VOL. 6, NO.

2 SUMMER 1986
A Scholarly Journal for Reflection on Ministry

QUARTERLY REVIEW

Security, International Responsibility, and Reconciliation

Tlieodore R. Weber
Theological Education in the Parish
/. Andrew Overman
Natural Law, Evolution, and Personhood
T. H. Milby
Control: Power or Impotence?
Carroll Saussy
Theology of Suffering
Ted Dolts
Three Pastoral Perspectives
Laurel A. Burton
Hebrew Bible Lections for the Season after Pentecost
Wilfred Bailey
Review of Books by Ervirig Goffman
Frank E. Wicr
QUARTERLY REVIEW
A Scholarly Journal for Reflection on Ministry

A publication of The United Methodist Publishing House

Robert K. Feaster, President and Publisher
and the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry
F. Thomas Trotter, General Secretary

Editorial Director, Harold Fair

Editor, Charles E. Cole

Editorial Board
F. Thomas Trotter, Chair Leander Keck
Lloyd R. Bailey Yale Divinity School
Duke Divinity School Cornish Rogers
Wilfred Bailey School of Theology at Claremont
Casa View United Methodist Church Roy I. Sano
Dallas, Texas Bishop, Denver Area
Fred B. Craddock United Methodist Church
Candler School of Theology John L. Topolewski
Emory University Johnson Memorial United
Pamela C. Dunlap Methodist Church,
United Methodist Minister Johnson City, New York
Northern Illinois Conference William H. Willimon
Brita Gill-Austern Duke University Chapel
Minister, Northern California
Conference, United Church of Christ

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Quarterly Review: A Scholarly Journal for Reflection on Ministry
Summer, 1986
Copyright 1986 by The United Methodist Publishing House
and the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry
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 VOL. 6, NO. 2 SUMMER 1986

QUARTERLY REVIEW

CONTENTS

Editorial: What Is Scholarly?

Charles E. Cole 3
Security, International Responsibility, and Reconciliation
Theodore R, Weber 12
The Parish as Context for Theological Education
/. Andrew Overman 30
Natural Law, Evolution, and the Question of Personhood
T. H. Milby ....39
Control: Power or Impotence?
Carroll Saussy 48
Six Points in a Theology of Suffering
Ted Dotts 59
The Origins of Three Pastoral Perspectives
Laurel A. Burton 64
Homiletical Resources: Hebrew Bible Lections
for the Season after Pentecost
Wilfred Bailey 75
Book Review: The Prodigious Work of Erving Goffman
Frank E. Wier 100
Effective with this issue of Quarterly Review, Harold L. Fair
becomes editorial director, succeeding Ronald P. Patterson.
Dr. Fair is associate book editor at The United Methodist
Publishing House.
 EDITORIAL

What Is Scholarly?

On November 14,1985, a thirty-two-year-old American, Gary

Taylor, was reading a catalogue of poems in the Bodleian Library
at Oxford University, As an editor of a new one-volume
collection of Shakespeare's works, he was making a last check of
manuscript sources purely as a matter of scholarly thorough
ness. Reading down a list of first lines of poems in manuscript
form in the library's collection, he came to one attributed to
Shakespeare whose first line he did not recognize. As he usually
did in such cases, he wrote the information down on a call-up
slip and left it at the library desk so that the manuscript could be
retrieved and examined the next day.
The next morning he did some chores at the office before
going down to pick up the manuscript. When he did ask for it,
he found it to be a bound folio of collected poems from several
poets, printed in a calligraphic style, and seemingly dated from
the 1630s. Taylor homed in on the one poem of interest and ran
the tests that he had been trained to doexamining the original
penmanship, noting how the poem was printed on the page,
deciphering the script. He checked other poems in the collection
attributed to poets such as John Donne, Robert Herrick, and Ben
Jonson. This last exercise was aimed at testing the editor's
accuracy in attributing poems to particular poets. After doing all
this Taylor analyzed the internal evidence to see if the wording
corresponded to Shakespeare's usual language. Then he shared
the results with other Shakespearean scholars at Oxford. A
check was made of other libraries throughout the world to see if
3
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

the poem could have been attributed to Shakespeare by

someone else. This test proved negative and at that point Taylor
and others at Oxford announced the discovery: an addition had
been made to the Shakespeare poetry collection.
This case study does not end here, of course, because scholars
will continue to examine the evidence and argue over it. But it at
least displays one characteristic usually associated with scholar
ship: the use of original, often old and unknown, sources. When
scholars read a book for the first time, it is common practice for
them to flip to the back and check the bibliography first. A
scholar familiar with a field of study will be able to tell quickly
whether the writer has used the standard authoritative sources
or has come up with new ones. A survey that turns up only
secondary sources ordinarily results in the judgment that the
work also takes its place as a secondary one. The use of original
sources is much preferred.
Use of original sources characterizes scholarship, but there are
other marks as well. The question of what constitutes
scholarship has no clear answer, and one reason is the wide
range of what passes for scholarship. Books and journals that
carry a complex apparatusnotes, bibliography, credits,
etc.most notoriously communicate scholarly pretensions. Yet
a prestigious journal like American Scholar carries no notes at all,
and many publications with copious notes could never be
mistaken for scholarly ones. An example is a baseball record
book. Moreover, even though much scholarship in the
humanities often takes the oldest and most unknown sources as
the critical criterion, scientific research does just the opposite.
The most recent and best-known sources are accorded a higher
status. Tone is another gauge. The mere mention of serious
scholarship conjures up images of sobriety, and yet some
scholarly publications are devoted to humor. Furthermore,
some scholars actually tell jokes.
We have an investment in the pursuit of the question of what
is scholarly because we aspire to be a scholarly journal. At last
year's meeting of the editorial board this question came up for
consideration, and although we are still awaiting the verdict of
other scholars on the results, I can at least share some of the
thoughts that were expressed.
4
 EDITORIAL

Originality seems to be the first quality that comes to mind

when the revered name of scholarship is mentioned. One
practicing scholar told me of a discussion in his academic
department on the matter. He said that one professor argued
that only those works that would be read twenty-five years from
the date of publication could be adjudged as scholarly. Aside
from the fact that this criterion would require colleagues and
editors to be prescient (some, sad to say, are seriously lacking in
this virtue), it would also mean that very few works would ever
be published. Most of us would settle, instead, for scholarship
that had a relative degree of originalitythat either raised a new
question or made a fresh point about the material under
consideration. Work that satisfies even this modest requirement
seems to be in scarce supply.
The canon of originality has itself led to some familiar
excesses. In order to write a doctoral dissertation successfully,
candidates are supposed to add to the knowledge in the field
under study. This requirement has pushed doctoral students to
ever-greater extremes to locate something new about which to
write. Thus we find scholars publishing such works as "A
Ugaritic Parallel for the Feast for Ba'al in II Kings X: 8-25," and
"History, Method, and Theology: A Dialectical Comparison of
Wilhelm Dilthey's Critique of Historical Reason and Bernard
Lonergan's Meta-Methodology." The result of this kind of
specialization has been an occasional increase in actual
knowledge coupled with an exponential growth in the number
of graduates who are unemployable.
Scholarship consists of more than originality, though, and
Dean Leander Keck suggested in the editorial board discussion
that another characteristic is that of "disciplined reflection."
That is, a scholar not only works within a field with an eye
toward detecting the new, or pushing the field forward, but also
works in a sustained and methodical way, usually over a fairly
long period of time. This kind of scholarly research usually is
asked to meet another criterion, that of insightsome previously
unthought-of way of viewing the material under consideration.
Mere familiarity with material does not make one a scholarthe
methodical gathering of information must result in actual
knowledge. To say that new knowledge is a requirement for
5
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

scholarship must be baffling to nonscholars who read books by

alleged scholars and find them to be bereft of creativity or new
insight. Yet the standard of new knowledge must be adhered to,
or else the scholarly becomes equated with the merely
knowledgeable. Most of us encounter redundant knowledge in
those books where the history of a field is reviewed before the
writer attempts his or her own contribution. This review often
consists of comparison and analysis, and of this we have more
than enough, but of synthesis we can hardly get enough. As the
late President Lyndon B. Johnson used to say after an aide had
read a lengthy memo, "Therefore what?"
Disciplined reflection implies as well adherence to the
traditional canons of reasonconsistency, logic, accuracy, and
coherence, for example. These rules have come under attack in
recent decades with the elevation of intuitive processes, but the
nature of reasoned discourse itself seems to require them. This is
not to say that unreasoned language does not have value. The
so-called primal scream, verbal free association, ecstatic
outpouringsall these and many other forms of language can
and do play a role in basic human communications. But unless
they contain a point A that leads to point B, it is extremely hard
to comprehend their place in scholarship.
These logical, linear procedures have been criticized because
they were the chief ingredients in some of the more spectacular
failures of rationality in recent history. How can any of us forget
how Robert McNamara and others argued with such seeming
plausibility the rationality of moving incrementally into a war in
Southeast Asia? Before that our culture had experienced the
rationality of Prohibition, and since then we have experienced
the rationality of liberals and conservatives in government. All
have argued that point A is connected to point B and therefore
the course of action being proposed is rational. And all have
ignored larger questions in the equation, as if absolute clarity
were the only standard for moral action. Besides underscoring
the fact that rationality has its vicious side, these rationalistic
failures have made us keenly aware that reason comprises much
more than the merely rational. As Paul Tillich taught us,
rationality can mean mere "technical reason," whereas the more
basic notion of reasoning that we inherited from the Greeks and
6
 EDITORIAL

others was that of grasping and shaping reality. Unless scholars

and intellectuals can demonstrate their use of reason in this
broader sense, we have a right to be leary of them.
Thus the linear processes must always be connected to some
way of asking basic questions about premises and methods,
questions that can be characterized as attempts to understand
the pre-reflective. These attempts surely belong to the human
istic tradition of reasoning, and they differ markedly from some
futile efforts in recent times to "hype" the intuitive at the
expense of the reasonable. We have witnessed in our day a
number of incredibly boring explorations of left-brain and
right-brain differences, mystical religions, psychedelic media,
and so on. It is as if all the cultural fads of our time had been
packaged in the form of Victorian books. The thoughts of
philosophers have become the canned goods of intellectuals, we
are told, but the obverse could as well be true: the junk food of
popular culture has been freeze-dried for consumption at
academic banquets.
These several examples, then, display two distortions of
rationality and reasonthe assumption that reason means
merely technical reason, and the pretentious effort to force
intuitive thought into the traditional forms of analysis and
rational discourse. In a way both excesses underscore another
aspect of the scholarly: the close relation between thinking and
writing or speaking. Good thinkers are invariably good writers
and speakers. And wherever we find stultifying language, we
inevitably find thinking that gives off the stale aroma of a
pharaonic tomb. Articulation of ideas is not merely adventitious
to those ideasit is constitutive of them. For those of us in the
English-speaking world, being scholarly must then mean using
good English. The late E. B . White wrote that good English is
characterized by grace, clarity, and force. And although we
cannot hold these qualities up as a sort of perfectionist standard
in determining what should be published, we can use them as
one test of the scholarly. It is always possible, of course, that we
are simply too dumb to understand what the speaker or writer is
trying to say, but usually these impressions result from technical
language and not the sophistication of the ideas themselves.
Anyone relying heavily on technical language must have
7
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

essentially conservative purposes in mind, which is to say that a

listener or reader can safely assume any ideas cloaked in such
language are deservedly obscure. This dictum substantiates our
prejudice against bureaucracies, but it applies equally to any
intrenched interest, and in one way or another, all of us have
such interests.
We have then three marks of the scholarly: a proper use of
sources, disciplined reflection (including insight and reason),
and articulation. To assert them does not gainsay the fact that
much that passes for scholarly fails to impress us as exemplify
ing these virtues. Consider, for example, the infamous dullness
of much that purports to be scholarly. We can understand how
scholars can argue among themselves about the legitimate ways
sources are connected to insight, or whether certain arguments
are consistent or not. But what most of us have more difficulty
understanding is how anyone who has been exposed to original
sources and to the best thinking in any field could possibly be a
drone. We become interested in Shakespeare, say, and go to a
lecture only to hear a putative scholar repeating the same cliches
we have heard over and over. Or we hear about new
developments in a fieldstructuralism in literature, the
sociohistorical analysis of the Bible, or semioticsonly to find,
on trying to read the books written on those subjects, that they
are loaded with jargon and encrusted with neologisms that few
persons understand, and seem to bear no mark of freshness or
vitality. There is a popular slogan that jeers, "If you're so smart,
why ain't you rich?" We could well ask many supposedly
learned persons of our day, "If you're so smart, how can you be
so dull?"
Possibly one reason for the uninteresting way in which many
scholars present themselves and their work is group insularity.
Like any human subset, scholars seem to prefer to talk to other
scholars. This tribalism accounts not only for much of jargon in
any given field, but also a tendency toward inertia. Scholars who
are trained in particular methods and accustomed to doing
research and writing in traditional ways are not likely to take
kindly to suggestions that practices should be carried out in other
ways. Thomas Kuhn has described how this process has worked
in the history of science, where any change in the basic models
8
 EDITORIAL

used to validate "true science" inevitably runs into resistance

among scientists. Those of us familiar with religious disciplines
can list any number of contemporary debates where this
struggle over basic models, or, as Kuhn styles them, paradigms,
is being fought. What do we make of the fact, for instance, that
church historians have employed the methods of social history
very little? Or that the so-called new hermeneutics still must
justify itself to those insisting on historical-critical methods?
Theology itself seems to have been Balkanized, so that no one
challenge exists to previous models, and yet many theologians
have been trying valiantly to find ways to think in terms
consistent with postmodernism. All of these debates are being
carried on heatedly in the professional journals, but few of those
outside the academy seem to be involved in the discussion.
Scholars are talking with scholars, and the rest of the world
seems relegated to the status of the uninformed bystander.
Those of us on the outside, so to speak, often perceive the
scholarly world as moribund. Only when some spectacular
breakthrough occurs, as in the case of a new poem being added
to the Shakespeare canon, can we catch a glimpse of life inside
the world of scholarship. Two things need to be said about this
perception of static scholarship. The first is that many scholars
do indeed suffer from intellectual dementia. A. N. Whitehead
has a passage in his chapter, "Requisites for Social Progress," in
Science and the Modern World, in which he claims that narrow
specialization in professional education does not prepare
persons for unexpected situations. "The fixed person for the
fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, will in
the future be a public danger," he wrote. He was thinking,
apparently, of professionals like those in the civil service who
must bear heavy social responsibilities. But what are we to say of
those worn-out specialists who are supposed to be engendering
respect for revered humane traditions in our young and in all of
us and who have gone soundly to sleep inside their tenured
crypts? Are these not "public dangers" as well?
We have a right to be indignant about dull scholarship when
we consider the second reason that the world of the scholarly
often seems to be calcified. Given the characteristics of
9
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

scholarship identified here, the scholarly ought to display some

inner tension precisely because it attempts to move from the
traditional to the new. Knowledge of sources, for example,
properly exists in tension with "disciplined reflection," or insight.
This tension results from the fact that the more persons of
intelligence reflect on the sources in any field, the more likely they
are to call into question the conventions and established ways of
working in that field. This experience of tension creates the famed
skepticism of scholars, and it often underlies the critical methods
they employcritical, meaning making a proper assessment of,
and not necessarily a negative assessment. Wherever we find the
scholarly at work, we nearly always find heated arguments,
however, because some are attempting to stamp out and destroy
the ideas that others hold sacred. Rebecca West once wrote, " 'A
strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over
the dark places of life cutting away the dead things that men tell us
to revere' " (quoted in the New Yorker, July 30, 1984, p. 86, in a
review by V. S. Pritchett). I am not sure West qualifies as a
scholarshe seems to be more of a creative artistbut the action
she describes does characterize much of scholarly work. And if we
are repulsed by blood, we had best stay away from the scholarly.
But if our complaint is that the scholarly is boring, then perhaps
we need to appreciate the dynamic character of scholarly warfare.
Are we being unrealistic in expecting the scholarly always to
be interesting or stimulating? Or does scholarship, like the
workaday world, depend on an enormous amount of tedious
work that only occasionally ends in new knowledge? Genius as
90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration, and that sort
of thing? If this slogan holds, then the reason we encounter so
many dull books and so many dull lecturers may be that we are
being exposed to the process of review without enjoying the
result of insight. It is as if we had to hear the gardener explain
how the soil was prepared, the insects repelled, the weeds
pulled, and so on, before we can enjoy eating the vegetables.
Usually, though, those who practice scholarship with agility
manage to capture our attention and hold it in unexpected ways.
Many of us have such high expectations of scholarship precisely
because we have experienced its power through our exposure to
authoritative practitioners.
10
 EDITORIAL

"What is scholarly?" may seem a curious question to be asking

in the light of contemporary practical concerns, many of which
are urgent. As we move into a new age vaguely called
postmodernist, the scholarly seems to belong, if not to the
dustbin of history, at least in the archives. But wherever the
truly scholarly is found, we find creativity, imagination, and
hope. We also find ways to cope with larger questions of
survival, human community, and the quality of life. We need
scholarship for more than utilitarian reasons, and post
modernism seems to ask that we go beyond the merely
utilitarian; but postmodernism will make it more and more
difficult to eliminate the scholarly, because the world of
scholarship has the power to place things in a large perspective,
to inhibit the parochial ways of thinking that have done so much
damage in the world today. T. S. Eliot told the story of hailing a
London taxi and, after being driven a short way, hearing the
driver ask, "Ain't you T. S. Eliot?" Replying in the affirmative,
Eliot asked the driver how he recognized him. "Oh, I know a lot
of famous people by sight," the cabbie said. "Why, just the other
day I picked up Lord Russell. And I says to him, 'Lord Russell,
what's it all about?' And do you know he couldn't tell me?"
Perhaps it is too much to expect anyone, even a philosopher of
the magnitude of Bertrand Russell, to answer such questions.
Nevertheless, the taxi drivers of the world do ask these
questions, and not only ask them, but in many ways could
probably help to answer them. That is, if we seriously consider
folk wisdom as a source of knowledge, or the basic perceptions
of ordinary people as important in understanding knowl
edgewell, you see what I mean. What is scholarly? The
tradition that has given us the term and the reality continues,
and all of us have a stake in seeing that it succeeds.

CHARLES E . COLE

11
 SECURITY, INTERNATIONAL
RESPONSIBILITY, AND RECONCILIATION

THEODORE R. WEBER

Even though the Scriptures offer us two conflicting

understandings of security, we can provide a theo
logical basis for security as a responsibility of states;
but can we also find a political work of recon
ciliation?

Studying the order of some of the words in this title is an

exercise similar to that of reading tea leaves or searching for
divine guidance in the entrails of chickens, but it is an interesting
speculation and possibly even suggestive of the issues we are to
consider. Notice that security and reconciliation are separated
from each other by international responsibilitya division which
may imply differentiation, compartmentalization, and even
fundamental incompatibility. Notice also that concern for
security is placed first in the order of thought leading to
responsibility, whereas the mention of reconciliation comes
afterwards. Does that arrangement imply that the relationship
between security and state responsibility is natural, necessary,
and even primary, but that the relationship to reconciliation is
accidental, incidental, and heteronomous? Or does it suggest
that a commitment to reconciliation must amplify and in other
ways correct a concept of state responsibility that is limited too
narrowly to a simplistic understanding of security?

Theodore R. Weber is professor of social ethics at Candler School of Theology, Emory

University, in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of several books and articles on foreign
policy and issues of war and peace.

12
 SECURITY

Reflection on possible meanings of the order of words in the

title yields the following preliminary observations: first, if both
concern for security and commitment to reconciliation qualify as
state responsibilities, they nonetheless are not generically
similar. Security, like economic viability, falls generically into
the category of national interests. Reconciliation becomes a
national interest only in certain instances where reconciling
policies and acts serve particular national purposes. These acts
and policies may elicit some broader moral approval when they
promote the common purposes, and indeed the community, of
several nations, but their genesis is in a state's perceptions of the
conditions relating it to other states. Considered on its own
terms, reconciliation transcends national interests and may even
call for their sacrifice. The same vulnerability for which secu
rity is the intended antidote is a condition which is accepted,
characteristically, freely and openly for the sake of recon
ciliation.
Second, concern for the temporal security of people, territory,
and ruling group belongsby the authority of common
agreement and established usageto the essence of the state,
whereas the mission of reconciliation does not. States exist in a
political environment where hostility and threat must be
presupposed in principle, even though they vary in form,
degree, and constancy, and where no finally authoritative and
decisively powerful world government exists to resolve their
conflicts and protect them from loss and destruction. What no
world government can do, the states must do. Vulnerability of
all that is under their jurisdiction justifies their existence as
institutions that organize, monopolize, and administer power.
Security is not their only business, but it is their first order of
business. By contrast, the promotion of international reconcilia
tion is not the reason why states come into existence, and it is not
a definitive attribute of statehood. States have the responsibility
for promoting peace, but they also may have the obligation to
conduct war to protect their vital interests, among which the
most vital usually is their security. The theory of the state rests
heavily on security, and only very lightly on reconciliation.
Third, if the call for reconciliation suggests a pious,
confessional bias, it also implies that the politically orthodox
13
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

concepts of and approaches to security are theoretically and

practically inadequate to their own purposes. Dominant images
of statehood and security, and the kinds of security policies
derived from them, have been overtaken and challenged by
events, and especially by technological developments in
communications and military means of destruction. Funda
mental retheoretization now is essential, and policies must be
reformulated to reflect the revised theoretical understanding.
Security cannot and will not be removed as a central concern of
the state, but increasingly it must be sought in the strength and
durability of relationships rather than in the presumed
invulnerability of the fortress or in the ability to "project power"
effectively. We may hypothesize, therefore, that the call for
commitment to reconciliation is not a proposal that the state be
transformed into the church and take the work of reconciliation
instead of promotion of security as its foundational responsibil
ity. Rather, it is a proposal to penetrate the thinking that
produces policy with the truth that security is contingent upon
the development of community among nations, not upon the
expansion and technical refinement of arsenals. In the light of
that understanding, the "pious, confessional bias" becomes the
highest political wisdom.
The intent of this paper is to provide theological perspectives
on the topic announced in the title. That proviso requires both a
theological analysis of political reality and an indication of the
normative direction of political action. So far as the former is
concerned, the line of investigation will begin with security and
subsequently consider reconciliation. That order is appropriate
for several reasons. One is that the inquiry itself was provoked
by profound uneasiness over the efficacy and moral justification
of current security policies and arrangements. The call for
reconciliation is a response to that uneasiness. A second is that
theological reflection on politics must engage the reality of
politics, and security is the real and principal ground of the
existence of states. A third reason is that security is not less
theologically significant and susceptible of theological interpre
tation than reconciliation.
So far as the latter, that is, the normative direction of action, is
concerned, we must allow the conclusions to follow from the
14
 SECURITY

inquiry. We have indicated that security is theologically

significant; we may therefore discover that a continuing
concern for security is an element in the "normative direction
of political action." Also, we approach the task with the
conviction that God works in history and nature to make all
things newto bring the entire creation to the fullness of the
promised shalom. We shall have to discover the political
meaning of that reconciling work in relation to the problem of
security in the definition of state responsibilities in interna
tional politics.

THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SECURITY

Security theologically understood and security politically

understood both are concerned with the vulnerability of human
existence. Their provisions for coping with vulnerability are
predictably and characteristically different. Security theologi
cally understood is a relationship of dependence on and trust in
God which carries hopes for the future but asks and expects
nothing other than what God wills to provide. Security
politically understood is a symbolic, material, and institutional
arrangement for protecting persons, institutions, and property
and for making the open and threatening future livable by
institutionalizing behavioral expectations. What isithe relation
ship between the two? Specifically, what is the theological
perspective on the evaluation of political security?
One can speak of a biblical attitude toward political security
because the position is consistent throughout the Bible. It is one
of negation and condemnation. The arrangements that human
beings make or attempt to make by human means for securing
their present and future are both futile and sinful. They are futile
because they place trust in what is weak, fragile, and perishable,
under the illusion that it is strong, invulnerable, and enduring.
They are sinful because implicitly they renounce dependence on
God and place confidence in human beings to do what God
presumably cannot do. The biblical attitude is stated clearly and
characteristically in the following quotation from the Book of
Isaiah:
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 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help

and rely on horses,
who trust in chariots because they are many
and in horsemen because they are very strong,
but do not look to the Holy One of Israel
or consult the Lord! (Isa. 31:1, RSV)

Alliances with major powers (Egypt), possession of advanced

military technology (chariots), and the ability to deploy masses
of men and cavalry will not give protection against a superior
enemy, and their use will invite an even more devastating
defeat. More important than such pragmatic calculations, the
wrath of Yahweh will bring defeat and destruction on those who
rely on ordinary political and military wisdom to give them
security or victory, "but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or
consult the Lord!"
This biblical attitude towards political and military security
must not be confused with pacifism. To the contrary, it is a
fundamental element of the holy war doctrine of ancient Israel,
1
which carries over in principle even into the New Testament.
There will be fighting and the building of fortifications, but only
when God gives the command. And when the command is
given and the people fight and win, they win only because God
fights for them. "The horse is made ready for the day of battle,
but the victory belongs to the Lord" (Prov. 21:31). If God does
not fight for the people, no amount of soldiers, horses, and
chariots will carry the day. If God does fight, then victory can
come with a Gideon's army of three hundred men, blowing
trumpets, shouting, and smashing jugs, thereby throwing the
thousands of Midianites into such confusion that they hack each
other to pieces. The issue is not whether armies and
fortifications are good things or bad things, but whether kings
and people look to those human means or to the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for security.
The basic attitude towards securitythat it comes from God
alone and not from political and military meansis the same in
the New Testament as in the Hebrew Scriptures. However,
despite the agreement on that fundamental point there are
important differences. One is that the Hebrew Bible expects
16
 SECURITY

those who trust God for their security to be protected from

physical danger, whereas the New Testament does not. The
psalmist can speak of the Lord preparing a table for him in the
very presence of his enemies, but according to the New
Testament, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God, the man of
perfect faith, was nailed to a cross and killed by Roman soldiers,
and God did not intervene to protect him. Because God did not
intervene, even in response to the cry of dereliction from the
cross, the implication for the Christian story is either that God
was (and is) absent, or that the Resurrection is truth. If God was
(and is) absent, the question of security turns back to the
consideration of merely human means. If the Resurrection is
truth, then whatever true security might mean, it is to be found
only on the other side of exposure to suffering and death.

T h e N e w T e s t a m e n t calls Christians to accept the risks of

vulnerability for the sake of reconciliation with the
enemy.

A second difference, which follows in part from the first, is

that the New Testament calls Christians to accept the risks of
vulnerability for the sake of reconciliation with the enemy. The
linkage of faith to physical security thus is broken completely.
The linkage to security in relationship with God remains, but as
the present assurance of a future blessednesseither in a realm
of eternity above history, or in a transformed world at the end of
history.
These differences may become significant when we turn to a
consideration of reconciliation in relation to international
responsibility, but they do not alter the agreement on the
fundamental theological perspective on political and military
security: Security policies and measures are at best a weak reed,
at worst a dangerous and demonic delusion. In either case, they
imply a repudiation of genuine faith in the living God.
A second major theological perspective on security is
provided by the doctrine that the state is an instrument of God
for providing order in a fallen world. According to this view, the
17
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

state is an emergency order of preservation that holds the world

together and keeps it from being driven centrifugally into chaos
by the forces of sin released by the Fall. It is a security order of
protection that maintains domestic peace and repels external
foes, and shields the innocent from the predatory actions of the
wicked. It is a punitive order that inflicts on evildoers the
temporal sanctions of divine wrath. It is an external sacrament
(in Calvin's language, not Luther's) that serves the redemptive
work of God by providing time and space for the preaching of
justification.
Although I have referred to the first theological perspective on
security as "the biblical view," the proponents of the second
insist that it, too, is biblical. Helmut Thielicke, who has given us
probably the most extensive contemporary exposition and
application of this doctrinal stance, contends, following Luther,
that the state as an order of preservation was established by God
2
in the covenant with Noah. The attitude toward the quest for
political and military security is much more affirmative in the
second view than in the first. The central theological claim of the
second view is that God as sustainer provides temporal security
as an integral aspect of the divine work in history. To that end
political institutions and magistrates receive divine ordination
and serve as instruments and vicars of God. Although some
Christian communions that share this theological view of the
state exclude true Christians from any and all political
participation, others believe that Christians may be called to
serve the neighbor in love by administering the institutions that
attempt to provide security. The Calvinists prefer (actually it is
God's preference!) that only the saints should rule. In the
development of doctrine on the question of political and military
security, the random interventions of God in response to faith
and sin have become institutionalized into a constant mode of
divine historical activity that invites human response and
participation.
The two positions provide us with a clear choice. In the first
case, systematic security policies and their implementation are
an offense against God. In the second case, they may be a
faithful response to one aspect of the work of God. If the former
is theologically necessary, a person who has become a new
18
 SECURITY

creature in Jesus Christ and lives by the authority of divine

revelation can say nothing more about security responsibilities
than that nations and their leaders must wait for prophetic
divine guidance and not trust their own political wisdom and
arsenals. If the latter is theologically necessary, or at least
possible, a confessing Christian can proceed to consider and
even participate in systematic security planning under the
conviction that the effort is a vocational means of sharing in
God's work of preservation and protection.
Of course, the first perspectivethe one that condemns
human efforts to provide for securityis almost certain to be
ignored and scorned. Its proponents may be persecuted.
1
Confronted with what may be mortal danger to the society,
persons responsible for its welfare will be more impressed by the
enemy whom they can see than by the God whom they cannot
see. If Jeremiah, who advised King Zedekiah to surrender
Jerusalem to the Chaldeans, were to make the same prophecy in
Jerusalem today, his words would be no more welcome now
than they were thendespite the fact that the State of Israel
believes itself to be founded on the gift and promise of the very
God whose Word established the distinction between true and
false security. And what is predictable for Israel in this regard is
predictable for almost any state.
But the prospect of being ignored and trampled is no decisive
argument against a theologically valid claim. If we speak the
truth and are not heard, the burden of blame falls on those who
refuse to hear, not on those who bring the witness. In fact, the
proper inference from this division may be that those who live
by the truth of the coming kingdom ought not attempt to offer
guidance to those who rule the kingdoms of this world.
However, there are strong theological arguments against the
first view and in favor of the second, in addition to the claim that
the state as order of preservation is grounded in the Noachic
covenant. One argument is that the first view does not allow the
creatures of God to assume the full responsibility for which they
have been created. That we have mind, will, memory, foresight,
and imagination is the result not of the Fall but of original
creation. That we should use these attributes to give some shape
and substance to world and time is not in principle a repudiation
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

of the divine will but a fulfillment of it. Certainly it is true that we

cannot master history and build out into the void a fully secured
highway of predictability. But we are bound by the stewardship
of human capabilities to use them in the governance of the world
that God has put under human dominion. Our faithfulness to
God is shown in the way we discern, interpret, and discharge
our responsibilities, not in our abandonment of reason, will, and
power in the construction, maintenance, and protection of
viable societies.
A second argument is related to the first but begins from
incarnation rather than creation. The coming of God into the
world in human flesh, accepting the full burden and possibility
of humanity with its weakness, temptations, hopes, and risks is
inconsistent with a view of the divine-human relationship that
denies the necessary role of human beings as makers of history
and bearers of responsibility. We cannot escape dependence on

W e cannot escape d e p e n d e n c e on G o d for any m o m e n t

and condition of our existence, but d e p e n d e n c e need not
m e a n p e r m a n e n t infancy.

God for any moment and condition of our existence, but

dependence need not mean permanent infancy. Without
accepting all aspects and implications of the theologies of
Friedrich Gogarten and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we nevertheless
can agree with them that the incarnate God has given to
humankind responsibility for the world in which we live.
For these reasons, something similar to the second perspec
tive rather than the first will provide, at least tentatively, the
theological perspective on security as we continue the inquiry
into international responsibility. But in making this decision we
must acknowledge that important elements of the first
perspective are contained in the second: the fact that the only
true security is that which one has in relationship with God, that
political and military arrangements are fragile and transitory,
that all of our efforts to preserve and protecteven when
undertaken in cooperation with Godare under the judgment

20
 SECURITY

of God. Attempts to gain worldly security are too susceptible of

illusion, too likely to distort our sense of value, too inclined to
involve us in brutal destruction for us to neglect the warnings
and limitations and heed only the justifications. Thielicke insists
that the emergency order "must not idealize its structure or
make of it a law, for this structure is a necessity, not a virtue, and
must be so regarded" (p. 132).

SECURITY AND THE POLITICAL W O R K OF RECONCILIATION

If we have found a theological basis for security as a

responsibility of states in international politics, can we also find
a political work of reconciliation? At first glance, the prospects
seem small. The original assertions remain firm: Security and
reconciliation are generically different as responsibilities of
states. Security belongs to the essence of the state as the
principal reason why states come into existence. Reconciliation
has no comparable place in the theory or theology of the state.
Even theologies of the state like those of Barth and Bonhoeffer,
which take a consistently christological stance and explain the
meaning of the state with reference to the divine work of
redemption, continue to characterize the work of the state
3
basically as that of preservation.
Furthermore, many of the conflicts of international politics
contain elements of seemingly irreducible opposition. The
issues of dispute are themselves irreconcilable, and the conflict
over them generates security concerns that widen the gap and
increase the hostility between the contending parties. That is
manifestly the case in the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Israel is an
example of irredenta, of "unredeemed" landterritory held by
one state but claimed by one or more others. In most cases of
irredentaAlsace-Lorraine, the Upper Tyrol, the eastern prov
inces of Germanythe disputed territory is only a part of one
homeland or the other. In the case of Israel, however, the entire
state is irredenta. It could be redeemed for the Palestinian Arabs
and other claimants only if the state as a whole were dissolved.
Obviously, the Israelis will not accept another final solution
(Endl'dsung); therefore, they take the security measures they
believe necessary to protect their small state from destruction.
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

These security measures in turn tend to provoke more hostility

and opposition, especially when they involve the occupation
and colonization of additional lands taken from their neighbors.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon is a case in point. The
government of Israel sent its army into Lebanon to eliminate the
PLO as a persistent threat to its present security and its future as
a state. In the process of doing so, it destroyed what remained of
the unity of Lebanon, exacerbated the religiously delineated
internal conflicts of that country, and opened the way for Syria
to fill the Lebanese power vacuum. Also, it aroused the Shi'ite
Moslems who turned out to be even more ferociously anti-Israel
than the PLO. And it did not put an end to the PLO. As a result
of this "security measure," the elements of opposition are even
more irreducible than they were before.
In the larger picture of Arab-Israeli relationships, Arab leaders
who are tempted to promote accommodation, if not reconcilia
tion, with the Israelis remember the example of President
Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who took the risks of rapprochement at
the cost of alienation from his Arab and Islamic brethren and
ultimately at the cost of his own life.
One could construct a catalog of conflicts with apparently
irreducible elements: China and Taiwan, China and the Soviet
Union, Greece and Turkey, Northern Ireland, NATO and the
Soviet Union, the United States and Cuba, black Africa and
white-dominated South Africa, North and South Korea,
Christian and Moslem Lebanon. The situations have their own
identity and particularity, but the common element is that the
disputes are real and fundamental, and they evoke means of
attack and defense. Negotiated settlements may be possible in
some instances, in others not. But even the reasonably
satisfactory settlement will incorporate the tension between
security and reconciliation.
However, "tension" does not mean complete opposition.
Security in many instances is supportive of the work of
reconciliation. More importantly for our purposes, reconcilia
tion often is a necessary instrument of efforts to provide and
enhance security. We can see aspects of the political work of
reconciliation both by looking more deeply into the meaning of
"security" as a political concept and by reflecting on the inability
22
 SECURITY

of contemporary military systems to provide national security

commensurate with their firepower.
The seizure in June, 1985, by Lebanese Islamic terrorists of
TWA Flight 847 was most immediately and visibly an assault on
the personspassengers and crewdirectly involved. At a
deeper level, however, it was an assault on the fundamental
social order that separates civilization from tribalism and
barbarism. Especially in this latter regard, it was a type of
dramatic and traumatic action, that reveals dimensions of the
phenomenon of political security that normally escape our
notice.
For most of the decades of commercial aviation history,
security considerations pertained to the airworthiness of the
flying machines, the capability, sobriety, and mental health of
flight crews and air controllers, and forecasts of the weather.
With the onset of "skyjackings," and especially those perpe
trated by politically motivated and sometimes suicidal terrorists,
the concept of "airline security" took on quite a different
meaning. It came to mean protection against persons who took
advantage of the inherent vulnerability of a populated aircraft to
advance their own causes, often with no scruples against
imposing suffering on and risking or sacrificing the lives of their
hostages. In response to that development, airports and airlines
hired additional guards, set up checkpoints with monitoring
equipment, subjected passengers to body checks, stationed
guards on some airplanes, and gave special training to
personnel for dealing with skyjacking and terrorist incidents. A
few passengers grumbled about inconvenience and delay. Some
protested the indignity of searches and what they saw as the
violation of individual rights and the perilous expansion of the
police power of the state and corporate society. Most, however,
accepted the new arrangements as a relatively small price to pay
for reducing the new perils of flying on an airplane.
In this context we think of "security" as visible, rationalized
force, organized and deployed for the purpose of guarding the
social order against those who flout the authority of its norms
and rules. This definition is correct but superficial. What the
terrorist skyjackings reveal concerning security is that funda
mentally it is a condition provided by common consent to the
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

expectations and claims of social order. Security is much more

fully present when persons in society accept and respect each
other's existence and the regulative institutions of the common
life, than when they are armed to the teeth against each other.
Prior to the advent of skyjackings there was no significant
"security problem" of an interpersonal or political nature.
Passengers and crew had unarmed security because, with rare
exception, all of them observed the ordinary conventions of social
interactions and the specific expectations of in-flight behavior.
Granted, the armed condition properly can be designated a
"security arrangement." It is the guardian of vulnerability
where violence threatens to become its own law. Theologically,
it is the order of preservation, the divine ordinance of God the
sustainer. But the resort to armed defense tends to be equated
improperly with security as such. The really important change
in our consciousness of the problem of security comes when we
recognize that real security is the freedom safely to be
vulnerable, and that this freedom is a prime ingredient of an
integral community.

R e a l security is the freedom to be v u l n e r a b l e , and this

freedom is a p r i m e ingredient of an integral c o m m u n i t y .

Once we understand security in the fundamental sense of

mutual consent to societal existence, we have the basis for a
security politics of reconciliation. Reconciliation, politically
understood, is the process of eliciting, coordinating, and
strengthening the elements of community in both domestic and
international society. The stronger the community and its ethos,
customs, and laws, the stronger the invisible and presupposed
security to be free to be vulnerable. The greater the invisible
security of common will and supportive social fabric, the less
need there is for visible, coercive "security forces." Therefore, a
politics of reconciliation, which attempts to overcome hostilities,
conciliate interests, and generally strengthen the fabric of social
relationships, may be much more valuable as a security policy
than a politics of competition in armaments.
24
 SECURITY

To avoid misunderstanding, I must underscore the fact that

the two forms of and approaches to security are not, in my view,
an either/or choice. The world is not constituted in human
material or social organization in such manner that states can
surrender their "security forces" or fail to maintain their
effectiveness. The world is under the power of sin; its resources
will not satisfy inexhaustible appetites or support unlimited
population; all forms of social organization discriminate against
and oppress someone. There is no way that human society in
history as we know it can dispense with the instruments of
preservation and live in libertarian anarchy, Marxist classless-
ness, or the theocratic harmony of the kingdom of God.
But the other side of the coin is that the society of mutual
consent is not an idealistic dream. Societies cannot exist by force
alone, and most of the societies of the world are sustained more
by consent than by force. The Hobbesian portrayal of natural
human relationships as a war of all against all might turn out to
be accurate if all of us could be stripped of our socialized
personalities and reduced to primal aggressive instincts, but in
most social contexts we are not so disposed. We may be latently
or overtly hostile toward each other, but most of the time we are
able to tolerate each other, and sometimes even to love each
other. Trust and love are neither absolutely present nor
absolutely absent. To the extent that they exist, they can be
nourished and increased. To perform such a work politically is
4
the security politics of reconciliation.
But let us turn to the explicitly military aspects of security
policy and ask whether it is possible to speak meaningfully of a
security politics of reconciliation in that connection. It would be
unnecessary to attempt to link reconciliation with security
where threatened states credibly can plan and successfully can
build an effective shield between themselves and the threaten
ing foe. So long as the threatened party could exist in reasonable
comfort and safety behind and by reason of its military shield, it
would have no real need for reconciliation as an instrument or
motive of policy.
If such conditions exist in our time, they exist only for small,
weak, nonnuclear states with foes of comparable military
capability. For all the other states, and especially for the nuclear
25
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

powers and their allies and dependents, the luxury of security

fully guaranteed by military power simply is not to be had. The
security of the United States and the Soviet Union against each
other's ultimate threats is defined not by the invulnerability of
each society against devastating attack, but by the invulnerabil
ity of its "second strike capability," that is, of the residual ability
of a state to destroy the society of its attacker after its own
weapons systems have suffered extensive damage. That is not
the whole of the contemporary meaning of military security, but
it is the strategic concept on which other plans and policies rest.
President Reagan's Space Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars"
program, is, of course, an attempt to break out of the deterrence
pattern and provide technologically based invulnerability. If it
were successful, it probably would eliminate the need for
security policies of reconciliation, at least on the part of the
United States. Indeed, it would reverse the process of
community building by eliminating the need for friends and
alliesa point to which our European partners are quite
sensitive. The massive technological difficulties of this proposal
are beyond my capacity to discuss, but even if they were to be
solved, the system would not serve its strategic objective of
moving from a deterrent to a pure defense posture. Cruise
missiles, bombers, and suborbital missiles would not be repelled
by the shield, and the society would remain vulnerable also to
nuclear devices carried by hand or in land vehicles. If the Soviet
Union had its own shieldand President Reagan has offered to
help them develop theirs once we have ourseither system
presumably could disable the other in a fraction of a second and
render the previously protected society completely vulnerable.
Given these considerations, the main strategic worth of such a
system would be as a backup for a first-strike capability and
5
intention, and not as a shield against a first strike.
And so there is no magic of increasingly sophisticated modern
technology to liberate us from the terrors of mutual deterrence.
It is this fateful, terrible, and unique circumstance that makes
reconciliation an essential component of security policy. The
states and systems that stand in what at times seems to be mortal
opposition must seek each others' cooperation in order to
survive. That is the significance, of course, of arms limitation
26
 SECURITY

and reduction negotiations and other reciprocal efforts, whether

bilateral or multilateral, to impose controls on the technology of
modern warfarethe demonic creations of the sorcerer's
apprentices. It is also the condition of success of the unilateral
limited steps toward reversal of the arms race that individual
states must take when bilateral and multilateral negotiations fail.
One cannot say with assurance that policies of reconciliation
always will serve the cause of security better than military
policies. In some instances the reverse almost certainly will be
true. What one can say with assurance is that the burden of
proof ought always to be on those who give priority to military
policies. The principal reason for this order is that military
power is rightly the servant of politics and diplomacy, and both
politics and diplomacy depend for their legitimacy and
ultimately for their success on the presence and growth of
relationships of mutual acceptance and agreement. A second-
level reason is that a world rich with associations and
institutions for resolving conflict is safer than one in which all
conflicts are drawn into the power struggle between the United
States and the Soviet Union. The Contadora Process, for
example, is a more effective way of dealing with the problems of
security in Central America than is direct or indirect military
6
intervention by the United States. The former creates regional
interests in and regional associations and procedures for
resolving regional problemsand it keeps the superpowers at a
distance. The latter excludes regional initiative as an indepen
dent option and ensures that the Nicaraguan government will
seek to increase the stake of the Soviet Union in its own
(Sandinista) survival.

STATE RESPONSIBILITIES IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS:

THEORETICAL RECONSIDERATIONS

Of the two terms that have been pre-eminent in this inquiry,

security and reconciliation, the first is usually regarded as
peculiarly political and the second, peculiarly religious. Partly to
counteract that preconception, and partly to amplify the
theoretical understanding of a state's responsibilities in inter
national politics, I have examined the theological perspectives
27
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SPRING 1986

on security and the security politics of reconciliation. The

question to be raised at this point is whether the results of the
investigation suggest any significant changes in the nature and
ordering of the state's external responsibilities.
In traditional theological language, is it possible any longer
(assuming it ever was) to discern the normative direction of state
responsibility solely through the lens of "order of preservation"
symbolization? Certainly we cannot suppose that the state as
such must or even can give up its vocation of preserving life
against chaos and injusticehowever ambiguously or abusively
particular states may fulfill that vocation. Nor can we suppose
that, in an unfinished and disorderly world, states will be able to
act as preservers without some reliance on military power. On
the other hand, we are led by our investigation to propose
certain fundamental revisions in the understanding of what
"preservation" entails. As to scope, it is not the particular state
alone that is the object of preservation, but alsoand at least
instrumentally if not primarilythe inclusive order of life and
nature in which the state as a set of relationships exists. As to
substance, preservation is not impregnable military security nor
irresistible military dominance, but relationships of mutuality
and cooperation in which the authority of power is grounded
increasingly in consent and to an ever-lessening degree in
coercion. As to method, it is political and diplomatic before it is
military, and as military it is directed and limited by the political
concern to enhance the relationships of mutuality and coopera
tion. States must fulfill their task of preservation not primarily
through armaments but through their contribution to the
creation and nurture of bilateral and multilateral relationships,
to the procedures, the institutions, the ethoi of international
society that address the security needs of states and peoples in
their larger and more realistic dimensions.
What these revisions of "preservation" imply is that the
international responsibilities of states must be explored and
discharged in terms of reconciliation as well as security. To be
sure, the states' understanding of both security and reconcilia
tion is political and prudential, not theological and confessional.
That is, they do not understand these responsibilities in the
same way as does the community of Christian faith. Conse-
28
 SECURITY

quently, one cannot assumeand perhaps cannot expectthat

political analyses and theological analyses of security and
reconciliation will come to the same conclusions. But because
the states are dealing with the same human reality under God
for which the Christian community prays, and because God is
ever present to that human reality in prevenient grace, it may be
possible to penetrate the political definitions of responsibility
with the awareness that God preserves the world in order to
make it whole. Given that the world is so rebellious, so broken,
so threatened, yet so valued in the self-giving of God, it is of
surpassing importance for the Christian community to pursue
that work of penetration.

NOTES

1. L. E. Toombs, "Ideas of War," Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G. H. Buttrick

(New York: Abingdon, 1963), 4: 796-801; Gerhard von Rad, Der heilige Krieg im alien Israel
(Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1951).
2. Theological Ethics, ed. William H. Lazareth (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 2:132.
3. I have explored the question of the political work or reconciliation more fully in
"Reconciliation as a Foreign Policy Method," Religion in life 38 (Spring 1969): 40-54. See
also "The Christian Community and the Civil Community," in Karl Barth, Community,
State and Church: Three Essays (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1960); and Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. E. Bethge, trans. Neville H. Smith (London: SCM Pr., 1955), pp.
332 ff.
4. For an excellent discussion of the possibilities and limits of cooperation in
international relations, see "Amity and Enmity Among Nations," in Arnold Wolfers,
Discord and Collaboration: Essays in International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Pr., 1962), pp. 25-35.
5. See Robert W. Bowman, "Star WarsPie in the Sky," New York Times, 14 December
1983, sec. I, p. 35, col. 2.
6. The "Contadora Group" includes Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela, and
takes its name from the island off Panama where their foreign ministers convened. They
proposed the removal from the region of all forms of foreign military presence and
assistance.

29
 THE PARISH AS CONTEXT FOR
THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

J. ANDREW OVERMAN

Ministerial education is limited by the context in

which the training is done. By more fully utilizing
the parish as a context for academic and practical
training, the distance between the academy and the
church is narrowed and the effectiveness of ministe
rial training is enhanced.

Most of the Bible was written in and for communities of faith.

In the Hebrew Bible those communities were, first, small tribes
that carried on and shared the traditions about their God and the
1
dealings of God with them as chosen people. It was in the
context of the struggles, doubts, and occasional personal and
corporate victories of these small communities that the earliest
traditions and beliefs concerning the God of Israel first took
shape, were developed and transmitted. Similarly, the theology
expressed in the Prophets is, in the main, a response to specific
situations or dilemmas within the given communities of which
2
the prophets were part.
Where the New Testament is concerned, it is generally held
that at least three of the four Gospels were written in and for
3
communities of faith. The Apostle Paul, of course, wrote to
specific churches. Several scholars have emphasized the
importance of the context and setting of Paul's work for the

J. Andrew Overman is a Congregational minister with ten years of community and

parish ministerial experience. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in New Testament
studies at Boston University.

30
 THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

4
understanding of his epistles. Paul's thoughts and letters came
off the burning griddle of the parish in the sense that the
emotions, questions, struggles, and love typical of the milieu of
5
a church shaped and provoked much of the Pauline corpus.
Paul was both a pastor and an apostle, and the various settings
and situations of his churches gave him the opportunity both to
demonstrate and to develop his particular theological genius.
So, our Bible and in fact our faith took shape in and grew out of
a community of faith or church. This may be the case
historically, but what relevance or meaning has this for
theological education? The import of this observation for
theological education is found, in essence, in the value of the
context or setting of one's biblical study as hermeneutical and
educational tool. In discussing the Apostle Paul and his letters,
Leander Keck writes:

The occasional character of Paul's letters calls for a measure of

sensitivity on the part of the interpreter. To interpret them calls
for more than making their contents intelligible; it includes
making Paul's point in a manner that confronts today's readers in
a way analogous to what occurred originally. To facilitate this,
the interpreter needs to penetrate not only Paul's "answer" but
also the "question" until what becomes apparent is the extent to
which today's readers share the same problem as the original
ones. The greater the similarity, the more directly Paul's
response may address also our own. If the interpreter first finds
the particularity of the original occasions to be an obstacle to
appropriating Paul, it is probably because one expects the letters
to articulate timeless truths and principles to be applied, rather
than timely words to concrete situations which are prototypes of
our own. In other words, in the long run it is precisely the
particularity of the occasions that makes Paul's letters perenially
6
significant.

If the writings of Paul, or any biblical author, were fashioned

in the setting of a community or church and sought to address
the problems and predicaments characteristic of such a context,
how does the student or interpreter of these biblical authors
acquire this "measure of sensitivity" that Keck believes is so
essential? Keck argues that today's reader must be confronted
with Paul's point in a way that is analogous to what occurred
31
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

originally. To a significant extent today's readers or interpreters

must share the same problem(s) as the original ones. "The
greater the similarity, the more directly Paul's response may
address also our own." The setting most analogous, the context
where the problems afoot are most similar to the problems
shared by the original readers and interpreters of the New
Testament, is still the community of faith or church.
This is not to claim that the milieu of the twentieth-century
parish is identical to that of the church of the first century. The
historical particularities distinctive to the first century cannot be
overlooked or dismissed. The life, the situations, and presup
positions of the first and twentieth centuries are not at every
point identical. It is ridiculous to assume they are, and if they
were, any historical investigation of the New Testament or
Christian origins would be irrelevant. However, in the search
for a deeper understanding of Paul, or the Gospels of John or
Mark, or a number of other writings in either the Hebrew Bible
or the New Testament, the greatest similarity in context, setting,
and milieu is still with the very setting that gave birth to these
traditions and documents, that is, the community of faith.
The point that the contemporary church is the twentieth-
century setting most analogous to the writings of the first
century is easier to see and accept when the first-century
document we have in mind is a Pauline epistle. This is so
because the "concrete situations" Keck speaks of are oftentimes
more obvious and pronounced in Paul's writings. For example,
when Paul begins a passage or section of I Corinthians with "peri
de" (now concerning), he is responding to certain questions
asked of him regarding specific problem situations present in
the Corinthian church, such as the eating of meat sacrificed to
idols or the presence of unmarried women, which for the most
part are obvious to us, the readers. However, Keek's point holds
for any biblical book or portion thereof that arose out of the
setting of a particular community of faith. The contemporary
church or community of faith is the modern setting that, in
Keek's words, "share[s] the same problem as the original ones."
Even though these two settings are separated by some nineteen
hundred years, they still share common, concrete problems and
situations. Issues of unity and authority, of competing beliefs,
32
 THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

periods of crisis, threat, life, death, uncertainty in matters of life

as well as faith, and much more are all the concrete situations or
"particular occasions" that the church of the New Testament
shares with the contemporary church and with very few, if any,
other settings. These first-century occurrences, as Keck says, are
truly "prototypes" of the occurrences and occasions perennially
a part of the life of a parish or community of faith.
What Keck means here is simply that the interpreter of Paul's
letters must be able to sympathize and identify with the same
situations and questions that were part of Paul's churches.
Failure to have this empathy and understanding leads the
student of Paul to err in one of two directions: on the one hand,
to take the letters or issues in the letters too lightly, discarding
them for being too particular and therefore irrelevant, or, on the
other hand, to make too much of the issues, viewing them out of
their appropriate contexts and making universal judgments
from very concrete and specific instances. It is easy to fall into
one of these extreme positions when Paul's epistles are studied
without appropriate sensitivity and in a context that fails to do
justice to these biblical texts.
If interpreters of the Gospels or Epistles, the Pentateuch or the
Prophets lack the measure of sensitivity called for and fail to
confront the biblical text in a way analogous to what occurred
originally, it may, in large measure, be due to the context and
setting in which our biblical and theological studies are done.
We will appropriate Paul or Mark or Matthew or Isaiah more
fully when we reflect, discuss, and wrestle with these authors
and their texts in a setting fraught with situations greatly similar
to those original biblical prototypes. Such a setting can only be
found in a parish or community of faith, and that is why the
Bible continues to speak to the church.
If the good and faithful interpreter is required to possess
sensitivity and empathy when determining the social and
7
cultural context of the original setting, as well as the other
"classical" and critical tools of translation and interpretation,
then the setting and the environment in which this work and
this learning is done will make all the difference. The importance
of the environment and context in which one's learning and
studying are done is readily accepted and implemented in the
33
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

training of other professions and in helping them to master and

8
integrate their new knowledge and skills. Training ministers or
theologians should be no different.
What has been said here about the environment of the parish
or the community of faith for biblical study and interpretation
holds also as a helpful, if not necessary, tool for general
theological study and reflection. This is true for two basic
reasons. First, theology at its core is biblical and so we are left
with the same necessity of a context similar enough to the
biblical contexts so that the theological thoughts and writings
can be adequately appropriated and understood by the student,
theologian, and interpreter. Secondly, theology is usually an
attempt to make sense out of the problems and pains and
dilemmas of life in the context of faith. Why do people suffer?
Why do I suffer? Is there a God? What do I think of Jesus? What
do I think of myself and of others? All these questions and more
are the stuff out of which theology is made, expressed in the
language of the everyday. Yet these are the particular situations,
indeed some of these are the very questions Keck has called the
interpreter to "penetrate."

If theology is a discussion about the crises and questions

of life and faith, then this discussion w o u l d best be
pursued in an e n v i r o n m e n t w h e r e crises and questions
concerning life and faith really occur.

Theology probes and responds to the same questions of life,

humanity, and faith that the biblical writers were seeking to
address. Once again these questions and dilemmas can only be
honestly and pointedly addressed from a theological perspec
tive in a context and setting that shares in a similar or analogous
way that particular theological problem. If theology is a
discussion about the crises and questions of life and faith, then
this discussion would best be pursued in an environment where
crises and questions concerning life and faith really occur. If one
wishes to explore life and death issues and questions, as
theology certainly does, then theology should be done where
34
 THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

life and death are truly taking place. That again, among other
limited possibilities, is clearly the local church.
If the parish has played a role in the enterprise of theological
education and ministerial training it has, in recent history, been
9
largely in terms of internships and field supervision. However,
viewed in this way the parish emerges as an important and vital
context for bona fide academic work in the areas of biblical and
theological study. The enterprise of biblical and theological
training is hindered and, to a certain extent, impoverished
because of the context it lacks which the church or community of
faith can provide.
We must develop models for theological education that allow
for the role of the parish in biblical and theological studies, but
the parish must also take greater responsibility and play a larger
role in the so-called practical and pastoral fields of ministerial
training. There are naturally other dimensions of a student's
training that many parishes could easily and effectively provide
in coordination with certain seminaries or theological schools.
Many such programs have been instituted at some seminaries in
cooperation with churches, but the idea is not yet universally
accepted. Internships should generally be intensified and
lengthened with a stringent and selective process for supervi
sion created by the seminaries in conjunction with denomina
tions and churches. Students should study with certain
ministers and priests in a parish while at the same time working
in parish ministry. Through the course of these intensified
internships students should be exposed to and taken through,
step by step, every dimension of the ministry that a particular
church has to offer. Weddings, funerals, hospital visiting,
counseling, constructing and maintaining programs, as well as
dealing with boards and committees, finding out how to handle
the pressure of a far too busy schedule and the anger or rejection
of a parishioner, and still being a student, reader, and writer
would help in truly preparing the seminarian for what lies
ahead. To wrestle with theological issues and studies while
human need, struggle, and the day-to-day ministry are going on
all around not only stimulates questions on the part of the
student; it also facilitates the integration of one's own theology
with the work of the ministry.

35
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

Seminaries should consider housing some of their depart

ments and faculty in certain select churches. Certainly the
practical and pastoral faculties and departments would do well
to utilize the setting and life of a parish while engaged in these
particular fields of study. Specifically, many parishes could offer
courses in human relations and dynamics (something too often
overlooked in ministerial training and seminary curriculum),
working with small and large groups, homiletics, counseling,
working with the sick and dying, and a host of other courses,
both academic and practical. Such a list could go on and on.
These courses could and perhaps should be taught by the
ministers and staff of some particular churches together with
theological faculties, utilizing also the tremendous resource of
the laity in that particular community or church. It is fair to say
that the parish is a resource in the training of the leaders of the
church that is far from fully tapped, much to the loss of the
seminarians and the churches they eventually serve. Such a list
or cataloging of potential courses, which, as we have noted, is
far from exhaustive, should not be construed to imply that the
role of the parish is that of reducing the theological student to a
mere "functionalist," familiar with all the how-to aspects of the
ministry. One does need to know how to function as a minister
(and the incidence of alcoholism and suicide among ministers
reflects that sadly too many do not), but there is far more to
learning to minister than knowing how to perform the various
tasks.
The minister must still be a theologian, a preacher, teacher,
articulator of the vision, and interpreter to a community of faith.
How can one, in the words of J. Christiaan Beker, speaking of
the Apostle Paul, "translate the Gospel into the contingent
particularities of the human situation?" That is the task of the
minister as surely as it was the task of the Apostle Paul, Mark,
John, or the prophet Jeremiah. In engaging in biblical and
theological studies in the context of the parish the students
would learn a great deal, not only about the particular field or
discipline they are studying, but also how they will translate and
appropriate the gospel into their particular settinga setting, as
we have seen, that shares much in common with the settings
and contexts of the biblical communities.
36
 THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

Viewing the parish as an essential component in a student's

theological education and ministerial training will foster a closer
relationship and perhaps an interdependence between church
and seminary. Naturally, both institutions, seminary and
church, would grow and benefit from such a relationship. More
significantly, however, the men and women seeking to be
ministers would benefit tremendously. These future leaders of
the church will have been exposed to the setting, demands, and
issues surrounding parish ministry in a much more compre
hensive and realistic manner. These students will have seen life
and work in the community of faith closeup, knowing full well
when they are through the pains and hurts, the challenges and
joys typical of the setting of the church. Such instruction and
experience will bring students to a fuller awareness of what will
be expected of them and what resources they will need in order
to work and minister effectively in the setting of the parish.
Also, working and studying in this context will enliven and
enrich the biblical and theological study being done presently in
a setting so different from that of the community of faith. These
students will understand and appropriate their biblical and
theological tools and knowledge more deeply and comprehen
sively. Because of the milieu in which they work and have
studied, these students will bring sensitivity and resonance to
the text being studied and issues being discussed; they will also
bring a greater degree of integration and interpretation of
biblical and theological questions to their work and congre
gation.
This is not the place to draw out completely a new paradigm
for ministerial training that involves both church and seminary.
However, it is essential to realize that the church cannot abdicate
its responsibility to train and nurture leaders, leaving it solely to
theological schools. Neither can seminaries carry on their work
without allowing for reaction, involvement, and even, at points,
direction from the church. Only when the church and the
scholastic communities of seminaries and theological schools
join hands and view the task of ministerial training as truly
mutual will the leaders of tomorrow's church be better equipped
and, in fact, prepared for the myriad tasks and responsibilities
that will confront them. If the parish can be viewed as an
37
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

important context and setting for theological education and

ministerial training, that relationship of mutuality, laboring
together toward the common goal of a more effectively
equipped generation of ministers, may be realized.

NOTES

1. For an exhaustive and fascinating discussion of this period of Israel's history, see
Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel,
1250-1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis, 1979).
2. See chapter two of W. Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1978); and Robert B. Coote, Amos among the Prophets: Composition and Theology
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), pp. 24-29.
3. Oscar Cullman, The JoJtannine Circle, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Westmin
ster, 1976), and Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York:
Paulist, 1979): two works that discuss John's Gospel from the perspective of a specific
community. Krister Stendahl, The School of St. Matthew, and Its Use of the Old Testament
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), posits a definite and particular Matthean community, as
Howard C. Kee, in The Community of the New Age: Studies in Mark's Gospel (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1977), does for Mark's Gospel. The idea of a "Lukan community" has not
received as much attention; however, Robert L. Maddox does discuss Luke's church and
audience in his recent book, The Purpose of Luke-Acts (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982),
though he does not develop the notion of a Lukan community.
4. See James S. Stewart's Cunningham Lectures, A Man in Christ: The Vital Elements of
St. Paul's Religion (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935), and, more recently, J.
Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1980). Beker speaks of Paul's unique achievement, his "translation of the
apocalyptic theme of the Gospel into the contingent particularities of the human
situation" (p. ix). See also Beker, part 2, pp. 24, 25, 33.
5. Two good examinations of the internal life (if not strife) of a congregation
prompting and shaping Paul's theology and arguments are D. Georgi, Die Gegner des
Paulus im 2 KorintherDrief(W. M. A. N. T. 11, Neukirchen: Neukirchen-VIuyn, 1964), and
Robert J. Bank, Paul's Idea of Community: The Early House Churches in Their Historical Setting
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).
6. Paul and His Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), pp. 16-17.
7. Howard C. Kee expresses succinctly the necessary sensitivity to the wider context
of the original setting in Miracle in the Early Christian World: A Study in Sociohistorical
Method (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1983), p. 3.
8. While many examples exist to illustrate the point, one thinks particularly of the
medical profession, where a student is given extensive exposure and experience,
learning and practicing the profession in an environment where medicine is actually
being practiced, where there are sick people, trauma, death, and healing.
The author notes his indebtedness to the late Dr. William W . Metcalfe of the University
of Minnesota, twice president of the American Association of Adult Educators, a
committed and insightful scholar and educator, for his illumination not only of this
particular point in reference to theological education, but also for his help in clarifying
both the shortcomings and the potentials for theological education in America.
9. This, of course, has not always been the case. Throughout the period of the Great
Awakening and in eighteenth-century New England the minister was teacher and
educator as well as pastor. See Mary L. Gambrell, Ministerial Training in Eighteenth-
Century New England (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 1937).

38
 NATURAL LAW, EVOLUTION,
AND THE QUESTION OF PERSONHOOD

T. H. MILBY

Can all fetuses be persons of infinite worth when at

the same time it is the divine intent that a far greater
number will be conceived than can be expected to
survive?

Abortion is one of the most troubling and divisive issues of

our time. The United States Supreme Court in its Roe v. Wade
decision has established the legal foundation for abortion during
1
the first and second trimesters of pregnancy. Public opinion
polls indicate that a majority of persons in the United States
support this decision while at the same time holding strong
2
reservations about the morality of abortion. The issue of
abortion is further complicated i for scientists, especially those
who are also committed to the Christian faith. This complica
tion, which has been largely unaddressed, is particularly acute
for medical and biological scientists whose attention is directed
toward the preservation and protection of human life, especially
at early, even prenatal, stages when the question of personhood
is compounded by Christian ethics. I refer to what may be
described as a conflict between one of the natural laws of biology
and the Christian ethic of love for persons.

T. H, Milbyis professor of botany and microbiology at the University of Oklahoma and a

member of Saint Stephen's United Methodist Church in Norman, Oklahoma. His
current research is devoted to the influence jof climatic conditions on the germination of
seeds. In 1983, his article, "The New Biology and the Question of Personhood:
Implications for Abortion/' appeared in the American Journal of Law and Medicine.

39
 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

It is a principle of biology, specifically reproductive biology,

that all successful species possess a reproductive capacity far in
excess of what is necessary to replace the existing members
within a population. In order for a species to maintain itself it
must produce many more offspring than the number of adults
that exist in the population at any one time. This excess in the
number of offspring allows for the loss of individuals to
starvation, predation, and disease, while in the long run
perpetuating a population that, though it may fluctuate within
limits, remains relatively stable. A larger number of individuals

A larger n u m b e r of individuals m u s t b e p r o d u c e d than the

habitat can support in order for the species to survive
against natural e n v i r o n m e n t a l pressures that tend to
reduce its n u m b e r s .

must be produced than the habitat can support in order for the
species to survive against natural environmental pressures that
tend to reduce its numbers. This phenomenon, which may be
described as reproductive redundance, applies in a general way
to all successful species, whether cockroach or elephant,
bacteria or redwood tree.
A second consequence of this redundance is the operation of
the processes of adaptation and evolution. Out of this
redundance only those individuals best suited to their environ
ment will survive and reproduce. As a consequence of this
differential reproduction, populations change, becoming
adapted to new environmental conditions, and in the time span
of geologic ages new species may be derived.
While this outline in scientific terms is a description of the way
reproductive biology functions to accomplish the perpetuation
of natural populations and how the redundance of offspring,
which is a consequence of that process, contributes to the
adaptation and evolution of new species, it may also be said to
describe to the person of faith who is not bound by a dogma of
biblical literalism the divine process of creation as that process is
manifest through the laws of nature. Such a view is expressed by
40
 NATURAL L A W

Harris F. Rail: "For the scientist they simply express the nature
of things as seen in the way they behave. For the religious man
they are the thoughts of God. . . . There is a 'reign of law' in
3
nature because God is a God of order. . . . " In this context,
natural law may be seen to have both scientific and theological
content.
Not only does natural law enjoy divine sanction in both
traditional Roman Catholic and Protestant theological thought;
the tradition also supports the proposition that natural law
applies to both beast and plant and to the life of humankind as
well. The operation of natural law, specifically the laws of
reproductive biology, performs the creative action of God
throughout the living world. For Saint Augustine natural law is
4
seen "as no more than the customary modes of divine action."
John Calvin, in Harro M. Hopfl's words, "described 'nature' as
the 'ordinary law of God', [and] asserted that 'what is natural
cannot be abrogated by either consent or custom' and again that
5
'the law of nature cannot be abolished by men's vices'."
Although natural law in its classical sense contains elements of
moral law, it can be seen in both Calvin and Augustine to
include the meaning that is commonly intended by the term
today: "the laws of nature discovered empirically by science, as
6
when we refer to the laws of physics and biology," Saint
Thomas Aquinas implies the applicability of the principles of
nature to humankind in his discussion of natural law: "When
speaking of Man's nature we may refer either to that which is
proper to him or to that which he has in common with other
7
animals,"
Applying these assumptions of the tradition regarding
natural law, the conclusion may be drawn that reproductive
redundance fulfills God's purpose for the perpetuation and
modification of the human species in the same way that it serves
these purposes with regard to all other kinds of natural
populations and species. Herein lies the conflict. On the one
hand we accept the fact that it is God's intention, operating
through the principle of natural law as manifest in reproductive
biology, that a species conceive and produce a far larger number
of offspring than can survive to adulthood and reproductive
maturity. It is expected that many of those individuals will be
41
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

destroyed at an early age, that many conceptuses will be aborted

before the time of birth, and that many more eggs and sperms
will be produced than can ever fulfill their reproductive
potential. In the case of the human species this is well known to
be true. Until only recent times, with the advent and application
of modern medicine and measures of public health, the survival
of an infant to maturity was more the exception than the rule.
And it continues to be a reality of the human reproductive
process that at least one-half of all human conceptions end in
spontaneous abortion, often at a stage in gestation so early as to
8
escape detection by the pregnant mother. In terms of the
operation of natural law this kind of reproductive "wastage" is
completely to be expected and is in no way an exception to the
operation of natural law as it is manifest through normal human
reproductive biology.
The moral dilemma arises, on the other hand, when out of a
perspective of concern for individuals an attempt is made to
ascribe personhood and legal and political status to prenatal
entities. How can we value fetuses and embryos as persons
while at the same time acknowledging that large numbers of
them are created to serve no other functional purpose within the
natural order save, through their collective existence, to provide
the diversity out of which the divine creative purpose is
fulfilled? Is it possible to reconcile what appears to be a
profligacy of offspring, beyond all number of those needed for
the species to survive and in numbers that may exceed the
carrying capacity of the land, with the notion of individual
human worth and value, a notion applied in much of Western
Christian thought to the product of every conception from the
moment of fertilization of the egg?
How can it be argued, from the perspective of the Christian
ethic, that each fetus should be valued as a person when, from
the perspective of the divinely sanctioned creative process,
many fetuses are redundant and can be expected to perish
through normal attrition? Can all fetuses be persons of infinite
worth when at the same time it is the divine intent that a far
greater number will be conceived than can be expected to
survive? Is there an answer that may be given to these questions
42
 NATURAL LAW

that will preserve human worth and dignity, as those qualities

may be applied to the individual prenatally, while at the same
time acknowledging the validity and operability of natural law
as the divine creative process for humankind? How can we
respond to this apparent contradiction? While it may be that no
answer that can be offered will be totally satisfactory, some
tentative insights into the questions should be considered.
For many of those who confront the issue the answer is simply
to deny the applicability of one element or the other of the
paradox to the human experience. A common answer disclaims
the operation of natural law as an implement of human creation.
This stance would accept the laws of reproductive biology as
they apply to all nonhuman species, but would disallow their
application to the evolution and survival of the human species.
Holders of this view claim that humankind is a special case in the
created order and believe that although the laws of evolution
and adaptation may bear on all other species, they are
suspended for humankind. The difficulty of this position lies in
the very humaneness out of which its motivation springs.
Although those holding this view can no doubt accept without
alarm the extravagant production and loss of propaguleg, i.e.,
sperms and eggs before conception, a similar extravagance in
the demise of embryos and fetuses following conception is
difficult to reconcile with the notion of a compassionate God, if
indeed these postconception propagules are understood to be
endowed with the quality of personhood. Can a God of
compassion employ a creative process the successful working
out of which presumes the inevitable destruction of large
numbers of persons preliminary to the production of a fewer
number of persons which are better suited to survive?
The antithesis of this view would insist that humankind is in
no way different from all other species of organisms and as such
is (or should be) subject without qualification to the working of
the biological laws of reproduction, evolution, and adaptation.
No distinction can or need be made in terms of reproductive
biology to accommodate the Christian view that human beings
enjoy a special relationship with and a special kind of affection
from their creator. How do we allow for the special qualities of
personhood, which place worth on the individual, without
43
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

risking the suspension or negation of the divinely sanctioned

creative process?
A clue to the direction we may take in our resolution of this
dilemma comes from data cited earlier in this discussion with
regard to the frequency with which abortion occurs spontan
eously in the human population. If it is true, as those statistics
indicate, that at least one-half of all conceptions do spontan
eously abort, many of those so early as to remain undetected by
the pregnant mother, it is consistent with evidence that comes
from the observation of survivability of organisms in general
that those that are in some way naturally defective are removed
first from the population. This kind of attrition of weak and
defective members from natural populations is an expression of
the working out of the law of nature that correlates fitness and
survivability. This kind of attrition occurs naturally in the
human reproductive process, as a function of the laws of nature
by means of which the human race is strengthened and
modified, and if our claim is correctthat natural law is the
process through which divine creativity is accomplishedthen
we may also infer that it is consistent with the divine purpose
that these spontaneous abortions occur as a way of fulfilling that
purpose.
May it not further be reasonably inferred that the proper
human response to this phenomenon is one of passivity? It
should not be interfered with. This is not to argue that in human
experience we should resign ourselves to fate. It is to say that, at
the prenatal stage of human life, where the impulse we may
have to interfere with the process of human development (out of
humane compassion) conflicts with the requirement to allow the
working out of natural law (where that law works to accomplish
human evolution and the survival of the species), our choice
should be in the direction of natural law.
Assuming that a high level of spontaneous abortion occurs as
a natural and purposeful phenomenon, our response should be
to accept the loss of those fetuses without attempting to
interfere.
Furthermore, we should do so, not out of dread that our
neglect is a failure to display compassion for persons, but rather
a sense of conformity with the divine purpose being worked out
44
 NATURAL L A W

through the process of natural law. Likewise, it may be assumed

that although the fetuses lost during this stage as a result of this
process may indeed be alive and possess certain human qualities
and attributes, it would be consistent with what we understand
of divine compassion that the quality of personhood be
bestowed at a stage in human development beyond this point.
An analogy out of human experience may be found at a time in
history when infant mortality was high. Barbara Tuchman
relates that it was the practice in western Europe during the
fourteenth century, when most children succumbed to disease
before their fifth year, to withhold parental affection and
concern from the child until such time as that child had achieved
9
a stage in life when its survival was more nearly assured. In a
sense, its identity as a person was conferred only when its full
potential as a person was more likely to be realized.

It w o u l d b e consistent with our u n d e r s t a n d i n g of divine

compassion that p e r s o n h o o d b e b e s t o w e d on developing
embryos at a stage w h e n natural attrition has eliminated
defective m e m b e r s of the fetal population.

Similarly, by analogy, it would be consistent with our

understanding of divine compassion that the quality of
personhood be bestowed on the developing entities at a stage in
the creative process when attrition has eliminated redundant
and defective members from the fetal population. On the basis
of this assumption, personhood would be ascribed to embryos
at a stage in development when under normal circumstances
their survival outside the womb would ordinarily be assured.
If this latter conclusion can be accepted, then it may be that
what appears in the beginning to be a contradiction may be the
consequence of a misunderstanding. In actuality, if personhood
remains unrealized until postnatal viability has been achieved,
then our involvement with prenatal embryos can be undertaken
without fear of damage to persons.
What courses of action does this understanding of human
evolution, adaptation, and human population allow? One
45
 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

course, mentioned earlier, is to accept spontaneous fetal

abortion as it occurs naturally with the understanding that it is a
normal part of the reproductive process by which human
evolution and species survivability are achieved. It would seem,
therefore, that although continued basic research into human
conception and reproduction should be supported and en
couraged, out of motivation similar to that underlying all basic
research, attention should be directed away from efforts
specifically concerned with frustrating this natural and sponta
neous attrition of the human fetal population, especially where
that attrition involves the loss of defective fetuses. This may be
described as a passive course of action.
A more active course of action, of course, would be both to
permit and approve induced abortion. This practice of volitional
abortion may be seen as a positive manifestation of human social
responsibility. If our ingenuity has given us the power to control
those postnatal forces that formerly limited the human
population and for which the human reproductive potential was
designed to compensate, then it is a reflection of the
achievement of a further level of social maturity to impose
artificial and self-chosen methods to limit human numbers
including abortionas a substitute for those previously
operative, naturally limiting forces.
For us to adopt these two courses of action manifests, in a
particularly distinctive way, the unique place of human beings
in the hierarchy of being. For us to accept the high level of
spontaneous prenatal attrition signals a recognition of our place
in the world of creatures to which our biological nature gives
witness. For us to practice abortion to limit our numbers, as a
deliberately chosen substitute for the natural forces that
accomplished that purpose at an earlier stage in human social
development, is a genuine sign of our transcendence of the
natural order of which we are inextricably a part. It is a course of
action befitting a time described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as "a
10
world . . . come of a g e . "
But what of the abortion debate and of the concern of
biological scientists whose research involves experimental use
of human fetuses and other human propagules? It is one thing to
make intellectual assertions about where theological and
46
 NATURAL LAW

scientific lines converge and the bearing of that convergence on

the question of personhood. It is quite a different matter to find
surcease from the ambiguity that is common among us on the
question of abortion and the use of human fetuses in research.
While it may be excessive to believe that misgivings grow only
out of ignorance and that a proper grasp of our human position
within the world of nature is its cure, nevertheless, anxiety is
certainly amenable to relief when ignorance is replaced by
information and understanding. It is with the purpose of
providing that understanding that a discussion of the interrela
tionship between natural law, evolution, and personhood
should be undertaken, a discussion that at the same time may
move us toward that maturity of which Bonhoeffer speaks.

NOTES

1. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

2. Victoria A. Sackett, "Between Pro-life and Pro-choice/' Public Opinion 8 (1985);
53-55.
3. The Christian Faith and Way (New York: Publ. for Cooperative Publ. Assn. by
Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1947), p. 27.
4. Rudolph C. Eucken, "Law," in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James
Hastings (New York: Scribners, 1951), 7:805-807.
5. The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1982), p. 180.
6. Errol Harris, "Natural Law and Naturalism," International Philosophical Quarterly
23 (1983): 115.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Latin text and English translation; New York:
McGraw-Hill; London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), 28:85.
8. Reproduction in Mammals, cd. C. R. Austin and R. V. Short (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Pr., 1972), 5:147.
9. Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York:
Knopf, 1978), pp. 50, 52.
10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prisoner for God: Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard
Bethge; trans. Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 146.

47
 CONTROL: POWER OR IMPOTENCE?

CARROLL SAUSSY

When we transcend our need to be in control and

attend to the possibilities that God opens to us, then
we are truly in control.

How much control over our lives do we need in order to live

satisfying and religiously concerned lives? The question is an
important one not only for religious and spiritual purposes but
also for pragmatic and realistic ends. Pastors and other
professionals in religion are continuously confronted by the
need for personal control. This need is rooted in the nature of
human existence and can be defined as the drive to be in charge
of one's life. But it can be distorted and, if not expressed in
creative directions, can be destructive. The demonic aspects of
the drive for control can be seen in the denial of death and
narcissism, both of which characterize professional ministers as
much as other professionals. The drive also has organizational
pathologies, particularly in congregational and other church
political conflicts.
My argument is that the drive for control has both positive and
negative aspects. The positive aspect is the desire to participate
in life. The negative aspect is the fear of separation and of limits.
Both are related to the drive to secure one's connections and
significance. This argument leads to the larger conclusion that

Carroll Saussy is associate professor of pastoral care at Wesley Theological Seminary in

Washington, D. C. Her research interests include the implications of process thought for
counseling, and the theology and psychology of the family.

48
 CONTROL

control has spiritual and theological dimensions. When we

transcend our need to be in control and attend to the possibilities
that God opens to us, then we are truly in control.

AN ONTOLOGY OF CONTROL

An ontology of control must include an understanding of the

very stuff of human existence as well as a description of the
fundamental dynamic or motivation to be in control.
The "stuff" of human existence is relational. Process modes of
thought, which are relational modes of thought, underscore the
fact that we are constituted by our relations. Alfred North
Whitehead says that apart from relations there is nothing at all,
and that through our relationships we are constantly becoming.
We are also constantly entering into the becoming of family and
co-workers, friends and acquaintances, and members of our
faith communities. (Process thought also provides a way of
coping with the need for control and celebrating genuine,
limited control on a day-to-day basis, something explored in the
discussion of the "pneumiatrics" of control.)
Because we are by nature relational, we are motivated to be
connected. "It is not good for man or woman to be alone." From
the moment of birth and throughout life we seek others in order
to know ourselves and love ourselves and give ourselves and
engage in life. Relationship is a way of affirming life.
We seek others for additional reasons as well. Standing on the
shoulders of Otto Rank, Ernest Becker held that "the fear of life
1
and the fear of death are the mainsprings of human activity."
The search for connection, then, can also be a disguised form of
evading life or denying death.
Through lived experience we learn about the human condition.
In Becker's language, we discover that we are both animal and
symbolic, both trapped in a mortal human body and gifted with a
transcending spirit. We discover that indeed our control is
severely limited, and that even our seemingly omnipotent
parents are not spared these limits: they have no power over
death. The awareness of death triggers a fundamental narcis
sism. We are driven to prove that we are objects of primary
value, of cosmic specialness, of fundamental significance in the
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

universe. We want to count, and not simply to perish. I will win

my immortality by becoming the perfect daughter . . . the
r e s p e c t e d l e a d e r . . . t h e ideal s t u d e n t . . . the trusted
friend . . . the life of the party . . . the self-sufficient person.
Such projects demand that we control our imperfections or what
we allow others to see of our imperfections in order to come
closer to actualizing our ideal.
However, this urge toward immortality is inevitably frus
trated by the reality of death. In other words, our control is
controlled by the human condition. In order to stay in control,
therefore, we devise strategies to keep the thought of limits at
bay, unconsciously to convince ourselves that we do not die.
Our language is full of such lies: "We will live here forever."
"Everything is fine." "I am in perfect health."

Control is both an attempt to deny mortality and the

p o w e r to participate in life.

Control is both an attempt to deny mortality and the power to

participate in life. Strategies, character armor, illusions, lies are
necessary if we are to get on with living in the face of dying. They
are attempts to control anxiety and fear. We would have a hard
time motivating ourselves if we continuously reflected on the
transitoriness of life. While we need illusions, then, we should
seek vital illusions, those that expand rather than restrict life.
For example, take the illusion that we can truly "play it safe";
that if we were careful enough we could live a risk-free life.
"Safety first and always" might protect us from considerable
risk but would hardly be life-enhancing. Think of all we would
deny ourselves if we gave up risks: cars, planes, crowds, even
relationships. On the other hand, consider the illusion that "life
is an endless adventure." We have more talents to trade with,
more knowledge and wisdom to cultivate, more places to go and
peoples to discover, more gifts to give and to receive, children
and grandchildren to cherish. Yes, but age and energy bring
their limitations, motivation wavers, disappointments and loss
checker our lives. "Life is an endless adventure" is a lie, but

50
 CONTROL

because it is a vital lie, it would undoubtedly lead to a more

enriched life than "safety first and always." And both are
strategies for controlling anxiety about life and death.
In his efforts to shatter illusions of power, Becker underesti
mates the potential for control that we do have as limited human
beings. Power, vitality, is ability to engage in life, to relate, to
create, to celebrate, and it is also power to deny mortality,
perchance even in that engagement, relating, creating and/or
celebrating. Becker fails to recognize a drive to live that is not a
disguised drive to deny death but a drive to live for the sake of
living.
Control, then, is both an attempt to deny mortality and the
power to participate in life. In its best sense, control is the ability
to transcend immediate wants and say yes to life's challenges.

A PSYCHOLOGY OF CONTROL

How does the need to control show up in life? Born into the
human condition, the infant quickly learns that mother and
father do not always meet its needs. What does the child do
about the unwelcome situation? The child struggles for control.
In a very primitive way, the child determines what it needs to do
or be in order to win the kinds of responses it seeks. Both
consciously and unconsciously, the child becomes a manipula
2
tor. Manipulation, learned in childhood, is for the sake of
controliin a threatening and perhaps rejecting world.
Where does one cross the boundary between an accurate
sense of limited control and manipulative control? Healthy
control acknowledges the facts of reality. And the prime fact is
that our control is limited by the human condition: we die. There
are other major aspects of our lives over which we have no
control: our parents and the conditions surrounding our birth,
our physiological and psychological givens, our heritage, some
illnesses, accidents, to name but a few.
The control exercised by the relatively secure person is
remarkably different from the control exercised by the person
suffering from excessive doubt. The secure, calmly self-assured'
person has befriended herself or himself; accepts the givens of
her or his life, its strengths and the limits imposed by the life
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

cycle; relates honestly and openly to significant othersand

does not need to overcontrol self or manipulate others. The
person who suffers from excessive self-doubt, feelings of
rejection, and therefore fear and anxiety, who feels inferior and
insecure (and such feelings can be long-repressed ones), may try
to handle the bad situation through overcontrol of self and/or
others.
The irony is that the need for control is met when one is not in
pursuit of control. Although Linda Tschirhart Sanford and Mary
Ellen Donovan are writing about self-esteem in women, their
comments on control are relevant to all.

If a desperate need to be in control rules somone's life, she is not

truly in control; the need controls her. To be genuinely in control
means being able to tolerate feelings of fear, uncertainty,
inadequacy or self-doubt from time to time without manipulating
3
everyone and everything into our singular view of the world.

The controlling person has difficulty relating in a noncontrolling

way. Some people are unable to nurture without control; some
people are unable either to give up or to share control without
feeling compromised or threatened.
Let us look at how control shows up in peer relationships, and
specifically within committed relationships between adults.
Ideally, two persons within a relationship share control in
mutual respect. However, control easily becomes the power to
control another. One member of the partnership is dominant,
the other submissive. One is dependent, the other independent.
Or the two live in a power struggle. Once enlightened, we do
not want either to control the other or be controlled by the other.
Yet we do want to exercise some control over the behavior of
others, as well as to feel that others have some control over our
own behavior. Without such mutual control and interdepen
dence, we would not feel significant in the lives of others.

THE PNEUMIATRICS OF CONTROL

Pneumiatrics is my term for that branch of theology dealing

with the healing of the spirit. Pneumiatrics is to spirituality what
psychiatry is to medicine.
52
 CONTROL

When we transcend our need to be secure, to be in control,

and attend to the possibilities God opens to us in any given
moment, choosing that possibility which we genuinely believe
is most life-enhancing, then we are truly in control. The
choosing may be an active assertion; it can also take the form of
letting go, recognizing that events or relations or God is
choosing me.
To look at the idea of control in terms of our faith life is to run
up against one of the deepest mysteries of human life: we are
both incredibly empowered people with potential for great
generativity; at the same time we are estranged weaklings
capable of vast evil.
The most fundamental experience of power or control is the
power to affirm oneself, the courage to say yes to one's
existence, to exercise what Paul Tillich calls "the courage to b e . "
The will is the vehicle of the power one uses in order to exercise
control over one's life. Self-affirmation lies on a continuum
between manipulative, aggressive control over self and others,
and an inability to assert oneself, to claim one's existence. At one
end of the continuum lies a false sense of omnipotence; at the
other, a false sense of helplessness. Somewhere near the
middle: limited control over one's destiny.
In both active and passive modes, we have the power to
respond to possibility, to receive grace, to affirm life, to engage
our destiny. Graced human beings, we have considerably more
genuine internal control over our everyday lives than we make
use of. I am not talking about control over the events that come
our wayalthough we obviously have some control in shaping
our external lifebut about an inner, spiritual control over how
we respond to such events.
Process thought offers a context for understanding the
engagement of one's destiny, or the actualization of one's
4
possibilities. Ours is a God in whom all possibilities for all time
find their being. God creates and holds in harmony all
possibilities. Therefore, there is nothing in all of existence or the
possibility of existence that is not a part of the nature of God.
The Creator God, the psalmist tells us, has made man and
woman just a little less than God, giving human beings
dominion over the earth. We are made a little less than God
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

because our movement toward fullness of life comes from God

and each aim is experienced in God. We are made a little less
than God because we share with God the ability to experience
novelty, beauty, and satisfaction. All willing, all creating, all
loving, all aiming is of the nature of God. Indeed, God is active in
an intimate and pervasive way in all of life, cosmic and
microcosmic. But God turns over to us, moment by moment,
responsibility to actualize ("control" in its best sense) a
possibility. Control resides in the act of aiming. Control resides
in commitment or noncommitment to the project of God, which
is to see actualized the largest possibilities available to everyone
existing. Control involves willing a choice in one direction rather
than another. Somewhere among the options there is a choice
that leads to more life, an option that with all possibilities finds
its being in God. To discover the larger choice is to discover
something of the heart of God, or what has long been called the
"will of God." Rather than seek the will of God from without, we
first discover the will of God from within, and then seek
confirmation of that lure or conviction within a community of
faith. We are more alive, more creative, more responsible when
we discover our own godliness. The lure, the desire to give, to
live for others, to exchange a destructive or negative way of
responding to life for a more caring, creative response is God's
willing or aiming within us. The transcending God, known
through intimacy, becomes more our God.
Let us suppose that our spouse or friend makes a decision that
means that certain financial resources are committed; we would
have chosen otherwise. Or our supervisor or the person to
whom we are professionally accountable makes a decision that
affects our scope of responsibility; we had hoped for a different
outcome. In either case, assume we are presented with a fait
accompli. For the sake of illustration, consider the decision
irreversible. Control has been taken from us. Now I do not want
to give the impression that decisions are not best made by both
members of a partnership, because I believe that they are. And I
do not want to suggest that anger is illegitimate when ground
rules have been violated and one member of a partnership has
made a decision without adequate conversation regarding the
options and consequences of the decision. But after the
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 CONTROL

legitimate anger has been expressed and some agreement about

future decisions or behaviors has been reached, the aggrieved
one has to decide what to do with her or his feelings. One can
passively accept the consequences of the other's decision and at
the same time control the other through resentment, anger, or
passive-aggressive behavior. One can resign oneself angrily or
become depressed. One can rage against what has happened.
Or one can give up control over the situation, living with, yes,
even finding God through the consequences of what has been
decided. There are new possibilities within the limits of the new
situation.
In other words, when something comes our way unbidden, a
frustration or disappointment of major or minor proportion,
God is there. If we quiet our rumblings, the internal blasphemies
we are hurling at the world, and in prayer seek to know the
possibilities open to us, we have the power, the control, to
co-create with God a unique response for this new moment.
And in that response we are co-creating the other with whom we
are dealing. When I let go of whatever issue it is that I am trying
to control, something remarkable happens. I feel a physical
release and relief in my body; I feel unburdened and renewed. I
know freedom because I have at least momentarily broken my
excessive need to be in control. An everyday frustration
becomes a religious experience. Perhaps because I deliberately
evoke my faith in the presence and lure of God, I am also aware
that God and I are co-creators of the me who emerges in the
experience. That is genuine control, a perishing to the old self
and rising to the new, as miraculous as the healing touch of
Jesus, and with just as ongoing a challenge as his words, "Go
and sin no more."
The difficulty in explaining this process is that I risk giving the
impression that resignation to social evil is possibly a religious
response. I am not talking about things that can be and ought to
be changed, but about power struggles within relationships. I
am talking about impotent control.
At any instance in our life, we have, for the asking, the grace
of God to be spiritually in control. Of course we do not always
use it: we are frail human beings who sin. Trying to live one's
belief in an ongoing co-creation of self and other is sometimes far
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

more demanding than my self-seeking nature would choose.

Many times I crowd out the lure: get busy, charge ahead, stay in
control. Yet even in our sinfulness, when we have squandered
rich opportunities to reveal the God of the crucified and risen
Jesus, the same God, whose hands hold the whole world, waits
to see our outstretched arms and fills them anew with fresh,
graceful possibilities for the next moments of our precious lives.
Following the lure is a theology of the cross, but it is also a
theology of resurrection. God continues with us to create man
and woman just a little less than God, giving us dominion over
all of the earth.
What are the criteria by which we pick out what we dare to call
the lure of God? In some cases, the lure may be so evident that we
could not fool ourselves into believing that there is more than
one religious response to the decision at hand. At other times,
the lure may be far more subtle. The key question to be
answered as we search for the Spirit of God is whether a decision
brings expansion or diminution to self and to anyone else
affected by one's decision.

CONCLUSION

Let us return to a variation of the original questions, this time

in terms of ministry in its large sense: the ministry of the people
of God within the local congregation and in outreach beyond
the congregation. The ordained or appointed minister is here
understood as a central leader and enabler of the people of God,
the church.
How much control over our lives do we need in order to love
and to work effectively and joyfully among the people we are
called to serve? How does the need for and expression of control
affect relationships within our faith community and with God?
The ordained or appointed leader who lives her or his belief
that at each moment God lures us toward new possibilities for a
more expansive, more generous presence and service within the
community is a sacrament of graced control. Such persons
recognize both their potential and their limits as co-creators not
only of themselves and their congregation, but of the city of God
5
as well. Such persons are as concerned about developing the
56
 CONTROL

leadership potential of the members of their communities as

they are about fulfilling their own needs. In other words, they
are generative people who share their power with others
through genuine delegation of authority. Rather than allowing
jealousy or envy to shape their response to the gifts of others,
they clear the way for their sisters and brothers to trade with
new talents. They empower rather than cling to power.
When one lives attuned to the lure of God, power struggles
that threaten to tear apart the fabric of a community are seen
with fresh eyes. Beginning with self, one must assess the nature
of the control at the heart of any given struggle. What is at the
heart of my conflict and what does it say about my personal
needs and fears? Who are the major players in the struggle?
Where does the control reside? Are we dealing with a question
of domination that grows out of self-doubt, rejection, and fear,
or are we dealing with mutual influence among interdependent
people? In other words, is the control being exercised impotent
or creative control? What would be the most generative,
expansive way in which the conflict might be resolved?
One of the major reasons why power struggles, divisions, and
scandals become demonic and threaten to or actually tear a
congregation apart is that we have not learned to make our
behavior conform to our beliefs, much less to the foundation of
our faith: God-is-with-us. We have not adequately interwoven
our Sunday creed with our weekday activities. We do not really
believe that if God is, then God is here and now, intimately
involved in every breath we breathe and word we speak. The
one sovereign God is in the power struggle that is tearing two
factions of a congregation apart. That is, the lure is available to
all parties willing to discern God's Spirit. Such discernment
requires a generative openness, the willingness to let go, to give
up control and be moved forward to a moment new to God and
all of us.
Whether individually or collectively, when we believe that
God is with us and transcend our need to be in control,
attending to the possibilities open to us in any given moment
and choosing that possibility that we genuinely believe is most
life-enhancing, then we are truly in control. The frustration or
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

agony of everyday conflict becomes shot through with the peace

of God and we know risen life. Or as my colleague Marjorie
Suchocki puts it, "Jesus becomes the firmness in the water, and
6
we, too, can walk."

NOTES

1. Sam Keen, "The Heroics of Everyday Life," Psychology Today (April 1974): 74. This is
the thesis of Becker's classic book, The Denial of Death (New York: Free, 1973). For a
critique of Becker, see Donald Evans, "Ernest Becker's Denial of Life," Religious Education
Review 5:1 (January 1979): 25-34. Two other classics: Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken
Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); and
Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny (New York: Norton, 1981).
2. For a detailed study of how this manipulation takes place, see Ernst G. Beier and
Evans G. Valens, People-Reading: How We Control Others, How They Control Us (New York:
Stein and Day, 1975). Also see Will Schutz, The Interpersonal Underworld (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Science and Behavior Books, 1966).
3. Linda Tschirhart Sanford and Mary Ellen Donovan, Women and Self-Esteem:
Understanding and Improving the Way We Thinkand Feel about Ourselves (Garden City, N. Y.:
Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), p. 412.
4. Two useful works include Gordon E. Jackson, Pastoral Care and Process Theology
(Washington, D. C : Univ. Pr. of America, 1981), and Evelyn E. Whitehead and James D.
Whitehead, Christian Life Patterns: The Psychological Challenges and Religious Invitations of
Adult Life (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1982).
5. I use the phrase "city of God" because it connotes a more democratic society than
"reign of God" or "kingdom of God." The latter adds sexism to monarchy.
6. Marjorie Suchocki, Cod, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (New
York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 101.

58
SIX POINTS IN A THEOLOGY OF SUFFERING

TED DOTTS

Transcendence, joy, repentance: what place do these

have in the experience of suffering?

A theology of suffering. I contemplate the phrase. The indefinite

article a connotes something not previously recognized, in
contrast to the definite article the, which connotes something
familiar. A theology of suffering suggests something about
suffering not previously recognized. Something not previously
recognized implies a p r e s e n c e , a p r e s e n c e awaiting an
uncovering.
Uncovering?
Theology means using words to uncover the absolute in the
1
midst of the relative. A theology means, then, to use words to
u n c o v e r s o m e t h i n g in o u r c o n n e c t e d a n d d e p e n d e n t
relativeexistence.
The English word suffering comes from two Latin wordssub
and ferre. Sub means "under" and ferre means "to bear." When
we suffer, we bear. The word to bear, an Anglo-Saxon word,
means to bring forth, to give birth, to render, to lean toward.
But, if the indefinite article a means uncovering something not
previously recognized, how could I render anything about
suffering not previously recognized? With Jesus, Job, Flannery
O'Connor, Kierkegaard, Barth, and Solzhenitsyn at hand, how

Ted Dotts is pastor of Saint John's United Methodist Church in Lubbock, Texas.

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2
could I render the not previously recognized? Indeed, should I
even consider so doing?
My first thoughts about suffering led me away from thinking
about suffering toward thinking about producing a unique
thesis. This near change of direction uncovers a first point in a
theology of sufferingsuffering diverts. Even thinking about
suffering diverts.
Diverts from what? From the task of staying with the
suffering. How sneaky. Suffering keeps our attention diverted.
"The better to eat us up," Red Riding Hood's wolf would say.
In Job we see the nature of the diversions accompanying
sufferingeven thinking about suffering.
Job asked two questions that diverted him. He asked Why?
and he asked How? Why did this happen? How am I to live with
it? He did not receive an answer to either diversionary question.
Instead, he received a new question, a question that set him
again at the center of his suffering. He asked Who? Who is with
me in this mess? Once he recognized this previously unrecog
nized, but ever-present question, Job sang from the deepest
deeps of his awful suffering:

Then Job answered the Lord:

"I know that thou canst do all things,
and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted.
'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?'
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
'Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you declare to me.'
I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees thee;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes." (42:1-6)

Job ends with a song. In the midst of suffering, we do not find

ourselves singing as we go. Our going makes us dull plodders
through the pain-filled time of our suffering. We need more than
a beginning and an ending song. Job shows us how to live in the
midst of suffering. We live into suffering by asking Who? Who is
with me?
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 THEOLOGY OF SUFFERING

If Job reveals the Who, Jesus lives by, on, with, of the Who. In
Jesus we recognize the one who goes before us into suffering.
This insight uncovers a second point about suffering, a note we
find ourselves eager to deny and to ignore at the first hint of
suffering. Suffering means we enter suffering. We do not run
away or go around, but we enter. The followers of Jesus follow

In Jesus w e recognize the one w h o goes before us into

suffering.

his steps on a path of suffering, the suffering that arises as

witnesses pit God against the world, and the suffering that
steals upon the just and the unjust alike from the dark mystery
of evil.
We ask, "Who so lives in Jesus that he can enter suffering?"
Rather than offer us words of explanation, Jesus teaches us to
pray. Prayer uncovers the presence of God. Following Jesus, we
pray, "Abba" (Mark 14:36, Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6). Perhaps
a Semite catches the meaning where we moderns miss it. Abba
means "father," but it carries the deeply intimate sense of
"daddy."
Who goes with us? Abba. Daddy. Parent. Momma. What
characterizes a parent? The assurance of a future. Parents work
to assure the future of their children. Present suffering does not
define nor confine the children of God. God labors to assure a
future, a future not limited to the present. Herein appears a third
point about suffering: Suffering can only achieve a penultimate
status. Suffering cannot contain the ultimate, because the
ultimate, God, labors from within to assure a future.
Once we discover that suffering holds at the worst only a
penultimate place in existence, we begin to ask where it ends.
This raises the fourth point about suffering: Suffering ends in
transcendence. Those who suffer transcend suffering: they
encounter the Highest in the very midst of their worst.
Flannery O'Connor, the southern writer of novels and short
stories, often used the grotesque as a medium to convey her
experience, to do her theology. She knew the grotesque through
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, S U M M E R 1986

the awful distortions of her diseaseseminated lupus erythe

matosus. She sufferedin and out of hospitals, on and off
medications, bounced from one side effect to another by the
very drugs designed to help her. Worse than her physical
condition was the isolation she suffered. Unable to live and to
work near New York with other writers, she took refuge on a
small Georgia farm. Her mother attended to her dying.
But, O'Connor transcended. She wrote to her friend " A " :

I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a

place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always
a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think
those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies, (p. 163, see
end note 2)

Suffering bears us to the ultimate.

When I linger over O'Connor's words, I feel joy. Point
number five in a theology of suffering: Suffering turns into joy.

What if the true, the strongest, the most refreshing and enduring
temporal fulfilments await us at the very point where in our
simplicity, which might well be our blindness, we will not seek
them, in the repulses, obstructions and disturbances which we
meet, in our confrontation with the dark aspect of life . . .? (Karl
Barth, p. 383, see end note 2)

"But," some will say, "not everyone feels joy in suffering."

True. The gospel of God remains a scandal for those who do
not exercise faith. The message from John's Gospel, "Your
sorrow will turn into j o y " (16:20), and from James's letter,
"Count it all joy, my brethren, when you meet various trials"
(1:2), will sound like babbling to those who trust that suffering
and death win in the end. But to those who risk allowing the
challenge and the threat of lifesufferingto own shares in
shaping existence, it tells of an on-tiptoe existence, leaning
forward to see around the bend.
Of course, the exercise of faith cannot, then, mean support of
pet projects or a guarantee of worldly success. Indeed, the
exercise of faith, especially where suffering appears, will call out
repentancea revision of life. We suffer and we find ourselves
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 T H E O L O G Y OF SUFFERING

face-to-face with an occasion to repent. We may not take it, but

we must either take it or reject it.
In 1943, Adolph Hitler's man, Heinrich Himmler, visited the
model death camp at Dachau. Himmler's lackey, Major Karl
Wolff, reported that Himmler asked to see Jewish prisoners
executed. The SS took him to a pit where Jews, prodded by
yelling guards, stripped off their clothing, ran along a narrow
ditch, stopped, and turned their backs to the SS troops, who
shot them in the head. As Himmler watched from close
quarters, one of the shots splattered a Jewish head. Some Jewish
brain splashed on Himmler's coat and face. Himmler became ill.
Wolff wiped Himmler's face and helped him walk away.
The moment of repentance brought into existence by
suffering had come, but Himmler turned away. From then on
Himmler took in the deaths of Jews by reading columns of
statistics.
Point number six in a theology of suffering: Suffering creates a
moment for repentance, a moment to revise life.

NOTES

1. Edward Schillebeeckx, God among Us: The Gospel Proclaimed (New York: Crossroad,
1983), p. 157. See also his Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New
York: Seabury, 1979).
2. Useful works include Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters, ed, Sally
Fitzgerald (New York; Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979); Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, Gospel of
Sufferings, trans. A. S. Aldsworth and W, S. Ferrie (London: J. Clarke, 1955); Karl Barth,
Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: Clark, 1960-61), 3:4; and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag
Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney
(New York: Harper & Row, 1973). See also Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., The
Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1981).

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 THE ORIGINS OF
THREE PASTORAL PERSPECTIVES

LAUREL A. BURTON

Emphasis on rules, on individual choice, or on

dialogue: these are three different styles of pastoral
care. Family systems theory offers an explanation of
the origins of these styles.

People engaged in the work of pastoral care operate with

implicit assumptions about theology, psychology, and ethics.
The kind of pastoral care provided depends on these assump
tions and reflects a particular perspective. Pastoral perspectives,
then, are the lenses through which ministering people view
God, themselves, and others.
Pastoral perspectives are influenced by many things, not the
least being the simple fact of modernity. Modernity is
characterized by our gradual realization that things are not as
they once were.
The transition from traditional cultures to cultures that have
been greatly relativized has had an impact on pastoral care
perspectives. In traditional cultures one simply would not have
a "religious preference." One would not have the option to
prefer this faith community to that. Rather, one would practice
the religion that is passed down, parent to child.

Laurel A. Burton, an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church, is head of the
pastoral care department of the Boston University Medical Center. He is the editor of the
Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy and is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled
Pastoral Caring.

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 PASTORAL PERSPECTIVES

Modern societies, however, provide remarkable freedom for

choosing how things shall be and how things shall be
understood. One choice might be to live somehow set apart
from the rest of the culture, maintaining distinct boundaries
and monitoring entrances and exits and communication with
the outside world, so as to preserve an authoritative tradition.
Or, one might choose a different direction and "go with the
flow," embracing whatever is current. Anyone making one of
these choices cannot fail to recognize that there are others who
have not made this choice. Further, it will be recognized that
both perspectives share an essential time and space relation
ship, suggesting that each is an alternative approach to a
similar end. Pastoral perspectives are, therefore, as pluralistic
as the culture.

RULES FOR THE RELIGIOUS

Within a religious context, the end toward which people strive

is transformation or salvation, and the means to that end is often
some set of rules or values implemented by the clergy as a
pastoral perspective. These rules become extraordinarily im
portant in times of crisis, because they become the maps which
are used as guides through the territory of pluralism's
conflicting claims.
There are three typologies that may be used to describe the
pastoral perspectives from which a religious person may
operate. The first of these types asserts the rules. It is an approach
that presumes a fixed order that has been determined by a
higher power, an order containing certain immutable values to
which each person is obliged to adhere. The second type
diminishes the rules, presuming that each person is the focus for
determining order in her or his own world. On this view values
will differ from individual to individual or from situation to
situation, and all values will have equal validity. The third type
interprets the rules, seeking to bring the reflective elements of
reason, tradition, and faith experience to bear on the situation.
Dialogue within the community of faith is the setting for this
perspective.
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 Q U A R T E R L Y REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

When the pastoral perspective is based on asserting the rules,

the shepherding task may sound something like this:

MRS. B: Oh, pastor, sometimes I feel so bad since my husband

died, I just wish God would take me, too.
PASTOR: Mrs. B, you shouldn't talk that way. Why, what would
God think?
MRS. B: Sometimes I don't even care, pastor. Isn't that terrible?
But it's true. Sometimes I just want to die and get it over with.
PASTOR: God's purposes are God's own, Mrs. B. Suffering is all
a part of his great plan for your life. You must not ask to die. That
is contrary to what God has in mind. When God wants you, God
will take you. Right now, you had better ask forgiveness for that
attitude. Why don't we pray that God will absolve you of that
thought and give you the strength to suffer in silence?

The desire to die, articulated by Mrs. B . , is perceived by the

pastor to be contrary to God's rules, and therefore it is a sin that
must be forgiven. Mrs. B. has broken the rule, and the pastor's
task, from this perspective, is to correct Mrs. B. with appropriate
judgment, exhortation, and prayer so that a right relationship
with God might be restored. Asserting the rules, then, is the
means toward achieving Mrs. B's salvation.
Consider another encounter. In this case, pastor # 2 is calling
on a pregnant woman from the parish who is in the hospital
having tests. This pastor's perspective is quite different from the
first example.

PASTOR: Well Janet, did you find out the test results yet?
JANET: ( A S tears come to her eyes) Yes . . , the doctor . . . she
said that . . . t h a t . . . the baby will be . . . retarded. (She
cries.)
PASTOR: Oh Janet, I'm so sorry. What are you going to do?
JANET: I don't know, I just don't know. Bill and I hadn't wanted
any more children, but when I got pregnant . . . well . . . now
this. Is it fair to the other two? Could we keep the baby at home?
What about my job? The doctor mentioned having an abortion.
What do you think?
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PASTOR: Sounds to me like all you see are the problems of

having a retarded child. Maybe an abortion is the answer. But I
can't tell you what to do, Janet. It's what you want that is
important. That's all that matters.
JANET: Well, I think I want the abortion, but . . . oh, I don't
know.
PASTOR: You're hesitating?
JANET: Yes. I mean, the baby is alive, it's a real little person
inside me, is it OK to . . . to . . . well, you know. I want to do
what's right.
PASTOR: Of course you do, Janet. What is right is what is right
for you. No one else can tell you what to do. There are no rules.
You must do what is right for you.

Instead of asserting the rules, pastor # 2 diminishes the rules,

suggesting that each situation and each person is unique and
that decisions should be made according to the beliefs and
values of the one taking the action. This is different from
situation ethics in that, here, transformation or salvation may be
understood as the result of being true to oneself and thereby
being true to God.
Let's look at a third conversation. Pastor # 3 is having lunch
with the head of the parish council, a person who is also an
executive with a local company recently cited by the bishop "as
an example of companies guilty of crimes against humanity
because of their manufacturing of nuclear weapons."

GEORGE: The bishop is entitled to her opinion, but I have to say

I think this is going too far.
PASTOR: Y O U sound pretty angry.
GEORGE: I guess I do. Our parish study group has raised so
many issues for me, more than I want to face right now. I'm not
perfect, pastor, but I'm not immoral either. I'm not out to hurt
people! This is a matter of self-defense and freedom. To keep
peace we must stay strong, and in the twentieth century that
means nuclear weapons.
PASTOR: You may be right, George, but maybe there's a larger
issue here. What's the dominant picture of Jesusfor you, I
mean?
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GEORGE: Oh, I guess I see Jesus on the cross. Why?

PASTOR: When his freedom was threatened, how did he defend
himself?
GEORGE: He didn't. But that's different. Jesus knew he was
going to have eternal life.
PASTOR: What about you, George?
GEORGE: That's not fair, and it isn't that easy. Even if I agreed
with all this, what would I do if I left Associated Industries? I
have kids, college ahead. With unemployment like it is, where
am I going to find another job as good as this one? And what
about all the others in our parish?more than half the
congregation, you'll remember. What happens to the church
and all our programs if they all quit?
PASTOR: Y O U raise hard questions, George. There do seem to be
more human questions than just the obvious ones. I don't know
all the answers, but I know we've got to keep on talking
together. Let's set up a congregational meeting, and have our
Bible study group share its peace-with-justice discussions. Let's
try at least to stay a community as we work on this.
GEORGE: You're on. We've got to give it a try.

Neither asserting nor denying the rules, pastor # 3 begins a

process of interpretation, acknowledging conflicting claims but
lifting up what she perceives to be larger issues of faith as well.
This pastor points to Scripture and community dialogue as
necessary. It is a reasoned and sensitive response to a difficult
situation.

AS THE TWIG IS BENT . . .

Why would three Christian pastors have such different

perspectives and provide such contrasting pastoral care? One
answer to that question comes from family systems theory,
which can describe the type of family in which each pastor was
nurtured as a child. Just as there are typologies for pastoral
perspectives, there are family types that may give rise to these
perspectives.
Pastor # 1 , who asserted the rules, may well come from a
traditional family. Traditional families seek constancy. They
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preserve their territory and can be very self-protective. These

families understand time as a continuum, running in a steady
line from past to future. They ward off experiences that do not
serve the goals of preserving the past and planning for the
future. Schedules are carefully set and kept, and there is a clear
plan or map for future goals. Deviation from the family plan is
suppressed and conformity is required. Such families are highly
disciplined, controlled, and predictable. Growing up in such a
family could well lead a pastor to a ministry where asserting
the rules expresses her or his faithful understanding of
shepherding.
Pastor # 2 , on the other hand, probably came from a very
individualistic family. Variety is the norm in these families, and
instead of protecting their territory they easily share it with just
about anyone who comes along. Time is discontinuous for
individualistic families and is experienced in the present
moment, without a great deal of concern for either past or
future. "Do your own thing" is the motto of these families, and
goals are seldom an issue. There are no set schedules, just as
there is no map or plan for family operations (other than,
perhaps a plan that things should always "just happen").
Without a plan there is no deviation, and family members are
encouraged to do what they want, when they want. Pastor # 2
may well have learned his or her perspective of diminishing the
rules in just such a family. (It is also possible that this pastor has
embraced an individualistic mode in reaction to a traditional
upbringing. Either way, the present behavior is influenced by
the earlier experience.)
There is a third possibility. It is the negotiating family. Dialogue
and consensus are two of the ways decisions about territory are
made in the negotiating family. Both constancy and variety are
important in this family type, and so while there may be
traditional goals, there will also be the understanding that these
goals may change over time. Freedom is important, but license is
avoided. There is a range of movement in the negotiating family,
and members usually fit comfortably within this range. With an
awareness of the past and an evolving future, negotiating
families live in the present. Elasticity and flexibility (not
relativism) are important, but there is a sense of being rooted. A
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pastor learning about life in the midst of a negotiating family, we

might assume, would operate from a perspective that reflected
the shared, communitarian values of this type, and we might
predict this pastor would offer pastoral care that is neither
authoritarian nor anarchist.
A summary of these three types would look like this:

Family Type Pastoral Perspective Action Plan

Traditional Assert Rules Preserve External
Power
Individualistic Diminish Rules Exert Personal
Power
Negotiating Interpret Rules Share Corporate
Power

CHART 1

RECONCILING PERSPECTIVES

We have seen how pastors may acquire their pastoral

perspective based on personal experience of the family. When
there is crisis or conflict, these perspectives become the way of
seeking reconciliation by asserting the rules, diminishing the
rules, or interpreting the rules. The work of reconciliation is
often understood best in terms of theories of atonement.
Atonement is the process whereby the ruptured relationship
between God and persons is accomplished via the life and death
of Jesus Christ. Usually three theories are identified: the
satisfaction theory; the theory of moral influence; and the
classical theory. The classical theory, as articulated by such
persons as Paul, Luther, and the Greek Fathers, understands
the human being to be enslaved by evil and sin, the "objective
powers" of the spiritual realm. These powers are defeated
through the work of God in Christ, and as a result people are
freed and reconciled with God.
A second theory is that of satisfaction. The orthodox position
of Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and most of
fundamentalism, this understanding sees humans in rebellion
against God in such a way as to affront the honor of God, who
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demands some kind of satisfaction. Since no created creature

can satisfy God, God must assume human form and become the
sacrificethe only sacrifice that could possibly accomplish its
purposethat makes right the wrong. It is the human
acceptance of this understanding that continues the salvific
work, and thus the continuing requirement for decision on the
part of the believer.
Historically the third theory, that of moral influence, is most
often associated with Abelard, though more recently with
Bushnell. This view of atonement argues that it is the human
misperception of God that separates us from God, and that
through the Incarnation God "gets our attention"and convicts
us of God's love. Atonement becomes both God's action and
humanity's response.
Atonement theory can be related to pastoral perspectives to
show the relationship among and between family type, nature
of God, nature of persons, and pastoral task. (See chart 2.) Here
we can begin to see how a pastor's early developmental
experiences in the family contribute significantly to her or his
understanding of God, persons, and pastoral care ministry with
those persons. For example, pastor # 1 is probably from a
traditional family and most likely would subscribe to the
satisfaction theory of atonement. God is then understood in
terms of the traditional family, with emphasis on discipline,
criticism, order, and love. The children of such a critical
parent-God are essentially rebellious and must be made to
conform to God's rules. The task of the pastor then is to be a kind
of prosecuting attorney whose perspective on pastoral care is to
assert the rules. "You will obey!"
It would be a neat trick if the classical theory of atonement
would fit into our third category, negotiating family/interpreting
rules, but it simply does not. Indeed, the corporate dialogical
nature of this perspective does not lend itself to any one idea.
Rather, this third category or type draws together an integrated
theory that includes insights from satisfaction, moral influence,
and classical theories.
A pastor whose family style is negotiating would find
meaning in the dialectic among the several atonement theories,
and would probably experience God in all of God's many forms.
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CATEGORY PASTOR # 1 PASTOR # 2 PASTOR # 3

Atonement Satisfaction M o r a l influence Integrated

Family type Traditional Individualistic Negotiation

N a t u r e of G o d Critical/loving Personal/ Completely other

parent ultimate values y e t radically
relational;
creator/redeemer/
sustainer

N a t u r e of Rebellious Neutral/ C r e a t e d g o o d , for

persons children teachable relationship; free
b u t subject to evil;
developing to
w a r d generativity

Pastoral A s s e r t rules Diminish rules I n t e r p r e t rules

perspective

Pastoral Prosecuting Resource person Proclaim word;

task attorney Offer critique;
Serve as
first-among-
equals

Expected C o n f o r m to t h e Learn/express Experience

human rules own values self-in-relation
response to G o d a n d o t h e r s ;
Obedience/
responsibility
t o a n d before G o d ;
L i v e in
c o m m u n i t y , for
others

CHART 2

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Without adopting an egoistic anthropology, such a pastor

would still understand people as good and free, yet subject to
the power of sin and evil. An evolving eschatology would
accompany this. Persons are free to obey God and stand before
God as individuals in community. This pastor would interpret
the rules within the context of the faith community, offering
critique, proclaiming the Word, and providing a first-among-
equals kind of leadership.

CONCLUSION

While each of the perspectives has its own value, I believe that
the interpretive perspective is to be preferred as a model for
pastoral care.
The interpretive perspective, growing as it does from a
negotiating family type, takes the idea of rules seriously but
understands them as the product of human reflection on
religious experience. The sources of religious experience
continue to be of primary importance, so the sovereignty of God
and the present mediation of Jesus Christ as the Word of God are
understood as normative. The validation of religious experience
takes place in community, where, indeed, interpretations may
vary.
The particular benefit of this pastoral perspective is that it
values both the moral-ethical concerns of the rules-asserting
perspective (without giving in to the deification of rules) and the
spiritual-emotional concerns of the rules-diminishing perspec
tive (without deifying the individual). The result is respect for
persons as God's creatures, an understanding that even good
people can make bad decisions, a commitment to dialogue in
community, and a continuing experience of the sovereignty of
God over all creation.
In light of the feminist critique of the church, there is a certain
urgency to lift up the possibility of an interpretive, negotiating
pastoral perspective. It seems likely that variations of the
rules-asserting and the rules-diminishing perspectives, as ways
of controlling an environment perceived as hostile and chaotic,
will proliferate. It is to be hoped that the interpretive perspective
will offer a grace-filled alternative.
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FOR FURTHER READING

Berger, Peter L. The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities

of Religious Affirmation. Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor, 1980.
Everding, H. Edward and Dana W. Wilbanks. Decision Making
and the Bible. Valley Forge, Penn.: Judson, 1975.
Kantor, David and William Lehr. Inside the Family. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1975.

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 HOMILETICAL RESOURCES:
HEBREW BIBLE LECTIONS
FOR THE SEASON AFTER PENTECOST

WILFRED BAILEY

Do pastors turn to other pastors for help in weekly sermon

preparation or do they look only to the Scriptures, within themselves,
and to the recognized professional exegetes? My own experience and
observation has convinced me that many pastors welcome help from
their colleagues. Obviously Quarterly Review concurs. What follows
assumes that most pastors have access to adequate exegetical
resources. This article offers some "conversation" about how this
lectionary preacher struggles with the preaching task, focusing on four
lections from Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
Mine is not a how-to approach. It is, rather, my current way of
working at lectionary preaching that comes out of the specific pastoral
charge which I have served for more than thirty-two years. During the
last half of that period I have followed the lectionary quite strictly,
studying the readings with the aid of a group of pastors each Monday
afternoon. These persons have been important to me as a personal and
vocational support group, but our announced task is taken seriously
with a covenant that calls for a weekly page or so of duplicated material
about the readings, concerning context, word study, or the like.

Wilfred Bailey is pastor of Casa View United Methodist Church, Dallas, Texas, He is the
author of Awakened Worship (1972), has served as a naval chaplain, and is a member of the
Quarterly Review editorial board. These Four Cozy Walls, a 1960s film about church mission,
was filmed at Casa View UMC.
Lections in these homiletical resources follow those provided in Common Lectionary:
The Lectionary Proposed by the Consultation on Common Texts (New York: Church Hymnal
Corp., 1983).
Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Revised Standard Version
Common Bible, copyright 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National
Council of the Churches of Christ in the U. S. A., and are used by permission.

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 QUARTERLY REVIEW, SUMMER 1986

We instigated the group out of our admitted need for this discipline as
well as for the textual help we could offer each other, drawing on our
own areas of interest and our particular resources. Others I know work
with similar groups or meet regularly with laypersons from the
congregation for a study of the texts.
Did I say "more than thirty-two years" at the same appointment?
That is correct. As most pastors know, it would be imprecise and even
somewhat misleading to speak of my preaching to "the same
congregation" all these years. In a suburban community rather typical
of those throughout our nation, many people move away as others
move in. Some people change congregations without changing
addresses. The degree to which the congregation has been the same is
far more an advantage than it is a problem. It took at least ten years for
me to begin to realize that the sermon was a corporate effort. This is
true not only at the time the sermon is delivered on Sunday morning,
but also as it is formed out of the life of the "community called church."
Along with my realization, the congregation has also become aware of
its own role through the years. More and more I know that I not only
preach to the people, but I also preach on their behalf.
The approach I am offering is lacking in strict organization and in
clearly defined, progressive steps within each lection. I hope it does
not come across as a rationalization to say that this is intentional. My
professional pride tempted me to offer some kind of textbook model as
being my own method, but I probably could not have pulled that off
even if I had yielded to the temptation. I have tried to be as honest as it
is possible for me to be with my peers looking over my shoulder, to
portray the process and directions that I actually take as well as the
ones that I intend to take each week. I have attempted to write the
material in that style.
A biblical professor told me recently that during the nine years he
attended his neighborhood United Methodist Church he never heard
the pastor preach from a Hebrew Bible text. His remark, along with
this assignment, has brought me to re-examine the frequency of my
own selection of Hebrew Bible texts. Most of us are not necessarily
seeking an even division of Sundays between the Hebrew Bible and
the New Testament or even a numerical balance of one-third Hebrew
Bible, one-third Gospel, and one-third Epistle, but a continued
presence of Hebrew Bible preaching is imperative.
Sermons bear a variety of witnesses. Not only is the richness of the
content in Hebrew Bible texts greatly needed by congregations as well
as by their pastors, but the New Testament texts also suffer when the
Hebrew Bible is neglected. Furthermore, sermons from these
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Scriptures can make an important witness. It is not enough that we

include a Hebrew Bible reading during the liturgy and sing hymns
from Hebrew Bible texts. These texts also need to be preached in order
to affirm that our identity as Christians is tied to them and to the entire
history of Israel out of which they come.
I have attempted to treat these lections from Jeremiah and Ezekiel
with respect. That is, to the best of my ability I have avoided
Christianizing them. It would be artificial to pretend that I am
preaching as one who has never heard of the Christian faith, nor
would that be appropriate. We preach as disciples of Jesus Christ, but
this does not preclude our honoring the Hebrew Bible's witness in its
own integrity. We have good examples of this reverence for the
1
Hebrew Scriptures throughout the New Testament.

TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Jeremiah 18:1-11

Within God's sovereignty we can choose life or death.

When I realized that this opening lection was Jeremiah's story of the
potter and clay, I was pleased and maybe even a little bit excited. To me
this is one of the Bible's blue-ribbon passages and I considered it to be a
most welcome gift. My experience quickly reminded me, however,
that my favorite texts often give me the most trouble in my efforts to
write the sermon and that those texts I dread most are sometimes the
ones out of which I seem to do my better work. Maybe it is because I
know that the unfamiliar ones will require more work from me and
that I cannot rely on familiarity. I also know the difficulty of
communicating anything that I have come to take for granted. The
positive feelings of preaching from this familiar Jeremiah text far
outweighed my internal warnings, however, and I found myself eager
to dig in.
"Digging in" means the same for me that it probably means for
many other preachers. It is the process of reading the text several times
from several translations without overt help from any commentaries.
Almost always these first readings will include for me the Revised
Standard Version, not because it necessarily offers the best presenta
tion of the text in English, but because of several practical reasons.
First, I am most familiar with it. I feel at home with its style. It is also the
translation we have chosen to use in the Sunday morning liturgy of
this congregation and one that often draws comparison and to which
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reference is made by other translations. Furthermore, the RSV is

important for my work because of my use of its concordance,
especially the New Testament analytical concordance (1979). Astute
readers must have guessed by now that I will not be reading Jeremiah
2
from the Hebrew text.
After these several readings of the text and after reading the verses,
sometimes chapters, that precede and follow the lection, I appeal to
the Christian community for direct and overt help. This is in addition
to the lifetime of help and support that the "community called church"
has given and that has brought me thus far. I am speaking now of my
turning to the written work of biblical scholars. Although this early
consultation flies in the face of the overwhelming advice I have heard
and read throughout my ministry, I do not wait two or three days
before consulting those persons who devote their lifetimes to a study
of the Scriptures. This step, which so many consider to be a sellout or a
stifling of one's own creativity, cannot wait three days. These people
have information that I need on Monday, and I am not convinced that
ignorance will turn into knowledge if left by itself for three days.
These to whom I turn are not the writers of sermons or "expositors"
of the lection. For the most part I have not found much help from
commentaries designed for sermon preparation. Those to whom I go
are the ones who can tell me more about the context out of which this
writing has come. Some of these from our cloud of witnesses wrote
centuries ago, while others are still alive and reflect recent scholarship
3
and discoveries. Because of my irregular visits with Jeremiah I want to
know more about the world in which the people to whom Jeremiah
was writing lived. I need to be informed of those points in the text over
which scholars have debated.
This is also word-study time. Jeremiah writes that if Israel turns from its
evil, then God promises to repent. "Repent"? God repents? That
would raise some interest in the congregation. Did Jeremiah quote God
correctly? It hardly seems proper to speak of God repenting. I am now
adding this to the notes I have been making as I have been reading
through this text. Maybe our church will need to rehearse again the
common Hebrew Bible understanding of God's call for the people to
repent as meaning primarily that they are to turn from their idolatry.
We remind ourselves from time to time that the Hebrew Bible usage is
in contrast to the modern, secular use of the term to mean primarily a
feeling of sorrow and regret. As I inquire of the historical community,
however, I find that God's repenting certainly does not mean that God
is to turn back from the evil ways God has been following, but rather
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that God will have a "change of heart" or "a change of mind" about
plucking the nation up and breaking it down.
The word study that I have described is part of those essentials I
need in order to be sure that I am dealing fairly with this passage. It
seems unreasonable to make any start on a journey toward a sermon or
even extract the primary message of the text until I have as sound an
understanding as possible of what the writer is actually saying. Members of
the faith community whom I have never met help me with this
essential task, such members as Gerhard von Rad, John Bright, and
James Hyatt. My question to them is not so much What did Jeremiah
mean? but rather, What is Jeremiah really saying in these verses? This
is a preliminary question, certainly, and it has no final value in itself. It
can even become an idolatrous question for us, reflecting our worship
of the past. Nevertheless, it is a vital step. We dare not deceive
ourselves by such statements as "It is not important what the writer
was saying; what counts is what I hear in this text." Ultimately, of
course, the question is, what does God say to me (us) in this text?but
we do not begin there. Much of our bad preaching comes from forcing
ourselves on the text and not being willing to make every effort to
understand what the writers, in fact, intended to say.
A decision needs to be made about the bounds of the text, and the work
done so far can help me make an informed decision. Although I rarely
depart from the lectionary on Sunday morning, I have determined that
I will follow my own understanding of the integrity of its boundaries
and divisions, leaning heavily, of course, on the exegetes I respect. If
now and then a distinct segment of material appears within the lection
itself, a segment that has its own unity without including all that the
lection designates, then I do not view it as a violation of the lectionary if
I limit my attention to that one unit.
Likewise, on occasion I become convinced that the lection stops too
soon. This is the situation in this work from Jeremiah, I cannot see any
reason why verse 12 should not be included and can see possible reason
why it should. Nothing I read from the exegetes changes my mind, so I
am including it. It might not make any difference that verse 12 is now a
part of my scope, but it is too early to make that kind of judgment.
Preparing for my Monday afternoon lectionary sessions with other
pastors is useful not only in getting me to take on the exegetical and
word-study task, but also in helping me bring it to a close. I struggle at
times against the need to read from "one more book" about the text,
but finally we all have to make the leap and go with where we are,
knowing the risk that is always taken. It is to this point that I ask myself
what I find to be the primary thrust of this lection. Until I answer this
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question I have no way of working toward a sermon, not even a broad

outline. When I have determined this thrust or message, I feel some
confidence that I am on my way, even though it is a feeling that does not
always hold up. At this point I am not looking for a sermon title. I want
some way to state briefly, possibly in one sentence, what the text is saying.
With the present lection I am thinking of the only sermon I possibly
ever heard from this text (but then how many sermons do most pastors
ever hear from someone else?). The preacher told us that the word
given in this potter and clay story is that in the shaping of humanity
God will "keep doing it until God gets it right." That was not
something plucked out of the air, but I find this an inadequate, if not an
inaccurate, way of summarizing the message.
Repentance is certainly involved here. If Israel does not hear the call
to repentance and obey it, its future is at best bleak. I have some
notebook items on repentance that I feel good about and this might be
the opportunity for putting them into a sermon. But is this the time?
Would I be using Jeremiah as an opportunity to preach one of my
sermons on the doctrines of the church while not playing fair with
what Jeremiah has given us? I had better continue the search, even
though I am keeping repentance as a contact point.
It does seem obvious that Jeremiah is convinced of the sovereignty of
God. God is the potter and we are the clay and there is no mistake
about this. More can and must be said, however. The clay can frustrate
the potter's intention. Contemporary philosophers Alfred North
Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne and theologians like Schubert
Ogden have continued to call our attention to the biblical witness that
refutes the claim, often attributed to orthodox theology, that God is
unaffected by what we do. Jeremiah is telling the people that they
determine what God does with them, while reminding them at the
same time that God remains sovereign. The freedom they have is a
real, genuine freedom. Human beings can choose the dark side of life
in which to live or they can choose the light. Whichever choice, all still
belong to God, and the "pot" God is shaping is never really destroyed.
What God will do with Israel will be determined by whether or not
Israel turns from its evil.
I am now ready to try out the following as setting forth the primary
thrust of the text: Within God's sovereignty we can choose life or death. I
wish that I felt totally confident that this is a faithful rendering of the
text, but I am willing to do what a friend once advised when we were
working on the wording of some liturgy. "Let's make our decision," he
said, "and then worry about it a lot." To say it another way, I plan to
stick with this but I hope to keep the dialogue open.
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With some understanding of what I belive to be happening in this

seventh century B. C. E. setting and proclamation, lam now looking at the
areas of life about me. If this text is to be alive for me and this
congregation, it will happen because it touches concerns and
experiences that are already inside of us. It is true of us as individuals
and it is true of our institutions. Nothing that comes out of the Bible is
to be worshipped and adored for its own sake. When the Word comes
to us from the Scriptures, it comes to creatures who already have been
claimed and called through the day-by-day world about us. This
Jeremiah text will have significance for us to the degree that it brings us
into an encounter that makes us aware of our own lives. I am not
looking for what I might consider direct parallels between what was
happening in Jeremiah's world and events taking place here and now.
Rather, I am looking at what this word addressed to Israel has to say to
us, in whatever condition we now live.
To what degree does our congregation understand itself to be
malleable to God's purpose? What about the United Methodist Church
or even all institutional churches? In the working of God's purpose of
wholeness, wherein is our obstinacy? It would be more comfortable to
consign this text to past history by saying, "See what God did when
Israel would not respond? God shaped into being the Christian
community." This is a deathly approach, as is any approach that does
not allow the word given here to address us as the stubborn resisters to
God's shaping.
For example, what vessels did God shape and what vessels are now
being shaped by God to relieve the oppression brought on by
continued racism, when the church has not been and is not now being
malleable because of its apathy, its lack of courage, and its own
complicity?
We cannot afford to be general. In both past and present situations
and incidents we need to call into question our specific resistance to
God's shaping. What was this congregation doing when Rosa Parks
refused to move to the back of the bus? What is this congregation doing
as the influx of Asians continues in our once all-white, Caucasian,
suburban areas? Will God cast us aside as an instrument of God's
purpose and shape another vessel? (While letting our institution
continue to prosper?) Where does this text engage me in my own life,
my own resistance?
Other areas that we might explore could include specific directions
Americans might follow in repentance of ("turning from") the
materialism that is so deeply embedded in our culture. Are we able to
think of repentance only in terms of individuals? If our psyches are
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once permanently formed, is repentance just a matter of behavior

modification, or is it something deeper or of another dimension?
This is no time to move entirely away from further considerations of
the text. This is not possible. My attention, however, is focused
primarily on the present time even as it never stops referring to
Jeremiah, the potter, and the clay. Now I am on my way. It is a long
way between here and a sermon but my mind is in gear, gathering
material not only at the structured times at my desk but as I drive to
meetings and make hospital visits. Soon, however, I need to begin
writingsooner than most recommend,

THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Jeremiah 20:7-13

God's calling claims Jeremiah's total life and will not let him go.

As I was reading this text in several translations, I found myself making

notes that would be applicable at several stages of the sermon process,
which goes on formally and informally from Monday morning through
Sunday noon, I am reminded again that even with all the benefits of
whatever systematic sermon process has evolved in me, it is not
possible for me to do all my work in sequential, self-contained units. I
am also convinced that strict adherence to such a system is not always
appropriate, for it is usually in this initial stage of reading that my mind
and my eyes do the most productive scouting about. For example, I
was still in the initial process of reading texts when I was struck by
Jeremiah's complaint that God had "deceived" (RSV) him. I
remembered having previously read somewhere that Jeremiah
complained that he was "seduced" by God and I began some word-study.
I found the word "duped" used in two translationsthe New English
Bible and the New American Biblebut I also found "seduced" in John
Bright's translation, as well as in the Jerusalem Bible. "Seduced" seems
more descriptive and consistent with Jeremiah's complaint. This is one
of those occasions, however, when I must once again be sure that I am
not choosing a translation on the basis that it will preach better. Which
translation is more consistent with the Hebrew? It is another case of a
search to know as completely as possible what is actually said, rather than
what I want the text to say. Only after I appeal to the exegetes for help can I
go back to Jeremiah's accusation that God seduced him, having been
satisfied by my favorite scholars that "seduced" is an appropriate
translation and probably the most likely.*
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Repeated readings as well as readings in other parts of this book also help
me better understand Jeremiah. I go back to the first chapter and listen
to his protest upon being called to be a prophet. I find there and
elsewhere a revealing and poignant portrayal of this man and of the
struggle he continues to have with his calling to prophesy to Israel.
These seven verses in this week's lection form another blue-ribbon
passage, but now I want to consider adjustments in the boundaries of this
lection. My first evaluation of the scope given here is that the
boundaries are too narrow. I have checked to see if the connecting
verses, the ones preceding and those following our lection, appear
elsewhere at any time in our lectionary. They do not, although such a
situation does occur in 1987 in two texts from chapter 31. I feel free,
therefore, to consider adding verses 14-18, the remaining verses of this
chapter.
My reason for possibly extending this lection is at least twofold.
First, along with the third chapter of Job, this additional confession
offers some of the most powerful literature in the Bible, and it is this
power that can help the congregation hear Jeremiah's voice more
clearly in our text. A second and possibly more valid reason is that they
seem to offer an understanding of what initially appears to be a sudden
switch in Jeremiah's emotions in verse 13. Although the two verses
preceding it have already moved into an affirmation of God's presence,
Jeremiah is still crying out for vengeance on those who persecute him,
Then a dramatic doxology comes in this thirteenth verse:

Sing to t h e L o r d ;
praise the Lord!
F o r h e h a s d e l i v e r e d t h e life of t h e n e e d y
f r o m the h a n d of e v i l d o e r s .

As abruptly as these words appear, the verses that follow present an

even more dramatic change:

Cursed be the day

o n which I w a s born!
The day w h e n m y mother bore me,
let it n o t b e blessed!

Exegesis and boundary-setting combine. If I consider this thirteenth

verse as having been inserted in the text at the wrong place, or even to
be inauthentic, then I would have far less reason to extend the
boundaries of our lection to include verses 14-16. Even understanding
the verse as a reversal in Jeremiah's mood might not convince me to
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make the inclusion. But I am attracted to the possibility that something

more might be found here, and that possibility came to mind because
of a member of this congregation.
In my reading I immediately thought of hera woman who has
survived three open-heart operations, but who has been told that the
hope of reversing her present downward spiral by more surgery is
almost nonexistent. No medication can remove the cause of her
suffering and her constant loss of strength. She cries as she
experiences her final days and she expresses her anger as I visit her.
But in between her displays of anger, sadness, and despair come the
"nevertheless" affirmations of faith. She even appears most Sunday
mornings with whatever strength she has, and she sings the doxology.
She has given me an insight into this text. I will consider the possibility
that in between his two confessions Jeremiah injects a liturgical act of
praise, or hymn, not reflecting his emotions but rather affirming his
faith in the midst of his despair.
In this constant appearance of the members of the congregation in
my thoughts as I plan my sermon I am reminded of my dependence on
them. I do not say this to be humble or generous. I am describing an
essential element. Composer-conductor Benjamin Britten once wrote
about the indispensable role and contribution of the "listeners." He
maintained that the orchestra's performance and the concert as a
whole is shaped by the audience. How much more significant is the
role of the congregation in the church's liturgy, including the
preaching. References are sometimes made to the power of sermons in
shaping people's lives. Seldom, however, do we recognize how
greatly the congregation shapes sermons.
In a manner not totally different from my listening to someone from
this congregation, I now want to hear if Job can offer me deeper
insights into Jeremiah's message. I remember the description a friend
once gave of the third chapter of Job, calling it a fugue on this twentieth
chapter of Jeremiah. Job has a possibility of offering aid for more than
my own understanding of Jeremiah; I also look ahead to the possibility
that I might refer to Job during the actual preaching of the sermon,
since most lay people I know are more familiar with Job than they are
with Jeremiah.
If I include references to Job and his self-cursing I run the risk of
distracting the congregation, but such a reference might also offer a
clearer insight into Jeremiah and his confession. I have tried to keep in
mind a suggestion offered by a colleague who recommended more use
of parallel material from other books of the Bible. Sometimes the
second source is used because of its contrast and at other times because
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of its similarities. I was reluctant to follow this advice at first, out of a

fear that I would violate the integrity of a particular writer or redactor.
Most of us know too well the problems. For example, a preacher can
take the word "faith" out of the Epistle of James and preach about it
from the understanding of Paul as if this were James's meaning. But I
once found that I could properly clarify much of what James is writing
about faith and works by referring to Paul and his similar concerns
related to the ways in which people understand, speak of, and live
their faith. Even aside from any future considerations of including Job
in the sermon, I need him now to help me with Jeremiah.
If I pursue this possibility I would need to take a new and closer look
at the circumstances out of which Job offered his self-curse. I know that
even if this becomes an unlikely path, there is no reason to utter a
self-curse of my own for having wasted my time in heading off on a
tangent. Sometimes these tangents produce results and often they go
dry. Some of this work might show up in another sermon further
ahead, possibly in a rather unexpected manner. Then again, it might
be resigned to that large pile of material that is abandoned each week,
never to be used in any recognizable form.
This is one of the toughest disciplines for methat of remembering
each week that the quality of sermons is far less likely to be determined
by how much material I assemble than it is by what I am willing to leave
out. And despite various efforts to make future use of that which
comes to rest on the cutting room floor, I know that much of it is
unlikely to be salvaged. This is no tragedy. The congregation will be
able to continue its journey in faith without the benefit of all of those
wonderful words that I must leave unspoken. How much more
important it is to have sermons that set forth a witness as clearly
focused and uncluttered as can possibly come from a cluttered mind.
All of this exploring must now move in some more specific
directions. What is the context of the preceding and following verses?
In chapter 19 Jeremiah prophesies the fall of Jerusalem. Chapter 20
opens with the narrative in which Pashhur the priest hears this
prophecy and has Jeremiah beaten, puts him "in the stocks," and
releases him the next day. Jeremiah tells Pashhur, "The Lord does not
call your name Pashhur, but Terror on every side." But this name for
Pashhur becomes a nickname for Jeremiah, and he hears those about
him whispering this phrase whenever he passes by. Here is added
commentary on Jeremiah's turmoil.
Possibly it is time to fix in my mind a sentence that will set forth the
primary thrust of this text. It is with fear and trembling that I take on
this task.
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Sufficient reason is here to focus on the statement, "The commitment

of Jeremiah is strong enough to endure all pain." This formulation presents
the problem, however, of focusing on the prophet's faithfulness rather
than on the activity of God and is a danger. All too prevalent is the
understanding of the role of Scripture as portraying models of
faithfulness and behavior on the part of the prophets and other heroes.
This understanding needs to be dealt with, and constant effort must be
made to offer the Scriptures as they are offered to us. They bear
witness to the mighty works of God through God's imperfect servants.
Therefore, I think it better to reverse the subject and predicate and say,
"God's calling claims Jeremiah's total life and will not let him go." Now what
does it mean for us to acknowledge God's claim on us to prophesy,
even when our prophecy is not received as anything other than words
of doom and gloom, and even when being a prophet is the last role we
would ever have chosen for ourselves?
Certainly one of the first steps in understanding our prophetic call is
that of understanding what it means to live in an awareness of God's
presence in our lives. Jeremiah's very personal conversations with God
and his identification of God with what is happening in his life are
likely to come across as rather strange thought and language for most
mainline Christians. Few in this age and culture understand
complaining about God to be a proper activity for Christians.
Complaining to God is one thing but complaining about God is
something else. At a social gathering a few years ago I listened to a
woman tell me in one conversation that she despised most people, did
not trust "the world," was constantly a victim of bad luck, but that she
loved God.
Jeremiah presents a different kind of witness from hers. He will not
look elsewhere for the source of his problems. He looks to God. It is
God who has made his life so miserable by seducing him into this role
of being God's voice. It is also God who is stronger than Jeremiah and
has therefore prevailed. Because of God he must proclaim a message
that the people do not want to hear and one that brings derision. He
has become a laughingstock. He is derided not because of bad luck, or
because the world is cruel. It is God's doing.
A very important person in my life once told me that each service of
worship might do well to allow for two sermons. When the pastor has
finished preaching and has sat down, he or she should be able to get
back up and preach "the other sermon." My friend's suggestion might
be illustrated in this instance by envisioning a "first sermon" which
sets forth the real presence of God in this present world as Jeremiah
proclaims it. The "second sermon" would correct any distorted
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thinking of what Jeremiah is saying, such distorted and often trivial

thinking as "Yes, I agree about the presence of God. I was low on
money the other day but found a one-hundred-dollar bill in the
supermarket parking lot. I knew immediately that it was a gift from
God." Or maybe the distortion would be expressed in a negative
understanding, in asking why God caused an airplane to crash and kill
hundreds of innocent people, for example.
Since we do not have the luxury (or burden) of preaching a second
sermon each Sunday, we are constantly under the demand to inform
the congregation of what we are not preaching as well as what our
message is. For example, a single opening clause, such as, "I am not
advocating a disregard for morals, but . . .," can be lost on the
congregation as they follow the sermon that describes our faith as
living by God's grace instead of trusting in our own moral
achievements. The listeners need more than one "disclaimer." They
must be clear in understanding that to live by grace does not mean that
one is indifferent to immorality, just as in this week's text we must be
clear about the biblical meaning of God's presence.
This most certainly is a text about God's constant presence. God
never lets up. But neither will Jeremiah let up. At times he is
determined to get out of this prophet business. He will never again
mention God's name nor will he speak in God's name. It will not work,
however. The burning fire shut up in his bones will not be quenched.
An example of this inner struggle occurred when my rrunistry and the
ministry of the Casa View church was set in a new direction in the early
1960s as it "discovered," almost as if for the first time, that the church
exists for the sake of the world. One layperson in our congregation led
the way. Working from within the membership through reading and
study and through contact with guest resource persons, and working in
the poor and minority areas of Dallas, through direct involvement this
woman was able to bring a consciousness and participation that
increased for several years. In private conversations with me, she told of
her desire for tranquility. She agonized over why her husband could
perform a rather routine day at the office, come home to a satisfying
dinner, and then watch television or read for the remaining hours of
every evening and on weekends, ignoring the crying world around him.
Why, she agonized, could she not do the same? Why was her life always
to be one of examination and active response? She would hear this
confession of Jeremiah.
Those who excuse themselves from bearing witness to God's claim
and promise because they "just don't feel like it" or because they
"aren't in the mood" will find a message directed to them in Jeremiah.
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The church that claims a desire to involve itself in more work with
those alienated from society but fears that this would destroy its inner
peace needs to hear this prophet's lament. The church that does not
prophesy is not the church.
Our tradition as the church enables us to be aware of what it means to
be the prophetic community called to proclaim a message that our
society does not always want to hear. We profess our belief in the
communion of saints and surely we are less than the church when we do
not "count the votes" of those women and men who have gone before
us. Scripture is the only norm for us, but we come to know the Scriptures
through those who have brought them to us. Therefore, we listen to the
voice of Martin Luther when he says, "Here I stand," and we recognize
the suffering of John Wesley as he called to account the ministry of the
Anglican church he loved. And much closer to our own day we can read
the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that he wrote as a prisoner in the
Birmingham jail to which his prophetic call had brought him.
To end on an apparent light note, we might look toward the
entertainers. Although it might seem like a rationalization for spending
my time reading the comic pages, I would say that some of the more
profound statements in our day have been made by cartoonists who
risked their careers in speaking out when at least some of them might
have preferred to have kept everyone laughing. "Pogo," a comic strip by
the late Walt Kelly, was cancelled by some newspapers and often
suspended by others because of Kelly's prophetic stance. Whatever pain
and financial loss Kelly suffered did not deter him from his presentation
of judgment through his "bad news" characters.
God continues to raise up prophets all around us who desire peace
and tranquility, but who persist in proclaiming a word to the people that
the people do not want to hear, but a word that is spoken for the
salvation of all.

FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Jeremiah 28:1-9

Jeremiah's yearning for deliverance is second to his faithfulness

to the message he receives from God.

My reading of other translations of this text does not offer much

additional information beyond what I find in the RSV, but on reading
the material preceding and following it seems especially significant.
The reference to God having broken the yoke of the king requires the
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clarification about the yoke's symbolism given in the verses that go

before our text (27:2, 8) and some that follow (28:10-14). Also, my
repeated readings of the text and its surrounding material made me
curious about the seemingly needless references to Jeremiah as "the
prophet Jeremiah." As I moved into some word study and conferring with the
exegetes, I found the suggestion that "it may be that the writer wished
with the utmost emphasisand ironyto point up the fact that
3
prophet was contradicting prophet, and in the name of Yahweh." A
brief look at biblical prophecy and Jeremiah's prophetic role is in order.
I am indebted to a seminary professor who once told his class that we
would do well to look at prophecy more as "forth-telling" rather than
as "fore-telling." Instead of being primarily an exercise in reading a
crystal ball, prophecy comes from the person who speaks God's word
within a specific contexta certain place at a certain time to a particular
community of people.
Not only prophecy, but all lectionary preaching, indeed all biblical
preaching, must of necessity be based on thorough investigation of the
context in which the lection comes. We need to understand the
background of the Hebrews to whom Jeremiah and Hananiah are
prophesying. These people know themselves through their history.
They are Israel, released from their chains and delivered out of Egypt.
They live by God's promise, by the covenant given to Abraham and the
covenant that God made with David. They are convinced that God will
not allow them to fail. Yet here some of them are, in the captivity of the
Babylonians.
We look again at this prophet Jeremiah. He wants to be loved by the
people and he wants freedom and peace, but as a faithful prophet of
God he cannot proclaim any message other than that one given to him
from God. His faithfulness to his callling is put into sharp focus in this
week's narrative of his encounter with the false prophet Hananiah.
Hananiah is sure to get a good hearing because he is telling the people
what they want to hear, Happy days will soon be here again. God has
broken the yoke of the king of Babylon and within two years God's
house will be restored. Jeremiah is one hundred percent for this kind of
prediction, but the truth of the situation will not let him live in this kind
of make-believe world.
Jeremiah is offering hope to the people, but it cannot be the kind of
immediate good news that Hananiah offers. Jeremiah believes that
Israel will continue to exist, that it will always be the people of God.
God's deliverance from Babylon was not to come within two years,
however. In the meantime, these exiles who had been taken from
Jerusalem to captivity in Babylon were to become good Babylonians in
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their exile and serve the king, Nebuchadnezzar. The good news and
hope that Jeremiah offers in his prophecy must be seen in long-range
terms and in a form different from that experienced by those who had
gone before. He defends his prophecy, however, as being consistent
with prophets before him, prophets who also had to speak of gloom.
The temptation at this point might be to portray Hananiah as an evil
man who tries to deceive the people, courting their favor by saying
what the people want to hear. The text does not justify this
interpretation. It might make good preaching for me, but it is not what
the text tells us. Jeremiah, as we have read, says "Amen" to
Hananiah's words. Even beyond that, Jeremiah prays that the
prophecy of Hananiah might come true. Hananiah the mean person
versus Jeremiah the good hero might be fun, but a preliminary
question that each preacher must ask is, what does the writer say? In
this instance, a careful reading of the text can prevent a mistaken
labeling of Hananiah. But careful reading is not always enough.
Even if we wish it were not so, anyone who struggles with
hermeneutics knows the "outside help" we need from the communion
of saints. I am impoverished in my preaching to the extent to which I
cannot lay hold of the scientific approaches in understanding the Bible.
I need to know methods of form criticism and of what has been called
"literary" and "textual" criticism. I need to know more about how the
Hebrew language is put together and how it expresses itself. I dare not
impose my own understanding of poetry on the forms we find in the
Scriptures. What are the patterns of thought used here? What is the
meaning of biblical myth? What is the role of parable and of allegory? It
is simple-minded for anyone to say that he or she simply reads the
Bible "as it is." All of the work being done by scholars is precisely
toward this point. For us to learn the meaning of scriptural symbols
and the like is to move closer to the Bible "as it is."
The exegetical and hermeneutical tasks remain staggering even
when we have laid hold of all the tools given to us. We can often
become confused attempting to read a contemporary letter written in
English from a person with whom we have communicated all our lives.
Sometimes serious breaches between family members come from the
misunderstanding of such a letter. How infinitely more difficult it is for
us to grasp what is actually being said in Scriptures when we consider
the difference in language, the radically different worldview, and an
unlimited number of other handicaps facing us. This ought not
discourage us, however, but should call us to a serious effort at
bridging the gap as much as possible in order to hear as clearly as we
can what is being said. One rather easy task required of us at this
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moment in order to make sense of the text's reference to a yoke is to

read chapter 27.
Even though Jeremiah does not offer the kinds of symbolic acts we
will be reading about in Ezekiel, he does employ the method on
occasion. In chapter 27, verse 2, he is told by God to "make yourself
thongs and yoke-bars, and put them on your neck," This is the yoke of
which Hananiah speaks in 28:2. "I have broken the yoke of the king of
Babylon/' he tells the people. As Jeremiah's putting on of the yoke
symbolized God's word to the people to continue their subjection to
the king, so Hananiah's breaking of the yoke portrayed the deliverance
that God would soon bring. Later in this chapter Jeremiah replaces the
broken wooden bars with bars of iron (28:13).
What, then, is the message of this text out of which I will move
toward my sermon preparation? I have a terrible feeling that it might
be stated most accurately with this sentence: The test of a true prophet
of God is whether or not that prophet's word comes to pass. I hope that
it is more than my reluctance to try to build a sermon out of that
message that tells me to search further. I am going further, anyway, to
try something else. How about this? Jeremiah's yearning for deliverance is
second to his faithfulness to the message he receives from God. I will go with
this statement for now, even though it conflicts somewhat with the
guideline I offered in the previous section of making God the subject.
With this particular text I am eager to let my mind pursue a number
of directions that relate to this message. I want to be open to historic
happenings in the twenty centuries of the church in which this need to
hear good news had to be dealt with. I am open to events that were
primarily rejections of God's word as well as acts of faithfulness. In
addition to the standard look at specific parts of the church, such as
United Methodism, churches in Dallas, and our own congregation, I
want to include events or happenings in the artsmusic, painting,
literature, drama, and whatever other direction my mind goes in.
What does the message of the text mean in doctor-patient relation
ships, and how is it acted out in parent-child situations? Do we protect
our children from the truth? Does it bear on the selection of which
movie I will see? How does it relate to reports we get concerning the
hungry of the world?
Finding related areas will be less of a task than will be the choice of
those most sensitive and crucial parallels in the lives of members of this
congregation. They are citizens of a nation that constantly informs its
political leaders by its votes that it wants to hear only good news and
the promise of a rosy future. Political analysts have been of one mind in
pointing to the cost paid by candidates, especially those for national
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office, who tell the citizens of the United States to prepare for some
belt-tightening, to look toward future days in which we must reduce
our standard of living. Our country wants to hear promises of good
news and be told of hope for even finer days ahead. We often accept
hollow promises, not always because we truly believe they will come
to be, but rather because we want them to come true.
Although I consider this a possible example to include in my
sermon, I know too much about the voting record of members of this
congregation to believe that very many of them will see themselves as
supporters of the false prophets of good news. Most have been
involved in the political process in such a way that much of what might
be preached at this point would come across as reason for
self-congratulation for their faithfulness. Sermons can validly include
points toward which people can look in order to determine their own
faithfulness and receive encouragement, but we will miss the point of
Jeremiah's prophetic voice and the voice of any other Scripture passage
if others become the sinners and we become the faithful.
The many dangers that accompany any current political references
in my sermon should not cause me to abstain from material that
includes this essential part of life, but it does have its own special set of
cautions. It would be unfair and false to infer that one candidate or one
part of our nation is identical with Hananiah and that another is
identical to Jeremiah.
Over a decade ago I found it altogether appropriate for me to
participate in various forms of opposition to our involvement in the
Vietnam War, even as a reserve U. S. Navy chaplain. But the question
as to how I was to approach this issue in sermons was a constant
struggle. Condemning war and speaking against the dehumanization
of someone for being an Asian or a communist was clearly appropriate.
But support or condemnation for certain United States military moves,
such as the bombing of Hanoi, was a different matter. The sermon is
not the place for me to tell the people what J think. It is, rather, the
occasion for me to put before them what I believe to be the Word of
God as the church has interpreted it through the Scriptures and passed
it along through the centuries.
Determining the difference is never easy for anyone, of course. It is
appropriate to be concerned that one is expressing mere opinion,
rather than conviction, but this concern can bring a preacher to choose
silence when it is actually time for a voice to be heard. The people need
to know that the pastor is aware that there is a difference between
personal opinions and that which the pastor believes to be the Word
given through the witness of the Scriptures in this particular context.
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Adequate opportunities exist elsewhere in the world for the pastor to

act out political opinions. Now I want to turn from politics to the church
in looking at good/bad news prophecy.
For almost thirty years the congregation at Casa View has heard the
call to confession from the Scriptures, like the one found in the
opening verses of Isaiah 6. This call to confession follows soon after our
hymn of praise through which the congregation gathers to enact the
drama of our salvation. If our Sunday morning worship is indeed a
drama, even the dramaa rehearsal of the story of God's saving work
in our livesis it not appropriate that we acknowledge the truth about
our lives, that we cannot depend on our works but must trust in God's
ever-forgiving grace? Throughout United Methodism and elsewhere,
however, comes repeated urging to make our worship all joyful,
eliminating the "negative." We want Hananiah's good news. But since
liturgy is essential in the formation of the church, we do well to look to
the biblical witness as the way of informing our worship, and we find
there reason to include "bad news," that is, judgment.
There are times when communities and individuals are in need of
that prophecy that offers hope and encouragement. It is altogether
appropriate and consistent with the prophet's calling to point toward
the "good news." The congregation needs to be reminded of God's
faithfulness throughout history and God's deliverance of those who
went before us. But when this word comes forth as an effort to give
false hope, crying peace where there is no peace, it does a disservice
and is false prophecy. True hope recognizes the actual state in which
life is being lived and the possible suffering and even tragic
circumstances that the people face.
A colleague of mine spent a number of years attempting to bring the
good news to indigent children in a section of Chicago. He wished to
expose these boys and girls to some significant and respected paintings
but was hesitant because of their lack of background in the arts. One day
he made the plunge, however, and showed them a print of Picasso's
Guernica. As the children viewed this portrayal of the tragic suffering of a
people, he waited for the giggles and ridicule that did not come. One boy
stared at the painful scene for a few minutes and then said, "That's the
block where I live." My friend used the boy's identification of his own
bleak circumstances as a beginning of a trek toward hope and found this
"bad news" painting to be a vehicle in that hopeful direction.
Even if many in a congregation are not familiar with Guernica, it is
still possible for some imaginative preachers to help people receive the
prophetic word that Picasso presents in this courageous and prophetic
work of art.
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In a more familiar area of our culture some might find parallels in the
outrage expressed by many when governmental agencies called for
warnings on cigarette packages or on certain medications and food.
We sometimes resist acceptance of "bad news" even if it is spoken to
us in an effort to preserve our lives. And that is what all "bad news"
from God is aboutthe judgment addressed to us that we might turn
and live in God's gracious mercy.

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Ezekiel 18:1-9, 25-29

God offers each generation and each person a new beginning.

This lection offers an opportunity to preach from the book of that

strange and magnificent prophet, Ezekiel. It is true that Ezekiel makes
two other appearances in the three-year lectionary cycleon the Day
of Pentecost in 1985, and again in Lent of 1987but the text in each
instance is the same: 37:1-14, For this summer, however, we have two
separate texts from Ezekiel and, what is more, they come on
consecutive Sundays. A further bonus is that of having these
opportunities to preach from Ezekiel immediately following the three
lections from Jeremiah. Not only do these two prophets share much in
terms of the place, time, and events out of which they prophesied and
wrote, but also their similarities and their differences help us better
understand each of them. Our dialogue with Jeremiah will provide us
with a helpful perspective through which we can look at Ezekiel.
A member of our church illustrated the power of a new perspective
through a brilliant breakthrough in understanding her faith. After
reading a book for her adult church school class, she called to tell me of
this dramatic new awareness in her life. The next Sunday morning,
following worship, she said to her friends with excitement, "I think
that the preacher has had the same breakthrough as I. Did you notice
how different his sermon was?" When she determined that nobody
else was aware of anything particularly different, she realized that the
newness was coming from the changed and enlarged perspective from
which she was now listening, a perspective that had come into focus
from her earlier encounter with the theology book.
I am not necessarily expecting an emotional or intellectual
breakthrough to occur with a similar amount of intensity to me or to
this congregation, but I suspect that I will not be the only person who
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will be hearing the prophecy of Ezekiel from a deeper perspective

because of the weeks we have already spent with Jeremiah. I also
suspect that this congregation will immediately recognize Ezekiel by
name, but few are going to know much about him and his prophecy.
I conducted an unscientific and limited survey to determine how
familiar church people are with Ezekiel. In truth, I simply talked with
one friend who belongs to a mainline congregation who described
herself as having attended worship and church school "regularly"
when her children were young and in school but who now attends
"somewhat less often." She said that she identified Ezekiel with a song
about his having seen a wheel, then added that she was not sure, but
"was he the one related to the dry bones?" I found this mildly
encouraging, following on her admitted lack of any knowledge about
Jeremiah other than that she remembered a song of past years about a
bullfrog with that name. I hope that our own congregation is better
informed, but I am not counting on it.
Although nothing major happened in my reading the various
translations, even slight differences in wording seem to offer some
freshness. For example, the New American Bible offers "green" grapes
rather than "sour" grapes. Also, the translation by Walther Eichrodt
provides sharper emphasis in verse 4 in refuting the proverb of the
sour grapesthat the people are suffering because of the sin of a
previous generation. Where other translations offer wording similar to
the RSV's phrase, "the soul that sins shall die," Walther Eichrodt gives
us a more explicit statement: "The person who sins, he alone shall die"
(Ezekiel, p. 231). The New American Bible also is more explicit in some
ways, such as the translation that a man must not "have relations with
a woman in her menstrual period." With the hope that I am not
overlooking words that need further study, I now move into further
exegesis.
This week's text opens with God's unhappiness with the people for
repeating a proverb: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge." Why should God be so upset because
the people of Israel were repeating a proverb? It hardly seems worthy
of God's wrath, at least not at first glance. For the person who attempts
to look only at the text under consideration for this specific Sunday
morning, the answer is not available. I will need to find ways of
enabling the congregation to gain some understanding of what is
going on in this book of prophecy in order to grasp the context out of
which it comes. It will be helpful, of course, if many remember what
was happening in our preceding journey with Jeremiah, and not
simply because Jeremiah has already presented this proverb (31:29).
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This is not a proverb like unto "A wet bird never flies at night." The
people are using this saying about sour grapes as a way of crying out
against God for the way in which God is dealing with them. Learning
about the context is essential for us to understand that this is a protest
that would not have been made by the previous generations of Israel.
These people, however, do not have the security and assurance that
their ancestors had, an assurance that came with being closely tied
together. The emphasis on the community and not on the individual
was so strong that they could endure their personal hardships and still
trust in the righteousness of God. They did not feel the need or see
reason to complain that they were receiving difficulties brought about
through the sins of their fathers. They were bound together in
community so completely that it seemed reasonable that one would
suffer because of the sins of another, whether that "other" was a
contemporary or of a previous generation.
But the nation had been and was even now falling apart. Their exile
in Babylon underlined the crumbling of Judah. They had troubles
unknown to their predecessors. This community did not provide the
security known earlier. Now they were beginning to understand
themselves more in terms of individuals than ever before, and not only
as part of a nation. Their questions about their existence, and primarily
their suffering, became more centered in themselves than in Israel. It
was here that they began to rebel against God. This rebellion was in no
way a denial of God's rule in their lives. God's presence was not being
challenged at this point. The complaint was about what God was in
fact doing. Why was God punishing them for something that was done
by their ancestors? This was no detached, intellectual wondering.
They were hurting and they were calling into question the
righteousness of God. Again, it was in Jeremiah's time that this
direction began.
With some awareness of the risk of focusing on the negative, I want
to point to a sermon that I will not be preaching out of this text. It is one
that has tempted at least a few of us in the past because of previous
questionable exegesis concerning Ezekiel's message throughout this
book. The sermon to be avoided is the one that distorts Ezekiel's
attention to the individual to the point of giving this prophet credit for
discarding an understanding of God's dealing with the nation or
religious community, and for proclaiming an understanding that
focuses only on the individual.
I know that it is true throughout our nation, but it seems especially
true in the Southwest, the area in which this congregation is located,
that we are obsessed with championing individualism as being the
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good and the true. We approach with suspicion and nervousness, if

not condemnation, any understanding of ourselves as coming before
God in terms of community. It seems downright un-American.
It is not only the Hebrew Bible that constantly addresses itself to
those who have responded to God's call as a people chosen by God for
witness and service. In the New Testament we have difficulty finding
any understanding of being a Christian apart from the church. It
would make no sense to New Testament writers to speak of
"individual" Christians. And it does not make sense to do so today.
The way in which our culture worships individualism would not have
made sense to Jeremiah or Ezekiel. Their awareness of themselves and
others as individuals was in no way an effort to disassociate from the
community. Out of their recognition of themselves as a community
they were able to come to a new and deeper understanding of
themselves as individuals. With clarity about this exegetical error I can
move on.
My previous work in historical review with Jeremiah gives me a
head start on this lection, but I recognize a strong need to become more
familiar with Ezekiel. Like Jeremiah, his father was a priest, but unlike
Jeremiah, Ezekiel was also himself a priest, even though he did not
exercise priestly duties. His priestly perspective shows through,
however. In verse 5 of our lection he begins his enumeration of the
marks of righteousness with references to obeying religious practices.
This list includes one's refusing to "lift up his eyes to the idols of the
house of Israel."
Ezekiel was much more than a priest, of course. He was also a
theologian, artistic writer, and historian. Most of all, he was a human
being called of God to be a prophet to Israel. His preaching for a
turning from sin did not focus on individual acts of immorality as is
often done today, but rather was a call for obedience to God. He did
i this preaching as one who warned Israel of its wickedness only that it
might repent and live.
This prophet made use of symbols in the manner of Jeremiah and his
yokes and in the style of other prophets. Ezekiel, however, outdoes
them all as he shaves his beard and head with a sharp sword, weighs
the hair, and then divides it into three parts (5:1-2), He burns one part,
strikes one part with his sword, and scatters the third part to the wind.
Now that is symbolism and that is Ezekiel.
I have always tried to take seriously the advice of a mentor who said
that the shape and style of the sermon should come in large part from
the approach and style of the writer and the setting of the writing.
However, since this text does not include any of these dramatic efforts
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from Ezekiel, I will forego shaving my head and a day's growth of

beard as I enter the pulpit. I will even pass up such stage props as a
bunch of sour grapes and rely instead on structure and verbal style in
an effort to communicate this portion of Ezekiel's witness.
The time comes for that awesome task of determining as precisely as
possible what the message or messages from this text might be. I could
begin with this attempt: Sin is death and obedience to God is life.
Ezekiel certainly does say this repeatedly. But in verse 27 he points to
the life-saving act of turning away from wickedness. Could the
message be a call to repentance? These approaches are not in violation
of the text, but I am choosing another sentence: God offers each
generation and each person a new beginning. Ezekiel tells the people that in
their hardships they are not, in fact, suffering for the sins of their
ancestors. God is dealing with them strictly on the basis of their own
faithfulness and faithlessness. He apparently overstates his case,
however, as I see his statement elaborated in terms of individualism by
other witnesses of our faith history. This is what I have previously
referred to as "the other sermon."
At this point, as I move from this primary thrust toward work on the
sermon, it seems likely that I might well move around two areas. The
first of these might be a look at the various ways in which we do suffer
from the sins of our ancestors. The thoughts that immediately pop into
my mind are of black children who are being reared in homes that
deprive them of adequate health care, an awareness of the arts, and the
experience of being part of the mainstream of society. They are often
alienated from those in our nation who make the decisions others will
live by, and they live in conditions that bring them to a sense of
helplessness in terms of education and economic achievement. These
are factors that they endure because of the discrimination and
mistreatment that has been put on their race by our society. This
suffering comes through the "sins of their fathers." These "fathers"
are not the blood relatives of their family, but rather an entire society of
nonblacks who for their own gain have exploited the black race.
My mind is in gear and I begin to think of the suffering of other
children of all colors who will live handicapped lives because we
choose to spend money on nuclear armament rather than on prenatal
care for indigent mothers. I consider the threat of nuclear destruction
of a future generation because of this generation's blindness that
comes from its national pride.
My second emphasis might fall on the primary thrust of refuting the
sour grapes proverb of our text. We know that Jeremiah is right. In a
crucial understanding of ourselves we acknowledge that nothing can
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stand between ourselves and God, including previous generations.

Here I might look for literatureplays, novels, biographiesin which
others have dealt with our unwillingness to accept our lives in the
moment, place, and circumstances in which we find ourselves. Such
plays as Eugene O'Neill's The Ice Man Cometh well illustrate the death
that a "victim" kind of approach brings. Biographies abound in which
people, such as George Washington Carver, witness to their
unwillingness to collapse under the terrible weight that they inherit.
They celebrate by their lives the fact that God gives a new possibility of
full personhood to each human being, even within the difficult
circumstances in which that life must be lived.

NOTES

1. In Hebrews 11 the writer recalls stories of faith, beginning with Abel. His examples
are so many, including illustrations from the lives of Abraham, Moses, and others, that
he finally asks, "And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon,
Barak, Samson. . . ." Paul also points to Abraham as an example of faith (Rom. 4; Gal.
3:6-9), and states in Gal. 4:28, "Now we, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise."
The synoptic Gospels contain statements from Jesus, such as, "Have you not read what
was said to you by God, T am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob'?" References to the Exodus are so numerous throughout the New Testament that
one might almost say that Exodus typology is what the New Testament is about.
2. Some years after my graduation from seminary I returned to participate in a class
taught by New Testament scholar John Knox. Someone asked him, phrasing the
question in a way that assumed an affirmative answer, whether he thought it vitally
important that the preacher know Greek and Hebrew in order to understand adequately
the text. Professor Knox replied that this was highly desirable and that he strongly
recommended that all seminary students acquire a working knowledge of these two
languages. He said further, however, that those who were already serving full time in
the pastorate without such knowledge were not hopelessly handicapped by their
ignorance. In fact, he believed that, given the demands of the pastorate, the many other
study needs, and the availability of a number of excellent translations and
commentaries, to involve oneself at this "late date" in learning Greek and Hebrew would
likely be of less importance than the other kinds of Bible study the preacher needs to be
doing.
3. The most helpful commentaries I have found are John Bright, Jeremiah, Anchor
Bible, vol. 21 (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1965), and James Philip Hyatt and Stanley
R. Hopper, "The Book of Jeremiah," in the Interpreter's Bible (New York, Nashville:
Abingdon, 1956), 5:777-1142. For Ezekiel I refer most often to Walther Eichrodt, Ezekiel
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970). In addition, 1 often look to Gerhard von Rad, Old
Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962-65).
4. Bright, p. 132; Hyatt, p. 973.
5. Bright, p. 201.

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 BOOK REVIEW
The Prodigious Work of Erving Goffman,
1922-1982

FRANK E. WIER

Back in the late 1960s, three books played a part in my decision to go

back to school and learn some sociologya subject previously
neglected in my formal education. One was Robert Nisbet's Emile
Durkheim. The second was The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter L.
Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Third was The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman. I was not influenced by the authors'
reputations (all of the highest order), because I did not know their
reputations. (I had, curiously, been alerted to Durkheim by citations
and methodological acknowledgments in From Religion to Philosophy,
by F. M. Cornford, the great Cambridge Platonist, who analyzed the
Greek terms for pride, fate, and retributionthe hinges of tragedyin
terms of the social organization of the polis.) These three books,
entirely different in subject matter, style, and method, and with little
overlap in the citations, seemed to me nevertheless to converge
powerfully, showing the possibility of sociology as a sciencenot a
mature science, but a real science maturing.
My high school physics teacher, years beforea fine teacher and a
wonderful manhad departed from his subject long enough to tell us
that he just could not go along with evolution (why are so many
engineers and hard-science scientists like that?) and that sociology was
not and could never be a "real" science because of the softness of its

Frank E. Wier was for many years an editor with the Methodist Board of Education. He
has written and edited many educational resources. He did graduate study in sociology
at Vanderbilt University and is now pastor of four small churches in the Sevierville Parish
of the United Methodist Church, in east Tennessee. He is the author of The Christian
Views Science (1969).

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data. I felt that he was all wet on biology, but for some reason implicitly
accepted his dictum on sociology for two decades. It was, I think, a
point of view widely held.
Erving Goffman, born in 1922, came along in a period when
sociology was diffidently trying to strengthen its claim. At Chicago,
where he took his Ph.D., a substantial part of the faculty (not all) was
leading the entire profession to new methodological rigor in
experimental design, hypothesis testing, and quantitative analysisin
short, "hard" sociology. By the time of his flourishing authorship, this
trend was dominanta tidal wave. Goffman's career has been made,
neither in ignorance nor in defiance of this trend, but certainly in
swimming against the tide.
But methodological rigor and self-consciousness are by no means
foreign to Goffman. No doubt the trend toward sampling, controls,
and number-crunching required him to think long about the defense of
his method. Much of his presentation of method is at least implicitly in
1
a defensive mode, and increasingly so in the later books. At first
glance, his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, must have
appeared to many a species of "pop sociology." The pejorative
buzzword "anecdotal" comes to mind; from the first he used
personally observed anecdotes, and, increasingly, file material,
conspicuously including even fiction. In what could hardly be a mere
lapse (for a Chicago-trained sociologist), he several times refers to
these as "data"surely knowing the opinion, at the other end of the
spectrum, that anecdotes could in no wise be data.
Any impression of Erving Goffman as a "pop" sociologist is,
however, far wide of the mark. There is not a hint of calculated appeal,
for example, in the book titles; no teasers or grabbers in the words
asylums, encounters, or frame analysis. To be sure, he writes well; I hope
the day is past when that means to anybody that he could not be writing
sociology. I have freshly examined his work with such criteria in mind
as: precision of definition; explicitness and consistency of method;
quality of literature search and citations; clarity of analysis; architec
tonics of writing; and relation to other sciences and to philosophy. He
does not suffer from comparisons with regard to any of these. I find
every evidence of ambition, daring, and professional eTan; very little
that could be considered hedging, obscuring, or papering over.
Goffman is a proud investigator and craftsman. (To me, that's one of
the good words.)
Reading Goffman's works in order of publication reveals a very
steady development, almost like a single work in progressno
thrashing about, no opportunism. In this singleness there is danger,
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for such a prodigious author, of writing the same book over and over.
His stylistic consistency would tempt one to think that he does so,
especially in the series Encounters (1961), Behavior in Public Places (1963),
Interaction Ritual (1967), and Relations in Public (1971). But a close
reading shows that the successive problems are carefully and
differentially defined; he is approaching, in a very ambitious design,
problems defined within several strong traditional perspectives or
subdisciplines; problems with application to the same research
environment, the behavior of actors in face-to-face encounters. The
subtitles, which are not mere adornments, help: Presentation of Self (no
subtitle) is identified as a study in interaction and social stratification.
Asylums is subtitled Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and
Other Inmates and invokes certain problems familiar in structural-
functionalism. Encounters, subtitled Two Studies in the Sociology of
Interaction, specifically studies "focussed gatherings" (and the latter
term is precisely and fruitfully defined). A number of distinctions as to
subject and method are exactly, if somewhat laboriously, made in the
preface.
Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings
looks at a wide variety of delicts and violations of rulesnot (as he says
of psychiatry) to discover what is wrong with the rule-breaker, but to
discover what the rules are supposed to accomplish. Relations in Public:
Micfostudies of the Public Order investigates, from the standpoint of
(borrowed) ethological and linguistic models and a concept of the
constructed virtual organism (the self), how rules function to produce
advantages for all or nearly all social participantsthe old "social
contract," but free of any assumption that the contract is or needs to be
understood by the actor.
Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, makes the
greatest ostensible break with the foregoing, as Goffman turns to
sociolinguistics and phenomenology for problems to be illuminated, as
always, in the observational sphere of the face-to-face. Gender
Advertisements (no subtitle) looks and feels different (it is an
8^-by-ll-inch picture book with accompanying text), but it continues
the use of frame analysis in the relatively narrow area where
advertising practice "hyper-ritualizes" the ritual practices and
relationships already embedded in American culture.
Everyone who has his consciousness raised by Goffman's anecdotes
wonders, What kind of person is he, and what is his attitude toward
manipulation of the knowledge and awareness he possesses? I picked
up an anecdote of my own from a Goffman colleague at one of those
paper-reading conventions. I think the story is true, but if not,
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Goffman would be the first to say it doesn't have to be true to be

instructive.
It seems that Goffman was seated with friends and colleagues in a
restaurant during the dinner break of a convention. Someone
approached the table, ostensibly to greet one of his companions, who
rose and made the obligatory introduction. Whereupon the intruder
said, in mock surprise and awe, "Not the Erving Goffman!" I am told
that Goffman frosted him so severely that he had to retire elsewhere to
thaw out.
Was Goffman sincerely hostile? Let us follow his lead and treat that
as an unanswerable question. His behavior was certainly punitive; it is
inconceivable that he was in any sense unaware of the message he was
sending; and we can be sure that he had a robust conscience about
doing whatever was necessary to put the offender in his place. There
are also numerous lines in his book that suggest he may have enjoyed
his antagonist's discomfortor, at any rate, the game, of which that
discomfort was an inevitable result.
Goffman's response cannot be attributed to a moralistic rejection of
the intruder's gameplaying, including his dissimulation. From
Goffman's point of view, that would be to object to the very
groundstuff of social life. As Goffman peels back (in Frame Analysis)
layer after layer of fantasy, wishing, dreaming, rehearsing, recount
ing, and other kinds of re-presentation, he never finds a "genuine" or
"sincere" core. But this is not the cynic's view (that people are no damn
good); it is the scientist's view (that life is complicated).
I think that Goffman must have felt, in this particular encounter, the
contempt that professionals always feel for amateurs who want to
challenge them to play. His message translates: If you want to play
with me, come ready. Maybe, too, he had the practical sense that the
best way to get rid of an intruder is to get rid of him.
If you are reading Goffman for the first time, I would suggest
beginning with a thorough reading of Presentation of Self, because it is
foundational. I don't mean that the later works don't stand
alonethey certainly dobut together these books provide an
exceptional documentation of the intellectual development of a scholar
and scientist, and it is worth collecting a sense of that as you go. In
Presentation, Goffman sets out a theatrical, dramaturgical frame of
human interaction that is never absent from the subsequent works.
Next, I would read Frame Analysis with meticulous care, because it is
very intricate, and because it exhibits the greatest departure from, and
complementarity to, Presentation. If the latter is foundation, the former
is culmination: turrets, battlements, parapets, statues, roof, finial,
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flagpole, and flag. Between the two are the stories, each different but
taking character from what is below and above. I would then read as
much as time and inclination support, somewhat sequentially,
between these opening and closing "brackets" (a Goffman term). I
would scan Gender Advertisements and decide whether or not to read.
Then, finally, Forms of Talk and Interaction Ritual.
Frame Analysis particularly interests me because it partly fills a place
implied by my initial sense of the convergence of Durkheimian
macrosociology, Goffman's microsociology, and the phenomenology
reflected in Berger and Luckmann; and partly because it doesn't and
even disconfirms this convergence.
I have never seen it noted anywherecertainly not as strongly as I
would preferthat linguistics, in a style consistent with de Saussure's
principle, 'Tarbitraire du signe," is almost the perfect type of a social
science under the definitions implied in Durkheim's Rules of the
Sociological Method. Its object is not a natural object (as the arbitrariness
of signs assures us); its object therefore is a social fact, which the
individual cannot create or destroy; which is before and after the
individual, and beyond him spatially, and beyond his ken; but which
has no existence apart from individual action, and yet exercises a
compulsive power over his action. If one looked long and hard for an
example to illustrate Durkheim's definition of social fact, none better
could be found than language. So, perhaps, Goffman's micro-
sociology, plus linguistics, plus phenomenology equals convergence.
It doesn't work out, however, quite that way. Goffman makes, I
think, better use of linguistics than of phenomenology. This is
somewhat surprising, since Goffman's citations show an unforced
ease and familiarity in using the great names of the discipline. And
despite the fact that Frame Analysis approaches the same subdiscipline
(phenomenology) through the same door (Schutz) as do Berger and
Luckmann, there are only two citations of Social Construction of Reality,
both so slighting as to be almost derogatory. I can't account for that.
They aren't on the same wave-length, to say the least.
Let's stop a moment to play a little game. Can you parse the
following string of symbols, by adding punctuation and capitalization,
so that it can be read as an idiomatic and true English sentence?
Is not a sentence is not a sentence is a sentence and is true but is a sentence is a
2
sentence is a sentence but false is true.
If you take the italicized sentence as what Goffman calls a "strip of
activity," then a successful parsing of it is precisely a "frame analysis."
Elements of the strip that are otherwise meaningless, chaotic, and
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anomic receive the "accent of reality" by being appropriately framed in

brackets, commas, quotes, etc., that define the grammatical status of
what is within. But linguistic framing is only a special and narrow case
of frame analysis, albeit the case in which the method was generated
and from which it was extended.
What Goffman does is to apply this method brilliantly to "strips of
activity" that are in no wise limited to words, though they may include
words. (The old embarrassment of the social sciences in handling
words and other frank artifactsthat these could not be interpreted
without resort to excessive assumption of rationality, hence vulnera
bility to the charge of rationalismis fading.) What the frame
expresses, then, is not the grammatical status of the contents, but their
otitic status.
Although Frame Analysis is said to be about "the organization of
experience," I cannot find experience defined. I don't know whether
that is good or bad. There is an implicit definition, and it is very
different, I think, from what you will find anywhere outside the
phenomenological tradition. In the book, Goffman cites two schemes
of experience as primary: the natural, where "full determinism and
determinateness prevail," and the social, characterized by "serial
management of consequentiality," "continuous corrective control,"
by a "live agency," usually human (p. 22). Other experience schemes,
such as dreams, dramas, rituals, sports, games, fantasies, memories,
wishes, attempts, and so on, are real in relation to the primary by way
of transformation rules implicit in their frames. Thus Goffman has a
formal but not a material principle of ontology. He is in the same boat
(the Titanic) that Kant left us all in: (1) there must be a ding an sich, but
(2) it must be inaccessible to certification. Thafs a definition, if you
will, of phenomenology, a peculiar predicament,
One of the reviewers that Harper's chose to quote in a jacket blurb
says that Goffman throws a "brilliant but weird light," If you will
immerse yourself briefly in the curious G'ddel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, which explores self-referential
phenomena, transformations, and analogies between Bach's music,
Escher's art, and Godel's incompleteness theorem (in brief: a system of
axioms cannot contain its own proofa confirmation of phenome
nology); then in one or two of the some fifty or sixty volumes (I seem to
remember) in Martinus Nijhoff's (publisher) series on phenome
nology; then in some of the material from the structuralists in
linguistics; then Goffman will seem no less brilliant but a lot less weird.
The complexities are there; the question is, are they to be exploited for
vertiginous thrills, or for understanding?
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Some of this sorting out has to be done; in particular, preachers and

theological teachers ought to "come ready to play" at a truly
professional level. Take so simple a "strip" as "The Bible is my
authority for believing the Bible is my authority." Lots of people, lay
and clergy, passionately assent. Most of us can readily "frame" this strip
logically. We need the skill, however, to frame the corresponding strip
that becomes experience, where the self is committed. Goffman can
help; but he cautions that every insight can be used on both sides and
cuts both ways.
Goffman makes brief but telling use of certain insights from animal
ethology. (Add another initial "A" to the scholarly bugaboos that
Goffman has faced down: Anecdote, Analogy, Anthropomorphiz
ingvery unscientific.) For my part, I find these insights liberating. I
once spent an hour or so in deep snow and deep cold watching tigers in
a city park. Given the weather, there was no one else around to harrass
the animals, and I, by preference, don't, so they were at ease. There
were a large male tiger and two females, somewhat smaller. The male
broke loose a piece of snow, almost a bushel's equivalent, from the
ramp where they had trodden it down. Suddenly he was stalking it,
then leaping high, fur on end, as if it were a cobra or something equally
dangerous. The females were aroused to curiosity, and approached.
Then the male rose on hind legs, paws and claws extended, seemingly
ten feet tall, and let out a great intimidating roar at the females. He was
the monster we all know and love from the old circus posters. The
females retreated. He quietly broke up the snowball and ambled away
to lie down. The females, sensing opportunity, quietly returned to look
for the toy, now nowhere to be found.
Throughout this episode, the six-hundred-pound tiger seemed to
me exactly like a six-ounce kitten, rehearsing the dangers of his world
in order to master them, playing at dominance, having fun. It would be
a strange kind of scientific rigor that says we have nothing to learn
from this about human theatricality.
Goffman, borrowing this frame, explores the behavior of the human
being in his umwelt or "surround" of crisis and opportunity. A
curiously fecund thing happens; the analogy generates not only
inference, but difference; and it emerges clearly that the human is
marginally understood as a natural organism in a natural world, but
centrally, and increasingly, as a virtual organism in a social world. It is a
Meadian social psychology that emerges, in the next-to-last essay of
Relations in Public, in the process of achieving a true empirical
foundation on the basis of "ethnographic work"and not to be
achieved, says Goffman, by "pencil-and-paper" sociologists asking
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people to choose from a list of traits to describe themselves (p. 342). Of

this virtual organism Goffman says, "He has no self that is deeper,
although he has some that are as deep" (p. 279).
An illustrious humbug of another generation (who happened to be
Methodist) used to write a daily "psychology" column for news
papers. After a few hundred of these, you knew what to expect by way
of advice: Husbands should keep romance alive with flowers and
compliments; women who want to get married should get jobs as
waitresses. One of his favorite themes was how to make a speech: two
minutes of flashing erudition (let 'em know how bright you are);
fifteen minutes of familiar, easy stuff (let 'em know how bright they
are); three minutes of rousements to an emotional payoff. (It works, of
course.)
I don't like to see scholarly writers overdo the first part of that, the
"dazzle the rubes" part. Alfred North Whitehead does it a lot, I think,
and it spoils my appreciation for what is clearly the work of a great
mind. Goffman does it a little; more in the later works. Maybe he feels
some license, and the temptation is very great. But he gives us a lot of
material that lets us know how smart we are. Reading these is great
fun. Try to remember that serious sociology is also going on.

NOTES

1. No less than ten books by Erving Goffman are currently in print: The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life (Doubleday Anchor, 1959); Asylums; Essays on the Social Situation of
Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Doubleday Anchor, 1961); Encounters: Two Studies in the
Sociology of Interaction (Bobbs-Merrill, 1961); Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social
Organization of Gatherings (Free Pr., 1963); Strategic Interaction (Univ. of Penn. Pr., 1970);
Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (Harper Torchbooks, 1972); Frame
Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Harvard Univ. Pr., 1974); Gender
Advertisements (Harper Colophon, 1979); Forms of Talk (Univ. of Penn. Pr., 1981); and
Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior (Pantheon, 1982).
2. This string is elaborated from a similar one studied in Douglas R. Hofstadter, G'ddel,
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage, 1979). Solution: " ' "Is not a
sentence" is not a sentence' is a sentence, and is true; b u t ' "Is a sentence" is a sentence'
is a sentence, but false," is true.

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 Coming in QR
FALL 1986

Can We Deter Deterrence?

Edward LeRoy Long, Jr.

Christian Bookstore: Caveat Emptor

Dale Goldsmith

Developing Eucharist Awareness

William L. Pugh

Why Christians Should Not Be Allowed

to Teach Religion at State Universities
Gary Comstock

Review of the New Harper's Bible Dictionary

Paul Minear t

Expository Notes on Selected Lections

Joseph D. Stinson

Homiletical Resources: Advent as Apocalypse

Beverly Gaventa
 I

Quarterly Review is a publication of The United Methodist Publishing

House and the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry.