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Theology and the Physical Sciences
Until early modern times the relations between theology and science were as harmonious as between theology and philosophy. Indeed, no sharp line of demarcation existed between philosophy and the natural sciences. As we have seen in the last chapter, systematic theology has retained, even to the present day, very close links with philosophy. The relations between theology and science have, however, been strained by a number of crises such as the Galileo affair in the early seventeenth century and the controversies about human evolution in the mid-nineteenth century. In our own century battles have continued to rage between fundamentalist Christians and scientists, as the Scopes 'monkey trial' of 1925 and the court cases about 'creation science' in the early 1980s bear witness. These conflicts direct our attention to the question of systematic theology's relation to the physical sciences.
Blondel on Faith and Science
Vatican I, without speaking directly of the physical sciences, laid down some general principles in its teaching on faith and reason. It affirmed that the two types of cognition can never be at odds and that they mutually support each other. Reason can assist faith by enabling it to construct apologetic arguments and theological systems. Faith assists reason by extending reason's sphere into the realm of supernatural mysteries and by delivering reason from errors, thanks to the surer light of revelation. Within its own proper sphere, the council declared, scientific reason enjoys a proper autonomy. Deriving from God, "the lord of the sciences," reason can, with the help of grace, lead people to God.
A generation after Vatican I, the French philosopher Maurice Blondel attempted to apply the teaching of the council to the academic situation of his own day. In the last two parts of a four-part article on faith, first published in 1906, he took up the linkage between faith and science. The relationship can be variously conceived, he said, in correspondence with different conceptions of science. According to the classical concept of science, taken over by Thomas Aquinas from the ancient Greeks, the concepts and theories of science are controlled by their objects and are intended to reproduce the structures of external reality. In that case science could directly confirm, or directly collide with, philosophy and faith.
According to a second view, held by some of Blondel's contemporaries such as Pierre Duhem, science was a system of symbols or notations devised for the purpose of accomplishing certain practical tasks. Science in that case would make no metaphysical claims. The only criterion would be its fruitfulness. In that case science and faith could coexist in mutual indifference.
Blondel was dissatisfied with both theories. The first, demanding concordism, failed to give science its proper autonomy. The second theory, by divorcing science from the real, would eliminate the possibility of any interaction between science and faith. In Blondel's estimation, science was autonomous to the extent that it was concerned with formal coherence, logical force, and inner consistency. But insofar as science aims to serve the needs of human life, it must insert itself into the real order. Even though scientific discovery does not have directly metaphysical significance, it does refer to the real order. Its notations are not merely arbitrary or conventional. It yields an authentic, though limited, grasp of truth. Moral and religious thinkers must take account of certitudes acquired through science: for example, that the firmament is not a solid vault; that there are antipodes.
According to Vatican I, Blondel notes, science and faith must cooperate, even while following their distinct methods. Conflict can arise, as the council stated, either from a misunderstanding of faith or from false conclusions of reason. Faith gives rise to confusion when it is falsely reduced to exterior formulations or when people look for literal agreement with scientific statements, overlooking the different modes of discourse. Science can be responsible for conflicts when it usurps the competence of faith.
A measure of friction between science and faith, said Blondel, is inevitable. Such friction can lead to advances. When science operates rightly in its own proper sphere, its findings can help believers over-come their unconscious narrowness. By adjusting to the progress of geology, archaeology, and other sciences, faith gains in solidity. For the same God, as Vatican I declared, is the lord of science and of theology. God never contradicts himself.
Vatican II, in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, extended the teaching of Vatican I along lines that Blondel would have welcomed. After affirming with Vatican I that the sciences have legitimate autonomy within their proper spheres of competence (GS 60), the Pastoral Constitution went on to admonish theologians to cooperate with experts in the various sciences and to propose the Church's teaching on God, humanity, and the world in ways that take advantage of recent scientific advances (GS 62).
Message of John Paul II
John Paul II, even before becoming pope, had a keen interest in the sciences; as pope he has maintained close relationships with leading scientists through instrumentalities such as the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In 1983, at the 350th anniversary of the publication of Galileo's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, John Paul II remarked that the Church's experience during and after the Galileo affair "has led to a more mature attitude and a more accurate grasp of the authority proper to her." He added: "It is only through humble and assiduous study that she learns to dissociate the essentials of faith from the scientific systems of a given age, especially when a culturally influenced reading of the Bible seemed to be linked to an obligatory cosmogony." Already in 1979 the pope had established a commission to make a careful examination of the Galileo question. A member of the commission has interpreted the condemnations of 1616 and 1633 as having merely disciplinary, rather than doctrinal, force.
A new phase in the development of the Catholic understanding of the relationship between religion and science was inaugurated by the Vatican-sponsored study week held at Castelgandolfo on September 21-26, 1987, to mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis principia mathematica. In a message of June 1, 1988, reflecting on this conference, Pope John Paul II presented a very open, confident, and encouraging assessment of the relations between religion and science. Ernan McMullin, an expert in the field, calls this message "without a doubt the most important and most specific papal statement on the relations between religion and science in recent times." Without preempting the prerogatives of working theologians, philosophers, and scientists to make their own applications, the Holy Father proposes a program that appears to be feasible, valuable, and even necessary for the good of all concerned.
The general position taken by John Paul II may be indicated by reference to the standard typology of the relationships between religion and the sciences: conflict, separation, fusion, dialogue, and the like.
Very clearly the pope rejects the position of conflict, in which it would be necessary to choose either science or religion to the exclusion of the other. This rejection can take either of two forms. One form is a 'scientism' such as that of Thomas Henry Huxley, who asserted in a sermon in 1866: "There is but one kind of knowledge, and but one method of acquiring it," namely, science. By the universal application of scientific method, positivists believed, it would be possible to dispel the dark clouds of dogma and inaugurate a bright new era of free assent to universally acknowledged truth. This triumphalist variety of scientism is not yet dead. The periodical Free Inquiry, for example, promotes science and reason as opposed to faith and religion. The 'scientistic' program tends to reduce quality to quantity and to emphasize the technological aspects of life. But it also makes room for a certain mystical exaltation of science, to the point where it becomes a pseudoreligion, involving what the pope in his message calls an "unconscious theology" (M 14). Jacques Monod and Carl Sagan are sometimes cited, though not by the pope, as examples of scientists who tend to extrapolate beyond the proper limits of their own discipline.
On the other hand, the pope no less firmly rejects the alternative possibility - the religionism of those who oppose science in the name of faith. In this framework theology becomes, as the pope warns, a pseudoscience (M 14). This may be judged to have occurred in the case of the 'creation science' taught by some American fundamentalists. The 'creationist' position, as Langdon Gilkey and others have shown, is in fact antiscientific. According to the sounder view, held by the pope in his message, faith cannot do the work of science, nor can the Bible function as a textbook of astronomy or biology.
The second major position that the pope rejects may be called separationism. Some thoughtful Christians solve the problem by relegating religion and science to separate spheres. This kind of separation has become almost axiomatic in Protestant theology since Immanuel Kant, who confined the competence of theoretical reason to the order of phenomena and regarded religious beliefs as deliverances of practical reason. Not only liberal theologians, such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack, but neo-orthodox thinkers such as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich accepted this division into two spheres. In an extreme reaction against the excesses of Galileo's judges Tillich writes:
Knowledge of revelation cannot interfere with ordinary knowledge. Likewise, ordinary knowledge cannot interfere with knowledge of revelation. There is no scientific theory which is more favorable to the truth of revelation than any other theory. It is disastrous for theology if theologians prefer one scientific view to others on theological grounds. And it was humiliating for theology when theologians were afraid of new theories for religious reasons, trying to resist them as long as possible, and finally giving in when resistance had become impossible. This ill-conceived resistance of theologians from the time of Galileo to the time of Darwin was one of the causes of the split between religion and secular culture in the past centuries.
McMullin, in a recent article, notes that
at the height of the 'creation-science' dispute in the U.S. some years ago, the National Academy of Sciences issued a declaration maintaining that religion and science are, in principle, entirely separate domains, one pertaining to faith and the other to reason, and hence of no possible relevance to one another. The new papal message takes issue with this convenient and popular way of avoiding the risks of conflict.
In our own day philosophers and theologians influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein frequently assert, as does Richard Braithwaite, that religious language is not intended to communicate cognitive truth but to recommend a way of life and to evoke a set of attitudes. In a somewhat similar vein, George Lindbeck maintains that doctrinal statements are "communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action." In all these theories the dogmas of the Church, even though they may seem to describe objective realities, are reinterpreted as symbolic expressions either describing the inner experience of the speaker or regulating the conduct of the worshiping community.
Some philosophers of science regard science as directly informative about the real order. But others, as we have noted in our discussion of Blondel, hold that science has a purely pragmatic aim, and thus that it cannot deny any claims of revealed religion about objective reality. Thus they rule out the possibility of conflict from the side of science.
Peace between religion and science is achieved in these systems, but only at the price of depriving religion or science of its capacity to say anything true about the world of ordinary experience. Wisely in my judgment, John Paul II takes a position akin to that of Blondel. He refuses to settle for a world divided into two cultures, literary and scientific, as described by C.P. Snow in his classic essay. Interaction, according to the pope, is necessary for the proper functioning of both religion and science.<FROWN:D02\>
CHAPTER FIVE
RECONSTRUCTING CHRISTIAN NARRATIVE ETHICS
ETHICAL PARADOX AFTER AUSCHWITZ
Despite the case I have made for the influence of Luther's two-kingdom ethic on the formation of the demonic double among the Nazi doctors, I would argue that the failure of Christian ethics during the Shoah can be thought of as a failure to maintain its two-kingdom ethic. Although Christianity began as a holy community, a separated community embodying an anthropological ethic of being in but not of the world, from the time of Constantine its ethic largely collapsed into a cosmological ethic of sacred cosmic order. Luther's Reformation theology, which significantly shaped the ethos of Germany, attempted to reinstitute a two-kingdom ethic. Opting for a paradoxical relation between the church and the world, he separated the realms of the sacred and the secular, which he believed had been dangerously fused together in the medieval hierarchical order of Christendom. The way in which he separated the two realms of church and state, however, permitted the paradoxical relation between them to collapse once again into a cosmological ethic and prepared the way for the eventual formation of the Deutsch Christian gospel of the Aryan Jesus.
The collapse of Luther's two-kingdom ethic is primarily the result of his privatization of religious experience. As the secularization of public order expanded during the Renaissance and Reformation, the public dimension of religious experience contracted. For Luther, the language of religion is the language of the inner person, and the language of the secular public order (of politics, science, etc.) belongs to the outer person. Because the kingdom of God is restricted to the inner and the kingdom of this world to the outer, the relation between the two ethical orders is rendered complementary rather than dialectical. The essential element of dialectical tension between the two ethical orders is eliminated. As a result the two kingdoms fit together too comfortably. The ethical tension between the cosmological and anthropological orders collapses into a sacral ethic of unquestioning obedience. The result is a pseudo-two-kingdom ethic.
Luther's instincts were right in attempting to recover a two-kingdom ethic, but his own version failed to alter substantially the Constantinian model of church-state relations. After Auschwitz, Luther's paradoxical two-kingdom ethic must undergo a fundamental revision. What is at stake here is more than restructuring Protestant ethics. As I suggested in the introduction, a two-realm or two-kingdom ethic is an essential feature of every anthropological tradition (e.g., Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Socratic) and essential to the critique of culture. Therefore, understanding what went wrong with two-kingdom ethics in the Christian tradition can point the way to a viable reconstruction that is of value to all holy communities.
Jacques Ellul offers a reconstruction of two-kingdom ethics which directly addresses the weakness of Luther's ethic. Ellul, a sociologist as well as a theologian in the Barthian tradition, has written over forty books on the social and ethical aspects of our technological civilization. As a sociologist, Ellul took on the task of identifying, analyzing, and articulating the "cosmological ethic" of our technological civilization. But as a theologian, Ellul then responded to that ethic by developing his own desacralizing "anthropological ethic." Like Richard Rubenstein and Arthur Cohen, Ellul sees the cold and calculating technobureaucratic structure of modern civilization as demonic and dehumanizing. The technicist ideal of efficiency subverts all other values, for once a society has opted for the most efficient solution in every area of human activity (his definition of a technicist society), human beings must conform to technical requirements, no matter how dehumanizing, for less efficient solutions simply cannot compete. Ellul's sociological work seems to suggest that human existence is determined by and conformed to technical and social forces, but that remains true only within the horizon of a cosmological ethic. Within the horizon of an anthropological ethic of transcendence, individuals may yet find it possible to exercise the freedom to call society into question and initiate a social transformation - one that brings the Is under the judgment of the Ought. This possibility occurs, Ellul insists, not when a cosmological ethic is replaced by an anthropological ethic but, as Eric Voegelin would agree, when one embraces both in a paradoxical relationship.
This paradox is expressed in Ellul's contrast of the sacred and the holy, which parallels Voegelin's distinction between cosmological and anthropological ethics (distinctions that I have adopted as foundational for my own work). Ellul departs from ordinary usage here by treating the terms sacred and holy as antonyms rather than as synonyms. The sacred performs the sociological function of integration and legitimation. Its positive function is to create a sense of order within which human life can be carried on. But its demonic propensity is to create an absolute or "closed" order (in which Is = Ought) that prevents the continuing transformation of self and society. Without such a self-transcending openness to the future, life ceases to be either human or free.
Thus for human life to be creative, Ellul argues, the claims of the social order to be sacred and unalterable must be relativized by that which is its opposite - the holy. The holy is that which is Wholly Other than society. Where the sacred demands integration and closure, the holy (as the Hebrew word qadosh indicates) demands separation and openness to transformation. A consciousness of the holy creates a feeling of tension and separateness between self and society. That tension prevents the social order from becoming absolute because it prevents the total integration of the self into society. This, in turn, forces the institutional structures of society to remain fluid and open to further development.
The paradox of freedom is that it is always an act of revolt against a limit. But the real limit, for Ellul, is a "combination of what is actually impassable and the inviolably sacred." Our sense of sacral awe makes us accept the limits of a given social order as absolute and also makes us seek to conform to these limits. Only our consciousness of the holy can enable us to desacralize and rehabilitate the sacred so as to open a social order to further development in the name of the infinite. The possibility of ethical freedom depends on the possibility of having a hope in something radically other than our technological civilization and its promises of fulfillment. For the hopes promoted by the mass media of our civilization serve only to integrate us into the collective social order as a sacred status quo. By contrast, a radically other hope would individuate persons, set them apart from the collectivizing influences of mass media, and give them the critical autonomy that belongs to an anthropological ethic.
Ellul's designation for this unique hope is "apocalyptic hope." When he speaks of apocalypse, however, he is not speaking of it in the literal and popular sense. On the contrary, "hope ... can be situated only in an apocalyptic line of thought, not that there is hope because one has an apocalyptic concept of history, but rather, that there is apocalypse because one lives in hope." Hope is apocalyptic not because it expresses a literal expectation of the end of the world but because the hope expressed in the book of Revelation breaks radically with the present order of things in order to inaugurate a new creation. An apocalyptic hope is a hope in the one who is both Wholly Other and the end (telos) of all things. Every person who is moved to embrace such a hope participates in the transcending freedom of God and inserts that freedom into society as a limit on its claims to absoluteness. Such a hope ruptures one's psychological dependence on 'this (technological) world' and permits one to break free and engage in acts that violate the sacral status of efficient technique, the ideological or mythological hopes of consumerism, and the political illusions that dominate our technical civilization.
When Ellul speaks about this kind of hope, he takes Judaism to be the model and argues that Christians must also learn to live a diaspora style of existence as a holy community. "Israel is a people centered entirely on hope, living by that alone .... As the one hoping people of the world, it is Israel which provides us with the model for this age ... an example of the incognito [i.e., its hidden presence as a holy community within the larger society]. In this age ... I think that Christians ... should take that as a model." Indeed, "if history is looked at closely, and without the usual Christian prejudice, it turns out to have been forged at least as much by the Jewish incognito as by Christian activism." "There is only one political endeavor on which world history now depends; that is the union of the Church and Israel. ... These two communities ... must join forces so that, in effect, this Word of God might finally be written. ... It would be written in counterpoint to the technological history of these times." Ellul is speaking not of an institutional merger but of a conversion of the church to share the same hope so as to support Israel "in its long march through the same night and toward the same Kingdom." The Christian community is the wild olive branch that has been grafted onto the cultivated olive tree of Judaism precisely to share in this hope.
Ellul's importance for post-Shoah Christian theology and ethics is linked to the fact that he is one of those rare Christian theologians who takes the Jewish experience of faith seriously in its own right. The essence of apocalyptic hope is embodied, for Ellul, in the Jewish tradition of chutzpah or wrestling with God. In an age of God's silence and abandonment, hope assaults God and wrestles with God. Prayer, which Ellul calls "the ultimate act of hope," is the "demand that God not keep silence. ... [It is] a striving with God, of whom one makes demands, whom one importunes, whom one attacks constantly, whose silence and absence one would penetrate at all costs. It is a combat to oblige God to respond, to reveal himself anew." It is motivated by a "commitment on behalf of man [that] is decisively bound to the commitment with God," from which "all further radicalism, of behavior, of style of life and of action" comes.
For Ellul, a Christian ethic emerges out of this shared paradoxical hope against hope. The only force that is a match for the integrating power of the fascination and hope inspired by the sacred is an apocalyptic hope inspired by the holy. Herein lies the ethical power of the dualistic symbolism of anthropological ethics. Only one whose hope is not in this world would even dare to contravene the present sacred order. Every act of inefficiency in the name of human dignity, every act of intelligent compromise in a world of politically absolute positions, is an audacious act that serves to delegitimate the present order and introduce new possibilities of ethical freedom.
Apocalyptic hope gives birth to an ethic of holiness, that is, of separation from the world. But unlike the sectarian, Ellul is not speaking of physical separation but of psychological and spiritual separation - that is, a change of hopes, from the claims for hope and meaning mediated by mass media to a hope in the Wholly Other. It is "separation ... only for the sake of mission. The break has to come first, but it implies rediscovery of the world, society, and one's neighbor in a new type of relationship."
Ellul's intellectual roots are in the work of the twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth and the nineteenth-century philosopher S<*_>o-slash<*/>ren Kierkegaard. But his fundamental stance on Christian ethics goes back even further, to the theologies of the Reformation and especially to Martin Luther's two-kingdom ethic. According to H.R. Niebuhr, Christians have historically responded to the problem of the two kingdoms in one of five different ways. At one extreme, Christians have preached a 'Christ against culture.' This is the sectarian option that sees the world as totally evil and seeks to withdraw from the larger culture into its own separate world.<FROWN:D03\>
Toward a Postliberal Religious Education
BY OWEN F. CUMMINGS
Cummings argues the need for a postliberal religious education that immerses the learner in Christian culture.
There is a considerable degree of division and confusion in Catholic circles about the nature, role, and function of religious education. At the international level, for example, there is the debate surrounding the proposed Catechism for the Universal Church. At a national level, in England, there is a degree of interdiocesan controversy over the recent religions syllabus for high school, Weaving the Web. Questions are asked: Is it too experiential? Is there enough Christian doctrine in it? Is the method too phenomenological? Something of this unease lay behind the contributions of Padraic O'Hare and Francis D. Kelly in The Living Light in 1984.
The purpose of this essay is to address that unease through a critical application of George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. This book has given rise to wide-ranging analysis and criticism since its publication, and has been described by Walter Kasper as the "... most noteworthy advance on the level of systematic theology" on discussions of foundational theology, and by David Ford as "a proposed 'paradigm shift' for conceiving the nature of religion, doctrine, and theology."
What Is Postliberal Theology?
The term 'postliberal' is ambiguous. It seems to connote conservatism in the pejorative sense of the word, insularity, and even fundamentalism. Nothing could be further from Lindbeck's intention and position. Described by David Tracy as "... the major theological contributor to genuine ecumenical dialogue among the major confessions," the core of Lindbeck's postliberalism is best outlined in his own words:
The four centuries of modernity are coming to an end. the The individualistic foundationalism rationalism, always wavering between skeptical relativism and totalitarian absolutism, is being replaced ... by an understanding of knowledge and belief as socially and linguistically constituted. Ideologies rooted in Enlightenment rationalism are collapsing.
The liberalism to which Lindbeck is opposed is "individualistic foundational rationalism," the child of the Enlightenment. 'Postliberalism' is probably best understood as a heuristic term, representing a more nuanced approach to knowledge and belief as socially rather than individually rooted.
While Lindbeck has coined the term 'postliberal theology,' and is its best known representative, it is a way of doing theology that is shared by others, for example, the late Hans Frei, David Kelsey, Ronald Theimann, and Brevard Childs, all having some connection with Yale. At the same time, it is not a school in the usual sense of that word. These theologians (and others) share a methodological family resemblance in refusing to allow the modern, 'enlightened' secular world as such to determine the agenda for theology or for the church. To plot a more detailed profile of postliberal theology, the best way to proceed is to attend to Lindbeck's own categories for theology as presented in The Nature of Doctrine.
Models of Doctrine
Lindbeck describes three types or theories of doctrine: cognitivist-propositional, experiential-expressivist, and cultural-linguistic. One of the most articulate commentators on postliberal theology, William Placher, advocates a somewhat simpler nomenclature. Placher speaks of the cognitive model, the revisionist model (= experiential-expressive), and the postliberal model (= cultural-linguistic). For the sake of simplicity I shall rely for the most part on Placher's terminology.
The cognitive model of doctrine insists that doctrines make truth claims about objective states of affairs. There is little or no historical awareness or perspective for the doctrinal cognitivist: "For a propositionalist, if a doctrine is once true, it is always true, and if it is once false, it is always false." The lack of informed historical perspective often has the effect of making doctrine extrinsic to the believing community, impedes a sensitive perception of the evolution of doctrine, and is ecumenically sterile.
The revisionist model of doctrine posits that doctrines express experiences and attitudes of the believing subject. They are noninformative symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, existential orientations. Theologians from Schleiermacher through Rahner and Lonergan to David Tracy exemplify this approach, according to Lindbeck. This approach sits ill with the cognitive approach because it underplays the objective status of doctrines. There is a common assumption among revisionists that we have experience and then search for a suitable language in which to express the meaning of the experience. Christian doctrines are the expression of the prelinguistic experience of Christian people. Presumably, for revisionists, the same would hold true of Buddhist doctrines or Muslim doctrines.
Lindbeck articulates a third model of doctrine, the postliberal or cultural-linguistic model, which he judges to be the most appropriate. In this model, doctrines specify rules for Christian speech and action. Taking his cue from the philosophy of language of the latter Wittgenstein, Lindbeck insists that language does not express an experience that precedes it. On the contrary, language makes experience possible. Doctrines, whatever else they may be, are language. And so, Walter Kasper can comment that "dogmas or theological doctrines do not have an expressive meaning, but primarily a regulative and performative meaning." This regulative character of doctrine insists that the primary function of church doctrines "is their use ... as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action." Whereas in the revisionist or experiential model the movement is from internal experience to external expression; in the postliberal model it is the reverse. We "internalize through stories, symbols, rituals, behavior, and many other influences, the 'language' through which we experience reality."
Some Criticisms of Lindbeck
Lindbeck's work has met with criticism, the clearest sign that he is being taken seriously by the "public of the academy," to use a prominent revisionist phrase! Kasper has made the point that labeling Lindbeck as neo-orthodox or neo-conservative advances nothing: "Such strategies of labeling and dismissing contribute nothing ... to true understanding and to progress in constructive discussion of the issues that we are, after all, faced with." Kasper's point is well taken, but, of course, it applies with equal force to Lindbeck's labeling of others.
Perhaps the major criticism of Lindbeck has to do with the a priori difficulty of representing the irreducible particularity and complexity of anyone's thought in clear-cut categories such as cognitivist-propositionalism or experiential-expressivism. Commentators of different theological persuasions have lodged versions of this critique. Colman O'Neill, a Thomist, believes that any Thomist "will have a basic sympathy for the cultural-linguistic analysis." At the same time, O'Neill is doubtful whether "any theory of religion or doctrine exists, at least within Christianity, which corresponds to the description given of cognitivism ...." A propositionalist account of faith and doctrine is sometimes considered a major characteristic of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. This may be true of some of the manualists, but even there caution is required because of Catholicism's heightened emphasis on symbolism, not least in sacramental theology.
At the other end of the theological spectrum, the position of revisionism, David Tracy considers that thinkers in the tradition have moved on in at least the last fifteen years to an explicitly hermeneutical position, providing a more nuanced view of experience and language than Lindbeck allows for. Tracy notes that in the text of The Nature of Doctrine, for example, that Hans-Georg Gadamer is not mentioned at all and that Paul Ricouer is referred to only once, and yet the more significant revisionists have engaged the thought of such hermeneutical thinkers and have moved on from earlier views. Tracy himself is the best example of this shift, and his Plurality and Ambiguity securely establishes him as a hermeneutical theologian.
Kasper contrasts Tracy and Lindbeck in the following way:
The real difference between Tracy's and Lindbeck's view ... does not lie so much in the inversion of the internal and the external word, of experience and language. It lies rather in the fact that, for the sake of universal intelligibility, hermeneutical and political theology interpret the texts within a modern, largely secular horizon of understanding, while Lindbeck trusts their performative power, that is, their self-evidence and internal plausibility.
Tracy trusts the texts of the Christian tradition to mediate meaning to contemporary people. Lindbeck trusts the performative power of these texts in the Church to proclaim a clear message. Both trust the texts. Therefore, the relationship between at least these two representatives of revisionism and postliberalism does not seem to be polarized in an absolute sense.
Some may wonder whether Lindbeck's postliberal theology does justice to the truth claims of Christian doctrine. Wittgensteinian philosophy has led to a certain relativism with respect to questions of religious truth. A stress on the 'use' of statements rather than on their 'meaning' may allow that Christian doctrines have a use without conceding that they have a cognitive meaning, that is, that they describe or give information about the real world. Would this be a consequence of Lindbeck's use of Wittgenstein in postliberal theology? I think not.
Truth and Action
Lindbeck distinguishes "intrasystematic" truth from ontological truth. Intrasystematic truth is the truth of coherence; ontological truth is correspondence to reality. Christian doctrines are intrasystematically true when they cohere with the total relevant context, include the correlative forms of life. They are ontologically true, that is, they correspond to reality, when they intend and enable a conformity of the self to God. Or, one might say, Christian doctrines are ontologically true when they are performed:
... a religious utterance ... acquires the propositional truth of ontological correspondence only in so far as it is a performance, an act or deed, which helps create that correspondence.
The only way to assert a Christian doctrine as ontologically true "is to do something about it, i.e., to commit oneself to a way of life ..."
This is no sophisticated version of doctrinal reductionism. Rather, it is the acknowledgement that there can be no neutral judgment in matters of religious truth. To profess belief in the Trinity is not in the first place to make an objective theistic statement; it is to commit oneself to living life and to understanding reality in the light of the Trinity. Finally, not only Lindbeck, but Frei, Kelsey, Thiemann, and other postliberal thinkers are theologically committed to the absolute priority of God. This Barthian emphasis stands as a corrective, if such be needed, to the methodological influences of Wittgenstein.
Immersion in Tradition
As far as I am aware, no postliberal theologian as such has turned toward articulating a postliberal religious education. There are ad hoc remarks here and there, but a profile of postliberal religious education as such has yet to emerge. A passage from E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy -and, indeed, a paradigmatic expression of his entire project of cultural literacy -provides a point of entry for seeing some of the implications of postliberal theology for religious education:
Believing that a few direct experiences would suffice to develop the skills that children require, Dewey assumed that early education need not be tied to specific content. He mistook a half-truth for the whole. He placed too much faith in children's ability to learn general skills from a few typical experiences, and too hastily rejected "the piling up of information." Only by piling up specific community-based information can children learn to participate in complex co-operative activities with other members of their community.
Whether it is exclusively or even principally to be associated with Dewey, there can be little doubt that a close engagement with many contemporary educational texts and philosophies reveals a deep-rooted skepticism about the "piling up of information."
Society at large is frequently being told that knowledge is exploding so fast that it is more important to teach a student how to learn, to gain knowledge, than to teach them 'facts' as such. The theologian/religious educator will see here the helpful and truthful traditional distinction between fides qua and fides quae. An emphasis on one at the expense of the other makes a nonsense of fides. It is epistemologically impossible, in fact, it is something of a performative contradiction, to divorce the one from the other. Or, in a word, people do not simply learn; they learn something.
One result of this rampant skepticism is a widespread illiteracy with regard to the humanities.
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INTERIOR MONOLOGUE AS A NARRATIVE DEVICE IN THE PARABLES OF LUKE
PHILIP SELLEW
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455
Six of the parables told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke use a narrative device that is otherwise rarely if ever employed in the gospel tradition. When faced with a moment of decision, usually in a moral crisis, the central characters in each of these little stories address themselves through the use of the literary technique of 'interior monologue.' The Rich Farmer, the Unfaithful Servant, the Prodigal Son, the Crafty Steward, the Unjust Judge, and the Owner of the Vineyard all think out their plans and strategies in private moments that are nonetheless simultaneously displayed for other characters in Luke's story to see and hear. The motivations and personal viewpoints of these actors in the parables are laid bare to give the reader direct access to their unspoken thoughts. The use of this device grants privileged insight into the human dilemma in a fashion not ordinarily available.
I. Interior Monologue in Narrative
Luke has characters in Jesus' parables voice their inner thoughts as a way to dramatize their private interior debate. The 'soul' disputes with itself, but its arguments are broadcast through Jesus' special insight. The true feelings and inner workings of the characters within these stories are made transparent, not only to the reader but to Luke's other characters as well, who act as the parables' audience within the larger story. This and similar techniques of self-address had long been employed in Greek mimetic or dramatic literature, especially in epic poetry, tragedy, and the Hellenistic novels, as well as in some of the biblical tradition, as a means for an author to paint more vivid and poignant portraits. But the use of such a device in writings of a more historical, philosophical, or rhetorical flavor is rare. When a Thucydides or a Xenophon (or the Luke of the NT Acts) composes a public speech by an individual character, this is very different in intent and effect from presenting the private thoughts of a Pericles or a Paul, even when we realize that the speeches are the creation of the historian rather than of the presumptive orator.
When a narrator renders his or her characters' thoughts and decision-making processes so directly, the reader or dramatic audience is able to grasp their self-understanding and moral dilemmas with increased psychological depth and empathy. Awareness of this technique and its effects is not just a modern event. The distinction between a distanced or 'plain' narration (translitGwapl<*_>e-macron<*/> digesistranslitG/) and imitative narration (translitGm<*_>i-acute<*/>mesis), where the narrator speaks in the person of a character, was already a matter of interest for Plato. The philosopher was primarily concerned with the moral effects of imitation of unworthy persons, emotions, or forms of behavior. His chief example was Homeric epic. Heroes in the Iliad will at times speak inner monologues to express their deepest emotions, especially fear. The Homeric characters are pictured as "disputing with their hearts" (translitGvall<*_>a-grave<*/> t<*_>i-acute<*/>e moi ta<*_>u-tilde<*/>ta f<*_>i-acute<*/>los dielxato thum<*_>o-acute<*/>stranslitG/), a phrase that has its echo in some of Luke's portrayals. Achilles, a man of wrath rather than of fear, will question in his heart about his unburied friend Patroclus (Il. 22.385). The interior monologues of the Iliad show how the heroes struggle from unworthy emotions to worthy actions.
Hellenistic epic and romance preferred to reserve the interior monologue for desperate lovers at moments of crisis. All of our known examples are from women. Medea in Apollonius's Argonautica attempts to resolve her dilemma of torn loyalties between her lover, Jason, and her father, King Aeetes, in a lengthy interior monologue (3.772-801). There is a similar scene in Vergil's Aeneid: when Dido is confronted with conflicting demands, she considers her difficulties in interior monologue before ultimately choosing suicide as her only escape (4.534-52). Ovid and the novelists Xenophon of Ephesus and Longus use the same technique.
Narrative in the Hebrew Bible is typically more laconic (or 'reticent') and more hesitant to provide direct access to its characters' thoughts, but self-address is sometimes used in interesting ways. The deteriorating relationship between David and Saul as portrayed in 1 Samuel 18, for example, and especially their negotiations about Saul's daughters Merab and Michal, is described for the most part using the techniques of distanced, external narration (techniques that will be discussed below). The exception is when the narrator begins to use the device of the interior self-address to expose the deceitful thoughts and strategies of King Saul (18:17b, 21a). Saul expects that David will fall in battle against the Philistines while displaying his valor for his prospective royal father-in-law. The reader is told precisely what is so crucially left unsaid to the other characters in the story.
Though this focus on the inner workings of an unheroic character will also find echoes in Luke's parables, the technique for the most part remains alien to gospel narration. Luke is the exception, and indeed only a partial exception: his Jesus will occasionally employ the device of inner speech when one of his characters is at a point of crisis or decision, but these are only very brief 'conversations,' running but a sentence or two in length, like Saul's in 1 Samuel 18, unlike the often very lengthy soliloquies or inner debates of classical mimetic literature. Luke's descriptive narrative is broken only briefly, within a few parables, a break made possible perhaps by the parables' more dramatic or fictive mode of presentation as contrasted with their surrounding, more matter-of-fact narration.
One of the few writers to take much notice of the use of this literary convention in Luke's parables has been John R. Donahue: "For Luke, the human condition is a stage on which appear memorable characters.... Luke invites us into this world by frequent use of soliloquy ... where we are made privy to the inner musings of the characters. Luke eschews allegory and expresses realistic sympathy for the dilemmas of ordinary human existence." This is very well put, but I cannot agree with how Donahue then continues: "His memorable characters offer paradigms of discipleship for ordinary Christian existence." This may well be true for some of the parables in Luke, but is generally not the case for those in which interior monologue is employed, including those classically labeled 'example stories.' What great difficulties the leading characters of precisely these stories have long posed for those seeking exemplary Christian heroes -including the gospel writer! None of the personalities whose thoughts are described is particularly commendable; indeed they tend to embody anything but noble characteristics. The self-satisfied, amoral, or even immoral individuals who star in these portrayals, who are looking out for their own interests above all, sometimes encounter unexpected divine intervention or retribution (the Farmer, perhaps also the Owner of the Vineyard), but more often they seem able to use their craftiness or amoral reasoning to escape punishment (the Prodigal, the Steward, and the Judge).
II. Techniques of Characterization in Descriptive Narration
The Gospel of Luke, together with its companion literature both within and outside of the New Testament, has ordinarily only two means of letting its readers learn of its characters' thoughts, intentions, or motivations. (1) The characters can speak their minds aloud or act in a decisive manner that will itself clarify their feelings and intent; or else (2) the narrator can inform the reader of the characters' moods or motivations through third-person description. These are the techniques commonly employed by the ancient historians and biographers, practitioners of the literary art of translitGdigesis, the ancient term for 'narrative description' (Luke 1:1). The intentions and opinions of characters in third-person narration are made clear only externally.
Contemporary literary analysis speaks of variations in depth of characterization in narrative texts, ranging from the two-dimensional cardboard figures found in stock folk tales to the fully realized psychological portraiture expected in the modern novel. "Characterization in the Gospels tends toward the 'flat' and 'static' end of the spectrum." Third-person description tells us about a character; first-person speech or thought shows us a character's inner life. Accordingly, as we read Luke's story of Jesus, the narrator will frequently provide a general statement about individuals who "wonder," "ponder," or become "amazed" or "astonished," but the specific content or wording of those thoughts or emotions is revealed only by having the characters utter them aloud or take some illustrative action. In contemporary terms, Luke tells us about his characters.
Luke's use of this common narrative technique can be briefly illustrated by surveying the infancy stories. In the opening scene of the Gospel, we learn of Zechariah's terror at the appearance of the angel through the narrator's description (1:12). The people's wonder outside the Temple is related in similar fashion (1:21-22). Elizabeth's understanding of her conception at an old age is expressed through her voiced opinion (1:25), even though the narrator does not mention any other character to whom she might be speaking. Her voicing of a statement out loud is the customary way in which the Gospel writers can allow a character to express internal judgments. Mary's perplexity at Gabriel's announcement is expressed indirectly by the narrator (1:29) and then voiced aloud through the question she puts to the angel (1:34). In the later scene of the naming of Zechariah's and Elizabeth's son, the wonder of those who heard the temporarily mute father now speak is expressed not as thought but as speech: "All who heard them pondered them and said, 'What then will this child become?'" (1:66).
In chapter 2, we learn by means of the narrator's descriptions of the shepherds' fright before the angels (2:9), the amazement of Jesus' parents at their report (2:18) and at the prophecy of Simeon (2:33), and the wonder of the crowds listening to the adolescent Jesus in dialogue with the teachers at the Temple (2:47). Other thoughts are expressed through direct speech. We learn of his parents' worry at losing track of their son Jesus in Jerusalem from Mary's words of consternation in 2:48. And twice in this section we read of Mary "keeping and pondering" events in her heart (2:19, 51b), but tellingly the specific content of her thoughts is neither described by the narrator nor voiced by the character. The narrator knows that Mary is thinking, and probably what she is thinking too; but we are left in the dark.
III. Lucan Parables That Employ Interior Monologue
The external descriptive technique just described is employed throughout the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles and needs no further discussion here. I shall now turn instead to the more interesting topic of how and why at a few specific moments the Lucan narrator has Jesus the Parabolist move beyond third-person narration to employ the more direct mimetic device of giving voice to his characters' inner debates. Our understanding and appreciation of Luke's literary artistry can be deepened by doing some comparative and historical analysis. Luke did not invent the device of self-address, of course, but a few comparisons will show that this author has at places emphasized or elaborated his characters' internal monologues to good effect. Our ability to see Luke's technique at work will be enhanced by starting with a parable that is also attested in an independent source. The other three full examples are known to us only from this Gospel.
The Foolish Farmer (Luke 12:16-20)
In Luke 12 we encounter our first example of how a character in one of Luke's parables thinks out his strategy of action when faced with a dilemma: the story of the rich farmer who foolishly expects to be able to live to store and enjoy his wealth. Luke includes the parable in the context of a discussion about proper attitudes toward possessions, daily sustenance, indeed toward threats of bodily harm or even death. After an exchange with "someone from the crowd," in which Jesus refuses to act as mediator in a dispute over inheritance (12:13-15), he addresses the parable "to them," meaning either his "friends" the disciples (present for the remarks about fear in 12:4-7 and then in 12:22-31 for the words on anxiety), or the crowd, or both.
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Love, Religion, and Sexual Revolution
Stephen G. Post / Case Western Reserve Medical School
Philip Rieff comments that, "in the classical Christian culture of commitment, one renunciatory mode of control referred to the sexual opportunism of individuals." While we should avoid prejudice against the human body per se, I contend that the modern cultural assumption that happiness is achieved as a matter of course through liberation from sexual control has proved unfounded. Moreover, as Max Scheler wrote, the relaxation of restraint can hinder the realization of sacred values and lead to a culture that "envisages man the external phenomenon, his sensual well-being. And increasingly it envisages this well-being in isolation from the objective hierarchy of real and spiritual goods."
Since Scheler's four modalities of value underlie the present analysis, I shall state them at the outset. According to his schema, pleasure values pertain to the individual seeking what is physically agreeable; welfare values to the promotion of health and social well-being; spiritual values to justice and truth; and sacred values to holiness, or love for God. In a holy person, sacred values occupy the highest level. The fundamental problem of human existence is the inversion of the correct ordo amoris within the person, so that the objective order of values toward which human beings are ontologically structured is violated. In short, "Loving can be characterized as correct or false only because a man's actual inclinations and acts of love can be in harmony with or oppose the rank-ordering of what is worthy of love." Scheler argues that "God and only God can be the apex of the graduated pyramid of the realm of that which is worthy of love, at once the source and the goal of the whole."
Modernity, Scheler contends, not only suffers from a disorder of values, but has deliberately chosen the inverse of the proper value hierarchy. This note of deliberate inversion goes beyond the less severe charge that most persons "will acknowledge no hierarchy of values" and "will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation." Granted that sexual restraint and the culture of control can be unduly morbid and dualistic, it is not mere frivolity that the likes of Saint Paul and Augustine, as well as the Buddha and Socrates, all asserted that unrestrained sexual desires can intoxicate the whole personality to the exclusion of spiritual values and interests. Walter Lippmann puts the point simply: "Religious teachers knew long ago what modern psychologists excitedly rediscovered: that there is a very intimate connection between the sexual life and the religious life." Around sexual desire, he continues, the churches have "built up a ritual, to dominate it lest they be dominated by it."
In this article, I propose a broadly applicable theological-ethical argument in favor of sexual restraint as an aspect of the human good, though my immediate focus lies within Christian ethics. As my aims are constructive rather than expository, I do not intend a full-scale interpretation of the thinkers referred to, including Kierkegaard and Tolstoy. My intention is to elaborate a criticism of the assumption that sexual desires are "so quintessentially, immediately, and irresistibly natural that it is as futile to deny, suppress, or sublimate them as it would be the contractions of the heart muscle." The argument moves from an appraisal of sexual control as viewed by modern culture and recent religious ethics to a recovery of the sexual interpretation of the Fall narrative.
Our culture can be described as manifesting a mass flight from beneficial sexual restraint. Although such flight is not new, its ubiquity in modernity may be. While Saint Paul proclaimed the human body as the temple of God, the flight from sexual restraint proclaims it as sportive. Sexual intimacy, which manifests a rich and beautiful significance when sought within the proper hierarchy of values, is debased by a culture gone awry.
FLIGHT FROM SEXUAL RESTRAINT: A CULTURAL APPRAISAL
Traditions of sexual discipline and control indicate a widespread understanding that sexual desire can impede spiritual values. The Pauline notion of a conflict between the law of one's members and the pursuit of sacred values is veridical, as common experience attests. Bodily desires can easily muscle aside spiritual ones.
In addition to the tension between unrestraint and the realization of sacred values, sexual desire often reduces its objects to mere means. Kant commented at length on how morally problematic the "appetite for another human being" can be and added that "there is no way in which a human being can be made an object of indulgence for another except through sexual impulse." It is a simple fact, Kant contends, that through sexual appetite one human being often plunges another into "the depths of misery," casting him or her aside "as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry." The analogy is powerful and fitting.
Beyond the de-emphasis on spiritual values and the exploitation of the sexually oppressed, the modern sexual revolution is responsible for increased disease, as psychiatrist Willard Gaylin describes:
While the final score is not yet in, the results so far of this so-called 'sexual revolution' are less than reassuring. The Freudian view of human behavior laid the positive groundwork for the liberation of the sexual aspirations of women from both an oppressive personal sense of guilt and the shame and humiliation of social stigmatization. But the only empirical results of that illegitimate offspring of Freudian philosophy, the sexual revolution, seem to be the spread of two sexually transmitted diseases, genital herpes and AIDS; an extraordinary rise in the incidence of cancer of the cervix; and a disastrous epidemic of teenage pregnancies.
The extent to which Freud was responsible for the revolution may be exaggerated, but the prevalence of the diseases on Gaylin's list is beyond doubt.
A final result of the sexual revolution is emotional despair and a sense of meaninglessness. Psychiatrist and theologian Paul R. Fleischman writes that if sexual repression dominated the psychological landscape in Freud's Vienna, the current problem is quite the reverse: "Among the hurt and pained in need of help, who may suffer from broken marriages, fluctuating or fallen self-esteem, obsessive constrictions, panicky attachments to parents, bewildering isolation, uncontrolled rages, and haunting depressions, the common denominator is an inability to transcend themselves with care and delight, to reach over and touch another heart." Fleischman's patients report that they suffer emotionally because they have assumed that genuine love requires sexual intimacy. They then pursue such relations, even when inappropriate, and suffer the consequences. Their experience may be summed up thus: "The binding together, the touch of person to person, is sought concretely, rather than spiritually, and dyadically rather than communally. The substitution of sexuality for religious life constitutes one of the most prominent and pervasive elements of cultural pathology that a psychotherapist encounters." Many people seek to touch physically for the sake of sexual intimacy alone, failing to see physical touch as at all expressive of a deeper spiritual meaning. They make sexual intimacy rather than spiritual values the center of their lives.
The toll of unrestraint on physical and emotional well-being has already been lamented. C. S. Lewis, for one, writing in the early 1950s, warned against the loss of any serious moral caution regarding sexual intimacy: "Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie." It is a lie, wrote Lewis, because sexual indulgence without commitment and steadfast love has always been associated with disease, deception, jealousies, and emotional pain. Lewis claimed that our society has lost sight of definitions of love that do not place sexual intimacy at their center, that it has illusory expectations of this intimacy, and the result is oppressive. He rejected the practice of sexual union when it is isolated "from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union." He complained against the "contemporary propaganda for lust" that makes it appear perverse to resist sexual union out of respect for a lasting and total union.
Criticism of unrestraint is neither irrational nor peculiar to Christian thought, for as Michel Foucault has emphasized, this suspicion was in place in Greco-Roman culture by the second century A.D. and was intertwined with Christian belief. Foucault writes, "A whole corpus of moral reflection on sexual activity and its pleasures seems to mark, in the first centuries of our era, a certain strengthening of austerity themes. Physicians worry about the effects of sexual practice, unhesitatingly recommend abstention, and declare a preference for virginity over the use of pleasure. Philosophers condemn any sexual relation that might take place outside marriage and prescribe a strict fidelity between spouses, admitting no exceptions." Numerous thinkers, including Plutarch, virtually all the Stoics, and the Physicians, also articulated a growing skepticism of unrestrained sexual activity and its consequences for the individual and for society.
Pride, the desire to dominate others, self-assertion, and egocentrism - all radically inconsistent with love - animate the sexual preoccupations that destroy love. Our culture of flight from restraint disguises these grim realities in order to reject sacred values, though it does not seem to recognize that voluntary restraint is not exclusively a religious practice. Religion may function as a motive for restraint, but it need not be the sole or even principle justification of it.
The aim of restraint, as Kierkegaard argued, is the affirmation of good rather than the prohibition of evil. The task is to bring sexuality "under the qualification of the spirit (here lies all the moral problems of the erotic)." The sexual revolution rejects all such qualification; its roots lie partially in nineteenth-century materialism and a view of the psychic life of human beings as the manifestation of processes in the physical organism. Eros, this materialism claimed, always aims at genital pleasure, the model of all human happiness; in the process, Plato's "heavenly eros" lost its classical ground. Historians John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman have shown that by the mid-1910s assumptions were commonplace that the sexual instinct demands constant expression, that restraint is harmful, and that gratification is a more worthy ideal than self-control. Thus, "the shift from a philosophy of continence to one that encouraged indulgence was but one aspect of a larger reorientation that was investing sexuality with a profoundly new importance." Sin was redefined as not expressing libido, and all restraint was construed as negative and repressive. The possibility of arguing for sexual restraint without diminishing the glory of sexual eros was not contemplated.
To be seriously religious, one must constantly ask the question, 'What is the source of happiness?' When one has determined that the true human good rests in God, one must demand much of oneself to achieve that good. Augustine was right to acknowledge God as the ultimate source of lasting happiness. He would agree with Freud that human beings show by their behavior that they strive after happiness that gives purpose to their lives. Augustine and Freud would disagree, of course, about the source of that happiness. Augustine believed we should seek our happiness in God: "For our good, about which philosophers have so keenly contended, is nothing else than to be united to God." Freud, by contrast, held that sexual love affords human beings the central experience of happiness, that it constitutes the "prototype of all happiness," and is the "central point" of life. A materialistic philosophy of the self, conjoined with atheism and the 'pleasure principle,' made sexual intimacy the highest good of Freudian theory. Augustinian thought, which established the Christian view of the self as ontologically structured toward God, the Highest Good, lost its cultural force. But if 're-ligio' or 're-binding' of human beings to God constitutes the essential path of the restoration of right order (ordo amoris) in our lives, then the assumption that sex is the highest good must be rejected.
Licentious sexual expression is ultimately the mainfestation of a meta-physical problem, that is, materialism, which presumes that there is no transcendent reality and no transcendent dimension in our being.<FROWN:D06\>
A Prayer That Availeth Much
Jeremiah 20:7-13
Psalm 10:12-18.
Hebrews 12:1-2,12-17.
Walter Brueggemann
THESE SEVEN verses from Psalm 10 plunge us into the midst of the prayer of a "poor person," who speaks for "the oppressed," "the helpless," "the orphan" and "the meek" - perhaps all the same person or the same class of persons. The prayer sounds the faith cadences of the marginated who are without hope in the normal arrangements of social power.
According to the partisan rhetoric of this poor petitioner, the "wicked" who are greedy and powerful have already had their say. The petitioner imagines the wicked being arrogant, autonomous and untamed in their use of exploitative power. Their arrogant autonomy denies and disregards God and abuses the poor. That is, "without God, everything is possible" against the neighbor. In this view of "the wicked," there is only "I" and "them," and "I" will surely prevail over "them." There are only two parties to social reality, and there is never any doubt who will prevail in such a simple scheme.
In verse 12, however, the poor person does not accept this two-party scheme, and everything depends upon the petitioner's courage to resist it. Indeed, if he or she accepted the definition of social reality given by the wicked, there would be no prayer and no Psalm. The very act of uttering verses 12-18 is itself a courageous and subversive way of redefining social reality. The prayer of the poor person insists that there are three players in social relations, not two. In addition to the abusive wicked and the oppressed poor, there is Yahweh, a joker in the deck who destabilizes and reorders the relation between the other two parties. The immediate problem, however, is that the third party has been absent, silent, indifferent and dormant. The poor person hopes to arouse and mobilize Yahweh, to alter drastically the relation of the other two.
The beginning of the prayer in verse 12 is daring and abrupt; the God of the Exodus is summoned, the one who is characteristically evoked by the cries of the wretched, by those who have no hope in the world. Every time it is sounded this Psalm-prayer reconvenes the drama of the Exodus in which the God of liberation is mobilized by and for the oppressed against the oppressor. This glorious name is matched by the enormous imperative: "Rise up" - to power, sovereignty, vitality. The term is and Easter word, echoed in Christian talk of resurrection, in which God's power for new life overcomes all the pretensions of death. The very sovereignty of God is evoked by the daring courage of the poor and weak who utter the name that will reshape social reality.
In the verses that follow, the speaker maintains initiative over against God. It is as though the speaker must line out in great detail for Yahweh exactly who Yahweh is and what Yahweh does. On the one hand, God is reminded of a characteristic past: "You have helped the orphan." On the other hand, God is summoned to a characteristic future: "You will do justice to the orphan and the oppressed." Both God's past and God's future are marked by this 'preferential option,' for that is who Yahweh is. Without this petition and its pressure, however, that 'option' might have been neglected, the dismissal of God by the powerful might have prevailed. The past and the future of transformation are focused on a present moment of "trouble and grief," wherein the wicked must be harshly overcome, so that the poor and meek may prosper.
SUCH IS the innocent, simple prayer of this petition. In its innocence and simplicity, however, the prayer is an act of enormous daring and resolve. The prayer refuses to accept the way the world seems to be and is said to be. An act of evangelical imagination, it refuses to let visible power drive out the trusted reality of God.
But who could pray that way against assured social reality? Many of us are 'children of Feuerbach,' who have come to accept that such primitive 'God-talk' is empty talk. Indeed, it has been suggested recently that such prayers are in fact only theater, designed to be 'overheard' by the powerful. An address to God is only a rhetorical device. Such assumptions about prayer follow from our intellectual sophistication that is in turn a function of our economic affluence. In a hospital room of the affluent, prayer is more likely a matter of casual indifference. For the unsophisticated (poor), such prayer is a matter of life and death. For the latter, everything hangs upon this daring redefinition of reality that refuses to accept apparent power relations.
Those of us who are more affluent and more sophisticated talk sometimes of "solidarity with the poor." This prayer suggests to me that there will be no serious solidarity with the poor until there is liturgical solidarity, until we are able to move through and under our intellectual sophistication and imagine that such a prayer is real speech, addressed to a real listener who is summoned as a live third force in social reality. Of such prayer, Harold Fisch has written:
The Psalms are not monologues but insistently and at all times dialogue poems ... The Psalms are not exercises in existential philosophy ... The 'Thou' answers the plea of the 'I' and that answer signals a change in the opening situation. The Psalms are in this sense dynamic, they involve action, purpose.
And Karl Barth asserts that God "is not deaf, he listens; more than that he acts. He does not act in the same way whether we pray or not. Prayer exerts an influence upon God's actions, even upon his existence. This is what the word 'answer' means."
We do not choose such prayer; we are drawn toward it when we finally notice that our usual pattern of prayer and powerlessness is killing, and when, in the exercise of our passion, we dare to anticipate a decisive agent. In such prayer we join the company of hopers and resisters who, like Jeremiah, rage (Jer. 20:7-10), trust (vv.11-12) and finally praise (v.13). Such prayer may indeed be the end of drooping hands, weak knees and lame joints (Heb. 12:12-13).
A Choice Amid Doxologies
Joel 2:22-30
Psalm 107:1
1 Timothy 6:6-19
Luke 16:19-31
Walter Brueggemann
THE READING in 1 Timothy asserts a stringent either-or about gospel faith. It is, however, an either-or that seems to mix categories badly. The premise of verse seven is that we bring nothing, we possess nothing, we depart with nothing; it is all a gift and therefore we should not seek contentment in our things. The tempting, rejected choice is wanting to be rich, which plunges one into "ruin and destruction" and pierces "with many pains."
Whatever the original crisis and context of this text, we have no difficulty hearing it amid our consumerism and preoccupation with commodities. We have no trouble noticing the poignancy of the text in a society that is more and more affluent for some (while others drop out), in a church where old luxuries become urgent necessities, where church conversations are desperately about budgets, salaries and benefits, where 'media Christians' embarrass the rest of us while our world of deprivation groans.
We have no trouble with the text touching us in heavy ways. This old text, however, is as powerless as we feel we are in an economy where our feeble efforts at an alternative are outflanked by the pressures, demands and desires in which we are full and often willing participants. The writer thinks the problem is not terribly complex. The alternative to "wanting to be rich" is a series of unadorned imperatives: "Shun all this, pursue [and then follows a catalog of covenantal acts and attitudes], fight for faith, take hold of the eternal life you have already confessed, keep the commandments."
The alternative to the destructive service of mammon is an act of disciplined will whereby the gospel-confessed are fully disengaged from the temptation. The writer dares to imagine and confess that while believers may be timid imitators of a covetous society, they have in fact started from a different premise. The apples of economic greed are countered by the oranges of a clear theological intentionality. That odd choice, which has always vexed the church, is now staring us in the face. The church has recently given much attention to issues of sexuality, but the writer of 1 Timothy knows that the key issues of life and faith are fought in the economic realm. We face the same old deal and same old choice about God, mammon and anxiety.
So far only didacticism. So far only a kind of unbothered, oversimplified Pelagianism. The options are not new to us, and we wonder if the text offers anything more than good advice and urgent imperative. Then in verses 15 and 16 the writer breaks out of a tight, instructional either-or into a lyrical doxology about "the only sovereign, the king of kings and Lord of lords" - immortal, unapproachable. The doxology is geared to an eschatological hope, with a high, extravagant affirmation of God, who, when inserted into the either-or of love of money or fighting the good fight, makes a decisive difference.
I don't want to focus on an eschatological claim, however, nor on the decisive difference made by God's sovereignty (albeit in male imagery), for I find such cognitive, substantive affirmations are less than decisive in this difficult struggle against commodity. I suggest rather that it is the bodily act of doxology, the sheer lyrical, unembarrassed yielding of an unguarded self to a prerational claim that matters most in taking the 'or' of faith rather than the 'either' of love of money. The very concrete, physical act of doxology is a social, personal, public ceding of self over to realities that the world will not honor and that I, in my fearful calculation, strident morality and settled creedalism, often find silly and trivial.
Think what it requires to utter a genuine doxology. This ceding over of self in an irrational act of singing praise I also find, sometimes, to be silly and trivial, because I don't want to commit an overt, nonrational act and I don't want to lose control of self, or give up the reasonableness of my calculated economics or my rather sure morality. But if I cannot yield even in this lyrical act, it is likely that I will always choose the love of money over a good confession. I am increasingly convinced that for myself and my church, it is only a doxological mode of discourse that will break the power of commodity - even as I know that doxology is also readily co-opted to become a commercial jingle for commoditization.
Daniel Hardy and K.L. Ford argue in Praising and Knowing God that praise is difficult in a technological society. Indeed, the more affluent and less generous a church is, the more muted its congregation's praise, because the very act of praise is itself an act of relinquishment. We end up with only paid soloists to render our praise for us, to whom we listen with respect and appreciation, but without foot-tapping, hand-clapping, bodily movement or bodily relinquishment. Maybe "white men can't jump," and maybe rich people (or those of us who wish we were) cannot sing praise with any abandonment of self, body or money.
The doxology acknowledges a character other than those of us who can be trusted. Psalm 107 recites the specificity of the "Lord of Lords" in whom Israel invests mightily. The Joel reading is a promissory (I do not say eschatological) assertion inviting gladness and joy for the God who has given rain, who will "act wondrously," and who will eventually "pour out my spirit" - give the power of God's own self to the world. Measured rationally and economically, doxology is a feeble, futile gesture. Whenever the church has had missional vitality, however, it has chosen the irrationality of doxology over the rationality of commodity.<FROWN:D07\>
Summary
Understanding conversion was a hermeneutic project in the twelfth century as it is in our own day. One purpose of this work has been to recover the broad outlines of that project as it was grasped in that distant era. I have regained part, at least, of what was read into St. Jerome's sentence "Christians are made, not born" (ep. 107,1). From beginning to end the hermeneutic project was a task in metaphorical analysis. In the languages of philosophy and theology, 'conversion' was a metaphor taken over from arts and crafts, especially from those employed in transforming raw materials into works of art or achieving some such alteration of metals as occurs in the production of bronze.
I found that those engaged in spiritual conversion employed a parable of Jesus to describe their task as recovering a treasure buried in another's field. The Apostle Paul provided an alternate metaphor when he wrote: "Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1Cor. 13:12). Paul added what was taken to be a crucial gloss on this text when he wrote that each person must think according to the measure of faith dealt out by God (Rom. 12:3). Thus, spiritual enlightenment depended upon grace, not on human traditions, laws, or actions. And inegalitarian grace, bestowed in arbitrary proportions by God's hidden judgment, established serried ranks of greater and lesser lights. In fact, Paul's metaphor, expanded with this gloss, epitomized the entire hermeneutic project.
What conclusions can be proposed? Three seem obvious. Perhaps too self-evident is that the word conversion is not a reliable tool of analysis. Far from being (so to speak) clinically sterile, it comes laden with connotations rooted in Christian history that transmit their coloration on contact to materials under investigation. There is reason to assume that the word has no equivalent in major languages outside Europe. The question is certainly worth considering whether applying the word conversion can impose Western conceptions on non-Western experiences and ideas.
Further, what is called 'conversion' is defined by contexts of time and place. Consequently, it is important to determine what is called conversion, by whom it is so called, and the language used to analyze it.
I have discovered that ideas about conversion in twelfth-century Europe had two senses. In the first, conversion was obvious. It occurred within the confines of human nature, expressed by the ideas and words and shaped by the capacities and institutions that grew out of human nature. Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians recognize this kind of conversion, as manifested, for example, in acceptance of Christianity and submission to the Church or in a change of affiliation or discipline within the ecclesiastical order. However, these inquiries have established that eleventh- and twelfth-century writers recognized this variety as conversion only in a formal sense.
For them, authentic conversion was not formal but supernatural and empathetic. The heart turned not to Christianity or Church but to Christ; by mystic union, it turned into Christ. Indeed, it was turned by grace, rather than by any logical deductions or emotional discoveries of its own. Indemonstrable and mysterious, this mystic turning of the heart into something else was not bound to formal, institutional obedience, nor could its outcome, hidden in God's foreknowledge, be predicted. To the contrary, reversing human expectations, it frequently proved subversive of formal obedience and customs.
Thus, a second outcome of the work at hand has been to define these twinned but entirely separable ideas of conversion and, moreover, to identify them as historical artifacts, souvenirs of the ascetic wing of a military, literary, and ascetic male aristocracy in western Europe.
The implications of insisting that the hermeneutics of conversion is a historical artifact are wide, but they are quite the same as some disclosed by the historical criticism of the Bible and the 'quest for the historical Jesus.' They can only entail asking whether the objects of faith, too, were historical fictions. This is my third conclusion.
Polemical experience with philosophical skepticism and the critical demands of Christianity itself prompted the Church Fathers to anticipate this query when they glorified in the great improbabilities: that God revealed the truth needed by all to an obscure and despised people in a remote corner of the world; that God became man and submitted to death; that God long withheld revealing the way of salvation, leaving whole nations to live and die in their sins; and that, condemned by lying witnesses and wicked priests and executed by a cowardly ruler and ignorant soldiers, the crucified God would bring about universal redemption through the crime of those who mocked and slew him. Given the first two conclusions, I should stress that the Fathers addressed such doubts not on the level of what could be demonstrated by natural logic but on the indemonstrable grounds of supernatural revelation and grace.
Let me recapitulate how this point was reached. I first distinguished the phenomenon (what was called 'conversion'), the name ('conversion'), and the process by which the phenomenon came to be called by the name. What began in esthetics, the realm of inexpressible feeling and intuition, was transposed into that of poetics, the realm of representation. It has been important to realize that conversion is a metaphor-word and, as such, a historical artifact. Thus, whatever may be said about the experience of conversion, the word conversion and the vernaculars used to define and express its meanings were by no means universal. I assumed that like other works of art, the name 'conversion' contained elements of the process by which it was made and that they could be unpacked by analyzing the artifact.
As a technical word in the language of manufacture, conversion denoted a variety of processes. Correspondingly, as a metaphor, it contained not one meaning but a large repertory of them, each with its own history and paradigm of change. The experience of the word in the world left its marks, especially during persecutions suffered by the early Church. One result of persecution was that for the survival of the institutional Church, devices were invented that enabled believers who succumbed to temptation, even to the point of denying their faith, to return to the fold and that in time permitted the cycle of confession, lapse, penitence, and reconciliation to be repeated throughout life. Monasticism was the great institutional form of conversion as a penitential way of life. Thus, in the repertory of paradigms, those became dominant that represented conversion as a process of transformation, full of perplexities and dangers, rather than a sudden, decisive peripety. However, they were supplemented and melded, in a highly eclectic way, with other patterns.
I have not argued that understanding the metaphor-word conversion was, or is, a matter of playing with words, or entirely a rhetorical exercise. Yet it seems inescapably true that access to that understanding comes through texts, which are written, historical documents, and that the ideas informing those texts are set forth in words and syntax that are likewise bound by time and place. I had to ask at the beginning whether Olav Tryggvessn's words to Sigrid the Strong-minded - "Why should I wed you, you heathen bitch?" - and his sharp blow to her face were really part of the confrontation between Christianity and paganism in tenth-century Scandinavia or a reconstruction tailored to suit expectations in a thirteenth-century Christian society.
It seems indisputable, moreover, that the language in the text, and the thoughts in the language, and the perceptions in the thoughts are also creatures of time and place and, consequently, that they have antecedents, possibly also consequences, that, being historical, are not universal.
This emphasis has had one further effect. To speak of language as historical evidence is to ask whose language it was. By whom, for whom, with whom did it signify, especially in concealed, metaphorical senses? The vernaculars of conversion were used in discourse. I have found correlations between the ways in which they were used and the identities of those who controlled discourse and its rituals and who, as a result, received, interpreted, enacted, and conveyed tradition. Hermeneutic circles are made by social circles.
I have also been acutely aware that all of these qualifications apply to me, seeking to understand how others understood conversion and thus working within a two-tiered hermeneutic structure that from some perspectives of hermeneutic circularity may resemble a gallery of mirrors.
Another object of these investigations has been to recover guiding ideas. Here the real point of departure was the proposition, inherited in different forms from Hebraic and Hellenic traditions, that human nature was made for happiness but lived in misery: What was called conversion was a way to survive and escape the wretchedness of this world and achieve happiness. And yet 'conversion' stood at the juncture of imperative and impossibility. Thus, understanding conversion was not susceptible to direct, logical demonstration; true to the nature of metaphors, it required poetic imagination - that is, fiction, built up by a strategy of criticism. Universal myths (including that of the noble origins of a people, its exile through catastrophe, and eventual return to a land of milk and honey) were brought to bear. Faith was accepted as a mode of knowledge, by no means opposed to reason. But among the varieties of faith - such as intellectual assent, common sense, and trust - only one was adequate to empathetic conversion. 'Believing in' through love produced the union of believer with the object of belief and therefore the transcendence of the believer's self and circumstances. This was, specifically, the kind of faith granted by God according to measure. In its poetics empathetic conversion was of the heart, not the mind. Emotions were dominant; mind served heart, each according to its own measure of faith.
Because it was understood as a gradual process of formation, rather than as an instant, irreversible event, what was called conversion entailed pathology. Fear of error and apostasy among professed believers demanded relentless, life-long vigilance, for since carnal desires could not be plucked out by the roots, one could only repeatedly shave off the wicked deeds that kept growing out from them.
Institutionalizing conversion in monastic order had two effects on understanding. The first was to establish ritualized methods of spiritual discipline (such as reading and prayer), each of which hinged on kinesthetic pain. The second enlarged the sphere of ambivalence created by the mysterious and ungovernable proportionalities of faith. For, devoted to imitation of Christ crucified, monastic discipline focused understanding on ironies.
Overarching all the ironies that I have examined were those of theodicy. Empathetic conversion was an essay on the existence, power, and goodness of God. If there were a God, how could there be evil? If there were no God, how could there be good? Why were those who served and obeyed God in purity of heart afflicted with temptation and physical pain, while the manifestly evil, the hypocrite, and the unbeliever prospered? Why did virtuosos in ascetic disciplines and eminent theologians experience spiritual aridity and dejection? One key to these queries was the ironic distance between appearance accessible to human minds and divine reality, as in that between Christ the victim on the Cross and Christ the universal Ruler and Judge. Not far behind came the ironic distance between Christ, as perfect archetype, and the human soul as his flawed image. Thus, understanding the metaphor-word conversion presupposed the inversion of values that the Apostle Paul had constructed in his theology of the Cross: what was to the world pain was to believers pleasure; the world's ignorance was God's wisdom; its degradation, his honor; its servitude, his freedom; its weakness, his power; its death, his life. Irony became the dominant trope for understanding conversion and its subversive effects.
Reflections on conscience underscored this irony. For, given the hiddenness and incommunicability of conscience, the spiritual condition of the soul was hidden even to the soul itself. The soul's capacity for self-deception meant that the great need of conscience was for purity, which could only be proportionate, and not for certitude, which could at least pretend to be absolute.
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William M. Bodiford
ZEN IN THE ART OF FUNERALS: RITUAL SALVATION IN JAPANESE BUDDHISM
Funeral rituals, even ones with an artistic aura, rarely appear in descriptions of Zen art or Zen practice. Although little commented on, the art of Buddhist funerals in Japan is very Zen. In order to understand the Zen of Japanese funerals, first one must leave behind preconceptions based on religiously inspired images of what Zen should be and, instead, examine how Zen functions as a religion in Japanese society. One of the most important social roles of Zen, as in other religions, is to guide the living through the experience of death. Buddhist scholars, who should know better, not uncommonly disparage funerals as mere ritualism peripheral to fundamental Zen insights. Yet for lay people suffering the loss of a loved one few occasions are charged with more emotional power and religious meaning. Zen funerals, furthermore, like their counterparts in medieval European Christianity, historically constituted one of the more significant regular meeting points between the closed religious world located within monastic institutions and the larger secular community they served. The exploration of Zen funerals thus can aid our understanding of how the religious worldview of monks attained expression in the world actually lived by lay people as well as how monastic institutions, by giving new meaning to the process of death, were able to claim privileged social and economic roles among the living. This article presents a brief overview of the historical development of key elements of Zen funerals in the S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> Zen tradition to show how Zen monks manipulated the symbols of Zen enlightenment to provide spiritual solace to the living and religious salvation to the dead. An examination of these practices will demonstrate the limitations of the usual academic answers to the question, What is Zen?
Most descriptions of Zen fall into two camps, sometimes placed in opposition, which could be called (in the words of Alan Watts) "beat Zen" and "square Zen." The first refers to the widespread belief in an intrinsic spiritual link between Zen and artistic endeavors. This view, now commonly associated with Watts himself and D. T. Suzuki, asserts that Zen represents the sublime achievement in personal, artistic self-expression. The association between Zen and artistic skill has become such a clich that most books published today with the word 'Zen' in their titles actually concern topics unrelated to Buddhism or religion. In contrast to this popular image, Buddhist scholars have stressed the earnest character of Zen as it appears in its traditional Buddhist setting: the Zen monastery. Instead of artistic pursuits, Zen monasteries house a tightly disciplined community of monks engaged wholeheartedly in re-creating an ancient life-style based on the legacy of the Buddhist patriarchs. Typically, the day's activities begin at four o'clock in the morning with the first of four daily periods of Zen meditation (zazen). During these meditation periods the monks sit cross-legged, lined up together in the meditation hall for about two hours of silent contemplation. When the monks are not engaged in communal meditation, they occupy themselves with an endless variety of religious rituals and monastic chores. Not a single idle minute is tolerated. These monastic monks have no time for art. They single-mindedly pursue the soteriological goal of Zen enlightenment. According to the scholars who direct our attention to this monastic pursuit, the essence of Zen lies in a life of meditation and enlightenment.
Yet these two descriptions of Zen Buddhism share a key similarity. Critics of Zen would assert that both types - the artistic Zen as well as the Zen in the monastery - constitute self-centered, basically selfish pursuits. This might well be the reason for some of the popularity of Zen in America. Whether focused on artistic self-expression or focused on the realization of self-enlightenment, both images of Zen seem designed to appeal to traditional American sentiments of rugged self-reliance, individualism, and freedom. This special Zen self-reliance, however, can be obtained only by years of effort and strict training, either in meditation or in art. Aspiring Zen artists and Zen monks both set forth on a rigorous quest for a transcendental, superhuman experience - an experience of insight or enlightenment - that will guide their art and their religion.
To many observers, this superhuman experience appears beyond the grasp of the average person. Anyone who has attempted either Zen art, such as the Tea Ceremony, or even a single session of Zen meditation knows how difficult it can be. Few people can take the necessary time away from families and jobs to devote years to harsh training in the pursuit of a narrow, personal goal. Zen advocates typically assert that to know Zen one must experience it directly. Yet if one cannot thus personally pursue the path of Zen, then what spiritual benefits can Zen offer? Indeed, however appealing some descriptions of the attainments of the accomplished Zen masters might seem, for many would-be converts Zen practice is too impractical. This very criticism of Zen, in fact, was common in medieval Japan. The famous Buddhist saint My<*_>o-stroke<*/>e (1173-1232, a.k.a. K<*_>o-stroke<*/>ben), for example, expressed great interest in Zen and became an accomplished meditator. Yet My<*_>o-stroke<*/>e wrote that the Zen school had nothing to offer laymen.
This exclusivity is especially associated with the style of Zen taught by D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen (1200-53), the founder of the Japanese S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> tradition. D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen stands out for his uncompromising insistence on strict, monastic Zen. Although he lived at a time of religious ferment when many popular religious movements in Japan competed for new converts, D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen did not attract a large following. Instead he devoted his energies to the cultivation of a few dedicated monks. He founded only a single, small, isolated monastery in the rural mountains of northeastern Japan. There he taught that single-minded sitting in Zen meditation embodies the essence of Buddhist enlightenment. According to D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen, this enlightenment must be realized in meditation and expressed in accordance to strict ritual forms. D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen wrote detailed commentaries on the monastic codes, in which he described how every action, from cooking to use of the toilet, must be performed as an expression of living enlightenment. In his more extreme writings D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen even went so far as to assert that people living outside the monastery cannot attain enlightenment. The severity of this assertion is clear when we remember that in a Buddhist context enlightenment implies salvation. In this instance, therefore, D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen denied that laymen and laywomen could attain salvation.
Contrary to the descriptions summarized above, neither the artistic approach to Zen nor the monastic approach accurately depicts the Zen Buddhism found in Japan. This is not to say that Zen-inspired artists do not exist or that Zen monasteries do not train monks in meditation. Zen artists and Zen monks can be found in limited numbers. But at the vast majority of Zen temples - and there are about twenty thousand Zen temples versus only seventy-two monasteries - no one practices art, no one meditates, and no one actively pursues the experience of enlightenment. The popular image of Zen known in the West and the image promoted by scholars both fail to reflect this reality. Neither tells us what religious functions truly occur at Zen temples. Surveys of Zen priests reveal that most monks stop practicing meditation as soon as they leave the monasteries at which they receive their basic training. Once monks return to their local village temple, lay-oriented ceremonies, especially funeral services, occupy their energies to the total exclusion of either Zen art or Zen meditation. Statistics published by the S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> school state that about 77 percent of S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> laymen would visit their temples only for reasons connected with funerals and death. A mere 7 percent would do so for what they termed spiritual reasons. Less than 2 percent would go to a Zen priest at a time of personal trouble or crisis.
These statistics, of course, are not at all unusual in modern Japanese Buddhism. For various historical reasons funeral rituals have come to represent the main source of financial income at most Buddhist temples in Japan, not just those affiliated with one of the Zen schools. Yet most people would judge the preponderance of funeral services at Zen temples simply as evidence showing the decline of 'real Zen' in modern Japan. In this view, the Zen temples still exist, but the practice of Zen has all but disappeared. Presumably some distinction can be made between 'Zen in itself' and the so-called non-Zen practices commonly found within the Zen school.
This distinction, however, is not clear-cut. Historically, Zen monks first popularized the widespread practice of Buddhist funerals in Japan. Prior to the emergence of independent Zen sects in Japan, only the wealthy nobility sought to supplement traditional Japanese funeral rites with special Buddhist services. The majority of Japanese people, in contrast, generally lacked access to the Buddhist clergy and economic prosperity required for elaborate Buddhist funeral rites. It was Zen monks who first introduced and popularized affordable funeral rites that appealed to the religious sentiments of the common people. These Zen rites came to define the standard funeral format that was emulated by most other Japanese Buddhist schools. In other words, Buddhist funerals are not external to traditional Zen practice. The image of Zen as a religion of artistic insight and enlightenment is incomplete. In Japan, Zen monks always have used their powers of insight and enlightenment to serve the more immediate worldly needs of their patrons. The realm of Zen enlightenment extended beyond the monastery walls into the homes of laymen.
ZEN FUNERALS
To find the origin of Zen funerals, one must look first to the Chinese monastic codes followed by Japanese Zen monks. As mentioned earlier, D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen (the founder of the Japanese S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> tradition) had stressed the spiritual importance of monastic regulations because they codify ritually meaningful expressions of enlightened activity. The activities described in these codes include funeral rites. Buddhist funeral rites were developed by Chinese Buddhists relatively late, in order to adapt Buddhism to traditional Chinese sensibilities. The first detailed account of Chinese Buddhist funeral rites is found in an eleventh-century Chinese Buddhist encyclopedia. It contains twenty-six entries on funeral rituals, most of which are explained by means of quotations from the Confucian classics, such as the Book of Rites (Liji), the Book of Documents (Shujing), and the Book of Odes (Shijing). In fact, all the funeral ceremonies referred to by this encyclopedia, except cremation and the chanting of Buddhist scriptures, parallel earlier non-Buddhist Chinese rites. This same pattern is found in the earliest Zen monastic code, the Chanyuan quinggui compiled in 1103. The description of the funeral for a Zen abbot in this text prescribes a sequence of ceremonies modeled on the traditional Chinese Confucian rites for deceased parents, with the abbot seen as the symbolic parent of his disciples. On the abbot's death, his direct disciples would wear robes of mourning and retire from their normal duties, while the other monks in the monastery would be assigned the functions of praising the abbot's accomplishments and of consoling his disciples. The deceased abbot's corpse would be washed, shaved, dressed in new robes, and placed inside a round coffin in an upright, seated position, as if engaged in meditation.
The subsequent funeral ceremonies then would take several days. A special altar would be prepared on which to display a portrait of the abbot as well as his prized possessions - his sleeping mat, fly whisk, staff, meditation mat, razor, robes, and so forth. The altar and coffin would be decorated with flowers. Decorative banners would be placed on both sides of the coffin. Other banners that proclaim Buddhist doctrines, such as a verse on impermanence, would adorn the room. The abbot's final words or death poem would also be prominently displayed. The hall containing the altar would be lined with white curtains, while additional lanterns, incense burners, white flowers, and daily offerings would be set out. On the day of the actual burial or cremation, an elaborate procession consisting of resident monks, lay patrons, and local government officials would carry not just the coffin, but also the altar, the abbot's portrait, and the special banners to the grave site.<FROWN:D09\>
The Christian Right in the United States
MATTHEW C. MOEN
In the late 1970s, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the United States began organizing to contend in the political arena. They did so out of a concern that traditional American values were waning, and out of a conviction that a secularized government was partly to blame. Reverend Pat Robertson spoke for many conservative Christians at the time: "We used to think that if we stayed home and prayed it would be enough. Well, we are fed up. We think it is time to put God back in government." Toward that end, millions of evangelicals and fundamentalists joined a number of organizations that collectively were labeled the Christian Right. Throughout the 1980s, the Christian Right earnestly challenged both governmental policies and secular principles.
This chapter documents the transformation of the Christian Right during the 1980s, as it proffered a challenge to the state, and focuses specifically on changes in the Christian Right's organizational structure, political strategy, and rhetoric. Elite leaders consciously drove changes in these areas in an attempt to maximize their political influence.
Threaded through the chapter is the argument that the Christian Right's leaders grew more politically sophisticated over time. Many of the movement's early leaders gained political experience and savvy, and some of the less capable people were replaced by those more politically astute. Joseph Conn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State focused on the latter point in an interview: "Over time, the old guard of the movement has mostly disappeared from the scene. Those early people were strongly motivated by fundamentalist religion, but were not particularly sophisticated in politics .... They gradually dropped out or were moved to the sidelines, leaving the political arena to the somewhat less narrowly sectarian, but more sophisticated people." Not surprisingly, Christian Right leaders agreed with the notion of increased sophistication. Gary Jarmin of the American Freedom Coalition flatly asserted that "the sophistication in the Christian Right has clearly increased." Although self serving, Jarmin's statement was also true, which becomes apparent as the sophistication theme is re-visited.
Before proceeding further, though, one caveat should be added: the improved political skills manifested in the leadership did not automatically result in a more powerful movement. In fact, evidence suggests that the Christian Right was a less formidable force at the end of the 1980s than it was at the beginning. Simply put, the movement was better led by the end of the decade, not necessarily a more influential political factor.
This inquiry into changes in the Christian Right is warranted on two counts. First, scholars have failed to examine its changes very thoroughly or systematically. They have focused on the Christian Right's influence in politics through studies of its political action committees, electoral clout, and lobbying activities. With the exception of Lienesch's article, which applies theories of social movements to the Christian Right, there has been virtually no focus on the other side of the causal equation: how has political activism shaped and influenced the Christian Right? It is an equally pertinent and important question.
Second, the inquiry into changes is timely, in the wake of a decade of activity, Rev. Pat Robertson's unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, and the termination of the Moral Majority. The Robertson candidacy and the closure of the Moral Majority, in particular, were substantive and symbolic benchmarks for the Christian Right; before a second full decade of activism is well underway, it is worth pausing to consider the changes that transpired in the first full decade.
Organizational Structure
The Christian Right's structure changed considerably in the 1980s. Ten easily identified national organizations were located in the nation's capital and were active during the decade. Those organizations, along with their major leader(s) and their lifespan, are listed in Table 4.1.
<O_>omit_table<O/>
An overview of those organizations, and a discussion of the multitude of groups, follows.
The National Christian Action Coalition (NCAC) was launched by Robert Billings, a fundamentalist educator from Indiana. In the late 1970s, he spearheaded opposition to Internal Revenue Service regulations aimed at revoking the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory schools. The NCAC was designed to be the 'eyes and ears' of the conservative Christian school network, informing schools of bureaucratic regulations that would affect their operations. Billings bequeathed the NCAC to his son Bill, after the former accepted a position in the 1980 Reagan campaign. Bill subsequently enlarged the NCAC's role by producing materials that taught conservative Christians how to participate effectively in politics, testifying on Capitol Hill for tuition tax credits for private schools, and compiling indexes on the conservatism of members of Congress. All of that activity did not prevent the NCAC from being overshadowed, though, by a budding Moral Majority.
Bill Billings acknowledged that "they [Moral Majority] went up front and we kind of went into the background." By 1985, the position of the NCAC was untenable, and it was terminated.
The Religious Roundtable was formed in 1979 by Ed McAteer, a fundamentalist layperson with deep roots in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). He used the roundtable as a forum for training previously apolitical ministers in the art of politics, hoping that they would foment opposition to Carter's 1980 reelection bid. Prior to the election, the roundtable conducted training sessions for an estimated twenty thousand ministers. It also organized the National Affairs Briefing, a forum for Reagan to solicit the support of conservative Christian elites. The Religious Roundtable was disbanded after the 1980 election, other than to serve as a platform for McAteer's political pronouncements. Its headquarters was moved from Washington, D.C. , to McAteer's hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. The roundtable is still in existence, but for all practical purposes it is nothing more than a letterhead organization.
Christian Voice was started by Rev. Robert Grant as a California-based, anti-gay rights organization. It received early publicity from Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and from its 'moral report cards' on members of Congress. The report cards caught the attention of the national media, partly because they distilled the Christian Right's agenda and partly because they came out so skewed. For example, a Catholic priest in Congress at the time received a zero 'moral approval rating,' in part because he supported the creation of the Education Department and opposed a balanced-budget amendment. Christian Voice consisted of a lobbying arm, headed by Gary Jarmin; a tax-exempt educational wing, responsible for disseminating information about political candidates; and a political action committee, called the 'Moral Government Fund.' During Reagan's first term, the lobbying arm was active on behalf of antiabortion and school-prayer legislation, while the tax-exempt wing continued churning out report cards on members of Congress. Near the end of that period, however, the organization's activity waned. A 1984 interviewee noted that the "Christian Voice is largely a letterhead organization these days. They still send out their mailings to raise money, but they do not do much else."
As Reagan's second term opened, Christian Voice's brain trust restructured its operation and channeled its resources away from Capitol Hill, toward the grass roots. It continued to distribute updated report cards, but it effectively suspended its lobbying operation. The moribundity of Christian Voice was evident in June 1989. The organization shared a suite in the Heritage Foundation building with a consulting firm, and the literature was a year old. Gary Jarmin confirmed the dormancy of Christian Voice in an interview, noting that it would only "serve as a door opener to churches" in the future. It was no longer the vehicle outside the church for Christian Voice's leadership. That task was assumed by the American Freedom Coalition (AFC).
According to Jarmin, "Following the 1986 election, Christian Voice had a poll conducted nationwide. We filtered out a group that was conservative, religious, and registered to vote. About 9% of that group was black. We asked them extensive questions about issues and politics." Rev. Robert Grant and Jarmin used that information in 1987 to launch the AFC, which they envisioned as a grass-roots organization. In November 1988, it held its first annual board of governors meeting; today, its leaders are trying to erect 'precinct councils' across the United States.
Another organization with connections to Christian Voice was the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV). It was headed by the Reverend Tim LaHaye, a one-time executive officer in the Moral Majority and a member of the executive board of the Christian Voice. ACTV was constructed to register voters for Reagan in 1984, much like the roundtable did in 1980. The quid pro quo for LaHaye's work was an administration promise to appoint religious conservatives to administration positions. According to a 1984 interviewee with intimate knowledge of the organization,
ACTV began after some discussions among many of the leading television evangelists across the country about the need to set up an organization that would register Christian voters. Of the thirty-two individuals who consented to their involvement in setting up an organization, ten actually contributed their mailing lists. On the basis of those mailing lists, a phone bank was set up that contacted 110,000 evangelical and fundamentalist churches.
ACTV's leaders sought to register two million religious conservatives. Following Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, ACTV was gradually wound down by Rev. Tim LaHaye, and then terminated in December 1986.
In the same year that LaHaye accepted the vice-presidency of the Moral Majority (1979), his wife, Beverly, created Concerned Women for America (CWA). According to Laurie Tryfiates, CWA's field director, "CWA started as a response to the stereotype of women brought by the [feminist] National Organization of Women. It really began as a handful of women brought together in neighborhood meetings. ... From there, the organization mushroomed." For six years CWA was head-quartered in San Diego, and then in 1985 it moved to Washington, D.C., "in order to have a greater impact preserving, protecting, and promoting traditional and Judeo-Christian values." It since has lobbied Congress, organized at the grass roots, and marshaled test cases in the courts. Its annual convention was visited by President Reagan in 1987; its current literature contains words from President Bush. Hertzke reports that its membership may exceed the combined total of the three largest feminist groups in America.
The Moral Majority was the most salient and perhaps the most successful Christian Right organization in the 1980s. Initially, it consisted of four divisions: the lobbying and direct-mail operation, called the Moral Majority; the litigation arm, called the Moral Majority Legal Defense Fund; the tax-exempt education division, known as the Moral Majority Foundation; and the political action committee, known as the Moral Majority PAC. Of those divisions, the Moral Majority proper was easily the most important. According to Roy Jones, its legislative director in the mid-1980s, Moral Majority had 250,000 members its first year; that figure doubled the next year, quadrupled the following year, and again doubled, so that Moral Majority had 4,000,000 members by 1983 -a figure within the calculations of one scholar. In 1986, Moral Majority was collapsed into the Liberty Federation, ostensibly to facilitate attention to international issues. In reality, its merger with another organization was recognition of the fact that it carried "high negatives" in public opinion polls. Gary Bauer offered an explanation: "The Moral Majority was one of the first groups of what has come to be called the Christian Right. Since it was one of the first groups, it suffered accordingly as people opposed to its agenda attacked it. ... [Falwell] took the lead to sound the alarm. Having done so, he was the focus of considerable attack. To put it simply, Falwell became damaged goods." Michael Schwartz, of the Free Congress Foundation, echoed that thought, in saying that Falwell was a "lightning rod" for criticism and "humble and intelligent enough" to retreat from politics once he was no longer in a position to advance the Christian Right's agenda. Moral Majority persisted for several more years under new leadership, until Falwell officially nixed it in June 1989.
The Liberty Federation had a vaguely defined purpose and a tenuous existence, attracting very limited attention in 1986 when it engulfed Moral Majority, and virtually none thereafter.
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'SYNCRETISTIC RELIGIOSITY':
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS TAUTOLOGY
Jeffrey Carlson
PRECIS
This article develops the thesis that religious identity is always/already a selective reconstruction from among many possibilities - one undeniably relative but utterly necessary product of a process of 'encampment,' a creative synthesis in which we dwell and from which we venture forth. From this perspective, even for those in 'mainstream' traditions, 'syncretistic religiosity' is tautological. The thesis will be developed through an analysis of correlational Christian theology and will begin to explore some of the implications of construing religious identity in terms of a 'syncretic self.' What happens when the pool of possibilities from which one draws in comprising one's 'list' of 'what matters most' is extended beyond prior boundaries, even when such boundaries have impressive names such as 'scripture' and 'tradition'? When religious identity is inevitably syncretic, what happens to boundaries between 'the religions'? Finally, might a recognition of the syncretic self become one contribution toward ethical reflection in this age of 'man-made mass death'?
I. On Correlational Theology
Correlational theologians have argued that the task of theology requires explicit attention to two major concerns, usually named something like 'the Christian message' and 'the contemporary situation.' According to Paul Tillich, one of the leading modern Christian representatives of this approach, theology must satisfy two basic needs: "the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation." It is thus concerned with both the "eternal foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received." Similarly, Karl Rahner stated that his Foundations of Christian Faith was written to allow his readers "to reach a renewed understanding of [the Christian] message" and to "try as far as possible to situate Christianity within the intellectual horizon of people today."
This would seem to be such a felicitous method, relating message with situation, reading the signs of the time in the light of the gospel, perhaps even, in the words of Rudolf Bultmann, "[making] clear the call of the Word of God." However, as Augustine discovered when he probed the meaning of that so-simple reality of 'time,' theologians, when they face up to plurality, may find themselves admitting that they know well enough what Christian theology is, provided no one asks them to explain. Let us ask.
Schubert Ogden has written that "to be assessed as adequate, a theological statement must meet the two criteria of appropriateness and credibility ... in the given situation." His point is that since theology must both represent the Christian message and relate it to the present situation, it seems eminently helpful to require explicitly that one's own theological formulations be 'appropriate' to that message and 'credible' in that situation.
'Appropriateness' means a fidelity to the Christian 'message.' This would seem simple enough, but then, like Augustine, we are asked to explain. What is that message, and what is the nature of our fidelity to it? Two clusters of questions are raised: First, what precisely is the 'referent' of the theological criterion of appropriateness? To what must adequate theological formulations be appropriate? To which model or image of Jesus developed through the centuries (and there have been so many!) should one attend, and why? This first question is clearly related to a second and even more basic issue concerning one's religious identity: Why am I 'a Christian' in the first place? Whence comes my religious identity? What are the implications of my answers?
II. Locating the Referent of Appropriateness
Ogden has argued that the norm or referent of theological appropriateness is what he called "the earliest apostolic witness to Jesus Christ." Where does one find this earliest witness, according to Ogden? In the findings of this century's "new quest" for the historical Jesus. Precisely what the new-questers are able to detect, he maintained, is the earliest stratum of Christian witness - the very norm of theological appropriateness. Arguing that the true canon is not the New Testament per se, Odgen wrote that the "real, indeed crucial, theological importance of the so-called new quest of the historical Jesus" lies in its "identification and interpretation of the Jesus-kerygma of the earliest church," which is "'the canon within the canon' to which all theological assertions must be appropriate." The new quest, it seems, is the 'good luck' of Christian theology!
Another correlational theologian, David Tracy, has construed 'appropriateness' rather differently than Odgen has. Tracy has written that the theologian must "take into account all the classic christological images, symbols, doctrines, witnesses and actions of the entire tradition." All the images. The entire tradition. For Tracy, it seems, one ought not to detect and isolate an essential and singular kernel from among all that plurality of witness but, rather, attempt to encounter something of its richness, power, and vitality. One would be led, according to Tracy, to "an abandonment of a search for 'a canon within the canon' in favor of the full diversity of the New Testament witness." To concentrate only on the 'Jesus-kerygma' as, in Tracy's estimation, "the expression 'canon within the canon' seems to suggest," actually "... risks losing the enriching diversity of the whole scriptural (and, in principle, postscriptural) witness and thereby risks losing the full reality of 'tradition' for the contemporary theological horizon."
Tracy is certainly more open to what he would call "inner Christian plurality" than Odgen is. However, in affirming and even celebrating the diversity of "the whole scriptural ... and ... postscriptural" witness, Tracy passed over a point I wish to accentuate: A decision was inevitable and has, in fact, been made, overtly or covertly, consciously or not. It was and is a decision to select from among the many. Even the whole of the Bible is still but a part. The canon, so diverse, is nevertheless still a circumscribed reality, one among the many other would-be witnesses to God or to Jesus. It is one product, achieved centuries ago, of an ongoing process of selective reconstruction, of daring to name a reality, to locate a religious identity in these texts (and, indeed, in these particular manuscript versions). It is an act of 'encampment.'
III. Plurality and Religious Identity
Think about it. If one is Christian, in which 'Jesus' does one believe? Does not one select, as well as inherit others' selections, from among many possible interpretations? What, for instance, were the last words of Jesus before his death? How does the Jesus in whom a Christian believes meet his end? With serene confidence that he is in the hands of his Father ("Father, into your hands I commend my spirit")? This is indeed the Jesus of Luke, but not the Jesus of Matthew or Mark, for whom Jesus cries, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Then he dies, abandoned.
Such different images! Are these plural 'portraits' and diverse 'memories' a weakness or a strength? Why not simply have one Gospel, one that 'got the story straight'? Or, is there in fact a 'surplus and excess of meaning' generated by every 'classic'? Perhaps Odgen's quest for the 'singular' is itself inappropriate. Perhaps the 'real' Christ is precisely the evoker of a plurality of witnesses.
One can ask questions about the canonical Gospels. Was Jesus born in a manger? Yes, but only in Luke. Were there wise men following a star? Yes, but only in Matthew. John and Mark tell nothing whatsoever of Jesus' birth. Peter the 'rock of the church'? Pilate washing his hands? Guards at Jesus' tomb? Yes, but only in Matthew. Only there, as well, are the onlookers, interpreted by much of subsequent Christian tradition to be 'the Jews,' made to cry out, at Jesus' trial, "His blood be on us and on our children!" When Christians select items from among the many images of Jesus and elements of his story, I hope they will exclude that one, as well as other blatantly violent texts that discriminate on the basis of gender, class, or ethnicity. This raises the question of criteria once more but here in terms of ethics. A nuanced argument for ethical criteria is beyond the scope of this essay. For the moment, it can simply be suggested that decisions should be guided by a hope for creation rather than destruction, liberation rather than oppression, conversation rather than deprivation of speech.
I am not calling for the abandonment of the New Testament canon, still less for a single, fixed canon within the canon. Instead, I am calling for an honest recognition of what the canon exemplifies: the need to risk a reconstruction, to wager a creative act in which, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, "The many become one, and are increased by one," which involves "... the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive 'many' which it leaves." Reality, here understood, is a veritable flood of images and possibilities, but some of it 'sticks' to us; some of it matters. Our identities are shaped by what has stuck. We simply cannot attend to all of it. Who knows what we do not perceive, on this side of absolute elsewhere, where only some of the many become one in us?
We are narrow in perspective, partial in grasp. To be 'Christian' is to be this particular assemblage of diverse elements, brought together out of freedom and amid a certain destiny, an array of influencing factors we cannot control completely. Our religious identities are shaped by the 'list' of 'ultimate' things, drawn from many pools with many names, some 'non-Christian' and even 'secular.' We are this syncretic amalgam, this selective reconstruction of elements.
Thus, an act of reconstruction, of encampment, is an articulation of one's religious 'identity,' and it is, I believe, an utterly necessary activity. As Mircea Eliade saw so clearly, humans need to be somewhere, to have a symbolic dwelling, a spiritual center, a true home. But, as he also knew, and as the Oglala Sioux Black Elk reportedly observed, "anywhere is the center of the world." We need to know both of these 'two truths' about our religious identities: concerning the particular and the universal, the relative and the absolute.
So why am I in this particular place? Why this center, these texts, that Jesus, that creed? Why, indeed? Not because assent is mandated from any external authority but because certain persons, places, texts, events, even objects, so disclose that which is deemed 'really real' that those affected cannot but wish to dwell there. Hierophanies (Eliade), classics (Tracy), historical mediations of transcendentality (Rahner) - these exist. They touch us in ways that range, in Tracy's words, "all the way from a radical identification with the claim to truth ... to some tentative, even hesitant, resonance with its otherness." Given that range, the specificity of one's own response to a particular 'classic,' coupled with one's own current and specific 'list' of classics, constitutes one's present religious identity.
What moves you? Which persons, places, texts, events, objects, constitute the truth that is true for you? That matter for you? So much of life is superficial. What speaks to you from the depths? When you think of your 'list' of deep things, from whence do you draw its items, and would you presume to circumscribe the boundaries within which deep items might be found? How, in all seriousness, would you dare do that? If the truth be told, would your list of 'what matters most' contain only items that have been stamped with ecclesiastical approval? If the truth be told, does not your real list include items that have not been so stamped, and does not your real list omit items that have been so stamped? Is not the stamping process itself always/already another reconstruction, another selection from among the many, another example of encampment?
Kierkegaard wrote: "Frequently, when one is most convinced that he understands himself, he is assaulted by the uneasy feeling that he has really only learned someone else's life by rote."<FROWN:D11\>
2. Sexual Ethics in the Roman Catholic Tradition
The Roman Catholic tradition in sexual ethics and sexual understanding has had a long history and has exerted a great influence on people and their attitudes both within and outside the Roman Catholic church down to the present day. At the present time, however, the Catholic tradition and teaching are being questioned not only by non-Catholics but also by many Catholics themselves.
The general outlines of the official Catholic teaching on sexuality are well known. Genital sexuality can be fully expressed only within the context of an indissoluble and permanent marriage of male and female and every sexual act must be open to procreation and expressive of love union. The natural law theory that supports such an understanding results in an absolute prohibition of artificial contraception, artificial insemination even with the husband's seed, divorce, masturbation, homosexual genital relations, and all premarital and extramarital sexual relationships. Virginity and celibacy are looked upon as higher states of life than marriage. Women are not allowed to be priests or to exercise full jurisdiction within the church.
Dissatisfaction with official Catholic sexual teaching came to a boil when Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae of 1968 condemned the use of artificial contraception for Catholic spouses. Before late 1963, no Catholic theologian had ever publicly disagreed with the Catholic teaching that banned artificial contraception. But events in the church (especially Vatican Council II, 1962-1965) and in the world at large very quickly created a climate in which many Catholic married couples and theologians called openly for change in the official teaching. Nevertheless, after much consultation and hesitation, Pope Paul VI in 1968 reiterated the condemnation. His encyclical occasioned widespread public theological dissent from the papal teaching.
Many Catholic couples disagreed with the teaching in practice. According to the statistics of the National Opinion Research Center in 1963, 45 percent of American Catholics approved of the use of artificial contraception for married couples, whereas in 1974, 83 percent of American Catholics approved. Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco, at the 1980 synod of bishops in Rome, gave the statistics that 76.5 percent of American Catholic married women of childbearing age use some form of contraception and 94 percent of these women were employing means that had been condemned by the pope. Andrew Greely concluded that the issuing of Humanae Vitae "seems to have been the occasion for massive apostasy and for a notable decline in religious devotion and belief"; he attributes the great decline in Catholic practice in the United States during the decade 1963-1973 to the teaching of this encyclical.
Dissatisfaction with official Catholic teaching on sexual meaning and morality has been raised both in theory and in practice with regard to masturbation, divorce, and homosexuality. And many Catholic women have become disenchanted with the Catholic church because of its attitudes and practices concerning the role of women in the church, whose patriarchal reality is quite evident. Abortion has recently become a very heated topic in Catholic circles; one important aspect of the discussion centers on law and public policy, but the moral issue of abortion has also been raised. Although most Catholic theologians and ethicists remain in general continuity with the traditional Catholic teaching on abortion, some have strongly objected to this teaching.
And so a widespread dissatisfaction with hierarchical Catholic sexual teaching exists within Roman Catholicism today. In general, I share that dissatisfaction, but my position does not involve accepting the impersonal, individualistic, and relativistic understanding of sexuality that is too often proposed in our society today. The purpose of my study is not to deal with all of the specific issues mentioned above or with any one of them in particular or in depth. This chapter will try, rather, to explain the negative elements in the Catholic tradition that have influenced the existing teaching, and I shall then appeal to other, positive aspects of the tradition that help formulate what I would judge to be a more adequate sexual ethic and teaching.
Negative Elements in the Roman Catholic Tradition
This section will briefly discuss five aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition in sexual ethics which in my judgment have had a negative effect on the church's official teaching - negative dualisms in the tradition, patriarchal approaches, over-riding legal considerations, authoritarian interventions by the teaching office, and the natural law method justification.
Negative Dualisms
The Catholic tradition in sexuality has suffered from negative philosophical and theological dualisms. Platonic and Neo-platonic philosophy, which helped to shape the thought of the early church, looked upon matter and corporeality in general and sexuality in particular as inferior to spirit and soul. Theological dualisms often associated the bodily and especially the sexual with evil and sin. A habit of thought in the early church these dualisms influenced the first stage of sexual teaching in the West. Such spiritualistic tendencies, however, have always been present in the church. Many contemporary Catholic dualistic attitudes about sexuality and about all aspects of spirituality have been influenced by the rigoristic Jansenism that reached its zenith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Jansenism's influence has continued especially on a popular level.
Blaming Augustine for most of the negativity about sexuality in western Christendom is a commonplace. Before him, however, Ambrose and Jerome were even more censorious. Ambrose's thinking emphasized a series of antitheses that should not be mixed - Christian and pagan; Catholic and heretic; church and world; soul and body. Ambrose was a person of action and so his dualism viewed the body as a perilous mudslick on which the firm tread of the soul's resolve might slip and tumble at any time. Through conversion and baptism the Christian was caught up in Christ whose sexless birth and unstained body mediated between the fallen state of the human body and its glorious transformation in the future. According to Ambrose Christ's body was unscarred by the double taint of sexual origin and sexual desires or impulses. In such a context, virginity was truly the ideal. For Christian married people to avoid adultery and to abstain from intercourse at certain liturgical times and under certain conditions (e.g., menstruation, lactation) was not enough; the couple must also strive to minimize the ever-present possibility of unchastity connected with all sexual pleasure itself. Peter Brown, whose analysis I follow closely here, points out the important relationship of the sexual understanding to the social context of the time. The church itself, like Mary the perpetual virgin and like other virgins, is to keep herself undefiled from the saeculum (world) around her. The sexual and the social were closely related for Ambrose.
Jerome stands out as the authority most fearful of sexuality in the early Christian West. His castigation of Jovinian for having placed married couples on the same plane as virgins contains some of his most vituperative language on sexuality. Even first marriages were regrettable, if pardonable, capitulations to the flesh; second marriages led one step away from the brothel. Jerome also left us the unfortunate legacy of understanding St. Paul's concept of the flesh as equivalent with sexuality. The spirit-flesh dualism was thus understood as the struggle against sexuality by Jerome, the most militant of the writers of the early church in his emphasis on female virginity, clerical celibacy, and the temptations and dangers of sexuality.
According to Peter Brown, Augustine avoided somewhat the antitheses and dichotomies of Ambrose and Jerome. For Augustine, marriage and intercourse, on the one hand, and human authority and human society, on the other, were not to be equated with sin, for they existed even in paradise. Martyrdom, not virginity, was the pinnacle of the Christian life. Augustine understood the fall of our first parents as a matter of obedience and the will. Before the fall, Adam's and Eve's sexuality was in perfect accord and harmony with the divine will. Uncontrollable sexual urges, like death itself, came about through the fall. Augustine contrasted to Eve Mary, the exemplar of perfect obedience rather than the defender of a sacred inner space against the pollution of the world.
The fall brought about in all of the children of Adam and Eve concupiscence of the flesh, which originated in a lasting distortion of the soul. As a result of their active disobedience, Adam and Eve were estranged from God and from each other and from their own conscious selves. Concupiscence affected everything and embraced more than sexual feelings, but uncontrolled sexual feelings (based on the text of Genesis that Adam's and Eve's eyes were opened and they knew they were naked) illustrated the fact that the body could no longer be controlled by the will. The sharp ecstasy of orgasm was an abiding sign of the limits of the human will because of original sin; had there been no fall, intercourse would have taken place at the command of the will solely for the purpose of procreation, not pleasure. As shown in the disobedience of the genital organs to reason and the will, concupiscence was the punishment of original sin that all the descendants of Adam and Eve would carry with them until their death.
Augustine formulated his very influential teaching on marriage in the light of this understanding, and he built on what had already been developing in the early Christian church. In turn, early Christian teaching on sexuality borrowed heavily from Greek stoic philosophy's belief in the laws of nature and duty, and saw itself as a response to other ethical positions that were based in gnosticism, such as the claim that marriage was evil, or that sexual intercourse had such a high value that it must be freed from the burden of procreation. In the face of these more extreme positions, the early church came to the conclusion that sexuality had to be reserved for marriage and used only for the purpose of procreation, which was nature's intention. The motive for sexual intercourse in marriage had to be procreation and could not be anything other, especially pleasure.
Augustine developed his teaching on marriage in the light of his own experience and on the basis of his differences with the Manichaeans and the Pelagians. For Augustine intercourse can be without sin only in the context of marriage, and marital intercourse is sinless only if it is motivated by the desire of conceiving a child and if no consent is given to any pleasure other than that coming from the anticipation of conceiving a child. The realistic Augustine recognized that not even a devout Christian could consistently confine her or his motive for intercourse only to procreation. Thus venial sin is usually associated with sexual relations even within marriage.
Our purpose here is not to summarize the whole historical tradition or even Augustine's total position. However, we should note that Augustine's description of the three goods of marriage - proles (offspring), fides (fidelity), and sacramentum (the permanence of marriage) - became very influential in the Catholic tradition; further, they could excuse sexual expression within marriage. Augustine found two additional meanings in marriage that were taken over by a later tradition and were part of Catholic canon law until very recently - the mutual help or support of the spouses and what was called the remedy of concupiscence. Marriage allows an outlet for passion that protects a person from fornication and adultery. For spouses, even sexual relations simply to satisfy libido constitutes only a venial sin, which thus helps partners in the struggle against concupiscence.
The early church's teaching on sexuality was influenced by several different dualisms, all of which downplayed the corporeal and bodily aspects of sexuality and the pleasure connected with sexual expression. The impact of this early development on subsequent Catholic tradition and teaching cannot be denied. Until the Second Vatican Council, Catholic teaching proposed that procreation and the education of offspring were the primary ends of marriage. The secondary ends of marriage are the mutual help of the spouses and the remedy of concupiscence basically as they were discussed by Augustine. In the 1930 encyclical, Casti Connubii, Pope Pius XI also recognized the secondary end of conjugal love and gave more importance to personalist values of marriage.
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WHICH THEISMS FACE AN EVIDENTIAL PROBLEM OF EVIL?
Terry Christlieb
Many philosophers simply assume that evil is evidence against a generic form of theism. Others have tried to offer an argument to show that this is so. I will argue in Part I that the most promising attempt to develop an argument of that sort fails. It will become apparent that generic theism is just too generic to permit anyone to show that known evils provide evidence against it.
Given the above results I will then in Part II examine the question of whether some other kind of evidential argument might still be possible. Perhaps an evidential argument from evil could be developed against a properly elaborated theism, that is, one more precise and detailed in its claims relevant to the relation of God to evil. But I will argue that it is doubtful that such can be shown against the really important forms of elaborated theism, namely those forms to which actual theistic religions are committed. I will point out a number of grave obstacles to the development of an argument of that sort. The conclusion will be that there is no adequate basis for the common assumption that evil is evidence against theistic religions.
I
For purposes of explaining and illustrating my position it will be useful to examine a particular presentation of the evidential argument against generic theism. I believe that the best development of an argument of this sort is William L. Rowe's so I will begin by briefly explaining his argument. I will then show why his argument in particular and this kind of argument in general cannot succeed.
Rowe's Fawn
Rowe has produced a series of articles in which he attempts to formulate and defend an 'empirical' argument from evil. The argument is aimed at what we might call 'generic' theism. The generic theist believes that a unique, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being exists and created the universe in which we find ourselves. We will refer to that being as 'God.'
The evils on which Rowe's argument focuses are, roughly, cases of intense suffering which have no readily apparent 'point' or 'purpose.' We may believe that we see why God has allowed some evils, but Rowe wants to call attention to cases for which the purpose is not known.
As an example Rowe constructs the case of a badly burned fawn. The evil of interest is the suffering that the fawn undergoes over a period of several days before it dies. A number of features of the case are included in order to block efforts to specify a purpose for this suffering. At the same time, the goal is to choose a kind of incident which happens, perhaps even on a regular basis, on our planet.
The fawn's burns result from a forest fire started by lightning. Hence the suffering is not the result of a free decision of any created being, but instead has natural causes. Thus, one cannot appeal to the free will defense with respect to the origin of the suffering. Second, the suffering transpires without any creaturely moral agent - or perhaps without any other creature at all - knowing of it. Hence no one's character is developed by the suffering, no one has an opportunity to do a good act in response to the suffering, and no one learns about evil from the suffering. Neither will the fawn profit from the suffering. For the fawn will never recover, so it cannot have improved itself by, say, having learned to flee at the first hint of smoke. And fawns presumably do not repent of sins, so the evil could not have been allowed in order to give the fawn a chance of doing that.
Rowe says of the fawn case:
So far as we can see, the fawn's intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn's suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn's suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn's suffering been prevented.
Later, in 'Evil and Theodicy,' Rowe adds another case for consideration. The new case is an actual case of the sort one finds with disturbing frequency in the news, a case in which a child was tortured and then killed. The new case provides an alternative for those unimpressed by the fawn case. The argument does not stand or fall on the fawn case (or the other one). Instead, those cases are offered to help the reader to focus on the kind of case that he ought to think about, those cases of evil for which, try as he may, the reader cannot find a purpose. The reader can choose his own particular example. As Rowe says in 'The Empirical Argument from Evil,' the point is that there exists intense suffering in vast quantities for which we can see no purpose at all, let alone any purpose obtainable by omnipotence without that suffering.
It seems clear that Rowe is developing the case in the way that it must be developed if it is to succeed. If there is evidence from evil against theism then surely those cases of evil which we have thought through carefully and yet have found unexplainable must be part of that evidence. Focusing on those cases bypasses debate about whether the theist may know the purpose of the evil. The theist is challenged to begin with the difficult case, the one for which she agrees that the purpose of the evil is unknown. So we can agree with Rowe's claim that his is the strongest sort of evidential argument, the sort that has the best chance of success. If these cases of evil are not evidence against theism, then none are.
Here is a summary of Rowe's argument. Let 'E' be used to refer to a case of evil for which no purpose is known. The fawn or the child torture case might be it, or, if the reader knows of a case Ofofevil for which the purpose is even less apparent than for the ones mentioned, let 'E' stand for that case. Let 'J' be used to refer to whatever property a particular good state of affairs would have just in case obtaining that good would (morally) justify an omnipotent, omniscient being in permitting E. Let me also note that here and elsewhere 'good' or 'goods' should be understood as good token(s) rather than type(s) unless otherwise specified. Then,
1. We have evidence that all the good states of affairs we know of lack J
2. So, we have evidence that every good state of affairs lacks J.
3. E is a case of a kind found in our world.
4. Therefore, we have evidence that evils exist which God would not permit to exist.
5. Therefore, we have evidence that God does not exist.
The claim is that evil with a certain characteristic - namely the conjunction of the characteristics of the case supplied for E - is actual and constitutes evidence that God does not exist. Rowe does not specify how much evidence there is. Let us assume, at least initially, that only the weakest claim is in view, so that the argument is only intendeded to show us some evidence that God does not exist.
Now clearly there are instances of intense suffering in our world. So far theist and atheist are agreed. But we must still exercise some caution in our description of such cases in order to avoid question begging. We cannot describe such cases as cases of 'pointless evil' or 'apparently pointless evil,' for that is certainly not how the cases have seemed to the theist. The theist, at least before hearing Rowe's argument or one like it, has been thinking of the cases (if at all) as cases which do have a purpose or at least as cases of evil which have a purpose of which humans are unaware.
So if there is to be common ground there must first be an acceptable description of the case, a sufficiently 'clinical' description of, say, the fawn or the child, the injuries, the physical pain, the psychological pain, any pain caused to others, etc. At a minimum the description must not be in terms of the actual purposefulness or purposelessness of the evil. Consistent with this requirement Rowe has focused our attention on the descriptions of the fawn and the child, descriptions which seem sufficiently 'neutral' in the way indicated.
The Failure of Rowe's Argument
Can the theist show that the cases mentioned are not evidence against God's existence? Let us decide by examining the kinds of responses that the theist might offer. For convenience I will follow Rowe's division of the possible responses into three groups.
Option 1 - Outweigh the Evidence
First, the theist might simply acknowledge that the argument does provide some evidence against the claim that God exists, but then resist the claim that God does not exist by piling up other evidence in favor of God's existence. This other evidence would be such that it 'outweighs' the evidence from evil.
Obviously, if the theist takes this option she has accepted the weak claim that evil is some evidence against God's existence, and so has accepted the soundness of Rowe's argument as we initially read it. In 'The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism' Rowe also suggested that this is the theist's best response to the evidential problem. But even if she did not possess favorable evidence the theist would not be without an adequate response to the evidential problem of evil, as we shall see. So having noted that this response is one of the theist's options we now set it aside, since an investigation of everything which might be thought of as evidence for or against God's existence is beyond the scope of this article.
Option 2 - Show that the Reasoning Is Unacceptable
The second sort of response is to try to show that somehow the reasoning goes wrong, that there is an unsupported premise or an illegitimate inference. In Rowe's opinion this response is a failure, but it seems to me that he has overlooked some considerations which show his assessment to be unwarrantedly pessimistic.
Before explaining these considerations I want to introduce a proposition to which Rowe might appeal for support of premise 1. Although this approach to supporting premise 1 has not appeared in Rowe's published works to date, he did utilize it as means of defending premise 1 in recent correspondence. I will call this proposition premise 'L.'
L. All the goods we know of and which are such that we can tell whether they have J, lack J.
Here Rowe countenances the possibility that we may not be able to tell whether some known goods have J or not. But L also tells us that whenever we can tell, we always find that they lack J. This offers a reason, he suggests, for accepting 1. So, besides taking account of what Rowe offers in support of 1 in his published works, we will also consider this strategy of deriving 1 from a general principle like L.
We are now prepared to evaluate Option 2 in detail, beginning with premise L. What does Rowe offer in support of the claim that of all the goods we know of, either they clearly lack J or we cannot tell whether they have J or not? Rowe explains that a good that we 'know of' is roughly a good that we conceive of and which we recognize as being intrinsically good. Goods we don't know of are ones that "include states that are enormously complex, so complex as to tax our powers of comprehension," or states that contain "simple properties we have never thought of ... whose presence ... might render that state a great intrinsic good."<FROWN:D13\>
Chapter 11
An Update on Neopagan Witchcraft in America
Aidan A. Kelly
The Neopagan movement in America and other English-speaking nations parallels the New Age movement in some ways, differs sharply from it in others, and overlaps it in some minor ways. Comparing and contrasting these two movements, which are roughly the same size, will help clarify the nature of the New Age movement as such.
The Neopagan Witchcraft movement in America is a new religion that, like almost all new religions, claims to be an old religion. It does, as one might expect, emphasize the reality and learnability of magic (or at least parapsychology) as one of its central concepts; but in almost every other way it is a surprise to anyone who comes from the study of 'witchcraft' in some other context. I have demonstrated from the available evidence, which is copious, that the religion actually began in September 1939 on the south coast of England, as an attempt to reconstruct the medieval Witchcraft religion described by Margaret Murray. The founding members included a retired British civil servant, Gerald Brosseau Gardner; a locally prominent homeowner and socialite, Dorothy Clutterbuck Fordham; probably Dolores North, later known for her regular column in a British occult magazine similar to Fate; the occult novelist Louis Wilkinson; and probably others in the occult circles of London and southern England.
Gardner took over leadership of the group, perhaps by default, around the end of World War II, and began developing it in a direction that would better meet his own sexual needs. At this point the religion began to take on characteristics typical of many libertarian movements of the past, especially a focus on sexuality as sacramental, which it has retained ever since. (In fairness to all I must stress, however, that this emphasis on sexuality remains theoretical and inspirational, not something expressed in practice.)
Gardner began writing and publishing in the late 1940s and 1950s, and his books have been primary documents of the movement ever since. After Doreen Valiente was initiated in 1953, she threw her excellent writing skills into the service of the movement and produced the text of the Book of Shadows (in practice, the liturgical manual) that is essentially the one now used by the movement throughout the world. She has described her contributions modestly but accurately in her recent The Rebirth of Witchcraft. During this period, the Craft began to assimilate the White Goddess theology of Robert Graves, who revived many theories about a matriarchal period in European prehistory, theories that had long ago been discarded by scholars as inadequate to deal with the known facts.
The Craft continued to grow steadily in England. Gardner initiated a great many new priestesses from 1957 until his death in 1964, and these carried on the Craft enthusiastically. Raymond Buckland, after a long correspondence with Gardner, was initiated in 1963 in Perth, Scotland, by Monique Wilson (Lady Olwen), from whom much of the Craft in America descends, since Buckland brought the Craft back to the USA and, with his wife Rosemary as High Priestess, founded the New York coven in Bayside, Long Island. Almost all the 'official' Gardnerians in America are descendants of that coven.
However, these 'official' Gardnerians are now a very small fraction of the whole movement, largely because they operate according to a fairly strict interpretation of the rules that were gradually established by the New York coven in its steadily expanding text of the Book of Shadows. Most American Witches, being spiritually akin to anarchists, libertarians, and other proponents of radical theories, regard the Gardnerian concept of 'orthodox Witchcraft' as an oxymoron and practice the Craft much more flexibly, using whatever they like from the Gardnerian repertoire and creating whatever else they need from whatever looks useful in past or present religions. Many of these claim to descend from some other 'tradition' of Witchcraft independent of Gardner, but such claims are almost entirely historically specious. The rare exceptions are the few individuals, such as Victor Anderson (from whom Starhawk derived most of her information), who had practiced a pre-Gardnerian, folk-magic type of Witchcraft, but that was so different from Gardnerianism, in both practice and theology, that they can be considered to be the same religion only by a great stretch of the imagination.
Since the late 1960s, enough information on the theory and praxis of Gardnerian-style Witchcraft has been available in books that any small group who wanted to could train themselves as a coven. Those who did so could be, and were, recognized as members of the same religion when they later met other Witches; and more and more covens began this way as more and more books becausebecame available in the 1970s and 1980s. We have now reached a stage where an attempt to diagram the proliferation of Craft covens and traditions resembles a jungle.
The Neopagan and New Age movements share so many characteristics that one might expect their members to feel a certain amount of kinship, but in fact they do not. Both, for example, are extremely interested in developing personal psychic abilities as much as possible. However, New Agers eschew the terms 'magic' and 'witchcraft.' New Age bookstores almost never have sections labeled 'Magic' or 'Witchcraft.' Instead, books on magic are shelved with works on spiritual disciplines, such as Yoga; and books on Neopagan Witchcraft are shelved with books on 'Women's Studies.'
Second, many typical New Age assumptions about religion are generally rejected by Neopagans. Many New Agers assume, for example, that all religions are ultimately the same; that spirituality is best learned by sitting at the feet of a master teacher or guru, preferably from one of the Eastern religions; and that a new world teacher or messiah will appear to usher in the New Age. Neopagans, in contrast, like the Craft specifically because it is so different from the Puritanical, world-hating Christianity that continues to be prominent in American culture. Most Neopagans believe in karma and reincarnation; but they reject the dualism of the Eastern traditions, and consider the guarantee of rebirth to be the reward for their spiritual practices. They generally believe that they are practicing an ancient folk religion, whether as a survival or a revival; and, being focused on the pagan religions of the past, they are not particularly interested in a New Age in the future.
They also generally believe that many religions are radically and irreconcilably different from each other; that the 'reformed' religions (especially the monotheistic ones) established by Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, and similar figures were NOT an improvement over the folk religions that they replaced; and that if there were a single worldwide religion in the future, it might very well repress human freedom even more than the Roman Catholic Church did in Europe during the 'Burning Times.' Hence, Neopagans are not at all receptive to teachers and teachings from the monotheistic religions nor to any from the East, with the possible exception of Hinduism, which is seen (whether accurately or not) as an 'unreformed' polytheism similar to that of the Greco-Roman world; Neopagans tend to be especially interested in Tantric traditions, since these can easily be seen as a type of magic parallel to that developed in hethe Western occult tradition.
Neopagans also generally tend to be extremely antiauthoritarian (whatever the reasons in personal backgrounds might be), and so are not at all inclined to accept the personal authority of any guru. The authoritarian structure of the official Gardnerian Witches in America might then seem to be anomalous, but it alone is a reason why there are at least ten times as many Gardnerian-imitating Witches as official Gardnerians in the Neopagan movement.
Neopagan Witches also operate with an ethic that forbids them to accept money for initiating anyone or for training anyone in the essential practices of the Craft as a religion. Neopagan festivals have grown into national gatherings, often of several thousand people, during the last decade, but they have remained quite inexpensive, since no one is attempting to make profit from them. As a result of this ethic, Neopagans look upon the 'Psychic Fairs' and 'New Age Expos' with open contempt and tend to consider most New Age gurus to be money-hungry frauds who are exploiting the public by charging exorbitant fees for spiritual practices that can be learned for free within a Neopagan coven. This attitude does not, of course, encourage New Agers to look kindly upon Neopagans.
There are, nevertheless, a minority among the Neopagan Witches who consider themselves to be members of the New Age movement as well. This minority tends to consist of the Witches who understand fairly clearly not only that the Gardnerian Witchcraft movement is a new religion, but also that this newness makes it the potential equal of every other religion in the world, since every religion begins as a new religion at some time and place. If the Craft is a new religion, then it can be understood as contributing to the spiritual growth in the modern world that is leading up to the New Age, whenever and however that might begin.
For scholars, the Craft is even more difficult to study than most new religions are because of its custom of 'secrecy' (actually, privacy): there are no central registries for covens, and many covens still do not let their existence be known to anyone except their own members. Nevertheless, by dint of diligence and ingenuity, one can get a fairly reliable assessment of the nature and size of the movement. For the sake of manageability, I take as my starting point the data presented by Margot Adler in the second edition of her Drawing Down the Moon, which is the only competent journalistic investigation of the movement to date.
Size of the Movement
How large is the Neopagan movement now? We can estimate its size by four independent methods.
First, because almost all members of the movement are avid readers (see later discussion), we can estimate the movement's size from the sales of certain key books. For example, extrapolating from the sales of the Llewellyn reprint of Israel Regardie's The Golden Dawn, Gordon Melton arrived at a figure of 40,000 serious adherents (essentially, members of covens) in the early 1980s. Similarly, Adler's Drawing Down the Moon and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance had each sold about 50,000 copies by the end of 1985.
Second, we can extrapolate from festival attendance. Even limiting the category of festivals to those that last two days or more (in contrast to local Sabbats - the 'traditional' Witch gatherings on the solstices, equinoxes, and Celtic cross-quarter days - which tend to be one-day affairs), there were 44 such annual festivals in 1986, and are closer to 100 now. Attendance can differ widely, but all reports estimate average attendance at between 100 and 200. Adler reports that the responses to her 1985 questionnaire showed that less than 10 percent of American Witches attend festivals at all. Harvest magazine learned from a survey of several hundred of its readers in 1986 that, of the readers who attended festivals: they attended an average of two festivals a year; a third of them belonged to covens; a third were solitary Witches; and a third were Neopagans, but not Witches (i.e., did not consider themselves to be initiated or 'ordained'). We can therefore carry out some rough calculations, as follows: Total annual attendance at festivals: 5,000 to 20,000; divided by average attendance of two festivals: 2,500 to 10,000; only a third are members of covens: 833 to 3,333.
Only 10 percent of all Witches go to festivals, but covens probably average ten members; so the number of covens would also range from 833 to 3,333, and the number of individuals who consider themselves to be Witches would range from 8,330 to 33,330, plus perhaps another 10 percent for the solitaries, giving roughly 9,000 to 36,000.
Around each coven there tends to be a circle of other people who are somewhat less involved: friends who come to Sabbats, students in study groups, and other noninitiates who are following Neopaganism as their primary spiritual path.
<#FROWN:D14\>
Inquisitors into Missionaries:
The Holy Office in Cuenca, 1547-1600
Since 1510 the Spanish Inquisition had been a court in search of a mission. The institution's original purpose, to punish Judaizers, had run its course, and fewer cases of judaizing came to its attention every year. Luther's split from the church in 1520 gave the Inquisition a new focus, the destruction of Protestant ideas. Even this, however, proved to be an elusive goal, as there were virtually no Lutherans in Spain during the 1520s. The inquisitors settled for discrediting the numerous followers of Erasmus and his ideas, which were perceived as having inspired Luther, destroying the tiny cells of mystics known as alumbrados, and going after the moriscos. These campaigns were quickly executed, and once again, after 1532 the Inquisition's level of activity fell. In fact, the tribunals, which relied primarily on court fines to pay their expenses, were perpetually in a state of financial crisis. Given what was to follow, the appointment in 1547 of Fernando de Valds as inquisitor-general might almost be viewed as an act of divine providence.
The Asturian Fernando de Valds's long career in the church began in 1517, when he entered the household of Cardinal Cisneros. Although unlike his patron in that he bore a lifelong animadversion to Erasmian ideas, Valds shared with Cisneros his passion for administrative reform. He is an excellent example of the skilled administrator turned inquisitor. Prior to his appointment as inquisitor-general, Valds had been in succession bishop of Oviedo, bishop of Sig<*_>u-umlaut<*/>enza, and archbishop of Seville. His episcopacies were characterized by the zealous administration of church affairs that was to become one of the hallmarks of the Catholic Reformation.
Valds brought to the Holy Office his administrative genius and an obsessive fear of Protestantism. He was convinced that it was just a matter of time before Protestant ideas infiltrated Spain. Accordingly, he quietly prepared for that crisis by completely overhauling the middle-aged, bankrupt institution. Nothing was left untouched - not court procedure, finances, personnel, nor administration. Two areas in which Valds's influence was critical were visitations and nonsalaried officials such as the familiars and commissioners. Together, the visitation and the comisario gave the Inquisition its major advantages over other courts in the sixteenth century.
The visitation was a means of taking the court to the people, announcing its intentions, and swiftly bringing the accused to justice. Since 1517, inquisitors had been under orders to go on circuit in their districts four times each year, but the record suggests that this order had been ignored. Valds changed the requirement to four months of visitations each year by one of the tribunal's two inquisitors. The Inquisition of Cuenca at least partially fulfilled Valds's orders. In the eleven-year period 1565-75, which encompasses the final years of Valds's generalship and those of Espinosa and Quiroga, inquisitors from Cuenca visited some part of their district at least once a year, if not more frequently. The officials made a point of covering the entire large district by visiting Sig<*_>u-umlaut<*/>enza one year, La Mancha the next, the city of Cuenca another, and so on.
The use of nonsalaried officials, the familiars and comisarios, complemented the visitations. Through such auxiliary officials, the Inquisition's presence could be extended year-round into the countryside. Familiars were Old Christian laymen who performed certain duties in exchange for privileges such as the right to bear arms and exemption from royal taxation and justice. They were supposed to denounce religious crimes, carry messages, escort prisoners, and in other ways assist the inquisitors with their work.
Familiars had existed long before Valds became inquisitor-general, but at the time of his appointment they were gaining rapidly in numbers and in notoriety for their freewheeling ways. To be an effective aid to the Inquisition, and not an embarrassment to it, the office had to be rehabilitated. Valds issued two important circulars in 1553 and 1555 that initiated the process of reforming the familiars by setting new standards of behavior and limits on the number of officials each tribunal could commission. In 1552 the conquense inquisitors began to keep records of all the familiars and other persons who held commissions from the Holy Office. If the tribunal followed the Suprema's guidelines as set forth above, at any given time in the sixteenth century the bishopric of Cuenca supported a network of about two hundred familiars.
The familiars' sinister image calls for a clarification of the real function of this official. The Inquisition never intended the familiars to serve as an omnipresent 'secret police,' an image of them that still persists in the popular imagination. Since their identity was not secret, they hardly could 'spy' on anyone. They could not even report the rumors that circulated about their neighbors because the tribunal would not accept hearsay as evidence. Familiars rarely appeared as witnesses in the hundreds of trials that the inquisitors prosecuted. In reality, the inquisitors of Cuenca used familiars to create an inexpensive network of officials who, when needed, could be trusted to carry out the Inquisition's confidential errands in the countryside. Modest as this function seems to the twentieth-century observer, it was a disturbing innovation to a population that rarely saw any representatives of the authorities who ruled them.
The lesser-known comisarios were quite different in nature from the familiars, and far more crucial to the success of the Inquisition's activities. While familiars merely ran errands, comisarios served as representatives of the inquisitors themselves. The comisario was a local priest who was empowered to publish the Inquisition's edicts, take denunciations and depositions, and ratify witnesses. When there seemed to be a probable case against an offender in his parish, it was the comisario who sent a denunciation, together with supporting testimony, to the inquisitors in Cuenca. Like the familiar, the comisario served without pay, apparently for the prestige and privileges of his post.
In Cuenca, the comisario's influence was greatly enhanced by the fact that the position was often awarded to village curas. The Inquisition relied on curas primarily because the comisario's legal duties required a high degree of education, which was not found in many priests other than curas. Nonetheless, there were added benefits to preferring parish priests over other well-educated priests for the position of comisario. The cura could draw upon his hired lieutenant priests and his other contacts in the area to aid him in gathering information about offenders. By using the cura, the Inquisition effectively latched onto an existing network of secular priests to extend its own presence outside the city of Cuenca.
The first comisario in Cuenca was one Dr. Gonzalo L<*_>o-acute<*/>pez, a theologian who was appointed in 1559 to serve in his parish of Tebar. The conquense inquisitors appointed comisarios at a steady rate, one to a town, until by 1600 sixty to sixty-five localities in the district could be expected to support the official. As in the case of the familiars, the comisarios were appointed only in the more important and more distant towns of the district. As the comisarios grew in number, the Inquisition came to rely on them to take over the legwork of the tribunal. Indeed, with responsible comisarios, the inquisitors had no need to visit their district on a regular basis. As a result, the traditional visita became less common in the seventeenth century.
Valds's institutional reforms worked in Cuenca. Beginning in the 1550s, the increased number of visitations and of local officials led to far more trial activity than usual. The tribunal's annual case load rose from a pre-Vald<*/>e-acute<*/>sian average of about thirty trials to nearly sixty. In fact, the networks functioned so well that in 1568 the tribunal had to work overtime to keep up with its docket. More trials, however, was not Valds's sole objective. In keeping with the inquisitor-general's policies, the kinds of offenses tried by the conquense Inquisition changed as well.
Valds attempted to head off the spread of Protestant ideas by controlling the flow of possibly dangerous information into Spain and restricting access to the Scriptures in the vernacular. Late in 1551 the tribunal in Cuenca received Valds's announcement that the Inquisition would publish a catalog of prohibited books, the famous Index, which was based on a list prepared by the University of Louvain. Cuenca was ordered to cooperate in collecting all Bibles, missals, and diurnals in the Spanish language, in addition to specific books mentioned by title. In the summer of 1552 the inquisitors wrote that they had found some diurnals and asked for further instructions concerning book collection. Censorship became more organized in the 1560s, when the Suprema began to send out notices to Cuenca of new works as they were added to the Index. Occasionally, the inquisitors inspected the district's bookshops for prohibited works. They also enlisted the booksellers' aid to control the circulation of broadsheets, primers, and playing cards, popular literature that sometimes contained scandalous or heretical material. Once, someone turned in some playing cards he had picked up from some sailors in Alicante, showing the pope with a woman. On another occasion, a French print warning against prostitution was mistaken for an ecce homo and was cause for argument and scandal in a local shop.
In addition to heretical literature, inquisitors in Cuenca were on the lookout for heretics themselves. Trials for heresy were a direct consequence of the growing fear of the spread of Protestant ideas to Cuenca from abroad or other parts of Spain. Foreigners, primarily French, Flemings, and Italians, passing through or residing in Cuenca suddenly were liable to face the tribunal on charges of 'Lutheranism.' Inquisitors inspecting the countryside uncovered conquenses who read prohibited books or spoke ill of the church, its officials, and its doctrine. These were difficult years for priests and friars, who discovered that their colleagues and parishioners were scrutinizing their casual statements or poorly written sermons for echoes of Protestant thought.
The Inquisition classified most suspicious statements as cases of either palabras escandalosas (scandalous words) or proposiciones (propositions), the latter usually being the more serious of the two charges. While there was enormous variety in the statements heard by the Inquisition, most fell within certain patterns. Some were popular sayings about religion that openly contradicted the church's dogma. Others, especially comments about specific practices of the church, may have been inspired by Christian humanism or Protestantism. Still others were simply incredulous or crudely speculative remarks.
Very common among the popular sayings were "In this world you won't see me have a bad time, because in the next one I won't suffer," and "There's nothing more [to life] than being born, living, and dying" (today's "Life's a bitch and then you die"). The sixteenth-century cases heard in Cuenca, rather than being defiant challenges to Catholic doctrine, seem to have been said in the context of justifying reckless living. Other people liked to say, "Each man is saved according to his own religion," a provocative statement that grew out of Spain's still multi-religious society but contradicted the church's teaching that there was no salvation outside the Christian faith.
Over the years, the inquisitors in Cuenca tried several cases reminiscent of Christian humanist or Protestant thought. Every year, someone would voice the opinion that masses and offerings for the souls in purgatory obtained no advantages for the dead. The eighty-year-old farmer Mart<*_>i-acute<*/>n Garc<*_>i-acute<*/>a turned himself in for saying that "the things people do here so that the dead will go to glory don't do any good." On more than one occasion, the tribunal encountered the sentiment that processions to shrines, because of their merrymaking, did less good than pious prayer at home, or similarly, that praying to a "stick of wood" was less efficacious than directing one's prayers to the saint in heaven. Others found some aspects of Christian dogma hard to believe, particularly the doctrine of the virgin birth and the resurrection of the dead. Twenty-one-year-old Mar<*_>i-acute<*/>a de Cardenas, the daughter of a shepherd in Villanueva de Alcardete, in 1568 maintained that "God did it to Our Lady like her father [did] to her mother" and "persisted in believing that God had known Our Lady carnally."<FROWN:D15\>
Four
Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book
Beyond the valorization of native knowledge, beyond even the lesson that anthropology, too, is a cultural system, there is more to be articulated about the relation between the cultural practice of anthropology and the cultures that anthropologists practice on. The comparison of the treatment of certain themes in anthropology with those by people in cultural settings widely removed from the origins of modern anthropology is one way to investigate this relation (Borofsky 1987). My approach here is rather different. I attempt a critique of certain unspoken fundamentals in professional anthropology through references to the Jewish textual tradition - a tradition that is intimately related to the Christian textual tradition out of which ethnography more immediately arises - and to the situation of Jews who have lived in or near the centers of world power within which anthropology has been produced. This Jewish tradition has resurfaced, albeit greatly transformed, within postmodern theory. Making explicit its critical potential vis-<*_>a-grave<*/>-vis the assumptions of ethnographic practice might, therefore, help to de-mystify and invigorate the contemporary practice of anthropology by revealing a particular manifestation of the link between knowledge and power. It should also help to explain why Jews have until quite recently been marginal as subjects of ethnographic study.
I will launch the essay with a fragmentary discussion of Stephen Tyler's book The Unspeakable. Tyler himself is adept at the postmodern techniques of close, multiple, and playful reading, and therefore I do no violence by relying on strong readings of selected brief fragments from his work. The book is first of all relevant as an ambitious account of textuality and orality in anthropology. Tyler's understandings of the written and the spoken are unselfconscioulsy grounded in the Christian tradition, thus enabling me to show more clearly what happens when we bring the Jewish voice in. Furthermore, Tyler articulates a nexus between orality and textuality on one hand, and time and space on the other, that is extremely relevant to my concerns. He writes:
It is a commonplace though many-named fact that there are two modes of integration, one a metaphor of space, the other a metaphor of time. The former is a static image of simultaneously coordinated parts, an objectlike structure, while the latter is a dynamic sequential relation of parts. Since Plato, at least, these modes of integration have been correlated with different modes of discourse, the sequential with narration and the simultaneous with argument or exposition. Plato's distinction between rhetoric and dialectic reflects this correlation, for dialectic in discriminating genera and species creates a taxonomy, a static and spatial image of reason which the syllogism merely recapitulates. In modern discourse analysis we have a similar contrast between the sequential and temporal formalisms of Propp and the simultaneous and spatial formalisms of Lvi-Strauss. Significantly, both Plato and Lvi-Strauss subordinate sequence to simultaneity. The indices of time - sequence, cause, consequence, and result are dominated by images of space - inclusion, exclusion, hyponymy, and the syllogism. (1987:80)
It is hard for me to know what Tyler would say about this passage. Is he iterating a truth or unveiling a misconception? The former interpretation can gain support from linking his term commonplace to his prefatory plea in favor of a repressed "commonsense world" (xi: emphasis mine) and from his binary assignment of time to Propp, space to Lvi-Strauss (and to Derrida; see p.42). The latter reading, on the other hand, can also draw support from his antispatialist dissection of Derrida, for if the fact he is referring to is commonplace, presumably he would find something in it that needs to be demystified.
My general concern here is with the sentence fragment "fact that there are two modes of integration." These two modes do not exist simply; they are constructed and naturalized, and I want to see them as such. I will begin, then, by discussing a spatializing discourse to which I am hostile but whose beneficent intent I am making some modest effort to comprehend - that of academic area studies. I will end by discussing a temporalizing discourse to which I am drawn, but whose mystifying silences need to be made audible - a reading of the Jewish Bible that privileges textual identity to the virtual exclusion of the necessary dimension of everyday life and collective identification.
My specifiable interests here are threefold. The first is my academic future as a Jewish anthropologist and an anthropologist of Judaism; I articulate this viewpoint in order to create a choice beyond what seem to be the existing options either of representing myself as being a specialist in an 'area' that is not recognized as such and that indeed is properly not an area, or of abandoning my professional relation to a particular group of people in favor of a focus on 'pure theory.' The second concern is the general status of Jewish ideas in elite intellectual discourse; they should be neither ignored nor patronized. The third is the well-being of the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab peoples. A critical approach toward the spatial and temporal grounds of ethnic identity is highly relevant to a better understanding of the construction of those two nations and of the conflict between them.
The index to Tyler's book confirms the gap between these concerns and the current theoretical/critical discourse in anthropology. There are no references there to Jews, Hebrew, Israel, or midrash, that genre of rabbinic interpretive literature that works largely by interweaving fragments of the biblical text and that has recently attracted considerable scholarly attention (see D. Boyarin 1990; Hartman and Budick 1986; Handelman 1982). The Kabbalah is mentioned in the text (p.180), but it is not indexed, nor is the Zoroastrianism to which it is coupled. The one reference in the index to "Bible (postmodern ethnography and)" directs us to Tyler's statement that
the hermeneutic process is not restricted to the reader's relationship to the text, but includes as well the interpretive practices of the parties to the originating dialogue. In this respect, the model of postmodern ethnography is not the newspaper but that original ethnography - the Bible (cf. Kelber 1983). (ibid.: 204)
The book Tyler refers to - Werner H. Kelber's The Oral and the Written Gospel - is a painstaking and insightful account of the transition from oral traditions to written texts in the Christian accounts of Jesus' sayings and life (see also Kelber 1989). But the Gospels are not what I usually have in mind when I think of the Bible, and it is not obvious that the same relation between orality and textuality obtains in the canonical Jewish books and in the Gospel. That Tyler himself identifies 'Bible' and 'Gospel' is further suggested by his Pauline paraphrase "the letter of ethnography killeth" (1987:99). It is easy to understand why this phrase is a powerful one for Tyler, since the ethnographic situation in which the oral dialogic of fieldwork is transformed into a monologic ethnography is so often roughly concomitant with the actual disappearance, the 'death,' of indigenous oral cultures. And yet we need to beware of this antigraphic prejudice, which Tyler shares with Paul: "If the apostle's thought is perceived as a theology of language, affirmation of the oral power of words and aversion to written objectification lie at its core" (Kelber 1983:184). Kelber does indeed say that "an oral language deconstructed by textuality undergoes a kind of death" (ibid.:185). But he has also taken care not to evaluate the former as superior to the latter (16), does not believe in an evolutionary progression from one to the other (184), and cautions against the very search for origins (xv). The Bible I will be writing about here in its relation - critical or potential, but not original - to ethnography is other than the Gospel and, in fundamental ways, that which the Gospel constructs as its Other.
Note that Tyler is doubly validating the Gospel-Bible, both as the original of ethnography tout court and as the proper model for post-modern ethnography. Tyler's Bible is both the way ethnography was 'originally' done and the way ethnography should be done. The indexing of the Gospel as Bible and as model postmodern ethnography, along with the absence of any Jewish references, suggest that for Tyler the relevant textual-interpretive sources of ethnography are generally Christian. The intimate link between missionary accounts and early ethnographic reports certainly reinforces this suggestion. On the other hand, there is the natural objection that so many modern pioneers in cultural anthropology (Mauss, Boas, Durkheim, Lvi-Strauss) were Jews. The issue, of course, is more one of social motivations and implicit frameworks of understanding than of the overt ethnic or religious affiliation of any particular scholar. Two observations can be made about the apparent contradiction between the Jewish personal origins of these pioneers and the Christian hermeneutic origins of anthropology as a whole.
First, all these Jewish scholars stand, as 'assimilating' Jews, in an apologetic relation to the modern nation-state that is curiously analogous to the relation of the early Christians to the Roman Empire. Jews in post-Enlightenment Western Europe felt obliged to prove their loyalty to the new nation-states, and many of the secular scholars among them (Durkheim perhaps most notably here) did so by helping to elaborate the legitimating ground of liberal state structures. The record of the church fathers' relations with imperial Rome demonstrates a similar concern for compatibility between Christian loyalty and loyalty to empire and a corresponding dissociation from the particularist and rebellious Jews (Greer 1986:121-22). The analogy is even more poignantly ironic when we consider that these secularist, modern, Western European Jewish scholars were, like the early Christians, "free to exploit the universalist aims of the religion from which they had sprung" (ibid.).
Secondly, identifying ethnography as profoundly (not essentially) Christian does not mean that its history is unrelated to Judaism. In fact, as I will discuss more fully later on, a major source of ethnography's logic of Othering is the early Christian encounter with Judaism. What came to be normative, orthodox Christianity did not simply reject the Hebrew Scripture in the way the Gnostics did. Instead Christian hermeneutics were largely bent toward "the transformation of the Hebrew Scriptures so that they may become a witness to Christ" (ibid.:111), a task made infinitely more difficult by most Jews' rejection of that "witness" (120). Here - as in the case of Marx's essays on the Jewish question or Lenin's confrontation with the Jewish Workers' Bund in 1903 - the Jews stand as the test case for universalizing theory, which fails to deal adequately with a stubbornly distinctive group. But equally interesting, we are talking about a process of Othering that is simultaneously inter-'ethnic' and intertextual. Thus in a historical and not only metaphorical sense, the history of Othering is a history of reading; a crucial early moment in ethnography is the hermeneutic, intertextual encounter between the Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah.
I am hardly an authority on Christianity, although I am doubtless shaped by its cultural heritage more thoroughly than I could possibly be aware. Indeed it is impossible to imagine ourselves without the superethnic, individualized universalism elaborated in Christianity. Here, however, I am attempting to identify some of the mystifications inevitably entailed by the institutionalization of that universalizing thrust. One mystification perhaps linked to the early Christian ideal of a community whose members are linked not by history but primarily by faith is the idea of an abstract, undefined, yet nevertheless universally human common sense. Here Tyler, for instance, becomes wonderfully polyvalent. On one hand he generally valorizes common sense as one in a series of repressed, presumably liberating values, decrying "the triumph of logic over rhetoric, of representation over communication, of science over common sense, of the visual over the verbal" (1987:170). Immediately afterward, however, he historicizes common sense, and undoes his own claims for its universal value: "These visual arts ... are ... historical emergents within a structure of common sense, and being thus relative to a cultural tradition cannot function as universals capable of constituting a fusion of all cultural horizons into a single integrated whole" (ibid.).<FROWN:D16\>
Bishops Meet at Notre Dame
By THOMAS J. REESE
BEFORE THE U.S. bishops even met for their spring meeting at the University of Notre Dame, storm clouds gathered over the university. The storm was both literal and figurative. Many bishops got stranded in Chicago and Detroit on the way to the meeting as high winds, rain and tornado warnings closed one airport after another.
Another storm raged over the decision of Notre Dame to award its Laetare Medal to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.). Although arguably the most academically qualified member of Congress and a supporter of social justice programs, Senator Moynihan was criticized by the bishops' conference president, Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, for espousing "the position that people should have the right to kill their unborn children."
Cardinal John J. O'Connor of New York and other bishops felt so strongly about the issue that they refused to set foot on the campus. Although he met with the bishops' pro-life committee in a hotel in South Bend, the Cardinal boycotted the spring meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (N.C.C.B.). Of the 286 voting members of the conference, about 200 attended the meeting. How many refused to come because of the Moynihan flap is uncertain, since attendance at the spring meetings is always less than at the November meetings of the bishops.
Controversy continued to plague the bishops as they gathered in South Bend. Even before approving the agenda, Archbishop William J. Levada of Portland, Ore., moved to conduct the discussion of the pastoral letter on women's concerns in closed session. Archbishop Levada and Bishop Alfred C. Hughes of Boston, both members of the committee drafting the pastoral, argued that the bishops could be more honest and free talking behind closed doors. They were supported by Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston but opposed by Archbishop John R. Roach of St. Paul, Bishop Raymond A. Lucker of New Ulm, Minn., as well as Bishop Joseph L. Imesch of Joliet, Ill., who chairs the drafting committee. The bishops voted to keep the discussion in the open.
Bishop Imesch had come to Notre Dame fearing the worst for his pastoral and that was exactly what he got. The draft letter was attacked from the right and the left. Auxiliary Bishop John R. Sheets, S.J., of Fort Wayne-South Bend, said that the document should include a condemnation of any radical feminist theology that threatens church unity by rejecting traditional Christology because Jesus was male, by seeing the church as a patriarchal institution that suppresses the feminine dimension and by refusing to participate in Eucharists celebrated by male priests.
Bishop Elden F. Curtiss of Helena, Mont., agreed with Bishop Sheets. He noted that the letter says sexism is a sin; it should also say radical feminism is a sin.
During the debate it became clear that the drafting committee itself is so divided that Archbishop Levada and Bishop Hughes prepared a minority report. Although the report was not made public, Bishop Hughes's criticisms of the draft were telling. He called for strengthening and expanding the Christian anthropology of the first chapter. Although he did not go into detail, this probably means reflecting more closely the Pope's theology of the human person, especially his views on the complementarity of the sexes.
Second, Bishop Hughes wanted the letter to analyze modern views of the individual, family and freedom rooted in Enlightenment. Finally, he wanted a more positive presentation of the church and the church's position opposing the ordination of women.
THE PASTORAL LETTER was also attacked from the other side. Bishop Lucker argued that the process was more important than the letter and recommended dropping the document while continuing the dialogue with women. He noted that the bishops have a difficult time applying their teaching about the equality of women to the daily life of the church and that the draft has lots of suggestions for society but not for the church.
Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B., of Milwaukee also called for dropping the letter because it does not have anything to say beyond what has already been said in papal and Vatican documents. He said it is not up to the standards of other conference letters and that it would be embarrassing to put it out in its present form. Furthermore, it would neither heal the wounds suffered by women nor bring people together.
Archbishop Roach spoke for the middle, who hope that the letter can be saved and approved after the normal amending process in November. "We need the document to focus the dialogue," he argued. "This document will be helpful for discussion on the local level."
Cardinal Jospeh L. Bernadin of Chicago also supported pursuing the document through the normal conference process. "It would be a serious mistake to walk away from the letter after all the work that was done, including the consultations," he said. He acknowledged that ordination is the neuralgic issue. The bishops would have to enrich the section dealing with ordination and explain the church's teaching. But to attempt to say the last word on Christian anthropology and feminism would in effect kill the letter, he said.
IN ORDER to give the drafting committee some direction, Archbishop Pilarczyk held a straw vote to see if the bishops wanted to use the current draft as a basis for debate and amendments in November. The committee had told the bishops that, after almost nine years of work, they were finished and would not attempt another draft. A standing vote indicated that a majority of the bishops wanted to go forward with the letter. But the vote also showed that the letter was in serious trouble: Fewer than two-thirds of the bishops wanted to go forward, and it will take a two-thirds vote to pass the letter.
The results of the vote were further muddied since some bishops thought that the committee could revise the text in light of the discussion. Others hoped the letter could be issued by the committee rather than by the full conference and thus have weaker authority.
"I don't see how it is possible to satisfy the concerns expressed by the bishops," said Bishop Imesch. "We will try, but that would be a miracle."
Bishops who support the ordination of women believe that they only have about 30 votes in the conference. Revisions in the letter will most likely reflect the views of those opposed to the ordination of women and to feminist theology.
While the bishops debated the draft, groups favoring the ordination of women and of married men released the results of a Gallup poll showing that U.S. Catholics favor both. Sixty-seven percent agree that "it would be a good thing if women were allowed to be ordained as priests," up from 47 percent in 1985 and 29 percent in 1974. An even higher percentage (75 percent) support a married priesthood. Since younger Catholics support these positions more strongly than older Catholics do, future polls will probably show a continued trend toward even greater support for the ordination of women and for married priests.
The poll showed disagreement with the bishops on other issues. Eighty-seven percent say couples should make their own decisions on birth control, and 75 percent think divorced and remarried Catholics without annulments should be able to receive Communion. Two-thirds of the Catholics also disagree with the bishops' opposition to capital punishment, showing that the sample was not limited to liberal Catholics. Despite disagreements with the Pope on these issues, 84 percent of the U.S. Catholics think John Paul II is "doing a good job leading the church."
The bishops also received reports on proselytism and evangelization. Proselytism is the attempt to recruit people away from another church through undue pressure and promises of material rewards. The bishops are especially concerned about the loss of Hispanics through proselytism.
The bishops will consider a statement on evangelization at their November meeting. The three goals of evangelization, according to the draft, are to increase enthusiasm for the faith among Catholics, to invite all people to hear the message of the faith and to foster Gospel values in American culture.
THERE ARE 15 million inactive Catholics and 80 million unchurched in the United States who will be the focus of the evangelization effort. Many bishops said that Catholic parishes need to be more hospitable to new-comers and strangers. A number of bishops indicated that Renew, a parish renewal program begun in Newark, N.J., is the best instrument of evangelization in the American church.
Another report by Bishop Edward I. Hughes of Metuchen, N.J., described preparations to receive and implement The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which will be approved by the Pope on June 25. Bishop Hughes chairs a conference subcommittee to develop a favorable climate for the reception of the catechism. An ad hoc committee of the conference severely criticized the first draft of the catechism, which was then called Catechism of the Universal Church (see AM. 3/3/90). The bishops are now being asked to embrace enthusiastically a revised catechism they have not yet seen. The English translation of the catechism is expected in January.
One surprise at the meeting came from Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, the Pope's representative to the United States, who said that the Vatican is concerned about the Christology and Trinitarian theology expressed in the new translation of the sacramentary being developed by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (I.C.E.L.). While he did not explain the concerns, one member of the bishops' liturgy committee felt that I.C.E.L. was going too far in trying to avoid using traditional Trinitarian language in referring to the Father and Son. He felt that if the draft came to the conference as it stood, "there would be a blood bath on the floor." There may be some hope for the I.C.E.L. sacramentary, however, since without much controversy the bishops did approve a new translation of the lectionary that uses inclusive language in dealing with the non-divine. This revised lectionary took eight years of consultation and work with bishops and scholars.
The bishops also met in executive session behind closed doors. Cardinal James A. Hickey of Washington, D.C., reported that he had gotten the Pope to approve a second conference of religious women in the United States to represent those who believe that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (L.C.W.R.) is too liberal. The L.C.W.R. has been under attack by conservative nuns whom some bishops consider more loyal to papal teaching. Also, Archbishop Pilarczyk indicated that there may be some Vatican movement on the issue of altar girls but warned against raising false hopes.
But the major topic of the executive session was sexual abuse of children by priests. The bishops heard from a panel of experts and bishops. In a statement at the conclusion of the meeting, Archbishop Pilarczyk, as N.C.C.B. president, addressed the problem with more directness and candor than had ever been heard on the national level. He called sexual abuse of a child "reprehensible conduct directed at a most vulnerable member of our society." He noted that research indicates that one out of every four girls and one out of every 10 boys is sexually abused before they reach their 18th birthday.
"Sexual abuse is caused by a disorder (in some cases, an addiction) for which treatment is essential," he said. "Sometimes the therapy may be successful; sometimes it is not." He refused to rule out the possibility of a priest returning to ministry after treatment, but "We realize we must seek sound medical advice as we make responsible pastoral judgments," he said. "The protection of the child is and will continue to be our first concern."
He admitted that mistakes had been made in the past when people treated sexual abuse as a moral fault for which repentance and a change of scene, so it was thought, would result in a change of behavior. "Far more aggressive steps are needed to protect the innocent, treat the perpetrator, and safeguard our children.
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Fruit for eternity
A testimony of God's sustaining love
by Stephanie Smedley
At some point in a Christian's life, he or she may face what I term 'the Judas Issue': How far are you willing to go for Christ? What will purchase your betrayal?
It may come through disappointment or a situation so shattering that the cost of following Jesus is sharply held in focus. I have faced such a challenge; I have lost a child.
Christopher Ryan, my second son with silvery-blue eyes and white-gold hair, departed this earth. He was perfect in form, beautiful to see, cuddly, sweet, and good. He called me "Amma," and I loved him - and love him still. He lived with us for seven months, then returned to the one who gave him life, a sweet and precious memory.
"You're a pastor's wife. You've walked with the Lord for years and witnessed countless miracles. Why would God, if he's so good, let this happen?" Such reactions, along with judgments of "not enough faith" or "having concealed sin" came from those who looked on, unable to perceive God's objectives in my life.
But throughout the ordeal, I never doubted God's goodness or God's love. God's purposes are higher than mine, more lasting, more enduring. I recognize God's right to do as God wills. As Job so widely said, "Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?" (Job 2:10, NAS).
I had to face the questions, What will be the price of my denial? Do I love God because God blesses? Do I serve the Lord for some reward? Will I remain loyal through difficulty or hardship?
This present life is full of trials. God entrusted my family with a massive test, one that has buckled others. The good news is that though we were shaken severely, God's stalwart love sustained us. God's grace truly is sufficient.
I relate to the sword piercing the soul as spoken of in Luke 2:35. I understand the physical ache, the yearning to hold and possess, the missing and horrible emptiness. I have faced the declaration that death is final.
But death is not final for the Christian. It is only the exchange of that which is frail for that which is indestructible. Yes, the pain of separation is great; there isn't a day I don't think of Chris. But I have this reassuring hope: I will see him again.
The power of Christ's grace brought me through what I could never endure on my own. I am not bitter, nor am I resentful. In fact, I am humbled to think Christ trusted me with such a test. I love my Lord.
At the time of Christopher's death, God spoke to our hearts: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24).
Life on earth is brief, just a blip on history's graph. I pray that we people of God will shift our focus from what is temporary to that which never ends. May we spend our lives with this goal in mind: to bear fruit for eternity.
What our children see
Suggestions for setting a good example
by Deborah Christensen
Linda sat propped up in bed reading her Bible. She enjoyed these moments to herself. The children were sleeping. She had read a Bible story to them and prayed with them before putting them to bed. The house was quiet. This was the first chance she had to spend quiet time with the Lord.
"What are you doing, Mommy?"
Linda looked up to see five-year-old Diane peeking into the room. She smiled and motioned for Diane to come in. "I'm having my devotions."
"Devotions? What's that?"
"That's reading the Bible to learn about Jesus, then praying to him - just as we do before you go to bed." Linda read aloud the passage she had been studying.
"I learned some songs about the Bible in Sunday school," Diane said. "Do you want to hear them?"
"Sure."
Diane started singing 'The B-I-B-L-E' and 'Zacchaeus.' Linda joined in. When they finished, Linda kissed Diane good night and sent her back to bed.
Have you noticed how children see everything we do, even when we don't know they are watching? Whether we like it or not, we set an example every day. What we do sticks with them. We decide if we set a good or bad example. How can we ensure that it is a good example? Following are a few suggestions that might help.
Weave your spiritual life into daily living. Read Bible stories to your children at bedtime, go to church, and pray before meals. But don't stop there. Allow the children to see you growing in your own spiritual journey.
In First We Have Coffee, Margaret Jensen talks about her mother's complete dependence on God. Every day she went to her room by herself and prayed on her knees. The children knew not to disturb her because she was talking to God, and it was a special time. She didn't hide it from them. They also watched miracles happen because of her faithfulness.
Deuteronomy 6:6-9 instructs us to teach the Lord's commands to our children in all circumstances. Our children learn about our values by watching us.
Be consistent. It's not a matter of 'do what I say, not what I do.' If what we say and what we do are different, we send confusing messages to our children.
Discipline is essential. Standards set in the home, however, apply to all family members, including parents. We are not above the rules. Pretending we are puts a wedge in our relationship with our children. They see the discrepancies between our actions and our words.
Children imitate us. When they see us doing something, even if we have told them not to, they feel they have permission to do it. Or they stop respecting us. They will probably sneak around behind our backs.
Recognize and acknowledge failures. We are not perfect. Our children already know that. They see every mistake we make. Admitting our mistakes and failures opens the lines of communication. It also lets our children know that failure is not the end of the world. It may teach them how to be open about their mistakes. Many people believe this undermines our authority. In fact, the opposite occurs.
Get involved in ministry as a family. Serve God together. Find something you can all do as a family. Let your children see you reaching outward to other people.
After church every Sunday, Bill and his father drove out to the local mental health facility. His father conducted services for the mentally handicapped patients. Bill watched as his father spent time with each person and treated her or him with dignity, showing love to each.
That image impressed Bill for the rest of his life. He cites his father's example as the catalyst that sent him into ministry. Bill now pastors a large congregation in the midwest. His church focuses on reaching people for Christ - no matter who they are. His theme is 'You matter to God.'
"Train up a child in the way he should go" (Prov. 22:6) means more than discipline or just talking about it. It means living it.
Putting back the thanks
Ten suggestions for a more thankful Thanksgiving
by Kathleen Buehler and Jennifer Veldman
Much has been said about the commercialization of Christmas that takes away from the real meaning of advent. But what about Thanksgiving? Has Thanksgiving become just a day to stuff ourselves with food and lie around watching parades and football games?
You may feel the need to put back into the holiday some of the gratitude to God that is the reason for the day. Following are some ideas that may spark your own new Thanksgiving traditions.
1. Weeks or days ahead of Thanksgiving, brainstorm as a family those persons who have meant a great deal to your family. Buy or make thank-you cards or write notes to send to these persons, expressing your gratitude to them. On Thanksgiving Day, make them part of your prayer time.
2. You could 'add' to your family. Invite persons who do not have a place to go on Thanksgiving to your celebration and include them in your holiday tradition. If there is a college near you, remember that some students may not be able to go home for the holiday, especially if they live far away, and may be spending the day alone.
3. Learn portions of the psalms that speak of Thanksgiving and praise. Recite these together on that special day.
4. Rewrite portions of Psalm 136 to fit the blessings of your family. Read your version as a litany on Thanksgiving Day.
5. Allow children, perhaps directed by an adult, to practice and present a skit or puppet show for the adults expressing the meaning of Thanksgiving or family togetherness.
6. At each person's place at the table, put a piece of paper with that person's name at the top. As the meal is being prepared, ask the various family members and guests to write on each of the other papers one characteristic or action that they appreciate about the person whose name is at the top. Then as persons gather at the table for dinner, each will find a list of reasons why he or she is appreciated.
7. Before digging into the dinner, spend a few moments looking back over the last year. Let each one express one person or event that has been a blessing.
8. As part of your prayer/worship time before you begin your meal, hold hands around the table and sing a familiar hymn or chorus of thanksgiving to God.
9. If someone at your Thanksgiving celebration is not a Christian, a specific testimony about what God has done in your life and how you are thankful to God may be a good way to share your faith.
10. If there is a shut-in or nursing home resident that you know, arrange to pack up a portion of your dinner to bring Thanksgiving to that individual after you have finished your meal.
Ministers of constant prayer
An unequaled opportunity for outreach
by John Eyberg
Even as the old are getting older, they are being joined in quantity by an aging, younger group. With a dramatic decline in birthrate, aging of the general population has skyrocketed. At the beginning of this century, an estimated one of every twenty-five persons was sixty-five or older; during the past decade the ratio was one in nine; and thirty years into the next century it is projected to be one in five - twenty percent of America's total population.
The graying of our country has ignited a national debate focused on building an economy that will sustain the aging population. What has yet to be ignited is a level of interest within the church community in what to do about an aging constituency. Mostly, the church has been satisfied with programs designed to entertain the elderly and with nursing home visitation. The result is an underutilized resource and a burial ground of unused talent.
Responsible stewardship is to be a hallmark of the church. To the church, God has entrusted gifts of great value, and God's expectation is for their return to him 'with interest' (Matt. 25:27). A church that violates that trust by burying talents embodied in aging vessels may one day hear, "You wicked and slothful servant!" (v.26).
As we grow older, we learn that aging is built into the system and happens at the same pace for everyone. Of course, we enter the human race at different times; therefore, we do not cross the finish line together.
Generation gaps can be the result, but an atmosphere of freedom can help fill the gaps. In the concluding chapter of her life, Hannah Whitall Smith wrote, "Advice we who are older may give, and the fruits of our experience, but we must be perfectly content to have our advice rejected by the younger generation, and our experience ignored ....