[Dialogue] The Thereness of It All . .

[David Walters]

Time Magazine
Friday, May. 04, 1962
The Thereness of It All

"Life is a cruel joke, and sooner or later I'm the punch line. Life is just 
the way it is — the thereness of it. The gift of arthritis. The gift of 
heart attack. The gift of the isness of life." The speaker was a lecturer at 
the Christian Faith and Life Community, a training center for undergraduate 
students of the University of Texas at Austin. His woebegone view of things, 
he warned, should not lead to despair but to Christian salvation. The man 
willing to accept "what is ugly and cruel and guilty as well as the 
contrary" is receiving Christ's message, and discovers that "this is the way 
it is, I am not what I thought I was, but I can live with my guilt." To hear 
this unorthodox theology, ministers from university campuses across the 
nation come to study at Austin's community in the heartland of religious 
orthodoxy. They hear God discussed as the "void," and the traditional dogmas 
of the Virgin Birth, Resurrection and Holy Trinity dismissed as so much 
deadwood in the lumberyard of faith. Fundamentalists, in turn, dismiss the 
community as heretical, but the leaders of the group consider themselves to 
be "in the middle of the Christian tradition." How to Be a Layman. Now ten 
years old, Austin's community is a radical Protestant version of the 
Catholic Newman clubs, which serve to provide guidance to Roman Catholic 
students at secular colleges across the country. The goal is to train 
students to become active Christian laymen as thoroughly as the university 
trains them for worldly careers. Each year as many as 100 students 
(including a few Negroes) sign up to live within the community's two 
residence halls. They pay up to $750 a year for room and board, supplement 
their academic studies at the university with interdenominational prayer 
services and lectures in theology. Everywhere—in the halls and in every 
community teacher's home—students are confronted by Picasso's Guernica, from 
which many lectures in theology are given.

Founder of the community is the Rev. Jack Lewis, 46. a Presbyterian minister 
who began serving students at the University of Texas in 1946 after a 
wartime tour of duty as a Navy chaplain. Lewis soon found that his students 
"didn't see the relevance of Christian faith in daily life." He quit his 
Texas chaplaincy in 1950 to take graduate divinity studies at St. Andrews 
University in Scotland, "the Valhalla of all Presbyterians." In Europe he 
encountered a number of religious training centers for student laymen, 
decided he had found the way for the church to reach undergraduates back 
home. He returned to Austin, rounded up a few thousand dollars from local 
businessmen, and with the cooperation of university officials, set up the 
"Austin Experiment" outside the campus gates. The community's present budget 
approaches $200,000 a year, most of it coming from gifts and donations. Said 
a Texas oilman who gave Lewis $5,000 last year: "I've studied over what you 
have, and I don't know that I know what you're doing, and I don't know that 
you know what you're doing, but I'm a student of the Bible and I know that 
Abraham and Moses were not sure of what they were doing either." Permission 
to Live. The community's theology ranges far from the orthodox, is wildly 
eclectic, although its teachers have borrowed much of their religious 
vocabulary from existentialism and from Harvard's Paul Tillich. Talk at the 
community is dense with jargon—the "over-againstness" of God, the 
"Christ-Event," "gatheredness" and "scatteredness." From the late Dietrich 
Bonhoeffer, the community has taken the Christian's utter commitment to 
life. Man, according to Austin Experimenter James Wagener, "gets cosmic 
permission to live out his life as a guilty man." God, says Wagener, 
"deflates our balloons, collapses our dreams, crushes our illusions," but 
ultimately calls man to belief—and to work in the world as a believer: "Is 
God dead?" asks a student, and answers: "Do you mean the God of the Sweet 
By-and-By? Yes, and good riddance." On balance, the Austin Experiment has 
made more friends than foes. Over the year, 570 ministers and laymen (mostly 
Methodists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians) from across the country have 
crowded into the community's guesthouse for symposiums; most go home 
impressed by the intensity of the program and the zeal of the students. 
Thanks to the community's work in the past, other "experiments" have been 
organized on nearly 50 other U.S. campuses from Brown to Wisconsin. But 
perhaps the best measure of Lewis' success is his group of "lost laymen": of 
the 1,500 students who have lived at the community since its founding, one 
in ten has taken Christian life seriously enough to enter the ministry.