The Christian Hope

Lest we be confused at the end, as we no doubt will be, let me say now that I’ve enjoyed these hours together with you as we think about the matters of Christian faith. and we concluded yesterday before I had finished what I had wanted to say about models or metaphors or images or visions of the Christian life. We had talked about some models or images that have been important in our Calvinist Presbyterian tradition in particular. There are other images of the Christian life, and I want to speak in particular about one. And that is the image of the person made free by Christ. The image of the person made free by Christ, which historically can be associated primarily with Martin Luther and the young Luther, the writings of 1520 and the exuberance of the experience of justification by grace through faith.

The gospel, to use the contemporary jargon, the gospel frees us up. I get put off by that. I was talking to one of our most brilliant recent graduates about a month or so ago from his studying, finishing up on a doctor’s degree at a large, prominent American university. And he told me over the telephone that he had decided not to be ordained. And that decision had freed him up to be a Christian. I asked him, I said, now this boggles my mind. How does not being ordained free you up to be a Christian? Well, of course, that’s part of the idiom of our time. But it’s also a very ancient idiom that emphasized the spontaneity, the self-generating character of the Christian life and the Christian experience. As I mentioned the other day, Luther, in writing on the liberty of the Christian, said that the Christian really has no need for the law.

The Christian knows out of the experience of being forgiven what it is to praise God and what it is to obey God. And I also said that John Calvin, even in his most ecstatic moments, would never have said anything like that. So far as I can tell, the one clear, irrevocable division between an authentic Lutheran and authentic Reformed is precisely at that point. No Lutheran could ever say that the law, the primary use of the law, is to stimulate and to guide a Christian behavior. And they may, many Lutherans can and do say that this is a tertiary, a subordinate use of the law to stimulate and guide Christian behavior. And you even have something like Puritanism in Swedish Lutheranism, for example. But no good Lutheran could ever really say, as Calvin did, that the principal use of the law is to stimulate and guide Christian behavior.

On the other hand, I’m really doubtful, but since I’m in the presence of more Calvinists than Lutherans, and I’ll be hesitant to dogmatize on it. I’m really doubtful that any Calvinist could ever say that the Christian really has no need for the law, that out of the experience of being forgiven, one knows spontaneously how one ought to behave out of the authenticity of the experience itself. Luther said, for example, No one has to tell a man how to express love for his wife. He knows this out of the experience of love. Well, I suspect Luther underestimated how much custom, tradition, the guidelines aid the expression of love. Luther could say to his colleague, sin boldly. He was not worried about the piccadillas of his own righteousness. Once he had discovered he couldn’t buy heaven, once he discovered he couldn’t merit heaven, then he had the freedom to sin boldly.

He had freedom to make decisions without an overly fastidious concern about whether or not he was right. We’re saved not by being right, we’re saved by the grace of God. We’re saved not by doing things perfectly, we’re saved by God’s grace. Now, I think this is a dimension to the Christian life that we frequently lose. And particularly those of us whose origins were in Calvinism as it had been filtered through, Puritanism, and I certainly don’t use that word pejoratively. One of the most creative and significant movements in our past was Puritanism, as I think most historians would recognize, and Victorianism, a Victorian version of Puritanism. and I do use Victorianism here in a somewhat pejorative sense, that for us, Christianity has been a rather tight and restrictive sort of experience.

Now, not many people suffer under that burden in 1982, but perhaps some of us suffered under it in 1930 up through the Second World War. How much also that is culturally determined by an impoverished people experiencing depression, the provincialism of life, particularly in the South, in those days, I do not know. But in any case, I think, one, if you had to characterize the vision of the Christian life in the Presbyterian Church U.S., one would have to conclude that traditionally one lacking quality, was this thing that Luther emphasized so much, the vision of the Christian life as a person made free by Christ, free from an overly fastidious concern with one’s own purity, free from a fear that one is not righteous, freedom to rejoice in the goodness of being alive in the world, that god made now one can wish that there was a little bit more of this uh in calvin and there is there is something in this in calvin in principle calvin was near the truth and in practice actually calvin uh very interesting book published uh calvin’s judgment concerning himself Calvin thought of himself as the successor of Luther.

And he felt that the future of Protestantism really fell upon his shoulder. A tremendous sense of responsibility for the ongoing of the kingdom was talked yesterday about Christian life as participation in the dramas of history and the fulfillment of history. Calvin simply did not have time for what today we would call culture and art. Culture and art always require a certain measure of affluence, a certain measure of leisure time. Calvin did not have the leisure time. He had a work to do. And I would say that’s involved in freedom. You know, you take this matter. Christ has made us free, and therefore we ought to be free to work and we ought to be free to play. Now, some of us are not free to play, but there are also some people who are not free to work.

And I think there are situations in human life and experience when one ought to be free to give up play for the sake of a great cause, for the sake of finding a cure for cancer, for the sake of resolving a social problem, for the sake of getting a particular congregation on the road or church building built, a congregation reaching its fruition as the people of God. We ought to be free, free to play and free to work. Calvin was free to give all the energies of his life, at least 95% of them, to his cause. Now, there’s plenty of evidence that Calvin enjoyed… He couldn’t have had so many friends if he hadn’t enjoyed them. He had a capacity for friendship. There’s also evidence that he really enjoyed having a good time, in quotation marks, and that he rejoiced, and certainly he was in principle in favor of having a good time in life, and he was in principle in favor of enjoying the creation of God, but he was free to give this up for the sake of a great cause. But I think that this has been a dimension that has been lacking in the vision of Christian life as we have known it in the Presbyterian Church, at least as I have experienced it.

Now, I do want to say a word about one of the most remarkable chapters in Calvin that bears upon this particular theme, namely Christian freedom. This is one of the six chapters that was in Calvin’s first edition of the Institutes in 1536. It remained almost unedited, unchanged, throughout all the succeeding editions to the final edition in 1559. One may wish that Calvin had expanded on this chapter. What does it mean to enjoy Christian freedom? Well, Calvin said it means three things. It means that we can enjoy the freedom of being forgiven. We are not under the rigor of the law. We do not have to earn our salvation in heaven. We can take it for granted that God loves us and that God places his blessing upon us. The joy and the freedom are being justified by grace through faith.

And then Calvin said Christian freedom here means a second thing, namely gratitude. We are good out of gratitude, out of thanksgiving. One of the principles for ethical conduct, a rubric, what some would call now a middle axiom of ethical conduct that Calvin frequently specified is thanksgiving. How do you determine whether a particular act is good? Well, one criterion of whether a particular act is good is whether or not we can engage in it in thanksgiving and in gratitude to God. Therefore, the freedom of the Christian is the freedom of a life of thankfulness, of gratitude, not the bondage of a life where we have to pay our way. We are good out of thanksgiving and gratitude for a salvation that has been given to us. As I mentioned the other day, Luther quite explicitly wanted to say that here we have an ethic of gratitude.

Calvin was willing to say that you have a morality of gratitude at this point, but Calvin, unlike Luther, always wanted to say that there is a further reason why you have to deal with the law, not simply that you’re redeemed, but that you’re created. And God created you so that the law of God is not something heteronymously from the outside imposed upon you, actually the law of God is the law of your own existence. And when you do the will of God, you’re fulfilling the basic law and purpose and intention of your own life. So Calvin had really no hesitation to tell people to obey the law whether they had experienced salvation or not. They’d been created and they were under the law by creation as well as under the law by salvation. But when he’s talking about Christian liberty here, it is the liberty and joy of a life of gratitude and of thanksgiving.

And the third point that Calvin made on the Christian life as a free life is freedom in things indifferent. Of course, the classic example in the New Testament is the matter of eating meat off of idols. And I suppose the classic example of this in our culture would have been, for the last 50 or 100 years, would have been the matter of taking alcoholic beverages. One of the points that Calvin made about the freedom of the Christian life is that That a good work is a work that God commands, and that the church has no business imposing good works on people that are the church’s works and not the work of God. A good work, as our Confession of Faith puts it, is a work that God commands, not a work that other people command. Not a work that a legislature commands, not a work that a hierarchy commands, not a work that the Pope imposes.

A good work is a work that God commands. God alone, as our confession puts it in one of the finest statements in the confession of our church, God alone is Lord of conscience and has left it free from the laws and the ordinances of men. and this is the point Calvin makes here you cannot bind the conscience you cannot impose obligations upon Christian freedom as we frequently attempt to do in the church in these matters there is the freedom of the forgiven person the freedom of a person who has been made free by Christ to do or not to do we are free to eat meet awful titles free not to eat we are free to participate in the drinking of social drinking of alcoholic beverages and free not to, at least in that particular context. I don’t want to answer that question for anybody’s conscience.

A very interesting thing to me, I was teaching a Sunday school, I’ll put this in parenthetically. At that time, my wife was a member of St. Giles Presbyterian Church, which is out in the west end of Richmond. And this was the late 60s, and I was teaching in an experimental class down at Virginia Commonwealth University in attempting to integrate the humanities. And I would say that probably 85-90% of the students in the class in which I was teaching were on drugs of one kind or another. and yet those students in that class standing at Virginia Commonwealth wanted to talk about the drug problem in our society and they thought this was a very severe problem but they defined the drug problem in terms of drinking alcoholic beverages and they thought there was some gross injustices in our society because the police didn’t stand around the country club of Virginia on Saturday night stopping cars and smelling people’s breath like they did around Virginia Commonwealth on the weekend when they had parties and sniffing the air for odors of one kind or another.

A week after we’d had this discussion, we were having a discussion at St. Giles Church Sunday School class which was made up of young lawyers and businessmen and other professional people in the city, all of them fairly prosperous. And they wanted to talk about drug problems in the Sunday school class. And I was teaching at that time, and I said, you know, I think that’s a very good thing. But I said, you know, we really ought to start out with the most serious drug problem in our society, the use of alcoholic beverages. And you would have thought that I had confused black and white. I had confused truth and falsehood. This was not a drug problem. The drug problem was marijuana and all the other various drugs. drugs. So I told them, I said, you know, it’s a very interesting thing.

I got a group of students down in Virginia Commonwealth who want to talk about the drug problem, and they want to talk about alcoholic beverages. And I come out here, and you want to talk about the drug problem, and you want to talk about marijuana. These are complicated problems. And Calvin goes on to say that our Christian freedom is subordinate to our love for neighbor. We are free. We are made free. So one can be a Christian and drink alcoholic beverages. One can be a Christian and smoke marijuana. One can be a Christian and use cocaine, I suppose. I’m speaking here rather loosely. I have not kept up with these things. I would assume that would be true from everything I’ve read in the papers. One can be a Christian and do all of these things.

But the freedom, Calvin insisted, is subordinate to love for neighbor, a concern for the neighbor, and concern for what we are attempting to do in the life of the church. So to be free means not simply to be free. All Protestants have a bad conscience about prohibition. And one of the signs of new freedom, particularly in the generation of ministers that came along in the 1560s, was to demonstrate that they could drink alcoholic beverages. But freedom is not simply the freedom to reject old shibboleths and old taboos. Freedom is also the freedom to give up things that are legally ours for the sake of the well-being of the human community, and even more particularly for the well-being of the Christian community, the community of faith and for the well-being of those with weak faith or with other weaknesses that make them susceptible to the evils that come from the use, say, of alcoholic beverages or marijuana or whatever drug may be in use.

But then Calvin, this goes a little bit beyond the image, but I think in discussing this, Calvin also makes a very interesting comment. and I’ve always found it very useful to preach this sermon-longest theme early in the two or three pastorates I had. Calvin says you need to be concerned about offending the weak but not so much concerned about offending the strong. Calvin put it remarkably well. he said part of Christian life is not giving offense the other part of Christian life is not being too eager to take offense and he says when you have to deal with people who are eager to take offense don’t let it worry you go ahead and offend them now I think we frequently in the church exaggerate the role of not giving offense and forget the other aspect of the Christian life, which is not taking offense.

So, Calvin suggests that we ought not to be too concerned about offending the Pharisees, the self-righteous, the strong. But we ought to be concerned about offense against the weak, the offense of people who don’t really have control over their lives. Part of Christian life is not giving offense. Part of a Christian life is not taking offense, being eager to have offense. And I suppose every pastor knows, as they hardly hear, maybe every seminary president will get to know, that there are always people around who like to take offense. And Calvin says it doesn’t extend to that. Calvin also suggests, and I’ll leave this with you, what a final verdict here would be, that this Christian freedom, this image of the Christian life as freedom, is subordinate to truth.

You cannot violate truth for the sake of love. We can use, I think I could use an illustration that we were using the other day in discussion to say what I meant here. There are a great many things in the church that you can do in order not to give offense. But if avoiding offense includes the violation of fundamental truth, then you simply have to give offense. This is, as Calvin suggests, a necessary offense. For example, I would put on that level the admission to the Lord’s table, admission to worship on the basis of faith alone. And if it offended certain people, As I knew some people, it did offend in the 50s if a person of another race sat down beside you at the Lord’s table. I think one of the most difficult problems I ever had in the life of the most angry situations I ever had was that a group of our high school young people who took communion from a black minister.

And mothers of several of these children called me up the next day about how I had abused their children and putting them in this situation, and they had come home having taken the Holy Communion from a black person. Well, you know, possibly I sinned, possibly I erred there in allowing them to get into a situation in which they did not know what was going to happen. I think we ministers ought to be very careful about violating the contract we have with people I’m very sensitive on that because I think I’m going to seminary chapel not so much now but 10 years ago you really never knew what the leader of worship was going to ask you to do and I resolved back then that I would never let a leader of worship compel me to do what I had not contracted to do when I came into that church, and therefore I would keep my seat or else walk out if the imposition of the leader of worship violated the contract that I had implicitly when I came there.

Well, perhaps I did violate the contract in not making it clear. But on the other hand, the truth that the church is constituted by faith in God is one that could not be compromised for the sake of love and for the sake of not giving offense. I worry about that a little bit, though, because my life is really a dichotomy. Up until 59, when I came to Union Seminary, I spent all my life fighting fundamentalists. And some of that was right bitter. There were right bitter consequences. An invitation to teach at another theological institution is canceled under the pressure of very prominent fundamentalists, whose names you would know, various things like that. Since 1959, though, you know, I really haven’t encountered many fundamentalists. And the problem is the reverse.

The problem is a lack of faith, not the imposition of too much faith on the life of the church. But anyone, I think, who has ever had experience with fundamentalism knows that when you say that love must be subordinate to truth, you’re opening the door to a great deal of brutality, a great deal of legalism in the life of the church. And as I said the other day, a very interesting question is, which comes first, truth or community? Which is prior? Of course, it partly depends on the definition of truth, whether you define truth in terms of propositions or whether you say that truth is ultimately personal. But, so much. The point I wanted to make is that one of the dominant images of the Christian life that has somewhat bypassed us in the Christian community and the Presbyterian community is the image of the person who is made free by Christ, free to live authentically and spontaneously out of the experience of being forgiven, free to rejoice in the day that the Lord has made.

Well, there are other images that we could talk about. In particular, the imitation of Christ, following Christ. The social gospel in this country began largely under the vision of the image of Christ. The most popular track of the social gospel movement was Charles Sheldon’s book, In His Steps. and as all of you know Sheldon suggested that if you want to know what Christian does you say what did you what would Jesus do when you meet the problems of an industrial society you answer them by asking what would Jesus do well this this metaphor of the invitation of Christ Christ is our exemplar our example whose style life and so forth we embody in our own existence is a very moving one very important it’s quite obvious to in the light of what I’ve said it’s inadequate They, as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, the simple teachings of Jesus have to be supplemented by a prudential ethic that takes seriously the persistence of sin in the life of our society, even in the life of the redeemed.

now we can come back to this in questions but what I’d like to move on to is the themes that we’re going to have today namely Christian hope what can we hope for in society and what can we hope for in our human pilgrimage? What are we going? Well, what can we hope for in human life, in human society? When I began my theological studies, the Presbyterian Church was torn asunder by a controversy concerning premillenarianism and our millenarianism, and then there were a few hardy souls who described themselves as postmillenarians. It’s almost ancient history to say that. I really came up believing that the premillenarians might take over Presbyterianism in South Carolina, and when I went to Columbia Theological Seminary, I carried with me a notebook filled with answers to the premillenarians, and then in our own church, on a wide scale, the battle focused even on a more exaggerated form of premillenarianism, dispensationalism, that was worked out in the 40s. Now, I see some of you are smiling as though you have come in contact with premillennialism.

I get the impression. You know, I wrote to the president of Columbia Seminary before I went there in 1940, and I told him, he wrote me and asked me if I had any requests about rooms and so forth, and I wrote him back and told him I didn’t want a room. with any Bible college graduate and I didn’t want the room with a premillenarian. And when I got, he wrote me back and told me he was putting me in a room with a graduate of the University of Florida. And I got there and within the first ten minutes I discovered I was in a room with a real premillenarian. And he had taken the bottom bunk in the bed so I took the top bunk, and when he got on the rapture, I said to him, I said, Roycott, when the rapture comes, I assume that if you’re sleeping, you will simply float up beside the bed here, and I said, when you do, I will catch on.

But, you know, it’s hard to realize that kind of a radical side of change that’s occurred in our church. But I figure that there has been a return, though I personally have not run into it with the people with whom I deal. And, of course, you get it in these popular paperback books. And you obviously get it in the contact between the right-wing people in the church and Menachem Begin. I mean, this is the ground on which, you know, Menachem Begin and Jerry Falwell, and even to put it in higher company, Billy Graham, maintain these close relationships. Well, this has something to do, you know, with what we hope for the future. that Christ will come and establish his kingdom and that life in that sense will be fulfilled. Now, the more hardy souls, and there weren’t very many of them in the 1940s, were post-millenarians.

They believed that through the general evolutionary development of the gospel, the kingdom was going to gradually come on earth. And then after that happened, Christ would return. But the real orthodox view, the people who did not really want to get caught up in the indecency of movements, all held to our millenarianism of one kind or another. I think these movements would not have had the power they did if they had not answered some basic human problems. It wasn’t sheer perversity. I have some suspicion if the charismatic movement in our time is not very closely related to the premillenarian movement. That the same type people, charismatics, who were premillenarians in 1940, and that the charismatic movement serves the same psychological and human purposes that the premillenarian movement served in the 1940s. Of course, in our time, the real eschatologists are the liberation theologians for whom the future is coming and the kingdom will be established.

But I have never yet been able to find out precisely how this future is going to be established on this earth. And it seems to me in the liberation theology, which I have read, that there is a hiatus between what we now are and this future that God is going to bring and a remarkable silence precisely as to how God will bring this future into existence.

As I try to formulate for myself our hope for the future, I think I would have to do it in Niebuhrian terms and say that the fundamental dialectic of the Christian life is not so much the dialectic between past and future as it is between creator and creature. The fundamental problem is not whether we are tied to the past and we need to be afraid for the future. The fundamental problem is that over against the creator, we are sinners. Now, of course, the Christian life has a dialectic that moves both vertically and horizontally. And I think all of us recognize that. There are certain acts in life in which we commit ourselves vertically, really without any concern about the horizontal consequences. Those are the moments when we thank God, not that the Spirit’s obedient to us, but that our names are written in the book of life.

There are certain situations. Modernism is always one. There are other less notable cases of modernism where the fundamental thing is the vertical relationship we have to God regardless of the horizontal consequences of those actions. There are many other situations, and I would say this is more common, when we are concerned with the horizontal consequences as well as the vertical consequences. And we sin because we calculate in our piety that it is better to sin to maintain certain horizontal consequences than to be absolutely pure and to give the future over to the devil. There are certain situations, however, where life becomes so, where any decision is so terrible that we no longer are concerned about the future, that the only thing we’re concerned about is our relationship to God.

And I suppose a person put the question to me the other day in a way that, where you’re so concerned about the future that you’re no longer really concerned about God. I put the question to you, because I don’t know exactly how the question ought to be answered. he said that any decision about nuclear war if nuclear war would bring an end to the human race on this planet then there was morally no situation in which a Christian could give consent to a nuclear war. Well, I’m not sure about that. I think there, even if a nuclear war would bring an end to the human race on this planet, it seems to me that there are situations where the vertical dimension would be so great that one would have to say, so be it. But that’s a difficult question, one I haven’t thought through.

But in any case, you have these… These two relationships, the horizontal relationship and the vertical relationship, one where we answer only to God, our names are written in the book of life, others where we are primarily concerned about the historical consequences of what we do. and of course the two are interrelated. One of the problems that I’ve always had in theology is the Shorter Catechism question where it says what happens to the souls of believers at their death, and it says the souls of believers at their death are immediately united to God and made perfect in holiness, and their bodies do wait in their graves until the resurrection. Well, you have kind of a two-pronged solution to the problem. You have the immediate judgment when you die, and then you have a judgment at the end of history.

And I never really could make any sense out of that and I’ve had no way to conceptualize it in any way that’s very meaningful to me and it seemed to me a very bad bit of theologizing. And yet it did come clear to me, though, that they were saying something here that’s very important. But no judgment on any person’s life can ever be complete and final until the whole of history is completed, because you do not really know. You may make a provisional judgment now, but the final judgment must be made in the light of the total significance of all of history. I think that’s true of us individually. one of the problems we have in judging other people is that we frequently make a provisional judgment that ought to be seen in a much broader context.

And I think what they were saying here was that the vertical judgment that can be made immediately now is not the only judgment. There is another judgment that has to be made at the end in the light of the whole of human history. Take this about the Vietnam War. It’s one of the terrifying things about the Vietnam War. You can make an apodictic judgment that it was contrary to the will of Christ to participate in the Vietnam War, and if you’re honest-to-God pacifist, that’s a respectable position. But otherwise, it seems to me that you have precluded the final judgment. I do not know how anyone can really know the final significance of the Vietnam War until one sees it in the perspective of 100 years or 200 years of what its real significance was.

But the point I wanted to make here, and I didn’t mean to take that long doing it, is, and that’s the trouble when you’re speaking from notes as I am this morning, the Christian life is lived both vertically and horizontally, and the dialectic between creator and creature is a more important dialectic, it seems to me, than the dialectic between past and future. The second thing I’d like to say is that so far as I can see, the ontological structure of the human situation is going to remain the same. This means that the, first, that human beings are uniquely free. If you have to push, I mean, what is it that really makes a human being free? I mean, a human being is a human being. Well, there are a great many things you can say, from posing thumb and forefinger to intelligence to language to memory.

I used to have been in a little discussion group here with a Jewish psychiatrist and he was a member of the reformed community, Jewish community and he said whenever he was tempted to give up on God the fact of language always called him back to God. And when he really thought about language he didn’t see how you could ever talk about it intelligibly apart from a belief in God. Surely the capacity for language is a very remarkable capacity. Certainly memory and a cultural memory. But the most unique thing about a human being is freedom. The power of the human spirit to transcend, as I mentioned the other day, every human achievement and every human accomplishment. The power of that dimension of the self that theology calls spirit, to objectify one’s personal existence and to pass judgment upon one’s personal existence.

To talk to oneself. The most significant talking we do. We carry on three important conversations. We talk to each other, or commune with each other, communicate with each other in a mutual, deep mutuality. We do more than give signs to each other. We talk to each other. We think we talk to God, and we also talk to ourselves. And this capacity of self-reflection, the fact that we are self-conscious as well as conscious, the fact that we can objectify our existence, the fact that we can transcend our existence, is, I think, the most unique thing about us. Now, possibly you and I exaggerate that because we have this capacity, probably more than most any people on the face of the earth, and some have it very little. But I was very interested in the other book, From Death Camp to Existentialism, where Frankl said that even in the death camp, even in the most desperate situations, there was still that final residual human freedom to form one’s attitude toward that which was happening to one.

This means, over against, I think, the liberation theological interpretation, that the fundamental problem is not that we are bound to the past. The fundamental human problem inheres in the fact that we are free. And this freedom means several things. It means, number one, that we are incurably creative. No achievement ever exhausts the possibilities of human life. and furthermore this means that there is no final or permanent society no matter how perfect the society may be the human spirit can always imagine a more perfect society and therefore there is no utopia that can possibly be final. In this sense, you know, there is no final society. And furthermore, this human freedom means that the fall is always a possibility. We are always in danger of falling. no matter to what extent we may be confirmed in goodness we always have to beware as I said the other day of the sins of good people and therefore the fall is even if you achieve the perfect society which I’ve just said in principle one cannot even if one achieved it the first act would likely be an act of repudiation, an act of fall therefore one has to say it seems to me, that human sinfulness is a permanent character of human society on the face of the earth.

And that human beings, until the end of time, are going to have to live with freedom and with the sinfulness that in his comes out of that freedom. the sinfulness as well as the creativity that comes out of that freedom now this is further predicated upon the conviction that god will continue to deal with human beings in the future as he has dealt with human beings in the past now i know people will try to say that this isn’t true but i would like for him you know to give me some concrete evidence i see nothing to me to believe that God will deal with people any other way in the future than that he has dealt with us in the past, namely with a great respect for our human freedom. Now when you say all of this, and at least some of you fully recognize that what I’m saying here is a straight out of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Salvation, as I’ve already indicated, is not first of all power over evil, but love and mercy toward the evil. you know those remarkable chapters Niebuhr talks about the messianic hope which he means it in a very broad sense in the sense that the Romans The Romans had a messianic hope, and there’s so much of messianic hope that the early Christians believed that Virgil’s messianic poetry was a prediction of the coming of Christ. Well, it was messianic, but he was predicting the coming of Caesar Augustus, who was going to fulfill life and give life meaning. That was the person about whom he was writing. the messianic hope takes shape in say the Roman version or you get I think in the Old Testament also that the fundamental human problem is the nation and if we can get the messianic king and the nation can arise from the dust and ashes of defeat then human life will be fulfilled therefore the Messiah is the one who restores the nation that is the kingdom and there’s a good bit of truth in that of course that’s the kind of messianic hope that most people in who have who have a messianic hope that Hindus don’t have a messianic hope it’s better to have a messianic hope to not have a messianic hope but if you have a messianic hope it may be the wrong kind of messianic hope and I suppose most people in our society the messianic hope takes a shape in the hope that life will be fulfilled in the victory of the nation and in the quality of the nation’s life.

Certainly this was the messianic hope of Virgil and the piety of the Aeneid, that life is fulfilled in a society that’s organized by reason, justice, not by envy, emotion, hate. In In the racially ordered society of Rome, the human life is to be fulfilled. But there is profound awareness in the Old Testament that a nation does not fulfill life. And then on a deeper level, you get the problem defined in terms of the good people and the bad people. And this is always a temptation to define the human problem in terms of the bad people having a hard time at the hands of the good people. And life will be fulfilled and life will be meaningful if just somehow the good people can get control of the bad people.

And therefore, the Messiah is one who will give the good people a victory over the bad people. well on a still deeper level though there is a profound awareness I think in the in the old testament itself that finally there are no good people and our problem is not that the nation does not fulfill life our problem of the social order our problem is not that the good people are having a hard time at the hands of the bad people. The ultimate problem is that there are no good people. Now, unless there are resources of divine mercy and power that can deal with this problem, we’re all undone. So the first message of salvation is forgiveness. uh god’s grace not so much as power over evil but god’s grace is love and mercy uh to evil now that’s not the only word just as i said the other day sanctification is also the matter of sanctification and uh here i think one has to say two things One is that evil in the world, and it may be age, but I think I’ve emphasized this more now than I used to, that the providence of God restrains evil in the world.

That’s a very important fact for Niebuhr, that there are built-in limitations to what evil can do. Evil is, in the end, finally self-destructive. Now, good does not self-destruct, but evil always self-destructs. So, there is, I know if you’re being put in a gas chamber, it doesn’t seem this way. But on the Niebuhrian theology, on Christian theology, I think you’d have to say that the evil of an Adolf Hitler is finally self-limiting. It’s not an infinite evil. Because evil always lives parasitically. So, Niebuhr insisted as we think about the future, we need to take hope in the built-in providences of God. that work to restrain evil. I think you see that in the history of our time. You think when some national army or something is going to move all over the face of the earth, you discover suddenly that there are built-in factors like geography, like the human nature, various problems that thwart the evil of human beings.

Now, the second thing, Providence, which I think I would put fundamental here. Limitation of evil and a built-in bias toward the good. And then further, the possibilities of history for the achievement of justice, for the achievement of goodness, must not be limited. As has been said, I’m leaving shortly to go to England, what I’m going to be doing in England. I’m supposed to be a reformed guest at a discussion of Wesleyan theology. Gordon Rupp once said that what Wesley represents in the development of Protestant theology is the optimism of grace. Wesley never wanted to underestimate the possibilities of goodness. and even like to talk about in severely restricted ways the possibility even of perfection in the Christian life. Niebuhr, too, insists that we ought never to underestimate the possibilities of achieving good and resolving problems. but these achievements will always be subject to corruption by human self-interest they will be always limited by a finiteness a limitation by space and by time there is no promise in the New Testament that love will finally win the victory in human history love in history will always be crucified finally be crucified love but the partial achievements are still very significant all groups, all achievements are not the same the ultimate judgment that in the presence of God we all fall short of his glory and that our highest deeds as well as our worst deeds are flawed by self-interest, must not obscure the proximate judgment, the relative judgment, that among us sinners and that among the nations and the classes and groups of people on the face of the earth, there are very significant differences.

And when you’re engaged in political activity, when you’re engaged in social life, these relative differences are of fundamental importance. If you’re hiring tellers for a bank, you can be sure that all ten of the people whom you interview are thieves and are dishonest. And this is the ultimate religious judgment. They have to be forgiven. But if your primary concern is to get a teller from the bank, it’s also important to note that some of them are worse thieves than the other. that are running for the Senate are all sinners, but the responsible political decision has to be as to which is the relative, well, one factor in the decision has to be which is the relatively, the less the sinner than the other. There are other factors in political judgment.

All I’m saying is that politically, socially, economically, the relative judgments are very important. Now, therefore, what we can look forward to in human history is relatively modest, but not insignificant. There is no promise that the problem of the inner city, there is no promise that the problem of nuclear war will ever be solved. And I think the people who think that these problems can be solved perhaps create more problems than those who are aware that they can. They can’t. They exacerbate the problem. I was talking to a friend of mine who was at a seminar in New York City led largely by Columbia University professors on problem solving, and one distinguished faculty member at Columbia said, the first thing you need to understand is that many problems cannot be solved.

And therefore, what we have to look forward to is a partial solution of problems that will always defy us, and the relative achievements of justice in a society in which there will be no final justice. now so much for history I think Niebuhr is correct in saying that at the end of history one has to have a doctrine of the second coming of Jesus Christ the Christ who was rejected in history stands at the end of history as his triumph of Lord and Judge the principle of the judgment will be the love that was crucified in history, that there will be a final judgment, that these relative distinctions of history are very important, if not of final significance. And then the resurrection of the body. And I want to have a little bit of time for questions, so I’ll just say a word here.

It may be the fact that now I’m 62 years of age, and therefore what happens at the end of this earthly pilgrimage may be more important to me than it may have been earlier. Roland Bainton, the last time I was there, he said, you know, this is getting to be a real existential question with me. Surely one of the disconcerting things about theology in the last 20 years, 30 years, has been the unwillingness of major theologians to deal with the problem, at least in any affirmative and positive way, of what happens when a person dies. I’ve often said that if you really want to, you know, in the presbytery they used to ask, do you believe in the virgin birth? Do you believe in the talking serpent? These kind of questions were those who had ferried out the heretics from the Orthodox and so forth.

But I would say that there are more basic sort of questions. Ian Barbour says if you really want to know what a person’s theology is, ask the person, is it proper to pray for rain? And if you can get an honest-to-God answer, Ian Barbour, some of you know, is a physicist who later became a theologian. And Barbour says that if you can get an honest-to-God answer to that question, is it proper to pray for rain, you know really what that person’s theology is. Well, another good question, if you really want to know what a person’s actual theology is, is to ask what really we’re talking about happens when a person dies. Well, in most first-line theology, Not much happens that’s worth talking about when a person dies. And I think one reason for that is that death is not nearly as important continually and always on a university campus where most theology is written or in an academic setting as it is in the local church where babies and 12-year-olds and 20-year-olds as well as old people die.

Now, what shall we make of death? Well, no, I’m not going to answer the question about what you make of death here. I suggest that you read Karl Rahner. Incidentally, Karl Rahner is a theologian well worth the investment. It takes a good bit of investment to read Rahner because you have to learn the new terminology. And I get weary with learning all these new terminologies for every new theologian. But Rahner is, unquestionably, the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th century. And if you’re willing to pay the price, Karl Rahner has a lot, I think, that can be turned into good Protestant sermons. Now, Rahner has given real serious attention to the problem of death. but I wanted to say that don’t give up on this matter of what happens when a person dies because actually it’s easy to talk about what happens when a person dies right now than it was 10 years ago a theologian always has to work with the data that is What is given to the theologian in that particular time?

If you’re working with the doctrine of creation, you have to work with the data. Whether it’s some myth about a dragon or something like that, or whether it’s the latest findings of Jastrow and others, astronomers in our time, you have to work with the data that’s given. And we ought not to despair when the data that’s given to us to work with as theologians is difficult to utilize in the light of Christian faith. And we ought not to be too enthusiastic when the data is very congenial to Christian faith and get false hopes up. Because who knows what somebody’s going to come up with ten years from now. And you ought not to base your theology on the particular data that a very faulty and limited science may give to you in a particular time and place.

But certainly in the last ten years, the kind of data that’s made available to theologians when they talk about immortality or resurrection of the body, which is a better term in the sense that the resurrection of the body means the fulfillment of a concrete historical individual life beyond history and not simply a personal existence. whatever, if it could be that, divorced from the past. I’ll give you one illustration, a book by Wilder Penfield. Penfield’s quite a person. He was a neurosurgeon, and he was a friend of Charles Hendel, who was a great philosopher at Yale University, And I noticed a classmate of his in college, and I noticed Hendel wrote a preface to this book, The Mystery of the Mind. By mind, Penfield means what I would mean by soul or self, and he makes these comments.

He said he started out as a neurosurgeon believing that the human mind or the human self was reducible to and explained simply as a function of the brain. But then his work as a neurosurgeon convinced him that you could not reduce the self to a function of the brain. He really came to thinking of the brain as largely the computer that the mind or the self may use. I’ll read you, as far as the example he says, that in all of his experimentation with the human brain and applying electrodes to the human brain, he had never been able to elicit a really personal act. I’ll read you here. I have been alert to the importance of studying the results of electrode stimulation of the brain of a conscious person and have recorded the results as accurately and as completely as I could.

The electrode can present to the patient various crude sensations. It can cause him to turn head or eyes, to move the limbs, to vocalize and swallow. You may recall vivid re-experience of the past or present to him an illusion that present experience is familiar or the things he sees are growing large and coming near. But the person always remains aloof. He passes judgment on it. He says things seem familiar, not I have been through this before. He says things are growing larger, but he does not move for fear of being run over. If the electrode moves his right hand, he does not say, I wanted to move it. He says, you made me do that. He even may reach over with his left hand and oppose his action. There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe, to decide, to engage in a truly personal act. and then he concludes.

What can one really conclude? What is the reasonable hypothesis in regard to this matter considering the physiological evidence? Only this, the brain has not explained the mind fully. The mind of man seems to derive its energy, perhaps in altered bomb from the high The brain is a generalized brain mechanism during waking hours. In daily routine of a man’s life, communication with other minds is carried out indirectly through the mechanism of the brain. If this is so, it is clear that in order to survive after death, the mind must establish a connection with a source of energy other than that of the brain. If not, the mind must disappear forever, as surely as the brain and the body die and turn to dust. If, however, during life, when brain and mind are awake, direct communication is sometimes established with the minds of other men or with the mind of God, then it is clear that energy from without can reach a man’s mind.

In that case, it is not unreasonable for him to hope that after death the mind may awaken to another source of energy. I mean that if the active mind of a man does communicate with other active minds, even on rare occasions, it could do so only by the transfer of some form of energy from mind to mind directly. Likewise, if the mind of man communicates with the mind of God directly, that also suggests that energy, in some form, passes from spirit to spirit. Well, that’s very interesting. I don’t know what connection Penfield died in Princeton a year or so ago I don’t know what church connection he had but he obviously writes out of his experience as a neurosurgeon and I found that a very delightful book to read and I said you ought not to get too enthusiastic but let’s rejoice in what treasures we can strip from the Egyptians on this matter you know I mean, Augustine made it legitimate for our theologians to spoil the Egyptians, by which he meant take all the goods you can from the secular culture.

And in this connection, I don’t have time. I want to have one or two questions, and time’s already up, but I’ll stay here for another five or ten minutes and talk with you about questions if you want to. John Eccles, who was Nobel Prize winner in neurosurgery, I have simply been thrilled with his books, reading his books. Living Reality was one, but more recently his Gifford Lectures, The Mystery of the Mind, The Mystery of the Human Mind. Only the first volume is out. But here is Eccles, willing to speak of the origin of the human self as in some sense the immediate gift of God in the development of a fetus. Very much like the old medieval notion of ensoulment. The coming into the being of the self has to be understood in terms of the mystery of the creative activity of God.

And he goes on the same line that the human self is a high form and the organization of energy as the rest of the body, and therefore can exist separately from the body. Now, all of you who have been deeply tarnished or enlightened by Barthian theology think all of what I’ve just said is a bunch of rubbish. But I think the Barthians are great as long as faith burns brightly and the sun is high in the heavens. But when faith begins to waver and the sun starts to set, you need some support. And I think you get them from people like Penfield. Incidentally, in this connection, great liberal theologian Harold DeWolf, DeWolf never bowed the head to the, I am, so far as I have a theological position, I think probably more neo-Protestant than some, but old DeWolf never bowed the head to the Barthians.

And I saw him about three years ago, and he said he thought his final onslaught would be to publish a book and entitle it The Immortality of the Soul. He said he didn’t think he could do anything that would offend the Barthians more than that, and that he thought that that would be his final publication. Well, I noticed he gave it a slightly different topic. But increasingly for me, the hope of the fulfillment of life beyond death becomes, it seems to me, very important. Jesus took it for granted. Calvin simply could not make sense out of life without it. And I think without some such hope today, we are. The rest.