JANUARY/FEBRUARY. 1975 Vol. XXV, No. 1 LIBRARY Broadway (at 120th Street), New York, N. Y. 10027 Subscription: U. S. A. $4.00 a year; $7.00 two years. Telephone: (Area 212) 662- 7100 All others $4.50 a year: $8. 00 two years. EDITORIAL AND CIRCULATION OFFICE 1-15 copies, 50¢ each: 16-50 copies , Room 678, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, N. Y. 10027 35¢ each; more than 50 copies, 25¢ each. Telephone: (Area 212) 870- 2175

THEOLOGICAL POSITION PAPER FOR CHURCH WORLD SERVlCE

Jorge Lara-Braud and Harold Schlachtenhaufen

I. Creation: Goodness and Alienation

The Bible begins with the affirmation of the goodness of God's original creation. It is good because through its responsible care and enjoyment it fulfills all human life (Adam). This affirmation is echoed in the early covenantal choice of God's own people, the Abrahamic community which is to be blessed as it becomes His instrument for the blessing of all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3). However, even that covenantal choice takes places already in the context of the alienation between the created and the Creator because of a fallen humanity bent on pride and selfishness.

Therefore, from the earliest passages, the Bible is neither sentimental nor cynical about the relationship between God and his creation. One can in fact observe that the whole biblical story from Genesis to Revelation, and indeed the entire history of Israel and the Church, represent a struggle to bring humanity, creation and the Creator into the kind of all-inclusive reconciliation signified in the word shalom.

We Christians acknowledge that such shalom has been accomplished in the life and resurrection of our Lord. His incarnation arises out of the very materiality of

This paper was prepared as a study document for Church World Service, Division of Overseas Ministries, National Council of Churches. It is based on a small consul­ tation convened by the NCC Commission on Faith and Order, and Justice, Liberation and Human Fulfillment at the request of CWS. Dr. Jorge Lara-Braud is the Assistant General Secretary for Faith and Order, NCC and Dr. Harold Schlachtenhaufen is consultant for the Joint Strategy Action Committee. This is not yet an accepted policy document. 2

God's creation no longer infected by pride or selfishness. In his risen life, in wha t Scripture calls the first fruits of a new humanity, the Ahrahamic covenant is fulfilled, for to be a part of it is to be unconditionally for God and for others. It is no coincidence that the principal signs of this new blessing for all the earth's families are the most basic gifts of creation: food and drink, bread and wine, r e pr es en t a t i ons of his flesh and blood. Standing, however, between our ,Lord's life and resurrection is the cross, a perpetual reminder that reconciliation between created and Creator is not cheap grace. He is already sovereign of all created existence ("All power is given to me in heaven and on earth ... ") but the brutal alienating forces of pride and selfishness have not yet come under his sub­ mission. His command, "Therefore, go ... " is the call to help complete what still remains of his suffering for the sake of his ministering body, the Church (Colos­ sians 1:24). Hope, then, is before us but not without the monumental human alien­ ation from both creation and Creator in which we all still share, but we follow One who says, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16: 33).

Throughout the Scriptures "world" is often used as synonym both for God's good original creation and for a cosmic environment at enmity with its Creator. Illustra­ tive of this ambiguity are passages like Psalms 24:1 (The earth is the Lord's the world and those who dwell therein"), Romans 12:2 ("Do not be conformed to this world ... "), Hebrews 11:3 ("By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God"), James 4:4 (" ... Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?").

No Christian enterprise can be unaware of or untouched by this ambiguity. But because God loves the world in the supreme saving gift of his Son, by both over­ coming its alienation and assuring its eventual transformation into a new heaven and new earth, we Christians are saved from illusion of cynicism. The illusion would be to assume that our salvation in him has freed us altogether from our sharing in the pride and selfishness of the rest of humankind. The cynicism would be the kind of "evacuation theology" which leaves that world of pride and selfish­ ness to its own devices in favor of a private religion which grooms an other-worldly minority for rewards beyond the grave. Our Savior does not pray to the Father for our being taken out of the world but rather for our being kept from the evil one (John 17:5).

Instead of illusion or c ynlclsm, it is hopeful realism that motivates Christian action. Even when we are most responsible, the sin of a fallen creation is still with our persons and organizations. But in Christ's forgiving grace we keep press­ i ng forward toward the call of God in Christ J esus, seeking to be more like his new humanity and less like the old from which he has set us free. The Reformation captured this liberating insight in the language of simul justus et peccator (right in God's eyes in spite of our continuing involvement in sin). It is liber­ a t i ng because we cease looking for sinless conditions to get on with Christ's saving agenda for the world. It is liberating also because the motive for serving him and those for whom he died is not repayment of outstanding moral debts but sheer thanksgiving, Yes, we do work out salvation in fear and trembling, not because our salvation is in question, but because our thankfulness may not reflect sufficiently that God is at work in us making us willing and able to obey his purpose (Philippians 2:13).

This kind of hopeful realism could permit us, American Christians, to confront with utmost seriousness and penitence our disproportionate accumulation of the gifts of God's creation, a nd t o work with the same de gree of seriousness and hope for the massive correctives required by the ca l l to Israel and the Church to be a blessing to all of the earth's families. 3

Passages from two recent publications dramatize what becomes of a fallen world and of the gifts of God's creation while the pride and selfishness of the powerful enjoy their temporary victory:

If the world were a global village of 100 people, 70 of them would be unable to read and only one would have a college education. Over 50 would be suffering from malnutrition, and over 80 would live in what we call substandard housing. If the world were a global village of 100 residents, 6 of them would be Americans. These 6 would have half the village's, entire income, and the other 94 would exist on the other half. How would the wealthy 6 live in peace with their neighbors? Surely they would be driven to arm themselves against the other 94 ...perhaps even to spend as we do more per person on military de­ fense than the total per person income of the others.l

and

Symbolize the whole three billion people alive today by a village of 1,000. Only 164 of these can be said to be living a moderately satisfied life, 836 exist under varying degrees of desperation, poverty, disease, economic and political oppression.... 2

Realism calls for a reminder that while the United States may be disproportion­ ately responsible for this tragic state of affairs, pride and selfishness are not confined to this country's dominant class and its lesser beneficiaries. There is a parallel dominant class in every other society, including Western Europe, Australasia, Japan, the Middle East, the socialist nations (with perhaps one or two exceptions), and the Third World. The oligarchies in poor nations rightly deserve the title Herodians, for like Herod of old, their power and wealth result from a partnership with an economic empire whose capital may be New York, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Moscow or Kuwait. The facile division of our fallen world into "oppressed" and "oppressors," especially when expressed in terms of geography, pigmentation or even class, is the kind of oversimplification that ill accords with our Christian realism regarding the pervasiveness of pride and selfishness among all peoples. It also hinders the more inclusive alliances among persons everywhere who in varying degrees suffer oppression from their own government, political party, economic system or racial group.

This reminder is crucial for those conscientious American Christians who, over­ burdened by the national sins of , militarism, racism and neo­ , might simply retreat from the task of domestic and international justice. It is difficult to appropriate Christ's liberating forgiveness when one already carries such a psychic load and continues to be confined to the ranks of the "oppressors" by fellow-Christians of different color, class or politics.

It is a fact, however, that a nation like ours in which 90 % of its population identifies itself as Christian, has arrived at its prosperity not alone by its industriousness, creativity, natural resources, democratic institutions or religious practices. It has also engaged in a great deal of institutionalized sin, the worst aspect of it being its religious legitimization of a savage competitive system whose rules were early laid down largely, if not entirely, by white males of British and northern European extraction. Civil religion is a universal phenomenon, but in our historical experience it has led to tragic confusions between power and virtue, prosperity and divine confirmation, the well-being of its white majority and national morality. Our enemies have been fought not just as opponents of our 4 national interests but as foes of the divine will. None of our institutions, including or perhaps especially our church organizations, are free from this deeply seated taint. Even when we thought we were as Christians opposing such civil re­ ligion, our distinctively American moralism made us appear insufficiently self­ critical or repentant. Thereby inadvertently we fueled the very civil religion we were opposing.

The freedom with which Christ made us free for authentic hopeful realism should permit us those acknowledgments. It might also lead us to a rectification stance more akin to the loving judgment of the Christ who liberates us from "prophetic" rhetoric for the kind of prophetic action which loves fellow-Christians into shared repentance and sacrificial deeds. God so loved the world ....

As we look at that global village from which we have appropriated half of its re­ sources, although we constitute 6% of its population, our toughest task is not going to be getting greater support for a more generous program of foreign assis­ tance through governmental or church agencies--difficult and urgent as that con­ tinues to be. There is something much tougher: reorienting our nation from a philosophy of maximization of profits to one of maximization of people. Nothing could be more calculated to feed pride and selfishness than the pursuit of money and its rewards. Nothing has militated more against love and community. It ought not to be surprising at all that at the moment of our greatest prosperity we ex­ perience the most acute sense of alienation from just about everyone and everything that matters to us. The human heart, of course, cannot survive without moorings or direction, and the search for those is as diverse as the searchers. Before we go on to inquire how this time of searching might be engaged for redirection, we might stop long enough to probe into some of the ways in which our prevailing philosophy fractures persons and communities.

A recent study on "Changing Youth Values in the Seventies: A Study of American Youth,"3 on the surface reads as though college students are indeed repudiating money-making as a priority. Out of a list of 35 possible job criteria, the chance to make a lot of money ranks among the bottom ten of the list. A perceptive analyst of the study was not fooled:

One might be encouraged •..were it not that those attitudes appear to have been shaped by the existing high level of economic security rather than by a measurable decline in materialism. The most neglected groups, the racial minorities and the veterans, who lack such security, clearly do not share the majority's cavalier attitude toward money. One cannot help but worry about the impact of a self-centered and self-satisfied majority on the fate of those disadvantaged groups.4

As the analyst also observes, these are the people who eventually move in to executive suites--or into the White House--bringing with them their own previous morality of campus or Main Street.

Our whole style of life is undergirded by forces and myths which go on legitimizing it. Modern bureaucracies in the name of efficiency (maximization of profits, or its equivalent,"success") use resources, personnel and information to preserve the arrangements for the benefit of those who are prepared to conform. Their expensive technology, invariably justified on humanitarian grounds, more and more swallows people not as persons but as functions (when we meet strangers or speak about our friends and relatives, we quickly establish their identity and worth by 5 what they do, i.e., by what they produce or fail to produce). Utilizing the deeply ingrained get-ahead mentality, we go on blessing the bondage of upward mobility. It is sinful not to ascend. Nationalism refuses to admit the mixture of right and wrong so that the government's case for the number-one-status of the nation may elicit greater obedience. Our scandals in high places become purges of undesirables so we can retain respect for law and authority as defined by our leaders. Williams Stringfellow articulates the case with devastating clarity.

It is the problem of authority usurping the law, of authority merging with the law. of authority superseding the law, of authority become a law unto itself, of criminal authority, of unaccountable authority, of the very premise of government become the exercise of authority ~ se, of authority abolishing law and coercion substituting for order, and all persons made vulnerable to political aggression.S

Self-fulfillment, a value never so prized as today, cloaks itself in the pursuit of a healthy inner life on the belief there cannot be without it a healthy community, nation or managerial class. Self-fulfillment looks even more credible because it feeds on traditional religion or the para-religions of the human potential variety. The net result is often the kind of self-preservation which ends up conforming to or leaving unchallenged the very forces it decries, and which in the long run make self-fulfillment impossible (bad bureaucracies, bad government, bad economics).

These forces and myths taken together make impossible a just distribution of God's gifts of creation. and even the major beneficiaries eventually find out that they cannot cope with their own conditioned demand for more and more. Quite likely this is what I ' Timothy 6:10 means when it speaks of the love of money as the root of all evil. The conclusion is inescapable. If we are truly to share the abundance of God's creation with all others, especially those whom we have dispossessed, we first must go through our own deliberate dispossession. The place to begin is by de­ legitimizing the forces and myths which have brought us to this mirthless condition and that have wreaked so much destruction on the lives of countless other people at home and abroad.

II. Transition: Between the Old and the New New Creation

The Gospel is the good news that in Christ's new humanity the alienating forces of pride and selfishness have been defeated and the whole realm of creation is now reconciled with its Creator. It is also good news because it is already ours as both gift and task. "If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). We are not called to sinlessness or success. but to faithfulness. In our case it means being joyfully and sacri­ ficially for the other, especially the least among his brothers and sisters. With them we share all of God's gifts--food.drink, dignity and everything which makes for the abundant life he exemplifies and gives. It is another way of saying that ultimately what we share is him. Whatever we are or have is his, even our persons, programs. organizations or budgets. no matter how deeply caught they may be in the alienating forces which He has overcome.

As we survey today the world which "Christ was reconciling unto himself," we are struck by a universal longing for freedom. justice and love. The whole of humanity seems to be gripped by a pervasive discontent with things as they are. Something radically new is in the making. A new kind of world is coming into being, with the pain and travail. and yet the hope and promise of a new birth. If St. Paul were among us today. quite likely he would use the same language he used in his own time to depict the ushering in of a new creation: 6

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. , For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience . (Romans 8:19-25)

The technology of news, images and transportation gives this picture of massive transition a sense of immediacy not possible even for St. Paul, the seer, or any of his contemporaries. The cliche of the global village is too true for comfort. We are visible neighbors to each other whether we live in Harlem or Calcutta. The dis­ parities between the haves and have-nots can no longer be kept secret. Their visi­ bility compounds the discontent of the poor and frightens the affluent. However, we would miss the point if we reduced the analysis to a new awareness of the inequity between poverty and wealth. The deeper issue is the realization dawning among the poverty-stricken that their poverty is not accidental, but rather a direct by-product of a history of injustice. The injustice may have been inflicted by Herodian mi­ norities or foreign colonialists, or both, but now it is seen as an accumulated human act, no matter what naivete or intentionality may underlie it. As a human a ct it can be reversed by other human acts, and that is exactly what millions are pre­ pared to do: not only to redress the exclusion from material goods, but more importantly, the exclusion from the right to make their own history. As frightening as the process of redress may appear to us the affluent, if we are Christians we should be able to detect behind it the prompting of the Spirit of him whose mission was to proclaim good news to the poor, to liberate the captives, to give sight to the blind, to free the oppressed, and to announce the year for the saving of his people (Luke 4:18-19).

Perhaps the most loving thing we should say to ourselves and our fellows in afflu­ ence is that unless such God-inspired redress takes place, and takes place soon, the mounting discontent of the new hopefuls will explode in a paroxysm of massive, counter-violent frustration, the worldwide dimensions of which will involve us all. If we are against violence, as we should be because we are claimed by the Prince of Peace, we should first acknowledge how much of the world's discontent is re­ action against centuries of legal, institutionalized violence. We in the United States have no farther to look than our own history against native Americans, Asians, Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Appalachians. We might also look at the bloody military translation of our "manifest destiny" in the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, the Indochinese War, and our more subtle but no less de­ structive economic exploitation of Third World people and their resources.

Of course our nation is not Christian, nor is it the New Israel, but 90% identifies itself as Christian and 60% as church members. The biblical interpretation of a Persian pagan, Cyrus, as God's anointed, subduing nations and ungirding the loins of kings, should not be lost upon us. If we are incapable out of gratefulness to share our Lord and his gifts sacrificially,God is still qu ite free to raise Cyruses among oppressed minorities at home and oppressed majorities abroad. Let us not forget, psychological violence, the kind that destroys self-respect, initiative and community, may be even more devastating than the taking away of possessions. On the other hand, to keep persons from food and drink is to commit the worst kind 7 of violence, for it is not physical sustenance alone that is denied; it is a l s o the removal of the essential energies which the human spirit requires for survival and creativity.

Who can hear the good news of the Gospel if spirit and bod y are still under the numbing effects of such violence? Who under such violence can hear the good news from the lips or services of one whose very appearance and demeanor are perceived as the symbol of that system of violence? Incidentally, it is increasingly diffi­ cult to expect people in other lands to make the distinction between our people and our government, particularly when the present administration was voted in by the largest percentage of the active electorate in the nation's history.

Solidarity is only possible when someone else's lot becomes our own, when the unfulfillment of another leaves us unfulfilled, when the other's hope is an integral part of our future. In the Romans passage quoted above those whose inward groan echoes the groaning of a new creation struggling to be born are precisely those who already have the first fruits of God's Spirit, we Christians. That Spirit, whose truth destroys myths, and whose power puts away fear, is the One who lets us in on the open secret of a creation already in our midst free from bondage and decay, a gift of glorious liberty for God's children, where bodies no longer waste away but are redeemed. Hope for it is obviously active, saving hope--groans becoming r ealized longing, and partners in co-creation showing themselves openl y as God's sons a nd daughters.

Clearly, all of this is a resounding "No" to the old creation of pride and selfish­ ness, and a resonating "Yes" to the new one of solidarity and self-giving which Christ both is and gives. "Whoever is in him has already become a new creation . The old has passed away. Behold, all has become new!" (II Corinthians 5:17).

How are we to translate this when the legacies of the old world are still so mu ch with us, all the way f r om our categories of sending and receiving to structures of power and affluence? First of all each of us, simul justus et peccator, is free from any hope of sinlessness past, present or future, and free also ~rom any il­ lusion that we are charged with bringing in God's kingdom. Our business is to raise wher ever possible signs that such a kingdom is already present and a t work wherever our Lord's Spirit has led people to throw off the shackles which kept them from denouncing and opposing the forces of oppression. But that same liberating Spirit will not force people against their will to channel their released energies into the wor l dwi de quest for authentic freedom, justice and love. The liberation l abel does not automatically make persons or groups instruments of God's liberation. Che Guer va r a himself, at the risk of sounding sentimental, reminded us that a r evo­ lutionary whos e motives were not those of love quite likely would become the ne xt oppressor. 6 I t is not triumphalist to suspect he retained that kind of hopeful realism from his early Christian instruction.

The greatest contribution Christians can make in helping usher in the new creation is explicitly to share the Gospel, whatever other resources they share with t hos e who denounce the old and announce the new. Not to share the knowledge of God's greatest gift, the Savi or and Lord of persons and history, even as we speak of sharing abundantly all his other gifts, would be a strange contradiction, indeed. Moreover, is not he the only One who liberates from illusion and cynicism and whose all-inclusive authority checks any self-righteous or absolutistic claims? I s he not the only One who so reconciles as to break the distinctions between giving and receiving, and who in fact puts down the mighty from their thrones and exalts those of low degree, who fills the hungry with good things, and sends the 8

rich away with empty hands? (Luke 1:52-53). Is he not the One whose definition of greatness is servanthood? The how and the when of such proclamation are inte­ gral to the Gospel itself. We should be grateful for the presence of fellow­ Christians in practically every struggle for a new society of freedom, justice and love. That means we no longer have to encourage or tolerate that awful miscarriage called "the white man's burden" or any of its equivalents. What we are called to uphold as a first priority is those partnerships through which the Gospel of the new creation in Jesus Christ is being announced in word and deed. A first priority so understood would demand a parallelism beq~een what we do at home and what EY invitation we do abroad.

Our missionary history has spawned a variety of partnerships. While we ar~ bound to them by legacy and fellowship, and must deal with them responsibly, it: does not necessarily follow that all of them are appropriate to the task of co-creation with Christ the Liberator. We are thinking of ecclesiastical structures and styles of church leadership at home and abroad which belong and are still captive to the old creation. It is no secret that often times "leaders" both in ours and other nations confine the Gospel to the spheres of the religious, the spiritual, the individual and the status quo as though the other spheres of human existence were outside the claim of Christ. It is no secret either that many authentic prophets, lovers of the Gospel and the believing fellowship, have been driven into a virtual diaspora. Are they not also the Church--the Church dispersed, where the issues of life and death are daily fare ? Should they not be now our primary partners and mentors? These options are not mutually exlusive. Rather, they suggest a hierarchy of relation­ ships whose ordering is dictated by the demands of God's new creation of freedom, justice and love. Such a hierarchy does not rule out partnerships with those who may not confess Jesus as Lord, but whose actions we perceive with humility and gratefulness to be motivated by his Spirit.

In the final analysis the business of Christ's community is to keep hope alive by hopeful experiences. It is St. Paul's hope of a new creation where bondage gives way to freedom, decay to vitality, pain to rebirth, groaning to joy, loneliness to solidarity, and lostness to salvation.

III. Re-creation: A New Heaven and A New Earth

Ours is a faith shaped by powerful promises concerning the future. Amazingly enough they spring from the moments of deepest perplexity in the experience of God's pilgrim community. In the face of impending captivity, Isaiah the prophet foretells the time when God will lead "many peoples" to beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (2:4). In the same shalomic vein, after the Creator has upheld the meek of the earth and slain the wicked of this world, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with the kid, and a little child shall lead a flock of calf, lion and fatling (11:6-7).

In the last book of the Bible, the lonely seer of Patmos depicts for a brutally persecuted minority a new heaven and a new earth fashioned from the loving hands of the One who makes all things new. In greater intimacy than his presence in Eden, God will dwell with men and women like us, wiping away our tears, freeing us from the finality o f death, removing mourning, crying and pain, "for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:1-4). 9

This unabashedly utopian imagery is the Bible's way of saying to us that "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). It is also its way of breaking us away from that enslaving habit of seeing no more into the future than a reconstructed past. The universal discontent with things as the.y are (even among the comfortable) is pre­ cisely because there is no experience yet of a qualitative jump. The most that we can report is accumulation or rearrangement of old things. Only intuitively here and there genuine revolutionaries strive for the making of societies and persons who will be indeed qualitatively new. How humbling it is to be reminded by Commu­ nists like Bloch and Garaudy that the genius and attraction of Marxism lie in them (and for us?) that no Marxist society to date has been able to re-create persons and societies without onerous and the consequent loss of individual freedoms!

Conversion in the Bible is always a qualitative leap ("the old things have passed away; behold, they have all become new!"). When Zacchaeus understands the re­ creative forgiveness of Jesus, he is turned inside out, from a life of self-concern to one of self-giving: "Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold" (Luke 19:8). Hear­ ing that, Jesus identifies· this qualitative newness as salvation.

The problem is that we have yet to find the equivalent experience for institutions. In a world like ours, where they affect everything from the availability of goods, to the information of our judgments, to the values of our humanity and to the con t r ol of God's creation, if they canno t be converted, at least they must be checked and humanized by the Lord who claimed Zacchatu.s and every force that impinges on human existence. His all-embracing Lordship requires no less. "For we are not contending just against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness ... "

We converts to the Gospel are converts to a Lord who is satisfied with no less than a new heaven and a new earth. Hopeful realists that we become, we perceive both the dimensions of the struggle and the possibilites already inherent in a divinely reconciled environment. Our utopianism is not wishful-thinking. It is rather that, "as partakers of the Holy Spirit, (we) have tasted the goodness of the word .o f God and the powers of the age to come" (Hebrews 6:5). Our freedom for the future is the strong suspicion of "untested feasibilities" (Freire), feasibilities for which the past has no precedents.

Schilleebeckx's observation is much to the point: "The hermeneutics of the Kingdom of God consists especially in making the world a better place. Only ir. this way will I be able to discover what the Kingdom of God means."] If freedom, justice and love are to be more than slogans, they require their translation into actual experience. Rightly so, those who do liberation theology insist with James, I John and the incarnation itself that God's truth validates itself in action. Any "theology" which is not practiced is simply pre-theological.

To act out the implications of a promised new heaven and a new earth is immediately to enter into the realm of risk. We have no blueprints, just powerful clues from Scripture, the living tradition of the Church as it has engaged the world, and supremely from the example of our Lord. In a fallen creation where we ourselves participate still in the alienating forces of pride and selfishness, nothing we do can have the guarantee of flawlessness. But as forgiven sinners whose sins never exhaust the abundance of God's grace, and who through faith perceive, though dimly, 10 the city of God amidst the city of man, we are always free to risk to do God's truth. We, too, like anyone else, require some confirmation from the history of such endeavors, lest we should repeat mistakes or fail to gain perspective from the modest accomplishments God has granted us.

In this regard, the record of risks taken by the churches through the Na t i ona l Council of Churches during the convulsive decade of the sixties might be of some encouragement. Here by way of illustration are some examples of pronouncements and actions which eventually gained the respect and acceptance of those who genuinely care to see Christia~ obedience raising signs of God's freedom, justice and love in the life of our nation. These , incidentally, a r e a l l positions which at the time brought widespread and painful scorn on the N.C.C. from dissenting fellow-Christians. 8

1958 - Recommendation (becoming policy statement in 1966) for steps to be taken toward inclusion of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations and its recognition by our government.

1960 - Policy statement calling on government provision for pre-payment of health services, and urging legislation to include ade qua t e health care for retired-age persons within the Social Security system.

1962 - Resolution opposing composition of official prayers by the government for any group of the American people to recite as part of a religious program carried on by government.

1963 - Establishment of an emergency Commission on Religion and Race, spear­ heading the churches' efforts to obtain the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965.

1965 - Support for legislation resul ting in the elimination of the national­ origins quotas, with their virtual exclusion of immigrants from the Asia-Pacific Triangle and other parts of the world not represented in the "base" census of 1920.

1965 - Congress passes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which includes the amendment proposed by the NCC favoring certain forms o f aid to children attending private and parochial schools without giving direct aid to the schools themselves.

1965 - Message to the Churches on Vietnam cautioning that if a unilateral policy by the U.S. were to follow , no conceivable victory there could compen sa t e for the distrust and hatred of the U.S. which will generate each da y throughout much of the world.

1965 - Provision for NCC staff to help establish anti-war protest, assisting such emerging groups as Clergy and Laity Concerned and other church­ related peace groups.

1968 - Support of migratory farm-workers , directing NCC employees to support the table-grape boycott then in progress.

1968 - Policy statement in support of guaranteed annual income, contributing to the debate and the proposals on the subject still before the Congress.

1969 - Amicus curiae brief lodged with the Supreme Court supporting exemption of the house of worship from property taxation as protection to the free exercise of religion. The Court upheld its constitutionality. 11

Many other resolutions, amicus curiae briefs, and risky actions of a similar sort could be cited. What is important to remember is not so much the eventual vindi­ cation of these positions, but the discovery of "untested feasibilities" in the struggle to erect signs of our Lord's total claim upon all of human existence.

Christian risk takes on particular poignancy when the immediate mobilization of resources is required to feed, house, heal or re-settle fellow-human beings sud­ denly struck by natural disaster or the devastation of war. From t ime to time su ch mobilization can only be carried out in partnership with Herodian regimes, and wi t h resources bearing the mark of political propaganda of the government which supplies them. It is at such exceptional junctures that Christians responsible for relief operations may have to allow themselves to be used in contradiction to their con­ science. Luther's counsel is pertinent, "Sin boldly, but believe more firmly." Victims cannot be further victimized waiting for the resolution of the moral scruples of those who are in a position to help. What is important in this instance is that it be viewed as exceptional, and not totally unfree from the opportunity to register vocal protest afterward, or assistance at the strategic moment to forces committed to the long-range liberation of the suddenly victimized. That is the richness of the freedom with which Christ makes us free for the other.

The One who promises and ushers in the new heaven and the new earth is the One who always goes before us, whose favorite dwelling is among the outcast and the down­ trodden. They are lovable simply because they are fellow-human beings . They are even more so because they offer the rest of us the surest and most direct way t o serve the One who meets us in them, and who will grant us the full measure of his freedom, justice and love only in so far as they become free, vindicated and loved.

He who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

New York, June 10, 1974 12

NOTES lAmerican Friends Service Committee, Some Friendly Suggestions.

2The Radical Bible. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. 1972, p. 2 .

3Daniel Yankelovich, Changing Youth Values in the Seventies: A Study of American Youth. New York. 1974.

4Fred M. Heckinger, "Youth's New Values." New York Times, editorial page. May 28, 1974

5William Stringfellow, "Do We Need a New Barmen Declaration?" Post American, April 1974, Vol. 3, No.3, p. 13.

6Quoted in Paulo Freire's, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. 1972, p. 78.

7Catblicos Holandeses, p. 29. Quoted by Gustavo Guti:rrez, A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. 1973, p. 13.

8Dean M. Kelley, The National Council of Churches and the Social Outlook of the Nation. Published by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1971.