[Oe List ...] CF&LC revisited

Mon Oct 8 14:54:15 EDT 2007

John, I agree that Rossinow does zip with Tillich's understanding of grace. But I was amazed that he gets at the heart of an existentialist one-story post-Christian universe through Bonhoeffer and Tillich, and then shows their influence on a generation of churchmen through JWM & Company. For a cultural historian to go to the trouble of reading theological sources to try to understand a political phenomenon is commendable.
  It's clear that Rossinow never "got" RS-1, and that he substitutes secular social activism for Niebuhr's image of the church as social pioneer, so I'd give him a B minus on that point.
  And his focus on Austin rather than Chicago/EI limits his perspective.
  But my major point is: if we don't write our own history, somebody else will...and already has.

  Marshall

  It would be interesting to look at Martin Luther King Jr. as another phenomenon of secular social activism grounded theologically in Tillich as well as tactically in Gandhi.

John Cock <jpc2025 at triad.rr.com> wrote:
        I'll talk to you more at the Springboard meeting. Busy now. 

  Basically, he comes in with his theory of existentialism and tries to fit JWM and CFLC into it. The select few students he talked to are hardly representative, we know: what about all the staff who left with JWM? Looks like Rossinow would have tried to ask them. Maybe he did. Only Al speaks, and you see what he thinks of him below. They're all still alive but Joe Pierce (GRHS). They would have jammed his too-neat research grid. He had little clue as to what happened later in Chicago, as you read here:

  In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Al Lingo worked with Joe Mathews to build a dissident, even revolutionary, church along the radical lines that the Faith-and-Life Community had laid out. Afterward, Lingo continued his involvement in countercultural, new age, and civil rights activity. . . . [you didn't, did you, Al?]

  Mathews’s goal, in Judy Schleyer Blanton’s view, was to "infiltrate" the mainline Protestant church and use them as a base for the pursuit of a "social justice agenda." . . . Mathews quit, and a majority of the staff members left with him. They went to Chicago where they started the Ecumenical Institute, which undertook organizing projects [what kind was that, Doug?] in localities around the world. [end of EI description]

  Rossinow's research is loose and suspect in places.

  He has some good takes on parts of Tilllich (zip on "grace," his and JWM's rosetta stone) and Bonhoeffer, almost zip on Bultmann and HRN, except that "he was conservative" -- which says more about Rossinow than HRN.

  I'd recommend we all read this. I learned a lot about CFLC I never knew. Silber's comment in Bending History is a much different take than that segment of the chapter. 

  More later. 

  Thanks, Marshall, for posting on the PORTAL and thanks, Portal-folks for letting him.

  John

---------------------------------
  From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of W. J.
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 12:46 PM
To: Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] CF&LC revisited

  John, you're teasing us with cryptic comments! I'd love to know what you think the author's criteria or slant was.

  My take on the story is that the JWM phenomenon was the spark in a tinderbox of cultural dissonance on college campuses in the 1950's and '60's , as evidenced (and perhaps inspired) by motive magazine, and that this unease with the conservative religious values of the Eisenhower era, and the angst that was dramatized in the Cuban missle crisis, exploded in the church pews when RS-1 came to town, offering a revolutionary stance of authenticity.

  Rossinow goes on in the next chapter to pull SDS and SNCC etc. through the radicalization of Casey Hayden and her colleagues, just as Tom Oden grounds the political radicalization of Hillary Rodham in RS-1 and E.I. a decade later in his book The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity. 

  Enough of the cryptic comments, John! What was your real analysis of the chapter? Spill the beans for us.

  Marshall

  Since today is Joe Mathews' 96th birthday, I'm very aware of the lingering residue of the impact of his explosive intrusion into the cultural universe a half century ago. It's like the measurable afterglow of the Big Bang.

John Cock <jpc2025 at triad.rr.com> wrote:
      Thanks, Marshall. Very interesting and revealing, though somewhat forced or slanted by the author's criteria -- his looking for a good example for his theory.

  John

---------------------------------
  From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of W. J.
Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2007 6:41 PM
To: oe at wedgeblade.net; dialogue at wedgeblade.net; springboard email list
Subject: [Oe List ...] CF&LC revisited: shorter, slimmer, and updated

  Regrettably, I sent the following out with an obese Word file that was too fat and not yet scrubbed for typos. I'm trying again without the attachment. I have uploaded the entire chapter to the O:E Repository. If the fat attchment goes thru, please delete and go to the Portal to retrieve your slimmed and corrected copy. http://twiki.wedgeblade.net/bin/view.cgi/Portal/WebHome Click on "recent changes" under the Repository section and you'll see it.
  Marshall

Joe Mathews was born on October 8, 1911, and died his death on October 16, 1977, almost exactly thirty years ago.

  I guess it's inevitable that if we don't write our own history, somebody else will do it for us.

  I was surprised and delighted to find an excellent history of the New Left in the 1960's that accurately sources the influence of JWM & Company on the development of a radical leftist countercultural movement.

  Title is The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (1998) by Doug Rossinow, who is an assistant professor of history at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis. This book is his doctoral dissertation, and without giving too much away, I was more than pleased at how well he, as a historian, integrated an understanding of Tillich and Bonhoeffer with an appreciation of the role of CF&LC and Joe Mathews in forming radical consciousness in Austin and across many campuses in the late 1950's and early 1960's.

  It's an amazing read to go ten years further back in our history than I had before in any depth.

  This guy is a youngster, so he wasn't there, and yet you have a sense of how much he is able to get inside the context and relate what happened in Austin to the cultural revolution of the 1960's.

  And oh yes, he interviewed Lingo by phone in 1991! Also mentions Fred Buss and Joe Slicker, if only once.

  Here's a sample paragraph to whet your appetite.

  Joe Mathews started his career as an evangelical preacher with fundamentalist leanings. The son of an Ohio Methodist minister, he went to Hollywood in the 1930’s to break into the movies and got saved instead in a Los Angeles revival. He maintained a dramatic flair; his heavy silences, poetic outbursts, and fake stammer in the classroom became legend among his students. With his faith intact, he entered the army as a chaplain during World War II. His experiences in the Pacific theater of war "destroyed him" when he found that his religious verities were useless to dying men. "He could offer somebody a cigarette as they died, but he didn’t have anything to say to them. They had to die by themselves," as Lingo puts it.

  I've uploaded Chapter Two to the O:E Repository in case you'd like to plow through it. And I hope to have some more reflections to share soon. I might even read the whole book--unusual for me.

  So let's read the chapter together and share our reflections.

  Happy reading,

  Marshall Jones

  http://twiki.wedgeblade.net/bin/view.cgi/Portal/WebHome

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