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THE

PRINCETON

SEMINARY

BULLETIN

VOLUME X, NUMBER 3 NEW SERIES 1989

Mackay Centennial
An Eloquent Witness
John Alexander Mackay:

A Centennial Remembrance
The Form of a Servant

Commencement Address, 1989
The Last Temptation of the Church

Farewell Remarks to the Class of 1989
Thinking about Everything, All the Time

DANIEL L. MIGLIORE

THOMAS W. GILLESPIE
JOHN A. MACKAY

FRED B. CRADDOCK

THOMAS W. GILLESPIE

Inaugural Address

Mission as Kenosis A LAN neely

Warfield Lecture

Reformed Preaching Today john h. leith

Sermons

The African-American Christian Heritage:

Witness and Promise clarice j. martin

A Claim Beyond Imagining Christine m. smith

PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Thomas W. Gillespie, President
James I. McCord, President Emeritus

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

David B. Watermulder, Chair

Robert M. Adams, Secretary

Johannes R. Krahmer, Vice-Chair

Frederick F. Lansill, Treasurer

Clarence B. Ammons

Henry Luce III

Eve S. Bogle

Karen Turner McClellan

Robert W. Bohl

M. Scott McClure

Stuart Cummings-Bond

David M. Mace

John H. Donelik

Donald C. McFerren

James G. Emerson, Jr.

Earl F. Palmer

Peter E. B. Erdman

George T. Piercy

Rosemary H. Evans

Jean M. Rech

Sarah B. Gambrell

Thomas J. Rosser

Francisco O. Garcia-Treto

Laird H. Simons, Jr.

Helen H. Gemmill

Frederick B. Speakman

C. Thomas Hilton

William P. Thompson

David H. Hughes

Jay Vawter

Jane G. Irwin

Samuel G. Warr

F. Martin Johnson

George B. Wirth

Louis Upchurch Lawson

Charles Wright

James H. Logan, Jr.

TRUSTEES EMERITI/AE

Ralph M. Wyman

Clem E. Bininger

Raymond I. Lindquist

Frederick E. Christian

J. Keith Louden

Margaret W. Harmon

William H. Scheide

Bryant M. Kirkland

John M. Templeton

Harry G. Kuch

Irving A. West

THE

PRINCETON

SEMINARY

BULLETIN

VOLUME X NUMBER 3

Daniel L. Migliore, editor

Jane Dempsey Douglass, book review editor

NEW SERIES 1989

CONTENTS

Mackay Centennial
An Eloquent Witness
John Alexander Mackay:

A Centennial Remembrance
The Form of a Servant

Commencement Address, 1989
The Last Temptation of the Church

Farewell Remarks to the Class of 1989
Thinking about Everything, All the Time

Inaugural Address
Mission as Kenosis

Warfield Lecture
Reformed Preaching Today

Sermons

The African-American Christian Heritage:
Witness and Promise
A Claim Beyond Imagining

Daniel L. Migliore

Thomas W. Gillespie
John A. Mackay

Fred B. Craddock

Thomas W. Gillespie

Alan Neely

John H. Leith

Clarice J. Martin
Christine M. Smith

Book Reviews

The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, by Sang Hyun

Lee Gerald P. McKenny

Deadly Sins and Saving Virtues, by Donald Capps Michael G. Cartwright

Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination, by
Garrett Green

167

I7I

182

!93

199

202

224

258

267

272

274

David ]. Bryant 276

Thinking the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American
Context, by Douglas John Hall

On Reading Karl Barth in South Africa, by Charles Villa-
Vicencio (ed.)

A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality. Part III, Christ in
Context, by Paul M. Van Buren

Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries, by Mark Kline Taylor

The Literary Guide to the Bible, by Robert Alter and Frank
Kermode (eds.)

Griechisch-deutsches Worterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen
Testaments und der fruhchristlichen Literatur, 6th fully
reworked edition, by Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland (eds.)

II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary.
The Anchor Bible n, by Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor

Jeremiah. Interpretation Commentary, by Ronald E. Clements

Congregations: Their Power to Form and Transform, by Ellis C.
Nelson

Faithcare: Ministering to All God’s People Through the Ages of
Life, by Daniel O. Aleshire

People of the Truth, by Robert E. Webber and Rodney Clapp

The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of
Christian Theology, by H. Paul Santmire

Dinner with Jesus and Other Left-Handed Story-Sermons, by
Donald F. Chatfield

Daniel L. Migliore

27)

Daniel L. Migliore

27<

Arthur C. Cochrane

281

Mary Ann Stenger

28:

Bruce M. Metzger

28,

Bruce M. Metzger

28;

]. ]. M. Roberts

281

Dennis T. Olson

28c

D. Campbell Wycbpff

291

Donald Capps

29i

Richard J. Mouw

29'

Thomas Sieger Derr

2gt

Donald Macleod

29I

The Princeton Seminary Bulletin is published three times annually by the Theological Seminary
of the United Presbyterian Church at Princeton, New Jersey.

Each issue is mailed free of charge to all alumni/ae and on an exchange basis with various insti-
tutions. Back issues are not available.

All correspondence should be addressed to Daniel L. Migliore, Editor, Princeton Seminary Bul-
letin, CN 821, Princeton, NJ 08542.

Because the policy of the Bulletin is to publish lectures and sermons by Princeton Seminary
faculty and administration, and presentations by guests on the Seminary campus, we cannot accep’
unsolicited material.

An Eloquent Witness

In this issue we mark the centennial of the birth of John A. Mackay, third
president of Princeton Theological Seminary and world-renowned Chris-
tian theologian and ecumenical leader. Along with a special article by
Thomas W. Gillespie, we are reprinting one of Mackay’s own memorable
convocation addresses, “The Form of a Servant.”

By any standard John Mackay was an extraordinary person. This was
evident not only to his many students and colleagues but to all who heard
him preach or lecture or who spoke with him in private. His combination
of honest piety, prophetic courage, tough-minded theology, and gifted writ-
ing was both rare and impressive.

In recent weeks I have reread portions of his many books and articles,
and have been struck again by their remarkable vitality, relevance, and clar-
ity. I offer a few examples that may serve as reminders to those who were
privileged to study under Mackay and as enticements to those who have not
yet encountered his eloquent Christian witness.

On Basic Christianity. “What is basic Christianity? . . . How do we find
it? The only authoritative source of information about the core of the Chris-
tian religion is the Bible, Holy Scripture. What do we seek when we take
up the Bible? We endeavor to find out what it says, what its basic message
is. We discover when we take the Bible seriously and listen to it that it is
basically a book about a person, Jesus Christ. When we fix our attention
upon him, he becomes the clue to our understanding of the Bible and also
the core of the message of the Bible. What is the highest thing that the Bible
says about Jesus Christ? We hear its central affirmation in four momentous
words of St. Paul: “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:11). That is basic
Christianity. Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the first creed in point of time, and
the basic creed for all time.” (“Basic Christianity,” The Princeton Seminary
Bulletin 43 [Winter 1950], p. 6.)

On the Danger of Orthodoxy. “Have you ever known people who were
ready to challenge the world to point out a flaw in the orthodoxy of their
belief, but who lived nevertheless complacent, unsympathetic, censorious
lives, utterly devoid of the spirit of Christ? They stooped, when occasion
demanded, to unethical procedures to further their worldly interest or even
to propagate their religious faith. How did such an anomaly become possi-
ble? Because those people had converted their ideas about God into God
Himself. They became idol-worshippers without knowing it, and their lives
took on all the ethical marks of idolatry. They patronized and manipulated

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

1 68

their God at will; they keep him in their pockets or on their book shelves.
Few people can be so unlovely or so utterly lost as these. The publicans and
the harlots shall go into the Kingdom of Heaven before them.” (“The Res-
toration of Theology,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 31 ( April 1937], pp.
16-17.)

On the Need for Community. “The major problem of contemporary civi-
lization is in the realm of community. Communities founded on blood or
soil or national tradition struggle desperately with communities founded
upon class. That being so, the relevance of that universal community which
came into being at Pentecost and which recognizes no barriers of soil or
blood or class becomes more than ever apparent. In both Communist and
Fascist countries the state tends increasingly to become converted into a
church with its Messiah, its holy books, its liturgy, and its theology. Only a
community of love, as closely knit together as the communities of race and
class and tradition, and rooted as much as they in a theological conception
of its nature and destiny, can withstand the assault of Christianity’s new
rivals and enable the Christian community to fulfill God’s purpose for hu-
manity.” (“The Restoration of Theology,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin
31 | April 1937], pp. 12-13.)

On the Need to “Mal{e Christians”'. “In the course of a public dialogue
which I had some years ago in Santiago, Chile, with a distinguished Jesuit
theologian, this question was addressed to my fellow panelist when the dis-
cussion period came: ‘Sir, what do you consider to be the main problem of
your church today?’ His answer: ‘We Catholics must make Christians.’ This
was a most revolutionary reply, for in the Hispanic tradition it was not
uncommon for a person to say, ‘I am an atheist, but I am a Catholic.’ Con-
gratulating my Roman Catholic friend for his frankness, I remarked, ‘We
Protestants too must make Christians.’ And I added, ‘Speaking as a loyal
Presbyterian, we Presbyterians must make Christians.’ ” (“The Great Ad-
venture,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 64 (July 1971], p. 32.)

On the Prophetic Tas/{ of the Church'. “Whatever concerns men and women
and their welfare is a concern of the church and its ministers. Religion has
to do with life in its wholeness. While being patriotically loyal to the country
within whose bounds it lives and works, the church does not derive its au-
thority from the nation but from Jesus Christ. Its supreme and ultimate
allegiance is to Christ, its sole Head, and to his Kingdom, and not to any
nation or race, to any class or culture. It is, therefore, under obligation to
consider human life in the light of God’s purpose in Christ for the world.
While it is not the role of the Christian church to present blueprints for the

169

organization of society and the conduct of government, the church owes it
to its own members and to people in general, to draw attention to violations
of those spiritual bases of human relationship which have been established
by God. It has the obligation also to proclaim those principles, and to instill
that spirit, which are essential for social health, and which form the indis-
pensable foundation of sound and stable policies in the affairs of state.” (“A
Letter to Presbyterians,” 1953.)

On Revolution : “Let us frankly recognize that many of the revolutionary
forces of our time are in great part the judgment of God upon human self-
ishness and complacency . . . That does not make these forces right; it does,
however, compel us to consider how their driving power can be channeled
into forms of creative thought and work. History, moreover, makes it abun-
dantly clear that wherever a religion, a political system or a social order,
does not interest itself in the common people, violent revolt eventually takes
place.” (“A Letter to Presbyterians,” 1953.)

On Christian Life as a “Great Adventure:’’ “Let it become more and more
for each of us an exciting thing to be a Christian. Forgive me if I say — and
do not think that I am being merely sentimental or romantic when I say
it — my one regret is that I am not a member of the present graduating class
. . . a member of your generation. For your generation has a tremendous job
to do as you face tomorrow. As you confront the time ahead, be sure that
you listen to Jesus Christ as your Savior, Leader, and Companion, who con-
tinues to say, ‘Come to me — Follow me.’ Beloved friends, embark on the
Great Adventure, and in doing so remember the words of the great musi-
cian Handel: ‘He shall reign for ever, and ever, and ever.’ Yes, Jesus Christ
will have the last word in history.” (“The Great Adventure,” The Princeton
Seminary Bulletin 64 [July 1971], p. 38.)

This is but a sampling of the rich theological and spiritual legacy of John
A. Mackay. We continue to find this legacy compelling not least because in
it heart and mind, passion and discipline, personal renewal and social trans-
formation— concerns so often divorced in the life of the church then and
now — are inseparably joined.

Daniel L. Migliore
Editor

John Alexander Mackay
1889-1983

John Alexander Mackay:

A Centennial Remembrance

by Thomas W. Gillespie

May 17 of this year marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth
of Dr. John Alexander Mackay — missionary, theologian, educator, ec-
umenist, author and for twenty-three years, the President of Princeton The-
ological Seminary (1936-1959). His biographer will one day narrate the life
story of this extraordinary Christian leader, plumbing the depths of his fer-
tile mind and noble spirit, and exploring the frontiers on which he lived out
his Christian vocation over the ninety-four years of his life. This tribute is
written simply from the perspective of one who knew Dr. Mackay during
student days here at the Seminary, whose life and ministry were decisively
influenced by his vision, and who, with many others, remains grateful to
God for the legacy he provided.

I

It was as a collegian at a summer conference that I first heard Dr.
Mackay. His morning addresses lifted up themes that were new to me, such
as “The Balcony and the Road,” “Christianity on the Frontiers,” “The Cos-
mic Christ,” and “Let the Church Be the Church.” Each one was an hori-
zon-expanding experience. The Christ of whom he spoke was clearly the
one in whom I believed, but whose magnitudes exceeded my youthful un-
derstanding. Until then the only church I knew was the congregation in
which I had been baptized, nurtured, and confirmed. Dr. Mackay con-
fronted us with the reality of the Body of Christ in which congregations are
but living cells. The week was not only memorable; it was a preview of
coming attractions that awaited me at the Seminary.

Only then did I begin to realize that these recurring themes, articulated
so vividly in the discourse of a “visualizing Celt,” represented something
more than novelties of theological insight or linguistic expression. His was
not a new theology , but theology in a new key. It was his passionate desire to
lift the church above its polarities and divisions, its sectarianism and paro-
chialism, to the ever increasing realization of that unity which is given in
Christ and honored in mission. He pitched theology in a higher key that
gave promise of a new harmony. As one veteran of the Seminary during
Dr. Mackay’s administration attested, “In the early days, when people were
touchy, he used to lift us right up to the spheres where everybody was in
agreement.” So also he lifted others.

172

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

The upward orientation of his vision of Christian unity is significant.
There is, he once observed, “a beyond ... to the purely theological, ecclesi-
astical and liturgical.” Indeed, it was his conviction that “there is a beyond
to Christianity as a religion. . . Only in this beyond may the essence of the
faith be found and the oneness of its community grounded. Ecumenical
though he was to the core of his being, he nonetheless saw “no future to any
vague ecumenism whose goal is the minimum common ground of Christian
agreement.”2 For the common ground is not a human achievement but a
divine gift that is received by the church in its faithfulness to its mission
mandate. Thus when he passionately advocated a “dynamic centrism,” the
reference was not to the middle of the wad but to the pilgrimage on the road
itself in focused obedience to the Lord of the church.

II

For Dr. Mackay, the name of this beyond was Jesus Christ. It was his
deepest conviction that “in its essence Christianity is Christ.” Reflecting
upon the early period of his Christian life in a 1972 Alumni/ae Day address,
he told his audience:

The reality and significance of the “Historical Jesus," of the “Crucified
and Risen Christ,” of the Christ who said, “Follow me,” of the Pauline
“Christ in us,” took on a luminous and dynamic dimension in my life.
An evangelical affirmation from the Middle Ages began to find an
echo within me: “I have one passion in life and it is He.”3

It is no wonder that he was known during his sixteen years of missionary
service in Latin America (1916-1932) as “this Scot enamored of Christ.”

He often quoted the words of Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philos-
opher under whom he studied in Madrid during the 1915-1916 academic
year, “Get a great idea, marry it, found a home with it, and raise a family.”
Noting the influence of this counsel upon her subject in a feature article
carried by Presbyterian Life , Janet Harbison commented:

Mackay has been, through the years, essentially a monogamous intel-
lectual. What appear to be different threads and emphases in his think-
ing are really different aspects of the idea he married many years ago.4

1 “Let Us Remember,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 65 (July 1972), p. 26.

2 (ohn A. Mackay, The Presbyterian Way of Life (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., i960), p. xvi.

i “Let Us Remember,” p. 26.

< Janet Harbison, “John Mackay of Princeton” Presbyterian Life , October 1, 1958, p. 8.

JOHN ALEXANDER MACKAY

!73

Though central to his thinking, Jesus Christ was more than an idea to
Dr. Mackay, and faith more than an intellectual exercise. He was an un-
ashamed advocate of personal religion, which he distinguished sharply from
religion that is merely conventional. Of the latter type he said in a convoca-
tion address at the Seminary:

Conventional religion is for the most part inherited religion. One is
religious primarily in loyalty to parents or grandparents, or because of
the social influence of the environment in which one was brought up.

By contrast, “personal religion is religion in which the divine reality,
however it may be conceived or experienced, exercises an overmastering
influence upon life.” Indeed, “It becomes the fountainhead of emotion, the
master of thought, the source of moral energy.”5

The origin of this distinction was clearly his own life experience. Born in
Inverness, Scotland, and raised in the rich heritage of that Celtic culture,
which included the strict piety of the Free Presbyterian Church to which
his parents belonged and in which his father served as an elder, this first-
born son knew conventional religion in his childhood. His adult faith,
however, was more than a cultural inheritance. Although he seldom spoke
directly of the moment in which his religious life moved from the conven-
tional to the personal plain, his language was lyrical when he did. In his
1972 address to our alumni/ae, he attested to “the experience of a personal
encounter with Christ in my early teenage years.” As he explained:

I was passing through a period of spiritual yearning when something
happened. Suddenly Christ became a living reality in my life. I expe-
rienced the ecstatic as I roved the Scottish hills. I fell in love with the
Bible, which began to speak to me in a very personal and meaningful
manner. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians became my favorite book. In
the experience I had just passed through these words were reproduced:
“And you He made alive, when you were dead” (2:1). A new era began
in my life.6

This experience itself he considered neither unique nor normative. It was
to his mind simply an example of that personal encounter with and com-
mitment to Christ that is basic to authentic faith. “We become Christian in
the New Testament sense,” he believed, “only when we bow ourselves ador-

5 “Personal Religion,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 37 (December 1943), pp. 3k

6 “Let Us Remember,” p. 27.

>74

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

ingly in the totality of our selfhood, before the living reality of Jesus Christ
the Lord, into whose presence we are guided by Holy Scripture.”7 If such
an event be called “conversion,” then let it be so called. As he declared in a
sermon at the Baccalaureate Service of the Seminary’s 159th Commence-
ment:

The primary answer ... to the question, “What does it mean to be a
Christian?,” is to respond to Christ’s timeless invitation, “Come to
me.” To do this is to become a new being, to experience conversion,
spiritual change. Alas! Alas! In many church circles today the word
“conversion” sounds meaningless and is even obnoxious. But conver-
sion is native to Christian reality. Through commitment to Jesus Christ
people become real men and women, God’s men and women, mem-
bers of the new humanity called the Church in its full spiritual dimen-
sion.8

As with the apostle Paul, his own spiritual change entailed a call to the
ministry of the gospel. In a fuller account of his own transforming moment,
provided in his beautiful exposition of the Ephesian Letter, Dr. Mackay
wrote:

It was a Saturday, towards noon, in the month of July of 1903. The
“preparation” service of an old-time Scottish Communion season was
being held in the open air among the hills, in the Highland parish of
Rogart, in Sutherlandshire. A minister was preaching from a wooden
pulpit. ... I cannot recall anything that the minister said. But some-
thing, someone, said within me with overwhelming power that I, too,
must preach, that I must stand where that man stood. The thought
amazed me, for I had other plans.9

The sum and substance of his later proclamation as an ordained Presby-
terian minister is stated succinctly in the “Jerusalem Message” issued by the
1928 Christian Missionary Conference that betrays his influence: “Our mes-
sage is Jesus Christ.”

So it was that a lad of fourteen years experienced the divine reality that
would henceforth exercise an overmastering influence upon his life, and
conceived it to be the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture, whom he now knew

7 “Basic Christianity,” The Princeton Seminary Review 43 (Winter 1950), p. 7.

8 “The Great Adventure,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 64 (July 1971), p. 33.

9 John A. Mackay, God's Order (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1953), p. 7.

JOHN ALEXANDER MACKAY

l75

as a “personal presence in life” and would continue to know as his “road
companion” along the way of his journey.

Ill

The road led him, in obedience to his call, first to the University of Ab-
erdeen where he took an M.A. with first class honors in Philosophy (1912),
and then to Princeton Theological Seminary where, upon graduation (1915),
he was awarded the graduate study fellowship that funded his year in Spain,
which he would later describe as “the most decisive cultural experience of
my life.”

Returning to Scotland in 1916, he married Jane Logan Wells whom he
had met while both were students in Aberdeen. Ordained by the Free
Church of Scotland that same year, he and his bride were commissioned as
missionaries to Peru. In Lima the couple founded a school, known originally
as Colegio Anglo-Peruano and later Colegio San Andres , which the Peruvian
government in time would acknowledge as the leading private school in
their country. It was during this time that he earned his doctorate at the
National University (1918) with a thesis on the life and thought of Una-
muno. In 1925 he was named to the chair of philosophy in the same univer-
sity.

From 1926 to 1932 Dr. Mackay served as a lecturer and writer under the
South American Federation of YMCAs, an assignment which he himself
described as that of “an itinerant expounder of the Christian faith in Latin
American lands.” While first working out of Uruguay and then Mexico, he
published the initial three of the twelve books his pen would produce over
the course of his career. The third of these volumes, The Other Spanish Christ
(1932), remains a classic on the history of Spanish spirituality.

During this period, he later divulged, “something happened of a para-
doxical character” that further shaped his life and faith decisively. Many
who know of his passionate love of the church may be surprised to learn, as
I was, that it was not always so. Disillusioned by the growing sectarianism
of his own denomination and abhorred by the “tragic phenomenon of the
Hispanic Catholic Church” to which he was now exposed, he had developed
a mood of “antichurchism.” In his own words:

While Jesus Christ became increasingly real and meaningful to me, I

lost faith in the church, I mean the church as an organization, a struc-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

176

ture. I continued to attend church services, but I no longer belonged to

any denomination.10

A new era of his life began, however, with “a rediscovery of the church
as a Christian ultimate which called for understanding and loyalty.” Hence-
forth, “Christ and the church became inseparably related in my interpreta-
tion of the Christian task. . . .” The occasion of this crucial change of mind,
we may infer, was an intuitive insight into the paradoxical nature of the
church, an insight that informs the meaning of the famous aphorism which
he coined and introduced at the 1937 Oxford Conference on Life and Work,
“Let the Church be the Church.” As he later explained, “By that I meant:
Let the church be in its historical existence what it is in its eternal essence.”
“Speaking personally,” he added, “those words enshrined my basic yearn-
ing.”11

Here again his appreciation of the beyond was decisive, for it enabled him
to perceive the dialectical tension between the eternal essence of the church
and its historical existence , and to devote his life to the reduction of that
tension by calling the church to a faithful realization of its authentic identity
in obedience to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

To the question, “What is the Church?,” he would respond, “It is essen-
tially the ‘Community of Christ,’ ” “the fellowship of those for whom Jesus
Christ is Lord.” The terms community and fellowship are important clues to
his ecclesiology. For Dr. Mackay believed the church was a hpinonia before
it became an ecclesia. This distinction had implications for his understand-
ing of ecumenicity as well as the task of the Seminary, which we will come
to shortly. Here let it be noted that it also had implications for his conception
of personal religion. Given his view of the church, personal may not be read
as a synonym for individual. For personal religion leads those who have it
into the fellowship of the Christian church, in which there is “no place . . .
for an individualist as such.”12

Because the church confesses the Lordship of Christ, it lives “as Christ’s
servant and as the instrument of God’s glory, that is, when it makes manifest
to the world the full dimension of God’s being and purpose.”'3 Faithfulness
in this servanthood requires the church to live on the cultural, political, and
missionary frontiers of human history. Such were some of the implications

■° “Let Us Remember,” p. 28.

" “Let Us Remember,” p. 29.

12 “Personal Religion,” p. 10.

■3 “Let Us Remember,” p. 29.

JOHN ALEXANDER MACKAY 177

of his recovery of faith in the church, and the resultant call, “Let the Church
be the Church.”

IV

It was Robert E. Speer, then General Secretary of the Board of Foreign
Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., who prevailed upon Dr.
Mackay in 1932 to accept appointment as the Board’s Secretary for Latin
America and Africa. Already known for his leadership at the 1928 Jerusa-
lem meeting of the International Missionary Council, Dr. Mackay ’s new
position led him directly into the arena of the church’s world missionary
task at the time of the emerging ecumenical movement.

The emphasis he would bring to the movement was clear already in these
lines from a 1934 study paper he had been asked to prepare for the upcom-
ing Oxford Conference:

The supreme need is that the Christian Church be a fellowship. Let
the Church be the Church, let it be true to its inmost self, that is, to the
reality of fellowship. The early Christian Community was a ^oinonia ,
a fellowship, before it was an ecclesia , or assembly. . . . Let the idea of
fellowship be worked out to the fullest degree in the Christian com-
munity, locally, nationally, and internationally.14

At the 1937 Conference itself, Dr. Mackay chaired the section on the
Universal Church and the World of Nations, which included such notables
as William Temple, John Foster Dulles, and W. A. Visser’t Hooft. The
report issued by this group restored to currency the venerable term “ecu-
menical” as a designation of the perception that the mission of the church is
coextensive with the inhabited globe (the oihpumene) and the oneness of the
church is realized in the fulfillment of this mission. What gives the theolog-
ical term “ecumenical” semantic superiority in a Christian context to the
political word “international,” the report explains, is that the latter “neces-
sarily accepts the division of mankind into separate nations as a natural, if
not a final, state of affairs,” while the former “refers to the expression within
history of the given unity of the Church.” Put simply, “The one starts from
the fact of division and the other from the fact of unity in Christ.” This way
of perceiving reality gives credence to Dr. Mackay’s alleged assertion that
the term ecumenical is “not only linguistically legitimate but conceptually
inevitable.”

14 John A. Mackay, Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 6.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

178

One further statement in the report of the section at Oxford chaired by
Dr. Mackay is important for understanding the scope of his ecumenical vi-
sion. It reads:

This fact of the ecumenical character of the Church carries with it the
important consequence that the Church brings to the task of achieving
a better international order, an insight which is not derived from or-
dinary political sources. To those who are struggling to realize human
brotherhood in a world where disruptive nationalism and oppressive
imperialism make such brotherhood seem unreal, the Church offers
not an ideal, but a fact, man united not by his aspiration but by the
love of God. True ecumenicity, therefore, must be the goal of all our
efforts.'5

Although written long before present sensitivities to inclusive language,
the statement nonetheless expresses a vision of authentic ecumenicity that
directs the Church to cultural and geographical frontiers, as well as to evan-
gelistic and social responsibility. For John A. Mackay, this too was entailed
in personal religion.

If his commitment to the church prevents us from interpreting the word
personal in his formulation as a synonym for individual , so also his under-
standing of the truly ecumenical church precludes its being read as a code
word for private , in distinction from social. He saw too clearly that God’s
love for humanity in Jesus Christ is a love both for the whole person and
for the wholeness of life in its social and political settings.

No one in the Seminary during Dr. Mackay’s moderatorial year (1952-
53) will ever forget either the public hysteria of the so-called McCarthy Era
or the courageous “Letter to Presbyterians” penned by and published over
the signature of the Moderator of the General Assembly. Not only was this
historic text printed in full by major newspapers around the world, but
many now credit it with being the manifesto which turned the tide of public
opinion at the critical time in our national history. Personal religion for John
A. Mackay, true to his Reformed tradition, clearly included public respon-
sibility.

While he could not abide the sectarian spirit and rejected all claims “to a
proud absolutistic confessionalism,” he was and remained a Presbyterian.
Convinced that “the fullness of Christ is beyond Presbyterianism,” he also
recognized that the church in its historical existence is characterized by a rich

15 Ibid , p. 8.

JOHN ALEXANDER MACKAY

179

variety of theological and ecclesiastical traditions. Thus he could, on the one
hand, claim Theresa of Avila as his saint, enjoy the inspiration of “Faith
missionaries,” celebrate the Pentecostal movement in Chile, worship regu-
larly in a Methodist Episcopal church in Montevideo, and credit important
insights to Soren Kierkegaard, a Lutheran, and to Feodor Dostoevski, a son
of Russian Orthodoxy. “Yet,” he could say on the other hand, “notwith-
standing these experiences, my grateful spirit has not been de-Presbyterian-
ized. I believe with greater fervor, and I trust, for more intelligent reasons
than ever before in my life, that there are some unique elements in Presby-
terianism.”'6 Again a paradox, this time that of a great human spirit both
open and focused. Ultimate commitments, he believed, belong to ultimate
realities. But in our historical existence, he realized, ultimate commitments
are lived of necessity in and through penultimate realities.

V

The Oxford Conference occurred, of course, one year after Dr. Mackay
had accepted appointment to the office of President of the Seminary. Once
again it was Robert E. Speer, this time as the President of the Seminary’s
Board of Trustees, who had come knocking on Dr. Mackay’s door. Given
the condition of the institution in 1936, following “the time of the troubles”
which had led to the disruption of the faculty and the reorganization of the
Seminary by the 1928 General Assembly, it is not surprising that the Board
had to knock twice before Dr. Mackay agreed to succeed Dr. J. Ross Steven-
son in the presidency.

What the third President of the Seminary brought to the task of theolog-
ical education was primarily the vision of Christ and the church attested
above. His immediate task was to rebuild the faculty, making appointments
on the basis of two criteria: Christian commitment first; then academic com-
petence. This was in keeping, of course, with the historic Plan of the Semi-
nary which called for the uniting of “piety of the heart” with “solid learn-
ing,” and warned that “religion without learning, or learning without
religion, in the ministers of the gospel, must ultimately prove injurious to
the Church.”

Early in his tenure, Dr. Mackay spoke editorially of “The Role of Prince-
ton Seminary,” declaring:

The primary and most important function of a theological seminary is

to prepare heralds of the Gospel and shepherds of souls. This function

16 The Presbyterian Way of Life, p. xv.

i8o

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

is worthily discharged when the Seminary makes adequate provision
for the progress of its students in learning and piety. . . . Neither of
these can be a substitute for the other in a Christian minister.

This, however, was but one focus of his vision, as he went on to explain:

Some seminaries . . . , of which this Seminary is one, have a further
part to play in the religious life of their time. In addition to discharging
the task common to all seminaries, it is theirs to match in the sphere of
evangelical learning the studies offered by influential graduate colleges
in the several branches of secular culture. That Princeton Seminary
should discharge such a role is inherent in its nature and consonant
with its tradition.'7

Over the twenty-three years of his presidency, Dr. Mackay led the Semi-
nary to the realization of this vision, including the inauguration of the doc-
toral program in theological studies that continues to flourish.

But his “deepest concern and most crucial task” in his new office, as he
later acknowledged, “was to transform Princeton Seminary from being
merely a distinguished institution of theological education to becoming a
vital manifestation of Christian togetherness.” Dr. Mackay was convinced
that the community which belongs to the eternal essence of the Church and
requires realization in its historical existence is equally God’s gift and man-
date to the Seminary. The venerable eating clubs were symbolic to him of
the divisions in the Church, determining their memberships to a consider-
able extent along lines of theological outlook and social background. To
provide a place for common meals he effected the construction of the Cam-
pus Center (that now bears his name) which opened in the fall of 1952 and
continues to serve as the Seminary’s refectory.

Five years later, under Dr. Mackay’s leadership, the Seminary con-
structed and dedicated the Robert E. Speer Library. The collection, for-
merly housed in two outdated buildings, had at last a home worthy of its
reputation as the finest in the western hemisphere. Other campus improve-
ments included the purchase of the Hun School on Stockton Street, which
became the Seminary’s Tennent Campus.

New programs, in addition to the doctoral degree, included the founding
of the School of Christian Education in 1944, the inauguration of the Sum-
mer Institute of Theology in 1943, and the founding of the respected journal
Theology Today in 1944.

17 “The Role of Princeton Seminary,’- The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 31 (November 1937),
p. 1.

JOHN ALEXANDER MACKAY

Over the years of his presidency, Dr. Mackay published four books: A
Preface to Christian Theology (1943), Heritage and Destiny (1943), Christianity
on the Frontier (1950), and God’s Order : The Ephesian Letter and This Present
Time (1953)- Upon his retirement in June of 1959, he authored The Presby-
terian Way of Life (i960), Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal
(1964), His Life and Our Life (1964), and Christian Reality and Appearance
(1969). All this in addition to numerous pamphlets and articles. His pen
never ran dry.

Some have called him “the second founder of the Seminary,” and that
may well be the case. What is undisputable, however, is that whatever
Princeton Seminary is today, it is in large measure because of the indelible
influence of John A. Mackay.

VI

In this centennial year of his birth, the church needs to see anew the vision
and hear afresh the voice of John Alexander Mackay. For the old polarities
which he sought to transcend have returned with a vengeance under the
guise of new labels to afflict the church. The one Christian life of personal
devotion, moral responsibility, and theological reflection is once again frag-
mented by the myopic champions of each dimension who mistake the part
for the whole. Religion is viewed often in academia as a phenomenon to be
studied scientifically rather than a reality to be embraced personally. Many,
disillusioned with the church even as Dr. Mackay once was, leave its fellow-
ship because they are unable to discern and accept the paradox of its eternal
essence and historical existence. The ecumenical movement has been trans-
formed in large measure from the missionary expression of the church’s
given unity in Christ to an ecclesiastical quest for achieved church union.

The vision of John Alexander Mackay, however, remains valid. The re-
ality of Jesus Christ transcends our theological efforts to attest him. The
church has an eternal essence that ever impinges upon its historical existence
in the power of its Lord. The Christian life remains a personal response to
the divine presence that becomes “the fountainhead of emotion, the master
light of thought, the source of moral energy.” Frontiers with new names
abound for Christian exploration and involvement. The missionary man-
date to the servant church continues in force, even if it must be obeyed today
in new ways. It is the abiding greatness of Dr. Mackay that he left to us a
spiritual legacy that continues to challenge the church of today. A century
after his birth it remains our task to appropriate and express the reality of
Jesus Christ and his church, to which Dr. Mackay bore such eloquent and
powerful witness.

The Form of a Servant:
The Restoration of
a Lost Image

by John A. Mackay

This convocation address was given by
President John A. Mackay on September
24, 7957 and appeared in The Princeton
Seminary Bulletin, vol. LI, no. 3 ( Janu-
ary 1958), pp. 3-12. It is reprinted here
with minor editorial changes.

For a number of years now the Biblical image of the “servant” has fasci-
nated me. I have come increasingly to feel that it is the symbol which,
on the one hand, is most deeply significant in the Bible and Christianity,
and which, on the other hand, is most needed by the religion, the culture,
and the civilization of our time.

There are three things I want to say, three affirmations I wish to make,
about the servant image.

I

First, the servant image is the most significant symbol in the Bible and in the
Christian religion. It pervades the Old Testament. Moses, the lawgiver and
prophet of Israel, is called the “servant of God.” So, too, is David, Israel’s
greatest king. Israel itself, the people of God, is called the “servant of God.”
“You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” Through Israel
God would make his nature known; through the Hebrew people his pur-
pose would be achieved upon earth. Israel’s true destiny was to serve God
to be “a light to the nations,” that God’s salvation might be carried to the
ends of the earth.

So, too, in the New Testament. The One greater than Moses and Solo-
mon, David’s greatest son, Jesus Christ, who knew that he was one with the
Father, the only-begotten Son of God, gloried in making clear that he came
to be a servant. “I have glorified Thee on the earth,” he said. “I have finished
the work that Thou gavest me to do.” Picking up the ancient designation
of Israel as a “servant,” even as the “suffering servant,” he exclaimed, “The
Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a
ransom for many.” It was as a servant that Jesus unveiled the splendor of
God and served the purpose of God. It was as a servant, and to fulfill his
destiny as a servant, that he allowed himself to be captured and manhan-
dled. He was eventually crucified as the “suffering servant,” who rose again
from the dead to reap the reward of his faithfulness.

So, too, with St. Paul, Christianity’s greatest convert. The man from Tar-
sus interpreted the significance of Jesus Christ as that of one who “though
he was in the form of God did not think equality with God a thing to be

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183

grasped” (or to be graspingly retained), but who took “the form of a ser-
vant.” In the “form of a servant” he unveiled the splendor of Deity and
fulfilled the divine redemptive purpose for humanity. It might be said that
God was never so truly God as when he took the form of a servant and
became human. It was no wonder that being fascinated by that figure, and
in thrall to allegiance, Paul was proud to call himself “a servant of Jesus
Christ” who was “called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God”
(Rom. 1:1). He, too, the greatest Christian of all time, “took the form of a
servant.” The man who knew what it meant to be in an ecstatic rapture “in
the third heaven” labored with his own hands to support himself. On his
last voyage to Rome Paul was the one man who behaved like a hero during
the hurricane in the Adriatic. Yet when he and his ship-wrecked compan-
ions got ashore he did not try to cash in on the prestige he won aboard.
Rather he scurried off among the bushes to get sticks to make a roaring fire
for storm-battered, rain-sodden, weary men. Like his Master, he did not
regard honor or status as a “prize to be grasped.”

How can we best describe the servant image? There is, happily, in the
New Testament itself an episode which provides us with the pictorial set-
ting and the psychological inwardness necessary to understand what it
means truly to be a servant in form and in spirit. I refer of course to the
foot-washing in the Upper Room. The same night in which our Lord was
betrayed, he laid aside his garments after supper. Girding himself with a
towel, he poured water into a basin and washed his disciples’ feet. In this
scene we have both the divine pattern of the servant and the human possi-
bility of assuming the servant form.

To appraise the significance of any deed it is important to know the mood
in which it was done, the psychological state out of which it was born. What
was the state of mind which gave birth to the act, the menial act, of the foot-
washing? Says the writer of the Fourth Gospel, “Jesus, knowing that the
Father had given all things into his hands,” being intensely aware that all
power, cosmic power, was his, that he was the Lord of History, did not take
into his hand the symbol of a scepter to overawe his disciples or to engrave
upon their imagination a regal image. Instead he borrowed a towel with
which to perform a menial act. Again, “knowing that he had come from
God and was going to God,” aware that is of his essential nature, of his
kinship with God, of the source and goal of his life, Jesus broke out of the
divine cycle. He did not summon his disciples to an act of worship at his
feet; no, he moved from Deity towards humanity, to express what is in the
deepest heart of God, a loving concern for human welfare. Here is a perfect

184 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

transcript of what it means to be a “servant” in the Biblical sense. It denotes
a complete absence of external compulsion. It means voluntariness, sponta-
neity, a certain inner joy and even exultancy. Nobody obliges the true ser-
vant to assume a menial role. Knowing fully who we are and aware of our
high destiny as God’s elect children, we are moved to perform the lowliest
act, joyously, voluntarily, in the “form of a servant.”

But here we confront a problem. How can we who are by nature self-
centered and want to be like God, be made willing to take the form of a
servant, and fulfill the imperative which Christ left with his disciples,
namely, that if he, their Lord and Master, washed their feet, so they, too, in
lowliest mien and obedience, should wash the feet of their fellows. The
answer to this problem is found in the context in which the footwashing
scene occurred. The washing of feet was preceded by the “breaking of
bread.” We can be like Christ; we can take the “form of a servant” and obey
Christ’s commands only when He Himself is formed in us. We must live by
him if we would act like him and for him.

In the background and preceding the feetwashing is the Holy Supper, the
Eucharistic feast. Christ gave an imperative to his disciples because he had
already invited them to partake of the symbols of his broken body and his
shed blood. The only way in which a Christian imperative can be fulfilled,
the only way in which Christian ethics can take on concrete reality, is when
the Crucified and Living Christ enters into and becomes part of our human-
ity, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. In other words, in the back-
ground of the feetwashing and preceding it, stands the eucharistic meal.
This must always be the order. First the Real Presence, Christ becoming a
part of us, through faith, and we living upon him, participating in his being,
that we may express his spirit, and, like him, take the servant form. This is
of supreme importance. It lifts the whole question of ethical obedience out
of the realm of pure morality and puts it where it belongs. The possibility
of likeness to Christ derives from that communion with Christ, that reali-
zation of the Real Presence which is at the heart of the Lord’s Supper.

There have been notable cases in which the episode of the feetwashing
has made a transforming impact upon thought and life. Some of you have
heard me speak of that young Oxford tutor, H. A. Hodges, professor of
philosophy in the University of Reading, England, and one of the most orig-
inal minds in British thought today. Strolling along an Oxford street one
Saturday afternoon, Hodges, a thorough-going agnostic, saw in a bookstore
window a picture of the feetwashing. The scene gripped him. He himself
tells the story, “As I looked at that picture,” he says, “I knew that the Ab-

FORM OF A SERVANT

i85

solute was my footman.” The doubting philosopher passed through an ex-
perience of conversion. Memories of childhood, of home and Sunday School,
were set in a new perspective. There was born a flash of spiritual insight
and intuition. He said to himself: If Ultimate Reality, if the Absolute, is like
that stooping Figure, that God has my allegiance. Young Hodges became a
Christian. His whole world view was changed. He knew that in God’s
world the human absolute is the servant, that it is the meek who “shall
inherit the earth,” that there is no ultimate place for pure force, for the
tyrant or the dictator, but only for those who are willing to serve God and
humanity in the form of servants.

II

The second affirmation which I would make is this: The servant image
has been degraded in our time. There is a contemporary thinker who discusses
this question, the French Christian existentialist, Gabriel Marcel. In a re-
markable book entitled, Men against Humanity, Marcel stresses the point
that in our time the servant image has been degraded. “To think of a ser-
vant,” he says, “is to think of one who is obliged to do what he does because
of compulsion, who is merely passive, whose obedience is forced, who would
not do what he does if he could do anything else to avoid it.” That is to say,
in our contemporary culture and civilization, to be a servant tends to be
interpreted in terms of enforced obedience and pure passivity. Colonialism
and Communism have been responsible for this in large sectors of the world.
In vast regions of the globe today to be a servant is to be a person who lacks
freedom because of social or political subjection. A servant is one associated
with social servitude or with racial inferiority, so that nobody would be a
servant if he could be anything else. Elsewhere, industrialism, the child of
technology, has tended to depersonalize, to dehumanize people, and so to
take all pristine and inherent value from the concept of the servant. Men
and women become types and mere cogs in a wheel; they have value not in
themselves but because they are useful, because they fit into a system. The
supreme norm whereby ordinary human beings are judged is their utilitar-
ian value for an organization.

Strangely enough, however, a form of false equalitarianism, which distin-
guishes a certain type of democracy, has done the same thing to the servant
image. There is a kind of democracy in which this sentiment is common.
Why should I do this? I am your equal; I am as good as you. The suggestion
is that readiness to do a certain job is to admit inferiority. Might one not
even say that there is an extreme form of democracy, based upon an abstract

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1 86

sense of equality, which can be, and is becoming, positively satanic in its
implications. Recall that in John Milton’s interpretation of the psychology
of Satan, the Archangel fell because he could not endure the thought that
anyone should be better than he. He wanted to be equal to the Highest, and,
if possible, his superior.

aspiring

To set himself in glory above his peers,

He trusted to have equalled the Most High.

Even to feel gratitude was a sign of weakness. So, “Better to reign in Hell
than serve in Heaven.”

One thing is becoming clear. The typical servant in our time lacks a sense
of belonging, a great attachment, a something beyond equality, an inner
compulsion, a spiritual motivation, a joyous self-giving. But to be a servant
in a deeper, truer sense is to give oneself with enthusiasm and unreserved
abandon to something that is conceived as being bigger than oneself, in
which one can and should lose oneself. Our Lord in the footwashing gave a
native, symbolical expression to what he, the Son of God, accepted as his
role in taking the “form of a servant,” when he undertook to be God’s
redemptive instrument for human salvation. The obedience unto death of
the suffering Servant of the Lord was something voluntarily and joyously
accepted. What is needed in our time, if the servant image is to become
meaningful and potent, is a sense of reverence and commitment to some-
thing bigger than ourselves. Let this something be our brothers and sisters;
let it be a human need, a great idea, a worthy cause. Above all, let it be a
sense of God, and of one’s indebtedness to Him and one’s partnership in
His divine, redemptive purpose.

Ill

I come now to the third affirmation. One of the major tasf(s of our time is
to restore the servant image. This needs to be done both in secular society and
in the Christian Church.

The statesmen of today need to envisage the servant image. They need to
realize that the state or nation whose destinies they seek to control exists not
for its own sake but to serve God and man. The totalitarian state, of course,
assumes the role of Deity and takes on all the airs and attributes of the
Master. Because of that the world has witnessed the tragedy of Hungary; it
has witnessed, too, the tragedy of Spain, an equally sad country. Yet, in what
we call, mythically and unreally, the “free world," a responsible statesman

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187

has dared to affirm that a state or a nation, and this nation in particular,
must act from pure self-interest as its highest motivation. Could anything
be sadder or more tragic? Could anything be more perilous for our national
life and destiny than to affirm to the world that the good that is done by a
people naturally generous above all the peoples of the earth, is done ulti-
mately because it is in our national interest that it should be done. How can
anyone acquainted with history and human nature affirm that it matters
nothing whether or not this country has friends in the world, or whether
people love us or hate us, so long as they serve our purpose and contribute
to our security? It is time that we realized as the English historian, Butter-
field, puts it, that “civilization needs forgiveness.” “There is none righteous,
no not one.”

Yes, the time has come for the rulers of nations to forget their “cold war,”
to sit down together in penitence before God, each to listen to the other, and
to be brutally frank with one another. It is time for statesmen who claim to
represent the Christian tradition in politics to do their thinking in terms of
the light and majesty of him who took the form of a servant. Repentance,
too, is needed, as we contemplate our national sins and short-comings, the
betrayal of Republican Spain, for example, and our alliance with contem-
porary tyrants and slave dealers because they serve our interests. This does
not mean that we should be unaware of the necessity of self-defense, or of
national security. It does mean, however, that we should realize that we
belong to a society of sinners in need of forgiveness. It means that we should
become vividly aware of the great inexorable principles of God’s govern-
ment of human affairs. It means a concern for truth and righteousness and
a desire to understand why certain nations and people think and act as they
do. When we come to understand them we can perchance forgive them.
God, moreover, can operate in human hearts. The outlook of men and
nations changes. Many a political theory breaks down when it confronts the
stark reality of human nature. Men and women were made for freedom and
they will affirm it. Profound changes are taking place even within Com-
munist countries. Let us contribute to social change by increasing human
contacts and by an exchange of commodities rather than by a mere increase
of armaments. Let us beware of sanctifying hate under the guise of disliking
a system. Let us, in a word, be willing to be the “servant” of another people’s
best interests and cease equating our own interests and actions with the will
of God and his righteousness.

So, too, the leaders of culture need to recover the servant image. Too long
have they lived with the image of the “master,” the image of one who mas-

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1 88

ters facts, who acquires knowledge, who becomes encyclopedic, who wins
the $64,000 prize, and who, nevertheless, may be a plain jackass in matters
involving ordinary human wisdom. Not knowledge but wisdom is human-
ity’s supreme need and glory, a capacity for right relations between each
person and God and between ourselves and others. “The beginning of wis-
dom,” let it never be forgotten, is the “fear of the Lord.” Wisdom comes,
truth is envisaged, when men and women take up a true servant’s attitude
of reverent, joyous devotion to the Great Master.

It is time, moreover, that some thinkers go beyond the idea that to be
cultured is to be a mere master of dialectic, to be aware of the dialectical
movement in thought and in history, so that a person comes to the point of
never being able to become a servant of any single idea or attitude. In that
case, the only absolute becomes the absolute of compromise, which is sanc-
tified by a plea for forgiveness. When that happens, when it becomes the
mark of a cultured person to refrain from making a forthright decision that
is followed by dynamic action, then creative endeavor will be carried out by
people whom we may despise and who live on the fringes of our traditional
and classical culture.

How common it is in our university system to consider that the training
of minds, the production of a critical intelligence, is the ultimate ideal of a
liberal education! God forbid that our minds should not be trained, that our
intelligence should not be critical, or that we should not have the gift of
forming right judgments. But how true it is that many people who call
themselves cultured are mere patrons of truth. They see in life so many
ambiguities and ambivalences, they are so overwhelmed by a dialectical
view of things, that they do not commit themselves to any single idea or
cause. The oncoming generation of educated youth are becoming aware of
this. In the course of the last year a Student Council Committee of Harvard
University issued a very significant document ( Religion at Harvard). It lays
stress upon the need of commitment in any person wrho would claim to be
educated. Here are some of the emphases in the document in question:
“Commitment is an active, personal affirmation of ultimate worth. . . .
Commitment is important to each person’s full development. . . . The idea
of commitment has a central place in the theory of the liberal university. . . .
An unclear understanding of ultimate ends is frequently the cause of the
misuse of means; this is as true in private as in public life. . . . The greatest
figures of history have been strongly committed and yet have retained wide
vision and broad sympathies.” What is here involved is not necessarily reli-
gious but some ultimate value to which one gives allegiance. The truth is that

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189

if a people are to be truly educated and alive they must sooner or later find
their value, their idea, their cause, and commit themselves to it. That is to
say, they must become “servants” of something to which they can give them-
selves with adventurous abandon.

At an early stage in my own youth this truth was burned into me by that
great Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, to whom I personally owe
more than to any secular writer. When face to face with Spanish intellec-
tuals who gloried in butterflying over the realms of truth, without commit-
ting themselves to any truth in particular, he used to say, “Get a great idea,
marry it, found a home with it, and raise a family.” Just what was Unamuno
saying? He was saying this: Become the servant of an idea, or a cause that
is big enough and true enough, and let yourself go in devotion to it, taking
all the consequent risks.

But today people are in a mood of conformism; everyone is engaged in
the great quest for security. Students are literally afraid, as we say vulgarly,
to “stick their necks out.” . . . This is one of the hallmarks of student life in
our time. There are reasons for this, of course. Our generation is suffering
from the disillusionment that has followed two world wars. People ask, “Is
it worthwhile getting excited about anything?” There is a tendency to re-
gard with suspicion, or as an inferior sort of being, the person who has
strong convictions, or who links his destiny to an idea or cause which means
everything to him. And, yet, we should remind ourselves that it is not nat-
ural for true men and women to be mere conformists in some comfortable
status quo; it is not natural to live for the mere sake of being secure. The
uncommitted life is as unworthy of human beings as the unexamined life.
Life begins for human beings when they commit themselves to the worthy
Master, when they joyously take the form of a servant.

IV

All this is still more true and relevant in the community of Christians.
Churchmen need to recover the servant image. They need to recover it for
example in their thinking about the Church as an institution. We face no
greater peril in the Christianity of our time than the peril of the Christian
Church regarding itself as an end in itself, whether as a world body, as a
national denomination, or as a local congregation. The Church as “The
Israel of God,” exists as did its prototype, God’s ancient people, to be the
“servant of God.” The standard by which the Christian Church, wherever
located or whatever its name, must be judged is by the measure in which it

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has taken the “form of a servant” and shows itself, by every evidence, to be
in very truth, “the servant of Jesus Christ.”

The purity of the Church and the unity of the Church are not enough if
purity and unity come to be regarded as ends in themselves. It is not Chris-
tian to lay claim to absolute purity, whether of belief, worship or church
organization. Some glory in their theological purity, that is, in their ortho-
doxy. They glory in having the right ideas; they defy anyone to prove that
they are tainted with false doctrine.

Now orthodoxy, that is, right or sound doctrine, is important. Yet we can
have the truth in a purely intellectual sense without the truth having us.
And Christian truth, let it never be forgotten, is personal truth; it centers in
a Person and it must possess the lives of persons who in the fullest sense
become servants of the Truth. Christian truth must not only be believed, it
must be obeyed. Human beings must do the truth. “Dead orthodoxy,” as
Archibald Alexander, the founder of this Seminary called it, can deny the
faith, and even betray it. Here is the paradox. Loyalty to ideas about Christ
can become a subtle substitute for loyalty to Christ Himself. Ideas can be-
come idols. The heresy of orthodoxy, that is, the heresy to which orthodoxy
is everlastingly subject, can be the most soul-destroying, mind-shattering of
all heresies.

Others say, “Ours is the true ministry. We can trace our descent to the
apostles.” So what? Can apostolic succession save you and give you good
and regular standing in the Church of God? Who are you? Do you serve?
Do you truly minister? Do you measure up to him who took the “form of
a servant”? Do you do the work of Christ? Do you manifest the spirit of
Christ? The proof of a true ministry is that it serves Jesus Christ the Truth.

Still others say, “Our Church is the true Church; it was founded by Christ
himself and its structure was revealed by the Holy Spirit.” The answer is,
structure of any kind is not the essence of the Christian Church. Structure,
too, must be a “servant” and must be judged by the degree in which it shows
itself to be a servant of the redemptive will of God in Christ. In the ecu-
menical movement of today it is only on the road of Christian obedience
that the Holy Spirit will reveal the structure which is most consonant with,
and can best express, the truth and unity of the Church of Christ.

But even the unity of the Church cannot be an end in itself. The question
must be asked, “Unity for what?” At the risk of becoming an idol the
Church’s unity cannot be for its own sake. The possibility that this should
happen is one of the perils of the ecumenical movement to which I am so
deeply committed. The ideal of Christian unity can never be tensionless

FORM OF A SERVANT

191

harmony. The unity of the Church must be for the sake of the mission of
the Church. The unity of the Body of Christ is fulfilled when all the mem-
bers, functioning harmoniously together, serve the mandates of the Head
and the impulses of the Heart. The unity of the true Church must be that
of a world missionary community , that is, a community which is both mis-
sionary and world-wide.

It is possible to conceive a form of Church organization world-wide in its
scope. Church structure may be created which would fulfill all the proprie-
ties and prerequisites of true Christian relationship. It would have an equal
place for people of all races. It would transcend nationality. It would grant
equal status to missionaries and “fraternal workers” among the native-born
sons and daughters of the Church. Ecclesiastical autonomy would be effec-
tive and Christian harmony would prevail. But autonomy and harmony for
what? A Church can never be in very truth the Church unless it shows itself
to be the servant of Christ, unless it takes seriously the missionary task of the
Church. A true Church of Christ must be loyal to the last mandate which
Christ gave his followers to make disciples of all nations. The Church’s
unity must be above all a unity in mission. It must carry the whole Body to
the frontiers, not merely to the geographical frontiers, but also to the un-
numbered frontiers which begin in the home and extend to the backwoods
and the high places of Government.

Christians as individuals must recover the servant image for themselves.
When are we truly human? When we fulfill our human vocation. In a doc-
ument of the reformed tradition to which this Seminary belongs there is a
famous question which runs, “What is the chief end of man?” What do
men and women exist for? When do they fulfill their destiny? The answer
is, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” We are
truly human when we become God’s medium, God’s servant. Through such
persons God manifests the splendor of his character and carries forward his
purpose, in holy fellowship with those who become his human instruments.
Such men and women become like their Master, who said, “I have glorified
Thee on the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.”
This is what human beings are for, to unveil the splendor of their Maker
and Redeemer, in their thinking, in their behavior, and in their daily toil. It
is on the road to obedience, in the “form of a servant” that a Christian comes
to know in his deepest heart the meaning of God’s presence, and to experi-
ence “fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” Christ-
likeness means letting oneself go in obedience to the Crucified and Risen

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192

One, making some facet of the divine nature visible to others, fulfilling
God’s redemptive will to the last frontier and till the sun of life goes down.

In the historic Plan of this Seminary there occur two great words, “learn-
ing” and “piety.” These two dare never be separated. “Learning,” the pur-
suit of knowledge, the exercise of thought, the cultivation of intellectual
judgment is supremely important; but it can never stand alone or be an end
in itself. It must always be related to true piety of heart. Piety means a sense
of the presence of God, an experience of communion with God, a dedication
to the service of God. . . .

He who himself took the “form of a servant” asks that we whom God
has called into the “fellowship of His son,” may also bear the servant like-
ness, in spirit, word and deed, on this campus and beyond.

The Last Temptation of
the Church

by Fred B. Craddock

Professor Fred B. Craddock^ holds the
Bandy Distinguished Chair in Preaching
and New Testament in the Candler School
of Theology, Emory University. An or-
dained minister of The Christian Church
( Disciples of Christ), Dr. Craddoc\ has
served pastorates in Tennessee and Okla-
homa, and is the author of many boo/{s, in-
cluding Overhearing the Gospel (1978),
Preaching (1985), the volume on Philip-
pians in the Interpretation commentary se-
ries (1985), and the “Commentary on the
Gospel of Lul^e” in the Harper’s Bible
Commentary (1988).

Commencement Address, 1989

President Gillespie, trustees, faculty, staff, families, friends, and espe-
cially the graduates of 1989, I congratulate you. I thank you for the in-
vitation to share with you on this occasion. I understand you had something
to do with my invitation. If you didn’t, you ought to be ashamed of your-
selves!

I am honored to stand with you for a few moments on this pleasant sum-
mit. This is a rare occasion. I know some people get a little jaded about
commencements, the repetition year after year. But it is a rare moment. It
is a time when the church and the academy, sometimes at odds, are unusu-
ally close to each other. It is a time when the enthusiasm with which you
came and the knowledge which you have acquired, join in happy union. It
is a time when that which you must do and that which you want to do, do
not stand at any distance from each other. Now and then, the service of
Christ fits our natural inclinations, and we are able to please both Christ
and ourselves. And this moment is very much like that.

I want to say something about a pressing temptation facing the church.
But I will do so by speaking to you about Jesus of Nazareth. I feel justified
in this approach for two reasons. The gospel narratives that tell us about
him tell us about ourselves. For it was the church that wrote, preserved,
collected, and respects as normative the story of Jesus. The church’s finger-
prints are all over those gospel narratives. I speak of him; I speak about us.

Secondly, I feel justified by the fact of the incarnation, for if he became
as we are, to speak of him is to speak of ourselves. Jesus, too, was tempted.
The Hebrew writer says he was tempted in every way as we are tempted.
But the temptations of Jesus seemed to have been especially strong, clustered
about the subject of his death. How early in his life Jesus thought of his

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death we do not know. We have no access to that information. The gospel
writers place the thought of his death quite early, as you know. But that
doesn’t mean that he thought of it that early. It is the tendency of the gospel
writers and the church after them to put the shadow of the cross even over
the crib. And I notice in some parts of the country it is customary to put a
lighted cross on top of the Christmas tree.

There was an attempt upon his life when he was still an infant by the
very disturbed Herod the Great. And though that attempt was foiled, the
reader knows somebody will try again (Matthew, chapter two). “Why don’t
your disciples fast?” “Oh, you don’t fast at a party. But the time will come
when the bridegroom is taken away from them. And in that day they will
fast” (Mark, chapter two). “And old Simeon took the baby, six weeks old,
held him in his arms and said to Mary his mother, ‘Because of this child, a
sword will pierce your heart’ ” (Luke, chapter two). “Destroy this temple,
and I’ll build it again in three days.” He spoke of the temple of his body
(John, chapter two).

Quite early in the Gospels, but how early in his life? We cannot know. If
it was in his youth, I would not be surprised. Young people think about
death. You go into any church and sit down in an informal discussion with
the young people and once they trust you, once they know you will take
seriously their questions, even high school young people will ask you about
death. There is not a one of them that did not have a friend commit suicide,
or have them killed in a car wreck. They want to know about death. How
soon did Jesus think about death?

When I began my teaching in the early sixties — my seminary teaching —
it was quite common then to talk about Jesus’ attempt at suicide. Have you
run across that? This was from the middle sixties. This was an interpreta-
tion given, an old interpretation resurrected from the early eighteen hun-
dreds, that the temptation to leap from the pinnacle of the temple, was a
temptation to commit suicide. “Why don’t you get up on the pinnacle of the
temple and jump? Move to the center of political power and religious
power. Move to the center of where everything is oppressive for the com-
mon people and there make a statement, by taking your own life in the
presence of all the people and let your body crash in front of that sacred
place as a statement.” This is what my students said. “And if God wishes it
otherwise, God will send angels to take care of you and you will waft to the
ground, like a feather from an eagle’s wing. Do it, Jesus.” And I remember
those days as a young professor, going to various informal gatherings and
sitting on the floor and reading poems about death and the death wish that

LAST TEMPTATION

i95

pervaded just about everything that was done and thought, a self-destruc-
tive streak in all of the thinking at that time. It disturbs me now, as a kind
of sickness. But I recall, we sat on the floor and we read Sylvia Plath, the
suicide poet. You remember her: “Dying is an art,” she said, “I do it excep-
tionally well. I guess you could say I have a gift.”

But when you say, “I give my life to God,” have you not raised the subject
of death? How soon did Jesus begin to think about it? We don’t really
know. There is no evidence that he had a death wish, that he went in search
of a cross. We don’t have here some melancholy Lincoln, some brooding
Hamlet, always looking for the sepulchre. We don’t have here Bishop Ig-
natius who, upon his arrest wrote to all the churches between his home and
Rome saying, “Don’t pray for me, now is my chance to die with Jesus.”
None of that. In fact, the gospel records give every indication that he tried
to avoid death. Even John, whose Jesus is almost untouchable, says, “And
he withdrew, for his hour had not yet come.” Luke says that he was com-
fortable in the day in the city because he was surrounded by a welcoming
crowd. But at night he went out to the Mount of Olives. He tried to hold
on to his life, didn’t he? But the time came when he accepted what lay
before him.

When Carl Sandberg was still Charles Sandberg, before he changed his
name to Carl, he wrote a little poem — little known — and I don’t know if
he addressed it to himself or addressed it to Jesus:

Take up your cross and walk the thorn way

And if a sponge of vinegar be passed you on a spear,

Take that too. Souls are made of endurance.

God knows.

However he came to it — sooner, later — the thought of giving his life in an
effective way impressed itself upon Jesus, but he found it very difficult to
talk about with his friends. Matthew and Mark say he withdrew with them
to the north country away from the crowds, and it was in the region of
Caesarea Philippi that he first brought up the subject. Luke says they with-
drew and Jesus was in prayer, when he mentioned it. And the reaction he
got from them was not one of silence, as is customary with us when the
subject of death is brought up. It’s hard to bring up the subject of making a
will; what a silence falls over the house: “Oh no, no, no, don’t talk of that.”
When he mentioned death he did not meet silence among his friends, he
met a storming protest: “No! This will never happen to you! You are not
going to die! We will survive! There is a way to survive, you will survive!”

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They were screaming there — Jesus screaming at Simon Peter and Simon
Peter screaming at Jesus. They screamed as though they were trying to cast
out demons. Of course Peter screamed. You don’t accept the fact of death
like that. What good is a dead Jesus? Life is the thing, the tenacity of life.
It’s hard to die. Babies just months old have open heart surgery and live.

Life is a tenacious thing. I remember when first I learned that. I was a
boy, maybe ten years old, chopping cotton. I don’t know if that means a lot
to some of you. You have a hoe, and it’s hot, and you’re in a field cutting
weeds out of the cotton. I came upon a snake. I didn’t take time to figure
out what kind of snake it was, because a snake comes in several categories,
all of which are called snake. I killed the snake — or at least I thought I killed
the snake, but I had not. Chop, chop, chop. Finally I went to my father and
I said, “I killed a snake, but it won’t die.” And he said, “You’ll have to take
the snake and hang it on the fence, and it will die at sundown.” I didn’t
know snakes didn’t die ’til sundown. I took the snake and hanged it on a
fence, and the rest of the day I looked toward the fence and the tail of the
snake continued to move, haunting me with life.

And when Jesus said, “I’m going, I will be killed,” no wonder Simon
Peter screamed in his face and said “No! We can survive.” And in that bitter
exchange, not bitter so much as loud and violent exchange, finally Jesus said,
“Hush, no more of this. You represent to me a tempter. Get behind me. The
voice that insists upon survival! survival! survival! No! In fact you’re wrong
about me, Simon Peter, in fact you’re wrong about yourself, because the
church that follows me must also take up the cross.” “Oh, no. You mean
the church might die?” “Yes.” With one hand he took his own cross, with
the other he handed a cross to the church, and the church has said with
Simon Peter ever since: “No, no, we can survive! We know ways to survive.
We can survive. I know attendence is dropping, I know the budget’s going
down. I know the public press is making fun of the church. I know they
talk about mainstream Christianity being on the way out. I know that, but
we can survive.”

You can write to Colorado Springs and get these survival kits. And there
are some tapes by motivators, and there’s the possibility thinking and all
that. We can make it. We can cut back on the budget a little bit. We may
have to take some of the money out of outreach and put it in a savings
account, in case we get a little low. I know we ll have to cut back on staff,
we ll have to reduce our program. But we can survive. We can survive. We
can do like some of the churches and have some special events. I notice a
big booming church in Florida. Every once in a while they’ll have a beauty

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queen come in and say a little word for Jesus. “A Miss Ochra from South
Texas will now say a little witness for us.” They have basketball players,
seven foot eight, come and say a word of witness, and the crowds are great.
And there was a church in Atlanta — they tell me the place was full — that
had a midget who was a professional yo-yoer who did all these marvelous
things with a yo-yo and quoted scripture for an hour all during the act. And
they say the place was packed. Now listen, we can survive! There are ways
to survive!

I know, I know as well as you do, that there is a lot of death around the
church, a lot of deadliness about the church. You experience it, I experience
it. I recall reading about Charles Dickens once attending a gathering of
clerics. And he said the meeting was so dead, so boring, so dull, that after a
couple of hours he said, “May I make a suggestion? Let’s move over to a
table and join hands and sit in silence and see if we can commune with the
living.” We all know that feeling.

But I am not here to read the coroner’s report about the church, to hang
crepe on the door of half-filled sanctuaries. I have not myself heard the flap
of the condor’s wing over the church. In fact, the whole idea of the church
taking a cross and possibly dying, is not a welcome one for me. I have a
tendency to think of the church as immortal! immortal! immortal! It is hard
to say, “The church is dead.” Just as it was hard for them to say, “Jesus is
dead.” The church has never been able to pronounce that. “Jesus is dead!”
Even on that awful Saturday, the church could not say, “Jesus is dead.”
They thought up stories: “You know the one they really crucified was the
one carrying the cross, Simon of Cyrene, that’s the one that was crucified.”
“Do you know that sponge they passed to him on the cross? It was a plan.
It had a drug in it. He would pass out. His bodily functions would recede
almost to imperceptible depth, and they would take him down and revive
him. He didn’t die! He didn’t die! No, Jesus! Survival is the word.” I feel
the same way about the church. But I know this. There is something faulty
in the thinking that says the death of Jesus is the life of the world, and the
death of the church is the end of the world. No.

When you move to lead the churches across this land and around the
world, pressure will be put on you as though the number one item on the
agenda is survival at any cost. Survival! survival! survival! And I hope in
that pressure for success and booming anything — let’s get them here
again! — I do hope you will hear his voice. “Get behind me tempter. Take
up your cross. You must give your life.” What does that mean, give your
life? I don’t know. I think it means to be willing to empty your pockets for

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somebody else’s children. I think it means to treat as mother and father
those who are not really your mother and father. I think it means to claim
as brother and sister people to whom you are not kin. I think it means to
reach out and touch untouchable people as far as our society is concerned. I
think it means to sit at table with people who live far outside the tight social
circle ot some of your friends. Break bread together. It means to be a voice
for moral values in a culture that will immediately accuse you of sinking
into a bunch of moralistic thinking. It means to witness for Jesus Christ
when evangelism is being laughed at everywhere. It means being an advo-
cate, being an advocate to speak the gospel as though something were at
stake. Not stand up and just describe how it is on one hand and how it is
on the other, as though we were serving afternoon tea to the pros and cons
of every issue. To advocate! It means to continue to give money to others
even when the paint is peeling in the sanctuary. I think it means that. And
if you go that way, there will be leaders in your own church who will say,
“Look, this is suicide. We’re losing. This is suicide.’’ And you’ll have to
decide whether it is suicide, or giving your life. Who can say?

That little poem of Charles Sandberg — Carl Sandberg — I don't think he
addressed it to Christ or to himself, I think he addressed it to the church.

Take up your cross, and go the thorn way

And if a sponge of vinegar be passed you on a spear.

Take that too. Souls are made of endurance.

God knows.

May God bless you.

Thinking about Everything, All the Time

by Thomas W. Gillespie

Farewell Remarks to the Class of 1989
by the President of the Seminary

In his latest book, Thinking the Faith , Douglas John Hall gives us this
vignette which suggests the scope of our theological task.

“Once, when I was making a long journey by air,” he writes, “I was asked
by a fellow passenger to describe my work as a theologian. Since it was a
lengthy flight, and since my companion seemed willing to listen, I took my
time and attempted to answer his question in a responsible way. At the end
of my discourse, he looked at me very earnestly and, without a trace of irony
in his voice, said: ‘It must be wonderful to think about everything, all the
time!’ ”

Professor Hall continues: “I took this rejoinder as a compliment — not to
myself, but to the discipline; for it was followed by a sort of confession, in
which my traveling companion confided to me that he, too, had once wished
to think ‘about everything all the time’; he had even, he said, ‘prayed.’ But
now, as an executive for a large multinational firm, his life had become so
centered in his work that he no longer could afford to be drawn into such
flights of contemplation. It was, he said, a great pity.”

You who graduate today from Princeton Theological Seminary, who go
forth now to enter the practice of ministry or to pursue further your studies
before taking up this practice, are privileged to center your vocational lives
in this theological task of “thinking about everything, all the time.”

Perhaps you are too weary just now from your years of study at the Sem-
inary to appreciate this task as a privilege. Many of you, I realize, are verily
“chomping at the bit” in your desire to be rid of academics in an ivory tower
and get on with the work of ministry in “the real world.” You are convinced
that you now “have” your theology, and all that remains to be done is put it
into practice.

Quite possibly I am guilty of projecting on you the thoughts and feelings
I had thirty-five years ago when I sat with the Class of ’54 where you sit this
morning. It is even conceivable that such thoughts and feelings are indige-
nous to all graduating classes from theological schools.

Please understand that I am in no way attempting to pour cold water on
the fires of your passion. The church needs passionate leaders, women and
men who care deeply about the gospel of Jesus Christ in relation to the needs

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of the world. Even more it needs ministers whose passion is informed by an
ever growing understanding of how the gospel mediates “the power of God
unto salvation” to human life in its personal and social dimensions.

Your experience in ministry may prove to be different from mine, but I
will tell you one thing I learned from twenty-nine years of serving congre-
gations as a pastor. The practice of ministry taught me not only that I did
not have all the answers on the day of my graduation, but that I had not
even heard most of the questions. It was that rude lesson that enabled me in
time to appreciate what a privilege it actually is to be vocationally centered
in a task that both allows and requires us to “think about everything, all the
time.” It also compelled me to acknowledge that this is a task too big and
too heavy for human ability and strength alone.

Douglas John Hall’s traveling companion on that flight confessed that he,
too, had once desired to think “about everything, all the time,” that at one
time he had even “prayed.” My guess is that he spoke for many, for his
name is “Legion." But before you judge him too harshly for being centered
on his responsibilities to a multinational corporation, be aware that the same
temptation is awaiting you in the practice of ministry.

Churches today have incredible expectations of their ministers and you
will be compelled to meet those expectations as best you know how. Your
time and your energies will be devoted out of apparent necessity to an end-
less round of duties that range from the sublime to the ridiculous. You will
find it difficult to think about anything any of the time. Even prayer, unless
highly disciplined, will be neglected. But without serious reflection upon the
sources of Christian theology, without constancy in prayer to the One who
is the Source of Christian faith, you will soon find yourself running “a mile
wide and an inch deep.”

If that happens, you will no longer be either a faithful or an effective
minister of Jesus Christ. Not that faithfulness and effectiveness in ministry
depends upon our knowing it all. No one ever has or will. Life as it unfolds
before you will ever confront you with new questions that merit serious
consideration. Faithfulness and effectiveness depend upon a willingness to
keep on “thinking about everything, all the time” in the light of the gospel,
even to keep on praying.

Douglas John Hall claims that both theology and prayer are forms of
struggle. He cites Anselm’s well-known dictum about “faith seeking under-
standing,” and argues that the participle “seeking” involves a life-and-death
struggle with God for understanding. That rings true to my experience in
both faith and ministry. Thinking and praying “about everything all the

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time” is not an easy task or a light burden. But it is a task worth undertaking
and a burden worth bearing for the sake of the gospel and the redemption
of the world.

Moreover, it is a privilege. There was a time, at least in the history of
Protestant Christianity, when the church understood that its ministers were
not a special but a privileged people. They were privileged by being relieved
of the need to center their vocational lives elsewhere than in the ministry to
the church. They were expected to use this vocational leisure to “think about
everything, all the time,” even to pray. That, I say to you on this your grad-
uation day, remains the theological task of Christian ministry.

To this impossible task, which is possible by God’s grace alone, we who
are your colleagues in it commit you. Go forth now into the practice of
ministry, remembering that it requires you to “think about everything, all
the time” — and to pray.

Mission as Kenosis:
Implications for our
Times

by Alan Neely

A graduate of Baylor University, South-
western Baptist Theological Seminary, and
The American University in Washington,
D.C., Dr. Alan Neely is the new Henry
Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and
Mission at Princeton Seminary. He has
served as pastor of churches in Virginia and
Colorado and has taught at the Interna-
tional Baptist Theological Seminary in
Cali, Colombia ( 1964-1975) and at South-
eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Wake Forest, North Carolina (1976-
1988). He is President of the American So-
ciety of Missiology, editor of Faith and
Mission, and author and translator of nu-
merous writings on the history and theol-
ogy of Christian missions. His inaugural
lecture was given in Miller Chapel on
April 4, 1989.

Inaugural Address

One can never be certain about the authenticity of stories that originate
in Texas, but I am satisfied that the accounts describing one of the early
Christian missions there do have a historical basis. It is said that in the spring
of 1757, five missionary priests and a large contingent of Spanish infantry
left San Antonio, traveling due North toward the hill country, their specific
destination being a fertile and inviting spot along the San Saba River. The
objective of the expedition was threefold: to extend and secure Spanish he-
gemony in an area as yet uncolonized, to bring the light of the Christian
gospel to any indigenous peoples they encountered, and most importantly,
to locate and bring back the treasure that was reputed to be hidden in the
hills of the Balcones Escarpment.

These eighteenth-century conquistador es were aware of the fact that the
Indians, particularly the fierce Apaches (and as it turned out, others as well),
would likely regard with disfavor any foreign encroachment into their ter-
ritory. Thus the Spanish plan was quite simple. They would attempt to
mollify and convert the Indians, baptize them, despoil them of whatever
gold and silver they possessed, and then kill them.

The expedition arrived in the area of present-day San Saba, Texas, in late
April, but without seeing any Indians or encountering any resistance. They
chose a desirable location close to the river, went to work erecting a fort and
a mission chapel, and then proceeded to wait somewhat impatiently for the
Indians to come and lead them to the fabled treasure. The anticipated arri-

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203

val of Indians, however, was delayed for reasons not altogether clear. Days
passed into weeks, and weeks into months. The waiting became intermi-
nable, or so it seemed to the Spaniards. Fortunately, one of the soldiers and
at least one of the missionaries utilized the time to record their experiences
and impressions in journals, some of which survived and today are main-
tained in the Texas University Library in Austin.

The leader of the expedition, Colonel Diego Ortiz de Parilla, became
particularly impatient and confessed his frustration in his journal: “The
country is good, but where are the Indians, and where is the treasure?” No
less disappointed was the missionary priest, Padre Molina, who clearly was
enchanted with the beauty of the place but nonetheless perplexed by the
failed appearance of potential converts. “The country fills my spirit with its
simple beauty,” Molina wrote, “but where are the Indians?”

It seems the answer to this repeated question, “Where are the Indians,”
came rather abruptly and infelicitously the following March, when two
thousand unannounced, truculent Comanches suddenly arrived, painted
and girded for battle. As you can imagine, they were in no mood to hear
the gospel or to dialogue about supposed treasure. Quite the contrary, they
quickly surrounded the surprised and ill-prepared Spaniards, made short
work of the fort and the mission chapel, burning them both to the ground,
and concluded their operation by depriving nearly all of the Spaniards of
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Since that time, San Saba has not
become what one might call a thriving metropolis, one reason being that the
unfriendliness of those Comanches in 1758 tended to retard urban devel-
opment in that area.1

I. Mission as Conquest and Cultural Imposition

This all but forgotten incident in American church history is significant
for a number of reasons, not the least of which is, it reveals a philosophy of

1 I am indebted to Robert Fulghum for recounting this story in his recently published All
I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (New York: Villard Books, 1986), pp. 24-
25. The reader who is inclined to see in this account tinges of the “black legend” or who is
dubious about the rapacious behavior of the European conquerors may see Enrique Dussel,
A History of the Church in Latin America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), pp. 41-55; John
A. Mackay, The Other Spanish Christ (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 23-41, especially pp.
31-33; and Harold E. Davis, History of Latin America (Ronald Press, 1968), pp. 94-100.

The bibliography compiled by Davis is extensive (pp. 731-733). He says, “Basically, our
knowledge of pre-Conquest civilizations has three sources: accounts left by missionaries,
explorers, and conquerors; written records set down by natives under the guidance of such
missionaries as the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun; and the reports of archaeological
research” (p. 732).

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

the Christian mission neither unique nor infrequent. Those acquainted with
mission history are aware that missionaries often have journeyed to other
lands with objectives beyond those of “preaching the gospel” or “planting
the church.” Moreover, on occasions they have been preceded or accompa-
nied by western gun-boats, soldiers, marines, or legionnaires. In certain in-
stances missionaries have intentionally prepared the way for commercial
enterprise, assuming that economic development by western entrepreneurs
would prove to be beneficial for everyone. It has not. In a word, Christian
missions have been compromised more than once by governments and busi-
nesses whose purposes were other than spiritual or humanitarian.2

The story is not, however, as unambiguous as some chroniclers have
sought to portray it. William R. Hutchison, for example, in his recently
published study ol the role of foreign missions in American Protestant his-
tory, Errand to the World , offers persuasive evidence that even in the heyday
of western imperialism there were a few courageous churchpersons in this
country (as well as in Europe) who challenged Euro- American claims of
cultural and religious superiority and questioned imperialistic philosophies
and missionary approaches based on these assumptions.3 The nettlesome

2 There is available a large number of works dealing with this theme, e.g., Robert L.
Delavignette, Christianity and. Colonialism (New York: Hawthorne, 1964); J. Duffy, Portugal
in Africa (Penguin, 1967); John K. Fairbank, The Missionary Enterprise in China and America
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Stephen Neill, Colonialism and Christian
Missions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); Arend Th. van Leeuwen, Christianity in World
History (Edinburgh House, 1964), pp. 267-268.

From the beginnings of the sixteenth century, the spread of Christianity was part and
parcel of western imperialistic expansion characterized by the subjugation and exploitation
of vast numbers of peoples and countries. As beneficiaries of western imperialism, mission-
aries carried not only the good news of the gospel, but their endeavors also included other
good and less-than-good things such as many of the trappings of western civilization, western
commerce, and western gun-boats. More than a generation ago, European and North Amer-
ican missiologists cautiously acknowledged the problem. Christopher Storrs, for example,
wrote: “I am not suggesting that Government and Commerce have deliberately and wick-
edly exploited religion in this matter. They have often been seriously concerned to bring to
the “natives” the blessings of Christianity hand in hand with trade and imperial expansion.
Still less am I suggesting that the Christian churches have ever consciously allowed them-
selves to be exploited, or that they have been unwilling to forgo (as often they have done) the
advantages of prestige and security, with which a tacit alliance with secular authority has
provided them. I think, however, that very many would agree that the spiritual integrity and
power of the Christian message has often grievously suffered by this association with secular
interests and motives” (see his 1943 Moorhouse Lectures, Many Creeds, One Cross [New York:
Macmillan, 1945], p. 6; and cf. Orlando E. Costas, Christ Outside the Gate [Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis, 1982], pp. 58-70). One of the more negative appraisals of the relation between the
political, economic and spiritual in missions is that of Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Missionaries
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). More recently William R. Hutchison, in his Errand to the
World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), offers a more balanced appraisal of the
North American missionary motives and objectives.

3 Errand to the World (1987).

MISSION AS KENOSIS

205

fact remains, however, that much of the missionary enterprise has been fu-
eled by a triumphalistic understanding of theology and history.

Moreover, it should be acknowledged that missionaries at times have at-
tached little importance to their calling to servanthood and have entered
other lands and cultures with what Kosuke Koyama calls a “crusading
mind,”4 assuming that their divinely designated role was to be that of master
or patron. In these cases, the missionary went as a superior, not as a subor-
dinate; went to teach, not to learn; went to evangelize, not to be evangelized.

Again, it would be misleading to imply that Christian missionaries have
all been crusaders, for this certainly is not the case. Mission history (apart
from the abundance of hagiography) is replete with accounts of men and
women who have exemplified the spirit of Jesus Christ and epitomized a
commitment to servanthood. In my own experience, I can affirm that most
missionaries I have known manifest a willingness to sacrifice, and they be-
lieve with good reason that their chosen vocation is a path of renunciation,
surrender, and devotion. Yet, the very nature of the missionary calling and
the predominant theological rationale that has undergirded the missionary
enterprise are such that there is a ubiquitous and subtle inducement, a pro-
pensity for missionaries to assume their own cultural and theological supe-
riority.

II. Pages from My Own Journal

My experience as a missionary has been like that of many others. I was a
child of a Christian, churchgoing family. If the church building was open,
we were there. My spiritual formation began at birth and was continuous,
affirming, and pietistic. 1 was taught to pray, reverence God, regard Jesus
as my Lord, and practice stewardship of life and possessions as naturally as
I was taught how to eat, to bathe, to read, and to play. My earliest recollec-
tions in terms of my ultimate vocation involved a sense of calling to Chris-
tian mission and ministry. Like most people of my generation, I received

4 Kosuke Koyama, “What Makes a Missionary? Toward a Crucified Mind, Not a Crusad-
ing Mind,” Mission Trends No. 1: Crucial Issues in Missions Today, ed. Gerald H. Anderson
and Thomas F. Stransky (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), pp. 1 17-132. Koyama later wrote:
“Evangelism has not made any significant headway in Asia for the last 400 years because
Christians crusaded against Asians. When did Christianity become a cheap military cam-
paign? Who made it so? I submit that a good hundred million American dollars, too years
of crusading with too, 000 ‘Billy Grahams,’ will not make Asia Christian. Christian faith does
not and cannot be spread by crusading. It will spread without money, without bishops, with-
out theologians, without plannings, and without ‘Billy Grahams,’ if people see a crucified
mind (not crusading mind) in Christians.” “Christians Suffer from a ‘Teacher Complex,’ ”
(Mission Trends No. 2: Evangelization, ed. Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky
[New York: Paulist Press, 1975], p. 74).

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

my elementary and secondary education in public schools, and 1 was privi-
leged to attend and graduate from a respected university and seminary.

My formal preparation for being a missionary, however, consisted of
three seminary courses in missions — two of which I prepared and taught to
African-American diploma students in the seminary’s extension program;
fourteen years as a pastor of churches in Texas, Virginia, and Colorado; and
a total of ten days of what was then called “intensive missionary orientation,”
which came immediately following our appointment by the foreign mission
board. One of those ten days was devoted to three lectures on “the biblical
basis for mission,” lectures consisting of an emphasis on God’s purpose for
Israel and Israel’s patent failure, the coming of Christ, the calling out of the
church, and Jesus’ commission to his disciples to “go into all the world and
make disciples of all nations.” The remainder of the orientation time was
given to recounting denominational mission history, understanding the or-
ganization and operation of the mission board, its rules and regulations
which included how many cubic feet of personal and family effects could be
shipped overseas, inoculations we would need, vacation and furlough sched-
uling, who were the recommended packers and carriers of missionary
goods, how the mission organization on the field functioned, alternatives for
educating missionary children, and how best to deal with emotional stress
in an alien environment.

Our first year as missionaries (1963) was spent in San Jose, Costa Rica, in
the Presbyterian Spanish Language Institute. The following year, my wife,
three children, and I arrived in Cali, Colombia, where my principal assign-
ment was to teach in the International Baptist Theological Seminary. Like
hundreds of others in the early 1960’s, I imagined myself as being a part of
the great wave of young people, Peace Corps volunteers, missionaries, and
others, who were making a personal sacrifice to come to Colombia and other
lands to teach and to preach to the less fortunate.

In my own case, the major impediment of which I was conscious when
we arrived in Cali was my still halting use of Spanish, for I believed, not
altogether incorrectly, that my career as a missionary depended on my abil-
ity to communicate effectively in this second language.

We had been in Cali less than two weeks when the field missionary called
me on a Monday and said, “Alan, are you busy next Saturday night3”

“No, I don’t think so,” I replied.

“I really need someone to go down to Puerto Tejada to lead a service
there in the mission. Can you do it?”

I was surprised and somewhat hesitant. “Don, I have only preached two

MISSION AS KENOSIS

207

or three times in Spanish . . . surely there is someone else who could do a
better job.”

“Nobody else is available to go,” he said.

I wanted to be cooperative, so after some discussion, I reluctantly agreed
to go. Don gave me the directions to Puerto Tejada, how long it would
likely take us, and where the mission was located. I asked him no questions
about the people in Puerto Tejada, nor did I inquire about the conditions in
which they lived and worked. I did not bother to ask any of my Colombian
colleagues at the Seminary to tell me about the history of the town or the
needs of its people. It did not occur to me that any ministry I might perform
there would best be determined by knowing something about the situation
and the people in Puerto Tejada. After all, I reasoned, I was in charge; I
was the designated preacher, and the only decision I had to make was which
of the two sermons I had translated from English into Spanish I would use.
Would it be the one on Jacob from the 28th chapter of Genesis, or the ser-
mon based on the parable of the prodigal sons in Luke 15?

My wife, Virginia, agreed to go with me, and after an early dinner with
the children, she and I got into the new camioneta (station wagon) the Mis-
sion provided us and headed south toward Puerto Tejada. We had not
driven five kilometers before the sun went down, the pavement ended, and
it became very dark. We met no other cars or trucks; there was no one else
on the road, and the only thing I could see was what was partially illumined
by the headlights of the station wagon. The decade known in Colombia as
la violencia supposedly had ended a few years earlier, but the bandits and
highwaymen still roamed the countryside, and the farther we went, the
more anxious I became. The distance was only thirty kilometers, but it
seemed much farther because of my increasing apprehension, and because I
had to drive slowly and carefully over a road that served as the highway,
but in those years was nothing more than a dirt road with occasional patches
of gravel and innumerable bumps, rocks, and pot-holes. But this was hard-
ship, and I began to feel like a missionary.

The directions Don had given were not difficult to follow, and when we
arrived in the town we located the mission easily. As we were getting out of
the stationwagon, however, a group of five or six children came running up,
looked into the back of the vehicle, and then one of them said to me, “Pues,
donde esta el proyector?”

“Como?” I replied.

“Donde esta el proyector? No hay pehcula esta noche?”

I had no idea what he was talking about and turned to see if Virginia had

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THE PRINCETON SEMINA R Y BULLETIN

understood. She said, “I think he is asking if you have a projector, and are
you going to show a film tonight.”

“A film?” I had come to preach. “No,” I responded, “there will be no
pelicula." The kids looked at each other momentarily, and without saying
another word they disappeared.

We went into the little house that was being used as the mission and
greeted the eight or ten people who were there. A few more arrived. When
I sensed that everyone who was coming was there, I stood up, formally
presented Virginia and myself, announced we were going to sing some
hymns and choruses, and then I would give a brief homily. I led the opening
prayer and directed the singing while Virginia played the accompaniment
on a small pump organ. One or two people slipped out during the singing
of the hymns. Then I opened my Bible and began to read the text for my
sermon, and, to my chagrin, as I was reading, others began to leave, one,
two, three at a time. At first I was mystified and then irritated, because
during the ten or fifteen minutes that I was speaking, people were leaving.
By the time I finished, the only people still there besides my wife and me
were three little girls seated back in the corner to my left, farthest from the
door, and the sexton who was waiting to turn out the lights and close the
building.

I had gone to Puerto Tejada with a message; few had bothered to listen,
and I was angry and aggrieved that these untutored Colombians did not
appreciate what I had said to them. As we drove back to Cali, I said to
Virginia, “Those people did not want to hear the gospel. They wanted to be
entertained.” Her reply was uncharacteristically frank. “Well, if they had
wanted to be entertained, they should have stayed to hear your Spanish.”

For a w'hile I consoled myself with the thought that if my use of the
language had been better, if I only could have spoken with less accent and
more idiomatically, then the people in Puerto Tejada would have remained
to hear my sermon. But eventually I had to abandon this ego defense be-
cause as I came to know the Colombians, I had to admit to myself that they
were not uncultured or rude. In fact, they were quite the opposite. Also, as
I observed other missionaries, one in particular, who did not speak “good
Spanish,” I had to acknowledge that something else was involved.

I listened, for example, to Myra who, when we arrived, had been in Co-
lombia with her husband for nearly ten years. Myra spoke the worst Spanish
I ever heard. She, too, had spent a year in language school in the mid-1950s,
but her linguistic skills, to put it mildly, were negligible. She is the only
person I ever heard who pronounced all Spanish words with a West Texas
drawl. She never used the tenses correctly, and elementary syntax and the

MISSION AS KENOSIS

209

subjunctive mood were mysteries she never fathomed. When she wanted to
say something in the future tense, she would say it in the present tense and
point forward. The preterit she handled by pointing backward. She never
learned to speak Spanish. But I could not ignore that the Colombians not
only understood Myra, they loved her, appreciated her efforts, worked en-
thusiastically with her, and in 1974 when she had to leave Colombia, they
wept. They loved her because it was unmistakably clear that she loved them.
Her attitude was neither patronizing nor pretentious. The primary gift she
had to offer was herself, and she gave of herself unstintingly.

I went to Puerto Tejada with a message. It was delivered but not heard.
I left humiliated and bewildered. Yet, reflecting on that painful experience,
I learned something from the people there about my mission. They became
my teachers, and the lesson they taught me — unintentionally perhaps — by
their ingenuous response to my insensitivity was: “What you have to say,
Sefior missionero, will be important to us when we as human beings — hun-
gry, poor, oppressed, discouraged — when we as companeros become impor-
tant to you.”

III. Being on Mission Is More than Just Going Somewhere

“Identification” is a much-emphasized theme in mission circles today.
The terminology is varied and includes such catchwords as indigenization,
partnership, mutuality, acculturation, interdependence, and contextualiza-
tion. Obviously, these are not synonymous, but they are interrelated, and
any serious discussion of them should reflect, I believe, the three principal
areas in the study of mission and missions, namely, theology, history (in-
cluding biography), and methodology.

We are living in an era in which probing, often troubling questions are
being raised about the legitimacy of any international missionary activity.
To some critics, it smacks of proselytism, neo-colonialism, of cultural and
religious imperialism. Concurrently, the interest in mission and the number
of candidates for vocational missions have declined substantially in the
mainline denominations, Protestant and Catholic. Meanwhile, mission sta-
tistics, always considered crucial for promotional reasons, are maintained or
inflated by some mission agencies by recruiting an ever-increasing number
of short-term personnel. Even the growth long enjoyed by many of the older
evangelical groups associated with the Interdenominational Foreign Mission
Association (1917) and the newer Evangelical Foreign Mission Association
(1945) peaked in 1968 and then began a slow decline.5

5 Robert T. Coote, “Taking Aim on 2000 A.D.,” Mission Handbook 13th ed., Samuel Wil-

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

Curiously, meanwhile, the ambivalence toward and the diminishing in-
volvement in international missions on the part of many Protestants and
Roman Catholics has not been experienced by the independent fundamen-
talists or conservative evangelicals. Their numbers of commissioned mis-
sionaries have burgeoned.

To illustrate, in 1968, denominations associated with the National Coun-
cil of Churches boasted 10,042 overseas missionaries. By 1985, this number
has declined to less than half, that is, to 4,339. In the same period, the num-
ber of missionaries sent out by the ninety-two agencies associated with the
IFMA and EFMA increased somewhat from 12,859 to r4d8i, while in the
same seventeen-year period a group of thirty-two independent evangelical
and fundamentalist agencies increased the number of their missionary per-
sonnel from 8,505 to 12,628, a gain of almost 50 percent, and more than
three times as many new missionaries as the ninety-two ERMA and IFMA
agencies combined.* * 6 This increase of 4,123, incidentally, did not include the
Southern Baptists, the New Tribes Missions, or the Wycliffe Bible Trans-
lators who reported collectively a 34.7 percent increase in missionaries under
appointment.7

More than one observer has noted that “the vacuum” supposedly created
by the decline in the number of vocational missionaries from mainline
churches has more than been filled by personnel from conservative, largely
independent fundamentalist missionary agencies. This not only has alarmed
many mission proponents and bureaucrats, it has likewise been difficult to
explain and justify in denominations where grassroots constituents are won-
dering out loud why they and their leadership cannot return to the days
when foreign missions was a central feature of their church’s agenda and
their young people were being sent out by the hundreds.

I am a product of a denomination with a foreign mission board not affil-
iated either with the National Council of Churches or with the IFMA or
EFMA. Statistics are very important criteria for most people in my denom-
ination because they believe them to be perceptible, convincing indicators of
spiritual strength and growth, or the lack of it, and statistical growth is the
means whereby the rationale is validated, achievement is measured, value is
determined, and legitimacy is established. Thus when the mission board
talks about five thousand foreign missionaries under appointment by the

son and John Siewert, eds. (Monrovia, Calif.: Missions Advanced Research and Communi-

cation Center, 1986), pp. 39-40.

6 Ibid., p. 40.

^ Ibid.

MISSION AS KENOSIS

21 I

year 2000, and an annual budget of two hundred or more million dollars,
this gets attention.

Here I would raise a question. Is this true of only one Christian denomi-
nation in the United States? Or would it be more accurate to say that in our
culture the value of nearly everything is determined by quantification? One
could wish that people interested in and committed to the Christian mission
believed and understood that being a part of Christ’s mission means more
than just going someplace, even in large numbers, and that slogans about
theological imperatives for world evangelization, enlarging the missionary
force, and continually increasing the mission budget would be rethought in
the light of Christ’s incarnation.

IV. Mission as Self-Emptying

In the Philippian correspondence traditionally believed to have been writ-
ten by the Apostle Paul during his Roman imprisonment, there is a passage
thought by some to be a fragment of early Christian preaching or a hymn
sung by the church during the first century. It is found in Phil. 2:5-11:

Have this mind among yourselves,
which is yours in Christ Jesus,
who being in the form of God,
did not count equality with God
a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant,

being born in the likeness of men (human beings).

And being found in human form

he humbled himself and became obedient
unto death, even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him and
bestowed on him the name which is
above every name,

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

It is not possible in the space of a single lecture to treat the whole of this
dramatic passage, nor would I pretend to exhaust the meaning of the single

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

phrase from which I have drawn the theme of this discussion, namely the
two words in verse 7 ,heauton ekenosen variously translated as “emptied him-
self,” “made himself nothing,” or “gave up all he had.” It is a poignant,
vivid expression, appearing only this one time in the New Testament.8 And
though consonant with the portrayal of Jesus found in the gospels, kenotic
Christology has incited intense, prolonged, and sometimes acrimonious the-
ological debate. At the same time, the idea of kenosis has been incorporated
into the popular piety of each of the three major branches of Christianity
with little apparent difficulty.9 Christian hymnody, for example, frequently
reflects a kenotic motif.10 One well-known example is a hymn by Emily
Elliott:

Thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown
When thou earnest to earth for me; ....

But in lowly birth didst thou come to earth,

And in great humility.

During the Lenten season this year I noted for the first time the words of
an anonymous American folk hymn, “What Wondrous Love is This”:

When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down,

When I was sinking down Beneath God’s righteous frown,

Christ laid aside his crown for my soul, for my soul;

Christ laid aside his crown for my soul

(From Wm. Walker’s Southern Harmony, 1843).

Though these lyrics may be unappealing aesthetically and theologically to
us, we need to recognize that some form of kenosis has found its way time

8 The verb appears four times in the New Testament (Rom. 4:14; 1 Cor. 1:17; 9:15; and 2
Cor. 9:15), but only in Phil. 2:7 in the sense of Christ’s self-emptying. See Gerhard Kittel,
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 661-662.

9 One can observe the kenotic idea in the works of Zinzendorf. Commenting on the hu-
miliation of the Creator in the Incarnation, the Moravian leader said that God not only
became a human being, he became “a child, and indeed one poor as a church mouse, so
naked that he could move a stone to pity” (Vier un dreyszig Homiliae uber die Wunden-Litaney
der Bruder [Barby?: 174?], p. 21; cited by Donald G. Dawe, The Form of a Servant [Philadel-
phia: Westminster, 1963], p. 83, n. 27). Consider likewise the kenotic theme in Eastern Or-
thodoxy and Roman Catholicism, Dawe, pp. 146-147, 149-155.

10 See, for example, Wesley’s “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” in which “the Sun of Righ-
teousness . . . lays his glory by.” In another of Wesley’s hymns, “And Can It Be," there is a
verse (unfortunately deleted in some hymnals): “He left his Father’s throne above. . . . Emp-
tied himself of all but love. . .” See also T. B. Tucker’s hymn, “All Praise Be Yours” which
begins: “All praise be yours, for you, O King divine, Your rightful glory freely did re-
sign.”Also in Cardene Marie Noel’s hymn, “At the Name of Jesus” — clearly reflecting Phil.
2:9-11 — one stanza includes: “Humbled for a season. To receive a name. . . .

MISSION AS KENOSIS

2I3

and time again into the consciousness of professing Christian believers. Fur-
thermore, the retention of this Philippian text as a part of the New Testa-
ment canon is evidence that the early church had no serious theological
reservations with the idea of Christ’s self-emptying. It is theologians for
whom it has been a vexing issue and “a stone of stumbling.”

What I want to say about these provocative words describing Christ’s
self-humiliation is a kind of paralipsis in which, for the sake of making a
single point, one compresses into the briefest comment the countless and
often conflicting interpretations and understandings of what the Apostle
intended by the use of kenotic imagery."

Christ’s self-emptying is meant to be, I believe, the subject of contempla-
tion— faith, reflection, prayer, meditation, and worship; and it is meant to
be a model for imitation — replication, renewal, and praxis — and not a prop-
osition designed to provoke theological or philosophical debate. Philippians
is, after all, a letter written to a congregation, not a society of theologians.

To seize upon the idea of kenosis as metaphysical evidence for shoring
up tenuous theological presuppositions or dogmatic speculations is, in my
judgment, to misuse it. For heauton ekenosen is a figure of speech, a meta-
phor illustrating a profound theological and ethical truth and affording us
who profess to be Christ’s disciples a sublime example. Alexander Bruce in
his (1874) classic study of kenotic theology said:

It is true that the act by which the Son of God became man is inimi-
table; but the mind which moved Him to perform that act is not in-

" Leonardo Boff contends that the synoptic gospels depict Jesus as “living a life charged
with conflict and pain,” and that if “we take the incarnation absolutely seriously,” we will
see it “as an ‘emptying,’ as the total evacuation of divinity,” Passion of Christ, Passion of the
World (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1987), p. xii.

It appears to me that Christ’s kenosis involved at least the following: (1) his renunciation
of divine prerogatives; (2) the necessity for his developing in knowledge and understanding;
(3) his refusal to presume upon his relationship with God and to employ the power of the
world to accomplish his mission; (4) his willingness to risk failure by attracting disciples only
by self-giving love, and by limiting himsell to a single time, space, and people — one would
do well to consider Jesus’ estimated thirty years of preparation before beginning his ministry;
and (5) the necessity for him to exercise faith in God and maintain a relationship with God
through prayer, dependence, and devotion.

We should not lose sight of the doctrinal Christological norms established during the first
five centuries A.D., for keeping them in proper perspective has preserved the church from
fanciful speculations and doctrinal excesses. At the same time, if we accept kenosis as a
mythic insight into the nature and working of God, we have thereby a very important key
for grasping the meaning and the means of the incarnation. Furthermore, one can accept the
exinanition of Christ without becoming bogged down in the debate regarding the implica-
tions of kenosis for Trinitarianism or in needless questions such as “What was happening to
the universe during the period of the Son’s earthly life?” See William Temple, Christus Ver-
itas (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 192.

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imitable; and it is the mind or moral disposition of Christ, revealed
both in imitable and in inimitable acts, which is the subject of com-
mendation. . . . Of Him whose mind is commended as worthy of imi-
tation, the apostle predicates two acts through which that mind was
revealed: First, an act of self-emptying, in virtue of which He became
Man; then a continuous act or habit of self-humiliation on the part of
the incarnate One, which culminated in the endurance of death on the
cross.12

Following Bruce’s very pastoral interpretation, I want to restate and un-
derscore several of his inferences.13 (i) Christ existed in a form capable of
self-emptying. (2) His incarnation involved a change of state and status from
being in “the form of God” to one of being in “the form of a servant.” (3)
Despite this radical condescension, the person of Christ remained the same.
“Kenosis did not mean self -extinction."'* (4) There was continuity between
the mind of God who purposed the incarnation and the mind of Jesus Christ
whose life was dedicated to fulfilling the purpose of that divine mind.'5 (5)
The life of Jesus the Christ was consummately and consistently a life of self-
emptying, a life of service. And (6) from the beginning of his earthly exis-
tence until the end, “Christ was a free agent.”16 He was not the helpless
victim of a prearranged or an unavoidable tragedy. “I lay down my life,”
the Johannine Jesus said. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my
own accord” (Jn. 10:17-18). His birth, his life, and his death were tangible,
continual, and incontrovertible evidence of self-emptying.

V. Kenosis: A Model for Mission?

Anyone who has investigated the extensive amount of literature on the
subject of kenosis is aware of the profound hermeneutical and theological
questions raised as to the meaning, the extent, the purpose, and the possible
repercussions of kenotic Christology. I am not dismissing these questions as
being unimportant, nor do I intend to imply that we should ignore the anal-
yses and insights of the host of renowned and learned scholars who from
the time of the early church fathers until today have labored and struggled
with this issue. We are all benefactors of their efforts. It is my belief, how-

11 The Humiliation of Christ (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1876), pp. 20-21.

Ibid., pp. 28-30.

M Ibid., p. 29. Bruce continues, “He who emptied Himself was the same with Him who
humbled Himself; and the kenosis and the tapeinosis were two acts of the same mind dwell-
ing in the same subject.”

Ibid.

'6 Ibid.

MISSION AS KENOSIS

215

ever, that Christian doctrine that ultimately matters arises out of the prac-
tical, day-to-day experience of human beings trying to relate their struggles,
doubts, fears, sufferings, and pain to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. If,
therefore, a significant Christological insight is ignored, or misunderstood,
or disparaged, for whatever reason, the consequences can be as far-reaching
as they can be injurious.

After working in the field of missions for many years, I have come to the
conclusion — based on experience and some knowledge of mission history
and theology— that the subject of Christ’s kenosis and the implications of
his self-humiliation either have been generally ignored or misapplied. I
voice this as something more than a hypothesis and something less than a
settled judgment.

There is no scarcity of published theologies of mission, some of which
deal more systematically and directly with the biblical material than others.
It is rare, however, to find one that discusses Christ’s kenosis or sees any
relationship between his “self-emptying” and the Christian mission.'7 For
example, the extraordinarily important and progressive decree of Vatican II
on the church’s missionary activity, Ad Gentes, begins by setting forth the
“doctrinal principles” for mission and cites the passage in 2 Corinthians 8:9,
which many exegetes regard as kenotic: “Though rich, he (Christ) was
made poor for our sake, that by his poverty we might become rich.” Also,
the familiar words of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark are quoted: “The Son

'7 See, for example, Johannes Blauw, The Missionary Nature of the Church (London: Lut-
terworth, 1962); W. Anderson, Towards a Theology of Mission (London: S.C.M., 1955); H. J.
Margull, Hope in Action (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1962); Max Warren, The Truth of Vision
(London: Canterbury, 1948); The Christian Mission (London: S.C.M., 1951); and The Christian
Imperative (London: S.C.M., 1955); Stephen C. Neill, Creative Tension (London: Edinburgh
House, 1955); G. F. Vicedom, Missio Dei (Munich: Kaiser, 1958); Edward Schillebeeckx, The
Mission of the Church (New York: Seabury Press, 1973); Julian Price Love, The Missionary
Message of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1941); Robert H. Glover, The Bible Basis of
Missions (Bible House of Los Angeles, 1946); Edward Shillito, The Way of Witnesses (New
York: Friendship Press, 1936); Edmund Davison Soper, The Biblical Background of the Chris-
tian World Mission (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1951); Donald Senior and Carroll
Stuhlmueller, The Biblical Foundations for Mission (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1983); Lesslie
Newbigin, The Open Secret (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978).

After examining more than fifty theologies of mission, the only exceptions to this neglect
I have found are in Josef Mueller, Missionarische Anpassung als Theologisches Prinzip (Muen-
ster: Aschendorffsche, 1972), pp. 277-279; La Formazione del Missionario Oggi (Brescia: Pai-
deia, 1978), pp. 8, 22-23, 126-127, 15L 181, 227-228, 241-242, 250, 253-256, 314, 322, 333-348;
Hans Waldenfels, “Das ‘Kenotische’ al Grundzug Kommunkation,” in Denn Ich bin bei Euch
(Zurich: Benziger, 1978), pp. 327-328; a brief discussion by Max Warren in an essay, “The
Meaning of Identification,” The Theology of the Christian Mission, ed. Gerald H. Anderson
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1961), pp. 234-235; and by way of implication but without ref-
erence to the kenotic motif, “Mission as Subordination” in Douglas Webster, Yes to Mission
(London: S.C.M., 1966), pp. 50-56.

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a
ransom for many” (10:45). But nothing is said beyond the citing of these
verses. The idea of kenosis is not developed.'8 Nothing is said about what
this implies for the missioner or for the Church.

Not unusual, especially in conservative evangelical theologies of mission,
are references to Phil. 2:5, for here one finds the basis for the oft-employed
injunction to be submissive to higher authority by having “the same mind
as Christ Jesus.” Likewise, verses 9-1 1 are discussed, for these describe the
exaltation of Christ that resulted from his “complete obedience,” and the
passage concludes with the assurance that sometime in the future the whole
world “will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Other than this, however,
nothing is said.'9 It is as if verse 7 were not in the text.

Why is this? Why have mission theologians for the most part passed over
this text? I must confess that I do not know, but I can suggest several pos-
sible reasons. In the first place, kenotic Christology since the third century
has been the raw material of sometimes intense controversy. It is easier, of
course, to debate the image of kenosis than to emulate it. In the second place,
when kenosis is overly accentuated, it raises unnecessary and unanswerable
philosophical questions. Furthermore, the kenosis tradition for many is as-
sociated with certain theological points of view, now generally discredited,
that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Why, then, pursue it as a missiological theme? My response is twofold.
First, any thorough portrayal of the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, the
Christ of the New Testament, will of necessity include a kenotic component.
I believe, with Vincent Taylor, that some semblance of kenosis “is an inev-
itable part of any Christology that claims to be rooted in the New Testa-
ment.”20 Kenosis is not a gloss, a Pauline innovation, or a theme limited to
one or two passages in the New Testament. It is a recurring picture of
Christ’s servant life and death. Self-emptying, moreover, is a reflection of
the kind of God for whom the incarnation was not only consistent, but was
also possible.21

18 Austin P. Flannery, ed., Documents of Vatican II (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), p.
8i5-

19 See, for example, J. H. Kane, Christian Missions m Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids:
Baker, 1976), p. 108. It is noteworthy, however, that in his treatment of the Person of Christ,
Kane discusses Jesus’ virgin birth, sinless character, atoning death, victorious resurrection,
ascension into heaven, and second coming to earth, but there is no mention of his self-emp-
tying (pp. 185-188).

“ Dawe (1963), p. 142.

21 Ibid., pp. 195, 200. “A self-limiting relation to man and the whole world," according to
Dawe, “is not a unique event in the life of God; it is a basic quality of his life. Kenosis is not

MISSION AS KENOSIS

2IJ

There is a second reason why Christ’s example of self-emptying is impor-
tant for mission, namely, the potential impact on the way mission is done,
that is, on praxis. One can only imagine, for example, how the history of
western South America — especially Peru — would have been different had
those first Christian “missionaries” who arrived with Francisco Pizarro un-
derstood themselves to be emissaries of the self-emptied Christ, whose im-
age they carried in the form of a large crucifix as they marched into the
valley of Cajamarca in October 1532, rather than the loyal subjects of the
court of Castile.22 What would Cuba be like today had most North Ameri-
can Protestant denominations and their missionary spokespersons in 1898
opposed rather than clamored for U.S. military intervention in Cuba? Their
primary justification for advocating U.S. involvement was that the defeat of
Spain would open the way for the immediate evangelization of the Cuban
people.23 Would there have been in the early 1970s the demand by third
world Christian leaders, beginning with John Gatu in East Africa and
Emerito Nacpil in the Philippines, for a moratorium on missions and mis-
sionaries had Christian churches, theological seminaries, and mission agen-
cies in this country and in Europe been instilling in their constituents the
model of the Christ who emptied himself and became a servant?

In terms of the effect of the moratorium on the third world churches, not
only was change necessary and inevitable, but it has been for the most part,

something that just happened once in Christ; it is something that has marked the whole
history of God’s dealing with men. The kenosis in Christ is the ultimate expression of God’s
kenotic love for man, but it is not an example isolated from the rest” (p. 195). Dawe contin-
ues: “Kenosis is the characteristic of God’s being and action in every aspect. . . . Kenosis is
the key to the saving action of God. His characteristic act in salvation is not one of self-
assertion but rather of self-negation. In contrast to all human attempts at self-salvation, God
saves in a gesture of radical self-giving. God limits himself, taking upon himself the incom-
pleteness, brokenness, and sin that separate men from him. Free self-limitation is the char-
acteristic of God’s every act, indeed, of God’s own person” (p. 200).

” In less than a month, Pizarro had publicly offended and humiliated the Inca, Ata-
huallpa, then took him prisoner, slaughtered hundreds of his subjects, promised him freedom
if a room measuring twelve by seventeen feet was filled with objects of gold and a second
room with silver. The gold and silver were brought, and the total booty was some 13,000
pounds of gold and more than twice that amount of silver. Rather than releasing the Inca,
however, the Spaniards accused and convicted him of treason and sentenced him to be
burned alive. As an act of “Christian mercy,” Pizarro offered Atahuallpa death by strangling
if he would accept Christian baptism. The Inca agreed, was baptized, and immediately exe-
cuted, Hubert Herring, A History of Latin America (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 139-140.
See also Julio Barreiro, “Rejection of Christianity by the Indigenous Peoples of Latin Amer-
ica,” Separation Without Hope , ed. Julio de Santa Ana (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1978), pp.
124-136.

13 There are several important studies of this era analyzing the widespread support of the
U.S. imperialistic policy by Protestants in this country. More significant, however, is the
Cuban perspective, e.g., Marcos Antonio Ramos, Panorama del Protestantismo en Cuba (Edi-
torial Caribe, 1986), pp. 159-186.

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I believe, beneficial. As for the immediate and longer term impact of the
moratorium on the churches here in the United States, the effect appears to
be equivocal if not adverse.24 Would this be the case if our mission theology
were less a reflection of what Niebuhr called our “collective egoism” and
more of the reflection of what the New Testament calls diakpma, which
Hoekendijk defined as “being subordinate, inconspicuous, available.”25
Does mission have to be done our way, according to our agenda, within our
structures, with our people in charge, for grassroots church members, pas-
tors, and the rest of us here in the United States to feel involved and be
engaged?

We cannot refashion history, but we can learn from it. And if we truly
learn from history, our theology and ultimately our praxis will be reshaped.

VI. Kenosis: Implications for Mission

If fesus is a model for mission, what features of his life are imitable?
What are the implications of his kenosis for mission today? I ambitiously
entitled this lecture “implications for mission.” What I can give are little
more than “intimations.”

(i) Most mission theology is based on a kingdom model, not a kenosis
model. I am not implying that we should scrap the kingdom imagery as the
“goal of the Missio Dei”26 (although I confess having serious misgivings as
to the usefulness of the image today). I am suggesting rather that kenosis
may be the means whereby we become a part of the Missio Dei. In the New
Testament, especially in the Gospels, the reign of God is a dominant, over-
riding theme. Jesus said little, if anything, about the church; his teaching
and preaching centered on the kingdom. As a part of the apprenticeship of
the Twelve, Jesus sent them out with the commission “to preach the king-
dom of God and to heal” (Lk. 9:2). When Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom
is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36), he was not saying, “You politicos need not
be concerned about me because my kingdom is located in some other
world.” What Jesus said and did troubled Pilate and Caiaphas and the
whole religio-political establishment, and rightly so, for Jesus was declaring

24 See Donald Black, Merging Mission and Unity (Philadelphia: Geneva Press, 1986) and
John Coventry Smith, From Colonialism to World Community (Philadelphia: Geneva Press,
1982) for accounts of the transition period and the struggle for a new focus, new structures,
and a new way of doing mission.

24 Hoekendijk continues: “Everything that was done by the Son of Man who came, Jesus
Christ, including humiliation, self-emptying, cross, and death is summarized in eight letters:
diakpnia. The same single word,” he insisted, “also indicates the pattern of life for all who
follow Jesus,” The Church Inside Out (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), p. 146.

26 J. Verkuyl, Contemporary Missiology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 197-204.

MISSION AS KENOSIS

219

that his kingdom is a different kind of kingdom, not one established by
violence nor maintained by tyranny. It is a different kind of kingdom be-
cause no one is compelled to be a part of Jesus’ kingdom (family). All are
invited, and the most unpromising — the poor, the handicapped, the margin-
alized, the nobodies — are especially summoned (Lk. 14:13, 21).

Furthermore, Jesus’ kingdom, as the Bible describes it, is one that encom-
passes all of life, one that welcomes the most unlikely subjects, one that
exposes every pocket of evil and liberates from every injustice and oppres-
sion, one that comes through the most implausible means, and one whose
sovereign’s power is revealed in weakness, poverty, suffering, and death (Is.
53). And Jesus’ kingdom is indeed a threat to other kingdoms.

(2) A mission theology informed by kenosis will allow us to see God from
a different perspective and discern where God is incarnate and with whom
God is working today. Such discernment could then help us find our place
in mission. In the last book that Orlando Costas wrote before he died, he
sounded a warning about our assuming that we know Christ and what
Christ is doing.

The true identity of Christ is not determined by our cultural reality.
The Christ we experience in the world of the disfranchised is not the
product of the so-called culture of poverty. Nor is he an offspring of
Marxist ideology, a consequence of the so-called scientific analysis of
the historico-economic process of society, which detects its inherent
contradictions and posits the means for its solution, guaranteeing
thereby the ultimate liberation of the oppressed.

The true identity is, rather, defined by the life, ministry, and death
of Jesus Christ as witnessed to by the New Testament. For the New
Testament constitutes the basic source of information about his history.

It also underscores its theological relevance for the church’s mission
and its historical significance for the confession of faith in his name.
Any other basis for the identity of Christ is simply illusory and unsus-
tainable.

The criterion of the life, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ permits
us to identify him today. This criterion leads us not only to discover
who he is . . . but where he is to be found today (among the poor, the
powerless, and the oppressed), and what he is doing (healing their
wounds, breaking their chains of oppression, demanding justice and
peace, giving life, and imparting hope).27

27 Christ Outside the Gate (Mary knoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1982), pp. 15-16.

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(3) A mission praxis shaped by a theology of kenosis could prepare us to
be evangelized by the poor and enable us to be converted for witness.28 This
idea of being evangelized by the poor, the weak, and the oppressed is not
appealing to most of us. To talk of us Christians being evangelized, espe-
cially by the very persons whom we have customarily regarded as objects of
our evangelization, is disconcerting if not preposterous. Is it?

Perhaps my experience was not, as I assumed, similar to that of other
North American missionaries. Possibly it took a wrenching experience, or a
series of such experiences, before I was in any sense prepared to be a mis-
sionary or to preach the gospel in Colombia. I confess that I required more
than one conversion, for as well as being converted to Christ, I needed to be
converted to the Colombians, to be confronted with my pride, my cultural
isolation, my unconscious nationalism and racism, my latent chauvinism,
and my confidence in my own knowledge and skills. I need to be converted
today and every day.

Do not assume that I am limiting conversion simply to attitudes. I believe
Christians in the third world can teach us something substantive about do-
ing theology, about praxis, biblical exegesis, history, and the church, partic-
ularly ecclesiastical structures. They can incarnate in different and fresh
ways the gospel and help us to understand powerlessness as well as the se-
ductiveness of power. They can teach us something about Christian solidar-
ity, a new form of ecumenism that is emerging. We can learn from them
about suffering, faith, values, hope, openness to the future, Christian wit-
ness, and authentic evangelism — if we can answer rightly the question. And
what is the question? It is Leonardo Boff s question to his own community
of faith, and it is a question applicable to all communities of faith. The
question is, “Can the church be converted to a more vibrant witness of the
gospel in our world today?”29 The answer is yes, if the church can renounce
its thirst for power and its attachment to stultified models and “obstinate
repetition of past statements” that prevent kenosis and a genuine “openness
to the future.” The answer is yes, if the church is able to learn from the
weak, the poor, and the marginalized, and if the church is willing to risk
failure by incarnating and depending on self-giving love. The answer is yes,
if the church can recover its role as pilgrims and strangers who are on the
way to a city whose builder and maker is God, not Madison Avenue or Wall
Street. The church, Boff declares, can and “will be a sign of liberation and

J

/

i

l

\

18 Segundo Galilea, The Beatitudes: To Evangelize as Jesus Did (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis,
1984), pp. 6-8, 16-20.

2<i Church : Chartsm & Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988), p. 64.

MISSION AS KENOSIS

221

will enter into the struggle for liberation with all peoples,” however, “only
insofar as it is converted and becomes more and more an incarnation of the
Gospel,”30 gives up its pretension, its triumphalism, and becomes a living
replica of him who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”

(4) Finally, a mission praxis resulting from kenosis could open to us ave-
nues of ecumenism and interfaith relations, the dimensions of which we
cannot conceptualize.

In 1806 William Carey wrote to his friend and titular head of the British
Baptist Mission Society, Andrew Fuller, proposing a decennial missionary
conference to be held in the Cape of Good Hope beginning in 1810. All
Christian denominations from “the four quarters of the world” should be
invited to send representatives, Carey said, for such a conference could in-
crease understanding, promote unity, and thereby benefit the whole mis-
sionary endeavor. Fuller, however, ordinarily very supportive of Carey, dis-
missed the idea by saying it was a fanciful dream of an “enlarged mind.”
Such a meeting would serve no real purpose nor produce any real unity.3’

Carey’s proposal was not, as Fuller thought, merely the product of an
“enlarged mind.” It was the fruit of a life and mind emptied to a remarkable
degree of self-interest, pride, and sectarianism. Yet a whole century would
pass before the dream was finally realized in Edinburgh (1910).

Why has ecumenical progress moved at a snail’s pace since that time?
John Wesley answered it this way: “The pretences for separation may be
innumerable but want of love is always the real cause.”32 In the life of Jesus
Christ and in the witness of his church, love and kenosis are two sides of
the same coin.

As to the possible effect of kenosis on interfaith dialogue, I invite you to
read with care the final chapter of Paul Knitter’s No Other Name ?33 Two of
his comments are particularly relevant. First, Knitter contends that the dis-
covery of the truth of Christian revelation comes not only by means of “the
sociopolitical praxis of liberation,” but also through “the praxis of dialogue

30 Ibid.

3' William Richey Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations (New York: Harper, 1952), pp. 7-8, 17-
18.

32 Sermon LXXV, “On Schism” (1786). Cited by Geoffrey Wainwright, The Ecumenical
Moment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 200. “If,” as is often said, “ ‘the mission is one,’ ”
Wainwright adds, then “a divided Christianity is no more tolerable ‘at home’ than it is
‘overseas’: the being of the Church and the credibility of its message are everywhere called
into question by division.” Wainwright, p. 205.

33 Paul Knitter, No Other Name? (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985), pp. 205-231. The chapter
is entitled, “Doing Before Knowing — The Challenge of Interreligious Dialogue.”

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with peoples of other faiths.”34 But, he continues, there can be no genuine
dialogue with those of other faiths without entering into the other persons’
experience.

A true encounter with another tradition cannot take place “from the

outside”; I cannot expect truly to grasp another religion by standing

outside it and looking in. Somehow, 1 must enter and be “inside” the

other tradition by sharing its religious experience.35

Entering into another’s religious experience does not require a renunciation
ot who I am or of my faith. Kenosis, as Alexander Bruce pointed out, does
not mean “self-extinction.” It means (in this case) humbling oneself so as to
be able to see and feel things from the other’s perspective.

In the year 1910, a baby girl was born to an Albanian family, Nikola and
Dranafile Bojaxhui, living in Skopje, Macedonia, now a part of Yugoslavia.
At her baptism, the infant was given the name Agnes Gonxha, “Gonxha”
meaning “flower bud.”36 The Bojaxhui home was very pious, and the three
children, Gonxha and an older sister and brother, were reared in an atmos-
phere wherein they were taught to reverence the church and the Holy Fa-
ther.

As a child and young teenager, Gonxha was caught up in the enthusiasm
for missions characteristic of the Catholic Church of that time. Her father’s
sudden death and the economic hardship her mother experienced evidently
contributed to a special concern for the poor that subsequently led her into
a life committed to God, the church, and to missions. Reading and hearing
of the work done by the Jesuits in Bengal, south of Calcutta, Gonxha even-
tually sought admission into the congregation of the Loreto sisters who
maintained a mission in Bengal.

The headquarters of the congregation, however, was in Dublin, and she
was told that it would be necessary for her to go there, become conversant
in English, and then request assignment to the India mission. This she did.37
She was eighteen years old at the time. The following year, 1929, she was
sent to Calcutta, and after her novitiate was assigned as a teacher of geog-
raphy and history in the high school located within the walls of the Loreto
convent. Her compassion for the poor and suffering, however, intensified as

34 Ibid., p. 206.

35 Ibid., p. 210.

36 Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street (New York: Doubleday, 1985), p. 7.

37 Ibid., pp. 1 1, 13.

MISSION AS KENOSIS

223

she came into contact with the slums, the hunger, the filth, and the hope-
lessness of the masses who lived in and around Calcutta.

En route to a retreat in the Himalayas, traveling by train, she said, “I
heard the call of God.” It was a “call within a call,” and the message was
quite clear: I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among
them. It was an order. I knew where I belonged, but I did not know how
to get there.”38

This new sense of calling was not the sentimental musings of an adoles-
cent. For years she had heard the sounds and smelled the stench of poverty
outside her convent window, for just beyond the high wall that enclosed the
Loreto complex were the slums of Moti Jheel.39 Though in a sense she was
protected from the dirt, the open sewers, the hungry and ragged children,
the sick and the dying, and the squalor of a part of Calcutta that was a
quagmire of suffering, Gonxja could not ignore what was taking place
around her.

It would be two years, however, before she could persuade her superiors
that God was calling her to leave the convent. Father Julien Henry who
knew Gonxja as well as anyone explained her determination as follows: She
was convinced, he said, that Jesus wanted her to serve him and follow him
in actual poverty, material poverty, to practice a style of life that would
make her similar to the needy in whom he was present, suffered, and
loved.40

In August of 1948 she finally received permission from the Archbishop
to move from Loreto into Moti Jheel. It was not an easy decision even then.
“To leave Loreto was my greatest sacrifice,” she later said, “the most diffi-
cult thing I have ever done. It was much more difficult than to leave my
family and country to enter religious life. (For) Loreto meant everything to
me.”4' She later became a citizen of India and in 1950 founded a new mis-
sionary order, the Missionaries of Charity. You know Gonxha, of course, as
Mother Teresa.

Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus
who, being in the form of God, did not consider
equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.

38 Edward Le Joly, Mother Teresa of Calcutta (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 9.

39 Robert Serrou, Teresa of Calcutta (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 37.

40 Le Joly, pp. 9-10.

4‘ Ibid., p. 13.

John H. Leith, the Pemberton Professor of
Theology at Union Theological Seminary
in Richmond, Virginia, has written exten-
sively on the theology of John Calvin and
the history and theology of the Reformed
churches. His most recent books are: The
Reformed Imperative (1988) and John
Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life
(1989). The following essay on preaching
from a Reformed theological perspective
was one of the Waif eld lectures given at
Princeton Seminary in March, 1989.

During the centennial celebration of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian
Church, New York (1908), A. F. Schauffler thanked the Session of the
church for its concern to provide excellent preaching. His words are worth
quoting:

The management of this church is of such an intelligent nature that
they place in this pulpit men of national and international reputation
during June, July and August, so that these pews and galleries are full,
never mind what the thermometer says, that is a benediction to this
great town of ours; that is letting your light so shine that men see your
good works, and glorify your Father who is in Heaven, and the gath-
ering here, the securing here, not during the summer season only, but
at times during the regular season, of men like “Gypsy” Smith, and
other men we can mention — Campbell Morgan and Hugh Black and
the like — the gathering of these men is something for which the city
ought to be thankful, and of which this church has just reason to be
sanctifiedly proud.

On behalf of many who come here, who are not members of this
church, to whom you have thus ministered, I desire to bring a token
of gratitude, and to render in their behalf to this church and its pastor
and elders, thanks for this careful ministry to the wants of the great
spiritual public.1

No higher tribute can be paid a session than that it provided preaching
of the highest excellence and integrity.

It is no longer clear that many church people attend church services with
the conviction that they shall hear a good sermon, that is, good in its depth
and breadth, in its utilization of the resources of the Christian community,

1 History of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church of New York City, New York from 1808-
1908, ed. Henry W. Jessup (New York: Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, 1909), p. 169.

Reformed Preaching
Today

by John H. Leith

REFORMED PREACHING

225

in its clarity about what the church is, and in its delivery by a person who is
passionate in conviction and trained in the art of explicating and applying
the Word of God in a sermon. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that
congregations want two competencies in their pastors. First, they want per-
sons who are able to explicate and apply the Word of God with power.
Second, they want pastors who know how to incorporate persons into the
worshiping, believing community and bring to them the treasures of the
gospel in the passages and crises of life as well as support when life is routine
and boring. With amazing unanimity, pulpit committees want a pastor who
can preach.

Yet most pulpit committees would have a difficult time explaining what
is a good sermon. Some have never heard good preaching in the classical
definition of the term, and have a difficult time distinguishing the preaching
of the gospel from entertainment, or therapy, or moral exhortation, or po-
litical advice. Indeed, many congregations may require a period of time to
become acclimated to a really good preacher. James Nichols, in a study of
Reformed worship, noted that church services in the Reformed tradition
were dependent upon a theologically and biblically informed congregation.2
There is a paucity of such congregations. Yet congregations can be educated.
A decisive test of the effectiveness of a minister is the difference between
•the sermon taste of the congregation when the minister arrives and the ser-
mon taste of the congregation when the minister leaves. A second test is the
power of preaching to gather a congregation, to create a godly public opin-
ion, and to build up the communion of saints. Once congregations have
heard good preaching of theological and biblical depth over a period of time,
they find it very difficult to accept poor preaching, or to be enticed by actors
or entertainers or moral exhorters or therapists in the pulpit.

There is great need for preaching with theological depth in our particular
day. More people are going to college in our society than has been true of
any other society. The number of lawyers, doctors, engineers has greatly
increased over a century ago. The loss of a theological picture of reality or
frame of reference in a society dominated by the secularity of television,
education, and many popular magazines also calls for theological preaching
which provides a Christian alternative. The centers of information and of
political and social persuasion are increasingly secular. Hence theological
preaching of the highest competence is essential today for persuasion and
for the building up of the community of the saints.

2 James H. Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition (Philadelphia: Westmin-
ster Press, 1968), p. 51.

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A further reason why theological preaching should be emphasized is the
abundant market for its wares. The theological preacher does not have
many competitors. The approbation of the people is not always immediate,
but it is lasting when it comes. This is the secular justification for theological
preaching. There are, as I hope to indicate, more theological reasons to jus-
tify theological preaching. All preaching is by nature theological. The ref-
erence here is to preaching that is informed by the best theology of the
tradition.

I

Jesus came preaching.3 His followers have preached ever since. Some-
times preaching occurs in great established churches, with marvelous music,
with an established liturgy and with a budget which finances both preaching
and the operation of the congregation. Much preaching, however, has taken
place not in established churches, certainly not in great churches or in ca-
thedrals, but along the highways, in empty stores, on the frontiers of life.
Preachers have gone forth not because they were offered a job or given
financial security, but because they felt a compelling call by God to preach
the gospel and to establish churches. The church in which I grew up was
established by lay people in the 1760s, and for many years it was maintained
by pastors who had to earn at least part of their living in non-ecclesiastical
endeavors. The roll of the great preachers has to include the Bonifaces, the
Columbas, the Farels, the Wesleys, the Peter Cartwrights and Sheldon Jack-
sons. There is finally only one justification for preaching, and that is the call
of God. The support of an established church may make preaching more
comfortable, but it cannot justify it.

Preaching is the announcement of the salvation that has come in Jesus
Christ, calling people to repentance and seeking to build up the Christian
community. Evangelism, according to Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the
New Testament , is proclamation with authority and power. Signs and won-
ders accompany the evangelical message. They belong together, for the
Word is powerful and effective.4

Many patterns of preaching are helpful. Yet there are good reasons to
insist that the recovery of theological preaching, especially in the Reformed
pattern, is crucial to the renewal of the church. This preaching responds to
the crisis of a pluralistic secular society by providing a coherent vision of

3 Mark 1:14.

3 Theological Dictionary of the New Testament , ed. Gerhard Kind (Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1964), s.v. “evangelizomai,” by Gerhard Friedrich, 2:720.

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227

reality, rooted in the theological reflections of almost two millennia and by
enabling the Christian to find a theologically intelligible place in the world
and in society.

This particular pattern of preaching has received three clear, precise for-
mulations from John Calvin, from the Puritans, and from Karl Barth.

Calvin’s famous letter to the protector Somerset in 1548 concerning the
reformation of the church in England contains a good introduction to Cal-
vin’s general understanding of the preacher’s task.

I speak thus, Monsignor, because it appears to me that there is very
little preaching of a lively kind in the kingdom, but that the greater
part deliver it by way of reading from a written discourse. I see very
well the necessity which constrains you to that; for in the first place
you have not, as I believe, such well-approved and competent pastors
as you desire. Wherefore, you need forthwith to supply this want. Sec-
ondly, there may very likely be among them many flightly persons who
would go beyond all bounds, sowing their own silly fancies, as often
happens on occasion of a change. But all these considerations ought not
to hinder the ordinance of Jesus Christ from having free course in the
preaching of the gospel.

Now, this preaching ought not to be lifeless but lively, to teach, to
exalt, to reprove, as Saint Paul says in speaking thereof to Timothy (2
Tim. 3). So indeed, that if an unbeliever enter, he may be so effectively
arrested and convinced as to give glory to God, as Paul says in another
passage (1 Cor. 14). You are also aware, Monsignor, how he speaks of
the lively power and energy with which they ought to speak, who
would approve themselves as good and faithful ministers of God, who
must not make a parade of rhetoric, only to gain esteem for themselves;
but that the Spirit of God ought to sound forth by their voice, so as to
work with mighty energy. Whatever may be the amount of danger to
be feared, that ought not to hinder the Spirit of God from having lib-
erty and free course in those to whom he has given grace for the edi-
fying of the church.5

Calvin understood preaching to be the will of God for his church. The
justification for preaching is not in its effectiveness for education or reform.
It is not a practice for which other practices may be substituted should they
prove to be more popular or useful. Preaching is rooted in the will and the

5 John Calvin, Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of
Publication, 1858), 2:190-191.

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intention of God. The preacher, Calvin dared to say, was the mouth of
God.6 God does not wish to be heard but by the voice of his ministers.7

Calvin had no illusions about the impact of sermons. He knew, as he said
in one sermon, that there were as many people in the tavern as at the ser-
mon.8 He knew that preaching would create problems and difficulties. It
kills as well as makes alive; it hardens as well as renews.9 The validity of
preaching does not depend upon the response it elicits. It is a witness or a
testimony that God wills to be made in his world even if all reject it.

This emphasis upon the foundation of preaching in the will of God
should not obscure Calvin’s practical concern for edification. He preached
to edify, to convince. Certainly on the human level he had confidence in its
power. On a deeper level, however, he found justification for preaching not
in its edification or in its power under the Holy Spirit to create the Christian
person and a Christian society, but in the intention of God.

Calvin understood preaching to be a sacrament of the saving presence of
God. Stauffer suggests that preaching for Calvin was not only a moment of
worship, not only a task of the church, but also something of a divine epiph-
any. “When the gospel is preached in the name of God, it is as if God
himself spoke in person.”10 In the Institutes (IV, 14, 26), he quotes Augustine,
who spoke of words as signs. In preaching, the Holy Spirit uses the words
of the preacher as an occasion for the presence of God in grace and in mercy.
In this sense, the actual words of the sermon are comparable to the elements

6 John Calvin, Commentary on Is. 55:11.

7 Calvin, Commentary on Is. 50:10.

8 “If there be one day in the week reserved for religious instruction when they have spent
six days in their own business, they are apt to spend the day which is set apart for worship,
in play and pastime; some rove about the fields, others go to taverns to quaff; and there are
undoubtedly at this time as many at the last mentioned place, as we here assembled in the
name of God.” Sermon on 1 Tim. 3:16.

’Calvin, Commentary on 2 Cor. 2:15; Commentary on Is. 6:10.

lo The following paragraph from the third sermon of Calvin on Jacob and Esau states a
basic element of his doctrine of preaching: “When the Gospel is preached in the name of
God, this is as much as if he himself did speak in his own person: and yet all come not to
Jesus Christ. There are a great many that go back the more when they have heard the Gospel:
for then the devil kindles them in such a rage, that they are more outrageous than ever before,
and this comes to pass, because there is a twofold hearing: the one is preaching; for the voice
of a man will not enter into the hearts of his hearers. I speak, but it behooves that I hear
myself being taught by the Spirit of God: For otherwise the word which proceeds from my
mouth should profit me no more than it does all others, except it be given me from above,
and not out of mine own head. Therefore the voice of man is nothing but a sound that
vanishes in the air, and notwithstanding it is the power of God to salvation to all believers
(saith Saint Paul). When then God speaketh unto us, by the mouth of men, then he adjoins
the inward grace of his Holy Spirit, to the end, that the doctrine be not profitable, but that it
may bring forth fruit. See then how we hear the heavenly father: that is to say when he
speaketh secretly unto us by his Holy Spirit; and then we come unto our Lord Jesus Christ.”

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of the sacraments.11 The word in preaching accomplishes nothing apart
from the work of the Holy Spirit, who illuminates the mind. (For Calvin,
preaching is sacramental in context of the order of salvation and as a means
of grace, and not in the more general sense by which all creation may be
sacramental. The distinction is important for Calvin, though he never ex-
plicated the meaning. The sense in which common grace may be saving is a
modern question, not an issue in which Calvin was interested.)

The power of preaching as the Word of God does not reside in the sound
of the words themselves, or even in their meaning. The power of preaching
is the act of the Holy Spirit, which makes the words, the sound and their
meaning, the occasion of the voice of God. “If the same sermon is preached,
say to a hundred people, twenty receive it with ready obedience of faith,
while the rest hold it valueless, or laugh, or hiss, or loath it.”12 Yet the ulti-
mate difference in the response does not reside in the sermon, the sound of
the words, the rhetoric, or the meaning, but in the electing grace of God.

Calvin’s sacramental doctrine of preaching enabled him on the one hand
to understand preaching as a very human work and, on the other hand, as
the work of God. The characteristic perspective that pervades all Calvin’s
theology, which on the one hand emphasizes the transcendence of God and
refuses to identify the transcendent God with any finite or determinate ob-
ject, and which on the other hand asserts the immanence of God in creation,
and more particularly in the means of grace, has particular application to
preaching. From one perspective, the human work of the sermon is critically
important. The sermon’s fidelity to Scripture, the skill of the syntax and
rhetoric, and the liveliness of the delivery are of fundamental importance
and ought not to be minimized. From another perspective, a sermon is the
work of the Spirit of God, which may make a poor sermon the occasion of
God’s presence and a brilliant sermon barren of power. Calvin unites the
work of God and the work of man in the sacrament and in preaching with-

11 The Holy Spirit seems to have the same relation to the Word, both in Scripture and in
preaching, as it does to elements in the Sacraments, cf. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, i960), 4.1.6 and 4. 14. 9-19. See also Hendrikus Berkhof, Christian Fatth: An Introduction
to the Study of the Faith , rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1986),
360-362; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 1.1:56.

The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 65 defines preaching in a similar manner: “Q. 65.
Since, then, faith alone makes us share in Christ and all his benefits, where does such faith
originate? A. The Holy Spirit creates it in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel,
and confirms it by the use of the holy Sacraments.” Cf. The Westminster Shorter Catechism,
Question 89.

12 Calvin, Institutes, 3.24.12. In a sermon on Jacob and Esau the percentage is lowered to
ten percent.

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out separation, without change, and without confusion. In practice he may
have claimed too much for the minister and the words of the sermon. Yet
in doctrine he knew that the words of the sermon are at best frail, human
words, but words which can by the power of the Holy Spirit become the
occasion of the presence of God.'3 For Calvin as for Luther, “the ears alone
are the organ of the Christian man.”'1 Hearing the Word of God makes one
worthy of the name Christian.

John Calvin’s preaching presupposes a biblical and theological frame-
work. Sermons were part of a structured and clear vision of reality. Calvin’s
hearers knew that human life had its origin in the purposes of God and that
God would determine its destiny. Human life was lived under the Lordship
of God whose purposes would be accomplished in human history. The clar-
ity of the biblical and theological framework made each sermon part of one
clear vision of reality. Calvin had written the Institutes for this purpose —
that is, to provide a coherent framework for his preaching and teaching.'5

Calvin’s theology may lack homogeneity, but not unity. For example, his
understanding of the transcendence and immanence of God, the distinction
between Creator and creature, gives a unity to his doctrines of the person of
Christ, of the presence of Jesus Christ in the sacraments, of the church as a
human work and a divine work. Or again, there is a unifying perspective
relating and holding together Calvin's understanding of revelation in Jesus
Christ and general revelation, of grace and nature, and gospel and law, of
church and society. There is a unifying theme, preeminently expressed in
the doctrine of predestination, and permeating everything Calvin said, em-
phasizing the immediacy of the divine activity and the initiative of divine
grace. On a still deeper level, there is the unity created by Calvin’s conviction
that knowledge of God involves knowledge of man and knowledge of man
involves knowledge of God, and that the w hole of theology inheres in the
explication of this relationship between God and man. In sum, Calvin had
a vision of theological reality expressed in the Institutes of the Christian Re-
ligion very similar to Augustine’s in the last twelve books of the City of God.
It is this theological framework which informed all of Calvin’s preaching
and made of his preaching a unity and gave it a direction which otherwise
would have been lacking.

13 Calvin, Commentary on Jn. 14:26, Ezek. 2:2, Is. 29:11.

14 Martin Luther, “Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews 1517-18’’ in Luther: Early The-
ological Worlds, ed. and trans. James Atkinson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), pp.
I94~5-

15 Cf. Prefaces to the Institutes ; “John Calvin to the Reader” (1559) and “Subject Matter of
the Present Work” (1560).

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2 31

Closely related to Calvin’s theological vision of reality is the ground plan
of Scripture that was clearly in his mind. This ground plan, too, is explicated
in the Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Bible as a whole, and Calvin’s
theology as a whole, impinged upon every sermon which he preached, and
all of his sermons fit into one biblical and theological whole.

The importance of this unifying theological and biblical context cannot
be overestimated. It means that the homiletician must be a person knowl-
edgeable in theology and in the Bible if the preacher is to stand in the Re-
formed tradition.

Calvin also had a vision of the holy community. This does not mean that
Calvin had a blueprint which he was seeking to impose upon society. In the
section on the Christian life in the Institutes , Calvin does not provide rules
or regulations.'6 In fact, Calvin was something of a pragmatist, attempting
to relate the Christian gospel to the complicated decisions and issues of hu-
man life. Yet Calvin could have answered the question, Who is a Christian
person and what is a Christian society? with a clarity that gave direction to
his preaching. He refers to the example of Jesus and he emphasizes the
disposition of the self and the relationship of the sell to God, to persons, and
to things. He clearly regarded human life as a vocation from God, a calling
which rendered the humblest task precious in the sight of God.

In sum, Calvin’s preaching was a clear, unadorned proclamation of God’s
works in creation and redemption as set forth in Scripture and in a frame-
work established by the Christian community’s reflection on Scripture. It
called people to decision, created them a community, and gave them an
over-arching vision of reality in which they could understand their own
lives and their place in society.

This Calvinist preaching was powerful. Donald R. Kelley has com-
mented:

In all this ideological uproar arising from religious sentiment the most
effective agent of transmission remained popular preaching. To this
other forms of expression — psalm-singing and iconoclasm, public dia-
logue and disputation — were subordinate. The sermon elaborated and
dramatized other forms of religious expression, including the cate-
chism (which in Calvinist practice furnished material for a year of Sun-
day preaching) and confession; it gave emotional focus to the congre-
gation and public trust to its enthusiasm; it gave impetus to other kinds
of demonstration, both musical and militant; and in general it repre-

16 Calvin, Institutes, 3.6-10.

23 2

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

sented a prime mover of public opinion. In the context of oral culture,
certainly, no other kind of discourse better illustrates the transition
from private conviction to public cause, from a profession of faith to
concerted propaganda and even a platform of action. In the Reforma-
tion as in earliest Christian times the ideological priority was clear —
“And the gospel must first be published among all nations” (Mark
13:10) — and so the sermon now becomes the center of our attention.'7

The second example of Reformed preaching is found in the Westminster
Assembly’s Directory for Worship.'8 The Puritans, like Calvin, believed that
the only opportunity they needed was the freedom to preach the Word of
God. They were convinced that by preaching the grace of God is mediated
to human beings and that thereby society is changed. The history of Puri-
tanism demonstrates the power of preaching to build up communities and
to influence the shape of society.

Puritan preaching, like Calvin’s preaching, took place within a unified
theological vision of reality. This vision found classic expression in the
Westminster Confession and catechisms. Furthermore, the Puritans had an
even clearer vision than Calvin of who is a Christian person and what is a
Christian society. This, too, had been delineated in the Westminster expo-
sition of the Ten Commandments. Puritan preaching was in intention and
in fact theological and biblical.

The Puritans, like Calvin, also gave attention to the style of preaching.
They too emphasized that preaching must be plain style, free from rhetori-
cal flourishes. From the beginning, the Reformed had emphasized simplic-
ity and authenticity.'9 These virtues were closely related to their theology
and their understanding of the reformation of the church. Their intention
was the evangelization of the church, that is, the removing of all human
trifles and flourishes which impede the grace of God. God’s grace is neither
the extension of nor contrary to the wisdom of human psychology or public
relations or drama. The church is free to use such wisdom so long as it does
not intrude into the gospel or become a substitute for it. In worship and
preaching human wisdom too easily becomes human trifles which obscure
the gospel. Simplicity for Calvin was very close to sincerity. The simple

17 Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 103.

18 The Westminster Directory , ed. Thomas Leishman (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1901),
pp. 29-37.

19 Calvin, Institutes , 4. 10.14, r9'> 4.15.19; 4.17.43. See also The Westminster Directory , pp. 31-
32. 35-37-

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233

uncovers reality and opens the way for the grace of God. The pretentious,
the pompous, the contrived, the artificial, the too carefully polished cover
up reality and obscure God’s grace.

Plain style preaching was also related to the Christian doctrine of what it
is to be a human being.20 The Augustinians had always insisted upon the
human being as a self, with the capacities of the human spirit to transcend
the self, of the human mind to read off the facts of life, and of the human
will to organize the energies of human existence. This psychology for Calvin
was very simple, but in its simplicity he emphasized the spirit, the under-
standing, and the will. Hence the Christian faith has to be spoken to a re-
sponsible self, and from that human self there must be elicited a deliberate
and conscious response.

The Puritans, as with Calvin, rejected magic, or to put it positively, they
emphasized conscious choice and deliberate decision. Puritan preaching
does not attempt to overpower human beings, or to deceive them. It at-
tempts to engage them and to elicit from them a yes or a no.

The Puritan concern for language appropriate to the Word of God had
very great theological and social significance. For a century and a half the
Puritans struggled with the task of putting the Word of God in English, in
the vernacular. William Haller has written:

The authorized version of 1611 was the culmination of the effort of
a long succession of English churchmen to put the word of God into
the vernacular. Versed though they were in the learned tongues and
reared in the tradition of letters, the translators did not do their work
upon the level of academic Latinized English. Neither, on the other
hand, did they English the Bible upon the everyday or vulgar plane.
They turned their learning and skill to the task of developing out of
the familiar common speech an English appropriate to the lofty matter
they had in hand and yet moving and intelligible to the plain, un-
learned reader. The result was the marvellous idiom of the English
Bible.21

This language of the English Bible shaped American culture decisively
until the Second World War. In its simplicity it opened reality and in its
sensitivity to the majesty of its message it did and does deeply move people.
Hence it was a manner of speaking very appropriate to the theological re-

20 William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938),
ch. 4, especially p. 135.

2' Ibid., p. 128.

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ality. Those who heard the Puritans had a sense of reality. The hearers felt
the force and reality about which the preacher was speaking. As Perkins
put it, preaching must “observe an admirable plainness and an admirable
powerfulness so that the ordinary person may understand and be powerfully
moved.”22

Puritan preaching in which the clarity and precision of the message is the
medium and means of persuasion requires great personal gifts, concentra-
tion, and persistence. The temptation is always present to use gimmicks and
tricks to persuade. Robert Baillie, the Scottish Commissioner to the West-
minster Assembly, protested in 1654 “the new guise of preaching” which
“in a high, romancing, unscriptural style, tickling the ear for the present,
and moving the affections in some, but leaving . . . little or nought to the
memory or understanding. This we must misken, for we cannot help it.”23

The Puritans had not only worked on language. They were also clear
about the form of the sermon. Their homiletics received classical statements
in William Perkins’ The Art of Prophesying 24 and in the homiletical section
of the Westminster Directory of Worship. The sermon contains the explica-
tion of the text, the doctrine, and finally the application. The Puritan
preachers gave great attention to the doctrine, the general principles con-
tained in the text, but they concentrated on the applications, on the ways
this text transformed human life. The events of the soul were of cosmic
significance, and the preachers charted in detail how the self moves from sin
to victory.

A third explicit doctrine of preaching is to be found in the theology of
Karl Barth. As is well known, Karl Barth intended his theology to be a
preacher’s theology. He was convinced that the problem in the life of the
church is the corruption of the message, and that if we can get the message
right and proclaim it with clarity, under the power of the Holy Spirit it will
elicit a proper response.

22 William Perkins, “Treatise of the Duties and Dignities of the Ministrie” in The Worses
of That Famous Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins (1609),
3:430.

23 Robert Baillie, “Letter to Mr. William Spang (Postscript), 21st July” in The Letters and
Journals of Robert Baillie, A.M.: Principal of the University of Glasgow , ed. David Laing (Ed-
inburgh: Robert Ogle, 1842), 3:258-9.

24 “The order and sum of the sacred and only method of preaching: 1. To read the text
distinctly out of the canonical scriptures; 2. To give the sense and understanding of it being
read, by the scripture itself; 3. To collect a few and profitable points of doctrine out of the
natural sense; 4. To apply, if he have the gift, the doctrines rightly collected to the life and
manners of men in a simple and plain speech. The sum of the sum: Preach one Christ by
Christ to the praise of Christ” (William Perkins, "The Art of Prophesying” in The Woif of
William Perkins, ed. Ian Brevard [Appleford, England: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970], pp.
325-349)-

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235

Karl Barth’s doctrine of preaching is summarized in his conviction that
there has been committed to the church “the gospel, i.e., the good glad tid-
ings of Jesus Christ, of the real act and true revelation of the goodness in
which God has willed to make, and has in fact made himself the God of
man and man his man. This great yes is its cause. It has no other task beside
this.”25

The church has the task of the “explicit proclamation of the gospel in the
assembly of the community, in the midst of divine service, where it is also
heard directly or indirectly by the world, that is, in what is denoted by the
overburdened but unavoidable term ‘preaching.’ ”26 Preaching differs both
from the exposition of Scripture and from theological study or lecturing.
“Preaching does not reflect, reason, dispute, or academically instruct. It pro-
claims, summons, invites and commands.”27 Preaching is a work of human
speech, but it is of decisive significance for the life of the church. Indeed, the
church lives by hearing the Word of God in preaching. The chief task of
theology is to examine the church’s proclamation, primarily in preaching, in
the light of the word of God in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture. Preach-
ing is the point where the whole theological task comes to focus. Barth him-
self argued that one reason for calling Schleiermacher a Christian theologian
was his interest in preaching.28 One cannot be a theologian in the Calvinist
and Barthian sense without being a preacher. One real test of all theology
for John Calvin was its preachableness.29 A theology which cannot be
preached and which does not have preaching as its goal is not from the
Reformed perspective a legitimate theology in the church.

These three doctrines of the sermon from Calvin, the Puritans, and Karl
Barth have common emphases, (i) Preaching is proclamation of the gos-
pel— what God has done for human beings in creation, judgment, and re-
demption. (2) Human life, especially in decisions of the will, has cosmic
significance and the gospel must be applied to it. (3) All of this is done in
the light of a biblical and theological vision of reality. The preacher pro-
claims the faith of the church. (4) Preaching is the means by which God’s
grace is mediated and the church as a community is established.

25 Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2:800.

26 Ibid., p. 867.

27 Ibid., p. 869.

28 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History
(Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1973), pp. 429-30.

29 See Calvin’s prefaces to the Institutes and his insistence that true theology edifies. See
also Corpus Reformatorum: Joannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. Guilielmus
Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke et Filium,
1863-1897), 33:709.

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This preaching presupposes the highest levels of biblical and theological
knowledge as well as the capacity to express it in clear, coherent English
sentences, and to deliver it in a lively and effective way.

II

Preaching, especially as it has been practiced in the Reformed tradition,
is at grave risk today. Several characteristics of our society which put
preaching at risk need special mention.

The first is the development of the entertainment industry. This devel-
opment has two consequences. First, it induces people to find the meaning
of life in being entertained. Entertainment (soap operas, athletic events, even
anchor news which turns great events into spectacles) relieve us of uniquely
human responsibilities to think for ourselves, to set goals and to accomplish
them. In addition, entertainment distracts our attention from the critical
issues of life, and finally our heroes become not persons of substance and
achievement so much as celebrities who attract our attention. Form takes
priority over substance. In sum, entertainment, whether it is soap operas or
political spectacles or athletic events, is not simply entertainment but also an
escape from the hard realities of life and from the questions for which
Christian faith is the answer.30

The emergence of the entertainment and communication industry pre-
sents another peril to preaching. The communications industry has devel-
oped skills and techniques which enable human beings of very limited
greatness, education, and culture to have enormous power over other hu-
man beings. This was dramatically illustrated in the movie of a few years
ago entitled Marjoe. Marjoe was a child evangelist, named after Mary and
Joseph. As a child he grew up knowing the techniques and skills of the
trade. The movie depicts him as an adult who has repudiated the faith and
the tradition. He illustrates, however, the way in which the techniques, the
procedures, the skills of the revivalist who himself no longer believes can
elicit predicted responses, whether these responses are the giving of money
or physical manifestations such as uncontrolled body motions. Speaking in
tongues can be elicited by atheists who know the techniques, if they have a
willing audience.

The movie Marjoe is offensive to Christian sensibilities. It is illustrative

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin Books, 1988). An excel-
lent, readable analysis. “Indeed, in America God favors all those who possess both a talent
and a format to amuse, whether they be preachers, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, teach-
ers or journalists. In America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers” (5).
When preaching becomes amusing it approaches blasphemy.

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of human fraud at the worst. However, those in the ministry who have the
strength to see it ought to see the movie. Religion is always a narrow razor’s
edge away from magic.31 Magic in relationship to God is the attempt to get
control of God and to fasten the infinite and indeterminate God to that
which is finite and determinate, whether it be the bread and wine of the
sacrament or the techniques of the revivalist. Magic in relationship to hu-
man beings is the effort to bypass conscious choice and decision. One of the
greatest temptations for the minister is the practice of magic. On this point
we should all be critically self-critical.

The modern communications industry reverses the traditional order of
homiletical achievement. Classically, preaching has arisen out of the sub-
stance of what is proclaimed. The Christian message determined the pattern
and form of preaching. The powerfulness of the message in determining the
form was dramatically illustrated in the Puritan style and use of language.
Today increasingly form and style take precedence over substance. Reinhold
Niebuhr in his diary records his commitment that he would forsake the
attempt to be a pretty preacher. The “pretty” preacher at least works at the
task, and for this reason one hesitates to criticize in a day when much
preaching is slovenly and careless. Nevertheless, Niebuhr was right. There
is an incongruity between the gospel and a pretty sermon. This is especially
true in the Reformed tradition. There must be something rough-hewn
about the sermon. For Reformed preaching, the message is in a real sense
the medium, and the worst heresy in preaching is for the medium to become
the message.

The development of the communications industry, as well as the enter-
tainment industry, jeopardizes good preaching by tempting persons to sub-
ordinate content to form and to practices which may be humanly effective
but which are theologically destructive.

Great preaching depends upon the integrity of the human heart and
mind, on the part of both the preacher and the congregation. It is not
through the practice of magic or the communication arts, but through the
integrity of the proclamation itself which under God creates the Christian
community.

Second, preaching is threatened today by the breakdown of a coherent
understanding of human reality, of life in the world, in society, and in the
church.

31 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era , abridged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1 957)» PP- 99FF- ; Paul T \Y\cYi, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963),
3:122.

23»

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Until quite recently, a basically Christian construction of reality was im-
plicit in the life of society. While the society itself may have given only
tentative commitment, it at least declared its allegiance to a Christian vision
of what it is to be a human being in the world. This Christian vision lived
for many years in very attenuated forms, but nevertheless it lived.52

The constructive coherent vision of reality that was implicit in our society
greatly strengthened the church in its proclamation. There was a time in
American life when evangelism was little more than bringing persons who
were basically Christian in their interpretation of reality into the organized
life of the church. Today our society less and less has any legitimating un-
derstanding of what it is to be a human being and of the place of human
beings in the world. There is no general agreement about the origin of hu-
man life or the destiny of human life or the meaning of human life between
birth and death. This means that increasingly the preacher can no longer
depend upon a knowledge of the history of Israel or a general theistic con-
sensus. The situation is more radical than that which faced Peter, or that
which faced Paul at Mars Hill. For the first time, we live in an increasingly
secular culture with no pervasive natural theology as well as little biblical
knowledge. In Calvin’s day an atheist was one who denied that God was
active in the world. Today atheism is denial of any cosmic purpose.

This breakdown of the over-arching coherent view of the human reality
in the world is true not only of society but also of the church. Most signifi-
cantly, it is increasingly true in theological education. The ordination of
ministers and the creation of theological seminaries to prepare pastors for
the church is predicated upon the assumption that the minister is not free
to express his or her idiosyncratic ideas about the meaning of human life.
Ordination, however, means that the minister bears witness to the Christian
faith as it has been understood and mediated through the centuries by the
Christian community. This fact has both practical and theological signifi-
cance. It has practical significance because the pastor is not always at an
intense level of theological conviction when he or she is asked to perform a
specifically Christian service. One may be asked to conduct a funeral service
at the very moment when one’s faith in eternal life is wavering. The min-
ister must have the will to believe what the churches believe. The responsi-
bility of the minister on that occasion is not to testify to the vagaries of his
or her own soul but to bear witness in this crisis for the church community

32 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1988), Ch. 10.

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to the church’s faith, a faith that has received the approbation of the people
of God through the centuries.

This point also has theological significance. It means that ministers and
theologians must first of all understand their role in the church as interpret-
ers of the tradition, not as the creative inventors of new theologies. The
theological community may, as all human communities, be dominated by
the hubris to create the great new theology. The history of the past thirty
years is strewn with the wreckage of such attempts. There have been great
creative theological developments in the Christian community, but these
have usually been wrought by persons who were very modest, who had not
set out to be the great creative theologian, but who in being faithful inter-
preters of the tradition had restated the tradition in a persuasive way in the
idiom of a new time.

The first task of a pastor of a church or a theological seminary is faithfully
and convincingly to tradition the Christian faith as it has been handed on to
us in trust from those who built our churches and our seminaries.

The problem of the breakdown of a coherent worldview is complicated
by the loss of Christian knowledge. In a former day, preachers could assume
that the members of their congregations had certain biblical knowledge, that
they understood theological terms, even if they were in other ways unedu-
cated. Those who have been pastors of many old churches have stood in awe
in the presence of the theological wisdom of persons with very little formal
education. We now have churches in which there is no network of infor-
mation which makes theological conversation possible.

The problem is even deeper, and involves theological competence, a prob-
lem that can be illustrated in changes in the theological curriculum since
World War II. In 1940, in almost every Presbyterian seminary, theology was
taught from a basic text. Whether this text was Hodge or Strong or Berkhof
did not really matter;33 they were all essentially the same working out of the
theology of seventeenth-century Protestantism as modified in particular by
the American evangelical experience. These theological textbooks were
written in a pattern that is easy to learn. The Puritans sought to write the-
ology so that its basic structure could be quickly memorized.34 Each theo-

33 Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology , 2d ed., rev. and enl. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1941); Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology , 3 vols. (New York:
C. Scribner, 1911); Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Com-
monplace Boop Designed for the Use of Theological Students, 7th ed., rev. and enl. (New York:
A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1902).

34 See the writings of William Perkins in The Worp of William Per pins. Also see J. Wolle-

240

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

logical course covered the gamut of theology from a perspective that had
been worked out in the Christian community. The student with average
ability but with diligence could grasp a coherent statement of the faith. This
enabled the pastor to become an effective theologian who could give an
answer that had been formulated in the church’s history to all the questions
that members of congregations were likely to ask. This was a realizable goal,
and as a result, persons of very limited ability went out and still proclaimed
a coherent view of reality that enabled people to find their place in the
world.

When one contrasts the situation of forty years ago with the teaching of
theology today, certain points become immediately clear. In few if any sem-
inaries is one dogmatic text the basic form of instruction for young theolo-
gians, with the exception perhaps of the Lutheran and the Baptist churches.
In most Presbyterian seminaries, graduates frequently leave the seminary
having read a few pages of Niebuhr, a few pages of Barth, a few pages of
Tillich, a few pages of the experimental theologies of the last thirty years,
without having a clear grasp of any coherent pattern of theology which has
received the approbation of the people of God through use in the church
over a period of time. The result is all too frequently that a person is called
to preach without having any coherent view of reality and without being
able to say in simple outline to an inquirer what it is to be a member of the
Christian community, that is, in a way which distinguishes the church from
a civic club, from a political party, from a therapy group, or from many
other good and useful human communities.

There cannot be a recovery of great preaching until there is the recovery
of a theological framework for preaching, both on the part of the preacher
and on the part of the congregation.

Thirdly, preaching today has a new audience, especially outside the
church, but also within the church. Willem A. Visser 't Hooft, in one of his
last essays, pointed out that three faiths were battling for the soul of Europe:
paganism, secular humanism, and Christian faith.35

Paganism finds the meaning of life in its vitalities and energies, particu-
larly in the intensification of those vitalities and energies. It defines life pri-
marily in terms of the physical realities of nature. Modern paganism does

bius, “Compendium Theologiae Christianae” in Reformed Dogmatics, ed. and trans. John W.
Beardslee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, “Evangelism among Europe’s Neo-Pagans,” International Review
of Mission 66, no. 264 (October 1977): 349-60. Cf. Marc H. Spindler, “Europe’s Neo-Pagan-
lsm: A Perverse Inculturation,” International Bulletin 11, no. 1 (January 1987): 8-1 1.

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241

not necessarily endow these vitalities and energies with any divine power,
but simply affirms that in the ecstasy and in the intoxication that comes from
the intensification of these energies, the meaning of life is found.

The second faith which battles for the soul of human beings in Europe
and, in particular, in American society, is secular humanism.36 In many
ways, secular humanism is a product of Christian faith. There has been no
finer statement of secular humanism than that which was produced by John
Dewey, a former theological student, entitled A Common Faith. 37 Dewey
wanted to have religious values without religion, and without theology.
Christians may argue that secular humanism is possible only in a society
that is still living off of the theological capital of the Christian faith, which
invests human life with the significance and dignity of the Creator, and
which, on the basis of God’s work in creation and redemption, affirms that
human life has abiding significance over against the overwhelming evidence
in the world that it does not. Secular humanism is an especially enticing
faith as long as it can assume the presence of those qualities of life that have
historically been rooted not in secular humanism but in the living faith of
the church.

Fourth, preaching can no longer presuppose a Christian society and more
particularly a universal natural theology. A natural theology existed prior to
the church and provided a point of contact for preachers of the ancient
church, however kerygmatic their sermons may have been. A scientific,
technological, secular society is bereft of this kind of reflection. Human na-
ture, the structure of human existence, however, remains the same. There-
fore, the absence of reflection on the questions of human existence and on
the world itself may create a yearning for that which Christian faith declares
to be the real nature of human existence and the world. This will mean that
the language as well as the content of preaching must have the note of reality
and must clearly, precisely, authentically declare the faith and relate it to
concrete human experience.

Preaching that will be effective in the last years of this century will have
to have three dimensions: (1) it will have to provide a biblical and theological
framework for understanding human existence; (2) it will have to give a
specific Christian response both to resurgent paganism and to secular hu-
manism; (3) it will finally have to do what Puritan preaching did — give to

36 James Davison Hunter, “ ‘America’s Fourth Faith’: A Sociological Perspective on Sec-
ular Humanism,” This World 19 (Fall 1987): 101-110.

37 John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934).

242

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

human beings guidance how they may understand the meaning of life and
how to live the Christian life in a pluralistic, secular, mobile society.

Ill

The greatest threat to preaching in the great tradition is theological. The
problem is twofold: the hiatus between academic theology in a secular set-
ting and the church as a community of faith and worship and the issues
which arise out of the pluralism of a secular culture.

The achievement of competence in explicating and proclaiming the faith
requires the discipline of the rational analysis of the faith as well as the
mastery of texts, of ideas and their relationship, of processes, and of the
coherence and consistency of the ideas when put together.38 It also includes
the testing of the integrity of the faith as Barth insisted and the intelligibility
of the faith for human experience as apologetic theologians demanded.39
The movement from the academic study of theology to the confessional
theology of the church and of preaching is not simple. A radical difference
exists between assenting to a proposition and committing one’s life in trust
to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, between risking one’s academic reputa-
tion and risking one’s personal destiny or the destiny of a congregation of
people.40

There is no convincing evidence that theologians today are more rational
or intellectually brighter than theologians of earlier generations. There is
evidence that the secular culture has an eroding effect on Christian faith. A
recent study of biblical interpretation concludes that a secular culture has
now achieved a “thoroughgoing nontheological study of Scripture.”4' Chris-
tian theology is also studied as one among many theologies or philosophies.
The study of Scripture and theology in a secular context has value for the
Christian community. Tillich once insisted that external criticism is neces-
sary for the health of Protestantism.42 The study of the faith by those who

38 Schubert M. Ogden, On Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986); Hendrikus
Berkhof, Introduction to the Study of Dogmatics, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.
B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1985).

39 Barth, Church Dogmatics, i.i:248ff. and Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).

40 No contemporary theologian understands this problem better than Albert C. Outler,
who in a remarkable way combined the academic and the kerygmatic. See Albert Outler,
The Rule of Grace (Melbourne: Uniting Church Press, 1982).

4' Robert Morgan and John Barton, Biblical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), p. 169; cf. p. 1 7 1 . “In a secular culture, to ignore the religious dimensions when
handling religious texts implies acceptance ot an alternative view of reality” (p. 277).

42 “In every Protestant form the religious element must be related to, and questioned by, a
secular element” (Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, p. 214).

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243

do not affirm the faith is an option for a secular university. Yet the church
must assess the significance of such study for its own life. There is no evi-
dence that I know that indicates that the non-theological study of Scripture
or the secular study of theology can prepare persons to gather congregations
and to build them up as the communion of saints. Even in the seminaries of
the church the movement from academic theology to kerygmatic theology
is not automatic or easy.

Theology for the past two centuries has also been preoccupied with a
skepticism about the reality of what Christians perceive to be the revelation
of God and about the adequacy of language to express such a revelation, or
to put it another way, with the question of whether theology is possible.43
This is a question which a secular culture forces Christian theologians to
ponder. For some the question may never be answered. But the quandary
and anguish is not the gospel or the Christian message. The acceptance of
the calling to preach and to teach the faith means that the question of the
possibility of Christian faith has been resolved as far as human beings can
answer such questions. All of us have to pray, “Lord I believe, help thou my
unbelief.”44 None can boast. Yet the acceptance of the calling to preach and
teach in the church presupposes that the pastor or teacher has with “fear
and trembling” made this commitment as a responsible human act. Until
this commitment is made, preaching as the New Testament and the church
have conceived it is not possible. No other quality is as basic for Christian
preaching as this commitment.

The contemporary discussion about the possibility of theology or the
foundation of theology or the public character of theology is new only in
idiom. New Testament Christians were aware that one comes to confess
that Jesus is the Christ only by the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no
evidence that their faith had any other foundation than Jesus Christ. They
went forth to preach this good news publicly to all people. John Calvin was
surely aware of doubt. Yet in the opening chapters of the Institutes he delib-
erately adopts the theological wisdom of Augustine as his own. We believe
in order to understand. For him the “proof’ of Christian faith on the human

« Cf. A History of Christian Doctrine, ed. Hubert Cunliffe-Jones (Edinburgh: T. &
T. Clark, 1978), 1 1 - 1 3 ; Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century , vol. 1
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972). For an excellent current review see Wil-
liam Placher, Unapologetic Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1989). Jeffrey Stout’s
comment concerning the preoccupation of theologians with methodology is to the point.
Theologians who spend too much time on method “become increasingly isolated from
churches as well as cultural forums” (Jeffrey Sioux., Ethics After Babel [Boston: Beacon Press,
1988], p. 163).

44 Mk. 9:24.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

244

level was rhetorical, the persuasive exposition of the faith in the language of
the people.

In the present theological context the essential condition for preaching is
the answer to the question, “But who do you say that 1 am?”4S The Christian
community did not have its origin in the understanding that Jesus was a
stoic wiseman, or a revolutionary or a prophet of Sophia, but in the passion-
ate conviction that he was the Christ, the Word made flesh, and that in his
life, death, and resurrection God wrought salvation for all people. It is pos-
sible to be a responsible human being without this commitment, but one
cannot be a Christian without it, certainly not a Christian preacher.

Another threat to preaching with great practical significance is the plu-
ralism of our society, the implicit assumption that there are many roads to
God.

The unified communities of the past are now gone. John Calvin could
not have imagined denominationalism, much less a secular society in which
not only Christian groups but non-Christian groups have equal access and
freedom.

Pluralism, however, is not a totally new phenomenon. The church in the
second century, for example, lived in the midst of a highly pluralistic society,
and on the human level it ran the risk of disappearing in the social mix of
that society.

Today pluralism confronts us in at least three ways: practically, socially,
theologically.46

There is the simple historical, practical fact of pluralism. Many of our
neighbors share neither our faith nor our style of life nor our understanding
of human responsibility. Secondly, the media continually bombard us with
varied styles of life and remind us of the living religions of the world. Fi-
nally, the history of the world in our time brings us into collision with living
religions in new and dramatic ways, though no doubt it is possible to exag-
gerate the newness. This is not the first time, for example, that the Christian
community has confronted Islam.

45 Mk. 8:29, Mt. 16:15, Lk. 9:20. Many of Jesus’ contemporaries thought of him as the
carpenter’s son, as a blasphemer, as a teacher.

46 Pluralism is used loosely in contemporary discussion with no clear definition of its mean-
ing or its limits. See Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, and jew: An Essay m American Reli-
gious Sociology, new rev. ed. (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, i960); John Murray Cuddihy,
No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury Press, 1978); Uncivil
Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Green-
spahn (New York: Crossroads Publishing Co., 1987); Pushing the Faith: Proselytism and Ci-
vility in a Pluralistic World, ed. Martin E. Marty and Frederick E. Greenspahn (New York:
Crossroads Publishing Co., 1988).

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245

Pluralism confronts us, secondly, in our customs of niceness and polite-
ness. Religion and politics are topics that are not appropriate in polite con-
versation. It is no longer proper to ask a person about his or her religion,
nor is it proper culturally or esthetically to question interfaith marriages.
The acceptance of the existence of other faiths, even on the most basic level
of a pluralistic society, constitutes a psychological problem. How can we, on
the one hand, affirm, practically speaking, that all religions have their valid-
ity, and yet be serious about our own. This is the practical and psychological
problem. It erodes preaching without our knowing it.47

Pluralism also confronts us in theology. Historians of religion are increas-
ingly insisting that the theology of the future must be a theology of world
religions.48 The new theology of pluralism is being expressed with as much
dogmatism, with as much intolerance, and with as many pejorative repre-
sentations of opposing views as any Christian orthodoxy has ever been ex-
pressed, which as with Christian orthodoxy may indicate a basic uncer-
tainty.49 It is an issue with which the church has to deal, in particular

47 No one has expressed this better than Walter Lippmann: “As a consequence of the
modern theory of religious freedom the churches find themselves in an anomalous position.
Inwardly, to their communicants, they continue to assert that they possess the only complete
version of the truth. But outwardly, in their civic relation with other churches and with the
civil power, they preach and practice toleration. The separation of church and state involves
more than a mere logical difficulty for the churchmen. It involves a deep psychological dif-
ficulty for the members of the congregation. As communicants they are expected to believe
without reservation that their church is the only true means of salvation; otherwise the mul-
titude of separate sects would be meaningless. But as citizens they are expected to maintain
a neutral indifference to the claims of all sects, and to resist encroachments by any one sect
upon the religious practices ot the others. This is the best compromise which human wisdom
has yet devised, but it has one inevitable consequence which the superficial advocates of
toleration often overlook. It is difficult to remain warmly convinced that the authority of any
one sect is divine, when as a matter of daily experience all sects have to be treated alike.

“The human soul is not so divided in compartments that a man can be indifferent in one
part of his soul and firmly believing in another. The existence of rival sects, the visible dem-
onstration that none has a monopoly, the habit of neutrality, cannot but dispose men against
an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of one sect. So many fruits, so many loyalties,
are offered to the modern man that at last none seems to him wholly inevitable and fixed in
the order of the universe. The existence of many churches in one community weakens the
foundations of all of them. And that is why every church in the heyday of its power proclaims
itself to be catholic and intolerant.

“But when there are many churches in the same community, none can make wholly good
on the claim that it is catholic. None has that power to discipline the individual which a
universal church exercises” (Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals [New York: The Mac-
millan Co., 1929], pp. 75-76).

48 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Theology and the World’s Religious History” in Toward a
Universal Theology of Religion, ed. Leonard Swidler (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), pp.
51-72; Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Towards a World Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1981); The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. John
Hick and Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).

49 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Idolatry: In Comparative Perspective,” in The Myth of Chris-
tian Uniqueness, pp. 53-68.

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because the theologians who write about the myth of Christian uniqueness
still Rnd their audience and readers in the Christian community. The theo-
logical justification of a radical pluralism is finally a more serious challenge
to traditional Christianity than the existence of pluralism itself.

One of the clearest statements of the radical modification of Christian
faith which some theologians think pluralism demands has been given with
clarity and with vigor by Gordon Kaufman. “From our modern historical
vantage point, however, looking back at the many great and diverse cultural
and religious traditions that have appeared in human history, all of these
diverse conceptions and pictures seem best understood as the product of
human imaginative creativity in the face of the great mystery that life is to
all of us. Out of, and on the basis of such traditions of meaning, value, and
truth, all men and women live.”50 “Christian theology would understand
itself in essentially the same terms that it understands other religious activity
and reflection — namely, as human imaginative response to the necessity to
find orientation for life in a particular historical situation. It would thus
keep itself open to insights, criticism, and correction from other points of
view, including other religious and secular perspectives and worldviews.”5'
“To acknowledge forthrightly and regularly that our theological statements
and claims are simply ours — that they are the products of our own human
study and reflection, and of the spontaneity and creativity of our human
powers, imaginatively to envision a world and our human place within that
world is to set us free from these all too easy but false moves toward au-
thoritarianism, which has characterized Christian theology in the past.”52

Kaufman’s view would seem to undercut any basis for preaching. In the
place of preaching there may be a theological lecture or conversation which
has equal validity with other theological lectures and conversations. If the-
ology is just conversation, just the imaginative construct of human creativity
as Kaufman suggests or as Richard Rorty concludes about philosophy, one
voice in the great conversation, then there is very little to preach.53

Congregations which gather to hear a preacher are called out by their
conviction that the Bible is the Word of God and that Jesus Christ is God
incarnate. This has been true from the first century to the twentieth century.
These two views about the authority of Scripture and about the significance

50 Gordon D. Kaufman, “Religious Diversity, Historical Consciousness, and Christian
Theology,” in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness , p. 8.

5' Ibid., p. 12.

52 Ibid., pp. 12-13.

53 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), pp. 389-94.

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247

of Jesus Christ are now openly challenged, sometimes with more rhetoric,
but sometimes, as in the case of Gordon Kaufman, with great clarity by
many theologians in the life of the church. The public persuasive power of
the new theologies in calling forth worshiping communities is thus far min-
imal.

The advocates of a theology of world religions speak very vigorously
against the triumphalism of the church, against the arrogance of the Chris-
tian claim of uniqueness, and even call the traditional views of the church
idolatry.54 This criticism has to be taken seriously.

How can we, on the one hand, affirm the authority of the Bible as the
Word of God and Jesus Christ as God incarnate and avoid the obvious perils
of triumphalism, arrogance, and idolatry? It is no doubt true that Christian
theologians and Christians have been guilty of all of these, though I know
of no reason to believe they have been any more guilty than are the advo-
cates of a theology of world religions in their own proposals. Arrogance,
triumphalism, idolatry are universal human problems. Modern secular uni-
versities, Harvard and Yale, for example, illustrate the human problem of
arrogance and ruthless, even violent, intolerance of dissenting opinion quite
as much as the church ever has.55

The solutions which pluralism offers are all at the expense of the integrity
of Christian faith. From the pluralist perspective, the claim that the Word
became flesh is always foolishness or a scandal. Only within the community
is Jesus Christ the power and wisdom of God for salvation. The theological
language from the tradition and from the Bible still has great power. One
evidence of this is use of the language as well as the resources of the com-
munity by scholars whose own theology is very different from that of the
church.

The constructive facing of the problem of pluralism begins with the ques-
tion of stance or method. John Knox, long-time professor of New Testa-
ment at Union Theological Seminary in New York, writing in 1968, de-
clared:

It [Christian inquiry] embraces every aspect of man’s life, and indeed

of the cosmos; but the base from which the inquiry proceeds is the

54 Cf. The Myth of Christian Uniqueness : see the essay by John Hick, “The Non- Absolute-
ness of Christianity,” 16-36; also Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Idolatry: In Comparative Per-
spective,” pp. 53-68.

55 Allen Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987),
3 1 3-335; Thomas E. Spahn, “Halls of Ivy, Walls of Glass,” Richmond Times Dispatch, March
12, 1989.

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Church’s existence in its concrete reality and the recognition that cer-
tain truths about God and man are expressed in that existence. The
Church will vigorously encourage this inquiry in order not only to
identify these truths clearly and surely and thus inform, confirm, and
enrich the Christian experience of its members, but also to be in posi-
tion to interpret them as far as possible in terms which those outside
the Church can understand.

On the other hand, I do not see that the Church has any obligation,
or that it belongs to its nature, to encourage theological inquiry which
does not begin with what I have called this existential a priori. I do not
mean that it will forbid (if it has the power) or impede inquiry con-
ducted on the basis of other presuppositions, nor do I mean that the
Church’s own thinking may not often be corrected, enlarged, and
quickened by the challenge of such thinking by others; but I cannot
see that the Church itself could appropriately carry on such inquiry
without denying itself. In a word, the Church’s theological inquiry will
be its own , just as any individual’s theological inquiry will be his own,
proceeding from premises established within its own life (and thus in
a sense “revealed”), however strongly supported by, because illumina-
tive of, the world and human experience as a whole these premises may
prove to be.56

Etienne Gilson, the Thomist scholar, in his autobiography confesses that
for forty years he misread Thomas, refusing to see that he was a theologian,
not a philosopher.57 As a theologian he began with revelation and as a man
of faith was free to welcome all truth from whichever side it came. Augus-
tine said, Love God and do what you will. A disciple of Thomas can say,
“Believe and think what you will. Like charity, faith is a liberator. ”58 The
starting point is faith. “The church knows that refusing the temptations of
vain philosophy she may suffer temporary losses but, by giving in, she would
cease to exist.”59 The God whose existence we demonstrate is but part of the
God whose existence we hold to be true on the strength of our faith in His
words. . . . The God of rational knowledge is included with the God of
faith.60

56 John Knox, “The Identifiability of the Church,” in Theological Freedom and Social Re-
sponsibility (New York: Seabury Press, 1967), p. 69.

57 Etienne Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology , trans. Cecile Gilson (New York: Random
House, 1962), p. 107.

5® Ibid., p. 204.

59 Ibid., p. 209.

60 Etienne Gilson, Elements of Christian Philosophy (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday & Com-
pany, i960), p. 54.

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249

The public and persuasive power of theology and preaching has not his-
torically been based on theological argument that begins on some neutral
ground, if there is such, certainly not on a secular ground. The great per-
suaders or preachers such as Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas, Luther, Cal-
vin, Wesley always began with revelation and spoke from the perspective of
faith. All theology is public, that is, spoken to human beings as human be-
ings calling them to decision. Preaching which explicates the faith with clar-
ity and which seeks to understand the social, political, cultural, economic,
and personal dimensions of life in the light of that faith has always per-
suaded people. Augustine and Calvin alike understood that rhetoric, which
is theologically responsible, is a “proof’ of Christian faith.6' On the human
level the church has lived by the persuasiveness of preaching. There is abun-
dant evidence in the statistics of American church life today that this is still
true, even when the preaching is theologically inept.62

If we begin with pluralism, there is no possibility of maintaining the his-
torical Christian faith. If we begin with our deepest Christian commitments
about Jesus Christ, there are at least five affirmations we can make that help
us to deal constructively with the truth wherever it may be found as well as
the fact of pluralism.

1. The first is pragmatic and prudential. A variety of religious groups
exist in our society. The pragmatic and prudential question is how these
religious communities who do in fact exist can operate in the same society.
This is no simple question, and it may be revealed, as time goes on, that
communities are not possible unless there is a greater consensus than seems
to be true today.63 In any case, one response is pragmatic and prudential, to
work out ways that diverse groups can live together with decency and with
dignity.

2. The second response is humility. Humility is implicit in the Christian
doctrine of creation which affirms that we are creatures of a particular time
and space and of limited intellectual powers. The very fact that we are crea-
tures means that our perspective, even the perspective of university profes-

61 William Bouwsma, “Calvinism as a Renaissance Artifact” in Papers presented at a col-
loquium on Calvin Studies at Davidson College Presbyterian Church and Davidson College,
1985. Also Bouwsma, “Calvin and the Renaissance Crisis of Knowing” in Calvin Theological
journal 17, no. 2 (November 1982): 190-21 1.

62 The strong rhetorical tradition of preaching in Baptist and even Assembly of God
churches persuades obviously highly educated modern persons, as is indicated by the statistics
of these churches as well as their presence in affluent suburbs and in the vicinity of univer-
sities.

63 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Without Consensus There is no Consent,” The Center Magazine 4,
no. 4 (July/August 1971): 2-9. The presence of Islamic communities in Britain and America
raises questions for a pluralistic society for which no adequate answer has been given.

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sors, is parochial. Furthermore, Christian theology affirms that all human
beings are sinners. As Reinhold Niebuhr liked to insist, it seems impossible
for us not to affirm that our truth is the truth, to realize that we both have
and do not have the truth.64 Yet as Richard Niebuhr wrote, the relativity of
our perception of the truth does not mean that that which we perceive is
relative.65

Christian doctrine requires a humility which recognizes the human lim-
itations of finite intelligence, of a particular human experience, of a location
in a specific space, time, and social group, and the sinful limitation of self-
interest. This humility applies to the advocates of the relativity of all human
awareness, of the sociology of knowledge, as well as to others. This relativ-
ism and limitation of our knowing also applies to all the major decisions of
life, to the experience of falling in love or choosing a career. Yet the fact that
we cannot know absolutely that another person loves us does not prevent us
from risking our lives that our conviction is true. The Christian must be
aware of the limited, broken, and fragmentary character of his or her per-
ceptions; but for centuries Christians who have known their own perception
of God’s presence in Jesus Christ is broken and flawed have affirmed in
faith that it is also true.

The Enlightenment and contemporary pluralism encourage the belief
that the final truth about the world is hidden to us.66 Revelation as the be-
ginning of Christian experience as well as of understanding contradicts the
basic assumptions of an Enlightenment culture. Theologians may engage in
theological conversation but there may be no one “out there.” Hence there
is the great temptation to soften the question of truth. Theology is construed
as a cultural linguistic activity, which it is;67 or as the narrative of Jesus taken
seriously because it is followable, which it surely is.68 Yet if the doctrine of
the Trinity does not attempt to say in a faltering way who God is, and if the
life and teaching of Jesus is not only the way but also the truth, why should
anyone bother either with the Trinity or with Jesus Christ or Christian dis-

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1941, 1943), vol. 2, ch. 8.

65 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan Company,
1946), p. 18.

66 James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Vatican II
(New York: Macmillan Company, 1971), especially chapters 1 and 2. Also Peter Gay, The
Enlightenment, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966-69).

67 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine : Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984).

68 Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 82-91.

REFORMED PREACH ING

251

cipleship? Christian faith and theology have their origin in the initiative of
God or not at all.69

Every human being must speak with the humility of a creature and a
sinner. This is no more a problem for orthodox Christianity than it is for
the secular exponent of the sociology of knowledge. Human life in every
dimension of personal existence must be lived on the basis of reasonable
certainty and tacit understanding.70 On this basis believers with humility
may say “the Word became flesh” as the truth.

3. Third, we can respond with respect for human dignity. It is our Chris-
tian conviction that God created every human person as a self who must be
responsible in the presence of God. There are depths of the human self
which have to be respected, and no state and no society has the right to
invade the privacy of the self.7' Christians above all ought to insist upon not
only the right but the responsibility of every human being to assume the
dignity of a child of God and to answer for himself or herself in the presence
of God. Christians, on the basis of their own theological convictions, respect
and protect the privacy of a person. This is what it means in part to confess
that a human being is the child of God.

4. We can respond to the coming of Jesus Christ in a manner congruent
with the coming itself. The birth of Jesus is told with stark simplicity. Mary
was a humble chambermaid to her Lord, and Joseph a carpenter. The birth-
place was a stable. Jesus was born not among the powerful or the rich, but
among plain, genuine human beings who waited for the Lord. This distinc-
tive character has survived the temptation of artists and writers to portray
it otherwise.72 The Word of God came into our midst without the trappings
of power. He did not seek to overwhelm. The reality itself was sufficient.
Furthermore, Jesus came not for the righteous or for the powerful, but to
the poor, in the biblical sense of those who want help and who know that
God is their only salvation. Cuddihy speaks of the homely Protestant and

69 Ibid., especially chapters 4 and 5. Thiemann’s exposition of Matthew is very persuasive,
but in my judgment he exaggerates the novelty of his argument. Few theologians have ever
conceived of revelation in terms of knowing subject and object, certainly not Augustine or
Calvin. I do not understand why anyone would be concerned with theological speech or with
discipleship apart from the conviction that the faith is true, that it reliably affirms what is.

70 The decision of faith is not formally different from the decision to marry or to choose a
vocation.

71 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1972, enl. ed.), p. 158; Milner S. Ball, The Promise of American
Law: A Theological, Humanistic View of Legal Process (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia
Press, 1981).

72 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Wil-
lard R. Trask (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday and Company, 1957), pp. tiff.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

252

the decorum of imperfection.73 There is the decorum of sinners saved by
grace. Yet we must remember the unostentatious, meek sinners of the New
Testament dared to die for their faith and to witness for it before the rulers
and the powerful people of the world.

5. The fifth response must be theological. From the beginning Christians
have been shaped by the conviction that God had acted for the salvation of
all people in Jesus Christ. Every page of the New Testament is written with
this conviction. Jesus Christ is the one who brings to fulfillment the longings
and yearnings of all human beings. “All things have been delivered to me
by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one
knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to
reveal him" (Mt. 1 1:27). What God had foretold by the mouth of the proph-
ets he has now fulfilled (Acts 3:18). Or the God who made the world and
everything in it and who commands all people to repent has now judged
the world by the man whom he appointed and raised from the dead (Acts
17). The Word, God in his self-expression, by whom all things were made,
became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn. 1). “In many and various ways God
spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has
spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through
whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the
very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power”
(Heb. 1:1-3). The Christian community in every time and place has lived by
this faith, which has received its classic theological statements at Nicaea and
Chalcedon.

This faith is a confession, not a demonstration. No historian or theologian
can show that Jesus is the Christ. Yet Christians have always confessed it as
the truth as well as faith. The confession is not a manner of speaking or
feeling, but the conviction that Jesus is in reality the incarnation of God, and
that what is true for the Christian is true for all people. In the light of this
conviction, they have sought to understand the world. The conviction about
the uniqueness and significance of Jesus Christ arises out of faith percep-
tions, out of repentance and commitment, not out of a study of religions.
Yet this faith illuminates and makes sense out of all human experience.

Augustine summarized the consequences of his rubric, “We believe in
order to understand,” for a pluralistic society, in this way:

This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out

of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all lan-

73 Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste, pp. 191-207.

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253

guages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and insti-
tutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognis-
ing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same
end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abol-
ishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adapts them, so long
only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God
is thus introduced.74

Calvin refused to speculate whether God would have become incarnate
if human beings had not sinned and needed redemption.75 Yet there was
never any doubt that the God who redeems is also the God who creates.
Hence all truth is consonant with what has happened in Jesus Christ, and
can be included within the Christian faith.76 The theological basis for the
persuasive interpretation of all creation in the light of the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ has always been affirmed by Reformed theology. Today this
persuasive proclaiming of the faith is crucial.

The Augustinian way of dealing with this problem can be abused. As
Gilson warns, “Second rate thinkers will use Revelation as a substitute for
rational knowledge . . . Thus confronted with a wisdom of Christians elab-
orated by Christians and for the exclusive benefit of Christians, unbelievers
find themselves in a rather awkward position.”77 The danger is very clear,
but in fact the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr in our time demonstrates the
powerfulness of this approach in getting the attention of secular intellec-
tuals.78

Contemporary theologians of the Reformed way have dealt with this
problem in various ways. Karl Barth’s attention was fixed on Jesus Christ to
the exclusion of world religions.79 Jesus Christ was the abolition of religion.
How much this was a concentration of attention and how much a theolog-
ical judgment is difficult to say.

74 St. Augustine, The City of God , trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950),
bk. 19, ch. 17, p. 696.

75 Calvin, Institutes, 2.12.4.

76 This position is supported by Calvin’s exposition of Jn. 1 and his doctrine of the “extra
Calvinisticum.” Cf. Heiko A. Oberman, “The ‘Extra’ Dimension in the Theology of Calvin”
in Heiko A. Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), pp.
234-58. See also E. David Willis, Calvin's Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-called
Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin's Theology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966).

77 Etienne Gilson, Revelation and Reason in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1938), pp. 32-33.

78 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1943), 2:6.

79 Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1.2, par. 17.

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Emil Brunner was more aware of world religions. For him, all religion is
rooted in revelation, and complicated by sinful human responses to that
revelation.80 The critical point is not religion, but Jesus Christ, who stands
in judgment on all religions, including the Christian religion.

Jesus Christ is both the Fulfillment of all religion and the judgment of
all religion. As the fulfiller, he is the truth, which these religions seek
in vain. There is no phenomenon in the history of religion that does
not point to him. . . .

He is also the judgment on all religion. Viewed in this light, all
religious systems appear untrue, unbelieving, and indeed godless.8'

Hendrik Kraemer came to the problem with a great knowledge of world
religions. On the one hand, this knowledge gave him an appreciation of
world religions which he understood as a human response to God’s univer-
sal revelation of himself. At the same time, it made him more aware of the
differences between religions and of religions as closed systems. Christianity
can never be the simple fulfillment of other religions.

The Christian revelation, as the record of God’s self-disclosing revela-
tion in Jesus Christ, is absolutely sui generis. It is the story of God’s
sovereign acts having become decisively and finally manifest in Jesus
Christ, the Son of the Living God, in whom God became flesh and
revealed his grace and truth. . . . Religious experiences or ideas are, of
course, not absent from the Bible, and they are by no means unimpor-
tant, but in no sense are they central. What is central and fundamental
in the Bible is the registering, describing and witnessing to God’s cre-
ative and redemptive dealing with man and the world.82

In so far as Jesus fulfills persistent yearnings and apprehensions, he also
recasts them. Furthermore, God as he is revealed in Jesus Christ is “con-
trary” to the sublimest pictures we made of him before we knew him in
Jesus Christ.83 In his final writing, he concludes, “If we are ever to know
what true and divinely willed religion is, we can do this only through God’s
revelation in Jesus Christ and through nothing else.”84

80 Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason: The Christian Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1946), pp. 262-64.

8' Ibid., pp. 270-71.

81 Hendrik Kraemer, “Continuity or Discontinuity,” The Authority of the Faith , The Ma-
dras Series, vol. 1 (New York: International Missionary Council, 1939), p. 1.

83 Ibid., p. 3.

84 Hendrik Kraemer, Why Christianity of all Religions? , trans. Hubert Hoskins (Philadel-

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255

The positions of Barth, Brunner, and Kraemer may not be persuasive to
many who are impressed by the fact of world religions. But their theological
reasoning can be convincing for those who begin with the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ and with the New Testament. A critic may say that it is not
true that Jesus is God incarnate, but the integrity of the theological argu-
ments of Augustine, Calvin, Barth, Brunner, Kraemer cannot be denied,
given the fact of “the Word made flesh.” In a variety of ways in their the-
ology, this faith seeks understanding, that is the intelligibility of world reli-
gions and of pluralism.

The critical decisiveness of what happened in Jesus Christ is the founda-
tion for Christian preaching. Without the intensity of this conviction,
preaching will languish, however much it may be maintained by the struc-
tures of the church, and however much it may serve as entertainment, moral
exhortation, political advice, or therapy. In recent years we have heard a
great deal about burnout, even in the ministry. Fortune magazine once de-
clared that burnout meant one had a job for which he or she was not qual-
ified.85 It may also be that we are engaged in a work for which we have lost
our enthusiasm. For example, there is the English professor who has to
teach English but who no longer loves English literature, or the historian
who has to teach history but who is no longer excited by the drama and
meaningfulness of human life on this planet. Without the passionate convic-
tion of faith, there cannot be Christian preaching, any more than there can
be great teaching of literature and history without an enthusiasm for liter-
ature and history. Hence the recovery of preaching first of all is rooted in
the living faith and the conviction of the preacher.

Pluralism undercuts not only the necessity for preaching but enthusiasm
for preaching. It certainly undercuts any justification for the enormous ex-
pense that preaching entails on the part of the gifts of the worshiping, be-
lieving community. It constitutes a challenge for the preacher to proclaim
Jesus Christ through whom all things were created, in whom all things are
held together (Col. 1:17-19).

IV

The need for the recovery of preaching in our time is plain enough. The
health of the Christian community has always been reflected in great
preaching. It is difficult to find a period of vital Christian growth in the

phia: Westminster Press, 1962), p. 79. Also see Hendrik Kraemer, Religion and the Christian
Faith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), chapters 22 and 23.

85 D. Dumaine, “Cool Cures for Burnout,” Fortune 1 17 (June 20, 1988): 78-81.

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entire two millennia of Christian history without great preaching. The need
for great preaching today in an increasingly pluralistic and pagan society is
clear enough.

The recovery of great preaching is more complex. In any case, it is not
simply a matter of courses in homiletics. Preaching requires personal com-
mitments, scholarly competences, and technical skills.

(1) The recovery of great preaching involves the renewal of faith. The
origin of preaching is in the heart, not in the head, not in reasoned argument
but in the passionate conviction of the human heart. Hence preaching is a
gift of the Holy Spirit for which we must hope and pray.

(2) The recovery of great preaching calls for the revival of the Christian
community as a disciplined, knowledgeable, worshiping community of peo-
ple. The recovery of preaching and the recovery of the community will have
to take place together, because there can be no recovery of a vital Christian
community, well informed, apart from the recovery of great preaching. And
on the other hand, a great congregation makes a great preacher.

(3) The recovery of great preaching involves the recovery of the Bible,
which has been assimilated into one’s thinking, and the recovery of theolog-
ical competence that likewise has become part of the structure of one’s per-
sonal existence.

(4) The recovery of great preaching depends upon a recovery of a frame-
work of theological reality that holds life together in a coherent way and in
which we can see our place in the church and in the world. Preaching has
to do with the ultimate issues of human origin and destiny and not with the
occasional facts of politics or organization. Ideally, the preacher should re-
capitulate in his or her own life the history of doctrine, what the church
through the centuries has believed, confessed, preached, and taught.

(5) The recovery of great preaching requires the acquisition of a language
that is precise and clear, that has the quality of reality, and that is appropri-
ate to communicate the Christian gospel. As long as English is spoken, this
must build upon the remarkable literary and theological achievement of the
Puritans. Language appropriate to the faith cannot be finally learned in ac-
ademic communities but only as those learned in the tradition engage a
broad range of people, learned and unlearned, in theological conversation.
The scientific, technological, secular character of our culture makes the
problem of language all the more important. As Calvin put the traditional
theology of the church in the language of ordinary discourse, so that is our
task today.

Preaching has always been powerful to move people, to shape personali-

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257

ties and communities in many times and places. It is not likely that its power
is diminished today. All people who seek to shape human history, politi-
cians, ideologues, advocates, would give anything to have what is available
to the church in the gathering of people. The great crowds on Saturdays at
college football games are impressive, but within a few miles’ radius of foot-
ball stadiums, more people gather to worship God and hear a sermon on
Sunday.86 This gathering of the people is a phenomenon that cannot be
duplicated in our society, and it is a challenge and opportunity for those
called to preach.

86 Cf. Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel, p. 163. Stout with seeming satisfaction declares that
theology is marginal in commanding attention “as a distinctive contributor to public dis-
course in our culture.” He doubts that theology can speak persuasively “to an educated public
without sacrificing its own integrity as a recognizable mode of utterance.” Stout appears to
identify “an educated public” with a university philosophy and religion department. Without
denying much of Stout’s criticism of “academic theology,” his contention that theology is
marginal to an “educated public” is refuted each Sunday in churches where Christian faith
is explicated to highly educated “modern people,” including the church adjacent to the
Princeton University campus, indeed, the church out of which Princeton University came to
be.

The African-American
Christian Heritage: Its
Witness and Promise

by Clarice J. Martin

An ordained Presbyterian minister, Dr.
Clarice J. Martin is Assistant Professor of
New Testament at Princeton Seminary.
She is a graduate of the University of Cal-
ifornia (B.A.), San Francisco Theological
Seminary (M.Div.), and Du^e University
Graduate School (Ph.D). Author of nu-
merous articles, her research and teaching
areas include the Synoptic Gospels, Acts,
and the social origins of early Christianity.
She is a member of the committee that has
prepared a new Brief Statement of Faith
for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). This
sermon was delivered in the Princeton
University Chapel on February 21, 1988,
in a service celebrating the Black, Heritage.

Text: But an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to
the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’’ This is a desert road.
And he rose and went. And behold, an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a minister of
Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of all her treasure, had come
to Jerusalem to worship and was returning; seated in his chariot, he was
reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go up and join
this chariot.” So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the
prophet, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he
said, “How can I, unless some one guides me?” And he invited Philip to
come up and sit with him. (Acts 8:26-31)

The richness of the African-American religious heritage is too vast to
address adequately in a chapel address, and yet, it is both fitting and
appropriate that we do pause together on this Black Heritage Sunday and
reflect upon some of the distinctive ways in which the African-American
religious heritage beckons all of us to live up to our highest calling as both
servants of and co-laborers with the God who has created us to live in com-
munity as one human family.

One of the most characteristic — if not pervasive — emphases of the Afri-
can-American religious heritage is its focus on the centrality and necessity
of human liberation as a fundamental component of authentic human per-
sonhood and existence under God. Theologian Olin P. Moyd correctly ob-
serves that human liberation means deliverance from sin and guilt, but it
also means deliverance from “human-caused states and circumstances of
oppression.”1 Not surprisingly, the Exodus story has been central in Black

' Olin P. Moyd, Redemption in Black Theology (Valley Forge, Pa.: fudson Press, 1979), p.

7-

AFRICAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE

259

liberation theology, both because it demonstrates that God is a God who is
concerned to liberate persons from human bondage and oppression, and be-
cause it is clear that God intended that the covenant community was freed
for community with one another and with their redeemer.2 African-Amer-
icans have insisted that salvation and redemption include liberation from all
forms of human domination — whether based on race, national origin, class,
or sex. Domination designates the right of some groups to control, subor-
dinate, and exclude certain persons or groups in society because they are
members of certain groups. 3 Elizabeth Carroll reminds us that domination
not only circumscribes human freedom, but it distorts truth itself:

Domination . . . imposes an ideology which divides people and their
activities into the important and the negligible, the recorded and the
absentees of history. It judges persons not in terms of their contribu-
tions to the well-being of society but in terms of that set mind which
has already categorized them as “in” or “outside of’ the pale of the
dominant. In these ways, domination distorts truth.4

The conviction that human liberation comprises an integral component of
God’s purposes for humankind remains a fundamental tenet of African-
American theological and ethical discourse.

Within the matrix of African-American history and culture experiences
of unmerited suffering and marginality as a whole people at the hands of
fellow human beings — many of whom confess faith in the Christian
God,5 — has through the centuries precipitated a prophetic appeal for a so-
cietal and ecclesial agenda which refuses to accept as normative any form of
oppression. The African-American religious heritage proffers a powerful
witness about the complex realities of social sin and the contradictions in
human existence.

Let us consider, then, in closer detail, three aspects of the richness of the
African-American religious heritage. We will, first, take a “retrospective”
glance at the force of its witness with respect to the past; second, survey the
ways in which the continuing legacy of this heritage speaks to us with ur-
gency in the present; and third, examine those dimensions of the heritage
which inspire hope and herald promise for our corporate future.

2 Ibid.

3 Elizabeth Carroll, “Can Male Domination be Overcome?” Women in a Men's Church.
Concilium. Ed. Virgil Elizondo and Norbert Greinacher (New York: Seabury Press, 1980),
p. 43.

4 Ibid., p. 46.

5 James Deotis Roberts, Blacky Theology Today: Liberation and Contextualization . Toronto
Studies in Theology, vol. 12 (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), p. 115.

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A Retrospective Glance: “The Good Old Days”

A major contribution of the African-American Christian heritage — in all
of its diverse denominational and institutional forms and expressions — is
that it has compelled us to “unmask” the veils of “pseudoinnocence”6 in our
national and ecclesiastical life. The Black South African theologian Allan
Aubrey Boesak, President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches,
has described “pseudoinnocence” as the result of capitalizing on an idealized
fixation on the past or the present. When human beings face issues too hor-
rible to contemplate, they often close their eyes to reality and make a virtue
of describing human existence in primarily idealistic terms. The realities of
human pain, injustice, and marginality are often minimalized or ignored.
“Pseudoinnocence" thus fosters a “blindness” or “paralysis,” and dulls one’s
awareness of a sense of responsibility necessary to encounter the “other” as
a true human being.7 Consequently, “pseudoinnocence” makes authentic
reconciliation impossible in human social relationships.

The decade of the 1980s in particular have been a time of unremitting
nostalgia — perhaps best summed up in the oft-heard phrase: “Ah, remem-
ber the good old days!” And yet, we must ask, for whom were “the good old
days” good?

Dr. Otto L. Bettmann, founder of the famed Bettmann Archive in New
York City (one of the world’s greatest picture libraries), has written a book
entitled: The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible /8 Bettmann observes that
the “good old days,” especially the period from the end of the Civil War
through the early 1900s, are often characterized as a “benevolent” period,
replete with images of a carefree America, full of gaiety and charm. But in
reality, the “good old days” were “good” for a privileged few only. For the
farmer, the laborer, most women and children, and for the “average bread-
winner,” life was an unremitting hardship. This segment of the population
often experienced widespread turmoil, suffering, and neglect.9

What is so often forgotten and neglected in portrayals of the “good old
days” is the hunger of the unemployed, crime, corruption, the despair of the
aged, the inadequate facilities for housing and assisting the mentally ill.
What is so often forgotten is the reality of over-crowded tenements in many

6 Allan Aubrey Boesak, Farewell to Innocence : A Socio-Ethical Study on Blacky Theology and
Power (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1977), p. 3.

7 Ibid., p. 4

8 Otto L. Bettmann, The Good Old Days — They Were Tetnble! (New York: Random
House, 1974).

9 Ibid., p. xi.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE

261

of the cities, the meager wages earned by the masses, the lack of health and
social benefits, and the often wretched working conditions for the old and
young alike.

Contemporary television sponsors selling cereal or other agrarian prod-
ucts like to portray images of the family farm and country life in the post-
Civil War era in somewhat idealistic terms. There is, for example, the image
of family farm life, with the sprawling farm surrounded by a neat stone
wall. In the interior of the home one sees neat wooden buckets, fairly nu-
merous and ornate household furnishings, and the buxom Betty-Crocker-
like women, complete with red and white checkered aprons and plump,
cherubic faces in sun-filled kitchens. But with the possible exception of the
gentry, history generally offers a different picture.

The wife kept the household without benefit of Westinghouse washing
machine or dishwasher. Nothing less than real stamina and fortitude were
required to perform such “routine” household tasks as making soap to
handwash the mountains of clothing. The country wife had to be more than
a “genteel” soul to cope with the tasks of cutting and carrying firewood for
cooking, and for lugging hot kettles of hot water from one room to another
as needed.10

Likewise, the idea of the horse and buggy days produces strong nostalgia.
But Bettmann notes that in 1900 the 15,000 horses of Rochester, New York,
produced enough manure to cover an acre of ground with a layer 175 feet
high, leading more pessimistic observers to fear that “American cities would
disappear like Pompeii — but not under ashes.”11 The timely appearance of
the horseless carriage was doubtless a welcome relief for hundreds of “san-
itation workers” who walked about regularly with large street sweepers in
an effort to keep the streets cleared.

In short, Bettmann has “demythologized” or “unmasked” the idealized
pictures of our early American past, challenging the tendencies toward a
“pseudoinnocent” approach to the “good old days.”

The African-American church, born in the crucible of racial oppression
and segregation, has over the centuries sought to “unmask” the misrepre-
sentations of African-American peoples in the annals of history. Its mem-
bers have been at the forefront of scholarly efforts to remove African-Amer-
ican female and male pioneers, inventors, scientists, historians, and
numerous other unheralded leaders whose names may never be known,
from the “silences” and margins of American history. The African- Ameri-

IO Ibid., pp. 48-49.

" Ibid., p. 3.

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can church has always questioned Presidential pronouncements which de-
clare that the nation is in “the throes of a strong economic recovery” such
that the masses of Americans are “better off today than they were some
years ago.” African-American religious communities, with many other re-
ligious communities remind us — in the face of such idealizations about the
socio-economic status of so many Americans — that the growing ranks of
the millions who remain “invisible” below the large, gaping holes of the
“safety net” represent a morally unacceptable state of affairs in our great
nation. “Witnesses” in the African-American religious tradition have re-
fused to allow this nation — precious to them also — to be “lulled” into a
“pseudoinnocence” which assumes that an inequitable status quo is morally
acceptable. They have insisted on becoming co-laborers with the God who
frees all persons in Jesus Christ, and who seeks to uproot all systems of
suffering and bondage. Ours is a legacy which values an America which can
truly live up to the best and noblest of its ideals.

A Call to Responsible Stewardship of Human Resources in the Present

If the African-American religious heritage is one which eschews a ren-
dering of the past shrouded in “pseudoinnocence,” it also challenges us in
the present to render a more effective and just stewardship of our human
resources to God.

In his book, One Generation After , the noted Nobel Peace Prize winner
Elie Wiesel tells a story which speaks forcefully of the importance of the
character of the human person as a resource available to God to achieve
God’s purposes in the world. Describing what he calls “Just Men” who trav-
eled about proclaiming the need for spiritual and moral repentance, Wiesel
observes:

One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabi-
tants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets
and markets protesting against greed and theft, falsehood and indiffer-
ence. In the beginning, people listened and smiled ironically. Then
they stopped listening: he no longer even amused them. The killers
went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in
their midst.

One day a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate preacher,
approached him with these words: “Poor stranger, you shout, you ex-
pend yourself body and soul; don’t you see that it is hopeless? "

“Yes, I see,” answered the Just Man.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE

263

“Then why do you go on?”

“I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I thought I could change man.
Today, I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to
prevent man from ultimately changing me.”12

The Just Man was as concerned about the quality of his own life as a
moral resource to God as he was to herald the call for personal and social
transformation in a world which cried out for such transformation. The Just
Man refused to join the great “fellowship of conformists” who in every age
have abandoned the quest to make justice in the personal and social spheres
more than a time-worn cliche. Concerned for the character of human per-
sons as stewards of God’s purposes in creation, he accepted the loneliness
and the ignominy which such a prophetic witness often invites.

African-Americans are acutely aware of the high costs of the poor stew-
ardship of human resources in our national life. Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, Pro-
fessor of Religion and Culture at Duke University, reminds us that our
racial madness has exacted an enormous toll of the American potential in
the form of: “poverty, ignorance, race hatred, self-hatred, high mortality,
low morality, insecurity, ethical compromise, and selective exclusion of the
ordinary common values we all helped to create.” Lincoln’s description of
the loss is jarring:

We shall never know what potential genius, black and white, has
been sacrificed to the racial Moloch which designated some of us as
keepers and others to be kept. But the possibilities stagger the imagi-
nation. What great music was never written; what miracles of medi-
cine remain undiscovered; what strategies for peace and understanding
among the nations of the world have never been developed because we
have been preoccupied with building fences and closing the doors
which eliminate the kept and enervate the keepers, to the inconve-
nience of everybody, and to the impairment of our common capacity
to get on with the Dream we once dared to believe in?'3

Lincoln correctly concludes that the toll of rrcial exclusion — and the dan-
ger of trying to suppress a whole race of people for so long — is extraordinary
in cost of dollars. But there is a loss that surpasses even the waste of human
potential and the tremendous economic expenditures: “. . . the greater tragedy

12 Elie Wiesel, One Generation After (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 72.

13 C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1984), p. 20.

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is the wasted witness we might have paid to the majesty of God and to the possi-
bilities we hold for a more perfect rendering of his image.”'*

African-American religious communities continue to speak to us with
great urgency today about the need to render a more just and faithful ac-
counting ot all of our human resources, including females and males, black
and white, and all persons represented among us as a nation. And so those
familiar words of the eighth-century prophet Micah, so often cited by Afri-
can-American foremothers and forefathers in the past, remains a potent re-
minder of our corporate mandate:

He has showed you, O man, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)

A Future of Partnership and Hope

Finally, if the witness and promise of the African-American religious
tradition lies in its retrospective uncovering of veils of “pseudoinnocence”
in portrayals of our national life and history in the past, and if it continually
challenges us with urgency in the present to render a more faithful steward-
ship of our human resources before God, it ever beckons us forward into a
future of partnership where the vision of God’s kingdom is made real.

Our brother, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that
among the more important moral imperatives of the twentieth century is
the need to recognize and reaffirm the constructive possibilities of our na-
tional and global interdependence. In one of his books he describes the in-
dissoluble and synergistic character of our interdependence in strikingly
pragmatic terms:

All men [sic] are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast
treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all
nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives
eternally “in the red.” We are everlasting debtors to known and un-
known men and women. When we arise in the morning, we go into
the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by
a Pacific islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a Euro-
pean. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a
South American, or tea by a Chinese or cocoa by a west African. Before

14 Ibid., pp. 20-21.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE

265

we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the
world.

In a real sense, all of life is interrelated. The agony of the poor im-
poverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We
are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s
brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.15

The penultimate note of African-American faith and religious dis-
course— and a characteristic feature of its legacy — is the note of hope. Con-
tinually drawing upon its own resources to survive, and struggling ever to
excel, African-American Christians, inspired by a conviction that a sover-
eign God will continue to act within the course of human events and human
history to achieve God’s divine purposes for all humankind, stand in part-
nership with those who seek to live as members of God’s new creation. The
African-American religious heritage in all of its complexity and richness
reminds us that we are all charged with the task of bridging the chasm
between what we claim to be and what we are. We are all called to bridge
the chasm between parochial, monocultural visions of community, and
more inclusive and pluralistic communities. We are called to transform the
selective, restrictive use of power to benefit the few to a use of power which
will serve the purposes of love and fulfill justice, and so lead to a fuller
realization of the highest human values and ideals — personal, social, and
institutional.

The conversion of the black African high official in Acts 8:26-40, whom
Luke calls “the Ethiopian eunuch,” underscores a vision of racial inclusivity
and pluralism in God’s new community. In Lukan theology, with its per-
vasive emphasis on universalism (the availability of God’s salvation in Jesus
Christ to all who repent and confess Jesus as Lord, Lk. 4:16-30; 24:46-47;
Acts 2:37-42; 10:34-43), the Ethiopian official becomes a fitting and appro-
priate symbol for demonstrating that from the very beginning, the good
news of God was meant to be inclusive of all persons as it spread throughout
the world. St. Augustine so interpreted the Ethiopian’s significance when
he said of him that under the name of “Ethiopians” he has signified the
nations of the whole world.'6

In conclusion, the richness of the African-American religious heritage

15 Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1967), p. 181.

,6 Cf. Frank M. Snowden, Blac\s in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 204, 334 n. 57; Au-
gustine, Enarationes in Psalmos 71.12 (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 39.980).

266

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beckons all of us forward with a call for a renewed commitment to authentic
solidarity with one another. It beckons us forward to a future where we
cannot speak about God’s love without also speaking about God’s righ-
teousness and God’s justice made concrete in the relations of women and
men with one another. It beckons us forward into a future with people of
faith who declare by their praxis (deeds, actions) that love always creates
room for justice and integrity in relation to others.

I close with a prayer by the noted African-American scholar W.E.B.
DuBois:

O Lord, teach us who love Liberty and long for it, to realize its cost
and purpose. There can be no freedom in a just and good world, if
freedom means to do as we please, when we please, and where all
about us in this life ... lie bars and bonds and limits. The free are those
who know the rules which God Himself has set and go their way
within these metes and bounds full freely. Truth is the knowledge of
these strait and narrow ways. It is the Truth that makes us free and
this it is we linger here to learn, O Lord. Amen.17

17 W.E.B. DuBois, Prayers for Darl^ Peoples , ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: The Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 52.

Christine M. Smith is Assistant Professor of
Homiletics at Princeton Seminary. An or-
dained United Methodist minister who re-
ceived her Ph.D. from the Graduate The-
ological Union in Berkeley, California, she
has served as pastor of churches in Wor-
thington and Columbus, Ohio. Her first
boo!{, Weaving the Sermon: Preaching
in a Feminist Perspective, was published
by Westminster Press earlier this year.

Texts: Heb. 11:7-13
Ps. 137
Mt. 20:1-16

There are voices in our world that tell us the church is dying. Yet today,
we gather to ask ourselves a bold and ancient question: “How shall we
sing God’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4).

There are voices in our world that tell us the church has no passion. Yet
today, we gather to remember a strange and quieting truth: “These all died
in faith, not receiving any of the things that had been promised, but they
saw them in the far distance and welcomed them, recognizing that they
were only strangers and nomads on earth” (Heb. 11:13).

There are voices in our world that tell us the church lacks vision. Yet on
this day, we gather to speak a difficult and wondrous claim: “These last
worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne
the burden of the day and the scorching heat” (Mt. 20:12).

The Christian church is not just some institution to be analyzed from
afar, or a community to be scrutinized for its life expectancy. The Christian
church is you. The Christian church is me. The Christian church is us. And
our presence here today, with all the vision, all the passion, all the life we
represent, proclaims to all the world that the church as the expression of the
faithful people of God will never ever die.

As the people of God, the tasks before us in this life are joyfilled and
difficult; they are terrifying and exhilarating. The commitments you em-
body as graduates from this religious institution call all our lives into ques-
tion once again.

Not only are the tasks difficult, but the promises are questionable. There
will be waters of Babylon where we will sit down and weep. There will be
floods that leave us working to save a remnant of creation. There will be
experiences of birth when we are eighty. And there will be days when we
receive one denarius no matter what we do.

A Claim Beyond
Imagining

by Christine M. Smith

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

This community gathers today to remember and proclaim that these are
strange and wonderful promises, and we throw our arms and our lives
around them because deep within our souls, deep within our spirits, we have
been claimed by a God, and we claim a God, whose promises we cannot
fathom, whose love we cannot comprehend, whose grace is beyond all our
imagining.

Amazing grace it is! It saves. It teaches us to fear. It secures our hope. It
brings us home.

The grace of God is an awesome thing. It is only by the Spirit’s help that
we can proclaim it. It is only by inspired courage that we can live it. And as
we seek to live it, the claim of God’s grace becomes more mysterious in its
power, more transforming in its breadth, more compelling in its depth.

“Come Thou Fount of every blessing, tune our hearts to sing thy grace.”

With our ancestors in the faith, there is a part of us that accepts with
some ease the call to sing God’s song in the foreign and alien places of our
world, even though places of marginality are often painful and lonely.

With our ancestors in the faith, there is a part of us that accepts with
some assurance the call to work for that which we will never see come to
fruition, even though investment in a future one will never see often leaves
us outraged and sad.

And similarly in the spirit of our ancestors, there is a part in most of us
that does not accept with any ease or comfort a world where the third-hour
and eleventh-hour workers are equal in worth and pay. This is a claim upon
us that offends and confuses, hurts and shatters. This picture of grace we
want to deny, resist, reduce.

Picture with me the scene. There is a householder who hires workers for
work in the vineyard. Workers are gathered when the sun rises, at the third
hour, the sixth hour, the ninth hour, and the eleventh hour. There is hard,
blistering work to be done. Some have labored in the scorching heat for
eleven hours, some for one. The day of work ends and all are gathered
together. The wages are to be paid, and there is quiet anticipation in the air.
The steward slowly and deliberately hands each and every worker one de-
narius. And Jesus says: this is what the reign of God looks like.

In 1986, a movie entitled The Mission was released. Since that time, many
of us in the church have experienced its powerful story. As with all great
movies, its themes and issues are complex and multifaceted. It is about the
killing and enslavement of an indigenous South American tribe by the em-
pires of Spain and Portugal. It is about the work and life of Jesuit priests in
the missions of South America in the mid-eighteenth century. It is about

CLAIM BEYOND IMAGINING 269

Father Gabriel and his passionate call. It is about Rodrigo Mendosa, a slaver,
a mercenary, a murderer, and his redemption.

Rodrigo has been the leader of those who have been in the land of the
Guarani in order to capture and enslave them. He is ruthless and without
mercy in his greed. His life has been full of violence, and at one point in the
story we see him murder his own brother.

Father Gabriel challenges Rodrigo to reclaim his life by choosing his pen-
ance. Rodrigo chooses to join the priests in their journey back to the village
of the Guarani, a journey that takes them up the falls to the top of an enor-
mous mountain. Rodrigo makes this journey dragging a net filled with ar-
mor and swords and metal, a load that makes his struggle to climb inhu-
mane and treacherous. At one point in the journey one of the priests can
bear it no longer, and cuts him free. Rodrigo climbs to the bottom, attaches
the rope and load to his body, and begins the climb again.

At another stop along the way the same priest tells Father Gabriel: “We
all think he has carried the load long enough.” Father Gabriel says: “But he
doesn’t think so John, and until he does, neither do I.”

When they reach the top, the tribe welcomes back the priests with
warmth and joy. Then they spot Rodrigo and instantly recognize him as the
same man who has been their captor. There is a moment of wonder and
silence, until one of the Guarani men finally picks up a knife, runs to Rod-
rigo, lifts his chin as if to take his life, and cuts the rope of his burden and
throws it over the mountain side. And there, surrounded by those he sought
to enslave, he begins to sob. It is the sob of release. It is the sob of new life.
It is the sob of grace. This is indeed what the reign of God looks like!

Here is a grace that allows the one oppressed to become the liberator of
the one who would enslave. Our rational minds tell us that the slaying of
the oppressor would be fair, would be justified. We know the grumblings
of the first-hour workers oh so well. “These last worked only one hour, and
you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and
the scorching heat.” This unspeakable grace we can hardly take in, hardly
receive, hardly celebrate. Instead of welcoming the magnitude of this gra-
ciousness, it offends our sensibilities, for it demands too much.

Yet in the midst of our grumblings, our faithful hearts sing with hope
when a knife of death becomes a knife of forgiveness and liberation. Here
is grace we long to taste, we need to know and feel, we are called to live.
Here is a love that forever changes everything it touches. We know it is a
grace too seldom known and experienced in our world. We see ourselves so
readily as the workers in the vineyard, faithfully doing that which is ex-

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pected and agreed upon. Is it not a profoundly different call to become a
steward, sharing and embodying a free and unconditional gift? Are you
ready? Am I ready? Are we ready, to claim such love, such grace, and be
claimed by it?

If we allow ourselves to claim and be claimed by such grace, it will for-
ever leave us shocked and confused. It will turn our world upside down, it
will transform all reality as we have known it.

A few months ago a friend shared a story with me of a woman she knows
whose world was forever turned, forever changed, by a moment’s encounter
with a stranger.

Kay was walking the streets of New York with lunch in hand when she
passed a woman rummaging in the trash can on the corner. She paused and
asked the woman, “Would you like my lunch?” The woman said, “No
thank you, I’ve already eaten.” Kay began to walk on, turned for a moment
to look at the woman once more, when the woman looked her straight in
the eye and said, “Do you need me to eat your lunch?” and Kay paused,
and said “yes.”

Who can say who are the bearers of grace in this world? Who can speak
fully of the sheer mystery in a loving act?

The one we would enslave becomes our liberator. The one we would give
to becomes our teacher and pastor, and nothing is ever the same again.

Amazing grace it is! It saves. It teaches us to fear. It secures our hope. It
brings us home.

The claim this grace makes upon us is great. It says that life is not pre-
dictable, secure, or orderly. Neither is life preferential, fair, or comfortable.

When the steward gave one denarius to each and every worker, some
were outraged, some were amazed, some were ecstatic, all were changed !

How shall we sing this grace in foreign and strange lands; in the midst
of work that never will be finished; in the moments of life where order
becomes liberating chaos, and stability becomes shifting ground?

We would surely hope on this day, as you are about to leave this place,
that whatever else this time in seminary has been for you, it has been a time
to learn how to see and discern, name and proclaim God’s grace. We hope
it has been a time when you have tuned your heart and your spirit to receive
and to be the steward of this wondrous love.

Have you learned how to stand and watch a mother wave good-bye to
her children on a cold winter’s day; yelling across a field “Daniel, do you
have your second pair of socks?” and saying that final “I love you" as they

CLAIM BEYOND IMAGINING

271

board the bus? Have you learned to quietly stand in that moment; to won-
der, to know, to celebrate, the sustaining power of grace?

Have you learned to walk the streets of New York, watching for the
strength of the homeless as they engage the eyes of the comfortable, or lis-
tening to the vulnerability of the hungry who constantly ask for help? Have
you learned to quietly stand in that moment; to be shocked, to feel exposed,
to be haunted by the transforming power of grace?

Have you learned to feel the pain and torment of the human heart, your
own and others? Have you learned to watch for the despair of broken
dreams, the ache of shattered promises, the shame of betrayal and abuse?
Have you learned to quietly stand in that moment; to listen, to weep, to
embrace the releasing power of grace?

If you have learned to do these things, you have been claimed by a grace
that has changed you, and can change the world!

The parable of the vineyard workers calls us to be those who usher in a
reign of radical grace-, a grace that does not give our lives security but roots
them in hope; does not give us exclusive status but engenders shared hu-
manity; does not momentarily comfort but eternally redeems.

The claim of this grace, the grace of this claim, is beyond our imagining!

BOOK REVIEWS

Lee, Sang Hyun. The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. 248. $35.00.

In recent years Jonathan Edwards scholarship has focused less upon broad inter-
pretations and assessments of the contemporary relevance of Edwards and more
upon the historical context of his thought and his distance from contemporary con-
cerns. In this context claims to account for both the unity of Edwards’ thought and
its contemporary importance are bold claims indeed. In The Philosophical Theology
of Jonathan Edwards Sang Hyun Lee, Professor of Theology at Princeton Theolog-
ical Seminary, backs up these claims by offering one of the two or three most im-
portant works on Edwards since Perry Miller’s famous 1949 biography.

Lee’s study focuses upon the concept of habit or disposition as the key to the
nature of reality for Edwards. He shows how Edwards retrieved the classical and
medieval concept of habit and reworked it to solve dilemmas posed for theologians
and philosophers by Locke, Newton, and others. Central to Lee’s analysis are three
features of habits which recur in all the themes he treats. First, habits are ontologi-
cally real as tendencies toward particular actions and events, and are actualized but
not exhausted in those actions and events. Thus reality is both permanent and a
dynamic movement from real (not simply logical) possibility to actuality. Second,
habits are relational. They are patterns or laws which determine that events and
actions will be realized in relation to other occasions as conditions for their actual-
ization. Third, since they are exercised in ever new relational occasions, actualiza-
tions of habits in history or in human life involve an increase or expansion of reality,
and are not merely instances of timeless forms. Thus human life and history possess
genuine meaning.

Using habit as a clue, Lee examines Edwards’ notions of being, the imagination
and God. In regard to being, Lee analyzes Edwards’ attempts to affirm both the
permanence and the dynamism of reality and to show how the world maintains its
own integrity while depending radically upon a sovereign God. Though established
by God, habits as laws possess a degree of independence from God, yet they depend
for their actualization upon God supplying the occasions in relation to which they
issue forth in events or actions. In an insight that deserves further theological atten-
tion, Lee shows how the relationality of habits as laws enabled Edwards to over-
come the disjunction between teleology and mechanism by explaining causation in
terms of what is required by the mutual fittingness of relations.

Students of Edwards are familiar with his thesis that reality becomes actual in
the form of ideas known and loved by finite minds. Lee is the first to connect this
theme with the imagination. According to Lee the imagination for Edwards me-
diates between the mind’s creative shaping capacity and its reception of ideas of

BOOK REVIEWS

273

sensation. As a habit it orders sense ideas into meaningful relations and thereby
brings to actuality the habits or tendencies inherent within the ideas themselves.
The divinely given habit of grace enables the regenerate mind to place ideas in their
ultimate context, namely their relation to the beauty of God as disclosed in Christ.
Known and loved in this wider context, both entities and the minds which know
and love them become fully actual.

Lee points the way out of a current debate among Edwards scholars over
whether Edwards is an empiricist or a rationalist. As habit, the imagination is a
priori and shapes reality, but it depends upon ideas of sensation for actualization.
Lee also lays the groundwork for a comparison of Edwards with current theological
construals of the imagination.

Lee’s boldest move is his attempt to analyze Edwards’ doctrine of God in terms
of the centrality of habit. According to Lee, Edwards viewed God as perfectly ac-
tualized yet with a habit or disposition to repeat this actuality ad extra in space and
time. God therefore creates the occasions (creatures) in whose knowing and loving
the repetition of the divine fullness becomes actual.

Although Lee’s attempt to understand the immanent Trinity in terms of habit
and actualization requires major qualifications of previous definitions, his under-
standing of creation and redemption as the actualization in space and time of God’s
disposition to repeat the divine fullness is brilliant and suggestive. It advances be-
yond tired disputes over whether Edwards was a Neoplatonist emanationist or a
traditional Calvinist and, as promised, provides an alternative to classical theism
and process theology. Again Lee’s work invites Edwards’ into current conversations
concerning the relation of being and becoming in God and God’s relation to the
world.

Historians may quarrel with Lee’s tendencies to downplay Edwards’ dualistic
distinctions between natural and supernatural and matter and spirit and with his
assumptions about Edwards’ debt to Locke and Newton. Nevertheless Lee’s project
is an overwhelming success. The concept of habit links together each of the themes
Lee treats with remarkable consistency. Problems often found in Edwards — for
example, tensions between divine sovereignty and the integrity of creation, ratio-
nalism and empiricism, Neoplatonism and Calvinism — are surprisingly clarified
when Lee views them under the lens of habit. Moreover, in addition to providing
an alternative to classical theism and process theology, Lee’s Edwards is a rich re-
source for contemporary theological reflection on the imagination, the relationality
of reality, and the theological meaning of history.

The clarity and consistency of this book makes some of the most difficult features
of Edwards’ thought accessible to the non-specialist while its rare union of depth
and breadth and its sensitivity to current debates make it necessary for any serious
student of Edwards and valuable for anyone concerned with theological reconstruc-

274 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

tion. We are greatly indebted to Sang Hyun Lee and look forward to more from
his pen.

Gerald P. McKenny
Rice University

Capps, Donald. Deadly Sins and Saving Virtues. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Pp.
162. $9.95.

Donald Capps, the William Harte Felmeth Professor of Pastoral Theology at
Princeton Theological Seminary, does not come to this study unprepared. Two of
his earlier books, Life Cycle Theory and Pastoral Care and Pastoral Care and Herme-
neutics, explore issues central to this latest study: viz., the importance of taking a
developmentalist approach to the moral life, and the ways in which the Bible re-
mains a “powerful ally” for the pastoral task as well is for the ethical formation and
discernment of communities of faith.

This latest study is divided into three sections. The first part of the book focuses
on “The Deadly Sins,” which Capps believes are “still relevant for us today.” Capps
begins with an explication of the traditional list of seven: pride, envy, anger, sloth,
greed, gluttony, and lust. For several reasons, Capps reinstates “melancholy” to the
traditional list, thereby bringing the total to eight. Unlike some treatments of these
sins, Capps is less interested in the specific behaviors with which they have come to
be associated, and more interested in them as they point to dispositions which are a
part of selfhood. Indeed, one of the great merits of Capps’ analysis is the way in
which he keeps the social character of the “deadly sins” in focus while also main-
taining that these dispositions or attitudes are “dynamically rooted in the personal-
ity” of individuals.

The second section of Capps’ study focuses on “The Saving Virtues.” If the first
section of the book focuses on a “diagnosis of the problem,” this section turns to
those resources within which “a cure may be found.” Capps correlates the deadly
sins with a list of virtues which he adapts from Erik Erikson’s life cycle theory with
its eight stages: infancy, early childhood, play age, school age, adolescence, young
adulthood, adulthood, and mature adulthood. Each of these stages involves a work-
ing through of “a crisis that is crucial for our continued development.”

Thus, Capps attempts to correlate the “saving virtues” of hope, will, purpose, com-
petence, fidelity, love, care, and wisdom with the integration ot the self at each stage
of the life cycle. Here Capps diverges from the traditional classification within
which the vices and virtues had been correlated in classical Christianity. Unlike
Chaucer’s list of virtues, which appears to be focused on th t avoidance of sin through
self-control or denial, Capps prefers to discuss the virtues “in more active terms.”
Therefore, he adopts Erikson’s understanding of virtue as “a vital strength that
issues out of an effective negotiation of the crisis of a given stage” (p. 74).

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Thus, according to Capps, the problem with “patience” is that it is “a rather
negative virtue, more passive than active.” Further, patience supposedly “lacks the
vigorous engagement with the world that the virtues of will and courage reflect”
(p. 85). Here I would want to raise a question about the ways in which Capps
characterizes the traditional list of virtues as “passive” and reactive. I think we must
ask ourselves whether this understanding of patience is central to the Christian
theological tradition, or is it a rather debased understanding resultant from a mor-
alistic pastoral usage in the late medieval period?

Surely, there is a richer sense of “patience” deeply embedded in the biblical wit-
ness as well as in the ecumenical tradition which is not merely reactive. Perhaps if
Capps had consulted such writings as St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Treatise On the Vir-
tues” ( Summa Theologiae I-II, 49-67) with its different catalogue of virtues and its
different moral psychology, he would have also found the same dynamic counter-
balance of passion and integrity which he found in Erikson’s works, but without
the developmentalist presuppositions of the life-cycle theory.

The third section of the book “The Saving Graces” focuses on the Beatitudes
(yes, there are eight of them!) and the way in which these can also be correlated to
the life-cycle theory as adapted by Capps. In addition, Capps also conducts a nar-
rative analysis of the “metastory” of the first eight books of the Old Testament in
relation to the “pilgrimage” theme of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. At this
point, the author acknowledges that this fourth pattern of eight seems “contrived”
(p. 138), but Capps adroitly defends this scheme, arguing:

The story begins with a family who, though created by God, sinned against
God; this led to terrible consequences. But the story ends with the formation
of another family that had much less promising beginnings but is in fact a
model of the experience of salvation. Thus, the metastory beginning with Gen-
esis and ending with Ruth is a pilgrimage from sin to salvation. The metastory
follows the stages of the life cycle.

Not everyone will find this fourfold juxtaposition of vices, virtues, beatitudes,
and biblical pilgrimage with life-cycle stages to be compelling at every point. Some
sections of the book almost demand further development, even as they dazzle the
reader with provocative suggestions. But one of the great merits of Capps’ study is
its heuristic power in suggesting connections which we might not have otherwise
made.

Every chapter of Deadly Sins and Saving Virtues makes some connection between
ethics, psychology, and hermeneutics while always keeping forefront the Christian
life pilgrimage. Capps’ readers will be grateful that he has presented us with a book
that opens up more than it resolves, and that calls upon the reader to follow up on
these kinds of connections. Indeed, it is a book which demands to be tested within

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

the context of pastoral care where interpretation of the Bible is conjoined with the
interpretation of the lives of the saints.

Michael G. Cartwright
Allegheny College

Green, Garrett. Imagining God : Theology and the Religious Imagination. New
York: Harper and Row, 1989. Pp. 179. $22.95.

Garrett Green, who chairs the religious studies department of Connecticut Col-
lege, has written an insightful book on the role of the imagination in theology. His
work is divided into two major parts, the first dealing with religious imagination
in which he examines some nineteenth-century thinkers, the Barth-Brunner debate
about natural theology, the role of paradigms in natural science, and the places of
imagination in religion; and the second dealing with the Christian imagination in
which he examines the image of God, the function of scripture, and the task of
theology.

Concern about the place of imagination in Christian faith is not new, as Green’s
illuminating treatment of some prominent nineteenth-century figures shows. Al-
though the concept was often present only in an implicit way, it was nonetheless a
central issue. The general development, pioneered by thinkers such as Kant and
Hegel, was in the direction of making a sharp distinction between scientific and
religious ways of knowing. Inevitably, the result of this development was a tendency
to reduce religion to something other than knowledge. Green argues that such re-
ductive tendencies arose trom a mistaken view of the imagination and its role in
human knowledge, especially scientific forms of knowledge. A proper understand-
ing of how imagination comes into play in human cognition can thus do much to
counter reductionist approaches.

Green also contends that a proper understanding of imagination can help us to
move beyond the impasse created by the Barth-Brunner debate. As the ability to
grasp and use paradigms to understand the nature of the world and God, the imag-
ination is a purely formal capacity awaiting the concrete forms that direct its activ-
ity. It therefore provides no basis for a natural theology yet offers a “point of con-
tact” for revelation, understood as God’s impression on the mind through
paradigms that allow us to imagine God rightly.

Science also approaches the world through paradigms. Although he takes the
concept of paradigms from Kuhn, Green defends it in a way Kuhn ultimately did
not and clarifies it, defining it as “the constitutive pattern according to which some-
thing is organized as a whole-in-parts” (p. 52). Such patterns may or may not be
true, which means that the adequacy of perceptions and truth claims cannot be
decided by determining whether the imagination is involved. The distinction be-
tween science and religion needs softening, then, since both require the paradig-
matic imagination and may make both true and false claims to knowledge.

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277

One of the most interesting arguments advanced by Green is the claim that the
“image of God” should be understood as the capacity to imagine God rightly. Sin
has destroyed the material image of God, the true insight into God’s nature, but
not the formal capacity to imagine God, the paradigmatic imagination, which pro-
vides a point of contact with God. This is a provocative suggestion and provides
some helpful insights, yet it is also difficult to see how this understanding can be
justified on the basis of the biblical texts involved and how it does justice to all that
this symbol evokes.

Scripture and theology come into focus with this understanding of imagination.
The Bible, especially in its narrative about Jesus, is the source of paradigms that
provide a true knowledge of God. Theology is the critical interpretation of the
Christian paradigmatic structure. The task of theology is to understand faith’s lan-
guage rather than to explore experience since language shapes experience. To the
charge that this is a form of fideism, Green responds that the Christian paradigm is
not immune from argument. Rather, arguments about such matters must deal with
the whole paradigmatic structure and not just isolated parts of it.

Green’s presentation is clear, shows an excellent grasp of a number of important
figures, and offers some stimulating arguments. Unlike the tendency of some to
treat the imagination as primarily constructive (e.g. Gordon Kaufman), Green notes
its receptive dimension. Unfortunately, he seems to have lost sight of its constructive
capabilities, at least in the formulation of the paradigms by which it operates, for
he treats the imagination almost exclusively as a power that takes over paradigms
from other sources. Is there any reshaping that occurs in this process? A closely
related issue is his treatment of the relationship between paradigms and experience.
It is surely right that language shapes experience. But is there no reverse influence?
What is needed is a more genuinely dialectical understanding of the interaction
between language and experience.

David J. Bryant
Eckerd College

Hall, Douglas John. Thinking the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American
Context. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989. Pp. 456. $29.95.

This notable book by Douglas John Hall, Professor of Christian Theology at
McGill University in Montreal, launches a three-volume constructive theology. The
first volume, Thinking the Faith, provides the prolegomena and is to be followed by
Professing the Faith (which will deal with the doctrine of God, anthropology, and
Christology), and Confessing the Faith (which will focus on ecclesiology and escha-
tology and will ask what it means to live the faith as the church in North America
today). Readers familiar with Hall’s previous writings, especially Lighten our Dark-
ness, will not be surprised that the “theology of the cross” is a pervasive motif of his
new book.

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278

The subtitle expresses the distinctive emphasis of Hall’s theological project. Ar-
guing that theology is necessarily contextual, he insists that responsible theological
work in North America presupposes a clear understanding of this particular society
and culture and the courage to rethink the faith in relation to the questions and
crises ot the North American context. Hall contends that the “failure to become
purposively and profoundly contextual in our thinking” (p. 235) prevents the light
ot the gospel from penetrating our North American darkness.

The two parts of this first volume of the projected trilogy are titled “The Disciple
Community” and “The Discipline.” In the first part Hall identifies seven critical
components ot our post-modern North American context: the end of the Constan-
tinian era; religious pluralism; the theological impact of the holocaust; the revolu-
tion of the oppressed; the rebellion of nature; the nuclear crisis; and the rise of
religious simplism. According to Hall, the deepest crisis of our context is the dawn-
ing recognition of “the failure of modernity” to provide us with intellectual and
spiritual resources to cope with negation. “Our crisis is the crisis of the disillusioned
who have no frame of reference for the experience of disillusionment” (p. 197). The
optimistic worldview of the Enlightenment has broken down, and the exaggerated
claims of technical-scientific reason have been humbled. Hall finds in this situation
a unique invitation to a renewed “theology of the cross,” by which he means a
theology that speaks of the crucified and hidden God and is thus willing to share in
the humiliation of the modern spirit, to accompany it in its descent into the partic-
ular hell of its own making, and to speak there of a God of suffering love who frees
humanity from its mad effort to win meaning and security through the exploitation
of nature and the domination of other human beings. Such a theology of the cross
stands in marked contrast to the triumphalism of bourgeois Christianity in North
America and its promotion of easy answers to the almost desperate questions which
thoughtful people ask today. Over against all pious simplism Christians “must learn
how to identify themselves with the questions of a humiliated and fearful rationality.

. . . Only as we participate in the suffering of the intellect and the humbling of the
human enterprise shall we have any possibility of bringing comfort from the side
of the suffering God” (p. 425).

In the second part of the book Hall discusses the elements of the discipline of
theology: faith, Bible, doctrinal traditions, experience, prayer, church, and world.
The theological method he espouses is perhaps best characterized as dialogical and
dialectical. He finds strengths in both the kerygmatic theology of Barth and the
apologetic theology1 of Tillich but charges both, in varying degrees, with being in-
sufficiently contextual: “The great works of theology produced by our immediate
predecessors seem singularly lacking in explicit references to their own situation"
(p. 361). Hall negotiates deftly between secular and biblicistic views of the Bible,
between fideism and subjectivism, between modernism and traditionalism, and be-
tween the absolutization and the rejection of experience in theological reflection.
His discussion of the place of prayer in theological work is among the most arrest-

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279

ing sections of this part of the volume. Prayer as passionate seeking and intense
struggle, in contrast to the pietistic trivialization of prayer, must be reclaimed as an
essential ingredient of the discipline of theology.

A bold and imaginative attempt to think through the faith in ways especially
pertinent to North American Christians, Hall’s book will prompt numerous ques-
tions. One is \yhether a theology in the North American context does not have to
give more attention to the voices of women and minorities than Hall does in this
volume. He suggests that the witness of the victims of the dominant culture cannot
substitute for an in-depth diagnosis of that culture. That is of course true, but it is
misleading to imply that such criticism of the dominant culture in North America
is not in fact being provided by the heretofore silent voices of the Christian com-
munity. Another important issue is whether Hall’s analysis of the North American
context and its implications for theological method is entirely consistent. On the one
hand, he rightly criticizes the triumphalistic amalgamation of piety and patriotism
in North America and calls for a genuinely prophetic theology; on the other hand,
he argues that in our situation it would be inappropriate to stress the discontinuity
between God and the world, gospel and culture, since the discontinuous side of the
dialectic of faith and culture is already overplayed.

But these and other questions that could be raised are simply indicators of the
important conversation that this pioneering theological work will prompt. The sub-
sequent two volumes of the trilogy will be eagerly awaited.

Daniel L. Migliore
Princeton Theological Seminary

Villa-Vicencio, Charles, ed. On Reading Karl Barth in South Africa. Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Eerdmans, 1988. Pp. 172. $14.95.

Social location makes a difference in theological reflection. Any doubt about this
is readily dispelled by this collection of lively essays by Reformed pastors and theo-
logians in South Africa, all committed to resistance to apartheid and all energized
in this struggle by their continuing encounter with the theology of Karl Barth.

As is well known, traditional Reformed theology in South Africa has been ap-
propriated by the forces of oppression. Less well known is that precisely in this
situation Barth’s theology is being rediscovered as a liberating and revolutionary
resource. Instructed by the experiences and questions of the oppressed blacks of
South Africa, the contributors to this volume aim to identify a Christian “counter-
tradition,” a heritage of liberating faith that has been ignored or suppressed by the
dominant theology of the white churches in that land. When Barth’s theology is
“reread” within the South African situation, both theological text and social context
are illumined. Important features of Barth’s theology that are often overlooked or
minimized in other contexts become strikingly prominent (e.g. his insistence on the
inseparability of theory and praxis), and Barth’s theology in turn clarifies the pro-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

280

phetic edge of the gospel and the task of the church in South Africa today (e.g. his
summons to the confessing church in Germany to resist Nazi ideology anticipates
the call to Christian resistance in face of the sin and heresy of apartheid).

Each author explores some aspect of this interplay of Barth’s theology and South
African context. Dirkie Smit finds special relevance in Barth’s interpretation of the
miracles of Jesus as paradigms of God’s unconditional free grace toward humanity
not only as sinners but as suffering creatures in need of total redemption. Charles
Villa-Vicencio, the editor of the volume, argues that when Barth’s theology is read
“in the eye of the storm” as in South Africa today, it provides a much-needed and
uncompromising theological No to the structures of injustice legitimized by a he-
retical Christian theology. Robin Petersen traces “the socialist continuity” in Barth’s
theology and praxis from his earliest writings as a pastor in Safenwil to the latest
volumes of the Church Dogmatics and argues that disregard of this continuity results
in the misappropriation of his theology by political conservatism and a-political
scholasticism. C. W. Wanamaker charts the changing emphases of Barth’s under-
standing of the relationship of church and state in his several expositions of Romans
13. Nico Horn argues that the present situation in South Africa is a status confessionis
and compares the Kairos Document of 1985 to the Barmen Declaration of 1934.
Jaap Durand examines Barth’s and Abraham Kuyper’s understandings of the sov-
ereignty of Christ and shows the vulnerability of Kuyper’s theme of independent
spheres of life to an interpretation that has not only contributed to the silencing of
the Dutch Reformed church in South Africa on sociopolitical issues but resulted in
the capture of Kyperians by Afrikaner civil religion. Finally, John de Gruchy con-
tends that there is for Barth an intrinsic relationship between the gift of reconcilia-
tion in Jesus Christ and the call to participation in the struggle for justice and free-
dom.

While aiming primarily to highlight the liberating resources of Barth’s theology
for the South African church, the contributors are not uncritical of Barth. In partic-
ular, they contend that greater attention to concrete social analysis than Barth him-
self was inclined to offer is a prerequisite of prophetic theology. Since detailed anal-
ysis of the South African context is mostly assumed rather than provided in this
book, the criticism which the authors make of Barth might also be turned on them
if one did not know that many, if not all of these writers have elsewhere attended
in depth to the particularities of their social situation. No doubt aspects of some of
the interpretations of Barth offered are in need of fine tuning, as when it is claimed
that he largely abandoned the dialectical method in his later writings (p. 97) when
it would be more accurate to say that his way of analogy in the Church Dogmatics,
properly understood, always includes a dialectical moment, just as God’s mighty
Yes contains an unmistakable No. Still, what impresses the reader most is not such
relatively minor flaws but the fact that in this rereading and reclaiming of Barth’s
theology in the context of church conflict and struggle for social justice in South
Africa a Reformed liberation theology is in the making.

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Dedicated to Paul Lehmann whose interpretation of Barth as “theologian of per-
manent revolution” has obviously influenced several of the authors, this book
should be on the reading list not only of every course on the theology of Barth but
also of every course, in church or seminary, interested in exploring the possibility
and promise of a liberation theology that is both self-consciously contextual and
vigorously Reformed.

Daniel L. Migliore
Princeton Theological Seminary

Van Buren, Paul M. A Theology of the Jewish -Christian Reality. Part III, Christ in
Context. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Pp. 312. $29.95.

This book is the third and central work of a series on the Jewish-Christian reality.
Part I was entitled, Discerning the Way; Part II, A Christian Theology of the People of
Israel ; and Part III, Christ in Context.

In successive chapters of the present volume the author deals with the place and
function of Christology, with the context of Jesus Christ as Israel and the Church,
with Christ as risen, as the presence of God, and as the crucified one, with the
novelty of Jesus Christ, with Christian witness to him as the eternal Son, the incar-
nate Word, and the Lord (who is the Spirit), and with the consummation. Van
Buren insists that Christology must be seen in context, namely, “as Israel’s gift to
and claim upon the Church.” He stresses that Jesus’ death was “an all-too-typically
Jewish death of the time: he was killed by Gentiles” (p. 74). It is true that the Gentile
Pilate pronounced the sentence reluctantly but only at the clamor of the Jewish
people. The Apostle Paul was more even-handed when in his letter to the Romans
(3 :9ff.) he charged that “all men, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin.

. . . None is righteous, no, not one.”

So intent is Van Buren to uphold his thesis that he argues that “the author of the
(Johannine) Prologue is wrong” when he wrote that “he came to his own and his
own received him not.” He cites Mary and Joseph, Peter, Andrew, James, and John
as those who “received” Jesus. The truth is that in the end they “all forsook him
and fled” (Mk. 14:50); they denied and betrayed him. It was not until he was raised
from the dead and the Holy Spirit was poured out on them that the disciples con-
fessed in Thomas’ words: “My lord and my God.” Later (p. 87) Van Buren explains
that Thomas’ confession “could not have meant that the Jew Jesus was God, the
God of the Jews. It could indeed mean, however, that directly and specifically in
their meeting with Jesus of Nazareth, they had met their God, the God of Israel.”
The author’s subtle distinction between affirming that Jesus was (is) God, and meet-
ing God in Jesus escapes his reviewer’s comprehension.

Yet surely Van Buren is correct when he writes: “If the world should ask where
God is, let it begin by looking to see where Israel is” (p. 91). As others have con-
tended, the existence of the Jews — in spite of all attempts to annihilate or to assim-

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

ilate them — is the one natural proof of the existence of God. Moreover, God’s cov-
enant of grace was and is His covenant with Israel. To this covenant some Gentiles
have been admitted “by grace through faith” in Christ (Eph. 2:1-22). “As God’s
anointed, Jesus binds the nations of the world to the nation of Jesus — -the nation of
the covenant, the Jewish people” (p. 137).

The chief merit of Van Buren’s book is that it deals with the Jews theologically.
For centuries the Church has taught that it has superseded the Jews as God’s chosen
people. Yet Paul insisted that the Gospel is “to the Jew first and also to the Greek”
(Rom. 1:16; 2:9-10; 10:12) and that the faithlessness of some Jews does not nullify
the faithfulness of God (Rom. 3:3^). As Karl Barth and Van Buren teach, we cannot
call the Jews the “rejected” and the Church the “elected” community. What is
elected in Jesus Christ is the community which has the twofold form of Israel and
the Church. Hatred of the Jews — in every century and in every land — is basically
a hatred of the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. If Hitler had triumphed in World War II,
we may be sure that Christians would have suffered the fate of six million Jews.
Alas, except for a significant few, Christians did not protest the discrimination
against the persecution of Jews. Shiploads of Jewish refugees were turned away
from American and Cuban harbors.

Van Buren argues that Auschwitz raises the question whether the cross of Christ
happened “once for all.” “To say that God was directly, personally, and immedi-
ately involved in the suffering of Jesus becomes unbearable when we reflect on the
suffering of the Jewish men, women, and children in the Holocaust. . . . We shall
learn to speak of Auschwitz from the perspective of the cross by first learning to
speak of the cross from the perspective of Auschwitz. . . . The death of God’s faith-
ful son Jesus must have hurt God, and the deaths of six million of God’s sons and
daughters in the Holocaust must have hurt God even more” (pp. 165-166). We
would prefer to confess that Christ’s death on the cross was for the sake of the six
million murdered Jews.

In spite of the above strictures we commend Van Buren’s book. It wrestles with
the basic question of the relation of Jews and Christians to the Jew — Jesus of Naz-
areth.

Arthur C. Cochrane
University of Dubuque Theological Seminary

Taylor, Mark Kline. Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries. London: Collins,
1987. Pp. 351. $19.95.

In Paul Tillich : Theologian of the Boundaries Mark Kline Taylor, a professor of
systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, provides us with a rich set
of Tillich’s writings, spanning his early life in Germany to his last lecture. Although
most of these were previously published, this volume offers a well-chosen represen-
tation of many of Tillich’s major theological directions.

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Taylor’s well-written introductory comments connect the issues of Tillich’s the-
ological life to present day theological concerns. Like Tillich, Christian thinkers
today find themselves facing many of the same “boundary” tensions although the
focus of their work may be different from and critical of Tillich’s theology. Taylor
uses Tillich’s boundary experiences to organize the selections and entitles each set
by the mediating theme which Tillich used to draw together the two sides of an
issue.

The first boundary shows Tillich in the midst of the tension between being a
theologian of culture and being a church theologian. “On the Idea of a Theology of
Culture” (1919) and a selection from “Basic Principles of Religious Socialism”
(1923) show Tillich arguing for a new “theonomy” which takes seriously the con-
crete political and cultural situation while allowing for its transformation and ful-
fillment in religious meaning.

A second tension informing Tillich’s thought was between the Protestant affir-
mation and critique of socialism. Tillich argues for a theonomous socialism, recog-
nizing the underlying faith and depth dimension. In “Realism and Faith” (1929)
Tillich proposes a “self-transcending” realism which combines historical realism
and the transcending power of faith. An excerpt from The Socialist Decision (1933)
continues this theme but with critical application to the myth of origin in Nazi
Socialism. Other selections here include a critique of Barth’s “dialectic” theology
(“What is Wrong with the ‘Dialectic’ Theology,” 1935) “Nature and Sacrament”
(1929) which emphasizes the sacramental basis which underlies Protestant critique,
and a previously untranslated set of ten theses on “The Church and the Third
Reich” (1932).

The themes of the immanence and the transcendence of God set the tension for
Taylor’s third section of Tillich’s writings. This tension is increased by the existen-
tial experience of the sacred void, of absolute meaning in the midst of meaningless-
ness. Selections from the first volume of the Systematic Theology (1951) and The
Courage to Be (1952) are complemented by “Religion and Secular Culture” (1946)
and “The Problem of Theological Method” (1947) to provide a helpful overview of
Tillich’s understanding of God as both transcendent of and yet immanent in the
basic structures and experiences of life.

Following the outline of Tillich’s Systematic Theology, Taylor’s next two sections
of texts deal with Christ as the New Being in relation to the structures of estrange-
ment and evil (Volume II, 1957) and the Spirit and the Churches in relation to the
ambiguities of life (Volume III, 1963). Taylor analyzes Tillich’s writings on sin/evil
and the Christ as arising from the tension between an historicist understanding
(focus on the Fall and the Christ as historical realities) and a presentist understand-
ing (focus on the significance of these for Christians in their present situations).
Taylor has carefully edited his selections from the third volume to emphasize the
tension between the structures of personal and social life and the experience of
spiritual ecstasy that can transform and fulfill those structures.

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The final set of texts highlights the contemporary tension between acceptance of
pluralism and specific commitment. Included here is Tillich’s last public lecture,
“The Significance ot the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian” (1965)
which looks toward a new phase of theology that considers the breadth of world
religions and yet recognizes the roots of theology in the concrete local situation of
the theologian. Appropriately, Taylor concludes this anthology with one of Tillich’s
powerful sermons, “The Right to Hope” (1965) which draws hope for this world
and its people from their fragmentary fulfillments in specific historical moments.

Taylor’s volume of Tillich’s writings will be useful in the classroom as an intro-
duction to Tillich’s theology but also valuable to pastors and to activist ministers
who find themselves facing the same tensions that Tillich did on a daily basis in
their work.

Mary Ann Stenger
University of Louisville

Alter, Robert, and Frank Kermode, eds. The Literary Guide to the Bible , Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. viii + 678. $29.95.

The editors of this volume, each eminent in his field (Alter is professor of He-
brew and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, and Ker-
mode is professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge), have planned
the scope of their volume on a grand scale. Their focus is literary rather than his-
torical or theological, and they have invited as contributors a wide range of scholars.
There are twenty-three articles on the books of the Old Testament, and nine on the
New. The division of space is partly determined by the literary interest of the writ-
ings. Thus there are separate treatments of Ruth, the Song of Songs, Esther, and
Jonah, while Jeremiah and Ezekiel are considered in the same chapter, as are the
Twelve (without Jonah). Each of the four Gospels has its own chapter, as do Acts
and Revelation, but the Pauline Epistles are grouped together and Hebrews is
treated with the Catholic Epistles. At the close of the book there are seven general
articles on various topics (such as the Hebrew Bible and Canaanite Literature, the
Canon, Midrash and Allegory, and the King James Version).

Obviously it is impossible in the space available here to discuss each of the thirty-
nine chapters, all of them deserving of comment and evaluation. The only feasible
procedure to follow will be to select some details that, for one reason or another,
struck the reviewer as deserving of comment, and then to look at the general ap-
proach and success of the undertaking as a whole.

Among the contributors to the Old Testament, David Damrosch of Columbia
University provides a powerful literary reading of Leviticus — a book that, he sug-
gests, is “such an unappetizing vein of gristle in the midst of the Pentateuch [that]
the natural reaction of most readers is simply to push it quietly off the plate.” His
interpretation (and this is a sign of its strength) seems perfectly obvious in the after-

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math of its working out: the legal prescriptions of Leviticus take on their full mean-
ing only in the context of the narrative that surrounds them, especially the narrative
of the Aaronic priesthood.

Moshe Greenberg (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) provides an analysis of the
book of Job that is noteworthy for its rejection of any theory of composite author-
ship, refusing to separate the poem from the prose story, and showing how sense
can be made of the appearance of Elihu in chapter 32, and even of the wisdom
poem in chapter 28, in the setting of the entire work. In his chapter on Isaiah Luis
Alonzo Schokel, S.J., of the Pontifical Biblical Institute ol Rome, looks at the poetic
and rhetorical devices used by the prophets who composed the three main parts of
the book: chapters 1-39, telling of events in the life ol Isaiah himself, between about
767 and 698 B.C.; chapters 40-55, attributed to Deutero-Isaiah, are situated about
553-539 B.C.; and Trito-Isaiah, chapters 56-66, appears to be post-Exilic. Embedded
in the first section is a special, late block (chapters 24-27) that some call apocalyptic
but is more appropriately called eschatological. Schokel characterizes the book as a
whole as “a collection of collections, like a lake into which the waters of various
rivers and tributaries flow” (p. 165).

In the New Testament section, Michael Goulder of the University of Birming-
ham assesses the main Pauline letters in the light of the several rhetorical devices
used by the apostle in order to achieve his purposes. Paul is ordinarily, Goulder
thinks, “in a pastoral mood [and] tries to be tactful, but he finds this a strain.” In
Goulder’s view, “the argument of Galatians is a sequence of preposterous sophist-
ries” by which the apostle sought valiantly to prove that “dependence on circumci-
sion and the Law is a total error: we are saved by Christ, who bore our curse on the
tree, and by faith we are crucified with him, and live.”

In his essay on Luke, John Drury of King’s College, Cambridge, provides an
introduction to the Third Gospel that is exemplary in its scholarship and interpre-
tative finesse. Especially penetrating is his reading of the scene (from Luke 24) in
which two disciples encounter the risen Christ on their way from Jerusalem to
Emmaus. He writes: “They are moving away from the locality where the decisive
events are happening toward a place of no significance. They are on a dispirited
narrative detour which, quite unexpectedly, will be revelatory. It is typical of Luke
that Emmaus, as a place which is nowhere in particular, should be lit up with
marvelous significance: Nazareth was like that too” (p. 424). After that profound
encounter, everything changes: “The end of the Gospel is also a beginning. As the
first two chapters gravitated toward Jerusalem centripetally, so from now on the
news will spread out from Jerusalem centrifugally. For a while the apostles are to
wait at Jerusalem, but only until the power to work comes upon them. Then their
journeys away from it will be creative, not evasions of disaster as in the sad walk
from Jerusalem to Emmaus” (p. 423).

From the standpoint of the declared purpose of the volume, namely, to assist the
reader of the Scriptures to understand what holds a biblical book together, the

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chapter on the book of Revelation is perhaps the least helpful of any. Here Bernard
McGinn of the University of Chicago, instead of providing a fresh literary analysis
ot the structure of this marvelous book, merely serves up a smorgasbord of the ways
in which the Apocalypse has been interpreted from early Christian times down to
the present century.

Ot the several general essays at the end ot the volume, the one on “English T rans-
lations of the Bible” by Gerald Hammond (University of Manchester) is a frank
and unabashed apologia for the superiority of the King James Bible of 1 6 1 1 above
all other English versions. No matter that later translators have had access to older
and better manuscripts of the Bible than those that were available in the seventeenth
century, the literary charm of the Elizabethan cadences of this version have never
been surpassed, and therefore any alteration must (in Hammond’s eyes) inevitably
be for the worse! No matter that there are occasional mistakes in English grammar
in the King James Bible (“Whom do you say that I am”) and no matter that the
inherent bias of the English language towards the masculine gender sometimes
results in restricting or obscuring the meaning ot the original text (e.g., "He that
hath an ear, let him hear . . .”), it still should be regarded as the literary standard
against which all other renderings are to be measured. In fact, Hammond’s point
of view is, to a great extent, shared by the editors and by many of the other contrib-
utors to the volume, who as a rule use the King James Version in making quotations
from the Scriptures.

What should be said, finally, about the impression made by the book as a whole'
Typographically the volume, crafted by the Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, is a superior piece of book-making — though lamentably with footnotes
placed at the end of a chapter. (What would be thought of a piece of music in which
the bass clef followed some pages after the treble clef?) But more to the point, how
does this book compare with other literary guides to the Bible — of which there are
not a few on the market?

First of all, it must be said, the approach here is strictly literary: the authors are
not concerned with questions of historical accuracy or with what may be called the
truthfulness of the Scriptures. In fact, the assumption shared by the authors of the
chapters on the Gospels is that the distinctive features of these four books — the
unities and significant turns of character, plot, and theme — derive from the evan-
gelists’ vivid imaginations, not from privileged and accurate knowledge. On the
other hand, it should be noted that such an approach can also be regarded as a
significant rehabilitation of the whole idea of authorship, a kind of rescue operation
of biblical texts from the clutches of redactors. For readers who have had the equiv-
alent of a theological seminary training, most of these essays — all of them urbane
and learned without being tedious— will open up fresh vistas within the biblical
stories and poetry.

But at the same time one must be struck, as George Steiner confesses he was
struck (in his perceptive review of the book in The New Yorker, January n, 1988),

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287

by the absence of any consideration of the numinous and the mysterium tremendum
that inevitably attends endeavors to speak to and of God. There is a more or less
polite dismissal of the reality of the spiritual world and of the central theme that
binds the Scriptures into a unity arising from the covenant relation between God
and his people.

Finally, does not the title smack of hubris in using the definite article, “ The Lit-
erary Guide . . . ,” rather than the more modest indefinite article, “A Literary Guide
. .

Bruce M. Metzger
Princeton Theological Seminary

Bauer, Walter. Griechisch-deutsches Worterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testa-
ments und der friihchristlichen Literatur, 6th fully reworked edition, Kurt Aland and
Barbara Aland, eds. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988. Pp. xxiv + 1796 columns.
DM 148.00.

The standard Greek Lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian
Literature was prepared some years ago by the indefatigable labor of Walter Bauer,
working seven days a week for many years. Not only was there a gigantic amount
of material to be mastered, involving the most minute acquaintance with the whole
body of Christian literature, but this task required at the same time the gift of
combining and relating facts as well as reporting them in the most concise way
possible. An English translation of the fourth edition was published in 1957 thanks
to the work of two American scholars, W. F. Arndt and F. W. Gingrich, and the
generosity of a sizeable subvention made by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.
Concurrently with the appearance of the English translation, a fifth, enlarged edi-
tion of the German lexicon was published (1958), and in due time the additional
information provided in it was incorporated into a second edition of the English
translation, revised and augmented by Gingrich and F. W. Danket (1979).

Now, with the scholarly resources and personnel (notably Viktor Reichmann)
available at the Institute for New Testament Text Research at Munster, a still larger
Greek-German Lexicon has been published under the editorial supervision of Kurt
and Barbara Aland. As would be expected, the quotations from the New Testament
have been accommodated to the 1984 text of the United Bible Societies’ Gree\ New
Testament, third edition (corrected). Lexicographic additions have been collected
from a broad range of non-Christian papyri; quotations from ancient literature,
whether patristic or secular, have been verified and augmented. This is particularly
noticeable in the increase of references to the exegetical use made of New Testa-
ment passages by leading church fathers. Modern bibliographic references to schol-
arly discussions, both philological and theological, replace some of the earlier ref-
erences. According to information given in the preface, the new edition contains
about one-third more material than the previous edition, yet the user will observe

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

that the physical bulk of the volume has not been correspondingly increased (only
1796 columns compared with 1780). The saving in space comes about by employing
a smaller sized type-face for material not directly connected with New Testament
passages. Furthermore, by using bold-face type for the New Testament references
and definitions, these stand out prominently and thus assist the reader who wishes
to concentrate only on such information.

The editors K. and B. Aland, are to be congratulated for making the standard
tool for New Testament lexicography even better than it was previously. It is to be
hoped that, for the sake of students who are not able to make use of the German
edition, an English translation will be forthcoming in due course.

Bruce M. Metzger
Princeton Theological Seminary

Cogan, Mordechai and Hayim Tadmor. II Kings: A New Translation with Intro-
duction and Commentary. The Anchor Bible n. Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1988.
Pp. xxxv + 371. $20.00.

Biblical scholars have long awaited the appearance of Hayim Tadmor’s Anchor
Bible commentary on the books of Kings. The work of this eminent Israeli Assyr-
lologist promised to fully exploit the wealth of contemporary Assyrian and Baby-
lonian sources in his interpretation of these biblical books. The anticipation was
particularly strong among those scholars working on the last half of the seventh
century, the period of Isaiah’s ministry, because Tadmor, who is also editing the
very poorly preserved annals of the contemporary Assyrian ruler Tiglath-pileser
III, probably controls the Assyrian sources for this period better than any other
living scholar. Since the history of the Israelite kingdoms was closely entwined with
the history of Assyria during this period, it was felt that Tadmor’s commentary
might finally resolve some of the difficult historical cruxes found in 2 Kings. The
international reputation of Tadmor’s coauthor, Mordechai Cogan, an Israeli biblical
scholar, further raised the expectations for the commentary.

Both scholars’ major scholarly interests are in the Assyrian and Babylonian per-
iods, so they decided to publish the commentary on 2 Kings first. Since they are also
reserving the main discussion of the literary formation of the books of Kings for
the publication of the volume on 1 Kings, it is difficult to evaluate their literary
analysis in detail. They do treat the work as a deuteronomic production, however,
and they attribute the composition of the bulk of the work to the reign of Josiah
with only an editorial updating in the exilic period. They also think it is possible to
isolate parts of an earlier north-Israelite composition embedded in Kings. This is a
promising approach, and one looks forward to their elaboration of these views in
the subsequent volume on 1 Kings.

The volume on 2 Kings is a very fine commentary, but it only partially fulfills its
expectations. It focuses on the historical issues, but it also offers a good translation

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289

with excellent philological notes. It makes extensive use of the available non-biblical
sources with particular attention to the contemporary cuneiform sources, and its use
of this non-biblical material is careful and sober. Both biblical and non-biblical ma-
terial is treated with critical respect. One cannot charge the authors with the typical
abuses of such comparative study; neither side of the comparative study is deni-
grated in favor of the other, and the sources are not pushed to say more than what
can be legitimately derived from them. If anything, there is too much reserve, and
it may be that reserve that left this reviewer, at least, with a certain sense of disap-
pointment. Tadmor in his earlier historical work, particularly in his famous study
on Azariah of Judah, had shown a willingness to engage in theoretical reconstruc-
tion to explain the historical dynamics of the period. In this commentary, that drive
to explain has been sacrificed to the desire not to go beyond the sources.

This failure to offer a larger theoretical framework in which to explain the in-
dividual details of the text undercuts Tadmor and Cogan’s attempts to resolve the
difficult historical cruxes of this period. They have their opinions, of course, but
anyone familiar with the debate over these cruxes will not find their new evidence
or insights significant enough to shift the balance of probabilities one way or an-
other. In their treatment of Sennacherib’s campaign against Jerusalem, for instance,
they do not adequately explain when or how the account of God’s miraculous de-
liverance of the city arose, and anyone who holds to the two-campaign theory will
find their cursory dismissal of the evidence supporting that theory totally inade-
quate. In short, they have not incorporated all the evidence in a new reconstruction
that is more satisfying than the previously espoused theories.

Ministers will find the volume short on theological reflection, but one does not
really expect the Anchor Bible series to be strong in that area. The volume is strong
on history, on the use of non-biblical sources, and on philology, and despite the
disappointment expressed above, these strengths will make the volume a valuable
addition to the minister’s library.

J. J. M. Roberts
Princeton Theological Seminary

Clements, Ronald E .Jeremiah. Interpretation Commentary. Atlanta: John Knox
Press, 1988. Pp. 276. $17.95.

Good commentaries on Jeremiah were hard to come by ten years ago, but that
void has been filled in recent years by several complete and updated studies on this
unique prophet of the Old Testament. No one commentary better fills the gap from
a theological perspective, however, than Ronald Clement’s recent addition to the
fine interpretation commentary series. Clements finds the delicate balance between
keeping in view the real historical and political events surrounding the ancient
readers of Jeremiah’s book and the enduring theological insights which continue to
address contemporary readers.

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Clements is a British Old Testament scholar who has worked extensively on the
prophets and on issues of Old Testament theology. His broad expertise enables him
to work effectively with the larger issues of theological importance which the book
of Jeremiah raises. Examples include the tension of divine wrath and divine love,
the relationship of judgment and hope, the struggle to discern the true word of God
in true and false prophecy, the understanding of sin, and the relationship of faith
and the behavior and attitude of moral and social life.

In contrast to earlier commentators, Clements follows a recent trend in much
contemporary biblical scholarship. He focuses more on the present shape of the
book of Jeremiah rather than on trying to peel away the editorial layers to get at
the “authentic” words of the prophet. The result is a fresh appreciation of how the
book of Jeremiah was read as a whole by the exiles after the destruction of Jerusa-
lem in 587 B.C. As Clements notes, “the shadow of the events of 587 B.C. covers
the entire book of Jeremiah, in much the same way as the shadow of the crucifixion
rests over the whole of Mark’s Gospel” (p. 9).

Readers of Clements’ commentary may come to new insights about the image or
persona of the prophet which the editors of Jeremiah’s words portrayed. Often
people think of prophets only as angry and negative and largely political critics.
Jeremiah certainly is portrayed as having some of those characteristics. But the
words of Jeremiah have been shaped toward a quite different ultimate goal. As
Clements notes, “like all the Old Testament prophetic collections, Jeremiah is es-
sentially formulated as a message of hope throughout” (p. 177). Moreover, in con-
trast to Isaiah, Jeremiah seems much less concerned with the political mistakes of
kings and much more concerned with the deeper issues of the whole people’s sin
and rebellion against God.

Clements does well in tracing the many ways in which the suffering and endur-
ance of Jeremiah function as a kind of forerunner for the people’s future life in
exile. Jeremiah’s life becomes a window into the people’s future. However, Clem-
ents does not do as well in showing the many ways in which Jeremiah’s life also
functions as a window into the agony and passion of God. In some of Jeremiah’s
laments, the words of Jeremiah and the words of God become fused and indistin-
guishable. Clements emphasizes Jeremiah’s insistence on God’s transcendence
above all human symbols (Davidic kingship, temple). But Clements often misses the
equally important dimension in Jeremiah of God’s intimacy and close involvement
with the prophet and with the people with whom God relates as parent, spouse,
and lover. The God of Jeremiah seems more down to earth than Clements allows.

Nevertheless, this is a rich and very useful commentary. It will be an effective
foundation for much good preaching and teaching on one of the most interesting
prophets of the Old Testament.

Dennis T. Olson
Princeton Theological Seminary

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291

Nelson, C. Ellis, ed. Congregations: Their Power to Form and Transform. Atlanta:
John Knox Press, 1988. Pp. 287. $14.95.

Among theological educators, C. Ellis Nelson is a leading proponent of the cen-
trality of the congregation in the structure, life, and mission of the church. In 1967,
at a time when the emphasis was on finding alternatives to the congregation, he
insisted, “the basic unit remains the congregation,” which he saw in holistic terms
as “the self-conscious human group worshiping, living, and working together,” in
interactive worship, fellowship, searching, and confronting issues (see C. Ellis Nel-
son, Where Faith Begins).

At that time, Nelson stressed the congregation’s power to form persons into a
community of faith. Now, in this carefully edited book, he turns also to the congre-
gation’s power to transform itself and its members.

In addition to Nelson, ten authors are represented. But great care is taken to
develop and maintain focus and unity. Three persons to whom the congregation
has been a central concern helped to plan the book and choose the authors. The
chapters were submitted to critique by congregational leaders in a two-day meeting
at Austin Seminary, and then rewritten. Nelson’s first chapter clarifies the book’s
purpose, special features, and assumptions, and provides a chapter-by-chapter guide
to its thought.

The purpose of the book is “to help ministers, Christian educators, and lay lead-
ers explore the major factors which create, sustain, critique, and transform the
unique characteristics of congregations and to propose ways they can influence the
character and mission of the congregations in which they have a leadership role”
(p. 2). Ten factors affecting congregational life are singled out, and a chapter is
given to each.

Chapters 2-5 suggest conditions for formation and transformation. Bruce C.
Birch’s “Memory in Congregational Life” stresses the biblical roots of the congre-
gation as a people of God. Conscience is the core of Jackson W. Carroll’s “The
Congregation as Chameleon: How the Present Interprets the Past,” warning of the
distortion of our history to suit our present purposes. In “Why Do People Congre-
gate?” David S. Steward deals with motives, indicating how differently people have
been and are drawn to the church. Carl S. Dudley’s “Using Church Images for
Commitment, Conflict, and Renewal” shows how different churches have different
characters and personalities because of the nature of their sense of identity, the
reason for which they exist (or think they exist).

Chapter 6 (Donald Eugene Miller’s “Centers of Vision and Energy”) is pivotal
because it demonstrates the holistic nature of the congregation as it builds on these
prior conditions, and utilizes the dynamics that are to be analyzed. It is the whole
process of congregational transformation with which he deals, suggesting a model
not unlike that of Thomas Groome’s “shared praxis.” The six steps that he outlines
for examining the faithfulness of a congregation, if followed, would expose the roots

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

of its present life and provide it with a new vision of what it could be. The process
is applicable to a variety of types of congregations (which he enumerates). “The
direction forward,” he says, “requires careful attention to the congregation’s living
story, for therein does the ever-present power of God to form and transform be-
come most evident” (p. 140).

Chapters 7-1 1 provide treatments of various dynamics of formation and trans-
formation. The dynamic with which Mary Elizabeth Moore deals is that of listening
(“Meeting in the Silence: Meditation as the Center of Congregational Life”). “Be-
longing: A Sacramental Approach to Inclusion and Depth of Commitment” is Rob-
ert L. Browning’s interpretation of the heart of membership. In “Leading: Paideia
in a New Key,” Janet F. Fishburn puts learning and spiritual formation at the
center of leadership. Charles R. Foster’s “Communicating: Informal Conversation
in the Congregation’s Education” shows how effective and pervasive the non-struc-
tured aspects of the congregation’s life can be in learning. “Teaching: Forming and
Transforming Grace” is Maria Flarris’s reconstruction of congregational education
as an art form that touches the deepest levels of affective life.

Among the book’s special features, according to Nelson, is its recognition and
use of the first-hand experience of parish leaders for the guidance of practice. “Sup-
pression of experiential knowledge of congregations and the substitution of theo-
logical language would have surprised the first Christian theologian, the Apostle
Paul. . . . When properly related to Christian belief, experience is the way we de-
velop our understanding of congregational life” (p. 3). The authors have, indeed,
used experiential knowledge, but in most cases it has been so distilled into theory
that the result strikes the reader as abstract rather than concrete. The expressed
hope that the book will be immediately useful to congregational leaders may there-
fore be difficult to realize.

At the other extreme, perhaps, is the problem of analytical treatment. The ex-
pressed hope here is that the book will promote a holistic view of the congregation,
and that thinking and planning will reflect that holistic view. Yet the analysis at
most points is in such familiar terms that it is difficult to get over the hurdle of
subordinating specific categories to the whole. It might have been useful if the au-
thors had dropped the familiar modes of analysis and subjected us to new and more
holistic ways of thinking. Maria Harris in her chapter has done this for curriculum.
She abandons the terms with which curriculum workers are familiar, and substi-
tutes terms that make her point about the need for a new way of looking at the
matter. She jars us into a holism that we might otherwise miss.

However, Congregations: Their Power to Form and Transform serves its stated
purpose in putting in one place for its intended audience the materials, understand-
ings, and processes by which, with hard work, a new way of dealing with congre-
gational change may be achieved.

D. Campbell Wyckoff
Princeton Theological Seminary

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293

Aleshire, Daniel O. Faithcare: Ministering to All God’s People Through the Ages of
Life. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1988. Pp. 180. $12.95 (Paper).

For Daniel Aleshire, Professor of Psychology and Christian Education at the
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, faithcare “is the sensitive
process of attending to and ministering with individuals who are struggling —
sometimes in the most ordinary ways — to let faith emerge and grow in them” (p.
13). The primary focus of his book is the “attending to” dimension of faithcare, for
it is his conviction that attending to or paying attention to people “provides the
information required for articulate expressions of ministry” (p. 15). Thus, Part 1 of
Faithcare is concerned with paying attention to the way that people of faith learn
and grow, while Part 2 centers on paying attention to the three major age groups
in the community of faith: children, youth, and adults.

Ministry, in Aleshire’s view, begins with attending to people, and requires a com-
mitment to giving attention rather than attracting it. Beyond this basic commit-
ment, there are sensitivities and skills which one can cultivate and learn, making
one a more effective attender and hence a more effective minister. Faithcare focuses
primarily on developing the sensitivities which are conducive to attending to people,
and this means acquiring some new learnings about people and discarding some
old ones. We have a habit of attending to persons in terms of their gender, their
occupation, their physical characteristics, the region of the country in which they
were raised or live, and so on. These are not unimportant, but, for Aleshire, they
can be misleading and superficial, as they fail to capture the unique individuality of
persons in their complexity, richness, and depth. Far better is to pay attention to
persons in terms of their development, in terms of the way they learn, and, most
importantly, in terms of their faith, and how it shapes their development and learn-
ing. There are more subtle and nuanced ways of attending to persons, and they are
not as easily gotten hold of; but they enable us to get closer to, and to perceive more
accurately and penetratingly, the persons we encounter in everyday life. Persons
experience faith in unique and particular ways, they develop in ways that are pe-
culiar to themselves, and they learn in ways that are congruent with who they are
and who they aspire to be. Attempts to generalize, to abstract, to objectify these
ways of experiencing, developing, and learning, cause us to miss sight of individu-
als’ uniqueness and particularity.

And yet, Aleshire believes that some theorizing about these particularities, and
some attempts to generalize about them, can be useful, if done with caution and
circumspection. It is possible, for example, to identify the typical ways in which
persons experience faith, e.g. as openness to God, as relational and transforming
participation, as investing everyday life with meaning, and as ever-changing and
renewing. It is also possible to talk about and, to some degree, describe the process
by which faith is learned, and the means by which faith is nurtured and enabled to
grow. Such insights, to which Aleshire makes his own contributions in chapters on

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

paying attention to the way of faith, on learning in the community of faith, and on
growing in the community of faith, can lead to active faithcare, that is, to the kind
of attending with w'hich we associate activities like gardening and parenting: at-
tending which is nonaggressive but steady, purposeful, and, above all, attuned to
what makes Jenny, Jenny, and Jonathan, Jonathan.

It is also possible to describe the characteristic ways in which children, youth, and
adults reflect and reflect upon their faith, as Aleshire does in the second half of
Faithcare. Again, such explorations are not to diminish the uniqueness of each per-
son’s faith experience, nor to divest faith of its essential mystery, but it is to claim
that there are some discernible ways in which children and youths, especially, will
reflect and reflect upon their faith. Adults, in Alshire’s view, are much more vari-
able and idiosyncratic in their faith-reflections, but this variability is itself charac-
teristic of adults, and to be aware of this fact is part of what it means to pay attention
to them, as individuals.

Faithcare is intended for a dual, but overlapping readership. It is for pastors,
especially those in parish settings, for the context to which it speaks is clearly
the congregation; and it is for Christian educators. I think it works for both
readerships, in part because of what it does not do, which is to address the ques-
tion of skill acquisition or techniques for enhancing attentional capacities. Un-
like most pastoral care books, it does not include case reports, though it is sprinkled
with illustrations from Aleshire’s own church and family involvements. And un-
like most Christian education texts, it does not include discussion of pedagogy
and curricular concerns. Thus, neither readership is likely to teel that the book
was actually written for the other. It may be, of course, that each of these reader-
ships would have w'anted some attention given to skill acquisition, some specific
suggestions for how one might nurture one’s attentional capacities, and some
guidelines for assessing one’s attentional abilities against certain standards or ideals.
It may be that some readers might also wish for somewhat more, dare I say,
theological discussion, as the whole question of “paying attention” raises the
theological issue of sin, especially in the form of distortion, ignorance, and in-
difference. What, in other words, are impediments to “paying attention” to
others, and what is the relationship between these impediments and the faith pro-
cess itself?

Then, this minor, but, to an Eriksonian, not insignificant criticism: Ale-
shire claims that Erik Erikson’s developmental theory emphasizes hereditary in-
fluences because it posits that personality develops according to an epigenetic
principle. Erikson’s epigentic principle does not entail the primacy of hered-
itary over environmental influences in personality development. In fact, Erik-
son is generally viewed as placing the greater emphasis on environmental
influences.

Faithcare is a good book. Aleshire is not atraid to confess that he is dealing with

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295

matters which are difficult to put into words. I admire his honesty, his humility,
and, above all, his obvious humanity.

Donald Capps
Princeton Theological Seminary

Webber, Robert E. and Rodney Clapp. People of the Truth. San Francisco. Harper
& Row, 1988. Pp. 136. $14.95.

These two evangelical authors, one a Wheaton College professor and the other a
Christianity Today editor, urge us to focus upon the church as the central instrument
of social change in the Christian scheme of things. Too many Christian activists on
the left and the right, they complain, think that if anything of political importance
is going to be done in the world it will be because we have harnessed the power of
national governments. This kind of social action simply is not “radical” enough.

What is needed, the authors insist, is more Christian attention to “depth politics”:
"Depth politics is happening whenever anyone maizes a deliberate and structured attempt
to influence how people live in society.” And this is the kind of political process that
only the church can effectively nurture.

Webber and Clapp do not pretend to be theological innovators. They freely draw
upon the work of a wide variety of thinkers, especially narrative theologians and
sociologists of knowledge. But neither are they mere popularizers of other peoples’
work. They do an excellent job of appropriating themes and insights for the pur-
poses of constructing an ecclesiological perspective that should be very helpful to
those who are immersed in the complexities of pastoral ministry.

This book deals with theological materials that usually get treated by writers who
identify with liberationist, Anabaptist or “Franciscan” theological projects: e.g.,
structural evil, principalities and powers, and “the option for the poor.” But Webber
and Clapp seem especially concerned to find ways in which these themes can be
applied to very ordinary North American suburban congregations. They want the
church to be a “diacritical community” wherein social evil is not only identified and
criticized, but where an alternative social-political reality is effectively nurtured.

Readers who still operate with older stereotypes of evangelicals may be surprised
by the authors’ strong liturgical interests. Citing Vatican II ’s declaration that liturgy
is “the fount from which all [the church’s] power flows,” they explore the relation-
ship of preaching, baptism, and eucharist to the promotion of “depth politics.” The
church’s liturgy shapes us into a people whose lives display and channel the justice
of God in a broken world. Our Christian approach to specific social problems must
grow out of our communal efforts to be a people whose worship is an “epiphany of
justice.”

Webber and Clapp do not leave us wondering how all of this is to be translated
into practical wrestlings with specific social problems. In a concluding chapter on

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THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

“The Church and Current Social Issues” they offer brief but cogent discussions of
pornography, aids and homosexuality, abortion, poverty, drugs, and nuclear weap-
onry. There are some gems here, even for those of us who think we have read it all
when it comes to Christian discussion of these kinds of topics.

This book provides an excellent brief refresher course in practical ecclesiology
for all who want the church to be a “people of the truth.”

Richard J. Mouw
Fuller Theological Seminary

Santmire, H. Paul. The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of
Christian Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Pp. xiii + 274. $16.95.

In the service of the environmental movement, which gathers strength daily,
many religious thinkers have plunged into the debates about a Christian theology
of nature. Few have done so with such careful concern for sources and such overall
fairness as Paul Santmire, who here gives us a tour of major Christian thinkers
from the New Testament to the twentieth century. This is a learned and informa-
tive work, a pleasure to read; and even if one disagrees with it from time to time,
in matters small and not so small, one admires the rigorousness and honesty of the
research and exposition.

Santmire’s tactic is to acknowledge right at the start that the Christian tradition
is complex and ambiguous (see his subtitle) on the subject of nature, and that it can
be read in different ways depending on one’s conceptual framework. He chooses to
highlight those thinkers and elements who have a positive appreciation of nature,
arguing that they represent as authentic a version of Christian faith as any other
reading. His heroes are Irenaeus, Augustine, and Francis. On the negative side, he
dislikes the attitudes toward nature which he finds in Thomas Aquinas, Bonaven-
ture, Bultmann, Barth, and Teilhard de Chardin. Luther and Calvin occupy an
ambivalent middle position. His biblical exegesis, which comes at the end of the
book after his discussion of the post-biblical tradition, similarly divides the sheep
from the goats, with Paul in the former camp, the Johanine school in the latter.

Going beyond the familiar idea of the goodness of creation, Santmire singles out
for emphasis the eschatological themes which imply that nature will participate,
along with humanity, in the renewal of all things in God’s consummation of history.
Unless we believe that nature has an eschatological future, he thinks, we will de-
value it and hence not properly care for it. He signifies this position with a couple
of “root metaphors,” that of the “fecundity” of creation, and that of “migration to
a good land,” metaphors he seeks out in the writings he explores. The rejected
position, the “anthropocentric” one where nature is backdrop to the divine-human
drama, he signifies with the metaphor of “ascent,” where the spiritual ultimately
triumphs over the material.

Naturally the chosen metaphors organize the material to favor the position the

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297

author wants. This is not truly an objective investigation leading where it will.
Methodologically aware and sophisticated as he is, Santmire admits this bias quite
openly, suggesting it is better to choose a direction self-consciously than accept one
unconsciously. Fair enough. But of course this also means one might write another
book, with another viewpoint, using the same Christian tradition. Indeed, Santmire
might help us if we wished to do so, since, to his great credit, he reports his materials
faithfully before making his choices from them, thus letting us see not only his
principles of selection but also some possible alternative hypotheses. For example,
he acknowledges the anthropocentrism of Irenaeus quite frankly before describing
it in a refinement which allows him to claim his man for an ecological viewpoint
after all. He admits that Augustine believed in human “dominion over nature,” but
fine tunes this notion till it yields a “kind of solidarity with nature,” and so lands
Augustine in the ecological camp also.

Despite a stubborn honesty, one which resists tendentiousness, Santmire’s schema
will out. And if we wish to object to his conclusions, if we find ourselves uncom-
fortably among the goats, we will have to offer different organizing principles and
different metaphors before being able to reclaim the tradition. It is possible, for
example, to welcome the “anthropocentric view” not only as thoroughly supported
in biblical and traditional Christian sources (Santmire admits as much), but also as
far more valuable in the service of ecology than a view focused on a future consum-
mation of nature as renewed in all its fecundity. After all, a cosmic renewal accom-
plished only by God at the end of days is one in which we can have no part and
does not answer to our need for responsible ecological action now. Such a vision
can also be only a “hope against hope,” considering the secular geological wisdom
which foresees the inevitable death of planet earth in fire and ice. Why not, then,
welcome as the best friend the environment can have, the traditional idea, of which
Santmire makes light, that we are meant to exercise “dominion” over nature as
responsible stewards for the Creator? Here anthropocentrism and environmental-
ism marry each other without desperate appeal to apocalypse.

There is, finally, the problem of the relation of ecological theology to social jus-
tice. Santmire claims that his vision of nature is necessary if we are to affirm the
value of the world and thus deal adequately with its problems, while those (like this
reviewer) who frankly take an anthropocentric position have unwittingly sub-
scribed to a “spiritual” view which breeds indifference both to nature and the ma-
terial life of humanity. Thus he turns on its head my argument that rejection of the
anthropocentric means rejection of the primacy of human concerns and leads to
indifference and even hostility to the claims of social justice. History will have to
judge between these opposing sides, and so far the history of the real environmental
movement is rife with social elitism and indifference to the claims of the poor. The
more mystical is the reverence for nature, it seems, the less firm is our will to man-
age it for human welfare. It may be that the political “Green” movement is begin-
ning to change this class bias. Yet even this movement is ecological politics in the

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service of humanity, another example, if one were needed, of the enduring utility of
the anthropocentric motifs of responsible dominion and stewardship of God’s cre-
ation which lie at the heart of the Christian tradition.

Thomas Sieger Derr
Smith College

Chatfield, Donald F. Dinner with Jesus and Other Left-Handed Story -Sermons.
Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. 1988. Pp. 128. $6.95 (paper).

The author, who is professor of preaching and worship at Garrett-Evangelical
Theological Seminary in Evanston, 111., helps us at the outset of this volume by
defining what he means by “left-handed” in the matter of the creation of the ser-
mon. He writes: “A left-handed sermon is one that encourages the right side of the
brain to take the lead for a while. The right hemisphere of the brain governs the
left side of the body; so what I call left-handed sermons tend to come from and
speak to the right side of the brain more than the left. . . . Typical sermons tend to
favor the logical, imperative side, rejecting the rich texture and flavor of a lot of the
Bible itself — which is largely and basically story ” (p. 9).

With this insight into the processes of the human psyche, Professor Chatfield
experienced a complete revolution in his own approach to and method of sermon-
izing, both in creation and delivery. Composing his sermons now entirely orally he
felt “pushed to structure my sermons more like plots, and with more images and
events” (p. 11). Further he writes: “One result is that I have increasingly found that
I too am a teller of stories. And more than that: I am told by the stories I tell. And
most of all, in the telling of tales I can increasingly see my life as a tale told by God”
(p. 12).

With this intention and goal in mind, how does he do it? What is his modus
operand /? Initially and by nature, Chatfield has a quiver full of qualifications, many
of them basic and requisite to this brand of pulpit communication. He possesses a
very lively and fertile imagination which he uses effectively and yet with appropri-
ate restraint. As a student of literature he handles the contemporary idiom easily
and some well-worn phrases are re-minted with attention-getting results. There are
twelve chapters here — seven emerge directly trom a pericope in Scripture and five
have either a Christian orientation or the hint of a strong moral teaching at and for
their close.

It would be unfair to attempt to evaluate sermons of this kind apart from the
context in which they were given originally or any knowledge of the skill of the
storyteller before a worshiping congregation. There are, however, a number ot fea-
tures here that merit commendation. Chatfield’s insight into both the assets and
foibles of human nature enables him to draw parallels between how the average
person acts and talks today with people and events separated in time from the first
century. He is less effective, however, in his mythological attempts as in his imper-

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299

sonations of biblical characters in crucial events from scripture which he does un-
commonly well. The average pulpit today speaks to a biblically illiterate generation.
Chatfield is aware of this and realizes that the story informs and teaches where
logical analyses and theological presuppositions no longer excite interest. At the
same time he claims that his method secures by implication the answers to some
deep theological questions more effectively than by hitting them head on.

Certain cautionary words, however, are in order. Some preachers lend them-
selves easily to the use of story; others cannot. Some storytellers make the narrative
so complex that the hearers fail to sort out the characters and hence they “sit this
one out.” Often biblical names familiar to the seminary graduate are foreign to the
layperson’s ear. (Incidentally — and this is an aside — this reviewer bristles when a
preacher uses “Yahweh” and “Sheol” before people whose common vocabulary,
especially invectives, features “God” and “Hell”!). Homiletical methods differ
among preachers and no one, including Chatfield, would expect everyone to fit into
the same system, because all of us have been engaged on occasion even by solidly
theologically propositional preachers whose imaginative powers were employed to
great advantage. On further thought, we are fortunately the heirs of John Bunyan,
Alexander Whyte, and Henry Ward Beecher, whether in allegory or story, and we
read and hear with fascination our contemporaries, Frederick Bruce Speakman,
Frederick Buechner, and all others — including Chatfield — who follow in their
train.

Donald Macleod
Princeton Theological Seminary

PRINCETON

THEOLOGICAL

SEMINARY

A SEMINAR ON PREACHING

December 4— R. Maurice Boyd

EARLY CHRISTIAN RESPONSES TO THE WORLD:
1ST CORINTHIANS AS CASE STUDY

December 4-7— Vincent Wimbush

THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL CHANGE

December 4-7— Carl Geores, Jr., Richard Fenn

FIRST MONDAY— POPULAR MOVEMENTS,
CHRISTIAN BASE COMMUNITIES. AND
LIBERATION STRUGGLES IN CENTRAL AMERICA

January 8— Richard Shaull

CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC
CULTURE

January 8-10— James Loder

THE FULL WEALTH OF CONVICTION

January 8-1 1— Diogenes Allen
(Off-Campus Seminar, Seattle, WA)

THE LETTER TO THE HEBREWS

January 8-11— Bruce Metzger

STUDY TOUR OF THE HOLY LAND

January 10-25— James Charlesworth

WITH THE EYES OF FAITH: APPRECIATING
THE CONTENT OF CHRISTIAN ART

January 15-18 — Karlfried Froehlich

CHURCH-BASED COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

January 15-18 — Wesley Woo

LEADERSHIP II (A COURSE FOR LAITY)

January 19-21— Roy Pneuman, Margaret Bruehl

CHRIST IN CONTEXT

January 22-25— Daniel Migliore

HUMAN INTERACTION

January 22-25— Roy Pneuman

EFFECTIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

January 22-25— Margaret Bruehl

THE PERSONAL DIMENSION OF EVANGELISM

January 22-25— Ben Johnson

BIOETHICAL QUANDARIES AND THE CHRISTIAN
FAITH

January 29-February 1— Jack McConnell, Abigail
Rian Evans

MINISTERING TO THE EMOTIONAL NEEDS OF
CONGREGATIONS

February 5-8— John Talbot

FIRST MONDAY— CHILDHOOD CANCER: WHY IS
IT DIFFERENT

February 5— American Cancer Society

PASTORAL CARE AND COUNSELING WITH
WOMEN

February 12-15— Christie Neuger

PRAYER AND THE BIBLE

February 12-15— Patrick Miller
(Off-Campus Seminar, Sarasota, FL)

"STEAL AWAY TO JESUS”: THE DISCIPLINE OF
SOLITUDE

February 19— Kent Groff

THE QUESTION OF ORDAINED MINISTRY:
CURRENT ECUMENICAL DIALOGUE

February 19-23— David Adams

Center of Continuing Education (609) 497-7990

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