submit to you that the modern duel between Israelite and Philistine is the struggle for the mind of man. Furthermore, unless we as individuals prize and cultivate our individual minds, then any social process will degrade our ideals. Unless we are unrelenting in standing forthrightly for individual freedom and human dignity, then the words of Hector (TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, ACT II, SC. 2) would fit us with deadly precision, “’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the God.”
Therefore, I presume to offer advice to individuals. For what avail is social process if too many of us echo the poet’s anguished cry, “where is the life we have lost in the living?” It is said that in a churchyard in Scotland, this rather puzzling epitaph appears on a tombstone,
“Here lies the remains of Thomas Nichols
Who died in Philadelphia, March 1753.
Had he lived, he would have been buried here.”
Is that not a mournful clause for anyone’s obituary, “had he lived?” I suggest to you that in order to endure the pressures upon us in the world where the target is our minds, we need not only defenses against Goliath, but also safeguards against our own over-organization. [Editor’s note: handwritten in margin: “faceless men in the crowd”]
Many years ago a high-school teacher in the Bronx, N.Y. gave parting advice to a graduating class. His advice was simple, but since the time one of his students passed it on to me, I have discovered that profound meanings are involved:
Take a walk
Read a book
Make a friend
Wheels, wings, and time-clock living have conspired to make walking a lost art. Charles Dickens once said, “the sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy; walk and be healthy; -- the best way to lengthen out our days is to walk steadily and with purpose.”
A walk in the cool of the evening or the brightness of the day establishes contact with a reality we tend to neglect. The great poets remind us in Wordsworth’s words that it is better to be a “pagan, nurtured in a creed outworn,” than to become so engrossed in the mechanics of existence that we neglect our vital, organic relationship to the universe in which we “live and move and have our being.”
Goethe proposed that “nature is the living, visible garment of God.”
Shakespeare, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” (Troilus and Cressida).
Bryant rhapsodized,
“to him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms,
She speaks a various language.”
Even skeptical Voltaire once remarked, “Men argue, Nature acts.”
But the value of a walk is not alone for the purpose of communing with Nature. Some persons respond not at all to the loveliness of a flower or the majesty of a wooded hill. “A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And nothing more.”
For the sake of inner honesty a person needs the opportunity to escape the jingle and jangle, mingle and mangle long enough to organize his thoughts. Victor Hugo reminded us, (LES MISERABLES, p. 519), “Meditation is, as well as prayer, a necessity of humanity.”
We need the discipline of being able to live with ourselves. We may not spend the time that Thoreau did at Walden, but like he, we too should now and again listen for the beat of a distant drum. In our own day Peter Viereck has wisely observed (THE NEW AMERICAN RIGHT, p. 114-5), “there comes a time when lasting values are conserved not by matey back-slapping but by wayward walks in the drizzle....”
Then, too, sudden delights are the occasional rewards bestowed when walking on a country road, the city street, or a primitive trail. Helen Keller, whose life is glory, once said “Oh the unexpected joys that meet us just around the corners of life.”
Take a walk.
Read a book. In this season when the pressures of exams, term papers, and reading reports are released, you may look with jaundiced eye on this exhortation. “Read a book. That’s all I’ve been doing for years!” you may say. You might quote with some secret satisfaction that old New England proverb, “Reading rots the brain.” Perhaps a weary student coined that one. Or you might approve Milton’s comment about the one who was “deep-versed in books, but shallow in himself.”
But while these graduating days may be the occasion when you keep up only with Dick Tracy and the stumbling Indians (who seem to be vanishing in the American League), your years will be well-used if you read—the classic, the novelty, the poetic, the bizarre, the “who-dun-it,” the stern criticisms of our follies and foibles and the great prophet minds who call us to become masters over our waywardness.
The O.T. prophet, Habakkuk (2/2) said long ages ago, “Write the vision; make it plain upon the tablets, so he way run who reads it.” Not much has been written clearly enough so that we may read on the run, although it is said of John Wesley, founder of the great Methodist church that he read history, poetry and philosophy while riding his horse on his long years of itinerant preaching. Most books need some single-minded attention. Your life is placed on a long line of social history. If you want perspective, you must go to the books. It is the books which transform the campfire legend to authentic history. If you would know history, you must go to the books.
Furthermore, although we all enjoy escapist reading from time to time, the art of reading is a serious as well as enjoyable pursuit. G.K. Chesterton once observed, (Charles Dickens, THE LAST OF THE GREAT MEN, p. 73), “There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”
So I plead with you in Goethe’s words, “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
Read a book
Make a friend.
If your college years have given you at least minimum blessings, you have made and cemented friendships which will endure all the years of your life. One of the best uses of the long years will be the maintenance, renewal and deepening of those friendships. Socrates spoke wisely when he said, it is well worth while to learn how the win the heart of a man the right way.”
Let me hasten to add that the years will batter you about and some friendships may provoke bitter disillusionment. Ambrose Bierce, one of the most thorough-going of cynics, spoke bitterly when he coined this saying for The Devil’s Dictionary: “While your friend holds you affectionately by both hands you are safe, for you can watch bot his.” Another embittered definition goes like this, “A friend is one who dislikes the same people you dislike.”
In spite of the possibility that the deepest hurts will happen when a friend “does you in,” make a friend. In the fellowship of human beings resides the relationship of deepest meaning and greatest job. If you only take walks and read books you are a solitary exile who has lost perspective.
Dostoevsky writes of this in the BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, when the following appeared in Father Zossima’s diary:
“All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof and hides what he has from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them....”
David’s friendship with Jonathan was far more significant to each of their lives than the spectacular victory over the Philistine giant.
The need for friendship will present difficulties for you peculiar to our age. This is an age of mobility. 25,000 people in the United States move every day. Many of you will shift your homes and occupations to other states, other countries. Today’s child is born in Canton, educated at the University of Akron, marries in Youngstown, moves to Cleveland to Dallas to Phoenix to Detroit to Cape Canaveral.
The opportunities no longer exist for most of [us] to derive the continuing joy of friendship from childhood associations through the adult years. In each of your moves I hope you keep before you the wise words of Hebrew scriptures (“A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such a one hath found a treasure.” So be a friend to have friends, whereever you go.
You may be wondering what this advice has to do with the titanic struggle for the minds of men between the Goliath forces and the David forces. Simply this – in order to be fit for the terrible struggle you must face, there must be moral resources so that you will have convictions disciplined by orderly thought and systematic knowledge. This strength you will need in order to take a political stand, influence political decisions and exert decent, democratic pressure on political institutions. [editor's note: the wording of the next sentence is unclear in the original] It is in the simple profundities of life that there is glow when the motivations which lead people change the world.
The best use of long years is to recognize, in John Ruskin’s words (UNTO THIS LAST) “there is no wealth but life.” In Miss Sackville-West's biography of Joan of Arc (p. 90), Jean de Metz offered to help Joan and asked her when she wanted him to start. Joan answered, “Now, rather than tomorrow, and tomorrow rather than the day after.”
Take a walk –- read a book – make a friend.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
The Effective Role of the Universalist Church
May 15, 1959
Illinois State Convention
This paper attempts to propose that religious dissenters gathered as members of Universalist Churches, have continuing, important functions to perform and significant tasks to accomplish. Furthermore, these functions, and the important duties to be achieved, can be fully understood only in apprehending and accepting the social reality that religious liberals are a minority in a culture that is at least somewhat constricted by pressures which tend to mold attributes of acquiescence and conformity.
If I am at all correct in interpreting the signs of our times, the Universalist Church, in any given community, is an organized, but numerically small group of religious non-conformists. Apart from some who are in the church because it is a family tradition or habit, most of the persons who are responding to our liberal message and participating in the worship and work of our Universalist churches, are enthused about release from out-moded religious ideas, and stimulated by our prevailing heady climate dominated by a freedom-conscious mood and the challenge of individual fulfillment. The brotherhood basis of all the world's religions, with no obeisance to a Christianity considered to be the uniquely-revealed "only, true" religion, is becoming an increasingly attractive motivation for association with us.
In the blending of these patters of ideas can be viewed the various operational phases of our religious movement -- preaching that appeals to common sense; religious education which seeks to develop the potential goodness, emotional health and ethical social participation of the growing individual; an attitude toward human need which is justified solely on the value of service to One Humanity, rather than missions to "win the world for Christ;" group attention to group programs (our AUW national office is to be commended particularly) which direct serious concern to informing us about efforts to bring about a better world and motivating us to do something which will advance practically some accomplishment of our ideals.
Seldom, however, is the pattern clear and frequently the operational phases seem to bog down. There is a considerable degree of confusion. "What do Universalists believe?" is a question not only asked by the seeker and the critic, but also a question asked regularly by many young and old veterans of the "faith."
In his latter years, the late, great newspaperman, Heywood Broun was a disillusioned liberal who once described a little boy fascinated by the merry-go-round at the county fair. The lad screamed to be put on the merry-go-round. When father lifted him on, the boy yelled and insisted on getting off. When father took him and backed away, the youngster raised another fuss. After observing the inconsistent uproars voiced by the child who wanted to ride, but actually couldn't muster the courage to commit himself to the whirling horses, Broun said to himself, "Now I know what a liberal is."
Because I feel that organized liberalism should be something more than a cocktail of three parts togetherness with one part confusion, plus a dash of bitterness, let me be audacious enough to define a Universalist.
From where I stand, one can assume rightfully that a Universalist accepts the body of tested truth accumulated by the geologist, astronomist, biologist, physicist, social scientist and all other authentic, learned professions. The Universalist follows reason as a guide and validates propositions by experience and experiment. The Universalist places freedom and the supreme worth of every human personality at the top of his hierarchy of values. Furthermore, the Universalist looks hopefully on the problem of the nature and destiny of man.
Now while my subject today does not deal with worship in the liberal church, parenthetically I would direct your attention to the imposing fact that adult group worship is the experience which consistently realizes the largest participation and most regular support. In my opinion, persons attending worship in liberal churches participate because of two paramount needs. First, they seek self-renewal because the treadmill of anxiety, pain, boredom, routine, or defeat has torn the edges of their inner selves. Worship has the power to stimulate the cells of spiritual growth necessary to heal the abrasions which are a consequence of living regularly with manifold difficulties. Secondly, worship is the great reminder of the obligations of a religion committed to the atmosphere of fellowship, the dimension of freedom and the basic assumption of the dignity of every person. In worship, these ideals should press on our inertia to the end that we shall depart only in peace, but also in commitment to action.
But, as T.S. Eliot phrased so tellingly, ("The Hollow Men")
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow.
In our land, one of the enveloping clouds considerably larger than a man's hand already, is the continuing cultural pressure from the constrictions of which it is a formidable task to escape. Contemporary literature, social studies and various research assignments have established in some scholarly detail certain perils to the liberal image.
In his classical study, THE LONELY CROWD, David Riesman vividly writes of the "other-directed" representative man of our day. Having forsaken the conservative "tradition-directed" position and no longer possessing the courage or desire to be "inner-directed," modern man extrudes his motivational radar screens in order to receive the signal of the class in which he aspires to be accepted. Erich Fromm in a different frame of reference describes the inner state of modern man as geared to a "marketing" personality. One strives to sell himself; in other circumstances, unpleasant nouns are used to define this sort of peddling. [crossed out: In a classic chapter of Sloan Wilson's, MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT, the hero striving to get a job, anxiously watches the prospective employer, trying to catch a facial cue so that he may answer what the prospective boss wants to hear, rather than that which is really the truth.] The social scientists have performed painstaking research in elaborating the thesis that we are a culture which combines what could be termed attributes of cat and chameleon. We strive for a place in the sun. When we "get it made," we readily accept the protective coloration of the surroundings. Then we will resist any venture which might provoke the other chameleons to notice differences.
You can find documentation for a rather alarming spread of a conformity which has few aspects of creativity. William Whyte's, THE ORGANIZATION MAN, and Vance Packard's, THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS, are both cogent reiterations of our creeping mediocrity in the realm of ideas. Judging from the reviews, Vance Packard's new book, THE STATUS SEEKERS fortifies the thesis that we are in danger of finding ourselves destitute of ideas amid a wealth of mechanical devices. If we sharpen our ethical sensibilities, we may find the "sweet smell of success," has become cloyed with the insidious odor of decay. Aldous Huxley (BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, p. 24), comments, "To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated by so few."
At the same time that our mass media of communication are pounding our malleable motivations into a state properly conditioned to respond with alacrity at the tinkle of the huckster's bell, as a culture we are concerning ourselves less and less with the opportunities to acquaint ourselves with ideas and facts which are not being dinned into our ears and limned into our eyes through the well-beaten paths of the airwaves. The April issue of the Journal of National Education reports a poll by the nationally known Roper firm. In the article, "The Lightly Travelled Road to Wisdom," Mr. Roper reports the reading habits of a cross-section sample of Americans. Because he had secured a similar sampling some years ago, he was able to compare the increase or decrease in American reading habits. 18% of our people never read a book they were not compelled to read. In the earlier survey, when asked the question, "Do you happen to be reading any books or novels at present?" only 21% of the adults were currently reading a book. In the more recent survey, taken ten years after the first sampling, only 17% were reading. It is sobering to note that 55% of adults in England were reading a book. Other countries, Canada, Australia, and West Germany had reading records nearly twice the percentage of Americans. While no statistical percentages are available of course, visitors to the Soviet Union report the amazing popularity of libraries, and the intense fashion in which the Russian people are seemingly taking advantage of learning opportunities.
Even more alarming is the impact one feels after studying the historic report by Philip E. Jacob, CHANGING VALUES IN COLLEGE. (Harper & Bros., NY 1957).
If you have studied the famous Jacob's report, you will need no exhortation from me to persuade you that it is not hysterical fear to feel alarmed that we are in danger of captivity to contemporary cowardice, as Martin Luther recognized in his day the "Babylonian Captivity of the Church."
Some of the generalizations supported statistically by the Jacob's report on college students are these:
Students tend to think alike, feel alike, and believe alike.
Students are gloriously contented and optimistic in outlook.
Self-centered, they aspire for material gratification for themselves and their families and expect others to be similarly self-centered.
The students expressed a need for religion but had no expectation that it would or should carry over into their daily lives.
They possessed an easy tolerance for diversity, but didn't care to become involved in any reforming crusades.
The students, by and large, had no desire to play an influential role in public affairs. Most of them would fit the description, "politically irresponsible and politically illiterate."
While almost to a man the students asserted that honesty is a moral virtue, "frequent cheating is admitted by 40% or more, with no apology or real sense of wrongdoing."
From their college experience students hope to acquire vocational or professional skill and experience in social adjustment. This is no real desire for intellectual development, no concern for strengthening character, no hunger for warm, responsive human relations.
This list of generalizations is not intended to make the average college student the target of special indignation. The massive threat of the Jacobs' report is not that the average college student has trivial concerns, only, but that those disheartening characteristics accurately mirror the society in which these students acquired these values, which surely seem of a quality not calculated to be a good omen for our civilization.
The question really is, "Are we motivating our children to seek acquisitive goals and "satisfactory" social adjustment only, rather than the moral values we profess?"
In recent research at the University of Michigan, (DETROIT FREE PRESS, 4/11/59), Dr. E.E. Jennings, the director of the study, reported "majority of the (business) men we interviewed admitted they believe self-interest is the basis of all human nature, that it is safer to be suspicious of men and assume their nature is more bad than good."
American business attitudes in major areas of human relations were summarized as follows:
"Friendship -- loyal subordinates are the mark of a competent executive but he risks a loss of flexibility by making close friends in areas crucial to his interests.
Agreement -- Agreements should commit the other person; past promises need not stand in the way of success.
Decision Making -- An executive should not allow free participation in decisions crucial to his interests; a decision once made should not be open to doubt.
Communication -- The executive should not expose his hand; superior information is an advantage; never tell all you know and give out information sparingly; don't take advice you didn't ask for."
Dr. Jennings canvassed clergymen to secure their anticipations on what the surveys would disclose about business attitudes and the director comments, "The clergymen were generally way off in their judgments. The majority underestimated how distrustful the executive is and how difficult it may be for him to accept the brotherhood of man."
This rather scattered summary of some of the social research in our country could be summarized in a barbed comment once made by Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." Or to dramatize the cultural dilemma in a different framework: "A computer attendant annoyed at the independence of the machine he is supposed to control, mutters, "All right, if you're so damned smart, tell me: Is there a God? Booms the machine, 'There is now!'" (TIME magazine, 4/6/59).
This leads me to certain directions which, perhaps, many of our groups have long ago charted. These suggested approaches may be "old-hat" to some of our churches and some of the possible ventures well-advanced in implementation. Nevertheless, in order to attempt a fairly complete review of the role, as I see it, of the Universalist Church in the cultural setting described, practices which may be routine to many of you will be advanced.
First, all varieties of the more orthodox Christian [churches], as well as those tending to be tinted with the colors of the more liberal end of the spectrum, are being subjected to the same smoothing-out process as other institutions. The strong tide of Christian oecumenicity, the growing "we" feeling of the various churches banded together in local councils, the increasing number of joint enterprises such as supporting educational chaplaincies and the tendency toward mergers, (Presbyterian and U.P., Congregational-Christian and Reformed, e.g.) and the undeniable social and political influence of the National Council of Churches, all support the view that doctrinal differences in the regular order of Christian churches are far less divisive than heretofore. If one should possess the point of view of middle-of-the-road Protestantism, one would be considerably comforted in the possibility of a coming united witness.
However, for those of us in the caps of unabashedly liberal religion, this growing Christian conformity represents an opportunity we can both seriously underestimate and sadly overestimate.
We can underestimate our appeal if we fail to recognize several facts about our age. There are additional factors, but first let me refer briefly to education, mobility and international cross-fertilization.
The Jacobs' report which offered so many discouraging facts about young America, also pointed out a salient item for religious liberals. The study showed that as a person matured from freshman to senior, he showed considerable increase in ability and desire to make intellectual distinctions; he grew in capacity to think. With the tide of college enrollments pushing the ceiling from matriculation statistics, we have a rapidly growing number of persons graduating from college who will respond to a religion intellectually sound and emotionally honest. For us to overlook publicity opportunities to acquaint this large group with what Universalism is and does, would be an oversight of considerable magnitude.
Mobility is no small force in our potential growth. 25,000 people move every day in the United States. America is a land of people on the "go." Born in Waukegan, growing up in Milwaukee, going to school in Ann Arbor, marrying in Cleveland, the young executive, labor staff-man, technician or salesman moves from Oak Park to Pasadena to Cape Canaveral.
The task of moving from the orthodox church to ours has some social inconvenience, at least, when one is born, lives, and dies in one home-town. But in new situations such difficulties are largely absent. We have an opportunity to present a soundly-inspiring religion in such winning fashion that mobile America will have an additional immediate target after the goods are unpacked -- not only find a doctor and dentist, but also the nearest Universalist or Unitarian church or fellowship.
Cultural cross-fertilization is far more widely accepted than we dare to hope. Students from Asia, Africa, Europe, Israel, Japan, and all the world are finding more about us; we are getting to know them. Even a casual observer can sense that the old religious jingoism is passing away. Even the standard Christian groups are asking serious questions about missionary proselytizing.
The fact of religious universalism is tacitly acknowledged. The word "pagan" is disappearing from the language -- except when liberals describe Christian Easter.
The times demand that we shall not fail to make attractive a Universalism which maintains clearly the universality of man's religious impulse, assumes the dignity of many ways of worship and spurns forthrightly the claim of any religion to be uniquely revealed and singularly authoritative.
In an alternate rhythm, let me postulate that we may tend also to overestimate our chances if we do not perceive that all opportunities have built-in hazards. The liberal religious organization is subject to the same pressures for conformity as all other institutions. Then, too, we are exposed to the peculiar temptation to confound anarchy with freedom, confuse mediocrity with simplicity and label idle curiosity, universality.
In one of the finest books in years, CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY, (Harper, 1958, p. 289-90), Walter Kaufman points out in another connection the subtle danger of confusing broad universalism with a collection of trivia,
"The eclectic collects; he builds a museum; he is sovereign. He does not go behind the work of art, the idea, the philosophy, to reach the disturbing experience that prompted it; he stays at home. His taste may be excellent, but something is lacking. He is like a man who assembles snapshots of works of art and prides himself on catholicity of his appreciation, but knows only the surfaces; what is lacking is dimension, depth, going out of one's own safe world to enter into what is strange.
"In the study of art, religion and philosophy, we ourselves are the clay and the biggest question is what becomes of ourselves."
The most serious hazard to a meaningful role for the liberal church is that we shall be non-conformist enough to satisfy a mild, intellectual revolt against religious fantasy proposed as revealed truth, while at the same time maintaining a position so non-committed that we will stay in the middle of the road to the end that no one in or out of the organization will be seriously disturbed and there will be no chance that anything important will be accomplished.
Consequently, I would maintain that religious universalism, in the doctrinal or sectarian sense, is not enough to insure our survival as a minority group. Religious universalism, narrowly considered, may not even be justified. Historically, in much of the first half of this century, when our organized movement declined, it occurred tangentially at least during a period when the great body of Protestantism stopped preaching about fire and brimstone and tacitly, at least, accepted the Universalist position on this ancient controversy about damnation. "No hell" preaching became neither wrong nor controversial. I suspect, too, that it became dull. It was like fighting at Gettysburg after some of the combat had shifted to Guadalcanal.
Today we must recognize that on the minorities hinge the door to survival -- physical and moral. The real struggle in our world is to win the minds of men before they are enslaved. There is not the slightest reason to be content that "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." The horrors pictured in George Orwell's 1984 are approaching reality apace. (Read Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED.)
Daniel Lerner in a recently published volume, THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY, MODERNIZING THE MIDDLE EAST, states in a scholarly framework, "A mobile society has to encourage rationality, for the calculus of choice shapes individual behavior and conditions its rewards. People come to see the future as manipulable rather than ordained and their personal prospects in terms of achievement rather than heritage."
The future can be manipulated! The ethical minorities must decide whether the process will be democratic discussion and expression or totalitarian brain-washing.
The world struggle for the minds of men pivots not on a single axis, the Western vs. the Soviet bloc, but also on vigilance and effective progress on all the questions involving the body and soul of humanity;
Underdeveloped and hungry nations.
Education
Church and State
Integration in the United States
The role and rights of organized labor
Over-population
Radiation poisoning
Urban planning and renewal.
This is, obviously, not an exhaustive list. But a minority cannot be significant and at the same time maintain a blissful ignorance of these thorny issues which are pivotal in the struggle for freedom and human dignity.
Ministers need to be reminded of the savagely ironic words of Gibbon (VOL. 1, Ch. 3, p. 290), "The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between throne and altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people." The only realistic way to refute that criticism is by action.
The problem of the religious dissenter becomes acute at this very point. Religious dissenters in our age are far from unanimity in the problem areas named. How can we achieve an actable consensus in a group in which a majority of opinion could be elicited on a controversial question only when the issues are precise and completely clear, which they seldom are. The minister speaks for himself; the social action committee speaks for itself and is sometimes the target of violent criticism in a church. There just is no health in a vague revolt even though it may placate some, which skirts all real issues in double talk with a consequence of stalemate and impotence.
Without exaggeration, we may find ourselves in the position on the legendary farmer who was asked how his cotton was coming on:
"Ain't got none."
"Did you plant any/"
"Nope, fraid of boll weevils."
"Well, how is your corn?"
"Didn't plant none, fraid there wa'n't going to be no rain."
"Potatoes?"
"Nope, scared of potato bugs."
"Really, what did you plant?"
"Nothin, I jest played safe."
Let me suggest that [a] partial solution to the dilemma of consensus on social questions in a liberal religious organization may be discovered in recognizing that apart from theological questions as such, there is no such thing as a universalist public. Because we are ministers, housewives, technicians, engineers, production workers, salesmen and all manner of occupational diversity, and because the forming influences on our attitudes have been indescribably various, there is no possibility of a united viewpoint. But there are Universalist publics. I believe they can be assembled.
[Achievable Goals]
Therefore, one Universalist public will be motivated to gather and discuss, and take a position on integration in housing; while another public, with probably some of the same persons, might gather for a discussion on fission bomb testing. The list could be extended to all issues which impinge on the ethical sensitivities of more than two persons. Now while there will be a handful of persons with wide catholicity of taste and ample time to participate in most of the minority interest groups within a minority church, for the most part a consensus wide enough to represent a majority of church members will be difficult to achieve.
This means that while no little group can be the authentic voice of the church except under regulated parish meeting disciplines, the consequence would be each group would speak for itself in the worthy effort to present facts and persuade people. The consequence is that on different issues the persons allied would not represent the same personnel.
In order to achieve this process of discussion, conviction and communication there must be certain basic assumptions about the nature of man and how he is influenced.
Lepidus says to Caesar and Antony, (Act 2, sc. 2),
"Noble friends
That which combines us was most great and let not
A leaner notion rend us. What's amiss
May it be gently heard. When we debate
Our trivial difference loud, we do commit
Murther in healing mounds. Then noble partners,
The rather for I earnestly beseech you
Touch you the sourest points with sweetest words."
Now while our debates may neither be "gently heard," nor with the "sweetest words," because we appraise human nature as fundamentally promising good rather than evil, our educative process must be coherent with confidence in man.
Martin Buber in his essay, "On National Education," (From ISRAEL AND THE WORLD), points out that there are two basic ways to educate.
One way, all too common, is that of the sculptor who chips the natural human material to the form of his vision or plan. This is the authoritarian way of the manipulator. This is not acceptable to Universalists.
The second approach likens the educator to the gardener, "who fertilizes and waters the soil, prunes and props the plan, and removes the rank weeds from around it. But after he has done all this, if the weather is propitious, he trusts the natural growth of that which is inherent in the seed...."
Admitting that the growth approach may be more passive, in the long run I believe we will function most effectively within our Universalist context, and in all society, if we prepare, present and announce our convictions, confident that the nature of man is such that he will not forever damn his own redemption.
One thing more -- I have assumed that a high degree of empathy is not only possible but already operating in Universalist societies. By empathy, I refer to a "real capacity to see ones-self in the other fellows' situation" (Daniel Lerner). Lerner points out effectively that in our type of liberal, mobile society, we can achieve consensus only through a participating organizational life. We will need to develop great skills of person-to-person relationships. Furthermore, our common worship must be not only prophetic, but integrating.
The stakes are large -- the survival of humanity with widening boundaries of freedom and human dignity. in the SRL review of Stanton Coblen's book, THE LONG ROAD TO HUMANITY, this paragraph appeared, "A gladiator in the Roman arena standing over his prostrate foe (and) looking to the spectators for the fateful sign. Will it be thumbs up or thumbs down? It is along these two lines that human history has taken its course: war vs. peacemaking; slavery vs. the freeing of the slaves; religious massacres vs. religious sanctuaries; head-hunting cannibalism, human sacrifice vs. care for the maimed and oppressed; ... These contrasted types of behavior have been with us all through history and everywhere in the world, thumbs up or thumbs down."
If the final verdict is to be "Thumbs up" rather than "Thumbs down," then we must be more than spectators, we too must enter the arena.
Illinois State Convention
This paper attempts to propose that religious dissenters gathered as members of Universalist Churches, have continuing, important functions to perform and significant tasks to accomplish. Furthermore, these functions, and the important duties to be achieved, can be fully understood only in apprehending and accepting the social reality that religious liberals are a minority in a culture that is at least somewhat constricted by pressures which tend to mold attributes of acquiescence and conformity.
If I am at all correct in interpreting the signs of our times, the Universalist Church, in any given community, is an organized, but numerically small group of religious non-conformists. Apart from some who are in the church because it is a family tradition or habit, most of the persons who are responding to our liberal message and participating in the worship and work of our Universalist churches, are enthused about release from out-moded religious ideas, and stimulated by our prevailing heady climate dominated by a freedom-conscious mood and the challenge of individual fulfillment. The brotherhood basis of all the world's religions, with no obeisance to a Christianity considered to be the uniquely-revealed "only, true" religion, is becoming an increasingly attractive motivation for association with us.
In the blending of these patters of ideas can be viewed the various operational phases of our religious movement -- preaching that appeals to common sense; religious education which seeks to develop the potential goodness, emotional health and ethical social participation of the growing individual; an attitude toward human need which is justified solely on the value of service to One Humanity, rather than missions to "win the world for Christ;" group attention to group programs (our AUW national office is to be commended particularly) which direct serious concern to informing us about efforts to bring about a better world and motivating us to do something which will advance practically some accomplishment of our ideals.
Seldom, however, is the pattern clear and frequently the operational phases seem to bog down. There is a considerable degree of confusion. "What do Universalists believe?" is a question not only asked by the seeker and the critic, but also a question asked regularly by many young and old veterans of the "faith."
In his latter years, the late, great newspaperman, Heywood Broun was a disillusioned liberal who once described a little boy fascinated by the merry-go-round at the county fair. The lad screamed to be put on the merry-go-round. When father lifted him on, the boy yelled and insisted on getting off. When father took him and backed away, the youngster raised another fuss. After observing the inconsistent uproars voiced by the child who wanted to ride, but actually couldn't muster the courage to commit himself to the whirling horses, Broun said to himself, "Now I know what a liberal is."
Because I feel that organized liberalism should be something more than a cocktail of three parts togetherness with one part confusion, plus a dash of bitterness, let me be audacious enough to define a Universalist.
From where I stand, one can assume rightfully that a Universalist accepts the body of tested truth accumulated by the geologist, astronomist, biologist, physicist, social scientist and all other authentic, learned professions. The Universalist follows reason as a guide and validates propositions by experience and experiment. The Universalist places freedom and the supreme worth of every human personality at the top of his hierarchy of values. Furthermore, the Universalist looks hopefully on the problem of the nature and destiny of man.
Now while my subject today does not deal with worship in the liberal church, parenthetically I would direct your attention to the imposing fact that adult group worship is the experience which consistently realizes the largest participation and most regular support. In my opinion, persons attending worship in liberal churches participate because of two paramount needs. First, they seek self-renewal because the treadmill of anxiety, pain, boredom, routine, or defeat has torn the edges of their inner selves. Worship has the power to stimulate the cells of spiritual growth necessary to heal the abrasions which are a consequence of living regularly with manifold difficulties. Secondly, worship is the great reminder of the obligations of a religion committed to the atmosphere of fellowship, the dimension of freedom and the basic assumption of the dignity of every person. In worship, these ideals should press on our inertia to the end that we shall depart only in peace, but also in commitment to action.
But, as T.S. Eliot phrased so tellingly, ("The Hollow Men")
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow.
In our land, one of the enveloping clouds considerably larger than a man's hand already, is the continuing cultural pressure from the constrictions of which it is a formidable task to escape. Contemporary literature, social studies and various research assignments have established in some scholarly detail certain perils to the liberal image.
In his classical study, THE LONELY CROWD, David Riesman vividly writes of the "other-directed" representative man of our day. Having forsaken the conservative "tradition-directed" position and no longer possessing the courage or desire to be "inner-directed," modern man extrudes his motivational radar screens in order to receive the signal of the class in which he aspires to be accepted. Erich Fromm in a different frame of reference describes the inner state of modern man as geared to a "marketing" personality. One strives to sell himself; in other circumstances, unpleasant nouns are used to define this sort of peddling. [crossed out: In a classic chapter of Sloan Wilson's, MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT, the hero striving to get a job, anxiously watches the prospective employer, trying to catch a facial cue so that he may answer what the prospective boss wants to hear, rather than that which is really the truth.] The social scientists have performed painstaking research in elaborating the thesis that we are a culture which combines what could be termed attributes of cat and chameleon. We strive for a place in the sun. When we "get it made," we readily accept the protective coloration of the surroundings. Then we will resist any venture which might provoke the other chameleons to notice differences.
You can find documentation for a rather alarming spread of a conformity which has few aspects of creativity. William Whyte's, THE ORGANIZATION MAN, and Vance Packard's, THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS, are both cogent reiterations of our creeping mediocrity in the realm of ideas. Judging from the reviews, Vance Packard's new book, THE STATUS SEEKERS fortifies the thesis that we are in danger of finding ourselves destitute of ideas amid a wealth of mechanical devices. If we sharpen our ethical sensibilities, we may find the "sweet smell of success," has become cloyed with the insidious odor of decay. Aldous Huxley (BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, p. 24), comments, "To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated by so few."
At the same time that our mass media of communication are pounding our malleable motivations into a state properly conditioned to respond with alacrity at the tinkle of the huckster's bell, as a culture we are concerning ourselves less and less with the opportunities to acquaint ourselves with ideas and facts which are not being dinned into our ears and limned into our eyes through the well-beaten paths of the airwaves. The April issue of the Journal of National Education reports a poll by the nationally known Roper firm. In the article, "The Lightly Travelled Road to Wisdom," Mr. Roper reports the reading habits of a cross-section sample of Americans. Because he had secured a similar sampling some years ago, he was able to compare the increase or decrease in American reading habits. 18% of our people never read a book they were not compelled to read. In the earlier survey, when asked the question, "Do you happen to be reading any books or novels at present?" only 21% of the adults were currently reading a book. In the more recent survey, taken ten years after the first sampling, only 17% were reading. It is sobering to note that 55% of adults in England were reading a book. Other countries, Canada, Australia, and West Germany had reading records nearly twice the percentage of Americans. While no statistical percentages are available of course, visitors to the Soviet Union report the amazing popularity of libraries, and the intense fashion in which the Russian people are seemingly taking advantage of learning opportunities.
Even more alarming is the impact one feels after studying the historic report by Philip E. Jacob, CHANGING VALUES IN COLLEGE. (Harper & Bros., NY 1957).
If you have studied the famous Jacob's report, you will need no exhortation from me to persuade you that it is not hysterical fear to feel alarmed that we are in danger of captivity to contemporary cowardice, as Martin Luther recognized in his day the "Babylonian Captivity of the Church."
Some of the generalizations supported statistically by the Jacob's report on college students are these:
Students tend to think alike, feel alike, and believe alike.
Students are gloriously contented and optimistic in outlook.
Self-centered, they aspire for material gratification for themselves and their families and expect others to be similarly self-centered.
The students expressed a need for religion but had no expectation that it would or should carry over into their daily lives.
They possessed an easy tolerance for diversity, but didn't care to become involved in any reforming crusades.
The students, by and large, had no desire to play an influential role in public affairs. Most of them would fit the description, "politically irresponsible and politically illiterate."
While almost to a man the students asserted that honesty is a moral virtue, "frequent cheating is admitted by 40% or more, with no apology or real sense of wrongdoing."
From their college experience students hope to acquire vocational or professional skill and experience in social adjustment. This is no real desire for intellectual development, no concern for strengthening character, no hunger for warm, responsive human relations.
This list of generalizations is not intended to make the average college student the target of special indignation. The massive threat of the Jacobs' report is not that the average college student has trivial concerns, only, but that those disheartening characteristics accurately mirror the society in which these students acquired these values, which surely seem of a quality not calculated to be a good omen for our civilization.
The question really is, "Are we motivating our children to seek acquisitive goals and "satisfactory" social adjustment only, rather than the moral values we profess?"
In recent research at the University of Michigan, (DETROIT FREE PRESS, 4/11/59), Dr. E.E. Jennings, the director of the study, reported "majority of the (business) men we interviewed admitted they believe self-interest is the basis of all human nature, that it is safer to be suspicious of men and assume their nature is more bad than good."
American business attitudes in major areas of human relations were summarized as follows:
"Friendship -- loyal subordinates are the mark of a competent executive but he risks a loss of flexibility by making close friends in areas crucial to his interests.
Agreement -- Agreements should commit the other person; past promises need not stand in the way of success.
Decision Making -- An executive should not allow free participation in decisions crucial to his interests; a decision once made should not be open to doubt.
Communication -- The executive should not expose his hand; superior information is an advantage; never tell all you know and give out information sparingly; don't take advice you didn't ask for."
Dr. Jennings canvassed clergymen to secure their anticipations on what the surveys would disclose about business attitudes and the director comments, "The clergymen were generally way off in their judgments. The majority underestimated how distrustful the executive is and how difficult it may be for him to accept the brotherhood of man."
This rather scattered summary of some of the social research in our country could be summarized in a barbed comment once made by Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." Or to dramatize the cultural dilemma in a different framework: "A computer attendant annoyed at the independence of the machine he is supposed to control, mutters, "All right, if you're so damned smart, tell me: Is there a God? Booms the machine, 'There is now!'" (TIME magazine, 4/6/59).
This leads me to certain directions which, perhaps, many of our groups have long ago charted. These suggested approaches may be "old-hat" to some of our churches and some of the possible ventures well-advanced in implementation. Nevertheless, in order to attempt a fairly complete review of the role, as I see it, of the Universalist Church in the cultural setting described, practices which may be routine to many of you will be advanced.
First, all varieties of the more orthodox Christian [churches], as well as those tending to be tinted with the colors of the more liberal end of the spectrum, are being subjected to the same smoothing-out process as other institutions. The strong tide of Christian oecumenicity, the growing "we" feeling of the various churches banded together in local councils, the increasing number of joint enterprises such as supporting educational chaplaincies and the tendency toward mergers, (Presbyterian and U.P., Congregational-Christian and Reformed, e.g.) and the undeniable social and political influence of the National Council of Churches, all support the view that doctrinal differences in the regular order of Christian churches are far less divisive than heretofore. If one should possess the point of view of middle-of-the-road Protestantism, one would be considerably comforted in the possibility of a coming united witness.
However, for those of us in the caps of unabashedly liberal religion, this growing Christian conformity represents an opportunity we can both seriously underestimate and sadly overestimate.
We can underestimate our appeal if we fail to recognize several facts about our age. There are additional factors, but first let me refer briefly to education, mobility and international cross-fertilization.
The Jacobs' report which offered so many discouraging facts about young America, also pointed out a salient item for religious liberals. The study showed that as a person matured from freshman to senior, he showed considerable increase in ability and desire to make intellectual distinctions; he grew in capacity to think. With the tide of college enrollments pushing the ceiling from matriculation statistics, we have a rapidly growing number of persons graduating from college who will respond to a religion intellectually sound and emotionally honest. For us to overlook publicity opportunities to acquaint this large group with what Universalism is and does, would be an oversight of considerable magnitude.
Mobility is no small force in our potential growth. 25,000 people move every day in the United States. America is a land of people on the "go." Born in Waukegan, growing up in Milwaukee, going to school in Ann Arbor, marrying in Cleveland, the young executive, labor staff-man, technician or salesman moves from Oak Park to Pasadena to Cape Canaveral.
The task of moving from the orthodox church to ours has some social inconvenience, at least, when one is born, lives, and dies in one home-town. But in new situations such difficulties are largely absent. We have an opportunity to present a soundly-inspiring religion in such winning fashion that mobile America will have an additional immediate target after the goods are unpacked -- not only find a doctor and dentist, but also the nearest Universalist or Unitarian church or fellowship.
Cultural cross-fertilization is far more widely accepted than we dare to hope. Students from Asia, Africa, Europe, Israel, Japan, and all the world are finding more about us; we are getting to know them. Even a casual observer can sense that the old religious jingoism is passing away. Even the standard Christian groups are asking serious questions about missionary proselytizing.
The fact of religious universalism is tacitly acknowledged. The word "pagan" is disappearing from the language -- except when liberals describe Christian Easter.
The times demand that we shall not fail to make attractive a Universalism which maintains clearly the universality of man's religious impulse, assumes the dignity of many ways of worship and spurns forthrightly the claim of any religion to be uniquely revealed and singularly authoritative.
In an alternate rhythm, let me postulate that we may tend also to overestimate our chances if we do not perceive that all opportunities have built-in hazards. The liberal religious organization is subject to the same pressures for conformity as all other institutions. Then, too, we are exposed to the peculiar temptation to confound anarchy with freedom, confuse mediocrity with simplicity and label idle curiosity, universality.
In one of the finest books in years, CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY, (Harper, 1958, p. 289-90), Walter Kaufman points out in another connection the subtle danger of confusing broad universalism with a collection of trivia,
"The eclectic collects; he builds a museum; he is sovereign. He does not go behind the work of art, the idea, the philosophy, to reach the disturbing experience that prompted it; he stays at home. His taste may be excellent, but something is lacking. He is like a man who assembles snapshots of works of art and prides himself on catholicity of his appreciation, but knows only the surfaces; what is lacking is dimension, depth, going out of one's own safe world to enter into what is strange.
"In the study of art, religion and philosophy, we ourselves are the clay and the biggest question is what becomes of ourselves."
The most serious hazard to a meaningful role for the liberal church is that we shall be non-conformist enough to satisfy a mild, intellectual revolt against religious fantasy proposed as revealed truth, while at the same time maintaining a position so non-committed that we will stay in the middle of the road to the end that no one in or out of the organization will be seriously disturbed and there will be no chance that anything important will be accomplished.
Consequently, I would maintain that religious universalism, in the doctrinal or sectarian sense, is not enough to insure our survival as a minority group. Religious universalism, narrowly considered, may not even be justified. Historically, in much of the first half of this century, when our organized movement declined, it occurred tangentially at least during a period when the great body of Protestantism stopped preaching about fire and brimstone and tacitly, at least, accepted the Universalist position on this ancient controversy about damnation. "No hell" preaching became neither wrong nor controversial. I suspect, too, that it became dull. It was like fighting at Gettysburg after some of the combat had shifted to Guadalcanal.
Today we must recognize that on the minorities hinge the door to survival -- physical and moral. The real struggle in our world is to win the minds of men before they are enslaved. There is not the slightest reason to be content that "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." The horrors pictured in George Orwell's 1984 are approaching reality apace. (Read Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED.)
Daniel Lerner in a recently published volume, THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY, MODERNIZING THE MIDDLE EAST, states in a scholarly framework, "A mobile society has to encourage rationality, for the calculus of choice shapes individual behavior and conditions its rewards. People come to see the future as manipulable rather than ordained and their personal prospects in terms of achievement rather than heritage."
The future can be manipulated! The ethical minorities must decide whether the process will be democratic discussion and expression or totalitarian brain-washing.
The world struggle for the minds of men pivots not on a single axis, the Western vs. the Soviet bloc, but also on vigilance and effective progress on all the questions involving the body and soul of humanity;
Underdeveloped and hungry nations.
Education
Church and State
Integration in the United States
The role and rights of organized labor
Over-population
Radiation poisoning
Urban planning and renewal.
This is, obviously, not an exhaustive list. But a minority cannot be significant and at the same time maintain a blissful ignorance of these thorny issues which are pivotal in the struggle for freedom and human dignity.
Ministers need to be reminded of the savagely ironic words of Gibbon (VOL. 1, Ch. 3, p. 290), "The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between throne and altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people." The only realistic way to refute that criticism is by action.
The problem of the religious dissenter becomes acute at this very point. Religious dissenters in our age are far from unanimity in the problem areas named. How can we achieve an actable consensus in a group in which a majority of opinion could be elicited on a controversial question only when the issues are precise and completely clear, which they seldom are. The minister speaks for himself; the social action committee speaks for itself and is sometimes the target of violent criticism in a church. There just is no health in a vague revolt even though it may placate some, which skirts all real issues in double talk with a consequence of stalemate and impotence.
Without exaggeration, we may find ourselves in the position on the legendary farmer who was asked how his cotton was coming on:
"Ain't got none."
"Did you plant any/"
"Nope, fraid of boll weevils."
"Well, how is your corn?"
"Didn't plant none, fraid there wa'n't going to be no rain."
"Potatoes?"
"Nope, scared of potato bugs."
"Really, what did you plant?"
"Nothin, I jest played safe."
Let me suggest that [a] partial solution to the dilemma of consensus on social questions in a liberal religious organization may be discovered in recognizing that apart from theological questions as such, there is no such thing as a universalist public. Because we are ministers, housewives, technicians, engineers, production workers, salesmen and all manner of occupational diversity, and because the forming influences on our attitudes have been indescribably various, there is no possibility of a united viewpoint. But there are Universalist publics. I believe they can be assembled.
[Achievable Goals]
Therefore, one Universalist public will be motivated to gather and discuss, and take a position on integration in housing; while another public, with probably some of the same persons, might gather for a discussion on fission bomb testing. The list could be extended to all issues which impinge on the ethical sensitivities of more than two persons. Now while there will be a handful of persons with wide catholicity of taste and ample time to participate in most of the minority interest groups within a minority church, for the most part a consensus wide enough to represent a majority of church members will be difficult to achieve.
This means that while no little group can be the authentic voice of the church except under regulated parish meeting disciplines, the consequence would be each group would speak for itself in the worthy effort to present facts and persuade people. The consequence is that on different issues the persons allied would not represent the same personnel.
In order to achieve this process of discussion, conviction and communication there must be certain basic assumptions about the nature of man and how he is influenced.
Lepidus says to Caesar and Antony, (Act 2, sc. 2),
"Noble friends
That which combines us was most great and let not
A leaner notion rend us. What's amiss
May it be gently heard. When we debate
Our trivial difference loud, we do commit
Murther in healing mounds. Then noble partners,
The rather for I earnestly beseech you
Touch you the sourest points with sweetest words."
Now while our debates may neither be "gently heard," nor with the "sweetest words," because we appraise human nature as fundamentally promising good rather than evil, our educative process must be coherent with confidence in man.
Martin Buber in his essay, "On National Education," (From ISRAEL AND THE WORLD), points out that there are two basic ways to educate.
One way, all too common, is that of the sculptor who chips the natural human material to the form of his vision or plan. This is the authoritarian way of the manipulator. This is not acceptable to Universalists.
The second approach likens the educator to the gardener, "who fertilizes and waters the soil, prunes and props the plan, and removes the rank weeds from around it. But after he has done all this, if the weather is propitious, he trusts the natural growth of that which is inherent in the seed...."
Admitting that the growth approach may be more passive, in the long run I believe we will function most effectively within our Universalist context, and in all society, if we prepare, present and announce our convictions, confident that the nature of man is such that he will not forever damn his own redemption.
One thing more -- I have assumed that a high degree of empathy is not only possible but already operating in Universalist societies. By empathy, I refer to a "real capacity to see ones-self in the other fellows' situation" (Daniel Lerner). Lerner points out effectively that in our type of liberal, mobile society, we can achieve consensus only through a participating organizational life. We will need to develop great skills of person-to-person relationships. Furthermore, our common worship must be not only prophetic, but integrating.
The stakes are large -- the survival of humanity with widening boundaries of freedom and human dignity. in the SRL review of Stanton Coblen's book, THE LONG ROAD TO HUMANITY, this paragraph appeared, "A gladiator in the Roman arena standing over his prostrate foe (and) looking to the spectators for the fateful sign. Will it be thumbs up or thumbs down? It is along these two lines that human history has taken its course: war vs. peacemaking; slavery vs. the freeing of the slaves; religious massacres vs. religious sanctuaries; head-hunting cannibalism, human sacrifice vs. care for the maimed and oppressed; ... These contrasted types of behavior have been with us all through history and everywhere in the world, thumbs up or thumbs down."
If the final verdict is to be "Thumbs up" rather than "Thumbs down," then we must be more than spectators, we too must enter the arena.
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