| Footnote 9 – Richard John Neuhaus, ed. Theological Education and Moral Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 211-213.
Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) was editor of the conservative journal First Things, as well as the Encounter Series of volumes published by Eerdmans, of which this source is volume 15. Readers of these Foootnotes might also be interested in other volumes in the series, particularly volume 2 (Unsecular America) and volume 5 (The Bible, Politics, and Democracy).Typically, each volume reports a conference in which four to six featured speakers delivered prepared addresses, following which those speakers and perhaps a dozen others join in a panel discussion of the issues raised in the prepared speeches. This particular volume reports a conference at Duke University and offers some rare insight into the state of the denominational mentality in America, and I offer excerpts from three different sections of the round-table discussion for your amazement. George Marsden, then Professor of the History of Christianity in America at Duke University Divinity School (later moving to Notre Dame), and author of Fundamentalism in American Culture and Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism in America, speaking of the crisis of authority in many American seminaries today: George Marsden: “What we need to do,” he said, “is to go back to Christianity. We should start talking about God and the authority of the Bible. We should pray and teach the liturgy. But in most Protestant seminaries, if we went back to that kind of Christianity and came out with it as authoritative, we’d get kicked out. You might be able to get away with it at Duke because of its traditionalist ethos.” “Is Duke really that different than, say, Union in New York?” Neuhaus asked the group. Geoffrey Wainwright took up the question: “While teaching at Union in New York, I always felt that the assumption was that Christianity was wrong unless it could be shown to be right. At Duke the assumption is that, on the whole, Christianity is the agreed-upon basic, though there are problems here and there that can be debated.” “At what point would you get kicked out of the University of Chicago Divinity School for authoritatively teaching orthodox Christianity?” Neuhaus asked. “When you offended the feminists or the relativists or the gay caucus,” Marsden answered. “How might you offend the relativists at Chicago?” Neuhaus probed. Marsden replied, “By implying that Christianity is a religion that has some exclusivism. By implying that relativists weren’t Christians. After all, if you’re talking about traditional Christianity, you’re going to have to isolate and argue against ways of believing that are different from traditional Christianity.” “George, you’re saying that there is a normative Christianity,” Neuhaus observed. “For example, if someone doesn’t believe in the resurrection of Christ, then he or she isn’t a classical Christian.” “Yes, and if you say certain people aren’t Christians, you’ll get booted out,” Marsden responded. “Do you really mean you’d get fired from the faculty?” Richard Hays asked with a note of disbelief. “Well, you’d get hooted down and eventually called a crank,” guessed Marsden. “I question that,” said Hays. “I think we’ve allowed ourselves to get buffaloed, to be intimidated into thinking that we could never say anything like that.” Then Neuhaus continued his line of questioning. “How much could be changed if seminary professors taught more confessionally?” Marsden attempted an answer. “In today’s seminaries you have pluralistic institutions, and you have to be careful about whom you offend. if you go into a seminary classroom and say, ‘Your problem is that you need to be converted,’ what you’re saying is that some people there aren’t Christians. That might not be an appropriate thing to say in a school that isn’t restricted to one denomination.” Neuhaus wasn’t so sure. “In a theological faculty,” he said, “it should be inescapable that at some point you’re going to be teaching about the idea of conversion. If you make it clear that your understanding of conversion is that it is constitutive of being a Christian, you’re not browbeating the class. You’re simply making clear what your understanding of the Christian life is. And that includes conversion, in the born-again sense and/or in the baptismal-renewal sense. You wouldn’t be a good teacher of the church if you didn’t teach that.” From Truth Magazine XXXVI: 17 (September 3, 1992) |
Category Archives: Footnotes
Footnote 8 – S. H. Bingman
Footnote 8 – S. H. Bingman, “From the Field,” Christian Standard XXIV: 50 (December 14, 1889), p. 830 (12).
“December 3 – Closed a very unsatisfactory meeting with the church at Union Center. . . . Rain almost daily, deep mud and dark nights; divided brethren, poor preaching, good singing and plenty of babies. We would have had a houseful every session, if enough people had come to fill up, and there would have been a larger number of additions, if we could have persuaded the people to obey the Lord. That the meeting was no worse, we ‘thank God and take courage,’ and intend to try again.”‘
As we approach the spring season of “gospel meetings” (aka “revivals” in many religious fellowships) I offer this intriguing quotation in the spirit of the season, hoping that readers will enjoy it as much as I did. I don’t know who S.H. Bingman was, but one day I would like to shake his hand! He gets my vote for “honest meeting report” of the century!
However, lest we take either ourselves or our counterparts from last century too lightly, let me hasten to add that we do not share the pessimism expressed by some regarding the demise of “gospel meetings” or the alleged lack of resultant good. To be sure, the results may occasionally be “less than sensational” (as one report we saw described it). However, there are positive results from such meetings which are not found in written reports or expressed in tangible statistics.
I count it a privilege to have expended some of my efforts in meetings among small churches, in the U.S. and overseas – several of which were without a “full-time preacher.” There is certainly nothing at all wrong with an established congregation, with an evangelist already present, inviting another preacher to come for a special teaching effort (Acts 11:20-24 seems to be an example of this). However, there is a great need for work to be done in edifying smaller congregations which are not receiving regular and systematic teaching. The good resulting from such efforts, while not subject to quantification in statistical reports, is nonetheless well worth the effort.
Of course, we “thank God and take courage” that not all meetings are like the one described above. Some of them result in visible, indeed, vivid responses: baptisms, emotional restorations, congregations with large and attentive audiences. We emphatically reject any suggestion that “meetings do no good.”
A final thought is suggested by the anonymity of the correspondent. As I said, I had never before heard of S.H. Bingman, though I have an active interest in “Restoration History.” Yet, even though we may never have known them, there are literally thousands of persevering souls like this man, working diligently in their section of the Lord’s vineyard, undaunted by less than sensational results, unrelenting in their labors despite discouraging circumstances or apparently insurmountable obstacles. Their kind is legion even today: unknown by face to most churches, unrecorded by brotherhood reports, shunning prominence, choosing rather to work in the obscurity of difficult fields. Truly, from their example we “thank God and take courage.”
— Adapted from Truth Magazine XXXII: 4 (February 18, 1988), p. 107
Footnote 7 – Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas
Footnote 7 – Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), pp. 132-136, 154-155.
“The claim by conservatives that the academy is under the control of a left-wing professoriate is an old one, and studies since the fifties had tended to confirm the general suspicion that professors, as a group, are more liberal than the general public. In 1952, for example, social science professors voted for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in the presidential election by a margin of 58 percent to 30 percent, even though Eisenhower (who, when he ran for office, was the president of Columbia University) won the election by almost 11 percentage points….
“In 2007, two sociologists working at Harvard and George Mason, Neil Gross and Solon Simons, conducted a national survey of the political views of the professoriate that observed all the protocols of scientific research and that has a good claim to being an accurate statistical picture of the 630,000 full-time professors, at every level of institution, from research universities to community colleges, in the United States at the time….The results of the survey are quite stunning.
“Gross and Simmons found that younger professors today tend to be more moderate in their political views than older professors, supporting the theory that the generation that entered the professoriate in the sixties was a spike on the chart ideologically. They also found, however, that the younger professors are more liberal in their social views. But the most important finding of the survey, they say, is that a large plurality of professors holds a center-left politics….
“What is striking about these results is not the finding that professors tend to be mainstream liberals. It is the finding that they tend to be so overwhelmingly mainstream liberals. These are the data: [Table] … 44.1 percent of professors are liberal and 9.2 percent are conservative. By contrast, in the public opinion poll closest to the time of the survey, the American public as a whole reported itself to be 23.3 percent liberal and 31.9 percent conservative.
“….It is unlikely that the opinions of the professoriate will ever be a true reflection of the opinions of the public; and, in any case, that would be in itself an unworthy goal. Fostering a greater diversity of views within the professoriate is a worthy goal, however. Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it.”
Louis Menand is Ann T. and Robert M. Bass Professor English at Harvard University. His book, The Metaphysical Club, wone the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2001. As with many of the quotations selected for inclusion (and sometimes commentary) on this blog, one should understand that there is often more nuanced discussion of the point at hand in the text preceding and following what is quoted here. These are designed to steer interested readers to those discussions – that is all!
Footnote 6 — Atheist Delusions
Footnote 6 — David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 222-223.
“Can one really believe – as the New Atheists seem to do – that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward, free of the constraining hand of archaic faith, will naturally make society more just, more humane, and more rational than it has been in the past? What evidence supports such an expectation? It is rather difficult, placing everything in the scales, to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives have already been swallowed up in the flames of modern ‘progress.’ At the end of the twentieth century – the century when secularization became an explicit political and cultural project throughout the world – the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts….The process of secularization was marked, from the first, by the magnificent limitlessness of its violence…The old order could generally reckon its victims only in the thousands. But in the new age, the secular state, with all its hitherto unimagined capacities, could pursue its purely earthly ideals and ambitions only if it enjoyed the liberty to kill by the millions.”
Footnote 5 – An Army At Dawn
Footnote 5 – Rick Atkinson, An Army At Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43 (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), pp. 33-34, 40-41, 413-415.
Perhaps it is appropriate to consider the battles waged across 1,000 miles of North African coastline 70 years ago in early 1943. Though the “timeline” is segmented by identifiable battles such as Kasserine Pass (28 February 1943) and el Guettar (23 March 1943), the genesis of the conflict occurred months before. Perhaps modern Americans can only imagine how much went into the conflict, even in terms of sheer material goods, as described by Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Atkinson:
“Dawn on October 24 revealed a forest of masts and fighting tops across Hampton Roads, where the greatest war fleet ever to sail from American waters made ready…..Young men, fated to survive and become old men dying abed half a century hence, would forever remember this hour, when an army at dawn made for the open sea in a cause none could yet comprehend.”
In addition to 33,843 soldiers, the holds of this flotilla carried “tanks and cannons, rubber boats and outboard motors, ammunition and machine guns, magnifying glasses and stepladders, alarm clocks and bicycles. Into the holds went: tractors, cement, asphalt, and more than a million gallons of gasoline, mostly in five-gallon tins. Into the holds went: thousands of miles of wire, well-digging machinery, railroad cars, 750,000 bottles of insect repellant, and 7,000 tons of coal in burlap bags. Into the holds went: black basketball shoes, 3,000 vehicles, loudspeakers, 16,000 feet of cotton rope, and $100,000 in gold coins, entrusted to George Patton personally. And into the holds went: a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and and sixty rolls of flypaper for each 1,000 soldiers, plus five pounds of rat poison per company.
“A special crate, requisitioned in a frantic message to the War Department, held a thousand Purple Hearts… Phrase books with pronunciation keys, to be distributed at sea, perfectly captured Allied ambivalence, giving the French for both, ‘I am your friend’ and ‘I will shoot you if you resist.’ A propaganda radio station, cobbled together with a transmitter salvaged in Jersey City and a generator from a South Carolina cotton mill, was secretly installed in the U.S.S. Texas … Quartermasters had rounded up 10 million salt tablets and 67,000 American flag armbands, with 138,000 safety pins to secure them to uniform sleeves….Using a Michelin commercial road guide to Morocco, a government printing plant outside Washington had spent weeks reproducing sixty tons of maps, which were manhandled into the holds along with sealed bundles of Baedeckers, old issues of National Geographic, French tourist guidebooks, and volume ‘M’ of various encyclopedias….”
All this in addition to 72,000 troops and half a million tons of cargo previously shipped to England for the “shorter” sea journey to North Africa…. “In late January, Eisenhower had pleaded with Washington for more trucks. Less than three weeks later, a special convoy of twenty ships sailed from Norfolk, New York, and Baltimore with 5,000 two-and-a-half-ton trucks, 2,000 cargo trailers, 400 dump trucks, 80 fighter planes, and, for ballast, 12,000 tons of coal, 16,000 tons of flour, 9,000 tons of sugar, 1,000 tons of soap, and 4,000 submachine guns, all of which arrived in Africa on March 6 ….”
“’The battle,’ Rommel famously observed, ‘is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.’ The shooting had begun months before in northwest Africa, but now the quartermasters truly came into their own. The prodigies of American industrial muscle and organizational acumen began to tell. In Oran, engineers built an assembly plant near the port and taught local workers in English, French, and Spanish how to put together a jeep from a box of parts in nine minutes. That plant turned out more than 20,000 vehicles. Another factory nearby assembled 1,200 railcars, which were among 4,500 cars and 250 locomotives ultimately added to North African rolling stock.”
“In Africa, total supply requirements amounted to thirteen tons per soldier each month. …From late February to late March, 130 ships sailed from the United States for Africa with 84,000 soldiers, 24,000 vehicles, and a million tons of cargo….The Americans’ genius ‘lay in creating resources rather than using them economically,’ a British study observed astutely….’The American Army does not solve its problems,’ one general noted, ’it overwhelms them.‘ There was prodigal ineconomy – of time, of motion, of stuff – but beyond the extravagance lay a brisk ability to get the job done. After Kasserine, American aviation engineers built five new airfields around Sbeitla – in seventy-two hours. More than one hundred fields would be built during the Tunisian campaign. The enemy would not be ‘solved’ in Tunisia. He would be overwhelmed.”
And, above and beyond the material cost, at the expense of more than 70,000 Allied casualties, “a continent has been redeemed,” to use Churchill’s memorable phrase.
Footnote 3 – Explanatory Footnote
Footnote 3 – Explanatory Footnote
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary to create yet another weblog and thus add to the verbiage already cluttering the blogosphere, exercising the verbal and mental abilities which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God have bestowed upon us, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that one should declare the causes which impel him to do such a thing (shamelessly paraphrased from someone much smarter than me).
This personal blog is something I have pondered doing for several years, and finally, “impelled” by wife, daughter and others, have taken the plunge. Will anyone read it? I hope so – but that’s not really the point of this blog. It’s for me as much as anyone else – my interests, my thoughts and words (and the thoughts and words of others), and my interactions with the thoughts and words of others.
It’s “eclectic” – from the Greek ἐκλεκτικός, which can be defined as “deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources (adjective); or, a person who derives ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources (noun); selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles; or, composed of elements drawn from a variety of sources, systems, or styles.”
Because I spent the last seven years co-editing a new hymnal – Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs – much of my consciousness is still oriented in that direction. I will continue posting my “Hymn For Today” feature which has been a regular aspect of my Facebook page since last June.
But my interests are broader and more diverse (eclectic) than hymnology, extending to history, religion, language, broadcast media, sports, and more: much of the broad range of human endeavor and achievement. I taught history in a state university for a number of years (history of religion, journalism, science and technology, the history and impact of “significant events,” e.g., World War II or the American Civil War, as well as the obligatory “survey” courses) before “declaring victory” and retiring from the field. History is arguably the broadest of the liberal arts, since one can, after all, write a history of nearly anything. Additionally, in a brief spurt of insanity during my long and checkered past, I did some news broadcasting (NPR and CBS affiliates).
Partly my “eclecticism” is due to my more-or-less typical baby-boomer career path of eight different jobs in three different “careers.” Some people have said that I just haven’t decided what I want to be when I grow up. My retort is: “Why grow up? No future in that!”
But the one common interest which binds all these eclectic disciplines together is, for me, religion – and the quest to understand the meaning of it all. Much of my adult life has been spent working as a minister – sometimes “bi-vocational,” supporting my family by working in the “secular” marketplace; often fully supported by churches. Much of my work has been with small-to-medium-sized, independent congregations whose stated intent is to be “Christians only” and attempt to follow the teachings of Jesus and his first disciples – those He sent out as apostles to spread and share the gospel of God’s grace. Thus, this blog has a decidedly Christian orientation.
Some individual blogs will celebrate the joys and hazards of living in suburban Chicago and the diverse (eclectic) advantages of a truly global city – as well as the agonies and ecstasies of following daBears, Bulls, Blackhawks and, of course, the Cubbies (World Champions, 1908).
The format of some of the blog , a series of “Footnotes,” is a nod to my former academic career. I cite a source in more-or-less standard academic format, and then reproduce a quotation or segment from some eclectic source. Sometimes I may feel a need to comment; sometimes not. Some of them may be “explanatory” footnotes, like this one. I stole this format shamelessly a few decades ago from one of my academic mentors who long ago abandoned the practice. Perhaps I will re-cycle portions of a series of “Footnote” articles I wrote several years ago in the “popular” (non-academic) press. At this stage it’s probably too late to come up with something else which is new and clever.
Help yourself.
Footnote 2 — Finke and Stark
Footnote 2 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 18, 84, 150, 169, 238; cf. pp. 249-55.
“as denominations have modernized their doctrines and embraced temporal values, they have gone into decline . . . the message becomes more worldly, and is held with less certainty as religion becomes the focus of scholarly critique and attention . . . [the decline starts when they] begin to lift restrictions on behavior and to soften doctrines that had served to set the sect apart from its social environment . . . as the general affluence and social standing of a group rises, otherworldliness — as expressed through tension with the environment — becomes perceived as increasingly costly . . . religious organizations are stronger to the degree that they impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members.”2
Footnote 1 – Philip Jenkins on Media and Religion
1 Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University;
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p, 163.
“The parochialism of Western public opinion is striking. When a single racial or religiously-motivated murder takes place in Europe or North America, the event occasions widespread soul-searching, but when thousands are massacred on the grounds of their faith in Nigeria, Indonesia, or the Sudan, the story rarely registers. Some lives are worth more than others.”1
ἐκλεκτικός 