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GOD IS INESCAPABLE
by David Wesley Soper
THE WESTMINSTER PRESS / Philadelphia
© W. L. JENKINS MCMLIX
All rights reserved no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review in magazine or newspaper.
Scripture quotations from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible are copyright, 1946 and 1952, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches, and are used by permission.
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 59-8895
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To Lynn Harold Hough, who believes:
When thinking ceases in pulpit and pen, it ceases also in pew and Pentagon
There will be a comparative shift of attention from a physiochemical and biological world to that of the mental, moral, social, philosophical, and religious order. Pitirim A. Sorokin, "The World We Shall Live In," in Maying the Gospel Effective, William K. Anderson, Editor, p. 14. Commission on Ministerial Training, The Methodist Church, 1945.
God is inescapable. He is God only because he is inescapable. And only that which is inescapable is God. There is no place to which we could flee from God which is outside of God. ... It is safe to say that a man who has never tried to flee God has never experienced the God who is really God. ... A god whom we can easily bear, a god from whom we do not have to hide, a god whom we do not hate in moments, a god whose destruction we never desire, is not God at all, and has no reality. . . . The protest against God, the will that there be no God, and the flight to atheism are all genuine elements of profound religion. . . . Omnipresence means that our privacy is public. Paul Tillich, The Shading of the Foundations, pp. 40, 42, 45, 46. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.
I try to understand . . . historical relativism in the light of theological and theo-centric relativism. I believe that it is an aberration of faith as well as of reason to absolutize the finite but that all this relative history of finite men and movements is under the governance of the absolute God. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, p. x. Harper & Brothers, 1951.
Infallibility belongs to God alone. . . . Think we must, but never confuse our thinking with God's. Nels F. S. Ferre, The Christian Understanding of God, pp. 179, 232-233. Harper & Brothers, 1951.
Romanticism understands the fact of the goodness of creation in all of its particularity and individuality; but it has no perspective beyond creation. Idealism seeks a rational point of vantage beyond the created forms and thus has an inchoate conception of God as judge. But the judge turns out to be man's own reason. The individuality of man is tenable only in a dimension of reality in which the highest achievements of his self-knowledge and self-consciousness are both known and judged from a source of life and truth beyond him. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. I, p. 91. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951.
Philosophy, like woman's work, is never done. If philosophy is difficult, it is not wholly the philosopher's fault. We live in a difficult universe. . . . No one can draw a mathematically straight line. Should we therefore give up every effort to draw lines as straight as possible? There is a great gulf fixed between the holding of philosophical opinions and the genuine philosophical spirit which holds no opinion that it has not earned a right to hold by intellectual work. Edgar S. Brightman, An Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 5-6. Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1925.
We may reasonably assert that there is really only one religion. It is the growing apprehension of God, following upon his self-disclosure to men. It starts very humbly, and rises gradually tc grander and grander conceptions of the great Reality. Finally it reaches a climax and a fullness in Christ. W. Norman Pittenger, The Approach to Christianity, p. 27. The Centenary Press, 1939.
The creative source of value must come first in man's devotion, while the specific values apprehended dirough the narrow slit of human awareness must come second, if we are to find the way of our deliverance and the way of human fulfillment. This reversal in the direction of human devotion is not new. It is, we believe, the very substance of the original Christian faith. Henry N. Wieman, The Source of Human Good, p. 39. University of Chicago Press, 1946.
The Deed of Agape in creation; the Deed of Agape in Christ; and the Deed of Agape in the community-forming power of the Holy Spirit. James Luther Adams, Our Responsibility in Society, p. 14. The Fourteenth Congress of the International Association for Liberal Christianity and Religious Freedom, Oxford, 1952.
The Lord's Prayer, which begins and ends with consciousness of the presence and power of God, is in all probability the centerpiece in whatever cultural unity exists in Western civilization. Indeed, not Christians only, but Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, and Jews also both can, and do, repeat it, without affront to their faith. Further, the Lord's Prayer is, after all, Christ's Creed, and thus takes precedence over the Apostles' Creed, which is the Creed of the church.
These pages are not about the Lord's Prayer, as such; rather, they are about the consciousness of the presence and power of God, the God who is truly transcendent but also truly immanent. The attempt in the following chapters is to enable the reader for himself to say to God, " Our Father." To the reader, then, let me offer this word: God is the source, the only source, of your life and mind, of all you are and have. He is your past, your present, and your future. He is both impersonal and personal, as you are. He is inescapable. You came forth from him, and to him you return. Even more, it is he who sustains you every hour of every day. His presence is the Big Universe under, over, and around you; his presence is also the Big Universe inside you the energy in your body, and the thinking energy in your mind. You don't have to go anywhere to find him; where you are, he is.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation for permission to reprint in this book the substance of Chapter 2, originally published in Together, November, 1958 (c. 1958 by Lovick Pierce); Chapters 3, 4, 7, 8, and 9, originally published in Christian Action; Chapter 14, originally published in Advance and Chapter 15 originally published in United Church Herald.
Beloit, Wisconsin
D.W.S.
Beyond Our Man-made Gods
Majorities, is seems, have seldom penetrated beneath the surfaces of religion, have perceived only now and then, in the compelling ethical insight of creative minorities and creative personalities, the God who is God indeed beyond the man-made gods, the symbols of " our " religion, " our " nation, " our " society.
In the human encounter with God, individualism, though inevitable and necessary, is not enough. It is necessary because the individual stands alone before his maker. As Woodrow Wilson suggested, we die as persons, not as majorities. No group encounter with God is meaningful to a man until it takes hold of him individually. Yet he is also forever involved, inextricably, in every one around him. He is a person, but he is also a SOCIUS. The most creative individual a Christ, for example is of no value to the struggling masses till he returns to them with his saving insight, his perception of the real God beyond the gods, and suffers with them while they learn to make use of it.
Not every individual acts creatively. One kind of individualism is the familiar philosophy: dog eat dog every man for himself, and " the devil take the hindmost!" I have heard this called " the American way of life." As Ivan Karamazov put it, " One reptile will devour the other. And serve them both right, too! " That is, one kind of individualism is cannibalism gnawing on other men's skulls; it is also larceny no matter how you spell it. There are undoubtedly enough wrong kinds of individualism to justify any amount of ridicule or open attack. Among the world's ««creative individuals one remembers Judas Iscariot; on the cross Jesus forgave him, though Christians generally have failed to do so. One hesitates to list the negative individuals, for the positive ones (contrary to popular opinion) are actually more interesting and considerably more productive; they constitute a refreshing challenge to the rest of us to resign our settled membership in the society of the self-approving, to join them in their effort to prod humanity toward reason, the healing sanity, the Holy Spirit, and to release man from his immersion in the worship of false gods.
Four positive individuals (not one of them a clergyman) illustrate the break-through of God the Almighty into human consciousness: Abraham, Moses, Gautama the Buddha, and Jesus the Christ; on their shoulders rests the better part of all existing civilization. There are thousands more, but these will show what the encounter (with God beyond the gods) is like for all creative individuals have common characteristics. Each of the four (humanly speaking) was a rebel; that is, each broke with the collective " unconscious," the essential idolatry, around him; his own honest thinking demanded it. Each in his own way discovered, and revealed, the God of all the earth and the stars, the God who cannot be identified with political or tribal institutions!
Western intellectual history began with an Easterner named Abraham. Because we look back through four thousand years of his active influence, we think of him as " safe," that is, as one who can be trusted not to threaten or disturb our self-approval. He did not appear " safe " in his own time. His father, Terah, manufactured idols little statues, little gods of clay by hand. We have made some progress since then all our idols are mass-produced. One day, when Terah was out of the shop, Abraham seized an ax and smashed every idol in the place both skinny ones and fat ones, like the people who bought them. " Now," he said to himself; " that's torn it! " A cold sweat broke out upon his body; he half expected bolts of lightning to fall upon him from the sky, or flames to issue from the angered idols, the shattered shards, and consume him. The deed was more than a sudden impulse. He had long wanted to know what would happen whether or not the little gods possessed any actual power, as people said they did. His own mind told him the clay figures could neither bless nor damn, neither help nor hinder anyone. But he had to prove the point to his own satisfaction. To pray to (or through) an idol or a statue, he decided, was silly; even more, it was stupid; further, it maintained an army of priests in nearby temples a burden on the people's resources and a curse upon their minds. He concluded that the sky, the stars, the sun, the moon, the good earth in short, the Universe Unlimited was the true source, the actual Father, of his own life and of all life; that life, not death, was the central concern of God, to be lived in accordance with his character. It was clear to Abraham that the people already had been given sufficient strength to solve most of their real problems if they would only stop using the greater part of it on imaginary ones. From him half of mankind has learned to say, "I believe in Jehovah or Allah or God, the Father Almightywhose presence is the heavens and the earth."
The story is hidden in antiquity, but seems simple enough. Because of his act of rebellion, his scientific experiment (if you like), Abraham, like others before him and since, was forced to leave town, and leave he did one step ahead of the sheriff. He had broken once and for all with human superstition! Naturally, he had to head for open country but fast! There, under the stars, he started a new nation, a new people, a new idea that God the Universe, the Father Almighty, cannot be represented by images, cannot be controlled by priests; that man's divine duty is to live thankfully and helpfully with his neighbors (far away and close at hand). The Grandfather of Israel would have understood and admired our American Abraham, Thomas Jefferson, who said: " A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. . . . It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. ... I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Three living religions sprang from Abraham's encounter with the Most High Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. He was an individual a rebel; he started thinking, and thinking started him; together, they started Western history on its way to sanity (as yet not more than half-attained). In Abraham's mind and heart, God' beyond the gods bro\e through to us!
But a few centuries later (the Bible suggests four) the same thing happened to Moses. Was he an Egyptian or a Jew? Two earlier rebels started him thinking: the one and only Abraham, but also the one and only Ikhnaton, Egypt's Prince of Peace. Something else, too, started Moses thinking human slavery (the very thing that started Lincoln thinking a hundred years ago). It was not because the slaves were Jews that their suffering stirred Moses, but because they were men human beings, God-bearers like himself. He was educated in Egypt, where every household boasted its gods and godlings, where thousands of priests lived well on the fat of the land while toilers starved. He defended one worker, a Jew, and in the process killed an Egyptian. The Egyptian's death, however, solved no problem, though it did make one thing clear Moses could be stirred (deeply stirred) by human slavery. An individual, who cannot be similarly stirred, is something less than a child of the God of Justice. If you can't be stirred by the mass denial of human rights in Hungary or in Arkansas your God is too nice! Moses was a hothead as Jesus was when, he drove the religious racketeers from the House of Prayer. Moses did not cool off through forty years in the wilderness. Rather, the flame in him turned from smoky yellow to steady blue. The forty years gave him time to think. It takes some of us longer than others. Like Abraham, he had left town in a hurry. However, like MacArthur, he had said in his heart, " I will return." Not every man who climbs a mountain sees a vision but Moses did. The light came on in his mind (not outside it) the light still shining in human consciousness the light of law. A Red Sea or two can never stop a creative idea. The Ten Commandments, broad principles designed to bless, have sometimes been shrunk by small-minded folk into narrow rules designed to trip, trap, and betray; nonetheless they have thus far ridden out all the storms of history. Intervening centuries piled tons of debris on them till Jesus unearthed them, simplified them into his ethic of love, of equal justice, of the dignity of every child of God, and set them aflame in the minds of his disciples and their heirs.
Gautama the Buddha was another Abraham, another Moses for God the Omnipresent leaves no nation in total darkness. Buddha lived in a world where only the life of a prince was of value; for the greater part of mankind, death alone was important a welcome release from the wretchedness of their existence. Each person, on Hindu terms, had lived forever before birth, and would live forever after death. The present seventy-year stretch, the present seventy-year sentence to life (a dreary imprisonment indeed!) was hardly worth mentioning and not worth improving. If people suffered, they did so for their sins in a forgotten former life; their suffering itself was God's will; to relieve their suffering was an act of irreverence. If people were in pain, it was their own darn fault one should ignore them. (I have found the same attitude among " Hard-Shell," or " Primitive," Baptists in the South). Life was nothing; death was everything. The devout Hindu lived in perpetual fear of life, and even more of death, his imagination peopled with ten million gods and godlings, each easily angered, each to be placated only at considerable cost, and each served by an army of hungry priests.
Buddha was raised in a sheltered palace, the son of a petty king. One day he went out with his servant to see the world, like any tender freshman going off to college. He saw a beggar, and had never heard of poverty. He saw a sick man, and had never heard of pain. He saw a funeral procession, and had never heard of death. He returned to his palace, but it was no longer protected; he could not forget what he had seen. The real God, beyond the gods, spoke to him in human need. He started thinking a dangerous and wonderful thing to do. As a student put it, "Buddha lived a normal life with his wife and family, and when he was thirty, left home in search of happiness." Like Francis of Assisi, he traded his princely finery for the rags of the first beggar he met, and joined a company of monks attempting in a forest to starve themselves into salvation. He tried with singleness of mind to outdo the others and fainted dead away; when he came to himself, he concluded that starvation, though fine for weight-reduction, had nothing to do with salvation. He left the monks, who no doubt considered him a piker and a sissy.
He decided to do a spot of thinking about life and its meaning. You haven't started living (not as a human being, a mind) till you have made the same decision. He spent forty days at it (to begin with) like Jesus in the Wilderness or Moses on Mt. Sinai. If your mind is on it, you can get a good education, a basic grasp of the meaning of the divine-human encounter, in forty days. If your mind isn't on it, forty years are not enough!
Maybe Buddha didn't find all the answers, but the ones he found were good. He concluded that the religion he had inherited was death-centered, not life-centered a monstrous miscarriage of the imagination, an intolerable burden upon mankind, a thick darkness in the mind. He said to himself (and the world): " All the prattle of the priests about heavens and hells, godlings and demons, is profitable hocus-pocus pious blackmail. Life, just plain life, its outward and inward enrichment and improvement on earth: this is the most important thing, the only important thing! Life itself is God's presence, God's miracle, God's gift, the object of God's unchanging love, the center and focus of his concern a vast treasure, an enormous power; the human capacity for thinking is man's primary link with God, man's true immortality an unlimited resource, the only resource, for release from bondage and the growth of good. To cause suffering in mind and body is the only sin to reduce suffering, to increase joy in mind and life, the only righteousness, the only worship acceptable to God."
Buddha broke completely with Hindu abracadabra its millions of gods and goddesses, its heavy burden of priestcraft, its elaborate way of destroying men's native confidence in their God-given ability to solve their problems. Buddha was an individual, a rebel; he started thinking about suffering, about man's real need of deliverance from idol-worship, and thinking started him; today half a billion people feel his influence though in garbled form, as we feel the influence of Christ. After Buddha's death, priests settled like flies on the project and made it over to suit them. Nonetheless, from Buddha, as from Abraham and Moses (and their encounter with Reality, with God beyond the gods), have come respect for life and respect for thinking, our only specifically human activity.
Jesus said," Blessed are the pure in heart." (Matt. 5:8.) Buddha said the same thing six centuries earlier: man's whole duty is to think straight, and thus to cleanse his mind and heart, to live in righteousness and love with his fellow men to leave life before birth, and life after death, to God. Micah taught the same doctrine in Israel two hundred years before Buddha: " What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? " (Micah 6:8, KJV).
What, then, is a creative individual? Is he not a person who breaks with the standardized mediocrity around him and for the sa\e of all men seeks God beyond the gods? He's a man " who thinks" about why he does what he does, about whether equal justice or racial pride is the actual basis of his government, his economic system, and his religion. He may appear out of step with his generation, for he hears a different drummer. He listens to the long past and the longer future. Maybe the world cannot afford many individuals; without a few, however, life would bog down altogether in superstition and fear (it has done so many times in history!); without a few, thinking itself would stop, and man would cease to be man. We are not so far from the Stone Age that we cannot return indeed, may now be returning!
We call Jesus the Christ (the Anointed) Son of Man and Son of God because he broke with the standardized mediocrity around him. As man he, too, encountered the real God, and as God he encountered man. Did he not start thinking? Did thinking not start him? Abraham had launched the Good Ship of human moral evolution, but tons of barnacles had attached themselves to its hull; the old Ark was " a-moverin'," but its progress was slow; it needed to be keelhauled and scull-dragged and a major overhaul. The mind of Abraham and the mind of Moses awaited rediscovery like Samson in the House of Bondage, or Livingstone waiting in Africa for Stanley. Jesus is said to have started a new religion only because he restarted and developed an old one, long embalmed in priestcraft, ritual, and dogma. Moses, the rebel Prince of Egypt, " thought" for forty days on a mountain and came down with the Ten Commandments. Buddha "thought" for forty days under a bo tree and came up with the Four Noble Truths (roughly the equivalent of our Beatitudes); Jesus " thought" for forty days in the wilderness and came out with the Sermon on the Mount (the basic Light of Western civilization). Jesus said, in effect: " What I'm saying to you all the prophets (from Abraham to Buddha) have said before me; not a jot or a tittle is changed: the creative thing is to do what God does to love, respect, help, strengthen, defend, enrich all men and each individual man black, white, pink, or pea green to protect equal human justice (the dignity of every mind) for others as you want it protected for yourself. This is the thing: the rest is priestly piffle! " It's not hard to see why he was murdered; and it's not hard to see why death could not imprison the Holy Spirit, the thinking he started, the thinking that started him and the Christian Fellowship.
Twenty centuries have attempted, with some success, to make Christ over into a Prince of Conformists a symbol of all that is safe and settled; it is now his turn to await rediscovery by thinking men! Only they can understand him at all! A new break-through of God beyond the gods is on the agenda and long overdue. How is it that we fail so easily to see that Christ was, for our sake, the Prince of Rebels, the King of Nonconformists? He started thinking, and thinking started him on the road to Calvary, but also on the road to history and the human heart. His kind of thinking started Schweitzer on the road to Africa and immortality. Wherever the Holy Spirit, the thrust forward, the impulse to ethical evolution, the thinking of Christ, the encounter with God the Almighty, moves in a human mind, a new rebel is born not the dime-a-dozen rebel without a cause, but the friend of Abraham, of Moses, of Buddha, and of Christ. Where we moderns are awake from the neck down, they were awake from the neck up. By comparison, it is we who are out of date! Without their kind of thinking, their break with standardized mediocrity, sanctified boredom, organized ho-hum; without their creative rebellion, their renewal of the divine-human encounter in every generation (specially this one!), progress keeps a snail's pace or the Clearing gives way altogether to the Jungle.
OUR FATHER, GOD
(Man Is Not Self-originated)
We believe in God the Father, infinite in wisdom, power, and love, whose presence is in all his works, and whose will is ever directed to his children's good.
"Father, Into Thy Hands"
Many men worship tribal gods now as in the past. The breakthrough of God beyond the gods involves dimensions wider than the tribe because it is always intensely personal. God is not " Father " to you until he is " your " Father; he is not " Father " to me until he is " my " Father. You are not really talking about God when you are dealing with, abstract generalities; you are talking " about" God only when you are talking " to " him about matters of absolute concern, about life, and about death.
Death is no problem to the dead; it is a problem only to the living. Jesus taught us many things; we have learned but few. Among other things, Jesus taught us " how to die." He faced death as he faced life unafraid, for death is an experience only of the living. At the hour of death, he said, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46, KJV). He surrendered his death, as he surrendered his life, to all-powerful, all-wise, and all-sufficient Love, to God, his Father and ours. Not by words alone, but by deeds, by example, Jesus taught us that God can be trusted at the hour of death and in every hour of life. He taught us that the only right response to God is trust, that God is worthy of trust, that in God's trustworthiness is no variableness, no shadow of turning. God is not worthy of trust sometimes, and unworthy of trust at other times. He is worthy of trust all the time, whether in death or in life.
At the hour of death, Jesus could say, " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," because at every moment before death he had said, "Father, into thy hands I commend my life." John Wesley could say at the hour of death, " The best of all is, God is with us," because when he was five years old his mother had opened a Bible on the kitchen table and taught him to read: " In the beginning God." Whatever does not begin with God has no true beginning; whatever does not begin with God cannot end with him.
Albert Schweitzer said, "No one ever learns anything except by example." We are built that way. Words seldom impress us. Deeds always do. Jesus did not tell us how to die, or how to live; he showed us how. There is only one right way to die, and therefore only one right way to live as he did: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit both in death and in life."
More important than knowing how to die is knowing how to live. It is very difficult at the moment of death to say, " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," unless you have long formed the habit of saying, " Father, into thy hands I commend my life."
A growing Christian there is no other kind worthy of the name is one who begins every day with the words, "Father, into thy hands I commend my life today." The growing Christian begins every day with this prayer because he knows he is not sufficient unto himself in knowledge, in strength, or in goodness. He wants knowledge greater than his own to direct the day; he wants strength greater than his own to sustain him; he wants goodness better than his own to surround him, and flow through him, for the quickening of courage and joy in the hearts of all who know him.
A growing Christian, who is a father, begins every day with the prayer: " Father, into thy hands I commend my family throughout this day and night. Let thy love and power, thy faithfulness and fruitfulness, today surround and fill my wife, my son, my daughter, myself." It makes all die difference in the world whether a father begins the day with, or without, the surrender of himself and his family to tiie care and control of all-wise Love.
A growing Christian faces every hour of turmoil, of tragedy, of frustration, of sorrow, of heartbreak, with the words: " Father, into thy hands I commend this crisis. Let thy wisdom and strength prevail in this hour of trial. Bring thy good out of this evil, for everyone." It makes all the difference in the world whether a man faces the crises that occur in everyone's life with, or without, self-surrender to a wisdom greater than his own. Victory is always one step beyond defeat, but only those who trust can make the extra step. What is trust? Trust is to face every crisis in life, whether financial, physical, or mental, with the prayer: " Father, into thy hands I commend this hour of trial." As Thomas a Kempis put it: " My son, I am the Lord who giveth strength in the hour of tribulation. Come thou unto me whenever it shall not be well with thee. . . . But do thou, having now recovered breath after the tempest, gather strength again in the light of my tender mercies. For I am at hand, saith the Lord, to repair all, not only entirely, but also abundantly, and with increase. Is there anything hard to me? Or shall I be like one that saith and doeth not? Where is thy faith? Stand firmly and with perseverance; be long-suffering and a man of courage; comfort will come to thee in due time. Wait for me, yea wait; I will come and heal thee."
A growing Christian is a man who surrenders his leisure time, and even more his daily work, to God not just now and then, but all the time. Every day he offers his job and himself to God, and says: "Father, into thy hands I commend my work today. Make this job of mine a channel of thy quickening presence and power. Make me a blessing today, not only to myself, but to everyone. Guide me in the midst of my work, and make my work thy work. Through my work today bless, strengthen, and quicken all with whom, or for whom, I work. Don't let me kill time today; fill my time with thy life, thy joy, thy victory for everyone." It makes all the difference in the world whether a man does or does not present his work, his profession, his job every day to God that a knowledge, a strength, and a goodness greater than his own may fill it, take the tedium out of it, and make it fun.
From the time he was seventeen until he was eighty, Brother Lawrence lived and worked in a monastery kitchen on K.P. duty. He learned that he did not have to leave the kitchen to find God; he learned to practice the Presence of God, to be conscious that God was with him in Power, in the midst of the pots and the pans. Bishops, cardinals, and popes traveled hundreds of miles just to see him, to try to discover, for themselves, the secret of his joy.
Many of us spend most of our time griping about the job we have. The more profitable thing is to present our job, whether or not we like it, and ourselves, to God for his baptism of poise and peace to let him turn our toil into triumph, our drudgery into delight, our humdrum monotony into high adventure, our boredom into blessing for our fellow men. It can be done, because it has been done.
Death is not important; life is. It is just life, our daily life, which can be a wonder or a waste of time. The difference between a useful life, ablaze with the glory of God, and a life that fails to justify the space it takes up, is just the daily prayer, offered from the mind and from the heart: "Father, into thy hands I commend my life, my family, this hour of trial, my leisure, and my daily work. Let thy quickening love for everyone flow unhindered into me and through me in blessing and strength for all."
A friend of mine said: " I thought we were supposed to rely on the strength and wisdom God has already given. Why should we go crying to him for special poise and power when we largely ignore our present ample resources ? " I find myself in full sympathy. We offer ourselves each day to God beyond the gods not to increase our helplessness, not to be lifted bodily over confronting obstacles. To pray aright is not to deny but to discover the abundance (in mind and muscle) already imparted, in rich supply, for our use. To pray truly is to purify our motives, to recover a lost sense of direction, to release within us God's own creative energy now deep and dormant. The universe, to be sure, is larger and older than we; its strength and wisdom are greater than our own yet its presence and providence well up in us like a spring and are released not only from beyond but also from within.
Woodrow Wilson said that his father told him that daily morning prayer enables you to sort yourself out, to see things in proportion, to get yourself back on the track. How else shall one restore the keen edge of consecration? Each day's give and take, its thrust and counterthrust, leave one's master motives dull and dim. To pray before breakfast is to start the day with sharp clarity of purpose.
There were, I am told, two kinds of devout soldiers in World War II: one type was called, and may indeed have been, " a religious jerk." He seemed perpetually busy sucking the thumb of comfort, seeking reassurance. It is understandable that men in combat feel special need. Who would not? This chap, however, did not evoke the admiration of his comrades he was often in a corner praying when his actual responsibility was elsewhere. The other type called forth new courage in his companions-in-arms; he did his praying at daybreak, as he had done in time of peace, then rested his case with God, and went forth bravely to the task at hand. False prayer is indeed a mechanism of escape. In the Reformation, a chief criticism of monastic life, throughout Europe, emphasized the same point: lives were sometimes dedicated to devotion as a denial of the call to duty. God's work waited to be done in his world, and to some if not to all, seclusion was evasion, and thus serious disobedience. At times we are all tempted to say, " Lord, Lord," as a means of hiding from God. There is a time for prayer. Five times a day is not too often for Christians as well as Moslems. But there is also a time for work and play, in the confidence and power of new perspective.
Young physicians, I am told, sometimes ruin a successful operation through nervous curiosity by too quickly removing the bandages. Older and wiser surgeons perform their task with the best of their skill, then leave the wound with nature and with God. Prayer at times is spiritual and moral surgery. When you have prayed, leave yourself and your problem in God's hands while you go forth to the tasks he has assigned. Give God a little time to answer one prayer before you offer another!
To pray daily and early, however and this is the hard part is also to submit yourself to critical inspection. Many of us, no doubt, are falsely introspective, endlessly struggling with a sense of guilt, often short-circuiting our labor and our love. A hidden self-pity sometimes causes, and curses, our self-analysis. Creative introspection is objective, cool, unhurried, practical. A man is reaching maturity in prayer when he examines himself as calmly and constructively as he examines the problems that confront him daily in his job. True prayer is not merely emotional; it is honest and creative self-criticism in the light of the mind of Christ.
A man I know put it this way: " For a long time I could get along with no one. I always carried a chip on my shoulder, was ready to quarrel at the drop of a hat with friends and family alikespecially about religion. One day, as I was praying, the thought came to me: there's no law requiring me to be unpleasant to everyone just to prove the superiority of my theology. All I prove thereby is the inferiority of my character. Most problems in my business are solvable when I put my mind to them. Perhaps if I put my mind to the unpleasantness of my disposition, I can do something about it. It dawned on me that I could study to be pleasant as one studies any subject. Since then, I have gained a new lease on life. I'm a friend to my friends again." This chap had long prayed for help in getting along with his neighbors, but had made little progress, till in better prayer he looked at himself objectively, as he looked at business problems; he then found the new mental outlook he needed. God was in no hurry to solve his problem for him externally, for the man himself was the problem; he had to rise above self-pity in prayer and face himself with cool honesty. God then gave him a new habit of mind and new courage of soul.
To break through to God beyond the gods is to discover, in yourself, unlimited resources of light and reason, already present but hidden, waiting to be mobilized, to be called into action, with strength and joy sufficient for the day.
The Source of Life and Mind
God beyond the gods concerns us personally because he concerns us absolutely. An encounter with the real God is therefore the beginning of intellectual as well as emotional seriousness; it was this to the first man; all men similarly are submen until their minds as well as their emotions wrestle with God.
Often enough, if not too often, our movies and TV shows sneer at the life of the mind die one thing that distinguishes us from the ox and the ass. Indeed, the distinction is sometimes scarcely discernible! In many parts of the world it is coming to be true: Americans are regarded as small minds who drive big cars. In this country (and perhaps elsewhere) the man who tries patiently to fill and use his mind his primary link with God is called an egghead. It is overlooked that the alternative to being an " egghead" is being a " balloon or bubble head," a " fuzz-bonnet" and therefore sooner or later a "has-bean." Paul said, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus." (Phil. 2:5, KJV.)
The mind of Jesus was the tough mind of a scientist. He discovered for himself, and for us, what God is and demands, what is real as against what is merely said to be; that is: he discovered how to live, and invites us to make the same discovery! We follow him because we believe that he was " How-to-Live made flesh," the " Walking Will of God."
Paul also said, " It is God which worketh in you." (Phil. 2:13, KJV.) The one Source of life and mind is perpetually at work in life and mind to enrich both, to keep both from losing the way, from " missing the boat," to help both find and follow the good.
America was founded on the idea of freedom or self-determination, which means not self-indulgence but self-direction, self-discipline. The only possible basis of intelligent self-discipline is a quickened awareness of reality of what it is and requires. The principle is clear enough in matters of physical health. The doctor does not create health; he merely removes obstacles in its path, helps to provide the conditions that enable the body and the mind to recover and assert their own natural well-being. In other words, die doctor co-operates with God, co-operates with reality or tries to do so, though, as one M.D. (with a sense of humor) put it, " Even doctors make mistakes why do you think they have hospitals? "
Thomas Paine, who played an important part in achieving America's independence from England, was not always intelligent. For example, he once said, " If I were God, I would make health contagious, rather than disease." Just a little thought discloses the folly of this argument. If health were contagious, disease would be normal. Thomas Paine at this point was merely a pain in the neck. God is intelligent, after all. He made health normal. Because disease is subnormal or abnormal, we call it dis-ease.
The point is simple: all education and all religion have a common objective: to acquaint us, so to speak, with the facts of life, including the fact of " how to use " the facts. Reality, which sustains us, is nonetheless stronger and tougher than we are; to ignore reality is to meet with slow or sudden disaster as nations and as persons. Human survival depends upon true co-operation with reality.
You ask, " What has all this to do with God, on the one hand, and with parental or self-discipline, on the other ? "
To begin with, God and reality are not two things. One God meets us in the material as well as in the moral world; he is the author of both; his presence confronts us (confronts us personally) in both. Much harm has been done alike in civil and religious life by the popular misconception that God is associated only with spirit, while the Devil, or the Great Neutral, is associated only with matter. It is just God, and only God, who is Our Father our one Source of life, in body and in mind. He is the author not only of our minds and spirits, but also of our bodies, indeed of the total physical universe whose ultimate nature, according to the scientist J. W. N. Sullivan, is mental or spiritual. There is no life, either physical or moral, that is not God's presence. For this reason, theologians speak of the divine, omnipresence. Learning to do God's will is learning to co-operate with reality, learning to co-operate with our own health as the doctor does when he aids the process of healing.
The unfortunate split in the popular misunderstandingthat God is related in some way with our inner life, while the outer world of physical quantities is in no real way related to him has produced all sorts of trouble. The objective world, on this basis, has no value at all, and people who live in it feel that they are (and sometimes are indeed) living valueless lives. It is falsely believed that science deals only with the visible, while religion deals only with the invisible, and never the twain shall meet. This is, historically, the root of polytheism the belief in many gods. The basic Hebrew insight that God is One, which we call monotheism, means this: One God confronts us (at every second) in all physical as well as in all moral experience. He is Our Father the one Source of life as well as mind, the one Source of all we use or abuse.
Both life and mind can be (and are often) misused, because our perspective is limited. Even God must take a few centuries to grow a man, and even more to grow a Christ, a man bearing the clear and full image of his Maker. Our knowledge (at best) is half-ignorance; hence we sometimes pursue with great energy the things that destroy or cripple or impoverish us as, for example, greed, lust, hate, and war.
Our parents exist to help us find (and live by) what is true, to learn to separate it from what is false. We call them parents because they are agents of our only real Parent, God. They mediate to us his gift of life and mind. We sometimes act as though we thought we had invented ourselves. Most so-called self-made men I've met should not brag too loudly about it. We invented neither life nor mind. We received them (most folk I know received them) from earthly parents, and beyond them from the one and only Parent, reality or God. It's simply standard procedure, a kind of basic conformity. For this reason Jesus taught us to say to God, " Our Father " (Matt. 6:9).
What we call self-discipline is our growing ability to do the same thing for ourselves that our parents tried to do for us when we were tots to mediate to ourselves a better knowledge of what reality is and demands. In short, our job is to be our own parents, our own teachers, our own guides to be Christ to ourselves, as well as we may, to train ourselves to do the will of God " made flesh in Jesus."
" Honor thy father and thy mother " is the Fifth Commandment. Our century seems primarily interested in the Seventh. Dorothy L. Sayers once announced that she planned to speak, in her next lecture, on the seven deadly sins. A naive young man came up and asked, " What are the other six ? " Confucius, the Chinese saint, was interested primarily in the Fifth Commandment. Why honor father and mother? For one reason only: because we have no life, in either body or mind no life at all that did not come to us from them, and through them from reality itself, from Our Father, our one and only Parent, God.
The commandments, C. S. Lewis pointed out, are not a frown on the face of the universe, not the Almighty's method of making us miserable. They are just the reverse: they are directions for running the human machine both social and personal. That's all they are. When you buy a new oil burner for your furnace, if you plan to operate it for five minutes, let alone for five years, you read the directions that come with it. The men who wrote those directions were not really trying to take the joy out of life though I think some of them could use a course or two in simple English. Their only objective in writing those directions was to enable you to make the gadget work, to get out of it the most of what you bought it for. If you ignore those directions, the oil burner won't heat your house in wintertime; the thing will break down, and you'll have endless headaches with repair men.
We are commanded to honor father and mother, not to make us miserable, but because of the facts of life. Our Father is God, and the life he has given us, through our parents, is sacred deeply sacred. God himself is at work in our bodies as well as in our minds. This is why we call them sacred God is in them. Both body and mind are therefore to be used, not abused. The commandments, all of them, are (in principle) simply scientific directions for using, instead of abusing, the sacred machine, the sacred gadget, our mind-body unity.
What we call self-government is neither more nor less than learning to read and apply the directions like any good mechanic. Government, in this sense, is always a necessity and, as Burke put it, the less there is within, the more there must be without. The object is to learn to govern yourself, to co-operate with reality on your own account as a doctor does, as Christ did. In other words, the object is not to be an idiot in the use of your body and mind, the sacred machine God has given you, that only God has given you, and that God has given you only for good. If, like an idiot, you insist on ignoring the facts of life, you will have to put up with breakdown. It's just that simple. If you won't put your mind to work learning, and learning to apply, the facts of moral and physical life, someone else will have to learn them and apply them for you, perhaps even " to " you either your parents or the police. If they can't do it, reality will. God will the hard way, if necessary. That is, you are playing a serious game called " Truth or Consequences "; if you don't find and live the truth, you have to take the consequences. As Albert Camus, the French novelist, expressed it in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize: two things demand the best work of which I am capable the service of truth and the service of freedom. And freedom itself is part of the truth.
Now and then you meet a delightful bird-brain who says: " I don't like God, and I don't like God's way of running things. I prefer to run things my own way." There's a bright idea. But you don't really have that choice as long as you are moderately sane. God is what he is; reality is what it is; the universe is what it is. We don't govern it ultimately; it governs us. We don't change the nature of God; if we will co-operate, he will teach us to get the most out of our own. Extinction, of course, is always an alternative as no sense is an alternative to sense.
For example, suppose you say to yourself, in a burst of anger: " I don't like the law of gravitation. I choose to reject it." Learning to fly an airplane, of course, is learning to use the law of gravitation plus some other laws; it is not a denial of them. Suppose you say: " I choose to walk straight off this precipice, and stand there in mid-air. I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul." Let me urge you not to try it; it's that first step that gets you. Sooner or later, and rather sooner than later, you will discover that maybe it's wiser to play ball with the law of gravitation at least until you can get it repealed.
Growing up there's never too much of it around is learning to govern yourself. The faster you acquire intelligent self-direction, the better your dad and mother will like it though they may sometimes disagree violently with your idea of what is intelligent. The funny thing is: they won't always be wrong. Learning to govern yourself is not your right to reject the way the universe operates; it is rather your right to learn how it operates, and to use this knowledge for your own and the common good. In other words, growing up is simply learning to live with God the one Source, the only Source, of all we are and have. To paraphrase Mark Twain, " When I was twenty, I considered God very small; but when I was thirty I was amazed to discover how much the Almighty had grown in only ten years." Paul said the same thing: " When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (I Cor. 13:11, KJV). The trouble is that not too many of us have followed his example.
The process of living is the process of learning to live with reality. On any showing, our knowledge and our action form our conditioned grasp of the reality that grasps us unconditionally. As Tillich put it: "God is inescapable. He is God only because he is inescapable. And only that which is inescapable is God." Hence we call God reality and reality God. He never lets go of us; that is one thing he cannot do. In our death and in our life he holds us, at every second, in the hollow of his hand, or, if you like, in a fold of his robe. By the same token we cannot, and do not, let go of God. At what moment, for example, have you, at any time in your life, let go of the universe ? We are stuck with it, and it is stuck with us. It is always serious but it is seldom solemn. A saint is simply a scientist with a sense of humor, a self-disciplined man who has learned, and is learning, to live with God, with reality.
The Divine Faithfulness
Intellectual as well as emotional seriousness begins in the encounter with reality, the wrestle with God beyond the gods for the real God is not only our constant comfort; he is not only our constant challenge; he is both.
Sometimes, in our educational and religious work, we succeed only in making men into mummies. Jesus was a better teacher perhaps because he had a better objective: he was interested, and often succeeded, in making mummies into men. However, to become fully human, he warned, may prove costly one can lose a hand or an eye! (Matt. 5:29-30.) To obtain the pearl of great price, he pointed out, one may have to give up somethingpossibly even his possessions. (Luke 14:33; 18:18-30; Matt. 13:44.) He explained that many men hear the call to growth, but some are drawn aside by secondary cares, and thus become unfruitful. (Matt. 13:22.) Paul said, " I count all things but loss" save the one important thing to diink straight and work constructively, to grow toward the stature of Christ. (Phil. 3:8.)
Years ago, as a high school junior, my first semester Latin grade was a dismal 68. We were confronted with Vergil the Terrible and few things have interested me less. My father and I were " in conference " on this business for some time. It developed that there was no escape thereafter I was to spend one hour (sixty full minutes by the clock) with Vergil, not just occasionally, not just when I felt like it, but every day, including Sunday. The important thing is not that I made " A " the second semester, but that I learned a basic lesson: most difficult things can be dealt with, if you give them time and thought.
Would my father have been really faithful to me if he had said: " Oh, well, who cares about Latin ? Take it easy, son. Why crack your brain vault with a horse-and-buggy subject? " One thing is certain: if to be a modern parent is to let kids do, or not do, whatever they please, my father was not a modern parent. He was often tough, and I confess there were times when I hated him. However, I never held him in contempt, never despised him as a weakling. I respected him then, and I respect him now. I look back to the days of his flesh, and call him blessed. He came up the hard way, and was not going to let me get away with flabby softness either mental or physical.
I have an idea a suspicion, if you like that God and my father were, and are, not wholly unalike. God too is tough at times, and, as Tillich has put it, " a god whom we do not hate in moments ... is not God at all." My father was like God (ia my opinion) in another way: when I " bobbled the ball," as I did frequently, and sometimes very seriously indeed, he was always in there pitching to help me. When I was twenty, he had grown weary of lecturing me. It was not merely that he had already exhausted his vocal chords; rather he knew it did no good. You can't push words into a concrete block! From then on, he refused to harangue me in any way. Instead, he asked one profound question. I believe it is the most important question, in the world. I think God asks it of us every day: Where do we go from here ? Not that yesterday is unimportant we have to face it. But that today and tomorrow are more important, for in them we can move in new and better directions. Speaking as a professional theologian, I think the question Where do we go from here? is the exact meaning of forgiveness. To God too yesterday is important, but today and tomorrow (specially in the life of an individual) are to him all-important. To look backward only is morbidity and death. To look and move forward, in a new and better direction, is to redeem the past, to absorb and transform it even to use it to build more stately mansions.
The point is simple: I received from my father a severe challenge, in fact, many of them; but I received also from him the strength to respond. God too is not only our challenge in every dimension of life; he is also, at every moment, the strength of our response.
In other words, reality is not just tough, and not just tender; it is both! If it were not both, it would not be reality; if it were not both, it could neither be nor evoke our serious concern. In the rough things that confront us, God is saying: " No time now to go to sleep specially mentally. In your house of life there's still a fairly large room for improvement. Get going, and keep going. Rest now and then, of course, but no nonstop coffee breaks. There's gold in you, but it's going to take a bit of mining! "
According to my friend, Arnold Toynbee, man has evolved from a shrinking to a thinking earthworm entirely through the interplay of challenge and response. Not by either one alone. All challenge, with no ability to respond, would quickly shatter us and sometimes does. No evolution, either physical or moral, could have thus occurred. The reverse is also true: all ability to respond, with no challenge, would leave us wholly undeveloped. The ability to solve problems, with no problems to solve, would givfr us the mentality of jellyfish and even they have problems ol their own (for example, the problem of survival amidst the tourists, the mental jellyfish, on Miami Beach). Every teacher knows that an unchallenged mind, however high its I.Q., learns nothing in school. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink and you can send your son to college, but you can't make him think. A man I know spent ten thousand dollars on his son's education, and all he got was a quarterback. Even this is better than a quarterbrain. It is sometimes true that education is the art of casting false pearls before real swine. No student, of course, is entirely without the ability to respond (though some seem pretty convincing!); what he lacks is challenge to find and develop what is in him, to stimulate and ignite his conceptual capacity, to put whatever brain he has to work for his own, and the common, enrichment.
Not only has individual man evolved from lesser to greater capacity by means of severe challenge from the human, or physical, environment by means also of a sufficient number of successful responses to keep his show on the road but whole civilizations, in India, China, Egypt, and Greece, have risen similarly to power. Stern challenge, without successful response, has destroyed twenty-one out of the twenty-six civilizations thus far known. Our own is now sternly challenged to make the United Nations work, lest like idiots we bomb each other into extinction. If we do not respond successfully to this challenge, the consequences, to say the least, are breath-taking. But for every challenge a successful response is possible. The challenge itself is a subpoena, a demand, that man put his mind to work. A problem is a loud call for a solution, and most problems have solutions, though some can be found only through blood, sweat, and tears, and seldom by one century alone. As Jesus put it, certain kinds of demons can be cast out only by much prayer and fasting.
Overconfidence is an enervating intoxication, but some confidence is a necessity. Our confidence is grounded firmly in reality itself: God is not only the challenge, every challenge, all the challenge, that confronts us, that arouses us to high achievement or low wrath, though he is that indeed because the universe is that, and God and the universe cannot be separated. God is also the intelligence within us, and the courage, to look our problems in the face and not be frightened to death, to think and keep thinking, to read and keep reading, to act and keep acting, until more adequate solutions are found. It is said that necessity is the mother of invention; as I see it, God (reality) is both the necessity and the invention.
If possible, let us make this point doubly clear. God is the challenge, but he is also the courage and cunning of our response. In every man, and in all men, the ability to respond is structurally present, not something added on. God has given each of us a measure of his own reason, a real capacity for conceptual thought, a real initiative and a real imagination. For good or ill, we are endlessly inventive and can use our inventive ability to create basic solutions for basic problems.
Only the mentally lazy, when confronted with a difficult problem, throw up their hands in despair and say, " Nothing can be done about it." What else is the cause of divorce? An alcoholic too does just this until he discovers his mind, particularly his depth mind, takes it out of moth balls, exercises it, and sets it to work. He then finds that the mountain, whether or not movable, is at least surmountable.
The trouble with much modern political theory is that it is not very modern; it is as old as man's desire to escape work specially mental work; the motive is wrong. People are thinking awfully hard trying to get by without thinking. They want someone to solve all the problems for them. They want to coast, to drift, to vegetate, to stop being humanto rot mentally. As Toynbee put it, "A do-as-you-like, left to himself, is bound to degenerate into a gorilla." The universe is not built to encourage mental lethargy with or without our permission; sooner or later it reaches out a long arm, and quietly or noisily removes our false supports, our ersatz substitutes for mental exertion, forces us to learn to walk on our own, to start using our inventive ability, to become really human to let the God in us come alive and actually create the good we yearn for.
As Paul put it, " Not just the lower man, but God the higher man, is at work in every man." Where reason is, God is. Even the lowest and slowest man has a measure of reason. He may not have discovered it. Having discovered it, he may be running from it, trying to hide. But who can hide from himself? Wherever he hides, he is there, reason is there, God is there. Both around him and within him is reality.
Whether we are men, women, or teachers we go to pieces both physically and mentally unless our minds are challenged with work we feel is worth doing, and experience the depth satisfaction of using our minds in work well done. Men who are turned out to graze at sixty-five are being told, politely or otherwise, " Go ahead and die." Without significant challenge and the fun of intelligent response, no one can stay human, let alone stay alive. Not a few men, of course, respond successfully to the challenge of retirement and advance mentally with the years.
A friend of mine, Dr. L. A. Garrard, of Manchester College, Oxford, describes our human predicament this way: all that happens is designed to accomplish one or the other of two things to make us happy or to make us strong. Happiness without strength cannot last, and strength without happiness is stoic despair.
We shall have to part company with the popular illusion that reality always exempts us, if we are good little boys and girls, from severe challenges. It doesn't! God did not exempt Stephen from stoning. Rather, that stoning was turned into the conversion of Paul, and many a stoning or scourging of Paul was turned into the partial conversion of the Roman Empire. God did not exempt Paul from suffering not even from shipwreck; rather, in and through these things Paul's intelligence (the gift, the presence, of God) wrestled with the basic human problem itself and found for us all, offered to us all, die basic solution the new reverence for every mind and every life. God did not exempt Christ from the cross, but taught us that every cross is a beginning as well as an end. Reality did not exempt Schweitzer from a prison camp in the First World War; even his hospital, built with sweat and tears, was destroyed. Schweitzer's mind responded to these severe challenges with new and better work and his life is a blessing to us all. His mind, like the mind of Jesus, is the tough mind of a scientist yet with tenderness. As an old hymn expresses it, "There's a kindness in His justice, which is more than liberty."
Get mad at the universe, if you like but remember occasionally that it is also your friend. To begin with, it produced you; even more, it sustains you every day. It presents you with problems though not you only but it also provides the minds and the muscles (your mind and your muscles) and endless resources in the earth and the stars, to deal with them.
More Love than Law
Being finite, we usually think of Love as comfort and Law as challenge. In moments of' careful reflection, however, we recognize that Love is challenge as well as comfort, that Law is comfort as well as challenge.
Christians frequently and falsely assign the Ten Commandments to the realm of Law, and the Sermon on the Mount to the realm of Love. Both documents are more law than love to the natural man; he can keep neither of them. Both are more love than law to man in the Spirit, for both measure him, both instruct him, both guide him toward the man he is to become; in both he sees that God is Love; in both he sees his own self-love. Both documents teach the same thing negatively: that self-love is idolatry, the cause of man's inhumanity to man, and of man's inhumanity to God. Conversely, both documents, to man in the Spirit, teach the same thing positively: that a man cannot possess righteousness, but righteousness can possess him.
To bring forth saints-in-fellowship the universe was made and now moves forward in the control of God. Saints who can get along together are better saints than self-styled saints who cannot. All things are to be understood in the light of this single divine purpose. But the purpose itself can only be understood by participation, by an inward shift from the center in self to the center in God. Where we are determines what we see. Things that are spiritual are spiritually discerned. No man knoweth the things of man save the spirit of man; likewise, no man knoweth the things of God save the Spirit of God and those to whom he reveals them. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are alternate suits of Saul's Armor to the self-approving man. Both are ill-fitting, uncomfortable, and impossible. Both interfere with efficient self-seeking. Both irritate the natural man's uneasy conscience. He hides them from himself, and himself from them. In tlieir place, he covers his moral and spiritual nakedness with the fig leaf of self-sufficiency.
Nothing can be understood, or appropriated, in high religion without the Spirit, and the Spirit will enter only the broken heart, the heart that recognizes that it is endless and total need. Whatever the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount mean outside personal Christianity, inside they are the Law of Love, the direction of growth, the blueprint of the future. Both are impossible possibilities. Neither can be fulfilled perfectly; both can be fulfilled more perfectly.
The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount constitute the undergraduate and the graduate curriculums in the university of faith. Both documents require fellowship, for fellowship is the nature of God, and fellowship is God's will for man, but fellowship is never complete; it always grows. In four eternities, no, not in five, will the saints exhaust the fellowship of God, the fellowship of the church. The self-approving heart has matriculated in neither undergraduate nor graduate school. Registration Day is the day the heart recognizes that man and need are two words for the same thing.
To the humble heart the Ten Commandments are not sub-Christian. They are spirit and life. The true Christian knows that the commandments are Christian, but he is not; they are not below, but above him.
The Ten Commandments mean one thing: Self-love Is Idolatry, the cause of man's inhumanity to man, of man's inhumanity to God, and of man's inhumanity to himself. Put positively: Only the broken heart, seized, shaken, and shaped by the Holy Spirit, can become a channel of Love: that is, man cannot possess righteousness, but righteousness can possess man.
The First Commandment means that Only God Is Good, Only God Is Love. In Jesus' words, " None is good, save one, that is, God." (Luke 18:19, KJV.) In Paul's words: " All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God " and " There is none that doeth good, no, not one." (Rom. 3:23, 12, KJV.) All men are inescapably religious. All men, atheists and missionaries alike, give their whole response to what they regard as most important and most real. The self-approving man worships not the God who made him, but the god whom he has made. He worships the work of his own hands; that is, he worships himself in his work. The forms of idolatry are many; the list is long of man's substitutes for God. But all the forms of idolatry add up to one fact, the idolatry of self.
In Germany, men substituted the Nordic Race for God. Protestants believe the Pope substitutes himself for God, then proceed to make a pope of every Protestant, or to substitute the Bible, a paper pope, for God. Communists substitute the Proletariat for God; Capitalists substitute Private Property for God. Government is always a plausible substitute for God; it may not be omniscient, but it is very nearly omnipotent, and certainly omnipresent. In American public schools Democracy is often substituted for God. Love of country as a means is responsibility; we are our brother's keeper. Love of country as an end is idolatry. The list of idolatries is as long as the imagination of man; yet all are reducible to one: the idolatry of self. Self-love hides from God behind the state. Self-love hides from God behind society, with its collective conscience, which is always sub-Christian. Self-love hides from God behind the organized envy of the Communist or the organized pride of the Capitalist. Both Communists and Capitalists substitute Mammon for God. Communism is the mammon-worship of the group; Capitalism, the mammon-worship of the individual. Communism is the idolatry of the masses; Capitalism, the idolatry of the classes. All idolatries issue from one idolatry, the worship of the ersatz deity, self.
Every idol is destructive and demonic; every idol places good human energy in the service of a false absolute. The false gods always turn upon their worshipers and devour them. A god that is less than God is less than good. The self-approving man cannot rise above himself in his worship; the man who sees that he is walking need, and prays with a broken heart, " God be merciful to me a sinner " (Luke 18:13, KJV), cuts down the tree of idolatry and pulls up its root. Only God is Good; the self as god is less than good; society as god is less than good. " Thou shalt have no other gods before me." (Ex. 20 13, KJV.) " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." (Luke 4:8, KJV.) " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind." (Luke 10:27, KJV.)
The Second Commandment means that the Idolatry of Self Destroys the Self. True worship is whole response to the self's Creator; false worship is whole response to tiie self's creations. The self's creations, not surrendered with the self to God, become Frankenstein monsters turned loose with terror in the earth. Nationalism, created by our parents, curses us and our children. The self must create; God made the self a second creator; yet God alone can use the self's creations for good. God is a jealous Lover; he relentlessly pursues the object of his love, yet never forces the decision. The only weakness of the Almighty is that he will never make up your mind for you. Nonetheless, any idol, including the Self, placed on the altar in the soul which belongs to God alone, will be pulverized. " Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." But God does not always act slowly; he sometimes acts with the speed of light. You and I live from moment to moment under that threat the threat of extinction, the threat of nonexistence, the threat of loss of participation in the universe both here and hereafter. The devout worships something more than himself, more than all selves; the idolater worships something less than himself, less than all selves. Even the self is less than itself when it fails to serve what is greater than itself.
The restlessness of the natural man rises in the fact that he can never be satisfied with what is less than himself. Boredom pursues all false worship. The inner vacuum, made for the Spirit and withheld from the Spirit, seeks to fill itself with pleasure, prestige, and property, only to find itself as empty as before. The empty soul creates endless amusements, but is never amused. The empty soul seeks to fill itself with possessions, but finds itself possessed by its possessions in joyless slavery. Things take the saddle and ride the soul. The first million dollars is the incentive to the second; the vacuum in the soul is wider than the wealth of the world. The empty soul drives fast, but is driven faster. The poor are less bored than the rich, for work cuts worry in half; worry turns wealth into a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mold. The rich seek diversion from the vacuum within; they build country clubs and are bored with them. Professors, who are not permitted to seek pleasure, and cannot afford property, seek prestige. But today's name is tomorrow's nonentity. Short is the life expectancy of praise.
Men are endlessly united by God, endlessly divided by their idols. Every idol leaves the idolater hungry, lonely, and cold. A diet of husks intended for swine has only one value it reduces weight, the weight of the ego. Before 1929, the Empire State Building counted its worshipers in the millions; after 1929, its worshipers could no longer count their millions. Worshipers at every Tower of Babel find their hearts vacant and their tongues confused. "Thou shalt not worship thyself in thy creations; thou shalt not bow down thyself to thyself, nor serve thyself: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God. I will utterly destroy every barricade erected between thee and me; I will utterly destroy every barricade erected between thee and thy neighbor; and I will utterly destroy every barricade erected between the present and the future." (Ex. 20:3-5, KJV, and paraphrase.)
The meaning of the Third Commandment is this: Blasphemy is to love God in principle and the self in practice. Blasphemy is doublemindedness. If purity of heart is to will one thing, impurity of heart is to will two things, to divide the heart's true worship between God and the self. This is spiritual schizophrenia, the schism in the soul which has destroyed every extinct civilization and every lost self. " If . . . thine eye be single," said Jesus, " thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. . . . No man can serve two masters. ... Ye cannot serve God and mammon." (Matt. 6:22-24, KJV.) The attempt to do so is to worship God meaninglessly, to take his name in vain.
Common cursing is the misuse of the good gift of speech. Speech distinguishes man from monkey. Speech is intended to mean what it says, and to say what it means. A saint is a sinner who speaks the truth in love. When the Apostles' Creed dies out of the churches, it is often found, in perverse form, in the taverns. Man curses by the highest he knows, and he knows no higher name than God, no higher name than Christ. Cursing is simply perverse praise. Only a believing generation can blaspheme. Atheists have difficulty finding higher gods than God to curse by. Someone ought to study cursing at the Kremlin, to discover whether Marx, Lenin, and Stalin have replaced the Trinity.
Common cursing bears unconscious witness to the Ultimate. A deeper evil is to worship God nominally and the self actually. As the theologian Nels F. S. Ferre, has said, " God was at the center of my theology, yet / was at the center of my life." When self-righteous souls remain self-righteous as they sing hymns written by humility, and repeat prayers written by repentance, the self, not God, is worshiped. When God and the Status Quo are worshiped at adjacent altars, or at the same altar, the self adores its creations, not its Creator. Nations and corporations have also been known to justify low pride with high pretense. Wars of aggression are always called wars of defense. Exploitation is always called Free Enterprise. Fleecing the employer is always called Championing the Cause of Labor. Fleecing the public is always called the Right of Private Profit. Fleecing the private citizen is always called the Right of Public Taxation. Nothing is blasphemy-proof, nothing hypocrisy-proof, nothing self-proof.
To worship in vain is to live in vain to build a life upon rubble rather than upon rock, upon the foolishness of men rather than upon the wisdom of God. All that is less than God is less than good. " Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." (Ex. 20:7, KJV.) The self-centered are full of vanity; the perpetually repentant, the meek who shall inherit the earth, daily sacrifice their vanity to Divinity.
GOD THE SON
(The Deity of Christ in the Humanity of Jesus)
We believe in Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, our Teacher, Example, and Redeemer, the Savior of the world.
The Four Bethlehems
The wrestle with reality, the encounter with God beyond the gods, is always the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end; it is always a Bethlehem, preceded by long preparation, followed by new anguish and insight. Whether in preparation or fulfillment, whatever does not begin with God beyond the gods has no true beginning.
There are innumerable Bethlehems. One was the Bethlehem of the universe, when God brought forth time from the womb of eternity, the dawn of creation, some six billion years ago, when the stars sang their first doxology. An important Bethlehem for us was the birth of this planet, some three billion years ago. A third Bethlehem, of obvious significance for us, was the birth of earthly life: you might call it the Bethlehem of biology. Directly important for us was the Bethlehem of the vertebrates, the Bethlehem of the mammals, the Bethlehem of man.
Of incalculable value for all religion was the Bethlehem of preparation, the birth of the Hebrew nation for Israel was the mother of Christ. Israel was born when Jacob wrestled with God, when God wrestled with Jacob, but Israel had been conceived when God called Abraham out of Chaldea. Israel came of age with Moses, reached the zenith of its wordly power with David, saw the purpose of its existence to bring God to men and men to God with the greater prophets.
All this was preparation, yet each beginning was, in deepest reality, a Bethlehem, a birth, a new life. In each creative act the initiative was not with man but with God. " In the beginning was Love, and Love was with God, and Love was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Love; and without Love was not any thing made that was made. In Love was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended him not. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness to Love, that all men through Love might believe. He, John the Baptist, was not that Love, but was sent to bear witness to that Love. That was the true Love, which embraceth every man that cometh into die world.
"Love was in the world, and the world was made by Love, and the world knew not Love. Love came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he the power of Love, the power to become the sons of God which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of the Love of God. And Love was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. For law came through Moses, but Love came through Jesus Christ. No man hath seen Love at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath demonstrated Love." (John 1:1-18, paraphrase.)
There were, and are, innumerable beginnings, but something more than preparation was reached at Bethlehem in Judea when the Wise Men came riding out of the East to gaze into the face of the Purpose of all things. Something more than preparation was reached when the Love of God was cradled in the manger of the stable behind the inn. Something more than preparation was reached when Herod, who could not wait thirty-three years to crucify Love, attempted his crucifixion in the cradle, and made sacrifice of infant boys on the altar of Self-Love, the man-made God of this world. The Love of God had created Herod, along with all men; the Love of God sustained Herod in life; yet Herod sought in Love's first year on earth to assassinate him. Herod is a part of the story, and an important part, for he represents us all. He is the picture of all our dark resistance to Love, our preference for self-love. But there is more than resistance in the story. The shepherds, the holy mother, the aged Simeon, the godly Anna, were athirst for Love, and knew him when he was born.
That was the first Bethlehem, the only first Bethlehem, the holy night when God's pure Love was born upon this earth in the flesh of Jesus. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews groped blindly among inadequate words to declare the meaning: " God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Love, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the power of his Love, when he had by Love's sacrifice purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high." (Heb. i a-3, KJV, and paraphrase.)
There was Joy at Jesus' birth, the earthly beginning of Love's pure light. Joy was always deeper in Jesus than suffering. His birth, his life, and his death involved suffering, for creation is always a costly enterprise, but suffering is not its purpose. Suffering was, and is, the cost of Love's entry into our world of self-love, our self-loving hearts. Our resistance to Love is the suffering of God, and this is the meaning of the cross, when divine Love was nailed to a tree by human pride, but could not be held in the tomb. The cross was suffering, for there the Future was slain by the present; there the Savior was slain by the status quo. But Joy was deeper than suffering even on the cross. The writer to the Hebrews put it this way: " Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Heb. 12:2, KJV). The Love and the Joy of God were united with the flesh of Jesus: neither could be long imprisoned in a tomb. Both die Love and the flesh broke the Roman seal and emerged to the waiting disciples. " Be of good cheer," said Jesus; " I have overcome death." (John 16:33, KJV, paraphrase.) Love is stronger than death; death is temporal, but Love is eternal, for God is Love.
The first Bethlehem was the birth of the Love of God in the flesh of Jesus. But there was a second Bethlehem the birth of the Love of God in the flesh of the disciples, the baptism of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, when one hundred and twenty men and women, made one by prayer, received, with open hearts, the power of Love, the power to become the sons of God. The church, created of, by, and for Love, was born, if the chronographers are right, about 1,930 years ago. Love's church has grown into a great tree, and the birds of the air, the birds of culture, civilization, capitalism, secularism, communism, now lodge in its branches. Love's church, as Jesus described it, is a fisherman's net cast into the sea of humanity. It has drawn to shore the evil and the good, the useful and the useless, the fish and the crab. It is easy to see that there are at times more crabs than fish. Within Love's church, born 1,930 years ago, there has been and will always be an automatic separation of the useless from the useful: in one way or another the useless are always thrown back into the sea. " God knoweth them that are his." The basis of our humility is that we do not know. It is God, not man, who knows "them that are his."
The Love of God has always mingled with the self-love of man in the church. In a prayer meeting some 1,930 years ago the church was born; in prayer it is always reborn. But the church sometimes argues more than it prays. The unity of the church today, across all our man-made divisions, is the Love of God, the embrace of the Holy Spirit. The disunity of the church today, above the deeper unity of the Love of God, is the divisive and defensive self-love of man our self-love in knowledge, in virtue, in economics, in religion. The church is many in human self-love, but one in the Love of God. The Love of God and human self-love struggle for the flesh of every Christian, every nation, every century, and every magnificent or miniature Caesar comes to destruction.
The power of Love, the power to become a son of God, is available in every denomination where prayer is offered in the spirit of Love. In every nation where the church exists, the power of Love, the power to become a son of God, is waiting for those who seek it, who lay aside the pride of the mind and the lust of the flesh and set their hearts toward heaven.
There is a third Bethlehem, and, I believe, a fourth. Let me describe the fourth before the third. The fourth Bethlehem is mentioned everywhere in the Bible, in Old and New Testaments alike, though it is never fully understood, and cannot be. The fourth Bethlehem is variously described as the Second Coming of Christ, the Day of the Lord, the millennium, the hour of fulfillment, the threshhold of the future, the acceptable year of the Lord the moment, whether far or near, the moment beyond tragedy, when this earth shall become one universal church of Jesus Christ.
Three major voices in modern times have described this inevitable future the birth of the Love of God in the flesh of all men. Toynbee, the historian, describes it again and again, and insists that it is going to come to pass. He speaks not from ignorance but from knowledge. Sorokin, the sociologist, describes it, and again and again insists that it is on the historical agenda. Dostoevsky, the Russian seer and saint, who clothed his vision in the flesh of the Karamazovs, endlessly describes it, and insists that, beyond all human delay, it will one day come to be. Whether by evolution or by catastrophe, or by both, the fourth Bethlehem draws nearer, the last of life for which the first was made. On that day, perhaps nearer than we think, the Love of God will be united with the flesh of all men, and this troubled earth will be readmitted to the fellowship of the Love which bears the universe on its way.
But the third Bethlehem is at hand, is available now to all who seek it the birth of the Love of God in the flesh of an individual, the flesh of the Christian, the flesh of the saint. It is not the saint who is peculiar, but the rest of us. It is not the saint who is above the Christian, but we who are below. The saint is simply standard, the rest of us substandard. The saint is on the beam; it is we who have not yet found it.
The third Bethlehem, itself one method by which the fourth is prepared, is the birth in any man of the Love of God. The third Bethlehem is rejected when self-love makes sacrifice of divine Love, when Christ is freshly crucified by human pride. The third Bethlehem is accepted when the Love of God is preferred to self-love, when the self finds its true center, not in itself but in God. God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble. Self-love destroys the self, but repentance the rejection of self-love opens the door to Love, not at one moment only, but every moment, every morning, every meal, every night. And this is God's activity, not our own effort. Self-love places the self outside the universe, outside healing, outside growth, outside grace, the dimension of damnation both here and hereafter for civilizations as well as for souls. Surrender to the Love of God, acceptance of the Love of God, places the self inside the universe, inside healing, inside growth, inside grace, the dimension of salvation both here and hereafter, for civilizations and for souls. Self-love alienates man from the future, relegates him to the past. The Love of God in the flesh of a man unites him with the future, turns all past preparation into present production.
Paul experienced the third Bethlehem on the road to Damascus, the road to Jerusalem, the road to Athens, the road to Rome. He knew that he did not possess the Love of God. He knew, rather, that the Love of God possessed him. Francis of Assisi received the power of Love, the power to become a son of God; he opened his heart to the future, and in the sacrifice of self-love banished the past, redeemed the past, received immortality. John Wesley preached and practiced Love. He surrendered self-love, natural to the English, natural to Americans, natural to man, to the Love which is the nature of God and the future of mankind.
Deep in his heart, every man desires God, God only, but lesser desires often choke the desire for God. To every man comes the perpetual summons to his own Bethlehem, his own virgin birth, his own birth of the Spirit. " Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: And let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." (Isa. 55:6-7, KJV.)
The Central Christian Insight
No abstract wrestle with reality, no merely academic encounter with the real God, concerns man either personally or unconditionally. Incarnation is a universal necessity; until the Word of God becomes human mind and flesh, it concerns neither flesh nor mind. When incarnation occurs, Love, the Word of God, takes possession of flesh and mind and spring comes on forever.
The tragedy of the vacant mind, attempting to serve as the moral mind, was understood fully by Jesus. To paraphrase his words in Luke n 124-26: " When an unclean spirit leaves a human mind, he travels everywhere seeking a home; finding none, he says,' I will return whence I came.' Presently he comes and sees his victim's mind clean and in order, but empty. For this reason, he brings seven other spirits more evil than himself; together they take and keep possession. Thus, the last state of the empty mind is worse than the first. Only the mind filled with good cannot be invaded by evil."
The " pure heart," as Jesus conceived it, is not an empty heart, but a heart filled with God, a mind alight with God's wisdom, a human spirit embraced and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Purity of heart, on Christian terms, is not a Zen Buddhist sitting in the Lotus position, staring into space, but a Socrates enlarging the minds of Athenian youth, a Luther fighting for the dignity of individual conscience, a Schweitzer thinking and ministering to human need in Africa.
A particularly alert mind, a young woman reading for a year at my direction, wrote recently: "I have just finished the Holy Bible in Brief and for the first time have seen the story as a whole, the majestic sweep of Old and New Testaments in a continuous narrative. The thing that amazes me most is the quickened tempo of the New Testament, the ebullience, verve, and bounce of the minds who wrote it. Where the Old Testament walks, the New Testament runs." I think she has something there! One does get the impression, correct or not, that the theme of the Old is prohibition, while the theme of the New is direction. The Old seems a fear and a frown; the New is a faith.
What does this mean? I think it means one thing: Jesus Christ, to those who are deeply moved by him, is not " Prohibition made flesh " but " Direction made flesh " the all-absorbing drive of God's creative purpose. He is not the Great Negative, but the Great Positive! True, both Old and New Testaments are concerned with the Law of God, but the first stresses " Thou shalt not steal or kill! " the second, " Thou shalt love! " To be sure, Love is the depth purpose of Old Testament Law; and Law, the depth meaning of New Testament Love. God and his character have not changed from the five books about Moses to the four about Christ; his will, his Law, is central in both; but one seems dark, bloody, and forbidding, the other, ablaze with light, grace, and welcome; the first, it appears, is a subpoena from a judge; the second, an invitation to a wedding. Hence, Christians everywhere believe that the Law of God made flesh in Moses was made flesh again, and more clearly, in Jesus, that he was indeed the child, the offspring, the fulfillment of Old Testament religion and all religion, the depth of all human desire the Law, the Love of God, set walking among us. Truly men speak laws, but God speaks Christ.
From the first Jerusalem conference (reported in Acts, ch. 15) onward, serious-minded Christians have always resisted the attempt of pious zealots and fanatics (Judaizers) to reduce Christianity to " Thou shalt not's," to quench its fire, its zest, with a list of negatives, to return its eternal youth to leading strings. To men who share the New Testament mind, regeneration is rejuvenation not an old set of rules but a new set of soul.
This is what is meant by the statement, " Christianity must be caught; it cannot be taught." I think it can be taught, too, because Jesus and Paul taught it. But it is true that Jesus himself caught it from two thousand years of Hebrew history, from Abraham, Moses, David, and the Prophets; he caught it from God. Paul caught it directly from Stephen and Jesus. The Roman Empire caught it from Paul and the Twelve. In this sense, health is more contagious than disease and outlasts it.
Self-discipline gets nowhere when it operates only widi negatives; it is then not propelled but repelled. Persons preoccupied with negative or premature self-discipline are not free, but bound. They are grounded, as were the dodos, and cannot fly. Their world and their minds grow smaller all the time. They are timid and afraid specially of life. Self-discipline reaches the thresh-hold of power, joy, and victory, only when it is part and parcel of Christ's forward thrust, his all-consuming and all-commanding reverence for mind and life.
Hebrew religion was renewed, reborn, spiritualized, universalized it was both widened and deepened in Jesus. He replaced legality with morality; he saw in Israel's many laws one law: " Thou shalt love" both God in man, and man in God. Thou shalt serve both truth and freedom! In Jesus' young manhood, his feet were literally " hobbled " by 613 specific rules of proper Hebrew conduct. Judaism, as he knew it, had substituted laws for the Law, had splintered Moses' ten creative principles into 613 precepts. He came through them like Samson through the gates of Gaza, or the green vines and new ropes of the Philistines. In him, as John put it, was Life, not death, and the Life was, and is today, the Light of men.
As H. Richard Niebuhr has understood: every great religion, at its beginning, is like white-hot metal poured into a mold; however, at the second or third generation the metal cools in the mold, the whole thing settles down, substitutes propriety for power, regulation for creation. The original Revolution is long past; only its Daughters remain.
When Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, said, " Love God with all your heart, and do as you please," he was not advocating self-indulgence; he was urging men to let the New Mind, the Mind of Christ, possess them the mind whose pleasure it is to please God by increasing human stature. We live by what we love, not by what we avoid; what we love makes us over in its image. Men who love good, men who love God, become, and are, his sons. Men who serve truth and freedom find freedom in truth. To love God in man, and man in God, is to be moral; of such love heroes, martyrs, and saints are made. To be moral is not to be a hairsplitting Pharisee; to be moral is to have the Law of God engraved in mind and heart not carried about on stone tablets.
You might put it this way. The spirit of man, under Pharisaic law, was, like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, tied to the earth with thousands of tiny thongs; the Pharisees were simply Lilliputians. You and I know dozens of Gulliver Christians tied down with thousands of negatives. The central creative thrust, the dynamic impulse of God's agape, the new mind, the new direction made flesh in Jesus, seems wholly missing. Arc not these the folk to whom Jesus will say, "I never knew you: depart from me" (Matt. 7:23, KJV) ? It's confusing, of course, for Gulliver Christians are always sincere, always doing their best to live by their complicated code, always pushing uphill the heavy stone of Sisyphus. The trouble is: they arc not set in motion but brought to a halt; they have not started they have stopped thinking; they live not constructively but constrictively; like hypochondriacs they fear all contact widi life, lest bacteria contaminate them. They are not marching forward but moving backward, not growing but spreading, not thinking but shrinking.
The central Christian insight is this: in our common human flesh the uncommon Law, the Love of God, can be released. This is what happened at Pentecost. This is the meaning of the incarnation or none has occurred, and none can occur. Not in something other than human flesh did Christ appear among us. Not in the form of an angel did he walk the streets of Nazareth and Jerusalem. It was not a ghost the rulers of Israel and the Romans nailed to a cross. In human flesh Jesus was " in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." His temptations were negative, but his responses were positive. He was absorbed in his work translating the character of God into the character of man. Temptations bounced from him, like raindrops from a swift-moving plane. What you and I call temptations were mostly beneath his perception he was busy; his plate was full; his heart had no room for piffle; he was a man possessed by the logic, the logos of the world, the mind of God!
It should be clear enough not fear but faith moves mountains; not fear but faith is moral. When fear is substituted for faith, both Pentagon and Kremlin grow larger, deadlier, and costlier. With faith, few bullets are needed; without faith, no bomb is big enough, no ocean wide enough. As the Jews learned long ago: " Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain " (Ps. 127:1, KJV). Without the creative thrust of the New Mind, the Mind of Jesus, our patriotism is paranoia, our best morality is negative miscarriage what the Bible calls " filthy rags " (Isa. 64:6, KJV). The New Mind, which moved in Jesus, can also move, must also move, in you. You will then be not a walking frown, but a walking faithfulness, a destination and a benediction.
It is written of the apostle Philip, on mission in Samaria, that because of his presence, " there was great joy in that city " (Acts 8:8, KJV). Why? He preached and demonstrated the Love of God for Samaritans as well as for Jews, for heathen Gentiles as well as for holy Israelites, for the ungodly as well as for the godly, for sinners as well as for so-called saints. His words were supported by deeds. He gave strength and peace to the mentally disturbed, and healed many who were paralyzed or crippled. Where he moved, love moved; fellowship replaced loneliness, acceptance replaced rejection, joy displaced sorrow. Little souls became larger; small minds became bigger; narrow vision became as broad as the ocean; shallow insight became as deep as the sea.
God's purpose and power for man, the self-discipline, the self-direction that lived in Jesus, can live also in us. As he was, so we can be, with his kind of effort, his kind of thought, his kind of prayer. Jesus could say no as well as yes. At times, we too must do so. Every car comes equipped with a brake as well as a motor, but it is the motor, not the brake, that thrusts it forward; the brake is an aid to steeringand there is a time to stop. Too many church folk, I think, operate with only a brake, and wonder why they are standing still! A motor under the hood is not really a luxury.
The life of self-discipline, as Christians understand it, is not a blind drawn against mankind; it is a hand held out to each man and all kinds of men not a retreat but an advance, not a hesitance but a holocaust, a refining fire. As Dorothy L. Sayers has understood: boredom seems to characterize too many of us pious folk, whose mouths are filled with negatives but Jesus " never bored a soul. . . [as] he passed through this world like a flame." His self-discipline was the self-determination of a Great Devotion, a Consuming Compassion. God's own creative process, God's own creative drive creation itself walked and worked in him, can walk and work in us, and replace all our boredom with bounce!
As Lecomte du Nouy said, only one definition of good and evil is adequate, though it can be expressed in a thousand ways: Absolute good is whatever co-operates with God's creative purpose in man, whatever helps human moral evolution, whatever deepens the character of our love, whatever widens human mercy to the measure of human need. Absolute evil is whatever hinders God's creative enterprise, whatever holds back the growth in us of die divine image.
It is true today, as in the first century and this is the miracle, the only miracle, and the only morality, that overcomes the world that it is not fear and a frown but faith that moves mountains and men, the faith set marching in Jesus, and waiting to be set marching in us!
The God/Man in Every Man
No incarnation of the Word of God can occur unless there is something wide and deep in man capable of receiving it. It is only through God that we can know God, and it is just the Logos, the Word and Image of God, however hidden or overlaid, that is already in man by creation. As the Jews understood, " It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves" (Ps. 100:3, KJV).
Words of Jesus seldom understood today, perhaps because not often read and less often pondered, are these: " You have heard that it was said to the men of old,' You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ' You fool!' shall be liable to the hell of fire " (Matt. 5:21-22).
As Paul put it, the primary man in every man is not the outer man who sometimes serves the law of sin, but the inner man who is capable of comprehending and serving the law of God and drawing even the outer man into full co-operation. Therefore he said, "To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." (See Rom. 7:16 to 8:8, KJV.) It is this God/man, structurally present in every man, to whom no man can rightly say: " You fool! "
The real value in our fellow men is not what we see, but what we do not see with our eyes. A friend of mine said, "We cannot love God because we have not seen him, and we cannot love our neighbor because we have seen him." But he was wrong, I think, on both counts. We have seen God in Jesus, in heroes, martyrs, and saints, in the dedicated man of science, in the growing and healing force in every body and mind, indeed in the energy and rationality of nature itself. Yet we seldom see the true man actually present in our neighbor and ourselves. The trouble is that we are too much impressed with surfaces, with externals, with quantities and only now and then see either deeply or truly.
The basic thing we usually fail to see is this: there are two men in every man. Not one only. One can be seen with the eyes; the other, only with the mind. The man we see with our eyes is the lesser one the man on the hoof, so to speak sometimes at our throats and other times at our feet, the man often carried away with passion and prejudice, the man whose range of vision is too limited, the selfish, cruel, deadly man at times more bestial than any beast. It is true indeed: man's greatest enemy is man, though man can also be (on the human level) man's greatest friend. To paraphrase Max Otto: man had better learn to be the friend of man, for (humanly speaking) man has no other friend. H. L. Mencken was talking about the lesser man in every man when he said that man is a sick fly, taking a dizzy ride on a spinning, speeding wheel; he is greedy, ignorant, brutal. Of course, of course. Nothing is so common as the man we despise, in others, because we know the same man, and despise him, in ourselves.
But the man we see, with our eyes, is never the whole man. It is hard, at times, to remember that the man we hold in contempt is the lesser of the two men in every man, though he may appear to be, even actually be, in full control at a given moment. Jesus commanded us to hold no man in contempt, to say to no one, "You fool! " Why? For one reason only: in the worst man there is also another man, and it is just this other man, the one we do not see with our eyes, that is, in fact, the important one, the primary one, manhood itself the offspring of the universe, the child of God.
Failure to perceive the depth man, humanity itself, in every man is the real evil in race discrimination. We see a human being whose skin (through no fault of his own) is a different color. That is all we see with our eyes; we therefore classify him at once as an inferior and a potential enemy. Only with our minds, so seldom exercised, can we see the man within, the one Jesus commanded us to respect as we respect our own right to exist! It is blasphemy to say to this inner man, to manhood itself, " You fool! " " You inferior! " The man within every man, the important man, is manhood itself, the Son of God God's growing creation, God's growing delight. The Image of God in a particular man may not be apparent at first or even second glance. The man himself may never have discovered in himself the Son of God. Like gold in a mountain, the Son of God in every man, for all practical purposes, may be too far back, too far down, to be easily discovered (even with a Geiger counter) and brought to light. Both Jesus and Paul emphasized the point: in every man is manhood itself, the God/man, the object of God's unchanging, creating love. A man and a mountain are different in this respect: not in every mountain, but in every man, gold is present and can be found!
Let us be as clear as we can: we are not paying man compliments; we are not being sentimental; we are not trying to be nice. The Son of God, as well as the son of society, is actually present and at work in every man this idea is central and pivotal in the Christian religion; it is either true (a rock, a surd, a fact) or it is a lovely lie, a pleasant fiction, an agreeable illusion. As Mencken put it, " Christianity is nonsense, of course, but it is sweet." If it is nonsense, however sweet, we cannot afford it for the same reason that we cannot afford " shots in the arm." If the Christian view of the inherent dignity of every mind is false, we have no hope, not even in this life. All hope rests in the fact that God is not only outside man but also inside him. If God is inside him, there is something there to which no one can rightly say, " You inferior!" If God is inside man, the color of his skin can neither reduce nor increase his value. If God is inside him, his mind (and the body which supports it) are worthy of our reverence whether he is a Russian, an African, an Asiatic, a Jew (or a gentile, a heathen, or an infidel)!
We are not talking about I.Q.; I.Q. is not intelligence itself but one fallible way of measuring it. To have any I.Q. at all is to enjoy the pure gold of God's own reason. In England I saw a man-made gadget with a two-celled brain; I've known freshmen who seemed to have no more. Even a two<elled intelligence is what we call the child of God in every man; it is this God in every man to which no man can rightly say, "You inferior! " A friend of mine put it this way: "The important thing is not how far or how fast you travel, but in what direction." Intelligence is man-power or mind-power in every man even a little goes a long way. A low I.Q. travels more slowly he may thus survive longer in our century of open roads, open throttles, open graves. A low I.Q. may not travel so far in the wrong direction! Remember the tortoise and the hare! Sometimes today people travel over six hundred miles an hour yet, on careful inspection, are going nowhere! A low I.Q. also travels and many travel on the most important errands in the world. The twelve apostles were not mental giants.
Unless this is true, democracy as a working political system is finished, and in fact, has never existed. For democracy is based solidly and simply on the fact that in every man is the God/man, a measure of reason itself, the ability to distinguish between fish, flesh, and foul balls in high office. Unless in every man, even the man we despise, is not only the despicable man but also the Son of God government of the people, by the people, and for the people is hysterical nonsense, as Hitler said it is.
Let's put it another way: when you look at an iceberg, you see only one ninth of it, the part above the water line. The biggest part is invisible eight ninths, to be exact. It was this invisible part which sank the Titanic in mid-ocean (April 15, 1912, at 2:20 a.m.) with loss of 1,513 lives. Western civilization (our own) may likewise sink, its hull shattered by invisible reality the neglected, ignored, and forgotten God/man in every man. Running headlong into this invisible reality, the Son of God in every son of society, medieval monarchies came crashing down. On this invisible rock, the God in every man, medieval religion cracked open to make room for the Protestant Reformation. On this invisible reality, the rational man in every man, the long stranglehold of superstition was broken, and the age of reason, the age of science, was begun. Science itself, though often preoccupied with the mere production of gadgets, is a " work of the Holy Spirit," what Jesus called " the Spirit of Truth." On this inner man, the invisible God in every man, all progress rests in knowledge, in education, in politics, even in religion. Indeed, from this inner man, the submerged eight ninths of every man, have come all religion and every social structure including both language and the state.
The basis of the self-disciplined life is this: when a man discovers that God is in him, in him personally, that this thing within him, reason itself, is the most important thing on earth, his world becomes a different place. Things he once loved he now considers of lesser value. Things he once despised religion, for example, or a depth education he now loves. He is a new man, because the deeper man in him, the true man, has come to consciousness. Until he discovers Christ in himself, the world seems to him a mere blur of competing idiocies, a meaningless miscarriage, a dark age. He cannot develop self-discipline until he discovers the deeper self, his mind, and sets it to work.
The invisible eight ninths of every man, the rational Son of God, can and must emerge from the " collective unconscious " and begin to live and move. Today the word "personality" means either superficial charm (you can buy it in a drugstore) or the extroverted mentality of a " You-Auto-Buy-Now " salesman. In religion, in education, and in fact, " personality" actually means something else altogether namely, the man within, the child of God in every child of the world, the depth in man always poorly recognized or never seen at all, the Christ/man structurally present in the man of flesh and blood and passion, the man of ignorance, superstition, and fear.
The sleeping giant in every wide-awake pigmy is seldom seen today, for we live continually (if only temporarily) in a world of social blocks and antisocial blockheads. The " collective unconscious " seems increasingly to rule all things; Hollywood and Madison Avenue cultivate not the man in the monkey but the monkey in the man. For this reason, Matthew Arnold called our century, and the last, the Age of the Philistine and the Barbarian. The essential savage (it seems) has returned to social control. The essential savage is simply the lesser man in all men, the man who has lost contact with his own depth. The essential savage does not know that the God/man exists within him, does not believe in his existence, is certain that he does not exist. The essential savage, now in control, can no longer think in universal human terms; he can think only in immediate and mechanical particulars this moment, this meal, this intercontinental ballistics missile, this rocket to the moon. He cannot think " why " he docs anything, but only " that" he docs it. The mere outer man, die lesser man, the animal man (it seems), has captured all our time and attention. It appears that the age of man was yesterday; ours is the age of the subman or the ex-man for only the secondary man, the quantitative man, the ape man, seems actually to live and breathe and rule.
However, within this modern savage, this barbarian, this sub-man there still lives, not in fancy but in fact, the God/man, the rational man, the Christ, the sleeping Samson. All education and all religion exist only to waken him. Thus the age of man was not really yesterday; it is actually tomorrow ahead of us, not behind us. Today man is merely half finished, half conscious, half awake. When the sleeping giant wakens as waken he must and will it will be clear to all that God has come to consciousness in him; at that time, and not before, the age of reason, deep reason (the age of Love, the Holy Spirit), will begin, and men will see in all men and themselves the growing image of God. It will then be self-evident that the whole man (body and mind together) is born of God that " whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world " (I John 5:4, KJV).
I Am with You Alway
There is something of God in every man, though the divine gift, as Jesus suggested, is often if not always mislaid. However, according to the parable of the prodigal son, the lost can be found, the dead can live again.
In Matthew's account, Jesus' last words were, " I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (Ch. 28:20; read also Luke 6:27-46 in both KJV and RSV). Both potentially and actually the mind of Jesus is present, deep down, in the mind of every man awaiting clearer discovery and richer development. The springs of creativity lie deep and mostly dormant in us all. Not outside us, but inside us, Jesus is with us forever. However, to know him (more than casually) is to think with him, to " rub minds " with him. His words await you in the New Testament read them, breathe them, walk around them, argue with them; they are not frail; they won't wither under scrutiny. Read between the lines; use all the imagination you have! Where men do not ponder Jesus' words, Christianity is dead, buried, and forgotten no matter how many churches are built or how many hymns are sung. Where Jesus' words are read, reread, pondered and repondered, the true church grows within our churches and breaks through beyond them. When men think and rethink Jesus' words, he lives, and lives to bless, in the total work of the world. When men rub minds with him, the settled will to truth and freedom, which we call love, is born to build and heal the whole of human life.
Where men are not moved by love, not thrust forward by the will to truth and freedom, Christ's presence, though real, is ignored; it then becomes our judge it weighs us and finds us wanting. As John Woolman said it, the only Christianity you possess is self-evident perhaps not equally self-evident to all, but nonetheless self-evident.
Love is not an ideal but an incarnation, not an emotion but an act of creation; it is the steady will to deal healingly, constructively, with every human being whether enemy or friend. Once you have made up your heart, your depth mind, to love God in man and man in God you proceed at once to mold your emotions and your prejudices with real reverence for every mind and every life. At that moment you begin to walk consciously with Christ; at that moment your primary purpose is not to get but to give to the family the larger one across the world, and the smaller one on your street and in your house.
Recently I met a refreshingly young-minded person named Mary Webster and learned her story. Ten years ago she could get along with no one not her husband, not her children, not her self. There is some good in everyone, but in her it didn't show. If people crossed her, specially the members of her household, she bit their heads off. And she was awfully easy to cross. She was what Shakespeare called a shrew a bitter pill for everyone to swallow if he could. She did not nail Christ to the cross; she was the cross on which he was nailed and with him, her husband and children! The description fits most of us doesn't it? if only some of the time.
But something happened it's a poor scientist who refuses to face facts. Eight years ago, partially aware that her trouble was chiefly herself, she went to hear a famous American missionary, E. Stanley Jones whose own life has been, and is, a lighted candle in the night. She received from him, and from Christ in him, what Plato called " the direct kindling of soul upon soul, as light from a leaping flame." Preachers don't always help people; the wonder is that sometimes they do. Now and then, in fact, they touch into life the hidden springs of creativity and explosive things occur. To shorten a long story, a young woman who had been prematurely old went home that evening mentally new; she was a different person, or, if you like, the same person with the unconscious Christ come to consciousness in her.
The next step involved a difficult choice. She could start bragging to her husband and children about her new experience, trying to impress them, to browbeat them (in a new way) into submission. Many make this mistake. On the other hand, she could say nothing at all, and let new attitudes and new deeds speak for her. The trick is not to tell other people you're a Christian; let them tell you! The next morning (after some inner debate) she dragged herself out of bed and fixed her husband's breakfast the first time in ten years. He nearly fell over in a dead faint when he came from the farm chores at five in the morning, and found a warm meal awaiting him and a smiling, pleasant wife. No doubt he said to himself: " Something phony here. This is too good to be true. Better take it with a grain of salt." But she didn't stop for she was no longer at war with herself, with her own depth, with Christ. Even her children recognized that somehow they had got themselves a new mother.
A few days later, her husband, himself at war with the church, fell into an argument with a neighbor about Jesus' miracles. The neighbor was a typical village skeptic the dime-a-dozen variety produced by "sour" church folk. He said: "Miracles are a lot of baloney. For example, take the one about Jesus' turning water into wine." The husband replied, " I don't know whether or not Jesus turned water into wine, but one thing is certain, and I should know, he has turned the nagging nuisance I married into a wonderful wife."
Fourteen days after her discovery that Christ was actually with her (and in her), her husband, of his own accord, called on the pastor and asked if he might join the church. In the meantime she had said nothing to him about it one way or another. She had simply made him happy down deep. Not once had she boasted, " Look at me; I'm a Christian." Rather, the new thing that she had, the new thing that had her, the mind of Jesus, was self-evident to her severest critics her husband and her children. Real Christianity, which is charity, begins at home. If it doesn't begin there, it doesn't begin. And if it does begin there, it doesn't stop anywhere!
You meet a lot of so-called Christians chiefly engaged in bawling people out. Is it not self-evident that whatever they have, it is not the mind of Jesus, and whatever it is, you don't want it? In other words, every life can be a healing and a help, or a noisy nuisance. As My Fair Lady expresses it, don't talk about love show me!
Not yesterday, and not tomorrow today is the time to let die words of Jesus take root in us and express themselves in our deeds, to rub minds with him, to let the New Mind touch us and everyone around us into life. If the mind of Jesus, the new reverence for every mind and every life, is actually alive and at work in us, wives and husbands will first discover it. Sex and marriage will be more than merely civil; both will be sacred. The common objective will be single and simple to make the people we live with (the people forced to live with us) happy about it. As Ludier put it: Husband, when you go to work in the morning, leave your wife happy at the thought of your return. Wife, when your husband leaves in the morning, make him happy at die thought of coming home. And children off to school are entided to be happy about returning. A delinquent (whether parent or child) is one who has long found no delight when he left, and less when he returned.
The fraternity man whose sole purpose is to use, to dominate, to take from the dignity and integrity of other human beings the dates who consent to spend evenings with him will find himself stuck with the dumb ones, and even they are not so dumb as they look they will resent him too! On the other hand, do not young men, also, resent being used, being treated like commodities, like door prizes to be bought and sold, or male birds to be captured and crippled ? Christ is almost wholly invisible when a young man says to a girl, or the reverse, " I love you " but actually means, "I want you to run my errands, to shine my shoes, to absorb all the punishment, for the next fifty years." The presence of love, the presence of Christ, adds to the happiness, the stature, of both the date and the dated alike mentally and physically.
Leisure is a major modern interest. As one chap expressed it, " My hobby is relaxation." But there are two uses of leisure not one only: the first in time but last in value forgets the man and lets die monkey live. Leisure is not really the occasion to resign one's membership in the human race. Its actual purpose is rest, renewal, the recovery of selfhood and perspective often through a change of occupation; leisure can recharge the mind for a new and more creative bout with the powers of darkness. In short, leisure releases either chaos or the Christ in every man.
Dostoevsky said, man is distinguished from the lesser mammals by free will and the use of money. Our money (whether great or small) judges us every day. What we do with it, what we use it for, demonstrates whether we are mice or men. One chap uses money like a miser to impoverish the world and enrich himself; in the end he finds no wisdom in his wealth; his gold purchases neither health nor happiness; he does not possess it it possesses him; it becomes, in fact, " a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mold." Another chap refuses to be ridden by money, he rides it instead, and makes it serve the common good; he uses it continually to bless, to build, and to heal. When you stop to think about it, the money we refuse to give away, Uncle Sam takes away. In either case, it was never really our own. Love, Christ's mind in us, is a constructive relation to money sometimes the hardest test of all. To be moral but mean about money is to be deeply immoral. Love uses money to provide a real education for children (and adults) for there is no love without active reverence for every mind. Love uses money to provide preventive medicine and hospital care for the ill, the crippled, and the blind, for there is no love without active reverence for every life. Love, the mind of Jesus, never stops with the local family; always it spills over to provide mental and physical healing for the larger family as well.
Christ lives when you dedicate your mind to tlie growth of knowledge and wisdom. Without this dedication there is no love, no will to truth. Did you know that only one American in a hundred ever reads a book (even a murder mystery) from high school graduation until death? Did you know that among the one in every hundred who actually reads one book in one lifetime only one in ten ever reads a serious book, however simply written? To read a serious book is to rub minds with dedicated men of science, with seers, thinkers, and saints in whom humanity itself, reason, the presence of Christ, has come to consciousness. A nation of mental dwarfs can build no permanent civilization, for " where there is no vision, the people perish." Love dedicates the mind to depth and breadth of wisdom. And love discriminates between sense and nonsense in reading for not every printed page adds wings to the soul.
You are what you read. Basically, Schweitzer has read three things: the mind of Jesus, the music of Bach, and the literature of medicine; he has carried all three with him from laboratory into life for Europeans, Africans, and Americans alike. In short, Schweitzer has read to grow in knowledge, in understanding, in usefulness. His depth and breadth reading and thinking (the scientific mind) have given legs to dreams.
Christ lives, when you love, not merely your work, but work well done which sustains, heals, and strengthens the minds and lives of men. Not the man in the moron, but the moron in the man, works to get drunk on Saturday and sleep it off on Sunday.
Finally, two kinds of people practice public worship and private prayer. One seeks " an emotional ' kick,'" " a religious ' jag,'" " a devotional ' shot in the arm.'" He desires not reality but escape, not growth in God but retreat into self. As Thomas a Kempis put it: " Are not all these to be called hirelings, who are ever seeking consolations? Do they not show themselves to be rather lovers of themselves than of Christ, who are always thinking of their own advantage and profit? " The other worshiper is moved by the will-to-love, the mind of Jesus, an inner dedication to truth and freedom; he seeks guidance, direction, greater usefulness; he wants not to possess, but to be possessed by the mind that makes prophets out of puppets, men of God out of " organization men." He desires not to control God, but to be controlled by him, not to be blessed but to be a blessing to the brother abroad and the stranger at home. His prayer is essentially this: O Lord, I have accomplished nothing for thee, for my fellow men, for myself. My best thus far is the merest beginning. Put thy mind in my mind, thy heart in my heart. Give me thy work to do, and thy strength to do it lest I live and die in vain.
GOD IN AND AMONG US
(Divine/Human Fellowship Increases Our Integrity and Community)
We believe in the Holy Spirit, God present with us for guidance, for comfort, and for strength.
How Confidence Grows
The discovery of God beyond the gods, and of God within, is intellectual, moral, and emotional new birth; it enriches, heals, and steadies unifies the mind and flesh of man. It makes men, individually and increasingly, at one with themselves, with their neighbors, and with God.
Will Rogers once said, " I've never met a man I didn't like." Growing Christians ought to have that attitude toward everyone their enemies, their friends, and the unknown individuals whom they pass every day in the streets.
The hardest thing in the world to do is the most necessary to trust to trust in God, to trust in man, in the desire for good that is him, in the capacity for good that is in him, to trust the starry heavens and the good earth. Striving toward the stature of Christ and universal brotherhood characterizes the true Christian, that is, the Christian who is becoming a Christian. In one sense, there are no Christians in the world, though there are more or less reasonable facsimiles; in another sense, there is probably no one in the world who does not want to be a Christian. But man does not strive well who does not trust well. It is easier to strive than it is to trust, but striving without trusting is hopeless, useless, and joyless. It gets nowhere, because it has nowhere to go.
To trust is to rest your total life in the hand of God, to believe that God is Sovereign, in total control of everything at every moment; to believe that God is all-powerful, all-wise, and most of all, all-sufficient Love: to believe, that is, that God is Godall the time and in every place. To trust is to believe that God's Love accepts you as you are sins, stupidities, failures, and all. To trust is to believe that God's Love accepts you as you areas a candidate for growth toward the stature of Christ and universal brotherhood. Exactly where you are morally, spiritually, intellectually, socially, economically is the place to begin. To trust is to believe that God's all-sufficient Love is now creating you, now moving you along the assembly line, now improving and perfecting you, now correcting and encouraging you, toward the stature and the Love of Christ. To trust is to let God love you, remake you, and love the world and all mankind through you.
To trust is not to be an idiot about practical affairs; to trust is to begin and end and sustain all practical effort with absolute confidence in God's absolute Love.
To trust is to give first-class allegiance to first-class values, to live in absolute relation to the absolute, and in relative relation to the relative. Lack of trust is to give first-class allegiance to second-class values, to live in absolute relation to the relative. Lack of trust is also to give second-class allegiance to first-class values. Active paganism, which characterizes both communist and capitalist mammon worshipers, gives first-class allegiance to second-class values. Passive paganism, which characterizes average churchmembcrs, gives second-class allegiance to first-class values. We must realize more than we have that all men by birth are members of Church C. " The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." The universe is a great Cathedral. The earth is our chapel in the Cathedral. All of us are born in Church C. Church B is made up of men and women publicly committed to Christ. Church B is designed to be an example, a guide, a teacher of God's Love to the members of Church C. Church A is the fellowship of men possessed by God's Love, the Light of the World.
The thing that makes virtue possible is trust. Trust is therefore the foundation of heroic living. The thing that makes sin possible is lack of trust. Lack of trust, or anxiety, is therefore the foundation of all sin. Saints become saints because they trust God and man and the world. Criminals become criminals because they trust neither God nor man nor the world. Since they do not trust man, they cannot trust themselves; they are forced to trust their own selfishness, the one thing in the universe that cannot be trusted.
The cause of showy almsgiving is anxiety, the fear that one may not sufficiently impress his neighbors with his virtue. The cause of alcoholism is not alcohol but anxiety, lack of trust that the problem-solving God is adequate for every frustrating situation. The cause of showy prayers in public, which Jesus condemned, is anxiety, lack of trust in God's Love. The cause of greed, the lust for money, and the lust for power, is anxiety lack of trust in God's adequacy.
If the cause of selfishness is anxiety, the cure of selfishness is trust. What is trust? Jesus continually taught singleness of heart toward God and singleness of purpose to accomplish his will in this earth. Trust and singleness of heart are therefore two words for the same thing.
Matthew presents the Sermon on the Mount in three chapters. The central idea of the first chapter is that recognition of lack is the beginning of growth. The central idea of the second is that trust, which cancels anxiety and sin, is developed primarily through prayer, through direct experience of the strength and love of the Almighty, direct experience of his trustworthiness. Men do not pray well together who do not pray rightly alone. Prayer with others is public worship, a necessity for growth in trust. Public worship that is not prayer with others is sterile. Men who do not open their hearts to God when they are alone seldom open their hearts to him at church. Public worship without personal prayer is form without life. Private prayer is therefore a desperate necessity even in public worship.
Private prayer is creative only when it is a direct encounter with God. God releases his power and love, his confidence and faith, in and through the life daily surrendered to him. The first thing in creative prayer is the recognition of the adequacy of God. Superstition is the attempt to control God; true prayer is the surrender of the self to God's control. One time-proved minimum method is to spend ten minutes a day reading a psalm or a chapter from the Gospels or the Epistles, thinking of God's power and goodness; then another five minutes surrendering yourself to be used for his purposes, to be made a blessing, a channel of his healing Love.
Let me offer a personal testimony. When I neglect private prayer, the opening of my heart and life to divine criticism and divine re-creation, I immediately experience loss of power, loss of love, loss of creativity. The springs of power and usefulness dry up at their source. When I withdraw my heart from God, he withdraws his hand from me. Then the nothing that I am without him makes itself felt, dismally, uncreatively, tragically. I have experienced the increase of power through prayer, and the decrease of power without it, so often, that I believe it to be life's first lesson, the most important lesson in Christianity. Christianity is not merely a statement about God, that God is the kind of Love enacted in Jesus Christ. More than this, Christianity is the release of this healing Love in and through surrendered lives. To keep the door closed, through the neglect of creative prayer, is to leave the soul hungry, lonely, and cold uncreative, loveless, and useless. Activity is not creativity. We are active enough without prayer, but creative only as we are open to the Love of God flowing healingly, forgivingly, redeemingly, into and through us for the world.
Anxiety, which increases as prayer decreases, is the cause, not only of sin, but also of insanity. Men's hearts fail them for fear fear of the known, but even more, fear of the unknown. Nameless fears crush the soul that is not daily reunited with its own depth, its own source of life, its own source of power. Not to pray is to stew endlessly in one's own juice.
Listen to this ancient word: "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee " (Isa. 26:3, KJV). That is the meaning of die second chapter of the Sermon on the Mount. Paul put it this way: " I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (II Tim. 1:12, KJV). Augustine expressed the same idea: "O Lord, thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are restless till they rest in thee." Prayer is the process of resting the mind upon God, letting him release his wisdom, his confidence, his adequacy, in you and through you. More prayer is more peace and more power more effectiveness, more creativity, more joy. Less prayer is more anxiety, more worry, and less constructive work.
God is not suffering with an inferiority complex. He does not need to be bolstered up with our perpetual praise. Prayer is our necessity, not his. Prayer is not our gift to him but his gift to us his all-powerful, all-wise, all-sufficient Love released in us and through us for the world.
Prayer is a simple necessity. All the life we have, the only life we have, is his life. He is the life in all that lives, the existence in all that exists. He is the strength in the atheist's criticism of immoral religion. He is the life in our bodies and in our minds. But it is his will that he become also the life in our souls, and this he cannot do without our invitation. Without our invitation he made us and is now the upthrust of energy within us. But only with our invitation, sincerely given, will he become the life in our souls, the downthrust of Love through our lives. Without his life in our souls, the light that is in us is darkness. Without our prayer he continues mercifully to be the life in our bodies and our minds; without our prayer he feeds and clothes us. But only with our prayer will he become the power and peace in our souls, the redeeming creativity for others in our lives.
And here is a practical hurdle. Trust throws out anxiety, and trust increases in prayer. But again and again you will experience, as you begin to pray, an immediate increase of anxiety. You become fearful, apprehensive, lest you fail to pray aright or enough. This is natural and inevitable. But it is only a hurdle, a test of sincerity. If you truly recognize that you are perpetually, totally, in need, you will press through the dark cloud of spiritual anxiety. Let prayer therefore continue. God hears your first uttered word, your first unuttered purpose, and your very prayer is his activity, his response, his answer. He is there. If he were not there, you would not be.
And you must be on your guard against another thing. The purpose of prayer is not happiness for its own sake, but an increase of usefulness through trust. It is not always God's will that prayer result in a sudden feeling of lightness and victory. Lightness and victory are not always our due. There is work to be done, responsible work in our daily jobs, the work of love in our families. The purpose of prayer is not unproductive happiness, but productive trust. Open your heart to God, acknowledge that he is the life in your body, the life in your mind, and even more, the desire for him in your soul. Open your heart toward God, and keep it open. Thus does God release his power, his guidance, his healing love in and through you.
Once, not long ago, I felt hopelessly defeated, frustrated, unproductive, uncreative. And I was. I had let go of the hand of God. I was running along on my own. But my batteries had run down. My gas tank was empty. Exhausted, in an agony of anxiety, I sank down upon my bed. I knew that I needed God, God simply, God totally. For a while, nonetheless, I continued to wallow in my own helplessness. After a while, knowing that I must, I began to pray. My prayer ran something like this: "O Lord, continue and increase thy creation in me, and through me, and in spite of me. Increase thy work and thy love in me, and through me, and in spite of me." Knowing nothing better to do, I repeated this prayer, over and over again. A cheap ecstacy never came, but there did come gradually a sense of power and effectiveness, a decrease of anxiety, increase of confidence. Presently I went forth a new man. What we were yesterday means nothing at all. It is what we are today that counts. It is not yesterday but today that we are lifeless, loveless, and useless without a fresh release of divine confidence, divine power, divine love in and through us for the world.
Remember the giant whose mother was the earth? He grew weak when lifted and held above the earth, and Hercules, learning the secret, thus easily defeated him. When the giant touched the earth, his strength was redoubled. We are exactly like that. Our mother earth is God. Prayer is not something you can take or leave; prayer is a daily necessity. And do not fear that prayer will decrease your activity. It will simply make your activity creative, and turn your unproductive labor into productive love.
The Thankful Heart
If it were easy to be a Christian, Jesus would not have known the cross. If human moral evolution were a simple matter, the challenge and hardship of life would be meaningless. The personal encounter with God beyond and within is the serious beginning of a new and difficult skill, possibly the most difficult of all skills, acquired slowly, and seldom or never perfectly developed the skill of constant thankfulness, what Brother Lawrence called " the perpetual consciousness of the presence of God."
Remember the line: I had no shoes, and thought I was poor, till I met a man who had no feet.
Griping about the food, the weather, the inevitable daily irritation, ill-health, misfortune griping is our favorite indoor sport. People who never gripe, never complain, who arc always grateful, always joyful, are quite beyond our comprehension. The gripers are many, die thankful are few. You can always start an agreeable conversation with a total stranger in a railway station by offering a gripe of some kind about politics, about the weather, about Russia. To speak thankfully to a stranger is to be regarded as an enemy alien, a lunatic, a dangerous character, probably a communist. To gripe is to be regarded as a friend. You might put it this way: to gripe is human; to give thanks, divine.
And here is a strange fact. People who have the most arc usually the least thankful, and people who have the least arc often the most thankful. Rich folk are seldom thankful; poor folk often are.
Everyone knows that to live with people who are always griping is to to live with hell. Most divorces are caused, not by adultery, but by incompatibility or mental cruelty. These are high-sounding words for O.L.G., that is, one long gripe. Gripers create hell all around them. Thankful people create heaven on earth. The average divorced couple would have made their marriage one whale of a success if their griping had been reduced, and their gratitude increased. That is, if there had been a change of heart. Their problem was not outside, but inside, them.
And here is an interesting thing. The basic difference between a prison and a monastery is just the difference between griping and gratitude. Imprisoned criminals spend every waking moment griping. Self-imprisoned saints spend every waking moment giving thanks. Yet both live, relatively speaking, on bread and water. In both hotels the room service is poor. When a criminal becomes a saint, the prison becomes a monastery. Conversely, when a saint gives up gratitude and starts griping, a monastery becomes a prison.
Let us look at it this way. To have a thankful heart is to be invulnerable, invincible, unconquerable. The Christian martyrs had a lot to gripe about in the Roman Colosseum: they were herded like cattle into filthy dungeons, then torn by wild beasts. The martyrs might well have said aloud: "This is a raw deal. What are we getting out of being Christians? Nothing, and worse than nothing. The Christian God has either let us down, or he is a monster, delighting in the torture of his disciples." The martyrs might well have damned Christianity, and no doubt some of them did. Yet most of them sang hymns as they were torn asunder. A joy, beyond human understanding, possessed them. God gave them the thankful heart, and they sensed what they could not have known that their blood was the price of Christian civilization. They died for all the babies that the Romans would no longer throw into the sewers. They died for all the slaves whom Roman masters would no longer treat as things; they made all slaves the equals of their masters, and one man forever another man's equal before God.
Principles are easier to define than to practice, but I think the secret of Christian joy can be stated simply, though it cannot be simply possessed. Be thankful for the worst (not because it is bad, but because God is good), and the better will come. Be thankful for the sting of defeat, and defeat will lose its sting. Be tliankful for victory, and victory will lose its sinful pride. As Paul put it, " In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God." Average Americans give feeble thanks one day a year, in late November, and gripe the other three hundred and sixty-four days. When the heart itself is not thankful, Thanksgiving Day is just another Gripe Day.
Christianity is never interested in a set of rules; it is always interested in a set of soul. And the difference between the grateful and the griping heart is precisely a set of soul. It is the thankful set of soul that God requires, for trust produces it, and out of it flows the healing of the world love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. No law was ever passed against the thankful heart; every existing law was passed against the lack of it.
One evening not long ago I explained the necessity of the tliankful set of soul to a wealthy woman at a supper party. I said: " In the past few months I have been increasingly impressed that the basic Christian demand is thankfulness. You must learn to thank God for all that happens to you for happiness, victory, success, health, but also, and equally, for unhappiness, defeat, failure, and ill-health. To thank God sincerely for unhappiness, defeat, failure, and ill-health is to conquer your anxiety and agony, to set your mind to work, efficiently and objectively, with God, to solve the problem in hand. Thankfulness is not a substitute for intelligent problem-solving; it is precisely the thing that makes the solution possible."
This wealthy woman replied: "What do you know about suffering? You are disgustingly healthy; you are doing all the things you want to do; you have a lovely wife, three children, and five grandchildren. Suppose you had been in my shoes? I had to stand by helplessly while my baby daughter became ill, lingered, and died in spite of everything the doctors and I could do. Just how do I go about being thankful for a tragedy like that? "
I have suffered very little, but I did not learn the necessity of the thankful heart from my own life alone. I learned it rather from the martyrs, whose joy overcame their fear, whose trust overcame their anxiety, whose gratitude overcame their griping, whose unconquerable thankfulness finally overcame the Roman Empire, and will eventually make the entire earth one community. I learned the necessity of thankfulness, not alone from my own meager sufferings, but from a man who spent nine years in agony as a chronic arthritic, and who honestly thanks God for the suffering that taught him humble love for others who suffer that is, for everyone. Before his ordeal by suffering he loved only, or mainly, himself, and did not know that other people existed. This man learned from suffering what he had not learned in all the books he had studied for his Ph.D. He learned the necessity of the thankful mind. His thankful love now flows healingly throughout America and England. Alone and well, he would have been food for himself and his family. Through suffering God has made him food for five hundred thousand.
I did not learn the necessity of constant thankfulness from my own limited suffering alone, but from Job, who suffered and yet said, " Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? " (Job 2:10, KJV).
I did not learn the necessity of the thankful heart from my own experience alone, but from a friend who is now an arthritic cripple. He has had a dozen major operations and, according to the doctors, will never walk again. Undoubtedly this man has every right to spend twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four, and sixty minutes out of every hour, griping his head off against the universe. Instead, he has discovered the Christian set of soul thankfulness, which is another word for joy. He is thankful that God is God all the time and in every situation, that God is all-powerful, all-wise, and all-sufficient Love. He is thankful for the daily strength of the Holy Spirit. He is thankful for the thousands of kindnesses that his fellow human beings have done for him. He is thankful that he has learned to pull himself from his wheel chair into his car, fold the wheel chair, and pull it in behind him, and drive to his office for a daily eight hours of work. You say the man is crazy to be so outrageously afflicted, yet thankful? Then it is a good kind of insanity, and we need more of it. Maybe it is true that you don't have to be crazy to be happy, but it helps. Of course it is barely possible that he is sane, the way God made men to be, thankful, joyful, unconquerable, and we gripers are the ones who are crazy. Look at it this way: if he had made up his mind to gripe his way through life he would now lie in his bed wallowing in self-pity, of use to no one, a drain on everyone. As it is, through his thankful heart God has released in him the power to be useful. He is the breadwinner for his family, and a light to his community. Who is crazy, the griper or the grateful?
You don't have to have a Ph.D. in theology to see this point. You don't even have to be a Christian to see that gratitude makes sense. Even an unbeliever can see that it is better to make the best out of the worst than to make the worst out of the best. Christ turned a cross into Christian civilization. His Love will create later, and better, civilizations after we have destroyed this one through our failure to be grateful. Paul turned a stoning into the conversion of Asia Minor. Most of us spend half our time and two thirds of our energy turning the best into the worst. Our anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow exhausts our energy today. God is Good. Life is Good. Nature is not evil. When we turn God and life and nature into one long gripe, we turn the best into the worst by a wrong set of soul. We turn great opportunities into stomach ulcers, wholeness into a heart attack. Saints experience as many raw deals as any of us, possibly more, yet they turn the worst into the best by a thankful set of soul. They have learned the psychology of joy to live one day at a time, to let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day. They accept each day, each moment, as it is, and make the best of it. With God's help, they make the bad good and the good better.
Let me tell you about a man who has taught me the meaning of the thankful heart. He claims to be thirty-two inches tall, but I think he has added 20 per cent for advertising. He looks about twenty-six inches tall, or maybe twenty-four. He is a midget, and what is more, a hunchback, and what is still more, a cripple. He walks on tiny crutches about a foot long. He was certainly behind the door when they gave out the bodies. There must have been a shortage of material the day he was made. Maybe the CIO angels were on strike. He could have spent his life in self-pity, griping about everything, and, as far as the eye can see, with perfect justice. Who could blame him if he were an inveterate griper? But strangely enough he has cleansed the gripe from the recesses of his heart; he has turned all his gripe into gratitude. From one point of view the man has another handicap: his wife is six feet tall and weights over two hundred pounds. Hardly an even contest a heavyweight matched against a flyweight. And he has a teen-age son a head taller than himself. Yet the little man is the head of his house, a miracle for normal men, and asks no one to support him. He is a watch repairman, and a good one. He pays his own way, carries his own freight. Further, he drives his own car, with the controls lengthened so his stubby legs can reach them. The little man is all soul and no body. His pastor told me he was the only saint, the only thankful heart, in his church. The little man has five brothers, each six feet tall all body and no soul. They are seventy-two inches tall, and every inch a gripe. They live for themselves. He lives for the glory of God and the well-being of his church and community. He wasn't given a great deal of starting capital, but has turned his small principal into profit. Better than the rest of us, he knows how to live. There are only twenty-six or at most thirty-two inches of him, but every inch is thanksgiving.
A thankful heart is a skill, like piano- or violin-playing. You don't play a masterpiece the first day. It takes practice and patience. Yet the right direction is chosen in a single day and re-chosen every day. And there is pleasure in playing a simple tune. The great masters enjoyed playing long before they became masters. If they had not enjoyed playing, they would never have become masters.
Make a twenty-four-hour vow to let no gripe escape from your lips, to let no gripe enter or remain in your heart, to thank God specifically for every " damn nuisance" that comes your way, every jack-high hand you are dealt at bridge. At the end of the first twenty-four hours, you will find that you have not succeeded too well, yet that there is a noticeable change in you for the better. Your family and friends will see the difference, whether you do or not. Then try another twenty-four-hour vow. Soon you will discover that God is giving himself to you in ways beyond your dreams, that new power, new confidence, new effectiveness, are released in you, and through you, for the world.
The Community-forming Power
Learning to get along with yourself and your limitations is an exceedingly difficult skill; not less difficult is the fine art of getting along with other living mortals with Russians, Africans, and Americans, with Catholics, Communists, and Capitalists, witJi citizens of the same community, with members of the same church.
It is strange but true: hot tempers really come from cold hearts. Recently in an Eastern city a very fine person said to me: " I love my church, the pastor, and the people but there is one member who is always trying to run things; I can't stand her, and as long as she is there, I will never attend." This splendid individual, whom God undoubtedly loves, is also a test of his patience. The hard thing to take seriously is that (in different ways) we are all alike in this regard God loves us all, each of us individually and uniquely, yet each of us, individually and uniquely, is at times (perhaps all the time in some degree) a real test of his patience. The trick is to be patient with others especially if you want them to be patient with you. As Jesus said, " If you do not forgive every man from your heart, neither will God forgive you! " (Matt. 6:15, paraphrase). To low characters (aren't we all?) it is always a high standard. It is just when people are hardest to love that they most need to be loved, and that we most need to love them lest bitterness consume our souls!
Love (which is mostly patience with difficult persons and in trying times) is precisely a skill; no man (or woman, or nation) masters it in a day. Is it not obvious that mankind in tlie twentieth century is primarily concerned with lesser skills ? Too many, both in and out of high office, consider the skill of love a luxury, the phony-baloney of starry-eyed visionaries, excess baggage we can do better without. But, as Jesus said, woe to those who are quickly discouraged. All progress hitherto has been slow in the man, and slower in the mass. If progress were not slow, it could not be sure; if it were not slow, it would not be progress. Love is the tough day-by-day service of truth, the practical daily service of freedom (or fair play); it is the lesson of the past, the one thing needful in the present, and (I think) the inevitable achievement of the future the alternative is extinction! People called saints are really scientists of the spirit, that is, tough-minded folk with tender hearts: in the religion called science and the science called religion these friends everywhere recognize that love has always been, and is now more desperately than ever, the minimum necessity of survival. For the entire human race, to be or not to be is the issue. Love casts its ballot " to be."
Unfortunately the skill of love (as the minimum necessity of survival) is not always valued by church folk; further, it is sometimes valued very highly by so-called secular folk. When it is valued, in mind and word and deed, whether by men of the world or by men of the church, it is called, in theology, the presence and character of the Holy Spirit the power that makes enemies into friends, the wisdom that creates a working community out of all kinds of hard-shelled nationalists and dogmatists (the folk with soft brains and hard hearts). When churchmen are not too busy running secondary errands, the thing that really concerns them is the increase of the Holy Spirit in the human spirit. This is the cause, the human cause, the divine cause, the educational, political, secular, and religious cause; there is no other!
When the human spirit wakens, it is always holy, always one with the Holy Spirit, as Jesus emphasized. The Logos, the Word of God, reason itself in man, is always sacred, though forced to operate with a limited perspective. When tough-minded reason sifts and sorts and acts, struggles for truth, freedom, and fair play, it is the Holy Spirit. At its worst, religion frustrates the growth of humanity, the growth of divinity, in man; for example, Jews and Arabs today, in part because of religion, seem incapable of community in the Middle East, incapable of remembering their common ancestor Abraham. At its worst, religion falsely evokes first-class loyalty to second-class values, imprisons the person within the partial and provincial, focuses his attention on the lead pipe rather than the water of life. At its best, religion calls forth the king in the commoner, makes men big in mind and heart, creates one world big enough for all the children of earth.
To begin with, the human spirit, when fully awake in the Holy Spirit, moves in force against every form of oppression. Men governed from outside are submen, puppets, machines, robots expendable pawns on the chessboards of dictators. The integrity and activity of the individual mind are not secondary concerns to God or man. Totalitarian churches and tyrannical governments fear one thing only the integrity or activity of the individual mind. Indeed this fear is their only wisdom. The billions they spend for propaganda exactly measure their fear of the thinking individual. If the individual were by nature the dupe, the dope, the manageable moron they consider him to be, these expenditures would be wholly unnecessary. Gestapos and thought police (in town and gown) are absolute necessities to religious or secular dictators the freedom and truth of the individual mind must be silenced and kept silent at any cost. Unless the individual mind is neutralized, diverted, or lulled to sleep, the dictator can neither get nor keep his show on the road.
The first move of the Holy Spirit in the human spirit, the first thrust of divine and human reason, unseats the dictator. History shows that this victory is not so easy as it looks, yet is nonetheless inevitable. Why? Because reason itself, the Holy Spirit, is structural in man, though often overlaid by secondary cares. In itself, however, it is by nature unconquerable and unquenchable. You can put men's bodies into prison; you can imprison their minds only with their own consent. Like murder, reason will out, and the first thing it murders is the mental or political lock step. In practice, it is sometimes expedient (whether or not necessary) to kill the dictator. In principle, it is never necessary to kill him; he too is a forgivable child of the universe, a test of divine and human patience; it is necessary only to extract the poison from his fangs to render him as harmless as a dove.
The main problem today, I think, is this: more than superficially, we have betrayed the Renaissance and the Reformation; we have retreated from the ground they gained. With sweat and tears our fathers in science and religion won an Anzio beachhead for the thinking individual against all tyranny. Down deep we may still be their spiritual descendants; down deep we may not have abandoned the prize they bought with their blood. However, more than is commonly realized, we have surrendered by disuse, by default, the individual right to think, to seek truth, to exercise freedom. Perhaps the human spirit is only resting only temporarily asleep gathering strength for a greater and better battle against the principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual blindness in pulpit and Pentagon.
Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and company fought for our right to seek, to read, to weigh, to interpret, the Word of God. Americans, generally speaking and Europeans too couldn't care less. We have ignored the gift our hardy forebears bequeathed to us. We seldom seek or read or weigh or interpret the Word of God one way or another. Everybody owns a Bible nobody reads one. Among the few who read, still fewer read with eyes wide open, with the steady will to find and appropriate what is permanently true! Essentially, I believe, we have returned to the B.R. mind the mental outlook Before the Renaissance and the Reformation. When men read and think the Bible, more than superficially, they stand on their feet, both intellectually and physically, and stop the tyrant in his tracks. When men neither read nor think the Bible, the tyrant rules without fear of revolt. And the tyrant is not always a man; it is sometimes (as in America?) a majority mediocrity in thought and speech.
You ask, " What can I do about it? " I reply, " Everything! " When you, individually, leave the reading and weighing of the Bible to alleged experts, you cast your vote for religious and secular dictatorship. It used to be said that the devil trembles when the saint kneels to pray. I say to you that the tyrant trembles when the common man probes the Bible. Until the average citizen searches in the Word of God for the Word of God, the tyrant doesn't worry about him at all for the giant within him is asleep. Only individuals who hear (within their own minds) the Word of God are capable of saying to the tyrant, " We ought to obey God rather than men " (Acts 5129, KJV). Where individuals do not hear the Word of Christ speaking in them from the Gospels, democracy is form without substance, an empty name, a trade mark, with neither vitality nor actuality. The dictator doesn't care if his tyranny is labeled Democracy. In fact, he prefers it. The Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia is called The People's Democracy. It is not the word " Democracy " that the dictator fears, but the thinking individual. The first work of the Holy Spirit is the quickening of divine reason in human reason the igniting of the passion for truth, freedom, and fair play in the common man, who is not so common as he looks.
The second work of the Holy Spirit is the release of the human spirit from the solitary self-confinement (called solipsism, or extreme individualism). The individualist lives in a shrinking world of his own, unable to commune with other men. To live in a phone booth is fine, but if you never take down the receiver it's mentally suffocating. It's as though you were saying: " I myself want to rule the world, to make everybody dance to my tune but the current tyrant got there first; all I can do is sit here, consumed with helpless envy." The dictator ignores or silences the thinking individual; the individualist ignores or silences (in his own heart) the community of persons. He has no real concern for the common truth, the common freedom. There are many of these frustrated miniature Hitlers bitter folk who crawl into an intellectual hole and pull the hole in after them. They want no part of the community of men. They say to the human race, " You can go to Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire! " Like Ivan Karamazov, they try to hand back to God their ticket to life. Freedom from responsibility is their one moving passion. Let someone else defend equal justice for Negroes, Jews, and Englishmen. They desire only to live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to themselves. The church is really for people who want to help live; the individualist has a different and smaller objective to live unto himself alone. At the extreme, he is insane for to be insane is to be a minority of one. As the Jews taught us: out of the mouths of at least two witnesses shall every word be established. That is, even in faculty meeting, or in Congress (the same thing), every motion to be taken seriously has to be seconded by somebody.
The Holy Spirit, the growth of reason, of deep reason, in man, is at work always and everywhere for one thing last in achievement but first in importance: the creation of dynamic community, real fellowship in mind and life across every shattering difference. Difference is canceled by hobnailed collectivism, but confirmed by spiritual community. That is, true community begins with respect for each individual's right to struggle for truth and freedom, to hold steadfastly the view he finds convincing even to make his own mistakes! Collectivism is coerced lock step, and coerced lock step is the denial of dignity, the denial of love. Where community exists (in mind and heart), men dwell together with a minimum of greed and lust, a minimum of mutual vindictiveness, and a maximum of mutual respect; together they seek the common truth and the common freedom; together they protect all kinds of difference in color and conviction.
Each denomination Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant exists to quicken the individual mind to hear (for himself and with others) the Word of God, to commune with all men, whether enemies or friends since they also are trying to hear. In practice, each denomination sometimes strengthens and increases its proud separation from the whole family of man, erects a high wall of mutual admiration for those who are within, and of mutual contempt for those who are without.
The choice is painful but simple: modern man must discover and develop within him the life of reason; he must focus his attention on the depth in him; he must let the Word of God, the Holy Spirit, enlarge his little soul to the dimensions of a cathedral or he will be passed over, set aside, transcended by a nobler handiwork of God, exactly as the ape was passed over, set aside, transcended by the emergence of man. For a thousand centuries, more or less, man has carried the ball, and often lost it. Today again he seems to be losing it and not alone in Little Rock. As an Arkansas segregationist put it, " If God be Faubus, who can be against us ? " The divine spotlight may turn from man to a better player, a new creation with greater moral intelligence! The bypassing of man may become a historic necessity!
It is not that man has made mistakes; the central problem may be that man is a mistake. He seems, for example, morally incapable of getting along with all his neighbors even on the same campus, in the same church, or in the same village. He finds it easier to get along with Russians who have the good sense to be a long way off. As one honest chap expressed it, " If my neighbors would move to China, I could love them too! "
Presumably, God is not terribly worried about the mistakes man makes; he is, rather, concerned about the mistake man could prove to be. It is better to make a mistake than be one. If man demonstrates conclusively, finally, and in public that he is a mistake, that he is a miscarriage, he will be replaced inevitably by a being with an active intelligence. It is the hope of our Jewish friends that the higher form of intelligence did, in fact, begin with Moses; it is the hope of Christian folk that the next stage in creation (the new \ind of man) did, in fact, begin with Jesus, and begins again in power when any individual mind begins to think with him.
From those who take time (or make time) to think with Moses and Jesus (and their friends in all faiths and in all disciplines) must and will come the new creation, humanity itself brought to dynamic maturity by the constructive patience of the universe. It is our hope that the words are not a dream but a prophecy:
" These things shall be: a loftier race
Than e'er the world hath known shall rise
With flame of freedom in their souls
And light of knowledge in their eyes."
Love Is Slow Magic
The encounter with God beyond the gods makes possible new skills of mutual acceptance and forbearance with all kinds of difficult people (oneself to begin with); the same encounter continued quickens one's urgency to create new men in a new world, but with it a growing realization that men create quickly but poorly while God creates slowly and well. He does indeed make men new but seldom in the mass and never in an hour.
When love makes any difference at all, it makes all the difference in the world. If, as Christ has always taught us, love is the nature of reality, it follows, to begin with, that love is the difference between maximum and minimum prayer.
All religion, even false or partly false religion, is prayer. Without prayer there is no religion at all, whether good or bad. The abracadabra of the witch doctor is not so different from the hocus-pocus of the priest as you might imagine; the abracadabra of the witch doctor is, to him, a form of prayer; he uses the power of prayer to bless those whom he loves and to curse those whom he hates. To say that the witch doctor's prayer contains no power at all is to underestimate it; all prayer is power, whether well or ill used, and none of us uses it well enough.
Because prayer is power, the intelligent man, and even the man who wants to be intelligent, must do his best to distinguish between true and false prayer, or, if you prefer, between prayer well or ill used.
What, then, is the difference between maximum and minimum prayer, between prayer at its best and prayer at its worst? Love, released in the soul by the Holy Spirit, is the difference. Minimum prayer uses the power of prayer for selfish ends. Minimum prayer has always been called superstition, the attempt to control God, to make a bellhop out of the Almighty, to bend the universe to our small purposes. Yet even minimum prayer is prayer; because God is the Lover of mankind, he listens to minimum prayer and makes the best of it. For example, we are offering a typical minimum prayer when we ask: " O Lord, make me rich, make me personally successful, make me strong and well, make me victorious over my enemies. Give me an advance reservation for heaven. Save me. Give me this. Give me that. Bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife, us four, no more. Amen."
If minimum prayer is power for selfish ends, maximum prayer is power dedicated to love, to die work of the Holy Spirit in the world and in the soul. So great is the meekness of God, when it is for the common good, that he does run our errands for us; he does delight to become our bellhop; he docs, at times, answer even selfish prayers if thereby the one who prays can be led in the direction of love. But maximum prayer is full self-surrender to the purpose of God and creative fellowship with him, creative work with him for the good of all men. For example, we are offering a maximum prayer when we ask, " O Lord, let thy love and power possess me, cleanse me, and make me a blessing to all mankind; let thy work, thy miracle, thy grace, flow unhindered in me, through me, and in spite of me, for the healing of the world." We are offering a maximum prayer when we ask, " Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven " (Matt. 6:10, KJV), and with our prayer offer ourselves, and all that we have, to God and his enterprise, for he is making and will complete one family, one brotherhood, one fellowship out of all our insane fragments. In simplest terms, minimum prayer attempts to control God; maximum prayer surrenders itself to God's control. Minimum prayer seeks to use God; maximum prayer seeks to be used by God, to be made a channel of creative, healing, renewing love. We all want something from God for our own good; often enough we fail to realize that God wants something from us for the good of all men. We want God's help in our work and in our lives; and he gives it to us all liberally and upbraids us not; but true religion, maximum prayer, begins when we see that God wants our help in his work and his love, for his work of love is abundant life for all men. You might put it this way: religion in general is to pray for help; religion in particular, essential Christianity, is to pray that God will make us helpful.
Similarly, love is the difference between invisible and visible magic, between the slow creative power of God and the quick uncreative power of human hypnotism and trickery. The sleight-of-hand artist and the hypnotist perform visible wonders; quiet constructive religion, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, performs wonders that are often invisible; it is sometimes plagued with sleight-of-hand artists and hypnotists in sheep's clothing. The sleight-of-hand artist, when he makes no pretense of piety, is a splendid entertainer. Who does not enjoy seeing the rabbit appear out of the hat? Wonderful to see the woman sawed asunder, and then appear whole before your very eyes! It's great good fun to watch quick visible magic, man-made magic. The magician appears to have discovered a short cut to creation. What God takes a long time, relatively, to achieve, the magician can accomplish in a few seconds. However, as we watch the magician, we know that nothing is actually created; it is only make-believe. The magic of God slowly, but actually, creates; there is no make-believe about it.
The universe is not less a miracle because God has been creating it for five or six billion years. This planet our corner of heaven is not less a miracle because God has been developing it for two or three billion years. Man himself is not less a miracle because God has been slowly creating him for 500,000 years, or 50,000, depending upon the imagination of the particular geologist with whom you are talking. God's magic is real, but compared with the handiwork of the magician, it is slow and cumbersome. The love of God is the slow magic which has created, and now sustains and advances, the life of the world and of all mankind. But it is, for the most part, invisible simply because nothing else is visible; you can see only what God's magic has created. You see trees and mountains and men, and you stupidly ask, " Where is the magic? " You can't see the magic because you are looking at it and can see nothing else, for there is nothing else to see. The sleight-of-hand artist performs quick visible magic, and, like the children we are, we clap our hands with glee. God performs slow invisible magic for the life of the world, and we sit around like stupid oafs and are bored.
Love is the difference between creative power and uncreative pretense, between truth and trickery. Faithfulness in marriage offers only the slow, invisible magic of love, while unfaithfulness offers at times the quick and visible magic of hypnotism and make-believe. Faithfulness in work, day in and day out, offers only the slow, invisible magic of love, for it carries the burdens of the world; shady business transactions or poker-playing or fools playing the rackets all get-rich-quick schemes offer the misleading short cut, the quick and visible magic of make-believe; they carry no burdens for mankind. God sometimes makes men moral in a hurry, when sudden stress and strain try men's souls, and they choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong; but what appears an instantaneous conversion is not so sudden as it seems, for twenty or thirty years of moral training, however poorly assimilated, have gone before it, have prepared the man for the hour of trial. Jesus said, " Be thou faithful over a few things, and I will make thee ruler over many things." (Luke 16:10; 19:17, KJV, paraphrase.)
A man's growth from lesser to greater faithfulness is not the quick and visible magic of hypnotism and make-believe, but the slow magic of love, the creative power of God. Rome was not built in a day; the City of God is not built in a night; the sanctuary in the soul, where the human spirit is embraced and cleansed and made creative by the Holy Spirit, is not built in an hour. Heroes, martyrs, and saints appear in the hour of noise, but were prepared in hours of silence. God seems to work slowly, because we want quick and visible results; yet what we build lasts for an hour; what God builds lasts forever. God actually creates quickly, in the Greenwich mean time of heaven, for he actually creates; trickery and hypnotism offer only make-believe creation; they actually create nothing. When the trick is done, you are no farther along than you were. When you wake from hypnotic sleep, you are still the same person rested perhaps and rest is good, rest is necessary but the old remains; nothing has become new.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin played a pleasant tune; multitudes followed him, but they were trusting children, and he led them to their death. Hitler piped an exciting tune; multitudes followed, and with him destroyed themselves and half the world.
In religion, as in marriage and in daily work, love is often embarrassed and put to shame by the legerdemainiacs, by the quick magic of make-believe. Faithfulness in marriage is often embarrassed by the quick and visible magic of promiscuity. Faithfulness in work is often embarrassed by the visible and glamorous magic of get-rich-quick trickery. Faithfulness in religion, the slow magic of love, the invisible miracle of God, is often embarrassed by the quick and visible magic of mass hypnotism, of religious hysteria. "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matt. 7:20, KJV), but also, " by their lack of fruits." Mass hypnotism and religious hysteria offer neither more nor less than entertaining make-believe; they make much noise, gather large crowds, capture the newspaper headlines, attract the newsreel cameramen, fill the sports stadiums, but bear no constructive fruit.
The drug wears off; the noise dies; the crowd departs in search of other thrills, other short cuts, other false alarms; the newspapers look elsewhere for headlines; the newsreel cameramen return to the legs of the movie actresses, from which, in a sense, they have never departed; the stadiums return from faith to football; and you are right where you were. The only thing you have lost is time time that might have been used for the slow creative magic of God's love, for maximum prayer and the constructive work that always follows it. " Love vaunteth not itself." (I Cor. 13:4, KJV, paraphrase.) The religious mass hypnotist returns whence he came; the underfed and underpaid and underloved clergy continue to labor with creative faithfulness in half-empty churches. Yet the churches are not so empty as they look, for God is in them, and his slow and patient magic continues from year to year to make evil men good, and good men better, and the best men humbler and more useful; the whole church, whether empty or full, continues to bear silent witness in every street to the Love who is the reality of the world, the Love who was made flesh at Bethlehem and shed abroad in humble hearts at Pentecost, the all-powerful, all-wise, and all-sufficient Love who is now available to all who make the maximum prayer.
The slow magic of love has created all that is good and new and forward-moving in the world; the slow magic of love is now creating the future, the better, and the more; the quick and visible magic of mass hypnotism is of the past and returns whence it came. " When thou prayest," said Jesus, " thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [or the hypnotists], who love to stand in the synagogues [or the stadiums], and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men; verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (Matt. 6:5-6, KJV, paraphrase.)
Maximum prayer is the slow magic of love, the labor of the Holy Spirit; it works silently, behind closed doors, and, as Thomas a Kempis put it, " blusheth to be seen in public." Love is often embarrassed by the fact that the much-publicized religious hypnotists receive the credit when love's private prayers are publicly answered. Many a noisy artist of religious make-believe has been given both praise and gold for the healing of the body, or other answered prayer, when God has listened to the saint praying and working alone. But love is prepared for human injustice and inertia; love is prepared to be unseen and unsung. Love is prepared to have its works credited to the account of hypnotists. For God is the reward of those who love, and love seeks not the credit but the work that makes man's life abundant. Love may falter when it receives no human praise, but it cannot fail, for it seeks not the praise of men but the approval of God. Love is often embarrassed by the visible and quick results of the short-cut experts, but in the end it has no fear; it knows that love's embarrassment, dedicated to God, is itself creative, for men cannot learn overnight to distinguish between the slow creative magic of reality and the quick uncreative magic of make-believe. Men must, and do, learn at their own pace. And, in time, what they learn is love, for there is nothing else to learn.
Jesus sent the multitudes away, for they sought not wisdom but bread, not faith but a false alarm, not the slow magic of love but the quick magic of make-believe. He said, " If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." (Matt. 16:24, KJV.)
" And now abideth faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love " the slow and invisible, but steadily creative, magic of love. (I Cor. 13:13, KJV, paraphrase.)
No Death in Love
A personal encounter with reality, with God beyond and within, is not the end but the beginning of immortality, the breakthrough of love's slow magic in human flesh. Years ago a man of fifty said to me:
" We come into this world naked and bare;
We go from here we know not where.
But if we are thoroughbreds here
We shall be thoroughbreds there."
The question " If a man die, shall he live again? " (Job 14:14, KJV) is natural and therefore universal. In some degree, human beings have always believed in conscious personal survival beyond the death of the body, and they are going to go right on believing in it with or without anybody's permission.
An attempt, however, must be made to answer the question, What does immortality mean? The best of our knowledge on any subject is inadequate yet necessary. It is necessary because the question, What is the meaning of immortality ? and tiie question, What is the meaning of mortality? are the same question. We must live by our answer.
To me, not necessarily to anyone else, immortality means at least seven things. Undoubtedly immortality means infinitely more than these seven things. There are more things in heaven and in earth than are included in my philosophy. Nonetheless, to me, immortality means at least seven things, and the first is this: mortality exists always and forever inside, not outside, immortality. All life, as we experience it, moves within the greater life which surrounds, sustains, and directs it, within the care and control of all-powerful, all-wise, and all-sufficient Good. Not outside God, but inside him, within the hollow of his hand, " we live, and move, and have our being" from first to last whetiier we are atheists or saints. We often shut our nation out of our minds, yet continue to live within it. Similarly, we often shut God out of our consciousness, but we cannot change the unchangeable the fact that God's consciousness endlessly surrounds and sustains our own. God's life embraces our lives in every conceivable dimension. Outside God nothing exists at all, for God is the life in all that lives, the existence in all that exists, as well as the Love that directs all life and all existence toward freedom and faithfulness in fellowship. To exist is to exist within the care of Omnipotent Good.
Let us look for a moment at four alternative views each of which, at one and the same time, seems popular and powerful, yet is wholly insufficient. The first alternative, exclusion, is as common, as a definition, among men who do not believe in immortality as among those who do. Exclusion means that immortality and mortality have nothing in common, that mortality exists entirely and forever outside immortality. Some exclusionists believe that eternal life is all-important, that temporal life is of no importance at all; others believe the reverse, that mortality is all-important, that immortality has no practical value. In either case, immortality is prevented from performing its creative work in and upon mortality, and mortality is prevented from running immortal errands; mortality is robbed of immortal significance, and immortality is robbed of mortal relevance. The two are held in mutual, and uncreative, isolation the one asserted, the other denied.
The second alternative is inclusion, or identification the view that mortality includes, surrounds, and imprisons immortality; that mortality is the only reality; that immortality is the illusion of beauty, truth, or goodness; that immortality is an aspect or quality of mortality. Mortality is fact; immortality is fiction, or another word for love and beauty between birth and death. Immortality is temporary happiness in a temporal world. God, in so far as he exists at all, is a product of the human imagination, a member of the local Rotary club. Nothing transcends mortality; mortality is absolute and final. Truth, beauty, and goodness are relative qualities within all-embracing mortality, not absolute demands intersecting mortality. The summons to the more and the better, the summons to absolute goodness, does not exist. Reality, I think, splits this view at its seams. Even atheists become heroes and saints when they experience the call to justice and fair play as an absolute demand and act upon it. When a man no longer hears any absolute demand, the humanity, the heroism, dies out of him. In addition, this view is its own denial, its own contradiction. To say that mortality is absolute is to affirm absolute reality in the moment of denying it. If no absolutes exist, mortality cannot be absolute.
The third alternative is synthesis the view that both immortality and mortality are real but related only as the second story of a house is related to the first story. Immortality exists above mortality, but sealed off from creative interaction. You climb into the second story to pray; you return to the first story to prey upon your fellow men, to make a living. You give religion the pre-eminent place, and daily life the secondary place, but keep the two apart. Never the twain shall meet, or marry, or raise children. My wife makes all the minor decisions, and I make all the major decisions; but there have never been any major decisions. In the same way, religion makes the major decisions, and practical existence makes the minor decisions, but there are never any major decisions. If creativity is mutual interpenetration by immortality and mortality, synthesis destroys creativity, for it keeps the two in pious, and unproductive, isolation. Religion that is not good enough for seven days a week is not good enough for one.
The fourth alternative is paradox, or tension the view that both immortality and mortality are real, but bitterly, irreconcilably, and forever at war. The individual must make his peace with both. He must perpetually perform what is structurally impossible, for immortality demands ioo per cent of his attention, and mortality likewise. The two demands are totalitarian, yet mutually exclusive. But for a buffer of worldliness between this man's faith and his nerves, he would go mad. The virtue of paradox is its recognition that conflict is possible, and often enough inevitable, between immortality and mortality, for God cannot be comfortably domesticated in time. The vice of paradox is its way of paralyzing thought and action; since man cannot act to please both immortality and mortality, why act at all? Schizophrenia, not growth, is the child of paradox.
To repeat, immortality means at least seven things to me, and the first is this: immortality surrounds, sustains, and directs mortality in every conceivable dimension. Mortality is not outside immortality. Mortality does not imprison immortality. Mortality does not exist in a separate sphere below immortality. Mortality is not by nature at war with immortality. Rather, mortality exists always and forever inside immortality. Earth is one province within the Kingdom of Heaven, within divine government. Mortality or history or human life is a half-finished enterprise within the control and care of Omnipotent Love, an educational or creative enterprise, not in escape from freedom but through freedom to fellowship, not without tragedy but through and beyond tragedy. The enterprise of mortality is at present half finished, but because it is a complex enterprise of Omnipotence, it is destined not to failure but to fulfillment.
The second meaning of immortality is this: our mortality participates in the immortality of life. Our civilization may live a thousand years or a hundred. As individuals, we may live seventy years or ten. In either case, as long as we exist, we participate in the immortality of life life that was here before us and will be here after us, life that is the impersonal presence, the energy of God. For God is both the directing Lord of all things, and the driving energy in all nature, in all life. To live for seventy years is to participate for that period in the immortality of divine immanence. A man is a moment and a radiance of eternity, whether or not he experiences spiritual birth, whether or not he enters into creative fellowship with God. We enjoy a seventy-year free ride on the train. The train is the total enterprise of life and history, the total enterprise of mortality as yet only halfway to its destination, yet destined to inevitable arrival. The immortality of life (God's impersonal energy) flows through us for seventy years as electric current flows through a light bulb. The immortality of life flows not only through us, but for us, It is God's gift, for life itself is a miracle.
God will give us all that we will accept. If we accept nothing more than life itself, for days many or few, it is still a glorious gift. We sometimes complain because we resist God's call to growth a call that comes to us through pain as well as through pleasure; but we seldom wish to give up prematurely our seat on the train. Most of us like life very much indeed, as we were meant to do.
But a further participation in the joy of God is offered us, and this is the third meaning of immortality. If we are willing to open our lives to God's personal presence, to his direct grace; if we are willing to be channels or agents of the Holy Spirit; if we are willing to let God's creative work in and for the world possess us and use us and make us a blessing, we participate, however imperfectly, in the immortality of love, the immortality of God's own nature, God's own immortality. All men, whether libertines or missionaries, are given their long or short participation in the immortaUty of life. All men who are willing to pray from the heart," Thy will be done," are given also as many of their seventy years as they wish of active participation in God's own creativity, the immortality of love, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the ability to bless and help and strengthen and heal the whole life of man. Francis died at forty-four, but became the servant of God at twenty. He thus shared forty-four years of the immortality of life, and twenty-four of the immortality of love, the presence and power of Christ.
The fourth meaning of immortality is personality or creativity itself, whether natural and mechanical or ethical and spiritual, the ability to resist what is in the name of what ought to be, and the courage and strength to change it. Incognito in the immortality of life, and openly in the immortality of love, we participate in the immortality of creativity or personality freedom from the dominion of mortality, the courage to mobilize mortality in the service of man and God, whose will is always other than, and better than, our own.
The fifth meaning of immortality is to live forever in the memory of God. To the divine memory, every human being who has ever lived now lives. As my total experience is present tense to my memory, so the total experience of the universe is present tense to God's memory. Our own memories are selective and discriminating; we remember some folk we have known with pleasure; others, with pain. It seems not unreasonable that the divine memory is selective and discriminating also, though with the perfect knowledge and perfect justice we seldom approach. Heaven, in this sense, is to be a present-tense joy forever in the divine memory. Hell is to be forgotten by the selectivity of the divine memory, or to be remembered, and justly, with pain.
To begin with, we are clothed thoughts of God; to be remembered by him is to be reclothed thoughts of God possibly with consciousness and therefore with the ability to enter into fullness of fellowship. Personal, conscious immortality, in this sense, is, as the New Testament pictures it, the reward of faithfulness and creativity; it is not the goal of life. The goal of life is to be creative and faithful, not to be remembered, but to be worthy to be. " Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord." (Matt. 25:21, KJV.) The goal of creative faithfulness is the full realization of God's will on earth. For the faithful there may be conscious fellowship forever in the joy of the divine presence. Conscious or not, to live at all is to live forever in the divine memory. To live in creative faithfulness with God is to live forever in his joy. My father and mother, I feel certain, now live fully in the joy of God, and I hope to join them there.
The sixth meaning of immortality is human memory. Human memory is relative and limited; it does not always discriminate justly. Yet to be remembered justly with joy and gratitude by human beings near or far is a form of immortality, and a very important form. Men always hate the memory of tyrants especially the tyrants within their own households; and men always love the memory of heroes and martyrs and saints. The tyrant's power ends with his death; the martyr's power begins with his death. Human memory is a fearful judgment, a great white throne; in some measure all men must, and do, appear before it. Plato said that the wise man, the superior man, is always, and ought to be, keenly interested, not in being remembered, but in being worthy to be remembered with joy. Both God and men remember Francis of Assisi with delight. Both God and men remember Nero with disgust. We ought to pray, and to live, not that we might be remembered with joy, but that we might be worthy to be.
Nothing is final in our preliminary and fragmentary seeing, yet immortality means, at least, a seventh and final thing to me: every human life is immortally significant. One may or may not be remembered by men, but the total weight of one's life is either for or against the will of God, for or against God's future for this earth which is not destined to fail, for or against the forward movement of the human race toward the full realization of the joy of God, for or against universal brotherhood and universal freedom and faithfulness in fellowship, for or against God's one world civilization the only intelligible goal of history. In the light of the goal of history, each of us, predominantly, is an asset or a liability. In actuality, we are usually both yet the scales tip toward or away from the goal. In simplest terms, we are, in the main, lifters or leaners, boosters or ballast, creative or obstructive, aids or hindrances, burdens or blessings. God sees us as we are. We often see ourselves, our friends, and our enemies in a distorted light. As Francis of Assisi expressed it, " As much as a man is in the sight of God, so much is he, and no more." In the whole fulfillment that is on its way to us, as in every moment of fulfillment along the way, whatever we have creatively contributed will be present forever. Only the evil we have done will be transcended, neutralized, and annihilated.
Moses, Plato, and Paul now walk our streets, bear witness to the truth among us, summon us to growth toward the more and the better, toward the full stature of Christ in the soul and the full fellowship of love in society. Each creative soul of the past, being dead, yet speaketh. Evil men of the past are a standing warning against present evil. The immortals, who once walked and worked with God toward the full realization of his purpose on earth, may or may not witness us with their eyes; they do undeniably, and will forever, witness to us with their lives of the all-embracing love of our Omnipotent Lord, of his enterprise with the human race, now half-finished, yet destined not to fail.
We are guests in the universe, guests within the House of the Lord, from first to last. Better guests than we have gone before us, bequeathed to us their wisdom, their call to constructive and creative participation. We live inside the universe, inside the House of the Lord. If we desire it with all our hearts, God's own Joy will live inside us, and make us creative.
Conclusion
No Man Is Outside God
You are talking about the real God only when you are talking about his universal yet also intensely personal nearness and availability to all men in all cultures, on all continents, and in all communions. The slow magic of his love, the beginning of true immortality, is directly accessible to every thirsty mind, to every hungry heart.
Recently, in a discussion period preceding a formal address, someone sent to the platform the following awkward question: What is the distinguishing characteristic as opposed to other religions? I thought at once of my wife's younger sister who complained about a playmate, " He hit me over the head with a nail in it! " Clearly, the question concerned the distinguishing characteristic "of Christianity" (namely, the mind of Jesus), but the actual words suggested a wider application for a distinguishing characteristic of every religion, often, if not always, has been vigorous opposition to other religions. The characteristic is therefore neither distinguishing nor distinguished; indeed, it cannot be said to characterize religion only, for in politics, in science, and in race relations also, enthusiastic opposition toward all difference is not unknown!
A central sorrow in our present world society, as in earlier ages, is the popular false belief that special virtue accompanies belligerence toward competing faiths and philosophies. Differences between religions are real enough, and often profoundly important (for example, the Hindu idea of caste as against the Christian idea of community); nonetheless, so-called " righteous" wrath against any and all difference is not very " righteous " after all. Christians, who should have the least trouble at this point, sometimes have the most. As Henry Clay Morrison put it, " It's a poor demonstration of perfect love to get mad at people who don't believe in it."
Our common weakness, not because we are religious but because we are men half grown, was described accurately by William T. Watkins: " Too many people with half a religion, when they find someone with the other half, decide at once that he has no religion." Thus, Catholic folk who believe in Authority sometimes despise their Protestant cousins who believe in Freedom and the reverse!
Intolerance is always and everywhere intolerable; for one reason, inevitably and invariably it proceeds forthwith to beat someone " over the head with a nail in it." According to Paul Tillich, the specific root of the trouble is the false assumption of absolute divinity, finality, and infallibility in " our" economic system, " our " theology, " our " church to the automatic exclusion of other dedicated systems, theologies, cults. The problem has no easy solution, for until " the " faith becomes " our " faith, we are not concerned about it one way or another. When it becomes "our" faith, if we are not perpetually on guard, we assume falsely that " the " truth is no more than " our " understanding of it, and thus poison the actual divinity of our religion with a king-size dose of idolatry.
Physically speaking, no part of this earth, our present dwelling place, is farther from God than any other part. The entire earth is the Lord's; all of it is his active presence. To live in Madagascar or Moscow, in Shanghai or Chicago, is not, automatically, to be out of touch with God. " Where there is no vision, the people perish " and today, as in the time of Samuel, there is no frequent vision any place! When vision occurs, the perpetual nearness of God to all men is discerned; the universal divine presence then and there becomes the more or less conscious experience of the seer, the scholar, and the saint and of others who find life in their words. Yet God is not more present one place than another or his presence could not be discerned anywhere. Clearer vision is quickened awareness of his permanent presence everywhere!
Where reason is, God is; hence the experience of revelation is more or less conscious in man, whether or not in amoeba. Where man is, God is; yet God is also in the whole of reality, the whole of his creation. He is present everywhere or he is present nowhere! The universe is his presence. At this point all wonder and all worship begin; with the continuity and integrity of the universe all thought and all science begin. Everywhere he invites men (both with and without words) to enter into active fellowship with all he is and has, with himself and the total human race, indeed, wth nature as well, with whom we share the miracle of existence.
But someone will say, " God is more present among Christians than elsewhere! " Jesus said, " Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (Matt. 18:20, KJV.) Where men think Jesus' thoughts after him, his presence is active. Yet whether men think with him or not, he is present. Christians are indeed a special people; they are called to bear witness, in mind and community, to the universal greatness and goodness of God, whose character they have seen in Jesus. That is, Christians do not privately " own" God; no one privately "owns" God; yet he gives himself to all, without respect of persons. Christians are called to bear witness, in newness of life, to the break-through, the presence, of the divine character in human flesh.
When Christians consider that they privately " own " God, they deny both his transcendence and his omnipresence; they believe falsely that they have captured, imprisoned, and domesticated him that he is not greater than man, not greater even than Christian man, not great enough indeed to hold all men in the hollow of his hand, from birth to death and beyond. The transcendence of God means this: God is more than man; his truth (active in all human thought) is more than any human understanding, however inspired; his life-giving presence embraces all men, all the time. The discovery of his presence is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of faith. Yet to live at all is to live within his hand, within his heart, within his invitation to maturity, to growth in the skill of love. Christians may sometimes fathom die divine nature less or more deeply than men of other faiths, but no one fully fathoms God yet all experience his thrust of life and mind.
A Christian saint is a man whose own flesh becomes (in some degree) a vehicle of the Word of God he perceives in the flesh of Jesus. Therefore, in deeds and words alike, he shouts with joy about the universal, personal Goodness which bears the total human pilgrimage and each individual pilgrim in all lands, languages, and religions. The Christian saint (like other saints) has a special function to translate the universal character of God into his own particular character. What wonder if he achieves only a caricature? His job is complex yet simple to grow, and to help grow, in the power of the Spirit, toward the full stature of Christ. He sees in Christ what Christ saw in himself, not the cancellation but the confirmation of all seers, scholars, and saints not the end of Moses, Isaiah, and Buddha, but their new beginning! Christians are convinced that the truth, which was true before Jesus was born, has been clearer since. In other words, God's permanent and universal truth is not true because it is labeled Christian; rather, we label it Christian because we believe it is true the truth of God, the truth of all religion, made flesh in Jesus, who was in himself, and is in us forever, the Son of God.
Remember the statement, " There but for the grace of God go I." Even better is Winston Churchill's remark about Sir Stafford Cripps: " There but for the grace of God goes God." This could be said about any of us! In short, no man is really outside God not a Hindu, not a Buddhist, not a Moslem, not a Christian, not a Jew. If Jews, for example, were excluded because they are Jews, Jesus too would be excluded! In each individual man there may be less or more of divine grace (more fully welcomed, more fully at work), but he himself is within grace from birth and beyond death. Both life and mind are in him; the two together form the gift, the miracle, the presence of God. In no man, not even the greatest saint, is the gift, the miracle, the presence of God fully developed. In no man, not even the worst sinner, is tiie gift, the miracle, the presence of God wholly undeveloped. God has a startling way of being present where you least expect him, on both sides of every street, and among sinners as well as the less obvious sinners called saints.
A strong impression from my childhood, as the son of a Methodist minister, is this: every town, every village, every city, maintains an invisible white line running unmistakably down its main street; on one side are the righteous, the well-to-do, the " churched," the " best" people, the respectable folk; on the other are the unrighteous, the ne'er-do-wells, the pubcrawlers, the " second-class" citizens, the generally disreputable who are often " booked," but never in the Blue Book.
There is, no doubt, a secondary value in thus separating the alleged sheep from the alleged goats. But there is also a primary error! According to Matt., ch. 25, not man but God, and only God, is entitled to make this separation and further, said Jesus, God (unlike man) insists on sending sunshine and rain, and life and mind, to the evil as well as to the good. The error is tlie misrepresentation of God, and God misrepresented is sometimes God despised. In simple truth, God is on both sides of the sacred/secular split in our society and the strength of both. He cannot be kept out anywhere. He is not merely the Savior of the Sacred and the Judge of the Secular. He is, at every moment, both Savior and Judge to every man and movement. He accepts us all, all the time, as candidates for growtli in his image, yet also all the time weighs our best moral achievement and finds it wanting. You might put it this way: God hates our superficiality enough to want to change it, yet loves us enough to think we're worth changing.
Some dear soul, of course, will ask, " Is there, then, no difference between Christlike and un-Christlike men, between truth and error, between white and black? " One must answer, with Kierkegaard, that before God all men are partly in the wrong, though also partly in the right. There is some Wisdom, some Light, in the worst man, and likewise some folly, some darkness, in the best man. As Paul insisted, no man may boast of his righteousness. (Rom. 3:27.) The moment he considers himself perfect, his perfection ceases; when he trusts only his own goodness, he no longer trusts the greater goodness of God. He is like a low-pressure steamboat sailing up the Mississippi when it whistles, it stops! As Paul emphasized, it is not man, not even the good man, who supports, sustains, and upholds God, but God who supports, sustains, and upholds him and releases the divine character in his life as fast as he is open to receive it.
Not long ago I heard a woman say: " My niece is marrying a young man of another religion. Of course, the ceremony will be conducted in a side aisle, not in the center of the sanctuary." In the same way, many believe in hell for those who disagree with them! Christians are not alone among the world's religious folk in building and maintaining a " side aisle " for dissenting majorities, tiie " lesser breed without the law." The " side aisle " is nonetheless blasphemy especially when built in the name of the God whose nature, demand, and gift is Love. It is more than a little hypocritical to say, " I believe in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man," and then relegate to a " side aisle " the larger part of the world's population which does not have the good fortune to see things exactly as we do. Most of us, each for his own city or nation or denomination, tend to repeat what has been called, inaccurately, die Unitarian Creed: " I believe in the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston."
We shall have to give up the popular myth that God the Universe is somebody's " private " property. The stars in the heavens are not really denominational! God is the strength of all men and the life of all religions, yet finds himself fully in none, offers himself fully to all. Indeed, he gives himself to each of us privately, inwardly, uniquely; yet we remain his property and we never receive as much as he gives. We belong to the universe; it is only a loan to us. Our governments tax us for land they claim to own, and do not; we ourselves pay taxes for land we claim to own, and do not. How silly can a government get taking seriously the view that the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. will claim and own the moon! If either arrives first, will it charge the rest of us a set fee for moonlight so much per kilowatt hour ? Will it veil the face of the man in the moon, denying his blessing to lovers in nonunion lovers' lanes?
In Middlesboro, Kentucky, a community once run by gangsters, a friend of mine said, " I believe God is everywhere, but I think he's a long way from Middlesboro." We all feel that way at times each for his own city, his own street. But God is not really a long way from anywhere. He is as close to you as you are. You can touch the hem of his garment and be made whole in Russia or America, in Africa or China. He meets us where we are that is, everywhere yet his character takes hold of us for good, with our consent and co-operation, only when we work with mind and hand while we pray: " I am empty, Lord. Fill me! Make me a blessing to every man! Let me live with Christ in my heart, and my head in the stars! " I read somewhere in an old, old book, " God so loved the world, the whole world, and all the people in it his offspring one and all that he gave his only Son [reason itself, the Logos, in man], that whosoever believeth in him might not wither away in futility, but bloom in fullness of life " (John 3:16, KJV, paraphrase).
In this volume reference is made to the following sources, listed in the order of their use.
Chapter 1
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. by Constance Garnett, p. 147. Modern Library, Inc., 1937.
Francis Samuel Philbrick, " Thomas Jefferson," pp. 989, 992. Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 12.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, tr. by Katherine Jones, pp. 3-15. Vintage Book, 1955.
See also The World's Great Religions, pp. 9-38 on Hinduism, pp. 39-70 on Buddhism, pp. 131-162 on Judaism, and pp. 163-181 on The Life of Christ. Time Incorporated, 1957.
Chapter 2
Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, tr. by C. T. Campion, pp. 73, 77, 79. Henry Holt & Co., Inc., 1949. Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. Three, Ch. XXX, 1-2.
Chapter 3
J. W. N. Sullivan, The Limitations of Science, p. 145. The
Viking Press, Inc., 1933. Dorothy L Sayers, Creed or Chaos? p. 63. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949. C. S. Lewis, Christian Behaviour, p. 1. The Macmillan Company, 1943.
Albert Camus, in Harper's Magazine, May, 1958. Paul Tillich, The Shading of the Foundations, p. 40. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.
Chapter 4
Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, p. 42. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. IV, p. 119. Oxford University Press, Inc., 1939. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. I, p. 30. Oxford University Press, Inc., 1935.
Chapter 5
Nels F. S. Ferre, "The Third Conversion Never Fails," p. 136, in David Wesley Soper, These Found the Way. The Westminster Press, 1951.
Chapter 6
Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, pp. 15, 251-252. Oxford University Press, Inc., 1948.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, Vol. Ill, p. 517. American Book Company, 1937.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. by Constance Garnett, p. 74. Modern Library, Inc., 1937.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pages from the Journal of an Author, tr. by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murray, pp. 49, 65, 67. John W. Luce, 1916.
Chapter 7
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism, p. 45. Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 1929. Augustine, Confessions, tr. by E. B. Pusey, Bk. Ten, Ch. XXIX. Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? pp. 23-24. Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1949. Lecomte du Noiiy, Human Destiny, pp. 182-184. Longmans, Green and Co., 1947.
Chapter 8
Max Otto, Science and the Moral Life, p. 140. New American Library, 1949.
H. L. Mencken, quoted in Reinhold Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion? p. 40. The Macmillan Company, 1941.
H. L. Mencken, in Introduction to F. W. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, p. 30. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1931.
Chapter 9
Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 302. Abingdon Press, 1950. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, tr. by Eva M. Martin, p. 576.
E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1943. Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. Two,
Ch. XI, 1.
Chapter 10
Augustine, Confessions, tr. by E. B. Pusey, Bk. One, Ch. 1,1.
Chapter 15
Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, tr. by James Luther Adams, pp. 37-38. University of Chicago Press, 1948.