Augustine - Index to an Age

November 25, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
10. Augustine - Index to an Age

When Rome was at its weakest, a strange man, brilliant of mind and passionate of spirit, provided the strongest individual influence ever made on the Christian Church. The Roman Catholic Church calls him "Saint" Augustine. The Protestants do not call him "Saint," officially, but the theology of John Calvin, and Martin Luther as well, were molded by Augustine. Liberals have acquired greater understanding of their own principles and methods by reacting to Augustine's dogmatic theology of the Trinity, Original Sin, Grace, Pre-Destination and the Sacraments.

An African, he was the pre-eminent figure in the history of the Catholic Church. In a very real sense, he was the draftsman of Western Christianity.

In common with all men who have molded history, Augustine cannot be understood apart from his times. He experienced the Roman Empire throughout his lifetime only as a state rapidly weakening, as it attempted to withstand the barbarians pressing in from the German forests; crowding in from the Asian steppes. When he was thirteen years old, the Picts and the Scots, far from North Africa, successfully invaded England. DV2911US When Augustine was in the maturity of his career, the remnant of the Roman Legions left England in a last valiant attempt to bolster weaker parts of the Empire.

There is no one reason why the Roman Empire fell. Nearly every theory that is advanced is plausible; but all are incomplete. In all such judgments, perhaps the total is greater than the sum of the parts. There is an intangible thing which has been called, "the fullness of time" in all sweeping changes and movements. It was long past the fullness of time for Rome's greatness. It was the fullness of time for her decline. Yet in one cultural sense, Rome never fell. The legal, political, CIVIL government was transformed into a legal, political ECCLESIASTICAL government. The years of Augustine's lifetime witnessed the frailty and decline of Emperors and Roman legions, but these years also knew the growing strength of the Church as a powerful institution with vigorous leadership.

If one isolates the one hundred years from 350 to 450 A.D., one would be hard-pressed to discover another century, except the first century, where there have been more competent or powerful men upholding the Christian faith. There was a backdrop of declining Rome; and in the foreground of the stage of history, there was the shifting scenery of dogma. Among the great men achieving honor and glory for the Church in this significant century was Ambrose, elected Bishop of Milan in 374. Ambrose feared God but not emperors. It is possible that because of his wisdom, Augustine was gathered to the Church.

It was in this same century that Augustine, the great theologian, fixed for Roman, Calvinistic, Lutheran and other branches of mainstream Christianity, the theological foundations of the doctrines of the Trinity, Church and State, Sacraments, Freedom of Will or lack of it, and he pointed up the mystic ideal. A most vexing question, which perhaps implies the most pathetic of answers, did Augustine also make the final muddling and the complete confusion of message, spirit and the contribution of Jesus?

We know more about Augustine than almost any great leader of the early period. His "Confessions," one of the great classics of Christian literature, tell us a great deal about his life, even more about his temperament; and to the critical eye, a great deal is disclosed as to what made Christianity the kind of theological religion that it is.

On the 13th of November, in the year 354, in the city of Thagaste in North Africa, there was born of Monica, a devout Christian woman, and a father who was a "pagan" and a freeman, a baby boy they called Augustine. In later years, Augustine would look critically at his own boyhood as he recalled youthful delinquencies, but he seemed to have had a normal boy's life. He played ball, preferring it to learning. He was somewhat scornful of adult occupations and labors. He said this was the "idleness they call business." He liked the epic stories from antiquity, but balked at proper study of his Latin grammar. He went on raids with other boys, stealing apples from orchards, getting great pleasure out of the fellowship of the "gang." Augustine's teachers thought he showed great promise. While in his home he received Christian training from his devout mother, Monica, and while he seemed to accept her instruction passively, there may well have been religious tensions in the house. His father was a non-Christian, a "pagan," although at a later time in his life, he may have taken instruction in the Christian faith.

Christian history probably has not been sufficiently appreciative of this “pagan” father, because he sacrificed enough so that Augustine could receive advanced education at Madura, a neighboring city. At school, Augustine showed commendable progress in the study of grammar and rhetoric.

Augustine lived in a time and place where promiscuity was the rule, not the exception. Greco-Roman-Oriental culture, except in those places where Christian rules for sexual conduct prevailed, was heavily larded with sensuality. Monica wanted to restrain the self-indulgence and the passionate drives of young Augustine. In what may have been rare faithfulness for his time, Augustine took one girl for a mistress and remained faithful to her for some years. But he was etching a rut of self-indulgence which was to cause him great inner storms of guilt later in his life. To this union of Augustine and his mistress, a son, Adeodatus, was born.

When Augustine completed his studies at Madura, he returned home to teach rhetoric. After a stay at home, he went to Carthage at the age of seventeen. He enjoyed the sophisticated life of that cosmopolitan center, following the drama, other arts and pleasures available in the large city.

Augustine’s great intellectual ability was recognized at this early age as he was made head of the school of rhetoric in Carthage. Augustine’s sensual life did not entirely overwhelm everything else. He yearned for wisdom. He was stimulated to search for understanding insight by studying the works of the great Roman, Cicero. Probably because mother Monica urged it, Augustine investigated and studied the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Interestingly enough, at this period of his intellectual life, he rejected those scriptures as not being on the same high scholarly level as the Latin classics. He was impressed by the dualistic religion of Manicheism and studied its teachings. Ten years passed while he taught, took his pleasures, studied, debated. Then came a climax, one of many in his life. Bishop Faustus of the Manicheans visited Carthage. For nine years, Augustine had anticipated the meeting. But Faustus proved a disappointment, for he could not answer the questions of the young rhetorician. Augustine concluded that the education of the bishop had been superficial and bothered no more with this dualistic, Asian competitive religion to Christianity.

Augustine, restless, searching, decided to go to Rome. He thought that there the discipline would be better among the students. (Note to teachers: some things are never new.) Although Monica objected, Augustine took his mistress and their young son and set said for Rome where he was to teach his major field, rhetoric. The Bishop of Milan was one of the great men of the age. Ambrose was a fearless leader, eloquent preacher, learned scholar, sensitive to the rhythms of poetry and music in the church. Augustine admired Ambrose; went to hear him, not so much concerned about the theology Ambrose was preaching, but rather as an appreciative critic of eloquence and style. But under the influence of this brilliant bishop, Augustine begins to wonder if there are not some great truths in the Catholic faith. He decides to make inquiries and accept instruction.

His mother, Monica, ever-prayerful, ever-devout (and if one may judge from references in the “Confessions,” apparently ever-weeping), followed Ambrose to Milan, still hoping and praying that her son would turn to Christianity. She arranged for Augustine to be married to a maiden of “suitable station,” but for whom Augustine would have to wait two years. Then, in perhaps the least forgivable action of the lives of Augustine and Monica, his mistress of many years is sent back to Africa alone. Augustine, his son Adeodatus and Monica remain in Milan. Looking backward, it is much easier to have sympathy for the woman who remained faithful to Augustine for many years, even though no marriage occurred, than for Augustine’s mother, who probably tried for years to persuade Augustine to do what he finally did, get rid of the girl whom he had loved and who was the mother of his son.

Augustine continued his studies. He studied Plato as well as the doctrines of Christianity. Christian converts told Augustine and his friend, Alypius, the story of the monk, Anthony, who resisted temptations in the desert. The two pagan scholars were greatly impressed. One day in the garden in Milan, Augustine was waging a great inner struggle, which he records in Book 8 of the “Confessions.” At the height of the battle between his yearnings for Christianity and his habit of skeptical philosophical analysis, not to speak of his troubles with his own sensuality, he thinks he hears a child, as in a game, say, “take up and read.” Augustine picked up a book which opened to Paul’s letter to the Romans. The first lines he read were, “not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.” (Rom. 13/13). That moment was the great conversion experience for Augustine. The bright light of Christian truth seemed to illumine his soul. Very soon afterwards, on Easter Sunday in the year 386, Augustine, his son Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius were baptized by Bishop Ambrose in the cathedral at Milan.

Monica had seen her fondest dreams come true. She prepared to return to North Africa, but was not destined to reach there. At the seaport of Ostia, after a conversation which Augustine records in the “Confessions,” with words mystical and uplifting, she died happy.

Soon after his mother’s death, Augustine returned to Thagaste in North Africa to form a community of religious men in the countryside. Later this society was to become the model of the Augustinian type of monastic life. (We might recall that among the great Augustinians, more than a thousand years later, was Martin Luther.)

Augustine now had ample time to use his powers of mind for the very intensive study of the scriptures. But this serene, academic life was not to continue very long. In 390, he was asked to go to Hippo, one of the important cities of North Africa, to give advice to a friend who was troubled by religious questions. In Hippo, Bishop Valerius ordained Augustine, somewhat against Augustine’s wishes. Four years later, he became the official colleague of the bishop – co-adjutor bishop he would be called today. Soon he was to become Bishop of Hippo when his aged predecessor died.

The date is significant. It was in the same year, 395, that the Emperor Theodosius, died in Milan. Theodosius was the last Roman emperor to reign over the whole Empire. After his death, the empire was divided – Rome and Constantinople. Rome was soon to fall. Alaric, the Arian Goth was to overwhelm Rome in 410. The traditional date of Rome’s final fall is dated 476, usually, when Odacer assumed the throne of the Caesars.

During the thirty-six years that Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, he wrote an incredibly large quantity of theological discourse. His point of view has been the most influential in the entire history of the Christian Church.

He wrestled with every theological and philosophical controversy of his day. In the Christian world, wherever there was a battle between the minds of men, Augustine’s brain and ready pen would be engaged in the contest. He wrote treatises on the Trinity, Original Sin, Baptism, Grace and innumerable other aspects of doctrines. Although Augustine insisted on the authority of the bishops, he also based his theological arguments on the authority of the scripture. Therefore, he was the supporter of both the Roman Catholic doctrine of the authority of the Church and also the Protestant Reformation doctrine of the authority of scripture.

Of considerable interest to us should be the famous controversy between Augustine and the British monk, Pelagius. Pelagius would have appealed to most of us because he was a fore-runner of the kind of religious thinking which has been a continuing emphasis in our liberal religious movements in the last two hundred years. Augustine was convinced man was born depraved, with no hope of salvation other than the Grace of God, a salvation pre-destined for the elect few. Pelagius on the other hand, used reason in arriving at his theology. Pelagius disavowed the doctrine of original sin. He believed every soul born was born pure [and] that human nature, because it is created by God, is basically good. Man possesses the freedom to choose good from evil in his life. Pelagius said, “everything good and everything evil is done by us, not born with us.”

The issue revives again and again in religious history, will do so again, “Does God save man or does man save himself?”

Augustine, fiery, intense, goaded by his own feelings of guilt about his youth, convinced that man was helpless, must always lean for strength on God, not himself, engaged in strenuous literary warfare with Pelagius. The arguments Pelagius used would be more persuasive to us now, but Augustine won the decision then. Pelagius, calm of mind, known for integrity, master of himself, apparently was no match for the dogmatic controversialist, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Augustine was able to get the teachings of Pelagius declared officially “heretical.”

Fearing a free market in theological ideas, Augustine insisted on the authority of the Church even to the extent of using force in dealing with alleged unbelievers. Misusing a text from a parable of Jesus, “compel them to come in,” (Luke 14/23) Augustine established the theological groundwork which led to the later persecutions and intolerance of the Medieval Church.

Augustine was extremely influential too in fixing the position of the medieval Catholic Church when he composed his great treatise, THE CITY OF GOD. This book was inspired by the fall of Rome to the Goths under Alaric in 410 A.D. THE CITY OF GOD was a comprehensive statement of the Christian faith seen in the fading light of a world that was dying. Augustine said that there were two kingdoms, one the kingdom of this world, the other the city of God. The city of Rome – the city of man – might be passing. It must decline, said Augustine, in order that the city of God may come to power. even though present times are bad, said Augustine, better times are coming. There will be a golden age when the city of God rules over men. Although this great treatise, “The City of God,” has many intellectual flaws from the viewpoint of the 20th century, the proposition was then a new conception of the old Messianic hope. A winsome standard of faith was established which captured the allegiance of the medieval Church. THE CITY OF GOD had a profound influence too on the coming assertion that the Church overruled the State. The State was subservient to the Church, which was the visible representative of the invisible and spiritual City of God. The City of God was ideal, spiritual, heavenly and superior to the earthly and the material. Augustine saw the City of God and the Catholic Church as identical. This reasoning by Augustine’s capable mind did much to establish principles which later led the medieval papacy to assert the Church should rule the State.

This division affects our lives even today. The present controversies of Church and State can be traced to the conflict of ideologies represented by the encounter of the City of God with the City of Man.

Although Augustine’s theological works did much to influence the future of the Church, perhaps the most intriguing side of his many-faceted character was his mystic piety. In his remarkable “Confessions,” we have a fascinating disclosure of his personality, his feeling of mystic identity with God. His famous first lines where he comprehends the entire relationship with God will endure, “our hears are restless until they find rest in Thee.” There are insights in the Confessions, which are helpful to achieving inner peace. Consider this insight about anger or malice against others, “As if any enemy could be more hurtful than the hatred with which he is incensed against him; or could would more deeply him whom he persecutes than he wounds his own soul by his enmity. Assuredly no science of letters can be so innate as the record of conscience, that his is doing to another, what from another he would be loth to suffer.”

It is also part of candor to say that with all its meditative beauty, when one reads Augustine’s Confessions, one can get the impression that Augustine never did solve his youthful stresses and guilt over boyhood peccadilloes and adult passions. One reads the “Confessions” rather fruitlessly waiting for Augustine to think of others beside himself. The wait is vain. For the most part Augustine thinks only of God and himself. There seems to be little understanding of association with his fellow human beings, serving them and enjoying their company. The only mature friendship he tells about is that with Alypius, and that seems a rather pale association. Even Augustine’s love affairs seem for him to be in a framework of self-reference. Along with all his great mind, Augustine seemed to have a psychic flaw which limited him. Even though he enjoyed a seemingly complete and wonderful mystic fellowship with God, this should have brought him closer to his fellow human beings, rather than separating him from them, as seemed to be the case.

Any appraisal of this Father of the Church is bound to be incomplete, with virtues unmentioned and vices unlisted. Yet, acknowledging all the criticisms that can be made of his dogmas and his self-centeredness, it is also true that when his city, Hippo, of which he was Bishop, was stormed by the Vandals in 430, Augustine remained in the city as month after month the siege went on. Augustine falling seriously ill, requested that the penitential psalms (including 7, 32, 38, 51, 130, 143) be posted on the walls of his bedroom so that he might meditate on them in his dying hours. On August 28, in the year 430, as Gaiseric was leading the Vandals through the gates of Hippo, Augustine died, bringing to a close a long, turbulent life of achievement for the Church he first scorned and then came to love.

The Roman Empire of the State was disintegrating. The Roman Empire of the Church was gathering strength and Augustine was the greatest builder of its theological foundations.

The Church Becomes Official

November 11, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
9. The Church Becomes Official

To change from being a voluntary association of believers, few in number, to being the official religion of the Roman Empire, with every citizen compelled to acknowledge that religion, is to move from a better to a poorer religion. Co-ercion is always less moral than freedom. Such a radical alteration occurred before Christianity was four centuries old.

We have observed how the church changed from fellowships of simple believers to formal organization, ruled by the bishop , expressed in sacrament and liturgy by a hierarchy, with conformity guaranteed by a creed. The Church changed toward these ways in the first two hundred years in order to confront heresies, define the differences in religions and simplify the instruction of uneducated converts. If it is regrettable that the Church gave up spontaneity for formality in the first two hundred years, it is deplorable that the succeeding two centuries culminated in the end of freedom and the sovereignty of compulsion. This, then, is an account of a sequence of growth, persecution, tolerance and tyranny. The relevance of this segment of Christian history is found in the question, what should make religion binding upon people?

By the time the third century began, the organization of the Christian Church had expanded. The bishop required numerous assistants for the work of their dioceses. The organization had become formal. The efficient and far-flung administrative system of the Roman Empire was a model for the Church and religious bureaucracy, too, touched all parts of the Empire. The Church had grown considerably in numbers, but still claimed only a small fraction of the people. Most scholars calculate that perhaps one in twenty persons in the larger cities had adopted Christianity. A controversy, not likely to ever find unanimous agreement, was the status of the Bishops of Rome in the early centuries. Roman Catholic thought has insisted for centuries that the Bishops of Rome have been the successors of Peter, were "keepers of the keys," and unquestioned voice of authority in faith and morals for all Christians. Historians find no unquestioned evidence for the pre-eminent place of the Roman Bishop for centuries after Christian beginnings. There is considerable historical evidence that the bishops of all cities were equal in authority. Furthermore, when one studies Christian beginnings, there is a much more persuasive case to be made that Paul, not Peter, was the founder of the Christian Church.

In the second and third centuries, although growth was slow, there was a dynamism of ideas and vigor of spirit which was beginning to make its mark on the ancient world.

The effects were observable in ways that would impress us today. As the historian Hans Lietzmann observes, "A number of callings were not reconcilable with Christianity, and had to be given up when application was made. Here were included not only ... prostitution, but also the disreputable arts of the actor, the gladiator, the racing chariot driver.... Naturally, the priest of a pagan temple, an astrologer, or other soothsayer was inadmissible. A sculptor or painter had to undertake not to depict gods, and a schoolmaster was recommended to abandon his calling because he was required to deal with pagan mythology in the course of giving instruction.... A soldier had to undertake not to kill and not to swear oaths; anyone already Christian was forbidden to become a soldier." (HISTORY OF THE EARLY CHURCH, Vol. II, p. 151-2)

In spite of the growth of creeds, there was continuous intellectual ferment. There was a wide variety of interpretations of Christianity, as different emphases of oriental and Greek thought mingled with, or confronted, Judaic and early gospel teachings. The famed Christian teacher, Clement of Alexandria, (d. 215), spoke of Christian differences as the "blooming of a hundred flowers."

The centuries before the Church became official were the times of persecution, too. In spite of dramatic legends and colorful books of martyrs, the historians approach the matter of persecution of Christians with considerable caution. That persecution of Christians began when Nero sought to divert suspicion towards them as arsonists who burned Rome, seems well-founded. Equally assured is the opinion that persecution was sporadic, at widely-spaced intervals. Origen, the famous Christian philosopher of the 2nd century, reported that the number of martyrs was not considerable. (See Gibbon, Ch. 16, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, p. 104-5). Gibbon, whose knowledge of ancient sources is astonishing, commented, "But I cannot determine what I ought to transcribe, till I am satisfied what I ought to believe." (Ibid, p. 144)

If, because of our limited knowledge of fact, we should be reserved about persecution by the Roman Empire on any wide-spread and persisting basis, we may also recognize with appreciation, that there were Christians who gave up their occupations because of inconsistency with Christian standards, that there were Christian soldiers who threw down their weapons because they were convinced that the way of Jesus was one of peace and non-violence, that there were Christian martyrs who died in the arenas because for them, death as a Christian was much better than life as a lapsed Christian. Anyone who considers this quality of devotion as unremarkable should also confront his own degree of willingness to permit his religion to interfere with his job, his patriotism or his life.

The advent of toleration and subsequently, a favored position for the Christian Church, comprises a congruence of remarkable men and dramatic events. Sometimes I wonder, that if Jesus could have foreseen the Emperor Constantine, the Council of Nicea and the official sovereignty of Christianity, whether this wandering preacher of the Kingdom of God would have ever spoken a word or raised a finger.

The Emperor Constantine had to eliminate rival Caesars before he became sole ruler of the Empire. What sort of man was this ruler who paved the way for Christianity to become official? Christian writers have heaped adulation upon him, but the more realistic historians have viewed Constantine as a shrewd, ambitious politician who appraised Christianity as possessing the vigor and charm which would aid him in the consolidation of power.

In 311, before the contest for empire was decided, Constantine and Galerius issued an edict of toleration to Christians. This was hardly more than grudging concession; by no means an emancipation proclamation.

Omens for the future were best illustrated by one of the most famous and least substantial myths of Christianity. In 312, when preparing for battle against Maxentius, his chief rival in the West, Constantine asserted that he saw a lighted cross in the sky, with the words, IN HOC SIGNO VINCES, (in this sign thou shalt conquer.) (The Nazarene, Jesus, had become the God of War!) The vision may have been myth, but Constantine did win the battle of Milvain Bridge. From that time on, Constantine was the friend and protector of Christianity. Although not baptized until his deathbed, he acted as the determined sponsor of the Christian Church. He rebuilt churches; returned property formerly confiscated and he freed clergy from the necessity of military service. (One historian reports that Constantine by this exemption created the problem of a rush of wealthy citizens seeking ordination. See 20 CENTURIES OF CHRISTIANITY, Hutchinson and Garrison, Harcourt & Brace, 1959, p. 49-51.)

Shortly after deposing of his last rival, Constantine was instrumental in the organization of the Council of Nicea, 325 A.D. This was one of the most important gatherings in all Christian history. The issue was theological, but Constantine wanted an end to controversies, because they interfered with his planning that a new universal Christian religion would be a support and a harmonizing influence in the "new Rome" which he planned would see an end to the decay and decline of Empire.

The theological dispute concerned the nature of Jesus Christ. Arius, a distinguished churchman of Alexandria, leader of Eastern thought, believed that Jesus was a created being. God was eternal, but Jesus was not. "The Son has a beginning, but God is without beginning." Arius believed Jesus to be God, but not one with the Father in "essence or eternity." Bishop Alexander of Alexandria took a different position. To him, the Son was uncreated, of the same essence of the father, eternal from the beginning.

Constantine, concerned with unity in the Empire called a council of the entire Church. Constantine provided transportation to Nicea for all the ecclesiastical delegated, from all over the Empire. Probably there were 318 bishops, each with his own retainers. The total number involved must have reached two thousand. Thus, as historian Philip Schaff noted, here at Nicea, there was a union of ecclesiastical council and the political state, wherein the Christian Church was vested with imperial power, but subservient to the Emperor.

There were several matters to be debated, but the Arian dispute was the most important. On May 20, 325, the sessions were opened in the Imperial Palace, with regular meetings beginning after Constantine, clad in cloth of gold, studded with precious stones, was seated in a golden chair.

The debate ensued and the position of Arius, argued by Eusebius of Caesare, was soon rejected and a compromise formula sought. Constantine, knowing that Arianism was not popular in the Western part of the Empire, (north Africa, Rome, Gaul, Spain), was influential in the adoption of the Nicene definition, which, while it failed to satisfy everybody, all but two bishops signed the creed. These two, along with Arius, were sent into exile by Constantine. The writings of Arius were burned. Book-burning seems an irresistible temptation to those who get unrestrained power. Constantine might have hoped that he had secured the results he wanted, but synods as soon as two years later questioned every conclusion of Nicea. There were to be more church councils before the Christian church could define or refine its orthodoxy. One is in progress in Rome at this moment, the Second Vatican Council.

The beliefs of Arius persisted for hundreds of years, despite official disapproval and censorship. The Germanic tribes, converted to Christianity by Arian missionaries, maintained this theological position until the 8th century at least. Socinianism, the 15th century Hungarian fore-runner of Unitarianism, could be considered a re-statement of the Arian position in the Nicean controversy.

Although Constantine favored Christianity, he did not make this religion compulsory. But fifty years later, the Church became official. Caesar Theodosius II, issued a series of proclamations which ended the voluntary nature of religion. Christianity became the only religion legally permitted in the empire. To reject Christianity was to commit treason against the state; the punishment for treason was death.

The church became official. A wrong proposition became law - that social cohesion and orderly government were possible only when one religion, one and only, was permitted. The continuing consequences of this erroneous premise have influenced events up to our own time and will present problems for our children, and theirs.

Did the Christians enjoying power and receiving the heavy flow of converts, which official approval started, ever look back on Matthew (20/26) where these words were attributed to Jesus, "You know that the rulers of the heathen lord it over them, and their great men tyrannize over them. It is not to be so among you, but whoever wants to be great among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man has come not to be waited on, but to wait on other people and give his life as a ransom for many."

In the closing years of the fourth century, events had come full circle. The persecuted Church became the persecuting Church. Pagan temples were destroyed; schools of philosophy closed. The Church inflicted more evils on its own whom they named "heretics," than ever had been the victims of so-called "pagans." The Christians killed each other in far greater numbers than Romans killed Christians in all the persecutions. (See Gibbon, p. 147-8). Not long after the Church became official, the pacifist was declared a heretic, subject to the punishment for treason - death.

Many have observed that the Sermon on the Mount has almost no theological content, but rather, great ethical emphasis. The theme is how we should behave, not what we must believe. The Nicene Creed produced under the watchful eye of the Emperor and on his expense account is entirely metaphysical, with no trace of ethical standards. This omission is symptomatic of sliding standards as the Church was on the way to becoming official.

This triumph with which the Roman emperors crowned the Church in the fourth century has been called the "Fatal Gift." Grateful churchmen bestowed on Constantine the utterly un-deserved title, "the equal of the apostles." Says Herbert Muller, (Constantine) "inaugurated the lasting confusion in Christendom between the things that are Caesar's and the things that are God's."

There is much more to be said of the Christian Church, virtues to recite, vices to relate. But the transition from persecuted sect to official church demonstrates what we should never forget: unlimited power is a temptation to unrestrained corruption to which any institution, even the Church, may yield. No institution comprised of people - and this is the only kind of institution of any meaning to us - can ever be given power without reserving ways to keep power in check; and ways to remove power when it is abused.

What should be the power of the religious institution to bind people? The answer is, only in those ways people choose voluntarily to be bound.

Somewhere along the line, the Christians made an enormous mistake. There was democracy and social equality in that on the whole, the clergy had been recruited from all sectors of the population, rich and poor, slave and free. But once the clergy was ordained, a system of self-perpetuating power was maintained. The right of the members of the congregation in Unitarian Universalist churches to ordain their clergymen, rather than the right of other clergymen to ordain their successors, is one of the healthiest safeguards we can maintain to ensure that our self-governing operation will be democratic in fact as well as theory.

When one pursues the winding trails of religion and government through history, we come again and again to the issue of freedom. The freedom to choose is no less the irreplaceable condition in religion than politics. This, as we shall see in discussing modern issues of Church and State, is the liberty most easily submerged in a confusion of irrelevant protest: Centuries before the Church became official, Paul, writing to his friends in Rome, in his most clearly theological letter says, "that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith." Then he goes on to make one of the most extensive and persuasive arguments for Christian theology, recognized as strong reasoning even by those of us who do not accept this Christian theology. But Paul, even when asserting his most urgent convictions, never made the mistake of the Church when it became official, pronouncing, "accede to this or die a heretic." Paul said, "let us encourage each other's faith."

And so may it be with us, no matter how wide our range of differences, no matter how provocative our distinctions, no matter how passionate the temper of our convictions.

The Accumulation of Creed

November 4, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
8. The Accumulation of Creed

The most common capsule definition of Universalist Unitarian people and churches is that we have no creed to bind us, that we are free to disavow all the chains of dogmas that for two thousand years, the Christian Churches have hammered out. I would like to discuss the accumulation of creed, the values that creeds attempt to maintain, the violations of freedom and conscience that creeds perpetuate and the obligations that freedom in religion imposes if we take our religion seriously.

First of all, a famous historical analogy emphasizes a wide area of uncertain knowledge. “The history of Christianity between the time when the first Christian congregation fled from Jerusalem just before Titus captured that city in 70 A.D., and a century later is like a plunge into a tunnel.” (20 CENTURIES OF CHRISTIANITY, Hutchinson and Garrison, Harcourt Brace, 1959.) Prior to that time, the new Christian groups gathered informally, in various places to worship simply, with a prayer, a hymn and a re-enactment of the Last Supper. As the earliest Christians were poor people, there was no pomp, no splendor. They worshiped in little rooms in private houses without altars and images. They witnessed to their individual religious experience that “Jesus was Lord.” But, as Paul’s letters indicated, in the early days this testimony was not so much a creedal requirement, doctrinally defined, but rather the basis for what a Christian ought to believe, more than what he must accept as a creedal test.

About the close of the second century, or about one-hundred twenty years after the time of Paul, when the church emerged from the historical “tunnel,” it was an elaborate institution. The Lord’s Supper had become the Mass, ritualistic and liturgical; the prayers and antiphonals had begun to assume fixed forms. The church observed feast days, fast days and sacraments. Bishops had acquired great power. Theology was becoming more and more subtle, intellectually, and the early creeds had largely replaced individual testimony.

The scant records we have of the century and a quarter in the “tunnel” comprise letters from Church Fathers, the later New Testament writings, traditions and legends. All these Christian sources have been filtered through the institutionalized source, the Christian Church. Therefore facts are much more rare than theology. The references to the Christian Church are few in non-Christian literature and records. There are few contemporary historical writings that tell us about the Christian movement. Even in the beginnings, although Paul writes to and speaks of numerous Christian movements, we have no real account of the formation and growth of any Christian community.

... great historians of Christian thought and times have enabled us to acquire a measure of understanding of the events and forces which transformed loosely-organized, unpretentious Christian fellowships into the structured, liturgical, creedal Church. We, too, can increase our understanding if we discuss the nature and purpose of a creed, how creed accumulated through the circumstances of what the Church confronted and how the Church changed and adapted, as well as withstood the pressures upon it.

“Credo,” (I believe) is the source of our word, “creed.” Creed is “a confession of faith for public use, or a form of words setting forth with authority certain articles of belief which are regarded by the framers as necessary for salvation, or at least for the well-being of the Christian Church.” (Philip Schaff, CREEDS OF CHRISTENDOM, Vol. 1). There have been numerous creeds in Christendom. In every case, there was no spontaneous generation or document delivered from on high. Many would hold that the purpose of a creed is to make clear the meaning of scripture. But every creed is marked by the forces of its own age and was the result of historical situations which caused the Church to define its meanings and mission.

One ancient version of the Book of Acts, (8/27 ff) holds that when Philip baptized the Ethiopian convert, he was required to affirm only “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” Six hundred years later, the Athenasian Creed not only had a bewildering catalogue of complex theological propositions which must be believed, but also there was in it proclaimed that any who disbelieved were irretrievably damned.

The creeds evolved not only as definitions of the differences between Christianity and the other religions of the ancient world, but also as measures of properly orthodox beliefs within Christianity. Heretics beyond number arose among Christians leading to the Council of Nicea and Chalcedon defining the Trinity so that both monotheism and the human-divine nature of Jesus could be maintained. When ancient dualism, which allocated equal power to the god of good and the god of evil (Gnosticism, Manichaeism), the canon of sacred scripture was closed to prevent the entry of books espousing heretical views. The Christians insisted on the sovereignty of one god of all creation against the numerous polytheistic gods of Asia, Egypt, Rome, Greece and Gaul.

As Harnack pointed out, in the days of the Old Catholic Church, before the church became official, that “monstrous abortion, political religion” was resisted successfully with openness in the cities and, at times, secretly in the catacombs.

Because there were large numbers of unlearned, unlettered and illiterate among the early Christians, whose allegiance to the faith was a commitment of the heart, not a consequence of philosophical deliberations, the leaders of the Old Catholic Church also formed the creed with the intent of explaining the scriptures. Gradually the religion of feeling changed to the formal institution.

But one of the astonishing consequences of victory – whether it be theological or military – is that the victor acquires some of the vices of the vanquished. What emerged at the end of the one-hundred and twenty year “tunnel” was not a simple, scriptural Christianity, but a complex combination of many streams of religions which flowed as the great river of Christianity.

As a product of Christian victory, the Christian movement had incorporated most of the common ideas and myths of other religions, and many of the ancient practices.

From time immemorial the myth of the divine infant, child of the gods, conceived and delivered by a virgin mother had stirred the wonder and worship of people. Neither Paul nor Mark apparently knew or believed this, for neither affirms the virgin birth of the god-man. But in the late additions of the birth stories to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, not to speak of the growing cult of the virgin in the Christian creed and liturgy, the Christians too had their charming myth of birth of the God-man. This myth drew to it a store-house of legends, customs and myths from all the peoples who became Christians. The astrology of the Near-East and the tree worship of the Germanic tribes are but two examples of the magnetic power of the myth of the divine child to draw to it, not only the hopes and fears of all the years, but also ancient superstitions galore.

Resurrected gods were familiar to that world, too, for this is another of the persistent myths of human-kind. The religions of Egypt, Asia and Greece had worshiped the dying-rising savior gods for thousands of years before the Christian movement witnessed to their risen Lord. Christian practice in worship was far more restrained than the ceremonial excess of the ancient religions, but again, the Old Catholic Church demonstrated the common roots and kinship of all religions in the ancient world.

The Lord’s Supper had become a eucharistic meal in which the miraculous sacrifice of the atoning savior is celebrated by the priest as the worshipers reverently observe. This, too, was a synthesis of the Passover meal and the ceremonies of ancient mystery religions.

In the earliest days, the duty of the elders or presbyters had been to supervise the behavior of their fellow Christians and organize assistance to the widows and orphans. At the close of the second century, leadership had concentrated in the Bishop whose primary task was to see that doctrine was kept pure.

In the earliest Christian groups, when Paul was writing and traveling, there was considerable self-government in the new movement. When the period of historical obscurity ended, the Bishop was an episcopal monarch, as well as priest. The Bishop had the responsibility of instructing the unlettered; he confronted heresies with an authoritative voice; he settled disputes in the organization as well as administering charity. The responsibility for insuring the purity of doctrine had resulted in the Bishop acquiring the sole right to ordain priests by the “laying on of hands.” This was the future controlled as well as the present, by authority to designate who should be permitted to perform the sacraments, now all-important.

Thus two centuries of accumulation of creed produced Christian churches in nearly ever important town and city of the Roman Empire. In each city or diocese, the Bishop’s authority was primary. The liturgy and sacraments were a synthesis of many ancient religions as well as the vehicle for the teachings of Jesus and the great monotheistic Jewish tradition. It is doubtful if more than a small minority of Christians had a wide knowledge of doctrine. Their reasons for Christian allegiance were various. Some were converted by Old Testament scripture; some because the Bishop exorcised demons; others by the better moral life of Christian communities; still others by the hope of immortality; or even as time went on, some were eager for the status Christianity conferred. (See MISSION AND EXPANSION OF CHRISTIANITY, Adolf Harnack, p. 87 ff.)

The influence of the Greek philosophic spirit had made Christianity considerably more intellectual and speculative. At the scholarly level, there has always been more room for differences of interpretation than is generally conceded. This was particularly true in the centuries before the church became official.

Because we are not bound by creeds, the relevance and importance to us of the idea of the creedal church or the authority of the Bishop is not so much the particular contend of specific creeds, even though we would assert the falsity of particular ideas therein contained. There was a fascinating inconsistency in the developing, creedal church. Looking backwards, we can comprehend that the Church adjusted to, or incorporated, every historical force. At the same time, the bishops defended every accommodation by asserting that this was what the scripture said or meant. The Christian leaders were convinced that the message they taught was necessary for salvation, that this message was delivered to them from the past and that history, with its traditions was to be the authority in religion. The seat of authority was the Holy Scripture whose divine revelations were abbreviated in the creeds, preserved in the Church and guarded by the Bishops to prevent doctrinal impurities from creeping in. One of the early Church Apologists, Cyprian, phrased it, “outside the Church (bishop) there is no salvation. He cannot have God for his father who does not have the Church for his mother. The Bishop is in the Church and the Church is in the Bishop.”

This attitude generated not only the virtues of loyalty, but also the vices of fanaticism. In the third century, a pagan philosopher, Celsus, wrote a critique of Christianity which emphasized the virulence of heresy-hunting by Christians and the bad feeling which sometimes prevailed in Christian groups. Celsus may have written with the bias of a philosophical opponent of Christianity, but there is undoubtedly a good measure of truth in his charge that “these people (the Christians) utter all sorts of blasphemy, mentionable and unmentionable, against one another, nor will they give way in the smallest point for the sake of concord, hating each other with a perfect hatred.” (see Harnack, ibid, p. 444)

Does the past have the truth? The sanction of our Universalist Unitarian emphasis in religion is that we affirm the authority of truth known or to be known. Truth is more like a trip around the world than it is like Mt. Everest. That is, truth is a process in human experience, not a fixed rock of ages. No one should be criticized for testifying to his beliefs, whether called creed, consensus or conviction. Human dignity is violated and reason prostrated when there is insistence that there is only one way to truth, e.g., the past as the seat of authority in religion. To attempt to limit truth to a creed is to discredit what is always elementary and essential to any vital religion – personal experience and social growth.

Immanuel Kant (in the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON) speaks of the land of truth, “surrounded by a wide a stormy ocean ... engaging the (adventurous seafarer) in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.” The search for truth can never be halted or ever finally terminated.

Erich Fromm, the psychiatrist who has placed so many of the pre-suppositions of religious liberals in relevant and topical framework, thinks of the human as a truthseeking being who continually refines truth through the elements of personal experience – observation, testing and agreement.

He upholds truth-seeking by bringing together three insights of the ages about truth. In modern times, Freud and his successors, who have studied the human personality, assert “truth (about himself) makes man healthy.” That is, when we know the nature of our deep conflicts – the truth about ourselves – we become more healthy, physically and emotionally. In ancient times, Socrates said, “knowledge is virtue.” That is, truth is the power that makes men virtuous. Before the accumulation of creed, Jesus said, “the truth shall make men free.” The consequences of truth are health, goodness and freedom.

There is no age, certainly not the one in which we live, where there is any excuse to abandon the search for new truth, to quit the task of constant refinement of what was held to be true in other times, or asserted to be true by those who would chart our ways. The great support any truth can have is the heretic who questions it, examines it, criticizes it. For this is how we grow. On the fiftieth birthday of Agassiz, the naturalist and geologist, who was a pioneer in theories of glacial formation, his friend Henry W. Longfellow wrote a poem for the occasion. Some of the lines go like this:

“... and nature, the old nurse took
The child upon her knee,
Saying: here is a story-book
Thy father has written for Thee.
Come wander with me, she said
Into regions yet untrod,
and read what is still unread
in the manuscripts of God.”

New Covenants – Then and Now

October 28, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
7. New Covenants – Then and Now

About two hundred years after the birth of Jesus, the Christian Church separated sacred scripture into two parts, the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. We know this two-part scripture as the Old Testament and the New Testament. Because common usage dilutes or clouds the original intent, words sometimes lose the power of sharp meaning. When one considers what has happened in nearly two thousand years of Christian history, the radical nature of the division is a vital proposition if one is to understand our heritage. Secondly, these dangerous hours of late October, 1962, are crawling with apprehensions of total desolation, but we are sustained by the promise of a new covenant chartered in our time. I would speak, then of New Covenants, Then and Now.

The Old Covenant was the main strand of the people of Israel. The Old Covenant was the bond that tied the Israelites to Yahveh, the one eternal God. Yahveh had chosen Israel as the vehicle of salvation. They had chosen Yahveh, promised to obey his laws and worship scripture of the people. Noah had accepted the Covenant and the rainbow was the sign. Yahveh instructed Abraham and his descendants throughout all generations; and the circumcision of every male baby at eight days was to be the sign. The book of Exodus (31/16) tells that “Israelites must keep the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant,” a sign between Yahveh and the Israelites forever. The covenant with Moses became not only the sign, but also the foundation, for the religion of the Hebrews in all the succeeding centuries.

In the four centuries before the Christian era, it became more and more apparent that the Chosen People could not prevail by strength of armies or national wealth. They were a tiny, subject nation with no hope of subduing the great empires of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Syria, Rome. The Jews, as one dismal century succeeded another, came to look for a Messiah who would be sent by Yahveh. Messiah, with Yahveh’s miraculous help, would bring in the Kingdom of God. As the years passed, expectancy grew. Many were the men who professed to be Messiah, or around whom the subject people built dreams of Messiahship. But still the occupying empires ruled.

Jesus lived, taught, died; and was believed to have broken the bonds of death and to have risen from the tomb. He was one of many of his time whose followers proclaimed the Messiah. After his death, his disciples re-assembled. Their meetings, teachings and service to others planted the seed of all the manifold varieties of Christianity.

Although all of Christian history is a record of contention and controversy, as well as more harmonious feelings, the most pivotal conflict occurred within a generation after Jesus’ death.

The basic belief cherished by all the early followers was that Jesus was the Messiah. But had he come as the Messiah of the Jews or of all people? Was the movement to be a reform effort within Judaism, keeping the law, observing the covenant requirements of circumcision and the Sabbath, or was it to be a fellowship not limited to the Jews, but including the Greek, the Roman, the African and all others of that cosmopolitan world?

James, the brother of Jesus, Peter and most of the disciples stood for maintaining the ways of Judaism. Incidentally, this was not, as sometimes believed, an exclusive group, barring everyone but Jews. The Petrine group believed that converts must be circumcised and obey the laws of Torah. But all were to be welcome, as all were welcome to all the synagogues, whether or not there was influence exerted by the followers of Jesus.

Paul, a Roman citizen, combined rabbinic training with attitudes influenced by Hellenistic culture. In Paul, the cultures met and mingled. He insisted that the followers of Jesus must be “neither Greek nor Jew, barbarian, bond, nor free.” Peter came around to Paul’s position after the notable Jerusalem council. “Christ” is the Greek word for the Hebrew word, “Messiah.” Paul prevailed over the Jerusalem disciples; “Christ” prevailed over “Messiah.” For that small group who were first called Christians at Antioch, the New Covenant replaced the Old Covenant.

The expression of the New Covenant is found in Paul’s letters and a more sophisticated version in the letter to the Hebrews (of unknown authorship). Paul’s case was this: Jesus was the Messiah and had been rejected by his own people, thus canceling the Old Covenant between God and his people, Israel. The Christians in their fellowship are the people now in covenant with God. They came to believe that at the Last Supper, Jesus said “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” When the Christians of early days participated in their weekly re-enactment of the Last Supper, they believed they were partaking in, and renewing, the New Covenant.

Most of the intricate theological interpretations came much later. These earliest Christians held as a common affirmation, “Jesus is Lord.” Doctrine for most of the followers of the “Way” in those days was not highly intellectualized.

Paul pushed great forced in motion in his prime advocacy of the New Covenant. It was a winsome and appealing faith to many who had become disillusioned with national gods and fertility rites. The New Covenant offered redemption to everyone and it was not necessary to abide by intricate Jewish law and ritual requirements. Then, too, who could match the appeal of a faith which testified that this New Covenant, instead of requiring men to sacrifice their lives, provided that Christ made the atoning sacrifice for all men? The New Covenant, with its promise of the Christ soon to come again and redeem his own, was a great spark to spirits dampened by despair over the overwhelming might of the Roman Empire.

There was an element of accommodation to the Roman Empire, too, in the New Covenant. By virtue of their persistent faithfulness to one God, the Jews had won a particular place in the Roman Empire which exempted them from sacrifice to the Roman gods. The New Covenant, in making Christ the “true Passover,” could claim that Christianity was not an innovation, but of great antiquity, a fulfillment of prophecy, and the Church was the true Israel. For awhile at least, the Christians were not averse to such coattail riding.

Theologically, Paul had compressed the whole nature of the salvation of men as being completely dependent on the death and resurrection of Christ. The nature of Paul’s involvement with death and resurrection only, is demonstrated by his utter disregard of the life of Jesus. Paul’s letters, earliest of Christian documents, might have made plain much that is confused about Jesus, if Paul had review the facts then known about the actual ways of Jesus’ life. But for Paul, everything hinged on the crucifixion and resurrection.

Adolf Harnack, greatest of all church historians, in one of his matchless expositions of the early Church, stated that the New Covenant witnessed by Paul and the others, was a great and sublime theme, but “that it is indissolubly connected with an antiquated view of the world and history.” (WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY, p. 149) Although most Christian churches still maintain elaborate or simplified theological varieties of the New Covenant, in our branches of liberal Protestantism, most of us would have to seek the timeless elements that are not antiquated or unbelievable, theologically. What endures for us in the New Covenant?

Apart from the elements of mysticism and the personal experience of Christ, early Christianity combined the features of a religion worth having. There was an inseparable obligation to, 1) understand that a person finds renewal, strength and hope inwardly, and, 2) that he was obligated to be a working member of a creative community. The Jerusalem group, at least, practiced a voluntary communism, so deeply did they feel their lives intertwined and their efforts shared.

Justin Martyr, living in the first half of the second century, a Greek philosopher, elaborated the reasons which caused him to become a Christian convert. What won him over was the distinctively better moral life exhibited by Christians and how this way of living was obvious even in the routines of day-to-day happenings.

Harnack also found an enduring element in the idea of Incarnation. God became a person and “it is persons who form the saving element in history.” (ibid, p. 142)

Timeless about the New Covenant are the strands of inner personal strength, cooperating community, high morality and a recognition that the saving power in history has to be the human element.

These qualities of the New Covenant then, are necessities for the New Covenant now. The United Nations carries our hopes for a working covenant which will be the effective agency for peace in the world. This week we have experienced as United Nations week, is also the most momentous of its brief history. These dangerous hours have brought us close to the full face of horror. Unless the timeless qualities of the Covenant idea are maintained by those trusted with power – inner personal strength, the achievement of a cooperating world community, faithfulness to high morality and a recognition that the human powers mus save us – then the abyss of terror by night and pestilence by day will enclose us all.

We have underestimated the need and capacity of the U.N. as a saving instrument to prevent international conflict. For many people, the U.N. has been justified only through the wonderful work of the agencies. UNICEF has saved millions of children from disease and starvation. If all the children of the world who are alive because of UNICEF were to march close-order file through this church, months would be needed to view the continuous column of millions now living who would be dead, but for UNICEF. So, if on Halloween, American children knock on your door, tricking and treating for UNICEF, you may be sure your generosity will save lives.

The World Health Organization has fed the hungry and carried through project after project which has had saving power. So also with UNESCO and the Emergency Fund. Now while all these represent a saving and serving covenant of good works of incalculable scope, until this week, we have not been sufficiently appreciative or recognized the need for the United Nations to be a New Covenant of political universalism. Political universalism requires that the Security Council, but more vitally, the General Assembly and the Secretariat, provide a modus operandi, a way of working together, by nations who maintain opposing political and economic systems; who hold strong levels of suspicion and hostility toward each other. In the case of the Soviets and ourselves, we now have the power to cremate the world and all that is therein. We and the Soviets are hostile, antagonistic, yet there is something sardonic about the news story in the New York Times that Khrushchev's letter to Bertrand Russell caused the New York stock market to rally, after Tuesday’s losses. We confront each other like ancient warriors, but the fact is that anything each does, inevitably influences the other.

An anecdote this week in Bill Beeney’s column in the Democrat & Chronicle stayed in my mind as a homely, but realistic illustration of our fearful days. Two fishermen, in one boat on the Ottawa River, each felt a strike on the line. Each played the tugs and runs skillfully for five minutes or so, until there was a sudden mutual awareness that each hook had caught on the other. This is our world. Unless the New Covenant of the United Nations can be made to work, the two great powers will hook each other.

The chance of such a fearful grapple now surrounds us with apprehension. We can deplore the circumstances that caused it. But the nature of power struggles seems to be that social growth and actual political achievement come much more slowly than enunciation of great principles. I doubt that history is granting much additional margin to make the New Covenant work.

I am just a man in the street as far as the intricacies of politics, diplomacy and defense are concerned. The scene is littered with ambiguities and too-easy generalizations. But we men in the street had better listen, read and make our convictions known.

There are wide differences of opinion about the nature of the present triangular duel between Cuba, the Soviets and ourselves. That any and all of these nations can be criticized from different perspectives is plain to any observer. But certainly it is unrealistic to consider the boiling issues in isolation from the thrust and counter-thrust of not only twenty years of Cold War, but also from the perspective of forty-five years in which there has been a persistent cloud of mutual threat and suspicion beginning as early as the Communist Revolution of 1917. Cuba, and all it involves, is not a sudden break in harmony, as a stone disturbs the waters of a placid pool. International turbulence, unnoticed at times, has been the companion of our days for fifty years, at least.

The mournful historical fact is that nations are not necessarily deterred from seeking power advantages, even when there can be no doubt now that war is a desolation beyond imagining.

The time must come soon when the New Covenant of the United Nations will be pledged by the nations without secret cynicism. Ways of living must be provided for open skies, open borders and free access to the end that no longer will fear of terrible attack be caused by spiraling tension and make easy the conditioning of people’s minds for war.

That this is a most hazardous moment in the Cold War cannot be denied, but that it has not turned to the white heat of nuclear war seems in large part to the United Nations – the opportunity it has given for confrontation and the pressure for peace it exerts. The current negotiations, even if war is prevented now, are essentially a holding action until the New Covenant of world peace through world law will be written on our hearts and enforced through the statutes of a United Nations, sovereign in affairs of world peace.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho told this story: “Sometimes when I think of the United Nations, I recall the story of Adam proposing to Eve. Eve hesitated for a moment, causing Adam to ask, ‘Is there anyone else?’”

Adam’s question is ours. Is there anything else than the political universalism of the New Covenant of the United Nations? It is interesting to observe that the people gathered in the earliest Christian movements, who were the creative strength from whom the great Christian religions grew, were not the rich, the powerful or the privileged, but the poor, unknown, underprivileged. Today, the U.N. numerically is largely comprised of the poor, weak, underprivileged countries. These new nations may be the genesis of tomorrow’s world order, particularly if the great and powerful nations fail to measure up.

The time has come to trust the process of the New Covenant. This trust must come to include soon, not only negotiated step-by-step disarmament, the end of nuclear testing, but also authentic police powers to enforce the statutes of international law. If our community had the codes of criminal law and civil law, but only organized a police force and appointed a district attorney after an alleged violation, one could expect not order, but confusion and delayed justice at best. If we coded traffic rules and installed traffic lights only after traffic was fantastically snarled, with a raucous chorus of thousands of horns and a terrible accumulation of collisions, then we would find ourselves well-nigh helpless to deal with congested chaos. This applies at the level of the international covenant and indicates how we might best strengthen the U.N. for the formidable tasks it must accept.

It is interesting to note that after the followers of the New Covenant of the New Testament were gathered, rules of order soon were necessary, moral behavior regulated, elders appointed, and processes of church government developed to meet the conflicts and problems of that day.

We are under similar compulsion today, it seems obvious to me. In the earliest days, sometimes a letter from Paul straightened out a problem, but that method soon changed to church government. Our world is vast, complex and has problems of great urgency and complex character to solve, even after peace comes as a way of behavior between nations.

It was about thirteen years ago that Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the U.N. was killed as he was on a mission for peace. It was said of the early Christians that they were ready to die and this is the reason their cause did not fail. Harnack, reviewing the rise of Christianity and the moral power he saw in Christianity, remarked “the sufferings of the just are the saving force in human history.”

U Thant, a Buddhist, Secretary-General, feels that suffering as he plays the role of mediator in the sharpest crisis yet faced by this organization, still in its teens. If he succeeds, people in a large part of the world have another chance for life and peace. If he fails -----

Let us pray:

O Lord of Justice and Mercy, we the people on the face of this world are a blundering lot, but we pray for strength to search for the truth as we know it; we pray for the initiative to inform our leaders of our deep-held convictions; we pray for the patience to talk with warmth, but not heat, with our friends to refine our opinions and deepen our faith; we pray that there will be a world where people can sleep in the night, work in the day and will make love and good-will the strands that bind the affairs of man. Amen.

Making the Most of Defeat – Temple-Synagogue-Family

October 21, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
6. Making the Most of Defeat – Temple-Synagogue-Family

When I say to you that the worst kind of setback can be the cause for the best of consequences, you may wonder if the pulpit now personifies Pollyanna. However, if you reflect on that part of our heritage which records the destruction of the Temple and the initiation of religious priority for synagogue and family, you too may marvel on what great things moral courage can create from disastrous defeat. The rabbis of old favored a parable which compared Israel to an olive. “In order for an olive to yield its essence, its pure oil, it must be subjected to pressure and crushed. History records that the Jews made their greatest contribution to religion, to art, to science at times of persecution and suffering.”

One of the most crucial events that is recorded in our history is the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, 586 B.C.E. Since being constructed in the reign of King Solomon, the Temple had been the sanctuary for Hebrew worship. The ritual laws had evolved to provide that only in the Temple could sacrifice be offered to Yahveh. Worship had been centralized. The campaign against offering sacrifices in village high places had been largely successful, though it had taken hundreds of years to eliminate the older practice.

Solomon’s temple was the shrine for the Ark of the Covenant, the place wherein sacred vessels were stored and provided a court for the worshipers. This was the acceptable place for sacrifice to the one eternal Yahveh. There was no alternative sanctuary.

Consequently, it was a bad defeat when Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in 598 B.C.E. and exiled many of the leading persons and craftsmen to Babylon. But when the Babylonian monarch returned to Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., to suppress an uprising, he destroyed both the city and the Temple. Most of the remaining citizens were taken to Babylonian exile to join their neighbors who had mourned by the rivers of Babylon for more than a decade.

The destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the Babylonian exile mark the great divide in our Jewish heritage. How could acceptable sacrifice be offered? The Temple no longer stood. How could the Covenant be preserved when all manner of alien influence would surround the children of Israel and lead them into the paths and practices of Babylonian worship?

Under the pressure of disaster and such threat, the synagogue was organized and responsibility given to the family to preserve and perpetuate the unique religious heritage.

The Synagogue (Greek “Assembly,” Hebrew “ben Keneset”) became a permanent institution because the Temple was gone and a place for prayer and instruction was necessary. The remnant in Jerusalem and the colony of exiles in Babylon had to know their faith, so the scrolls of the Law were gathered. In the synagogues of Babylon and Jerusalem, the Jew could hear the traditions and laws of his religion.

Now when Cyrus and his Persians overwhelmed the Babylonians, he permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem after their fifty-year exile, although some chose to remain in Babylon. The returning exiles built another temple, which was to stand for centuries, until destroyed by the Romans, under Titus, in 70 A.D.

But the strong effort to make the vest of disaster had established the synagogue as a permanent institution and it was the growing edge of Judaism. Hundreds of synagogues existed in Jerusalem by the time of Jesus. Synagogues existed in most of the cities and villages of the Roman world. The gospels refer again and again to the time Jesus spent in the synagogues. (Matt. xiii/54; Mark vi/2; Luke iv/16). Judaism in those times was a missionary faith with tremendous appeal to the Greek-Roman world. To the jaded tastes of the world-weary, Judaism with its unequivocal monotheism, rejection of idolatry and explicit moral codes was refreshing, appealing and positive. Because missionary activity has not been a characteristic of Judaism for many hundreds of years, we tend to forget or be ignorant of the universalistic outreach of the Jews in ancient times. The converts were many. Actually, Paul, the greatest Christian missionary, was competing in the synagogues for converts.

With the building of the Second Temple about 538/515 B.C.E. and continuing to 70 A.D. the temple priests became a religious and political aristocracy. Religious leadership for the teaching of scripture and morals passed to the synagogue leadership. We in the Protestant traditions appreciate too little that for the most part we follow the synagogue patterns in our service: Psalms, the reading of scripture, prayer, exposition of scripture. We have the ancient and persisting heritage of a religious body which celebrates no ritual of sacrifice and without a hereditary priesthood. This has happened because the synagogue made the most of defeat. When the Second Temple was destroyed and the Jews dispersed throughout the world, there was no irrevocable disaster. The synagogue traveled with [the] wanderers. “We have Yahveh and his Torah and this will suffice.” The synagogue was a place of prayer and instruction, continuing of course to this very day.

We will fail to do justice to our heritage unless we apprehend that the synagogue, born from the ruins of the Temple, has been an inestimable influence on education as well as religion.

The synagogue is the longest continuous school in Western culture. The synagogue was the first center of adult education. The fathers came to learn; the children to listen. When Alexander the Great brought Hellenistic culture into the Near East, the Jews established schools for young people to counteract the alien cultural influences. this was followed by elementary schools for children. Before the time of Jesus, the synagogue provided education for women!

The educational procedures of the synagogue were directly connected to family responsibility. The synagogue did not remove from the father the responsibility of educating his children. The father’s responsibility was emphasized. More than other religions in our Western world, Judaism is a religion of the home. The Sabbath ceremonies are observed in the home. Judaism is a religion celebrated not by priests for people, but by the people themselves.

In ancient days, the Roman philosopher, Seneca, stated that the Jews were the only people who knew the reasons for their religious ceremonies and the source of their guidance. This religious competence is directly owed to the synagogue and family responsibility.

One of the great religious affirmations of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, A.D., was Martin Luther’s exposition of the “priesthood of all believers.” This was a defense of the proposition that man needs no priest to mediate or intercede for him with God. Man can maintain a direct relationship with his God. It is ironical that Martin Luther, seethingly anti-semitic, was defending an idea that had been Jewish custom and practice for thousands of years.

When the Temple was destroyed and the people exiled, Judaism became essentially a layman’s religion. The synagogue teachers were laymen, not priests; the responsible fathers, taking seriously the obligation of religious nurture in the home, were laymen, not ordained ecclesiastics. The scribes were laymen and “rabbi” means teacher, not priest.

There has been growth and change in Judaism, as well as other religions of the Western world. But the goals of the ancient synagogue are still high values toward which not only the Jew, but also all other people may worthily aspire: “the discovery of one God in Nature and the Social Process,” (Noss), the demand that religious meaning shall culminate in the individual achieving a morally mature personality, the prevailing insistence that the child shall be taught by the parent to be loyal to the best of his heritage.

These values were strengthened, and workable educational methods achieved by the home and a laymen’s league, as a consequence not of good fortune, but rather of crushing disaster. This leads to another historical truth which may surprise us: national defeat meant perpetuation of what was far greater value than national pride or possession.

Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple, but in less than fifty years, Cyrus at the head of the Persians crushed the Babylonians. Cyrus was fair with the Jews, permitting them to return to Jerusalem and build another temple. The Persians were a mighty empire for awhile. Cambyses conquered Egypt and Darius subjected Scythia and Thrace. But Darius and Xerxes, his successor, were held by the brave Spartans at Thermopylae; Greek sailors administered a crushing defeat to Persia in the Bay of Salamis; and the Persians tasted the bitter dregs of defeat and decline. Alexander, a bright and quick-burning Greek flame, marched to India; returning, died at Babylon, where his generals divided up the spoils of empire. Then the Romans conquered the remains of Alexander’s divided empire. So conquest and defeat has marked our history then and all centuries since. The poets mourn the “glory that was Greece” and the “grandeur that was Rome,” but Shakespeare dramatized the truest insight when King John muses (act iv, sc. 2),

“There is no sure foundation set on blood,
No certain life achieved by others’ death.”

Except for the brief period of Maccabean independence, and until 1947, when the State of Israel was established, from Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler, in most places the Jews have been a subject people, sorely tried and cruelly treated. The Jew was segregated into ghettos in much of Christian history. He was prevented from access to many occupations and professions. Socially he was barred. Even today in our country, anti-semitism still exerts both obvious and subtle discriminatory practices in education, business, social life.

But during this continuing ill-fortune, the Jew has made the most of depressing circumstances. In Europe, the most severe repressive measures, up to the advent of Hitler, occurred in the Middle Ages. Amid the squalor of Ghettos how did our religious founders respond? First, their home life was distinctly more worthy than their neighbors outside the Ghetto. They were moral in a time when Christian culture was at a low level generally. With the Jewish family, drunkenness was rare, while outside the Ghetto it was common. Hospitality was ungrudging. As in the Days of Babylonian exile, education was a duty. When most of the Christian communities were illiterate, in the Ghetto period, “there existed in the smallest Jewish community an education system of breadth and universality which even now in the most advanced countries has barely been equaled. Enrollment for either sex was free. The number of pupils in each class was regulated .... Meals were given to those who were in need.” (Cecil Roth, JEWISH CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION, MacMillan, 1938, p. 34.)

The Hebrew epic is the most telling historical example of the truth that national defeat created the conditions for the perpetuation of ideas more precious than national power and might. Consider how much we Americans dread losing our place of pre-eminent power among the nations of the world. We are willing to make war to preserve the forms of our national sovereignty. We forget easily that “There’s no sure foundation set on blood.” I suspect that pride and fear are embedded too deeply in our bones to consider the desirability of perpetuation of values rather than maintenance of might. Last year, the driveway of the parsonage received a new layer of asphalt, pounded down and smoothed by a road roller. Late this summer, I observed a healthy dandelion which had grown through several inches of asphalt. So with great ideas. Nurtured with loyalty and persistence by a surviving remnant, values can break through the crust of hard disaster.

The survival and growth of values in spite of defeat should highlight another aspect of the human venture. Values are not necessarily corrupted when new institutional forms are found necessary. It may be surmised that as the beaten exiles made their weary way to Babylon with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed, the could hardly have guessed that out of the catastrophe would emerge a new institution, the synagogue, which would make the religion of Yahveh the most pervasive religion in history, directly through Judaism and indirectly through its two main offshoots, Christianity and Islam.

There is something in the nature of man which tends to find a way of solving puzzles and to make good spring forth out of present evil. Religion is many things; takes many forms and one of our needs is to create new forms today. We need not fear a dynamic religion, one of changing forms as long as we uphold the obligations of moral men. That ancient and enduring obligation is to refuse to remain blocked from our loyalties by whatever obstacles changing conditions may place in our path; to deny domination over our minds by all shadowy threats which would destroy our determination to search for the truth which will make us free. This is what inner strength can produce and our heritage testifies to it.

The rabbis concluded the parable of the crushed olive, “If we take oil of an olive and attempt to keep it at the bottom of a glass of water, the oil will rise to the top. So it is when Israel is crushed low and forced in to the gutters of human degradation by oppression. Then those of the faith must rise above their suffering; rise above injustice, upward in the direction of God.”

The Indestructible Writings

October 14, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
5. The Indestructible Writings

Not only has the impact of law from our Judeo-Christian heritage ordered our institutional structures; not only has the great prophetic influence ever urged us forward toward the selves we might be; but also the indestructible writings have branded our expressions, clarified our goals and helped us to look with honesty at man and his ways in the universe. If the books of the law can be considered legal, although of course this is an inadequate word for them; if the prophetic books can be called inspirational; the Writings can be classified as literary. The word, “literary,” does not encompass their fullness and diversity. But the ancient Hebrews called these books the Writings, the Ketubim.

The Writings are classified (see Harper’s Bible Dictionary) 1) the Poetical books – Psalms, Proverbs, Job. 2) The Rive Scrolls (Megilloth): Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther. 3) Histories: Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

The Hebrews came to believe that sacred scripture should include more than Law and the Prophets. The Writings came into accepted form gradually, over a period of hundreds of years. Ernest Trattner pointed out, (UNRAVELLING THE BOOK OF BOOKS, P. 184), “... in here is a vast and interesting mixture of all sorts of things coming from many different ages. It is a grab bag containing moral philosophy, hymns, dirges, romances, proverbs, psalms, idylls, love songs, apocalypses – all massed together.”

This extensive body of literature has inestimable literary value and should be justly honored for its contribution to our culture by being more widely read by adults. However there is an influential trend within the Christian churches which makes it important to understand the origins and purposes of the writings. This development is the rebirth of Bible Theology.

Bible Theology is the proposition that essentially the Bible is a united book, telling a single story – the salvation plan that God built into the world. A Christian believer in Bible Theology sees Jesus as the Christ who divides history into the Old Covenant and the New Covenant – the Fall of Man in Adam’s sin; the redemption of man when God in Christ dies an atoning death for mankind’s sins and triumphs over death by his resurrection from the tomb. In our discussion of the Judeo-Christian heritage, we must return again and again to this old story of salvation.

Bible Theology finds prophecies, fore-runners, allegories, omens in all Old Testament books and interprets (usually awkwardly) these as signs in the salvation plan.

When the scholarly discipline of Bible criticism first established its place a century ago, Universalists and Unitarians generally and easily found themselves among those who came to see the Bible, not as one book with one salvation scheme, but as a library of 66 books, written in different times, by different authors, with different purposes and of vastly different value. This historical and literary interpretation of the Bible we still espouse today.

But Bible Theology as a faith about history, as contrasted to the history of faith, has achieved a position of restored strength in the Christian churches generally. Sometimes called “neo-orthodoxy,” the theory asserts that “theology must be controlled by the life, world and faith of the Bible.”

Because of the unceasing controversies about the place of religion in public schools, and other public institutions as well, it becomes of great importance for us to come to convictions about what religion is – or better still, what religions are.

There is unbounded need to demonstrate that our religious heritage is diverse, not unitary. The prevailing pressures to continue prayers and scripture readings in public schools are current examples of the false notion that there is a clear, emphatic and uncontradicted truth in our Judeo-Christian culture. Furthermore, the exhortations urge that unless this “pure” message is preached daily in the public classrooms, we are in grave danger of adopting all manner of evil, or so we are told.

Theseus, the mythological Greek hero, encountered the evil Procrustes. Procrustes had an iron bedstead on which he used to tie all travelers who fell into his hands. If they were shorter than the bed, he stretched the victim. If the victim was too long, Procrustes chopped off enough to make the body fit the bed. The indestructible writings not only communicate a “variety of religious experience,” but also the reader who takes time to consider the printed page usually concludes that only by subjecting the scriptures to Procrustean stretch or Procrustean amputation can one affirm that there is contained [there]in a clear, unquestioned doctrine of either man or god.

Not the solidarity of doctrine, but the presentation of human experience in literature of matchless quality, is the superb gift we have received from the writings.

The Psalms comprise the songbook of Judaism. David was not the author, although it is possible that some of the ancient lines may be his, or date from his time. The Psalms were revised and rewritten, their composition covering several centuries in the times before the Christian Era when the temple still stood. The Psalms are the most well-known devotional literature in the entire Judeo-Christian world. The 23rd Psalm is a great comfort to millions in either good times or bad; the 46th Psalm was the inspiration to Martin Luther when he composed the greatest hymn of the Reformation, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” But the Psalms are not limited to expressions of faith in a God strong to save. There are psalms breathing hate and revenge (#10, 55, 58, 69, 109). There is interspersed within shepherd songs of faith, psalms that pray that infant children of the Babylonians have their heads bashed open by swinging the babies against a wall (137). Thus, like life experience in any age, the important is never completely free from the trivial, the beautiful from the ugly, the moral from the immoral. The glory of the psalms is not sustained by the consistency of theology, but by the awareness that men in hard times can sing great songs of courage and trust. We should not be dismayed that revenge and narrowness of spirit creep in – because these feelings steal into our lives too.

Consider Ecclesiastes, the preacher: Here is an example where great literary creation is a formidable obstacle to easy ideas of faith. Ecclesiastes (Koheleth the Preacher), is a melancholy agnostic, gentle and wise. (1/14): “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” Although he comprehends no transcendent purpose in the universe, his wisdom reflects decent morality and ethics established by unapologetic humanism. He speaks of child-training, the evils of drunkenness, the wisdom of work and prudential behavior. The impact of the biblical expressions of Ecclesiastes on our language has been considerable, even though theologically, Ecclesiastes is no comfort to those who need to believe in an immortal life and no help to those who must see divine purpose running through all events and ages. Ethics are emphasized, even though pessimism is central in Ecclesiastes.
(7/1) “A good name is better than precious oil...”
(9/10) “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.”
(9/18) “Wisdom is better than the weapons of war.”

There is not the slightest hint of enthusiastic faith in Ecclesiastes. Those who insist that a consistent theology runs through the Old Testament just ignore this plain-spoken book.

When one turns to Proverbs, one encounters a vast collection of the wisdom of the ancient Near-East. Two things are reasonable certain about the Proverbs. First, Solomon did not write them; second, the Proverbs comprise several collections from different dates. There may be isolated bits from great antiquity, and it is possible that Solomon may have coined some of these mint specimens of human wisdom, but more important is to appreciate both the insight into human nature that the Proverbs possess and the impression on our culture that they have made.
(14/34) “Righteousness exalteth a nation;
But sin is a reproach to any people.”
(16/8) “Better is a little with righteousness
Than great revenues with injustice.”
(28/1) “The wicked flee when no man pursueth
But the righteous are as bold as a lion.”

The [Book of] Proverbs is not a doctrinal text book, but a sourcebook for insights into human relations.
(15/16) “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is
Than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”

To consider briefly another book of the great writings, it is even less likely that Solomon wrote the collection of love lyrics called the “Song of Solomon,” or the “Song of Songs.” Throughout Christian times, there have been labored theological interpretations of this collection of love songs garnished with erotic imagery. How does one accept in theological structure this early poetry which originated either in early fertility cults, ancient Near-Eastern love songs or both? Christianity accepted the love song in the book of Christian faith by interpreting the verses as an allegory of the love of Christ and the Church. Christ was allegorized as the bridegroom and the Church as the bride. The theology is not persuasive.

To consider the book of Ruth as anything but a delightful and pointed ancient romance is to do injustice to one of mankind’s great short novels. Simply and charmingly written, it was an answer to racial bigotry then and can be a lesson today. With great art, the unknown author controverted the prejudice that foreign blood was evil. By portraying Ruth as an ancestor of David, the emphatic point was made that in the veins of the great King ran the blood of a Moabite woman. When Mahlon died, the husband of Ruth, the son of Naomi, the mother prepared to return to Judah. Ruth the Moabite widow utters the imperishable words, (1/16)
“Entreat me not to leave thee and to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people and thy God, my God.”

The international flavor of Ruth is abruptly contrasted by the intensely nationalistic novel of Esther. Under the pressure of probable persecution by one of the Persian emperors, this book breathes a spirit of vindictiveness. When the famous council of Hebrew rabbis and scholars convened as Jamnia in 100 a.d. to settle the matter of which books were canonical, the book of Esther was one of several, including Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, which were admitted as authorized scripture only after prolonged argument.

Of all the writings, Jonah is the best known, but fame is wrongly based. The fish story is trivial, but the book of Jonah, as an example of high level goals and thinking, is a superb testimony to the equality and unity of the whole human family.

Jonah, a self-righteous man who despised foreigners and thought it ridiculous that God should have any concern for foreigners, is shown that all person count. Anyone who holds the notion that our Judaic heritage, prior to Jesus and Paul was that of a narrow, chosen covenant people, from which others were excluded, should read Jonah and be enlightened.

In the last few years, Job, the literary masterpiece of the Bible has become better known because Archibald McLeish wrote the fine, modern dramatization of Job, J.B. Job deals with the agonizing problems of unmerited suffering. Later editors emended Job to soften the impact of the bare, blunt questions Job posed. The poetry is matchless, the imagery superb. As McLeish demonstrated, Job’s agony could be a cry in modern times. Whether your views are conventional, strongly traditional, intensely modern or deeply rebellious, you will confront the human experience of man in the universe in the magnificent drama of Job.

The Judeo-Christian heritage is one of religious greatness, interspersed always by a weakness and choice of lesser goods. Great religions cannot be stuffed into a single mold – even when that mold is called “Bible Theology.”

What is universal about the Writings (and the Law and Prophets too) is not doctrine, for we have seen there is no universal doctrine. What is universal and timeless are people in sorrow and job, love and hate, life and death. There is the sensualism of the Song of Songs, the agnosticism of Ecclesiastes, the courageous despair of Job, the mixed moods of the Psalms, the nationalism of Esther, the appreciation for the foreign born of Ruth, the strange and compelling visions of Daniel, the universalism of Jonah.

The writings are human. They tell of the grandeur and misery of men and women in human situations of hope and fear, kindness and anger, assurance and anguish, patriotism and rebellion, content and discontent, great heights of achievement, low levels of failure.

In her biography of John Calvin, Professor Georgia Harkness commented (p. 7) “The Pref[ace] (of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion) is a letter to Francis I of France, protesting against his persecution of the Protestants, and is a masterpiece of apologetic literature. It is courteous, logical and to the point – and Beza pathetically remarks that if Francis had only read it, it could not have failed to win him from the errors of his courses....”

If he had only read it – there should be concern that so many adults no longer voluntarily read the great literature of our culture, rather than uniformed insistence that children be subjected involuntarily to prayers composed by Regents, Legion Posts, or clergymen.

If there is any pre-dominant theme in this library of diverse literature we call the Bible, it is moral, not theological. When one sees the stories unfold, primitive or advanced, poetry or prose, song of love or hate, there comes a prevailing emphasis of the superiority of a moral basis for humanity. Perhaps these lines from Proverbs are an appropriate summary of the moral themes: (3/13 to 18)

“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom
And the man that getteth understanding.
For the gaining of it is better than the gaining of silver,
And the profit thereof than fine gold.
She is more precious than rubies:
And none of the things thou canst desire are to be compared unto her.
Length of days is in her right hand;
In her left hand are riches and honor.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
And all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her;
And happy is every one that retaineth her.”

The Writings have a great gift for the willing reader. They will widen his understanding of human virtue and vice; they bring home to him from the printed page the range of emotions people feel, the depths to which they can fall, the heights to which they can rise. It may come home to the reader that (in Matthew Arnold’s words,) “The object of religions is conduct,” that conduct is not possible of understanding, except through the experiences and ways of human beings.

Carl Sandburg caught the spirit of the Writings when he told an anecdote about Bill Greene, Lincoln’s helper at the store in New Salem, Illinois. (See Carl Sandburg, THE PRAIRIE YEARS, p. 56). Bill Greene was on the witness stand, “when a lawyer asked him who were the principal citizens of New Salem, answered, ‘There are no principal citizens; every man in New Salem neighborhood is a principal citizen.’”

This underlies all the diversity of scripture, too. Every man is a principal citizen.

The Great Prophetic Influence

September 30, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
4. The Great Prophetic Influence

When a man of religion specifically charges that a merchant is giving short weight at long prices, then religion is involved in the market-place. (Amos 8/5). Most church organizations would include those who would be antagonized and ask,"He's meddling in business; why doesn't he stick to religion?" Yet this man who felt compelled to point the finger of condemnation at merchants, and many others, as we shall see, was the first prophet known to us who represented the astounding, original, ethical, prophetic influence.

Throughout the long centuries of ebb and flow of strength and weakness, good and evil, of Judeo-Christian events and ideas, this great prophetic influence is the best justification of the heritage. Lacking this influence, religion is either trivial or harmful. Looking with alarm at the crisis and growing insurrection in Mississippi, people ask me, "is one man worth it?" Yes: if you would understand James Meredith, you must understand and reckon with the great prophetic influence. If you would understand the United Action Committee for Rufus Fairwell, you must recognize what happened in history when the 8th century ethical prophets made their voices heard. What was their assertion? It was that the religious life and the moral life were identical. This was the source and is the continuing strength of the "social gospel," which announces plainly that men are redeemed in society, by justice which is achieved by action of people. I would talk of this prophet and his successors today, because their proposition should ever sting our conscience: A nation is redeemed by justice, those in the nation by the righteousness of their living.

Because of the breadth and depth of the lives of the ethical prophets, a look at just one will have to serve as the illustration of the great prophetic influence. But our example, Amos, is prime. For when he walked into the city, his face gleaming with the inward conviction that he was speaking God's will, a new attitude was introduced in our history, which has been perhaps the most significant single element in the history of the western world.

The setting had features we would recognize. Israel was enjoying its most fortunate political and material period in history. Wealth had increased and national power strengthened because the great kingdoms of Assyria to the north and Egypt to the south were in a time of political weakness. The city was growing rapidly, people were leaving the land and heading into the metropolis. Outwardly, religion was successful, dignified, respectable. The sanctuaries were known not only for their beauty, but also for adulterated worship because Canaanite cultic practices had been adopted. The people complacently believed that they were particularly favored by the Lord; that if they carefully performed the ritualistic requirements of sanctuary attendance and brought the proper meat and grain sacrifice requirements, then their salvation was assured.

It was a long time ago when Amos gazed on this complacency and wealth, even though there are some startling contemporary aspects to the scene. It was about seven hundred and fifty years before the time of Jesus that the events unrolled. The Roman Empire was yet to be born, for the Latins were still an obscure and unimportant tribe living primitively on the banks of the Tiber. About that time the first invasions of Celts were crossing the channel and successfully landing in England, there to gaze on Stonehenge and other religious monuments of the Beaker people, a primitive culture then, [of] at least 2000 years. The Hebrew culture was old too. The kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon had long before reached their peak and then divided into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and Jeroboam II (784-744 B.C.) reigned in Israel.

At such a time as that, a shepherd felt convinced that God was to speak through him to the people of Samaria. He was a prophet, but not a prophet that had generally been known. Actually, Amos declined to be classified as a prophet in the older definition.

Prophets had been known for emotional frenzies and ecstatic states. Some had claimed to be clairvoyants; some may have been musicians; some professed to foretell the future. Amos represented a new emphasis, reforming prophecy – not foretellers, but forthtellers, who spoke out against evil.

There are many aspects to the reforming prophets we will not easily understand or comprehend. When they said, “thus saith the Lord,” they meant this literally. God was in them, speaking through them. As professor Pfeiffer brought out in his notable book, (RELIGIONS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, p. 83 ff.) Hebrew prophecy may be classified with those mental and psychological states which demonstrate that the “human mind can have experiences which depend upon certain beliefs, irrespective of their objective truth.”

Amos and the other prophets were great poets, too. When Amos arrived in Bethel, he boldly condemned the complacent people for the things they prized most, their wealth, leisure ... religious attachments. He felt compelled to deliver the message of Yahveh, for he felt Yahveh had chosen him to speak,

“Can two walk together,
except they be agreed?
Will a lion roar when he has no prey? ...
The lion hath roared,
who will not fear?
The Lord God hath spoken,
who can but prophesy?”

Amos denounced Israel’s neighboring nations for their sins; but he also denounced Israel. He made not hit whatsoever with the upper class women of Samaria, being unsparing in his criticisms of their self-indulgence and shallow values. He called them “cows.” (“kine of Bashan,” 4/1). Amos pointed his finger not only at swindling merchants, but at greedy landlords and corrupt public officials. He didn’t spare those who were technically innocent in the midst of wrong-doing, but who prudently kept silent:

(5 12/13)
“For I know your manifold transgressions
and your mighty sins.
They afflict the just, they take a bribe,
And they turn aside the poor from their right.
Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time,
for it is an evil time.”

But the prophets placed little value of prudence. In a passage which is among the greatest words ever spoken by man in any time or place, Amos condemned the forms of religion where the spirit is absent: (5 21/27)

“I hate, I despise your feast days,
and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.
Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your mean offerings,
I will not accept them,
Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.
Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs,
For I will not hear the melody of thy viols.
But let justice run down as waters,
and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

Now all this was theological, as well as a call for social change. The values of social justice, the righteousness of individuals and society were not just an appendix to theology, or an unimportant additional activity of the ecclesiastical institution. Amos and his successors in this mighty line, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and the others felt that justice was the operation of God in history. Isaiah pleaded,

"Cease to do evil,
learn to do well:
Seek justice, relieve the oppressed,
Defend the fatherless, plead for the widow:
For these are the things that I delight in,
Saith the Lord."

As has been brought out by Cecil Roth, (JEWISH CONTRIBUTION TO HISTORY, MacMillan, 1938, p.10 ff.) this conviction that God was known by qualities and acts of social righteousness established in time, not eternity, was one of the great contributions to our values of freedom and the right to choose one's political destiny. When the King's prerogatives are described in the Pentateuch, (Deut. xvii-20- "a phrase...sums up the ideal of the Hebrew monarchy: 'that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren.'" The Prophets did not sanction the "divine right" of kings, but rather, provided an undergirding for constitutional government in later times. The famous phrase of Lecky summed it up, "Hebrew mortar cemented the foundations of the Republic." Nor should it be thought strange that the first seal adopted by our revolutionary government showed the overthrow of Pharaoh at the Red Sea, together with the famous motto, “rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.”

There is a parallel and distinctive emphasis we find in the ethical prophets. If you read Amos, you may note that all through the great poetry, which is both scathing in its labeling of the ills of society and magnificent in its diction and hyperbole, you do not find Amos pointing the finger at one individual and telling him to get right with Yahveh. Even when Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, came to Amos and instructed him to get out of town because the townspeople will no longer tolerate him, Amos does not retaliate personally against the priest. Amos replies, "The Lord said unto me, 'Go prophesy unto my people Israel.'" (8/15)

Now no matter how positive, various, or unconvinced your ideas of God may be, consider that if God is inextricably linked with the operation of justice in History, it would certainly follow that spiritual crises may be identified and known by social conditions. And by spiritual I mean moral. When the Divine spirit is thought as operative in justice among men, then spiritual can mean nothing else than moral. This is still a revolutionary concept.

In the recent spectacular highway robbery in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, part of the reason for the success was that the robbers were dressed like policemen. This disguise enabled them to get close enough to the armored car to prevent resistance or escape. Amos of old was saying that the false or trivial may masquerade as real religion and people are robbed thereby of the real meaning and real duties of religion. The average man thinks of the obligations of religious faith in terms of some individual contribution to the religious institution, individual acts of penance, individual affirmations of belief or creed, an individual relationship to God, which is maintained in specified hours, of worship or moments of prayer. This is his reasonable service and he may then spend the bulk of his time in the service of other rules and other obligations, even contradictory ones. But, says Amos, the acts and attitudes of society mark the degree to which people are right with God.

This is formidable. There is little evidence that Amos had much effect on his own time. His nation proceeded on its self-indulgent slide and one day the Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold. Up to now, at least, civilizations have been given second chances or new cultures have built on the ruins of the old. Such margin for mistakes would not seem to exist any longer. Nevertheless, I do not see how we can affirm that our religion, or any religion can meet the times unless it affirms that crisis, trouble, disorder, injustice anywhere in society indicate that organized religion should act more effectively in the affairs of men.

Amos confronted his time not only with social righteousness as basic to religion, but also he set forth the vigorous and revolutionary idea of universality. Amos coined one of the great figures of speech which has branded our language, when he said, “Behold, I (the Lord) will set a plumbline in the midst of my people, Israel.” There is no doubt today that we the people of the world are being measured by the plumbline of universality. Can we line up soon enough?

One of the startling ideas Amos advanced in those long-ago days is found in the second chapter, “Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Moab, and for four. I will turn away the punishment thereof; because he burned the bones of the King of Edom into lime.” Doesn’t sound like world-shaking insight, does it? But remember, in those days, each people had its own God. The Hebrews worshiped Yahveh, the Assyrians, Ishtar, the Canaanites, Milcom, and so on. But Amos says, Yahveh will punish Moab for crimes committed against Edom. The nationalistic idea of god is transcended. Amos proclaimed that Yahveh is the god of all nations.

The later prophets supported this same belief, astounding for those days. Isaiah, speaking with Yahveh’s bidding says: “Oh Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury.” In the period of the exile, Zoroastrianism got along with Judaism. In the book of Isaiah, Cyrus, the king of Persia, and a Zoroastrian, is looked upon in a Messianic role for the Hebrews. As Malachi said centuries later, “Have we not all one Father, hath not one God created us?” This insignia painted on the beam overhead is another of the immeasurable contributions of the great prophetic tradition. The ethics and social institutions implied from the idea of the universality of god, point to one world of man. This grand goal we will deter and oppose only to our own hurt.

It should not escape us that this proclamation of the social nature of religion in no way lessens or discredits the individual’s feeling for, and absorption in, high religion. Commitment to great causes not only fulfills the duties of one’s faith, but also strengthens the moral health of the individual. Some of the ancient rabbinic sayings bear directly on this truth of religion: “If a man occupies himself with the study of Torah without the intention of fulfilling it, it were better he had never been born.” (Rabbi Hiyya). Another rabbi commented on the man who says, “What have I to do with the concerns of the community or the world? What have I to do with their suits? Why must I listen to their talk? Peace to my soul.” The Rabbi said, “Such a man destroys the world.”

The prophetic influence is the power which prevents us from building inner tunnels of the mind and staying there, shut off – in unworldly mysticism, unproductive ritualism or shut off by concentrating on salvation in eternity, not salvation in time. For this wisdom we owe much to the ethical prophets, beginning with Amos in the 8th century B.C. We don’t know the fate of all of them; one could guess that Amos may have been executed. We know Jeremiah was about as unpopular as one could get. The prophets combined rare qualities: they were always in touch with the realities of the world in which they lived. Although one could say they disregarded public opinion and called spades, spades, there never was any doubt, amid the candor of their indictments, that they loved people; they loved the land, the hills and the arching, starry skies. Their brave involvements outside of self, saved individual self. There are so many of us that badly need this point of view today.

One thing more. We, in the liberal traditions in religion, Universalists, Unitarians and others, have a more definite obligation to permit that prophetic influence change our ways. For centuries we have been aligned with the point of view in religion which discards dogma and makes commitment to morality and the search for truth. That commitment we have modeled from Amos, Isaiah and the others. For apart from integrity and love in the human relationships of human society, symbols, sacrifices and rituals are abominations.

The next time you act on your convictions about society; when you say plainly that you don't measure neighborhood desirability by color or national origin, you are moved by the prophetic influence and be proud of it..

The next time you insist that there are no alternatives in international affairs but peace through one world of law, be not ashamed, for you are saying in today's words what the prophets proclaimed as the coming universal kingdom of Yahveh.

When you are honest enough to admit that our nation makes mistakes as well as others, that we are one among all nations which stand under the bar of the judgment of justice and mutual responsibility, be of good cheer for you too are beginning to move under the same sanction as the great ethical prophets.

In my lifetime, I know of no time when we more sorely needed the promise and hope of the great dream of Isaiah: (2-1/4)

"they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks,
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more."