NOTES TO THE 20TH CENTURY:

ON THE STYLE OF BEING CHRISTIAN

Introduction

Once upon a time, a Man and his Brothers took a long Journey to a great city, from the lands of the forests and mountains, where mystery dwells. As they lived in the city, they learned of the wave of power. They learned about power to build and power to destroy. Power to harm and power to heal were theirs, as wag the power to put light into darkness. one day, while he was resting, the Man spoke with his brothers and said, "Brothers, I perceive that there is no longer any mystery in life. Our powers have pushed back the edges of Time and Space until nothing is hidden from our eyes. Is this not how it is, Brothers?" Being practical men of power, they all agreed with their Brother that it was so.

But one Brother, being somewhat wiser than the rest, saw that that was not how it was. "Brothers," he said, "I perceive that we can no longer see the Mystery because we now belong to the heart of mystery. Mystery dwells within us, and we move and breathe as the very expression of it. Even all our powers spring from the mystery. Its name is life."

At once all of the brothers understood that they had never left the land of mystery. For Man is the knower of Mystery, and Mystery dwells where ever man dwells. Mystery is the heart and substance of Life.

This is a story of Man in the 2Oth Century. He has made a long journey through history. He has gained power over the earth and everything in it. And he has begun to lose his sense of awe, and wonder at the universe in which he lives. But these who stand as the church understand that man only stands just on the verge of the discovery of a whole new dimension of existence. For it is not the world, but Man himself who changes. And the journey is the Journey toward universal life.

It is the purpose of the article which follows, first to describe something of the transformation that has occurred in 20th Century humanity. We will then seek to understand what relation this has to the "Mysterious power" at the center of life, which we call God, or Christ, or the Holy Spirit. And lastly, we shall come to a description of the "mode" or "style" of man's response to this reality, first individually, then corporately.

It is not the intention here to convey new information, or even to present new theories. That has never been the purpose of writings from the Church. Rather it is the purpose of theology to call into full consciousness the things that we already know about life in such a way that we are compelled to stand openly before them. Only then is it even possible to say a "yes" or a "no" before the Spirit Lord of all life. And just because the Christian message is a calling to consciousness and not a communication of facts, the assumption follows that there is no distinction, in the first instance, between authentic human life and authentic Christian life. Piousness, in the sense of pure living apart from the world, is dead. There remains only the distinction between the aware, the self-conscious man and the one who refuses to face both the dread and the wonder of life as it is. It is perhaps safe to say that the claim to exclusiveness which has characterized the Church throughout history cannot he understood today as a subscription to a right formula, but would now be understood primarily in terms of something like right-sensitivity, or right posture, or right-consciousness, or a right wisedness. To the degree that it is true that every culture in every age has had groups of people who understand their life task as that of calling others to consciousness, the Church would now recognize that it has had allies who could properly be called the people of God.

Nor are we to be concerned in any way with "rules for Christian living," for this has never been the burden of the authentic message of the church. There are imperatives, of course, but they arise from the structure of human life itself, not from authoritarian dictum from prophet, priest or church. Not that the Church in past centuries has not made its pronouncements--in quantity. Rut at their best, they have stemmed from the imperatives of the historical, human situation. That many rules and regulations come to us now as arbitrary, senseless restrictions is only testimony to the universal quality of man's fearfulness in the face of present ambiguities and future uncertainties. Whatever else needs to be said, the Christian Word about life has to do with freedom and not protective bondage, no matter how or why it is engendered.

Throughout the pages that follow, we will use many kinds of language, from culture, sociology, science, philosophy, psychology and even art. Each of these types of language has its own power, and it is a mark of understanding in the 20th Century that there is great wealth of knowledge to enable us to perceive many facets of life that were previously closed to us. We shall use "religious" language as well, but when we do, we need to treat it as suspect, for far too often, clergy and laymen, social clubs as well as churches use religious language freely, in ways which are neither interesting nor disturbing to anyone. Casual treatment will make any language lose its power. The time may be approaching when we will again recover the power of the great linguistic symbols of the Church Fathers-words like "sin," and "grace," even God, Christ and Holy Spirit. When that happens, they may once again bind men together in a common unity of understanding. Until that day comes, every churchman, thoughtful for the renewal of the Church, must exercise care in their use.

At its best, religious language must always have the quality of the poetic. Theology is always, in part, the business of weaving the poetic design of life understanding. Theology can elucidate and elaborate the linguistic symbols it uses, but it can never finally define them. Where philosophy would use definition, theological language shifts rapidly from metaphor to simile to paradox, weaving all together with a variety of mythical images. In our day, theology often attempts to sneak through the hollow voices of poetic ghosts. The words change nothing. So, of course, the best way to spot a ghost is to see whether men can walk right through it-or whether they are forced to deal with the image presented.

So our task here is the theological description of life, that is, the task of drawing together the total of human experience in relation to the Mystery which lies at its heart. Let us then, take a journey of consciousness.

PART I

THE MEANING OF CHANGE:

TRANSITION FROM THE WORLD OF SPACE TO THE WORLD OF TIME

"Revolution"--once it was a word that brought to mind only images of war and destruction. One can still speak in this way, of course. But modern hearers are likely to respond indifferently. Three centuries of revolution have brought revolution in the use of the word revolution itself: now there are commercial revolutions, industrial revolutions, American and French Revolutions, intellectual revolutions, technological revolutions, to say nothing of the incredible scope of the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions, Historians have come to describe these centuries simply as "the age of revolution." And whether revolution is a good thing or a bad thing simply depends upon whose revolution it is, yours or mine.

Scholars have developed many sophisticated schemes for demonstrating the inter-relatedness of the varying components of culture. In the end we know that whatever scheme we follow is a matter of the decisional stance w}1iCh -we assume will best enable us to grasp the meaning of the present moment. For finally, we are always re-writing historv9 searching out new bits of factual information to meet our own changing requirements for self understanding. With this in mind, we might characterize the development of Western civilization over the last three centuries in terms of three revolutions. The 18th Century was the time of the great political revolution. Here was the development of the nation-state which we take so much for granted tod2y out of the comparatively chaotic distribution of power among the feudal baronies. With it came the beginnings of a large middle class, built upon a foundation of new possibilities for commercial ventures, whose deepest desire was for political order and stability in which trade could flourish. The concept of the stabilization of the balance of power through a system of shifting political alliances, the development of large armies financed through the new merchant wealth, worked together to assure continuance of fixed geopraphica1 boundaries.

Once the fundamental political re-ordering of society has been achieved the development of the merchant middle class could move on to enlarge its sphere of influence through the development of the full-scale economic revolution, the characteristic mark of the 14th century. The incredibly rapid advance in technology improved the production of goods to such an extent that it was now possible for the first time for whole populations to share in the wealth and resources of the world. In the midst of all this, Capitalism and Communism emerged, almost as matched opposing edges on a single thrusting sword piercing into civilization. Capitalism furnished the momentum behind the further development or resources and technology, and Communism lent strength to the need and desire for improved means of distribution of the new goods and services.

Adjustments in troth the political orders and the economic systems are still going on, of course, Just as the seeds for political and economic revolution were planted far back in the Middle Ages. But the basic patterns in both of these areas of human concern are relatively fixed in the modern world. Further changes in their structures will occur, hut when they come they will dc so in response to cultural demands external to the political and economic structures themselves, not as the result of the internal pressures of the system.

That is to say, the 2Oth Century is the century of the great Cultural Revolution It is the century of the revolution within man himself. For culture is the expression of man's consciousness of himself as man. It is the expression of the corporate dimension of the human spirit without which the individual could not exists without which human community could not be conceived of. Culture is the underlying consciousness of the consciousness of reality itself. We understand culture is transformer, no value remains untouched, because culture embodies the very meaning of value itself. \7e understand culture in the sense of being the underlying conception or image of reality which is the foundation for all the endless lists of social customs and mores assembled and detailed for us by the scholars. We must never confuse culture with man's relationship to the mysterious, unsynonymous power of Being, but in the same vein, we must never assume that it is anything but its expression.

Because cultural transformation points to the transformation within Man himself, it is more difficult to see it for what it is than it was to perceive and analyze the political and economic activities of previous centuries. Like the traveler in the tale at the opening of this essay, mystery is most difficult to perceive when one lives in its heart. We see great restlessness among nations, among racial groups, and restlessness in youth which cuts across national and racial boundaries of every sort. We are somehow dimly aware that the overt causes of this generalized disturbance are only partially responsible for its existence, even where they are very specific as in the racial conflict. Yet we find ourselves constantly at a loss to put a name to the other sources, though we know the roots are very deer. All this is simply part of the difficulty in accurate perception of what is closest to us.

What are the forms of the cultural revolution, and what are its qualities? We should make clear at the beginning that the cultural transformation can finally he perceived only as a flow, a dynamic, directional stream. That is to say, one senses that the revolution has direction to it, that mankind is not merely in process of moving from one arbitrary state of being to another, there to rest until some equally arbitrary power forces another move. That this is so is a "faith statement." Perhaps most of us would have presumed it anyway, but it is well to make it Present to our consciousness. For without such an assumption, life itself is no more than a blind arbitrary force. In one sense, cultural transformation is best observed as the flow of a dance, where what is significant is known only when awareness of individual components movements gives way to the apparition of form created by movement. This is a theme to which we shall return later, for it has many implications for the practical expression of understanding, as well as for theory.

There are two overlapping paradigms or models we can use in our effort to describe the 'ongoingness' of the cultural revolution. One way of dealing with it is to sneak of three 'subordinate' revolutions, as it were; the urban, the scientific and the secular revolutions. These in turn correspond to three "modes" of cultural existence; common style, common sense and the common mood, or symbolic manifestation of culture. In each case, there are three corresponding or coalescing manifestations of the same reality. They are, simultaneously, both cause and effect of each ether and the whole cultural transformation. We will take care in describing each of these movements, for they are the foundation upon which the work of the practical modern churchman must be built.

When someone sneaks of the "scientific revolution," the images which spring to mind are usually those of technological accomplishment. One thinks of Sputniks, Cape Canaveral, atomic accelerators and satellite communications. But in the context of the on-going cultural transformation, it means far, far more. The scientific revolution has wrought a change in man's most fundamental perceptions of himself in relation to his universe. In short, it has brought about a change in "common sense." Technological improvements are among the most apparent evidences of the new kind of common sense, but they are not necessarily the most far reaching. But they do provide a logical starting point for the discussion.

The significance of technology is that it has enormously extended the strength, reach, speed and endurance of man's physical powers and senses. This has been demonstrated most dramatically in the fields of communication and transportation. Up until a century ago, human words and thoughts could travel no faster than a man could travel himself. Now, whether he wills it or not, every individual is connected with every other individual in the world by a complex network of electronic passages. Were the necessity clear enough, any two persons anywhere in the world could be out in contact with each other in a matter of hours at most. And man's wings are far swifter, if less efficient than those of any beast of the air. But what is most amazing to the senior generations is that neither of these phenomena have power to amaze the young. They are as much a part of the "natural" world as were wind and rain for earlier generations. It is almost a cliché to say that technology has outstripped man's capacity to absorb it. No one can be aware, for instance, of the fact that two or three nations in the world could easily feed untold thousands actually on the brink of starvation if only they would, without feeling that something is incredibly amiss. Technology has many other implications, particularly for the urban revolution to which we must turn shortly.

Once upon a time, everyone 'knew' that the universe was composed of air and fire, earth and water. If you lived in China about the same time, you 'knew' that there were five elements, and the fifth was wood. Now, every school boy 'knows' how "silly" such a notion really is. There are many "substances" or "elements" in chemistry of which matter is composed--or so a "modern" man might have said. But science has pushed even beyond this, so that the "post-modern" man thinks of matter in terms of the relationships between units of energy, and even of the interchangeability of matter and energy. The insight was that even the most basic Polarity upon which our understanding of the universe was founded had collapsed when pressed to its logical extreme. Now, matter is energy, energy is matter, and new power lies in our understanding of the structure of the relationship between the two. This insight, at first a technical curiosity, has been transferred into the cultural wisdom, so that men of the new age have come to understand the whole of reality in terms of structured relationships, and no longer in terms of fixed categories. Man has come to perceive even himself as a bundle of structured but ever-changing and developing relationships. And that, after all, is only "common sense."

When Albert Einstein wrote the historic equation e=mc2 it seemed anything but 'common' sense, even if an astounded world was willing to grant that it made any kind of sense at all. Yet this too was founded on the understanding that reality is relationship. This time, it was the relation between time and space which was being held up for examination, and e=mc2 was the symbol for its structure. The theory which gave meaning to the formula was, of course, the theory of relativity. Few of us could even present to comprehend the thoughts which it involves. Yet "relativity" and its semantic variants have passed into our common vocabulary, and everyone understands that we live in the midst of relativities, make decisions on the basis of relative goods and bads and act on the basis of a relative conception of right and wrong. We may not understand the implications of e = mc2, but everyone understands perfectly that he lives in a world where there are no more absolutes--because it is common sense. Even the most rigid moralist struggling desperately to hold on to outdated religious absolutes knows, perhaps only at the second level of consciousness, that his everyday affairs are conducted on the basis of relative values and relative Judgments.

"Relatively" and "probably" are words that go together in the common vernacular. This is one more thing we have learned from the scientific revolution. In the Middle Ages, when Western Civilization was just beginning to become conscious of its identity, all the universe was directed by a thing called "Divine Providence," or "the Will of God." God's Will was the final answer to every question about why reality was what it was. When God created everything that had existence, he created in it also its own telos, its own final end. Every seed was created with the essence of "freeness" or "flowerness" built into it from the beginning, and likewise, every man was created to fulfill his own station, or purpose in life. It was not until men began to build machines in earnest that the notion of effective causality came into being. It was only when man became the machine maker that he came to understand, as matter of common sense, that everything; in the universe had a cause, that it was caused by something else' and finally that it became the cause of something else in turn. Then the universe itself came to be understood as a vast machine, each part playing its role in causing the other parts to move. Translated into the realm of history, effective causality provided the necessary theoretical dynamic for troth capitalism and communism. The capitalist stood convinced that if every individual human being worked to achieve his own personal satisfactions, he would certainly cause the well-being of the entire social organism. The Communist was certain that the capitalist exploitation would lead to the revolution of the masses, which would in turn bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Both had in common the belief, the common sense assumption, that history was a matter of cause and effect, and that particular causes necessarily produced particular, predictable effects.

But the scientific revolution of our time has put an end to the notion of effective causality. Now the man of science makes his mathematical calculations in terms of probabilities, in terms of statistical causality. And so does the man on the street, even though he knows nothing of the sources of his thoughts. Common sense understands that just as there are no longer absolutes, there are no longer certainties, but only probabilities.

In this is perhaps the greatest contribution which the scientific revolution has made in the cultural wisdom. For now Man is free to shape his own destiny, personally, socially and historically. He is no longer the victim of divine intention or mechanical necessity. Man is now a free agent, determining at least to some degree, his own fate, cut of his own free decision. To the degree that man was unable to perceive this before, the scientific revolution has set him free. Not that there are not perceptible historical and social trends. But historical trends are only ways of talking about historical probability. Man has now the freedom to shape, bend and influence the historical trends. The understanding of that new freedom is perhaps the greatest of the gifts of the scientific revolution to 20th Century common sense.

Finally, the scientific revolution has taught 20th Century Man his very method of thought. It has taught us to observe in precise detail, both the relevant and seemingly irrelevant facts of each situation. It has taught us to make relative Judgments as to which data is ne~.es6~ry9 and what is not. It has taught us to weigh the evidence in each case at the same time being self-consciously present to the prior sets of values we ,ring to the situation. And it has taught us to make decisions, and to act upon them, always aware that what is usually required . red is a relative decision, not some final, inherently correct, eternally valid pronouncement. Twentieth Century Man is model-building man planning, deciding and testing the results of his decisions. What has been called loosely the "Scientific method" is now almost as much the methodology of the man on the street as it is that of the man in the laboratory. Everyman has had his thought conditioned, that is to say, by relative, relational scientific methodology, building upon a reality described in terms of statistical probabilities. Such complexity is the "common sense" of our time.

The new common mood of the era is manifested in the particular phenomenon we have called the secular revolution." We shall not be using the word mood in this case, to designate an emotional state like gaiety or sadness, although there is a relationship of a sort. Instead it will be pointing to all of these exasperatingly vague qualities which give a culture its particular 'tone' or atmosphere. It has to do with the most generalized values of a culture, its particular 'tone' or atmosphere. Perhaps it can be illustrated9 although on a very superficial level, by the kinds of things that an artist designing travel posters will seek to capture about some nation or some part of the world. Yet this is hardly an adequate image for we are seeking to describe the cultural mood of the world in this particular historical period.

We speak of the secular mood of our time because for the first time in the memory of man's Journey into civilization, he does not seek to Justify his actions, his thoughts and even his basic existence by the Intentionality of some higher being. That the secular revolution has occurred is the message of the "God is dead" theologians. And if one is inclined to treat this development favorably, he says with Dietrich Bonhoeffer that "man has come of age." At last Man knows that he must act on the basis of his own authority. At last Man knows that the responsibility for the condition of the world is his, and that it can really belong to no one, or to nothing else. The consciousness of the truth of this is what is meant by the secular mood in which the Spirit of 20th Century Man has its being.

Relative to the shift of the center of authority, it is the secular mood which gives 20th Century lien permission to operate within the common sense of science. Man is now free of what was previously the literal necessity of searching for eternal systems and patterns, and consequently he is free to live and act out of the immediate, temporal plans and models of his own creation. No longer, for example, is there an ordained prototype of what it means to be a person, with fixed concerns, patterns of behavior and manners. Now man determines this for himself, according to the needs of the life situation. The secular mood of the age has given him permission to be what he must be according to his own image, or the socially determined image.

Within the secular mood, there is a new freedom to experience what was hitherto known through scientific abstraction, that man is no longer bound to the personalized natural powers of the universe, to the demons as they were pictured. Powers there are which have p- influence on human destiny--but they are historical powers. There are the social powers to whom one has given authority by one's own free decision, whether it be intellectualism, sexual urge, nationalism, or any of a thousand other "isms." Those who have engaged in the absurdity of the "religion vs. science" controversy are well aware that it was not science of its own that set man free from the natural demons, although it was a large part of it. It was the new secular mood which gave us permission to "know what we know."

The common sense of science and the secular mood linked once again to give modern man a new awareness, as it were, of the locus of the meaning of life. In common language we express this by saying that man no longer looks up to find God or heaven, nor down to seek demons or hell. Instead we speak of "the heart of the matter" the "depth experience', the ''core of meaning." If Cod at the "edge" of the universe has died, then God at the center of the universe, in the midst of daily life, in the midst of life routine, is being born anew. The religious mood reached out to find meaning. The secular mood penetrates. Understanding comes as one is about the business of earning a wage tending a garden, building a home. To reach beyond9 in the secular mood, is to guarantee a miss.

The secular revolution has announced that this is the time when men can and must deal with life experience itself, on the most practical functional plane. The day of the religious mood, the days of dealing with ideas about life have gone.

The "urban revolution" of the 20th Century is far more than the mere massing of great numbers of people within relatively smal1 and confined areas of the surface of planet earth. Men have lived in cities for thousands of years. They were always functional and important, serving as centers of trade or as seats of power, complete with military garrison. They were much smaller then, of course, but cities still. By "urban revolution" we mean the fundamental transformation which has occurred in human life style. It is through the new urban life style that the common sense of science and the secular mood of our age have come together. Cities9 and the metropolitan and megalopolitan centers we know, would be impossible but for technological advancement, simply for mechanical reasons. Nor could the great numbers of people survive such close proximity, had there not been a change in mood and value structure. It is in the new urban life style that the dimensions of the whole cultural revolution become evident.

Cities require the extension of human perceptions and powers given by technology in order to exist. Villages and towns are adjusted to the human biological scale; that is, all human needs can be met within easy reach of a man's arms and legs. Re could walk or ride an animal to obtain food, shelter, clothing, employment and the satisfaction of his social needs. But large numbers of people require specialization and higher levels of efficiency in production and distribution. Specialized functions tend to concentrate in special localities, and the number of functions available tend to multiply and spread over a very wide area. Were it not for the technology of high-speed transportation and communication, excessive time would be consumed merely in traveling to and from the different areas of specialization, and servicing the larger population, bringing goods and services to them, would be impossible. Obviously, with rail, road and electrical cable as the extension of man's reach and senses, the size limits a city can expand are enormously increased. Nor could our cities of today be possible if it were not for the extension of man's vertical reach through the technology of architectural engineering. It seems almost absurd when he realizes that the cores of the metropolitan centers of the world could hardly exist at all were it not for something so mundane as a high-speed elevator. The new urban life style both permits and requires scientific technology.

The frantic, frenetic pace which characterizes the urban life style is more than a reflection of the synchronization of human rhythm and mechanical rhythm. That automobiles, assembly lines and railroad schedules often seem to control man nearly to the extent that man controls his machines is a kind of partial insight that has tended to obscure the major issue which lies just behind it. The transition from rural life to urban life has, in fact, wrought a change in man's very perception of time and space. The quality of perception has altered, as well as the relative valuation most readily perceived.

Rural man was linked to the natural rhythms of the seasons and climate, and these pervaded his being. Whether he was aware of it self-consciously or not, he tended to perceive time in cycles. The world repeated itself, dying each Winter and being renewed each Spring. Time was a given thing, over which a man had little or no control. But space was different. Space was the source of power and wealth. Given opportunity and strength, a man could change the amount of space he controlled, and his status among other men depended more on this one factor than upon any other. Just as it was with individuals, whole peoples were judged strong or weak, depending upon the amount of space they could control.

For the new urban man, the case is reversed. Tine is what is most important as the source of power and wealth It was not that anyone could extend the length of his life, but time, measured in man-hours of labor, productivity per day or week, and tine measured in miles per hour, could be controlled. In an urban setting, it is the administrator, whether in government or private business or industry who has the greatest status9 for he is the one who knows how to make the best use of time. For the urban man, space is usually the limited given factor, least subject to manipulation. In fact, land, space, not held in direct productive use, tends to be a liability and not an asset.

The internal, or psychological, space within which a man lives is also strikingly different depending upon whether he is oriented to rural life or the urban setting. Rural man has to be defensive about the space he controlled' or it would be taken from him. He was continually bound to his space. Hence his view of the world tended to be somewhat narrow, confined primarily to his kinship group in association, and the lands of his own people in geography. But the modern urban man, physically cramped and restricted9 is tied in many, many ways to the whole civilized world. It is in terms of time, which he is most able to control that he feels pinched. But agricultural time rolled on and on and on.

The changed value in the perception of time-space has left a deep mark on the quality of inter-personal relationships, as well. We have already said that the kinship and family groups provided the effective limit to the interpersonal associations of the rural man, and that for urban man, these are determined by professional association. Everyone knows that in a city, physical proximity gives no claim to the title 'neighbor.' When professional associations are linked around the world, geography loses its power, even as a psychological barrier. And geographical mobility, characteristic of urban man, nearly always has its analogue in social mobility. In sum, the time-space value shift has meant an increasing number of secondary, or functional social relationships for urban man, fewer and fewer intimate relationships. Cramped physical space and the need to defend privacy against onslaughts from every corner have given urban man the 'coolness' so often taken for a hard shell.

There are many other dimensions to the question of the inter-relationship of time and space which we have left unexplored. But simply from what has been said it should be clear that it would be no easy matter to determine whether it was the new 'common sense' of science which created the urban revolution through Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, or whether it was the 20th Century urban style which made the theory of relativity a possibility for human thought. Such questions are only speculation, but it does underscore the interdependence of the various facets of the general Cultural Revolution of which we have been speaking. The theological implications of this transformation we shall return to shortly.

"Secular" and "city" are two words which have gone together long, long before they were made the title of a book. In fact, the distrust which rural people have always held for the city dweller, the "city - slicker," has often been built upon a kind of tacit assumption that they were synonymous. All of which is to say that the urban revolution and the secular revolution took root and matured together. But what is most significant is that it is the move from the religious to the secular "mood" of the United States that has made it possible for the first time in human history to regard urban life and style as a normative form of human life. Just as the secular revolution had the effect of giving permission for the development of the common sense of science, so also it has given "permission" to the existence and growth of cities and the urban style of life.

To illustrate, let us look briefly at the mythology which has dealt with the city. For the mood of a culture is often best expressed through its mythology and symbolism. Almost since the beginning, of written history, folk story and ballad have depicted the city as the very abode of evil. The Biblical account of the adventures of the Prodigal Son is only one example of how it was that young men who made their way to the city to seek their fortune ended in corruption and debauchery. Even when the Patriarch Joseph was successful in winning wealth and fame in the cities of Egypt, it finn11y ended in the enslavement of the people of Israel. Only Kings and nobles could tolerate the life of the city out of necessity, and this they did by extending their simulated gardens as far out around the walls of the palace as possible. Even in the great age of the Greek city-states, the polls itself was composed of a relatively small elite group of nobles who had as little to do with the 'masses' who inhabited the city as possible. Strength came from the countryside. Saul and David, the great Hebrew Kings who brought Israel to the height of its power were country lads. It was the city-bred son of David named Solomon who began the downward trend through his excessive spending, and his pre-occupation with the material evidences of power. Despite the contempt of the citified scribes and Pharisees, it was not an accident that the outlying" province of Galilee was claimed as Jesus' birthplace. It was to the city, Jerusalem, that he went to die. Illustrations could be multiplied by the thousands. Rural, reliPiou6 man's suspicion and even hatred of the city is seated deeply in the collective memory. He might travel to the city to use it or exploit it, but the story was never completed until he had returned "home" to his rural town nestled in field, forest or mountain side.

Only in recent years have we begun to see serious evidences of a new mythology depicting the new urban-secular mood. Film producers in 11ollywood and London, Tokyo and Bombay have finally allowed heroes and heroines to come into being whose qualities are unmistakably those of the urbanized 20th Century. In this if nothing more, James Bond, agent 007 of the Ian Flemming novels is unique in that he is typical of a comparatively new kind of folk mythology. But there is a long way to go before such a mythology has reached the kind of maturity necessary to capture the secular urban reality.

Scientific-secular-urban Man is thus a new historical phenomenon. He lives his complex life like a character in a speeded-up cinema story, making relative and ambiguous decisions every moment of his life. The world of the Cultural Revolution is his world. What shall be his - our- stance toward this new world, this new life?

PART II

A WORD IN THE WORLD

"It is in changing the world that we can come to know it," said Sartre. Stating the same thing in religious poetry, "It is in loving Cod that we come to know God." And yet again, "It is in the full living of life that one comes to know about life." In what follows, we intend to explore the relationship of 20th Century man to the ongoing activity which we have discussed under the category of the Cultural Revolution. Or, perhaps we should say that we intend to explore man's relation to the mysterious 'Thereness' which lies at the center of his new world whatever may be the words we use, it is in the midst of that relationship that we again discover the meaning of Mystery, and in which we again begin to have a sense for the meaning of Power, as The Power. It is not our concern to raise up abstract theological issues. We are concerned only with the stance of 20th Century Man as he struggles to come to terms with what is actually happening to him. If it is understood that this is the only place where Man is confronted with God, then finally, theology simply cannot be abstract. With this as our context, humanity in this age stands on the verge of religious recovery more significant than any event since the First Century of the common era.

It is clear that this human event of the 2Oth Century, has been a painful thing. There is significance in the insight that when Man meets God face to face, the consequence is death. For "old mood" man with his feet still planted in the rural soil, his mind still searching for eternal truth in a world where good inevitably must prevail over evil, the multiple revolution brought the experience of the void, the abyss. He sought explanation for what was happening to himself and his world, and he found only the utter emptiness of being. He saw the First and then the Second World War, and he knew that the values of good and evil, right and wrong, were simply gone. He saw the explosion of the atomic bomb, and he saw the transciency of the world itself. He saw and heard of the deaths of millions, and he knew that it was his own death as well. He saw the swollen slums of the city, and he saw nature violated and destroyed. He looked at life, and he saw that the only certainty was the six foot hole into which he would be lowered at the end of it. For the man of the old mood, the 20th Century was the century when all things passed into nothing. There was nothing left, nothing left...

The only escape was flight, the only hope was to hide. This was done in the early part of the century with marvelous ingenuity. The best way, of course, was just to go on with business as usual. Keep the family together. At all costs, keep the family together. Go into business. Gain power. Make money. Business as usual. Nothing has happened. Business as usual. But always the question was just below the surface: Who am I? How did I get here? Why am I here?"

But the questions would not stay hidden beneath the surface. Perhaps it was the students of the world who finally brought them out into the open. In the United States, they found expression in a great fascination with psychology. Every lecturer or writer who had something to say on the question of the meaning of personal identity had almost automatically made both his fame and fortune. But even in this, especially in this, there were no answers. The fascination of psychology turned into just one more faddish obsession. It became only one more way of hiding, from reality by dealing with peripheral questions to avoid the critical fact that human life in the new would could never again be secure or certain in any way.

The new mood, the secular mood, of which we have already spoken really came fully into being only in the 50s. It may have been the event of the the Russian Sputnick which signaled it. The vision of that "thing" out there hurtling around the earth at man's behest under man's control was enough to spark the realization that opportunity and possibility were everywhere From the void of futility and non being we passed into the overwhelming experience of life and world and self as the very fullness of Being. It was the North Carolina author Thomas Wolfe wrote that his life's desire was to ride every train fly in every plane, speak with every man, sleep in every bed, but he spoke the new fresh desire of every 20th century man.

But if the experience of the passing of all the old values was a jolt in the corporate life of humanity the transition into the world of fullness and infinite possibility was no less so. The new possibilities of the urban scientific secular world were crushing in the insistence of their demand to grasp every moment and wring it dry of every instant. Decide, decide at every turn a new decision was required. No longer could one trust others to make the decisions on his behalf. Every man had his own life on his hands. With his new awareness of time, he felt it slipping away from him with each tick of the clock, as though it were so many grains from a handful of sand, passing through sticky fingers. The crucial question of life was no longer Who am I? There was no time to ask that. The only question we could ask was What do I? What shall I do? Life was as it were going down the "drain of history" squeezed down into it by the sheer weight of the future, No longer was there any escape through hiding save only for the very naive. 2Oth Century man was lucid self conscious man as the world had never known before. But he could still escape through floating high above the level of practical reality, like a child's runaway balloon. He could still allow himself to postpone decisions endlessly until I am older, until I am out of school, until I have married, until I have achieved status in my profession, until my children are grown until, until, until… But always he knew on the periphery of his consciousness that the responsibility for the state of the world was his alone just as it belonged to every other man alone. And he knew that every refusal to decide about his life was in fact a decision against life itself. For every refusal to decide is of course itself a decision not to decide. The absolutes of heaven and hell have gone and the 20^th Century man finds himself with nothing less than the world on his hands. But still he can refuse to grasp it. Perhaps, he says, I will deal with that little matter tomorrow.

It is here that everyone of us finds himself for the journey from the old mood into the new mood is the journey of every one of us. We are all aware of the world and the time in which we live. But we are all weary of the burden of constant decision. And we are weary of the shiny new technological wonders which surround us and we are weary of exercising the new powers they have given us. We hunger once again to perceive Mystery but we are weary so very weary. With D. H. Lawrence we can say

I was so weary of the world,

I was so sick of it,

everything was tainted with myself,

skies, trees, flowers, birds, water,

people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines,

nations, armies, war, peace-talking,

work, recreation, governing. anarchy. . ."

From Selected Poems, D. H. Lawrence.

New York: 1967 the Viking Press.

Such is the life of 20th Century man in the words of the poet.

This condition of weariness, this state of being which springs from our own refusal or inability to deal with any reality but that of our own creation' has a name. One hesitates to use it, because it is a word which has been grossly misused, since we have forgotten that religious language is poetic language, but it has no adequate substitutes. The name is sin. The theologian Paul Tillich speaks of sin as the separation of man from himself, from his neighbor and from the Ground of Being, from Cod. Because man is in this condition of separation, he shows it in particular actions, just as a man who is in the comparatively simple emotional state of happiness will show that he is happy by the way he acts. But we must never make the mistake that many have made of assuming that sin is identical with the actions of one sort or another, which man in the state of sin, will perform. To be in the condition of sin is to be in the condition of one who is an outcast in the universe. The things he may do are only signs pointing to that fact

20th Century Man is in the condition of sin, because he experiences himself, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, as one who does not belong to the new age. And the awareness of being an outcast comes at the very moment when man has come to realize that he alone is responsible for creating the world in which he is an alien. We are not suggesting that sin is unique to the 20th Century, but certainly each new age of history has manifested its own characteristic quality of sin. The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard spoke for those who followed many, many years after him when he described the condition of man as that of despair. And perhaps we are even closer to the truth when we borrow from the wisdom of the Eastern world describing Sin in the 20th Century as the condition of life lived in illusion. For perhaps the mark of sin in our own time is our infinite inventiveness in fabricating worlds which have no reality, in order to escape the real world. In the area of foreign policy, certainly it is clear to all that the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics share a common ability to disguise exploitation in the garb of foreign aid, and aggressive interference as protective policing. Nor have other nations of the world been slow in developing the tactic. Within nations, there is no end to the fabrications used to justify the suppression of minority or underprivileged groups. And on the individual level, there has been no end of commentary on the capacity of the commercial advertisers to exploit private dreams nod illusions for economic advantage. These are only a few very superficial examples of course, but they make the point that in the 20th Century, in its own peculiarly ingenious way, "Sin abounds."

"Moreover the law entered, that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound," said the Apostle Paul.*(Romans 5:20).

In the context of the new age, this statement increases in its power. The Christ event is that which occurs at the moment an i1lusion is shattered. It is that which brings to light the half-conscious sense of despair so that we can see it for the refusal of life that it is. It is the moment when the pap separating man from neighbor is seen for the chasm it really is. It can be experienced as an explosion in the unconscious depths of the human Spirit, or it strikes as a flash of light. Always it is that which brings utter clarity where vagueness and confusion once reigned. It is the event which brings consciousness beyond consciousness of utter reality. The Christ event is never finally describable or definable, yet it is always recognizable for what it is. It can come as the address from a friend, an enemy or be simply the consequence of a routine daily event which strikes us in an unusual way.

Always the Christ event comes as an intrusion. Always it brings pain because it shatters illusions. And illusions are precisely those false realities which we contrive in order to protect us from pain. No man admits to his particular blindnesses or provincialisms lightly, any more than a nation readily admits to error in matters of national policy. The intrusive, offensive quality is a mark of the Christ event as smoke is a mark of fire. And the inevitable first response to it is a defense. The Christ event is that which throws a man or a community or a nation against the limits of life, and it demands a decision in response. He is compelled either to change the direction of his life, or find a method of doing away with the intruder. The Christ event is the illusion-shattering intrusion which demands of every man that he receive and come to terms with his very humanness. This is the universal experience of the meeting between Man and God. And always the address is the same. It goes only one way, and God says, "This is the universe you live in. Either you decide to live in it, or you don't. But there is no more hiding." That is always the universal Christ word.

Always and everywhere, the Christ Word is the same Word. It speaks of the utter, unconditional, total acceptance of all that has existed, past, present, and future. Paul Tillich gave an entire sermon entitled "You Are Accepted." But he could have read only the title from the pulpit before sitting, down, and in principle, it would have been sufficient. The Christ Word "You are Accepted," is the Word addressed to nothing less than the sum total of existence in universal time and universal space.

How could a Word of universal acceptance carry an offense? How would we in our day talk about the "Offense of the Gospel?" Perhaps we must talk of four dimensions of the Christ word. To say that all is accepted of God is to say that all of the past is received. To one who thinks in psychological categories, this comes rather easily, even glibly. Cheap, home-grown psychology is always telling us that our past is forgiven. Martin Luther's confessor told the frantic, fanatically self-depreciating young theological student, perhaps in a moment of exasperation, that he ought to go and murder his father. Then he would know what it meant to have one's past forgiven by God' For many today, the shock is no less severe when we awaken at 20, 30, 50 years of age, possessed by the question, 'Now just what was it that I have done to justify my existence over these many years?" Then an inner voice from the depths of Being comes to us and says "You have done NQTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING --- but here you are, sustained in life by the same Power which sustains the stones of the Earth itself." Then we know that the past has truly been received.

The offense of the Word is even more brutal when we look at the historical world of Man, and hear its acceptance pronounced. Then we are compelled to think of 6,000,000 murdered Jews during World War II, 1000 children who died of starvation 'yesterday,' 6000 courageous young soldiers who died fighting for national independence six months ago. The word which pronounces that past as received is an offense! But there it is in history, undeniable, irreversible - eternally received into history.

Is the Word easier to bear if we say that all the present is approved? Is it easier to say that all pain and suffering, all physical and psychological warpedness, all ugliness and rotting filth, as well as n11 those things we personally appreciate, is precisely what is approved by the Word of God?

When we say that all that is, is good, then we are saying that the reality of the universe that we know is, at once, God's Will and God's Judgment. All of history is God's Intention and God's unqualified Demand upon us for the future. It is in the demand of Life, where the past and the future are one, that we finally Perceive God's Judgment. It is when the temporal and the eternal are united in the very present moment that we are able to perceive that the judgment of history and the Eternal Judgment of God are paradoxically utterly different, yet more profoundly, utterly the same. To say that all that is, is good, is no one's personal valuation of the life situation as we find it. It is the stance which we daringly assume in making God's will our own will.

From that stance we are then able to pronounce the Word of universal acceptance in its forth dimension, saying that all the future is open. In a peculiar way, it is this aspect of the Word which is most obvious, yet most offensive. It is most obvious because we are aware that we are constantly moving toward the future. Yet it is the future which threatens us at the depth of our being,, and only the unself-conscious man of illusion faces it without awe and dread. To be able to receive the Word of God that not only all that I will do in the future, but even my own personal death is finally approved by God, is finally to be an utterly free man. It is the freedom which God gives. In the past, we have spoken of this poetically as eterna1 life. For to experience the future, utterly unafraid, as being utterly open, is to experience eternity focused upon the present moment, perhaps as the rays of the Sun are focused by the power of a magnifying glass, It was only When 20th Century Man, becoming too scientifically literal about his religious poetry, came to think of eternal life as some kind of "life after death," that this whole aspect of the Word of God was lost to his understanding. And when the image of the eternal as focused upon the Present moment is lost, so also has the whole power of the Word of God been lost.

Thus we can say that the Word of God is the word of universal acceptance. All the past has been received. The present is utterly what it is intended it should be. Absolutely all that is, is good. And the future is open. All that we have said so far has presumed the Word of God. All that follows must be built upon it. The Christ Word is always the contentless Word, which means that it does not prescribe, in any way, who is to do what and when. It is the Word which exposes reality for what it is, and compels the hearer of the Word to make a decision about his own life. For one who has heard the Word, there is never any question about its truth. It is his own life that is called into question by the Word, and never the other way around.

The Church, in the early years of Her life, found a much shorter, a much more powerful way of announcing the Christ Word than all of this. She said, simply, Jesus Christ is Lord." That wasn't a statement of fact in the sense that "the sky is blue" is a statement of fact. It was a confession of faith, and probably the earliest confession the Church made. "Jesus Christ is Lord" is a kind of code statement, something like the Einsteinian mathematical formula E = mc2. Everyone who was part of the church knew exactly what that special poetic formula meant, because they shared the common code.

But if someone from outside the Church came in and asked what in the world anyone meant with "Jesus Christ is Lord," they had an answer. It wasn't the kind of answer we would give, of course, in which we would define all the words, give a description and then an analysis of what was going on, and then tie it all together in a conclusion. Instead, the members of the early Church just told a story, which was THE story of their lives. It is as though a citizen of India was asked how it came about that India was an independent nation. He might respond by telling a story about a man eared Gandhi, around whose life such and such a series of events took place. And then he would conclude, ". . .and before that, we were no nation, and after that, we were a nation." And because he was a citizen of India, that story would also be his own life story. So it was with the Church. Before "Jesus Christ is Lord," there was no Church, and afterwards, there was. The story about Jesus of Nazareth was the story the Church told in order to 8ay who She really was. It was something like "before I was blind, now I can see," or "once I was lame, now I can walk,' or "once I was dumb, now I can speak.; Except that it was a little more like, "Once we were no people, but now we are a people."

The story they told used two symbols, primarily. One was a cross, and the other was the empty tomb. Then they put these together with the activity of a man named Jesus, it meant simply "to die is to live." It meant that whenever one is willing to surrender all his illusions about life supposedly being pleasant, or easy, or absolute or certain, and when he finds that when he can do that he can go on living, even in the midst of that, then he says "Jesus Christ 1s Lord." The cross up an which the man named Jesus died, and the empty tomb, the symbol of his creative life after having given up all illusions, are pointing to the twin reality of death and renewed life. It is important, not just because it is the story of a man named Jesus, but because it is the story every man knows to be true, if only he be conscious of reality as it is. It is not simply the story of a Nazarene carpenter. but the story of every kind and condition of men. This is why the Christ Word in the Christ Story is the universal Word. It is important not because it was written in the Bible, but because it describes the experience of life.

The affirmation "Jesus Christ is Lord," is the formula which pushes us to make decisions about life, just where we are and how we are. It is never a word which tells us how to avoid doubts, uncertainties or problems, but the Word which tells us to embrace all of them. For life itself is found in the midst of making decisions about life, and the only certainties are the certainties one has decided upon. Finally, all decisions resolve themselves into one decision, which is the decision to die. All that one has is the chance for one glorious, victorious death, and it is that which we must embrace before life comes into its own. It is in the way in which each of us chooses to embrace death that the code phrase "Jesus Christ is Lord" becomes the code for our own life story - and becomes something like "Jesus Christ is Lord, John," or "Jesus Christ is Lord, George." or "Jesus Christ is Lord, Sam." In the process of embracing our deaths, of laying down our lives with purpose, for the sake of humanity, each man picks up the role of the Christian. It is the role of the utterly free man, and in what follows, we intend to explore how this might look.

PART III

FREEDOM AS THE STYLE OF THE CHRISTIAN

The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke about the quality of the freedom of the resurrected man, the man who has decided to give his death purposefully, in a few brief sentences which have already become part of the classical literature of the Church. He used just three critical concepts: freedom, obedience and responsibility.

"Responsibility and freedom are corresponding concepts. Factually, though not chronologically, responsibility presupposes freedom and freedom can consist only in responsibility. Responsibility is the freedom of men which is given only in the obligation to God and to our neighbor."*

*Ethics, ed., The Macmillan Company; New York 1961. p. 216f

The free man, the Christ-man of the 20th Century is thus the man who is able to live in the perpetual tension between obedience and freedom. He is 100,'. obedient, for he lives, with every other man in the "no exit" situation which is history. He is perpetually bound up in the network of interpersonal relationships and the maze of routine daily living which are the substance of the human condition. Yet he is 100% free in that he knows that every decision he makes, every act which he performs in his life, is utterly his own, for which he is ultimately accountable to no individual human agent. The free Christ-man never permits his thoughts or his actions to collapse either wholly on the side of obedience, nor wholly on the side of irresponsible freedom.

A second tension within which the free Christ-man of the 20th Century lives is that between the universal dimension of human existence, on the one hand and the dimension of particularity, on the other. For a man's obligation to God is actualized as man's responsibility to the entire existing universe9 understood as though it were the stage for the unfolding of the vast drama which is human history. For it is here that the Creator God shows himself as who he is. And always the responsible man is making his decision about the drama of humanity in the way in which he makes his decisions about his neighbor, his fellow men, in every immediate situation. Like the tension between obec1ience and freedom, the tension between the universal and the particular is never a matter of a 50-50 relationship. The free Christ-man's decisions and actions are always made 100% within the confines of the particular life situation which is his own, and 100% responsive to the universal historical demand.

It has been said that "The greater the tension a man can tolerate, the greater the man." The free Christ-man of the 2Oth Century is the man who knows this to be true to the nature of human life. For life is struggle, end to be a free, living man, at "peace" with life is to be a man who is at one with the rhythm of that struggle. To be out of harmony with the struggle is to be dead beyond hope of resurrection.

It is out of his lucid awareness that the world is a world of struggle that the free man of the Christ life is released from illusions about himself, about other people, and about the world he lives in. He is no longer concerned with the multiple levels of his psychic processes, his psychic and moral ailments which many of us find so fascinating in ourselves. For it is only the well-being of the human race itself which can give us a perspective upon ourselves and our personal concerns in a way which no amount of individually directed psychological therapy could hope to accomplish. Nor is he particularly shocked by the strange, variant perversions of others. Because he is aware of the nature of his own being, he is aware that every human being is fundamentally out to escape the reality which is life. He knows that every illusion, no matter how subtle or how bazaar has only this one object of flight from the one God of historical reality. The free man is fully conscious of the problems of the world, from population explosion to the excessive exploitation of natural resources, and since this is precisely the world that God loves, he neither flinches nor hides.

The free Christ-man is never under compulsion to reduce the dimensions of the world he lives in, in order to cope with it, Knowing that the world is finally God's world, he does not find it necessary to expend his mental and emotional reserves in continuous calculations of what is good and what is bad, of what is threatening to his own life and what is not. He moves from situation to situation with his nerves exposed, seeing what he sees, knowing what he knows, deciding and acting as the particular situation demands, He is the man capable of action where the unfree man dares not tread, for he has not reduced the world of his consciousness to the safe dimensions of his life, his children, and the pet dog. Because he was sensitive in an immediate way where other men had closed their eyes, Mahatma Gandhi changed history when he decided to fast until the members of his government brought him an "untouchable" - by the hand. Each and every moment of the free man is valued for the unique, unrepeatable event that it is, and he savors it to the depths. And in the midst of this depth involvement, the free Christman is the one who is utterly detached, able to assume any role required of him in order to move his brother and his neighbor toward the universal humanity in which he finds his meaning and his roots. He is the lover of every moment, the actor of every role required by history, and the conqueror in the midst of every situation - because his life is always on the line, and he needs to conserve nothing. And finally, the free Christman is willing to live with the consequences of every act, because he renders his every deed to the Judgment of Cod. He is the responsible man living on behalf of all that was, all that is, and all that ever shall be, knowing that the God of history is the only arbiter who can grant him vindication.

Freedom is the gift and the consequence of the address of the Word in history. Whenever it is spoken to an individual person and received by him, he is transformed. Whenever it is spoken to history in the midst of an historical setting, history is changed. It is no magical transformation but the kind of thing which is meant in the paradoxical statement, "Everything is changed, but nothing is different." The Word is that which inspires awe and dread simply through granting the insight into human consciousness-of-consciousness that every man has permission to be precisely what he already is--a free man, responsible in his own particular situation for universal existence.

PART IV

THE CORPORATE STRUCTURE OF THE CHRIST LIFE

We are now ready to return to the starting point of our discussion, the world in the midst of multiple revolutions. But if we are among those who have heard the Word of Life, perhaps we return to our starting point with a new kind of sensitivity to the Mystery which abounds in its midst, to which we have been blind by its sheer proximity. It may be that here we shall see that we are once again on the great journey which we never left. In this section, we shall be talking about the church, its manifestations and the 'methodology" of the practical churchman.

D. H. Lawrence spoke to the heart of every man receptive to the gift of divine Grace when he wrote the following lines so expressive of Man's hunger after the Divine Not-Man:

"Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!

If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!

If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed

By the fine, fine wind

that takes its course through the chaos of the world

Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge

Driven by invisible blows,

The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall

find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,

I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,

Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression."

How is it that a man, a group of men, can become like "an exquisite chisel", "driven by invisible blows" in the task of shaping history? Of course, everything that has been said up until now presupposes the existence of the corporate social entity which is the Church. It has been the Church that has recognized the presence of the Word in History as the judgment, and it was the Church who perceived that the prospects and possibilities for the future rested solely on the appropriation of the judgment. The history of the Church has been a series of fiery eruptions, each one culminating in a major change in the social landscape. After each such eruption it let loose a seething burst of creative energy in every field of human endeavor, and each time it cooled into rigid crystalline structures. In the 10^th Century, we are witnessing another eruption, corresponding to the social cultural revolution that has been described. It is only the obvious consequence of the Christological Word that "to die is to life" that this renewal should come at a time when all but a few rigid "die-hards" and a few faithful students of the Word had ceased to look to the Church for anything more than pious mouthings of tarnished poetic images. Nevertheless, we are in such an age of renewal. Perhaps we can date it from 1917, the year Karl Barth published his commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans. From that time on, it was possible once again to understand that the Church was about the business of transmitting life through Word and Deed. Now, in the years since 1950, it is reasonably clear that the theological task has been completed, and we have moved into the phase of practical implementation of those theological insights in tangible, visible social forms. We, are in the 50th year of the renewal of the Church and we are on1y beginning the practical task of creative building. How young we are, measured against the perspective on time held by our Christ-men forefathers.

Interpreted from the vantage point of practice, the initial 'retooling' phase of the renewal of the Church in every age has been concerned to find that new set of basic images, or mental pictures, which would allow the great numbers of people to see themselves as creative agents in the process of social restructuring. Each image was correlated to the task the Church had to perform in that era. In the early centuries of Her life, the task was that of gaining clarity on the meaning and implications of The Word about life. It was evident to all, both inside the Church and out, that that Word would bring an end to the power of Roman civilization, so the basic image was of the community living before the temporal limits, before the end of time itself. The early church was the eschatological community. When, so to speak, the end of time did come for Western Civilization at the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Church turned up as the only social agency with any power and organization whatever. It became clear that if culture was to be maintained, if there was to be any renewal of civilized order, it was the Church who would have to do it. So the image became that of the Church as super-agency, welding all the varied elements of human life together into one firm structure. In their turn, the reformers, at first Protestant and later, Catholic as well, cut through the medieval perversions with the image of the priestly-prophetic community. The wreckage of the historic Church we often see around us is but the consequence of the perversions of the reformers great insights. Where once we defended doctrine as a way of defending the very humanity of mankind, we are now often caught in the role of defending doctrine for the sake of preserving our own sense of certainty in the face of evident social upheaval. I'm are often caught in institutionalism, so called not because the Church does not need structures in order to operate, but because we defend structures for the sake of defending church structures upon which personal security depends. An we find ourselves enmeshed in 'communityism', where the fellowship of the work-gang has degenerated into the fellowship of the anxious and soul-weary. When group therapy becomes the most 'popular' activity in which the Church is engaged it is a certain sign that the role of the Prophetic community, from which our current understanding of Christian fellowship sprang, has reached the end of the road.

The new image of the Church in our time is that she is mission. This does not merely mean that she embodies mission as one part of her being, but that She is Herself the very embodiment of mission. It is a living theological statement of the cultural fact that it is no longer possible to separate corporate or private identity from vocation. To state once again what has already been said in many ways, in a slightly different way the mission of the Church in the 20th Century is to serve as a kind of corporate social entrepreneur, perpetually searching out new possibi1lties for the Investment of its living capitol. Like the entrepreneur, she changes the social structures she touches, not simply by building new ones, although she may do that too, not merely by tearing down old structures and replacing them, but by transforming them, revivifying them from the inside out. Like the entrepreneur, she builds her plans never feeling certain as to what the outcome of the venture will be. Like the Fathers of the Church, she shares the vision of something which might be described as "full humanity" for all men, but, again like the Fathers of the Church, she trusts in the Lord of Life to make clear precisely what that will be as she builds her role in the vast human evolutionary drama. She participates fully in the cultural revolution with human evolution as her context.

The time is passing when the dominant cultural image of the Church member is that of the grumpy little old lady--of either sex. Perhaps the vision of the solitary man of faith surrendering his individuality for the sake of mankind has best been described by Nikos Kazantzakis, the poet-theologian:

"Love danger. What is most difficult? That is what I want' Which road should you take? The most craggy ascent! It is the one I (God) also will take: follow me'

Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his

own is free.

Learn to command. Only he who can give commands may represent

me here on earth.

Love responsibility. Say: It is my duty, and nine alone, to

save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to

blame.

Love each man according to his contribution in the struggle.

Do not seek friends; seek comrades-in-arms."

(The Saviors of God Spiritua1 Exercises, trans. Kimon Friar. Simon and Schuster: New York. 1960).

The solitary churchman is bound to others of his community in the shared knowledge of his utter aloneness. He knows that no man can help another to die. He knows that every man's decision about his life is his own. He knows that to stand as the one who is willing to assume responsibility for the future of mankind in the course of history is a dangerous thing. Nor is the danger exclusively from small men ready to fight when the walls around their tiny self-made worlds are threatened. For the God of Life who makes his presence felt in the Old and New Testament documents of the Church seemed often to be even harsher in His Judgments upon those who loved him than upon those who hardly knew His Name. Those belonging to the community of the solitaries are never even permitted the securities or the certainties of home and community granted to his neighbors. For his business is that of calling into question all of the old righteousnesses, complacencies. His anxiety is perpetual, His task is perpetual, for there are always those falling out of even the relative structures of right and wrong that he and his comrades are able to build. Of men such as this, the Church of the future must be built.

Just as the decisions of individual men must retain the polarity between the universal-comprehensive and the local-particular, so must the disciplined body of the Church hold the tension in its missional service between 'witnessing-love' and 'justing-love.' The Word and the Deed can never be collapsed into each other, nor can they ever be separated. What is especially clear in our time is that neither expression of the Divine Love can be understood in the Romantic terms of by-gone centuries of history in the Western World. The one who takes the responsibility for shattering the illusions of his neighbor never appears "loving" in the conventional sense of the word. Nor does the intentional man of faith appear loving when he makes the decision that his personal energies and resources will be devoted to the elimination of Poverty through the building of new urban structures rather than the random distribution of charity to hapless individuals. Yet these are the kinds of decisions called for in our time, and someone must make them.

The Church, therefore, is that concrete social reality made up of solitary individuals engaged in a combined thrust, who are willing to take responsibility for the welfare of all mankind for the sake of the emerging humanness. If one says that he is looking at that which he thinks is the Church, and does not find this sort of activity going on, one can only say he is looking in the wrong place. What he is seeing, no matter what name it has chosen to live under, is not the Church, that body which has chosen to live its death to the hilt, and has been passed on to us by the historical Fathers. It must be added that wherever one sees a group of people dispensing the word that men are free to live their lives in the midst of reality as it is, and wherever one sees a group of people executing the deed that will bring humanity to men, there he is seeing the Church, no matter what name it may choose to live under. The Lord of Life is never without His own, and if ever we find ourselves tempted to defend the church, we can be sure that it is not the Church we are termed to defend.

The task of the Church is not to defy the ongoing cultural revolution, but to bring it to its fulfillment.

Before the development of the model for the structure and operation of Church mission in the 20th Century, there are some things which need to be said to provide a context. One is that there is no theological or even Biblical stipulation prescribing the organization of the Church. The only requirement is pragmatic effectiveness. If perhaps this seems too obvious to commend comment, we need not search far in Protestant denominational history to remember the time when receptivity to such a warning Word would have been most valuable. The Church's responsibility for all of mankind requires that the mission be accomplished. The rest is a matter of the goals, strategy and tactics.

A second point which cannot be reiterated too often is that, in the first instance, nothing in the life of the Church has value or meaning apart from the task. With our current perspective on history, it is clear that all of the perversions of the Church occurred when her members began to perform the acts of worship, meditation, preaching and ecclesiastical organization primarily for their own sakes. Within the context of mission, there are, of course, infinite possibilities for innovation, experimentation and artistic creativity in each of these areas, and many more besides. But they must never lose touch with their concrete missional grounding.

In our time, the Ecumenical Movement is a powerful, strengthening influence pressing toward the image of the Church as mission. For it is evident that what is required here is not a simple blending or smoothing of differences. The much praised 'discussions' between Protestant denominations, between Protestants and Catholics and even between Protestants, Catholics and Jews have usually remained just that--discussions. By contrast, where the representatives of various faiths have been able to perceive ~ common need and unite forces to deal with that need in concrete terms, the results have frequently been quite striking. Perhaps this may in time prove to be true of "dialogue" between the great religions of the world. Clarity on the significance of theological differences and similarities emerges most readily within the common missional thrust.

Finally, at least a brief word must be said about the dynamic of social change. The great "secret of history" which has been revealed in the 20th Century, of which men were primarily unaware in past ages, is that history does not merely happen--it is decided. To contemporary ears, this sounds like an obvious thing, but in practice, it has not proven so. Intellectually aware that authority rests solely in the hands of men, and usually very ordinary men, one is still prone to react as the victim of historical trends Consequently, it is imperative that Churchmen of the 20th Century work constantly and self-consciously to hold before their eyes their own possibilities for altering the trends of history. For it is not only a possibility; it is a necessity if man is to continue towards the goal of full humanity for all men.

Another thing that we know in the 20th Century which we did not know ever before in quite the same way is that the dynamic of social change is an objective phenomenon. That is to say, there are known effective methodologies employable to achieve social-cultural transformation. It is not merely the case that some people have 'better' causes than others, or even that some people have 'better luck' than others in their efforts ~o achieve their ends. Through the lucidity which has come with the present age of human revolution, every man is thoroughly aware that every other man has his own point to make, his own set of goals to accomplish, his own set of values to implement. The difference lies in chat some men are intentional about the goals they seek and about the methodology which they employ, and some men are not. The vagueness of the Liberal Movement in the United States yields an example of what happens when great ideals are not backed up with a hard-headed comprehension of social practics. The power of Nazi Germany, at 1east in the first phases of her private war against the world, is a superb example of what can happen when even the most debased, reduced form of provincialism is supported by an intentional concern with precise strategy and tactics. The Lord of History 'guarantees', as it were, only that men will experience His judgment. He does not guarantee the outcome of any particular battle. The dictum that 'might makes right' gives an inadequate image of reality in some ways, but the truth that is in it has rewritten many pages of history.

The position of the Church as an historical force is no different than that of any other group which presumes to deal with history. She also must consider carefully her strategy and her tactics. In the end, the Church 'ill be judged by the Lord of History upon her effectiveness, and the judgment will not be altered because she learned her methodology from Karl Marx or from the Apostle Paul. When the Church takes her stand on behalf of the possibilities for humanity for all men, against the forces which defend every sort of parochialism, narrowness and bias, let there be no mistake. She is out to achieve an objective social change. She is engaged in revolution, and she had best inform herself of the best of revolutionary methodology.

For objective strategic reasons, therefore, the 1ocal congregation continues to be the spine of the Church. This is because there is literally no mace in the world where there is not a congregation of Christians, awaiting only clarity of vision to enable them to act. They have shared in the perversions of the past, but they are also open to receive the Word of the future as well. The local congregation is finally where the models and constructs of the Church must be developed and put into action. It is the local congregation which must be the basic unit of the human revo1ution.

It is not a mere value judgment, but an observable reality that within every group of human beings, there are those who are more sensitive and more self-consciously intentional than others. This is no less true in the units which comprise the Church than elsewhere. It is therefore necessary that these smaller groups discipline themselves in a common covenant on behalf of the whole. In many parts of the world, this is already happening. We shall call these groups the "Congregational Cadres" of the Church, and it is through their existence in the 2Oth Century that another resultant phenomenon has come into being. This is called the "Spirit Movement." It is made up of all of those men and women who are aware or the depth dimension of the cultural transformation now occurring, and who intend self-consciously to support it. These local cadres are the front line troops in the "Revolution in Humanness."

There are four aspects critical to the life of every local congregation in the Church, and it is therefore of the first order of responsibility of the local cadre to see that these aspects receive their due attention. They are worship, study and reflection, discipline, and action. Taken together, they comprise the mission-oriented common life of the Church. Space allows only a brief consideration of each one.

The people of God, not one whit less than other men, labor under constant pressures of life to reduce that Final Mysterious Power before which they have determined to stand to more 'manageable' proportions. That is to say, in the old language of the Church, they are prone to worship idols, to live before a reduced view of reality. In order to accomplish this, the act of worship is a necessity of mission, for it is here that the Christmen rehearse the role that they have assumed as the ones who are laying down their lives for all men. At each worship event, they come in humility, confessing, the temptations with which they are burdened, they render praise to the Lord of Life, gratitude for the givenness of life, and they rededicate their lives at each opportunity to renew in themselves the decision for compassion upon the human creation. It is only through the act of worship that the missional people are able to retain the creative tension of their lives.

To be intentional is to plan, strategize, and develop tactics. Therefore, study and reflection is the utter imperative of every local congregation. It never indulges its curiosity nor participates in academics for their own sakes, yet its planning and research must be thorough. Study and planning is the "model building" phase of the Church's work. In every situation, there must be a thorough, detailed analysis of the problems which exist, and the problem chart must be accompanied by other charts depicting the forces, or the personnel resources which are available, the instruments or the logistical tools at the disposal of the cadre, and an outline of the enduring structures which it is seeking to create or to rebuild. None of these can be left out of a thorough, comprehensive man of approach. Every presupposition must be spelled out clearly. For instance, a local congregation needs to operate geographically, and it needs to define that geographic area. It must deal with all the human problems at once, or it runs the risk of reducing its mission to the absurdity of a side issue.. It must deal with every social level and every age level within the geographical community, for it is aware that social entities are profoundly inter-related. And finally it must deal with the depth human problem, or problems, which characterize that particular situation. It must understand the hearts and the spirits of its people. These it will deal with through the intentional use of symbols which present the tangible, possible realities for the missional and creative life style. Such careful plans never are completed quickly or easily, without months and months of hard, corporate, intellectual thrashing. Yet without them, the mission of the Church has no possibility of succeeding in accomplishing" its revolutionary aims in the face of the already organized, already thoroughly intentional structures of the world around it.

Worship and study are held together in the discipline of the common life of the Church. It is always a voluntarily assumed discipline, of course, for no one can compel a man to give up his life willingly. But it must be a rigorous discipline, spelled out in a common covenant, and it must give every necessary ordering structure to the corporate body. The members of the local cadre must understand that discipline is an absolute imperative if anything significant is to be accomplished. Again it must be stressed that it is never discipline for the sake of discipline. hut discipline for the sake of mission that counts.

Along with the structure of discipline goes the structure of accountability. No man can finally discipline another free man. But at the same time, every man is subject to the desire to allow discipline to collapse. To prevent this, he needs to allow himself to live and work under the close scrutiny of his neighbor. Criticism, encouragement, and even, from time to time, a good swift kick, are all part of accountability before one's neighbor. It is corporate accountability that makes personal discipline in freedom a real possibility.

And lastly, there must be real, tangible, physical action involved in the accomplishment of the mission of the Church. The Churchman needs to pound into his head over and over again the general rule of thumb that if he cannot point to what he has done, he has probably done nothing. If he has not built a visible social structure embodied in real people in real time and real space for the sake of enabling humanness, then any missional achievement he may claim is only one more illusion. If he has not changed the existing structures of justice to deal more adequately with real human problems, then he is laboring under another illusion. And if the labor required of him for the accomplishment of the task does not produce real physical threat and a constant reminder of his biological contingency, he is only fabricating more false dreams to unravel for someone who is willing to be the Church.

There are many other dimensions to the strategy and tactics of the local congregation, but this at least depicts a bare skeleton of what is needed. But most critically, the 2Oth Century Christmen of the Church can never lose the vision which holds them in being. Father Teilhard de Chardin caught something, of that vision in the following words

"In spite of the wave of skepticism which seems to have sweet away the hopes (over-simplified and over-materialistic) upon which the nineteenth century lived, faith in the future is not dead in our hearts. Better still, it is this hone, deepened and purified, which seems bound to save us. It is not only that the idea of our consciousness of a possible awakening to a super-consciousness easily becomes better based scientifically on experience and more necessary psychologically to keep alive in man the zest for action in addition, this very idea pushed to its logical conclusion, seems the only one capable of making mankind ready for the great event which we are awaiting, the discovery of a synthetic act of adoration in which are allied and mutually exalted the passionate desire to conquer the world, and the passionate desire to unite ourselves with God; the vital act, specifically new, corresponding to a new age of the earth. (Chardin, Building the Earth. Dimension Books, Wiles-Barre, Pa., U.S.A., 1965, pp, 122-125.)

NOTES TO THE 20th CENTURY

ON THE STYLE 0F BEING CHRISTIAN

By The Corporate Office

The Ecumenica1 Institute: Chicago