[00:00:06] INTRODUCER:
Now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to the Foerster Lecture. The Foerster Lectureship was established in nineteen twenty-eight by Miss Edith Zweybruck as a memorial to her sister and brother-in-law, Agnes A. and Constantine And E. A. Foerster. It provides for a lecture each year on the immortality of the soul or on other kindred spiritual subjects.
And such lecture is not to form a part of the regular college course. The Foerster Lecture is to be delivered by a person especially qualified and especially appointed. The Foerster Lecturer for nineteen sixty-four is the Right Reverend James A. Pike, Bishop of the Diocese of California.
Bish– Pike received his AB and LLB degrees from the University of Southern California and the JSD degree from Yale University. He attended Virginia Theological and the Union Theological Seminaries, and received the Bachelor of Divinity degree in nineteen fifty-one from the Union Theological Seminary. He has received honorary degrees from Cornell, from his alma mater, USC, from the Hebrew Union College, from University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Virginia Theological Seminary.
Mr. Pike was admitted to the California Bar in nineteen thirty-six. He was ordained deacon of the Protestant Episcopal Church in nineteen forty-four, made a priest in nineteen forty-six, named curate of St. John’s Church, Washington, D.C., and chaplain of George Washington University, where he served from nineteen forty-four to nineteen forty-six. From nineteen forty-seven to nineteen forty-nine, he was rector of Christ Church, Poughkeepsie, New York, and Episcopal chaplain of Vassar College in that city.
He joined the faculty of Columbia University in nineteen forty-nine. He was the head of the Department of Religion and university chaplain from nineteen forty-nine to nineteen fifty-two, and associate in religion and law nineteen fifty-two to nineteen fifty-three. An adjutant professor in the university from nineteen thir-fifty-three to nineteen fifty-eight.
He was named Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in nineteen fifty-two, where he served until nineteen fifty-eight, when he was appointed Bishop Coadjutor of the Diocese of California, and was named Bishop of California. in nineteen fifty-eight. He is the author of twelve books, the first of which was published in nineteen thirty-eight.
You may be rather astonished at this, those of you who don’t know his publications. A book, Cases and Other Materials on the New Federal and Code Procedure. His later books, uh, more understandably, have been concerned with Church and Society,
[00:03:29] CHANCELLOR:
uh, Roadblocks to Faith in nineteen fifty-four, The Church, Politics, and Society in nineteen fifty-five, A Man in the Middle in nineteen fifty-six, A Roman Catholic in the White House in nineteen sixty. He’s a member of the editorial board of the American Theological Review and contributing editor to the Christian Century. It’s my pleasure and honor to introduce Bishop Pike.
His first year lecture is entitled Eternal Life and Social Action Now. Bishop Pike.
(audience applause and cheering)
[00:04:22] BISHOP PIKE:
Thank you, Mr. Chancellor. My, it’s extraordinarily peaceful here.
(laughter)
I guess we got the wrong picture from the radio, from the TV, and from the newspapers. Um… I have, uh, been involved in a slightly dissident relationship to the university myself, both when I was in that portion of the university once known as the Southern Branch, now a rather sizable institution where I lectured yesterday in Royce Hall, uh, when I found myself carrying a picket banner around on some issue or other, I’ve been trying to think what it was I didn’t like. Um, in any case, later I had some occasion, uh, to say something once it was raised by a student group about the advantages of having instruction in the, in the field and Department of Religion at this university, and became acquainted with the Chancellor Strong at that time, and, uh, we had visits about it.
I was very pleased later to be invited to come right within the midst and talk on an obviously religious subject until I noticed what the subject was, which was the immortality of the soul, And I was in some difficulty. Uh, I, I don’t believe in the immortality of the soul. I don’t think I even believe that there’s such a thing as a soul.
And so there was some wrestling of conscience as to whether I qualified as the lecturer, but
(laughter)
but I, uh, uh, uh, I, I relied very heavily on that very ample title, which must have been negotiated very carefully by the then president or chancellor when the bequest or gift was made, uh, Kindred Subjects.
(laughter)
So I’ve chosen this title, Eternal Life and Social Action Now, because I do believe in eternal life, And I do believe in social action. I hate to say now, right now.
(laughter)
I certainly did then when I selected the title. Uh, but in any case, first to explain this first ground of my reticence, which was quickly solved, and this title was accepted by the chancellor, and I proceeded to think along those more precise lines than the ones I could believe in. Immortality of the soul is a philosophically derived notion, uh, which has, by the way, some plausibility.
It tends to assume a bifurcation of human personality into its psychic and somatic parts. It tends to picture life beyond this incarnated bodily life In some sort of oblong blur, uh, a disembodied, unparticularized form of existence. It tends to suggest the drop of water returning to the ocean or the soul being absorbed into the oversoul.
A departicularization, an unspecificity, the generalizing of a person’s personality into attributes and characteristics and finally into the one universal. The thought of soul itself. Suggests certain dangers which we’ve seen not only in certain world religions, which for my taste are too spiritual, uh, but also within the Judeo-Christian heresy as a constant threat to its balance.
Because of the natural tendency for us to group things in pairs, you say soul, body, spirit, flesh, And then we have, uh, a-and we say spiritual, material. And then we have, of course, good, bad. So the tendency is to say soul is good, uh, body is bad.
Uh, spiritual is good, material is bad. Uh, spirit is good, flesh is bad. This tendency, I say, has expressed itself within the Judeo-Christian tradition as well as outside of it in religions and philosophies which are more self-consciously dedicated to such a distinction.
In the medieval church, such notions that the denial of certain natural fleshly enjoyment gained one brownie points. Um, even a notion which found its place until recently in one tradition that if a married couple would make a voluntary and mutually agreed upon compact to refrain from sexual intercourse, this was meritorious toward their status in the life to come. The, uh, kind of talk often in churches and from pulpits about our becoming more spiritual and less material, less fleshly, as though this were the end of human existence, that implying that the more soul and the less body, the better off you are in the eyes of God.
Tendencies in the American Protestant tradition coming in, in two different periods of history from two different sources, often confused in people’s minds. First, the Puritan source, and later the pietistic source arising from, uh, the new movements in Germany and England, uh, of the, uh, Zinzendorf-Wesley type of trend that flourished in this country, uh, very much identified the fleshly with the, with the evil and created in the unconscious minds of many Americans, uh, this identification, even Americans who had no religious connection, who might claim even to be atheists or secularists. Nevertheless, in their unconscious minds, there was this identification which any of us engaged in pastoral counseling recognizes even when we’re talking to non-church people in terms, for example, of marital adjustment.
The view I would hold about human personality and its destiny is that while for certain purposes of talking it may be useful to distinguish soul and body, in fact, the medical profession quite scientifically concerned with the relationship of the literally physical aspects of the human mechanism and those things going on in the unconscious and conscious mind does exactly the same thing in the word psychosomatic, soul-body medicine, if you wish, psyche and soma, with a hyphen between. Uh, maybe that’s the way you have to talk. You have to put together a hyphen to say you mean the whole man.
But that’s really what I think we should mean. Uh, every one of us is a whole person, that is all one piece. Now, how whole in other senses of psychiatric health and, and integration and all is another question.
We– I guess none of us are whole in that sense. But whatever there is of me is all in one piece. And the, uh, growing understanding of total health in terms of the well-being of what we might call my soul or my mind or my unconscious depths and my body, uh, is one of the most exciting and promising and rewarding aspects of modern diagnosis and therapy.
As to the destiny of such a being, that type of creature which in the evolutionary process came along with marked capacities of what we would call soul, spirit, mind, and the capacity to transcend one’s situation, to tie up past, present, and future, to plan, to decide, to organize. That’s a bad word now, too. To, to, uh, um, um, well, to relate to other people, uh, and so forth.
Uh, actually, the traditional biblical faith does not assert immortality of the soul. It asserts something that sounds much more incredible, the resurrection of the body. Now, do I believe in that?
The rising up from the grave of a– of the remaining portions of, uh, this particular body, obviously not. Whether I be cremated or otherwise. Um, whether one is buried without cremation or with it, it has no, it has no, makes no essential difference as to the ultimate outcome.
It’s just a question of speeding up a process. Um, uh, this doesn’t last, I gather, very many years anyway, due to the constant change within the system and growth of new cells and so forth. And yet, the word body in this usage reminds us, uh, of something quite important.
That any ongoing life, at least as Western religion has seen it, is ongoing personal individual life. In other words, as time goes on, I would become more myself, not less myself. Rather than the absorption like ink into a blotter, There would be a greater expression and capacity to develop that which is expressed in each personality.
And if that is what is meant, then the word body at least makes clear that there will be a means of expression, a means of relationship, a means of individuation, a means of separation, because that is how now in this kind of existence that occurs. Possibly two or three of you at least, upon leaving this auditorium, might say one to another, “You know, uh, he has a good spirit.” I hope somebody could say that.
Well, if you did, it’s really quite an inaccurate statement because you don’t know anything really, by way of direct evidence or relationship about my spirit. Physical ears have vibrated in a certain way, uh, because of waves set forth by my, uh, doing things with a physical throat and physical wind or hot air, if you wish. And, uh, your physical eyes have seen certain physical gestures and for certain muscular gyrations, and putting that all together, you infer from that something about Jim Pike as such.
but you haven’t seen anything except physical things. It’s my body which relates to your body. And the phrase, “resurrection of the body,” does affirm that the continuity of life in whatever form it takes is individuated, relatable, uh, kind of life, uh, not abstract, universal, absorbed, uh, generalized kind of life.
Resurrection suggests ongoingness of personality that it’s not some other person that begins at that point, that there’s the ongoingness of that core or middle or heart of what a person is. Now, that latter is not a very adequate phrase either, but at least it has in it some correctives that the phrase the immortality of the soul does not have in it. Uh, Uh, the plausibility for either, uh, is there, I say.
But in the end, if one does believe in eternal life, one does so by faith. Uh, one does not prove this particularly. I know there is some effort in the field called psychical research and some quite respectable effort, rather discriminating kind of, of treatment of this field, uh, and it’s always rather intriguing.
There seem to be things which do happen, evidences of appearances and so forth, which, uh, certainly leave one open to this. I, I think it would be very dogmatic, uh, to say that we, we just know none of those things are so. Uh, on the other hand, uh, maybe it’s because I’ve not been a very detailed or special student in that field, I’ve never found very much conviction about this coming from this, quote, scientific, unquote, direction.
In any case, uh, any meaning about all this would come from faith, which is not shocking because any matter of importance to us, we take on faith. Uh, hopefully a plausible faith, uh, and I think this one is. Uh, what I am does transcend what you see.
Uh, this I can look at and change. Or experts, surgeons, or whatever, can further change it. We can manipulate it.
Um, I’m above it. I can use it. Not long ago, it was about a couple of years ago now, I was dressing in, in our bedroom and happened to glance sideways in a full-length mirror and discovered that what my wife had been saying about me was true.
(laughter)
(cough)
So I decided to change the shape of me, and I did. There won’t be time in this lecture to tell you about just how to do it.
(laughter)
Sunday, self-addressed stamped envelope to
(laughter)
the Diocesan House.
(coughs)
But, uh, this capacity to look at oneself and change one’s own shape, one’s own self, this transcendent quality, uh, is suggestive here of the, uh, universal, almost universal thirst for eternal life, which can easily be explained away, uh. We’d then make a projection of this as wishful thinking, and that’s one thing you can say about it. It also can be used to suggest that maybe there’s something to match that yearning and that conviction.
Because all other relatively universal yearnings and thirsts have something in reality which corresponds to them. I say that very carefully. Not always in each case is something matching up, but there is something like that which is desired or wanted.
People do get hungry. Right. There is such a thing as food.
Uh, doesn’t mean every man has the food when he needs it, but there is such a thing that corresponds to that hunger. Uh, people do get thirsty. Well, there is such a thing as water and other forms of fluid.
Um, people, uh, like generally do have sexual desires, and there is such a thing as sexual fulfillment. Again, not for everyone at all times in just perhaps the context he’d like, but there is such a thing. There is such a thing as a feeling about yearning for, yes, belief in, quite universally, an ongoingness of human personality.
It’s not implausible to say there could be reality matching that universal yearning and thirst. But in the end, one will say, “This makes more sense than its alternative view, and therefore I operate on this assumption.” Now, in whichever way it’s defined, either in the more philosophical form of immortality of the soul, or the more creedal and Judeo-Christian form of resurrection of the body, or any other form, there is a great danger in talking about eternal life at all.
Or to be more explicit, there’s a great danger in talking about heaven at all. Again, not as some outside threat or some outside mistake. Right within the Judeo-Christian heritage, over and over again, the thought of heaven or the life to come and so forth has been used as an escape from reality.
(cough)
Karl Marx, uh, said something which is all too familiar to quote in the halls of this university. I better be careful there too, any university, uh, namely
(laughter)
that, uh,
(laughter)
religion,
(laughter)
religion is an opiate, uh, of the people. This statement is both right and wrong. But let me first, at the risk of being gotten at by the Alameda County John Birch Society, uh, affirm in what way the statement is right. Uh,
(coughs)
existentially and descriptively speaking, all through church history, we see that this is true. That is an opiate to people in the living context which presents an evil social situation, and likewise often even personal or family situations or interpersonal relations, uh, there has been a concentration upon what’s going to happen afterwards in the next world, and a kind of lulling, uh, into quietude as to what is going on in this world. Into– as to individual problems, if one can grin and bear it or hold one’s breath long enough, you will die, and then everything will be all right because you will be in heaven.
And as to social problems, well, what goes on here really doesn’t matter because in heaven it’s very nice. That should be a consolation to those of us who got defeated on the issue of Proposition 14. Uh, we know that the housing in heaven is integrated.
(laughter)
(applause)
Uh, and I suspect that there are more active chapters of the CREA in– No, I better not say that.
(laughter)
Um,
(laughter)
(laughter)
In any case, Um, also, as some Christian groups have emphasized the, the coming of the kingdom right into the earthly scene on D-Day, as it were, where all of a sudden everything is great, just like that. Um,
(clears throat)
everything’s straightened out, everything’s perfect, everything is the way anybody would want it, and we just wait for the coming of the kingdom. The agnostic humanist, really concerned about human evil, thus rejects the idea of eternal life or heaven with a very good motto, really, which I also endorse, mostly, with some qualification later, one world at a time. Let’s get with it here.
The examples are fairly obvious. The retreat from the world, the, uh,
(cough)
overemphasis upon mysticism, which someone has defined as misty plus schism, um
(laughter)
The escape from particularized reality, the close alliances often of state churches with the status quo, uh, urging blind obedience on the theory that, again, while you may have it tough here, and, uh, yet obedience is called for, God wants it that way, and you’ll come out better in the next world. In fact, since the time of Constantine, there’s been an actual vacillation and torment, if one might say, within the visible Church itself as to what the role of the Church is, whether it is to sprinkle holy water on the status quo or whether it is to disturb and transform the status quo. I might say that that, uh, tension exists in the Episcopal Diocese of California, Uh, with some very worthy laymen using the only weapon they have left, cutting their pledges to the parish and the diocese because we took the only possible moral position on every level, grassroots up at the top and back down again, on fair housing.
Uh, because we are not supposed to be involving ourselves in those things outside of the narrowly ecclesiastical. In other words, we are not to involve ourselves with the things that really matter. Yeah.
(laughter)
Now, while descriptively one can endorse Karl Marx’s statement, and while it remains a constant threat and therefore a real danger in even talking about heaven or eternal life, yet normatively, it is not a correct statement. And in even the one world at a time phrase, there is a misunderstanding as to the, uh, biblical tradition and that of the Judeo-Christian heritage as to the meaning of the Kingdom of God, to use one familiar biblical phrase, or eternal life, and its relationship to the here and now. If it really is eternal life, if that has any meaning at all Nearer to the sound of those words, then we right here are in it, uh, we are as much in eternity as we will ever be.
This is part of it, too. Therefore, there’s no fleeing from here to some other time and space. This is where we are, and we’re in eternity.
More than that, what goes on here and now, and the relationships of persons here and now, and the kind of society here and now, and its effects upon persons, uh, is as real and is as significant as anything that could happen at any time, either in history or beyond history, in whatever we might conceive of as life beyond death. Now, if that’s so, then an unseen dimension of ongoing reality, you might say, penetrates or interpenetrates the here and now, the visibly historical If so, then a question of allegiances immediately comes up. St. Paul has a couple of phrases which, when put together, state it very neatly.
He said, “We are citizens of the kingdom. We are colonists here.” I, I certainly am not here to endorse colonialism.
Uh, it might be interesting if I were. That’d be a real red herring across the trail, don’t you think, at this point? Um, but this particular form of colonialism I think is just fine.
At least we can gain a little insight as to what this double allegiance means. Um, in the old days, we’ll say, of British colonialism, there were some characteristic features of the old colonial hand. Likewise, the old missionary hand These people went from familiar surroundings with, say, in England to some desert or some swamp or some forest or some jungle or whatever, and very soon they wanted to put in that place things like they knew at home.
Um, well, a lot of Englishmen were used to having a club. It could be a shabby one, but it’s nice to have a club. So s-soon enough, soon, sooner or later, we see a club here, some kind of shack.
If they can get some kind of worn brown leather furniture, all the better, and a torn rug. And in those days, uh, scotch was served even in England without ice, so there were no special problems in the jungle about that. Um, The, um, look at the churches that they used to build, uh, with no attention to what would fit into the culture and would express meaning to the people there.
Some of the worst carpenter’s Gothic versions of dear old St. Swithin’s in the swamp or St. Vitus in the Vale, uh, uh, which were remembered from times past. Uh, well now, you know, it is funny. And yet it’s touching.
They were homesick, that’s all. They were just homesick. It was nostalgia.
Well, uh, St. Thomas Aquinas has called this other dimension our true native land. And the supposed concept means that we are supposed to be trying to make this look like that. Our ultimate allegiance, our first citizenship is to the kingdom, to the eternal dimension of things.
And as to our earthly nation or state, we are essentially colonists. Now, this immediately raises the possibility of treason. In most countries in the world, this is treason.
You are not, or at least in a good many. You’re– And in times past, in nearly all.
You, you really could not have any allegiance higher than that of your own nation. I’m convinced that because of some understanding of these things in the formation of our land, and implicitly in the unwritten British Constitution, that which in some places would be treason is here built in as a right by virtue of the First Amendment. I’ll give you an example from my own personal experience.
Uh, when I was dean of Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, every year we had a visitor we loved to have come there. Um, our country wouldn’t let him come outside of a few blocks around the UN building. A priest of our church known as Michael Scott, who was there as lobbyist for the Southwest Territories as against the encroachments of the Union of South Africa upon them under the UN mandate.
Michael Scott, a fine saintly man, was, uh, barred by our country even from coming up to our cathedral. Uh, he could only, as I say, hover around the UN, where he every year tried to get resolutions passed against the apartheid policies in South Africa, and also, uh, protecting the tribes that he represented officially in the South African southwestern area. Uh, we sprung him once by claim of First Amendment.
(coughs)
We even went so far as to threaten a suit so that he could have his– the, the religious freedom. We could have the religious freedom to have a priest of our church, who happened to be, uh, working out of England in South Africa, an Englishman, uh, function in the normal way a priest should. So a couple of times we could get him up to the cathedral to preach.
Once we took a risk and wondered if they’d dare arrest him, and the government didn’t. I suppose that was civil disobedience. Well, In any case, he won every time because the communist countries and the State of Israel and some Arab countries, too, went along with the condemnation of the Union of South Africa in eight separate resolutions and the protection of attempts to protect the Southwest African tribes.
For several years, our nation, every time, was on the side of race hate and of gobbling up the rights of individuals on the side of the Union of South Africa, either by declining to vote or voting the wrong way. The abstaining wasn’t very honorable. We have a text in the last book of the Bible for that, the Book of Revelation: “You were neither hot nor cold.
You were lukewarm, and I spewed you out of my mouth.” That’s the judgment on our UN delegation on some of those significant issues as to human rights. Well, we made noises about this every year, and then our nation would lose.
And if he couldn’t get up there to say it, I would say every year, “Thank God our nation was ignominiously defeated because the communist countries, the Arab countries, the state of Israel, and others were on the side of the angels. And these godless peoples in the communist orbit were on the side of God, whereas our nation was on the side of the devil, and it lost. Hooray!
Hallelujah, I mean. Excuse me.
(laughter)
Now, uh, this sounds very unpatriotic. Uh, in many places, it would be treason. I say my own religious freedom enables me to have a dimension of judgment and discrimination, where I judge my own nation as a citizen and seek to defeat its own ends and seek to help, help others outside the nation defeat my own nation’s ends.
My own nation is evil, as indeed we were year after year. But what happened? Enough talk like that, including some consultations with this delegation in Vienna, and our nation began to vote, vote on the side of the angels.
Uh, actually, the flag waver, the two hundred percent American, the my country right or wrong kind of person is not as useful a citizen, I’m convinced, as the restless ones, the critical ones, those who are not satisfied with their own nation, who would never say my country right or wrong. If my country is wrong, let’s do something about it and put it to rights. I think the critical citizen with a dimension of judgment Above the nation, uh, is a more useful citizen.
It keeps the nation safer from its own blindness and its own folly, its own self– ah, utter overconfidence, and from horrible self-righteousness which particularly successful nations, economic– economically successful nations can fall into. The, um… Yeah.
Dimension and allegiance, or the allegiance rather to this dimension settled, the question is what actually happens in terms of the interlocking of the concept of an ongoing kingdom which is to come, which we see as the fulfilled image and picture of ideal human life in perfect interrelationship of justice and love, Uh, to the here and now. Here a- we must distinguish the work of a committee, we’ll say with generally humane motivation, and the attitude of those engaged in a cause which has an eschatology. That is, a cause which has a sense of a meaning of development in history toward an end and an outcome, uh, which in principle already is victorious.
A committee, and most people around institutions like this or in churches are rather bored with the very word. I think a camel has been defined as a horse put together by a committee.
(laughter)
Um, A committee hopes that by thought and work and propaganda and carry through perhaps this evil can be remedied. This park can be made larger, better swings for the children, Or, integration can g– replace segregation in a given area or something. Now this is good, and this is fine, and often these things work out.
But there, the power in the present is either from past capacity and good experience of achieving things or from present hopes. But where there is a confidence in an outcome of things, power can come into the present from the future. Actually, Marxism helps us understand what the Judeo-Christian tradition has meant to be in this regard, but often has become a pale version of.
The orthodox communist, and they have denominations too now.
(cough)
(laughter)
Um
(cough)
for the really Bible-beating, tent-meeting kind of communism, I guess you better go to Red China. Now, there’s a very corrupt, heretical, liberal Protestant version of it up in Russia.
(laughter)
Um,
(laughter)
Somebody defined the difference between a pessimist and an optimist, that the optimist is having his son learn, learn, uh, Russian in the university, the pessimist Chinese.
(laughter)
Well, the, um,
(coughing)
um, the the communist who’s convinced, he and his fellows, is not simply a committee hoping certain changes can be made. They’re absolutely convinced that the victory of the proletariat after the class struggle, this particular image is inevitable, absolutely inevitable, and all they’re doing now is getting with it, getting on the bandwagon, being part of that which clearly is to be. Realizing that the more that get with it, the more it will be projected into the present in at least minor breakthroughs, and perhaps some major breakthroughs, for part of this which is to be now is.
This is the Judeo-Christian concept of the meaning of eternal life. That knowing the full meaning, the full outcome, the full power of this dimension, we seek to let breakthroughs occur, to have things opened up for a coming of the kingdom pro tanto, to use a legal phrase, for so much. Uh, in this instance, at least, where there was evil, there is now goodness.
In this area, we’ll say, of employment, where there was a barrier to equality of employment, there now is an openness to equal opportunity. This community, which was ghettoized, is now free of that, and persons can have a chance to find their own level of housing in terms, at least of their economic ability and their taste. To this degree, the kingdom has come.
And that which we call eternal life, in its meaning, has broken through and been made manifest. And the– in that particular area, pro tanto, this is just as important and significant as anything which will ever happen in any kind of vision of a completed kingdom manifests. For those who read some theology, uh, and this is in– in a footnote, really, you will recognize this as what Professor C. H. Dodd of Cambridge University calls realized eschatology.
A rather useful phrase, realized eschatology. It’s not just a question of holding your breath and waiting until everything marches right in at once or descends upon us from the heavens or the clouds. It’s a confidence in the dimension of meaning and power, a relationship to the ultimate ground of all being who is love, justice, and power, and creating openings for breakthroughs so that here and now
(clears throat)
this may be seen, known, experienced, and add to confidence. Add to confidence in this dimension and allegiance. Now, this is not to say that those who work from humanist presuppositions of hope about change are less worthy as persons or that they are less effective in achieving things.
Uh, we can’t make judgments like that. But rather, as far as motivation goes, there is, in fact, more, more courage or more basis for courage and strength in the view that, uh, the kingdom is the first allegiance, that eternal life goes on and on and on, that the degree to which one can make things happen here, one has already achieved part of the final purposes of the whole grand enterprise. And therefore, the here and now action, small or great, is significant.
There is a potential for more, more, more motivation and power and courage in that. How this works out in given individuals of differing convictions is quite another question because we’re all in one culture, and all of these, uh, trends and motivations from various sources affect all of us more or less. Um, and I am very tired of people trying to prove particular religious convictions by the statistics of how many people hang around the given church building or how many, uh, converts seem to have been made on a university campus by a given college work program run by a church.
You can’t measure these things. Ah, particularly irritated by a s– an article, it’s one of his three installments to appear in one of our official Episcopal trade journals, ah, weekly, known as The Living Church. Ah, a rather wholesale attack on my book, A Time for Christian Candor, which Harper Bro– Harper’s brought out last month, ah, implying that I’m really Unitarian.
(laughter)
And then saying that, uh, in trying to scuttle all the excess luggage and to take away the time-honored earthen vessels in order that the treasure may be better packaged, um, I, I should learn from the Unitarian movement because they meant well. They thought everybody would get this now that it was all freed up from moth-eaten old obscurantism. But you see today, he says, uh, the Unitarians swing few elections.
(laughter)
Well, in my answer, which is still in sort of third draft,
(background chatter)
uh, I hope I can do a short answer to three long articles. Uh,
(clears throat)
I say as to that, this is not a very impressive argument to me, still raw from the Proposition 14 battle in this state, where everybody from Unitarians to Roman Catholics combined swung no election either.
(laughter)
And that this was not a very happy concept for me just at this moment.
(clears throat)
Um, no, we can’t count things out that way. But here there is indeed something we have seen in, in the lives of groups and persons as a, a, a basis of courage in the present. Uh, as St. Paul can tell us, “Be ye not conformed to the world, but rather be ye transformed and transform it.”
Uh, the independence, almost holy recklessness of prophets and martyrs, it gives illustrations of this kind of thing. When, um, the Maccabees got thoroughly tired of Antiochus Epiphanes and his, uh, collaborationists, and when finally there was the last straw, as you recall from those books of the Bible known as Maccabees, which are part of Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Jewish Bibles, but not part of what are generally called Protestant Bibles. Uh, my, you know, Protestants generally are missing a lot not having the Apocrypha.
Some of those tales are fascinating. True, you can’t read all of it in church, but, uh
(laughter)
Um, In any case,
(coughs)
um, uh, you remember, uh, the overlords, as the ultimate offense, sacrificed on– in the Holy of Holies of the temple in Jerusalem, sacrificed of all things, a pig. Well, so these Maccabees brothers and the rest, the whole family got together with others, and they openly resisted the power of the state, and for a time were victorious. Uh, again, their conviction about the eternal meaning was greater than any loyalty whatsoever to what happened to be the legitimate nation of the time.
Uh, likewise, Uh, St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, stood down the Emperor Theodosius, who was with armed forces with him at the cathedral steps there. The bishop armed only with pastoral staff, refusing to allow the emperor to come into the church or receive communion until he repented of what was a kind of McCarthyite purge that he had pulled. I won’t go into the details.
I’m not referring to the present Senator McCarthy. The, the other Senator McCarthy knows better by now, but
(laughter)
Uh, uh,
(laughter)
And to turn to more recent history, some years ago, the South African Parliament was, uh, discussing a law which would require segregated or allow the ministry of the government to r-uh, require segregated church worship. Uh, on the front of our cathedral in Johannesburg was a sign during those deliberations saying, “This cathedral will be opened at all times and all services to persons of all races.” ” The purpose of that was to say, “We don’t care what law you adopt.
It will have no bearing whatsoever on what we do.” And indeed, when the law was adopted, our bishops there issued directives, and we don’t often do that in our church. We’re sort of…
Well, we try to be persuasive.
(laughter)
Uh, we negotiate. Uh,
(laughter)
uh, Uh, uh,
(laughter and applause)
Uh, we, uh,
(laughter and applause)
we, um, uh,
(applause)
They issued directives to the, all the priests of the diocese saying, “You can in no wise obey the law.” At that point, the government notified the bishops that we have another law which says for doing a thing like that, you can be whipped in the public square. To which the answer was, “Well, then we will be whipped in the public square.”
We have an old tradition about that sort of thing. Um, one came out, one bishop, with kind of the cliché, you know, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” But I think a brighter remark was, or at least more fresh in that situation and rather ironic, was, uh, one of the bishops dug up from the Calvinist theologian, and that was important because the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, Calvinists, uh, kind of provides the government with the holy water to sprinkle the apartheid status quo, though they’re not liturgically very strong on holy water.
But I mean, just as a— a, a, um, eh, a metaphor, you know. Um, the, um, uh, I dug up the statement of the Calvinist Beza in the seventeenth century, “The Church is an anvil which has worn out many a hammer.” Uh, which is an ecclesiastical version of that statement which offended so many Americans.
Do you remember Mr. Khrushchev’s statement, “We’ll bury you”? Well, we will. The church will be going long after there are none of the present nations existing.
We’ve seen them come and go. And the point is, we’re not going to alter our moral position no matter what you do to us. And you can’t do anything to us, really.
This is the point. You can’t do anything to us. Because we do believe in eternal life.
This is not an escapism from now. It gives an additional confidence as to now you can do nothing to me. We’ve recently experienced that in a way at the General Convention of our church in St. Louis, uh, so, in addition to our Strong 14 work, uh, along with other churches, I’d had had the imprudence to sign a statement of some seven hundred and fifty Episcopal persons at the convention condemning a couple of prominent candidates of a particular party for the way they were using the racial issue and the racial backlash issue.
And of course, this got spread over headlines that Episcopalians condemn uh, Goldwater as racist. We hadn’t said that. But we had said some things that talked about the way the race issue was being used.
And so we were being fraught with pledge cancellations, with, uh, threats to the finances of the churches. In fact, the image being given us day by day with hundreds of wires was that of utter ruin. And it was very disturbing, particularly when at that same convention I was undergoing charges of heresy day by day.
But, uh, uh, uh, whether, uh, it was the God in three persons that others very much wanted to stress or just God, uh, He did see me through, uh, whether in a triple way or a single way, uh, um,
(laughter)
in that
(coughs)
I, I found that the spirit among my own clergy and lay leaders, uh, and that which I seem to bring back too in pondering all this, is that all right, let them cancel pledges. Let them take it all away. What can they do to us in their self-righteous anger against the obvious moral law when it affects what they think of their economic advantages and their bitter prejudices?
Let them go. Because we have voices and pens, and we have a tradition as expressed in the scriptures and church history and the tradition of the martyrs and the brave ones of all time, and we have tables and bread and wine. What can they take from us?
Well, you might have thought it was a gimmick. Uh,
(breathing)
I began to say this, others began to say it. Meeting of all our clergy after election to mourn the outcome on fourteen and talk about where we were. Everybody was saying, “Fine.”
Cost us something, fine.” And when it came to the fall canvases, we found a lot of people increasing pledges. It looks like we’re going to do better than ever.
Well this is a little embarrassing, you know?
(laughter)
I mean, it’s nice. It’s nice. Because, because I think our motives were pure there.
I think we’ve gotten the true word, uh, but there is a dangerous, uh, razor edge there in this. You remember Jesus said, “Seek ye the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and these other things will be added to you.” He didn’t say, “Seek ye the kingdom of God and His righteousness in order that these other things will be added to you.”
Nevertheless, it’s something like that, that is part of this confidence, uh, beyond the moment, which can bring into the moment strength and courage and confidence, which is the very opposite of escaping from the situation and the context of our existential existence, the very opposite of an opiate. Now, to return to Marxism for a moment, uh, it’s a commonplace to make this statement, but I think it needs to be filed by title here, in the light of what I’ve already said, Marxism could not possibly have arisen out of the ancient Greek philosophies, out of typical Oriental religions. Uh, it normally, tracing it genetically, could only arise out of a Judeo-Christian culture.
It– unlike these other traditions which have a relatively static or cyclical view of things, uh, Marxism does have an eschatology. Uh, it has what in a tent meeting revival you might hear as they’re here called a good time coming. Uh, and it takes history and the here and now seriously.
It has detached the
(clears throat)
spiritual dimension and left the material dimension, which is as bad or almost as bad as erasing the importance of the material dimension and exalting the spiritual dimension, so often characteristic in the Judeo-Christian tradition of certain groups and times and places. Uh, either is a heresy, and hence Marxism has wisely been called a Judeo-Christian heresy. The opposite fault of exalting the spiritual at the expense of the material, forms its own view of escapism, provides its own basis for self-righteousness, and is also an evil.
The biblical doctrine of matter is well summarized in the mythology of the early part of Genesis. “On the sixth day, the Lord looked down on all that he had made, and he said, “It is very good.” It is a world that is good.
Its joys, its possible fulfillments, its fleshly aspects are good. The aim of life is not to become more spiritual and less material, more soul and less body. The aim is, as individuals, to be sacramentally united, that is, with the right relation of outward and visible, inward and spiritual, if you wish, where that which one is at the middle of him somehow can express itself, and that’s the important of fre- importance of freedom, and where the outward and visible contacts and relations are means of grace, means of fueling inward and spiritual capacities and relationships.
The Particular realm where a, a sort of anti-material, anti-fleshly attitude has most conspicuously presented itself and, and which therefore has created a particular type of or exaggerated rebellion has been the negative views towards sex because sex involves flesh. Um, when actually, if one conceives of the sexual relationship as sacramental. That is where the outward and visible both expresses the inward and spiritual relationship, but also fuels that relationship as means of grace.
Then one does deni-not denigrate such a holy and wonderful thing. One would make choices about appropriateness in the light of this high function, uh, rather than saying, “Well, in general, it’s not a good thing, uh, but if you have a special kind of license, then, uh, well, like, Well, I felt tonight coming here, uh, on a kind of close schedule, a little more sureness of having a parking place near here because we were in the chancellor’s car,” you know, that sort of thing. Uh, that if you are– have something special here, then that which generally can’t be done now, I guess, is okay or not too bad or something.
Uh, now this, uh, uh, this distinction which tends to identify, as I say, the spiritual with the good and the fleshly with the evil, uh, is out of character essentially with biblical faith and with the best insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The aim of life, either personal or social or corporate, is not to become more spiritual and less material, become more sacramental. Or to use another hyphenated kind of concept with an actual hyphen in it, uh, to have psychosomatic health, whether in the individual or in the social unit or in the nation, where all things are pulling along together in a sense of vocation and meaning and purpose, uh, rather than one aspect as we thus conceive of it as soul and body being exalted among– above the other.
And that as this happens, as this kind of health comes, either in individual life or as between individuals in personal relations or in society in its various ramifications, then the kingdom to that degree has come. And that has an eternal significance. The Three bases in summary then, and about two of them that I’ve not been able to develop fully by title.
The three bases for social action now, which can arise from the major Western religious tradition, are first, that it is a good world which is important and significant, that in the evolutionary process have come along beings who henceforth ever thereafter are part of the evolving. We help create the world where we can share with the ultimate ground of our being in the finishing of the tidying up of the world, the ordering of the world, the redeeming of the world, the healing of the world, Uh, and since he is the ground of all being, he is claimant over all. Shema Yisrael, hear, O Lord, the Lord thy God is one, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, thy whole soul, and thy whole mind.
The reason why that word whole is there, or all thy, as I said in some translations, is there’s only one of him. He claims all. Hence every moment in every situation is under claim, under judgment.
And we are sharers in this responsibility, one for another, in our common life and bringing it to fulfillment for the benefit of all. And second, since there is a measure of freedom, obviously, in our lives, not as much as we had once thought, perhaps, when we know more about unconscious drives. Uh, it, it didn’t take…
Uh, it was not only Dr. Freud who knew that. Here’s St. Paul on that. There’s another law in my makeup which wars with the law in my mind, and those things I would do are the things that I can’t seem to do, and those things I would not do are the very things I find myself doing.
Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The psychoanalyst, of course. But they—
(laughter)
The problem of compulsion has rarely been better stated. Perhaps not as much freedom as we thought, but nevertheless freedom. Uh, and, uh… we were involved with freedom.
He could have, I suppose, been involved to, to be run like marionettes or puppets, in which case it would have been a better, more orderly world. Everything would go just as it should. There wouldn’t have been these troubles of recent hours here, for example.
Nothing like that. But there is freedom, and freedom means freedom to make mistakes, particularly in very complex situations. And yet, since God has left us free, it should be on only on the most serious grounds of social need that society will take away people’s freedom.
Uh, since he has risked this with us, uh, we should be very chary of, of narrowing the freedom of persons to be. Freedoms– freedom to be, freedom to become. Yes, even the freedom to err.
And third, as we do seek now to fulfill responsibility in common social concern and about our corporate problems as well as our individual problems, there is more than the here and now. There is more than the problem. There is more than simply the energy of human decision and cooperation.
There is indeed a dimension of power and love and justice and strength in colleagueship with the communion of saints, the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, those who’ve gone before, who’ve given them themselves in this strength and power to the creation and redeeming of our common life, which already in principle has the victory, and from which can come strength and courage now, a detachment from the world and involvement in the world at the same time. In his great prayer rep– as reported in the fourth gospel, the night before he was betrayed, Jesus prayed something like this: “I do not ask, O Father, that they be taken out of the world. I want them in the world, but not of it.”
In the world, but not of it. Or to return to St. Paul’s phrase, citizens of the kingdom, colonists here. Thank you.
(applause and cheering)
You’re very kind. It’s been a hard, long, hard day, and, uh, that will keep me going at least for a couple more hours. Um, I will, because none of you bolted for the door right at that minute, uh, give you just one little illustration I dropped out because of lack of time.
Uh, now you’re really pinned, you see. Uh, I wanna tell you about a subversive pamphlet. Uh, it’s now been discovered that that’s in fact what it is.
Uh, the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, sometimes called the Apocalypse, uh, the last book of the Bible, uh, was indeed a subversive pamphlet circulated among the Christian cells meeting around the Mediterranean underground with a special password and a special symbol to identify before they could get into the shop, something like the, I guess, the key clubs or the the, uh, Playboy and the like, or the, um, uh, uh, secret societies and so forth. It was this symbol. It’s the s-symbol of the fish.
Uh, and, uh, as these people in these subversive units, which were against the law, saw their brethren thrown to the lions or otherwise persecuted, and they’re very much aware of the activities of informers. These were referred to in this little pamphlet. Uh, it was a problem of keeping their courage up.
And the author of this pamphlet wrote something very, very confusing to us. It’s confusing because it is in the apocalyptic style, which was customary in that period of Jewish writing, uh, which is very heavy on the imagery. All the scholars in the world, since the time it was written, haven’t been able to figure out all of it.
but also was deliberately written deceptively to keep it, uh, confusing to the police and the public authorities. For example, when they mean the Roman Empire, they call it Babylon. When they mean the reigning emperor, they use numerology, six-six-six, the mark of the beast.
Uh, since then, um, that six-six-six has been worked out by various types of fundamentalists to mean either the Pope or, uh, uh, Stalin or that man in the White House or anything you don’t like.
(laughter)
Perhaps, if there’ve been any fundamentalists demonstrating last day or so, they might even figure that out. That means Chancellor Strong or something like that.
(laughter)
(laughter)
But, uh, uh, actually it meant the reigning emperor. And, uh, the, the message of this
(laughter)
The book reaches a climax in the description of the war in heaven, which is one of the fine biblical myths which several religious traditions, including my own, celebrate once a year on the Feast of Michaelmas, which is the date of the opening of term at Oxford and Cambridge, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Well now, when this pamphlet was discovered, it did not at all go over well with the Senate Enrollment Activities Committee. Um, and it, it resulted in the second set of persecutions.
I’m indebted for all this new information to Professor Robert Grant of the University of Chicago in his book, the, the Crown and the Cross. Well, uh, this myth is interesting. It starts out, “There is war in, there was war in heaven, and Michael and his angels fought, and there also fought the angels of that old serpent called the devil, and that old serpent was cast out of heaven, and there’s no room for him there anymore.”
” You can see this would be rather impossible as history or geography. Uh, it, it’s a myth, which means it’s a way of conveying truth, if it’s a good myth.
(clears throat)
(laughter)
Uh, myth doesn’t mean the bunk. If it’s a good myth, it’s a very good way of communicating paradoxical truth, ’cause we’re talking about double-level things here about the kingdom and the colonists and so forth. Um, there’s no room for him there anymore, meaning that the victory is in principle already over against evil.
Uh, now then there’s a primitive Christian or maybe late Jewish hymn there, a praise to God kind of about the wonderful thing that evil’s all over in the world. It’s already been licked. Well, that does to give courage, you see, to these early Christians that they were already on the right bandwagon.
Just stick with it. It’ll all work out fine. Except that, uh, if the devil had already been defeated, it did seem like he wa– he was having quite a time for himself nevertheless.
And so how does one explain that? Well, you don’t explain such things very well, but again, continuing this myth, there’s a very fine, courageous phrase in this pamphlet, uh, which closes this section. It says, after pra-praising God in a hymn for the defeat of the devil and being thrown out of heaven, “but woe to the inhabitants of the earth, for the devil has come down among you, having great wrath.
Why? Here’s the note of victory. For he knoweth that he hath but a short time.
(applause and cheering)
30 years ago, I attended the first, first lecture on the campus. Will, uh, weren’t you there also? Ralph Barton Perry.
[01:14:33] WILL:
I was teaching at Yale that year.
[01:14:34] BISHOP PIKE:
Yeah. It was Ralph Barton Perry, and I attended most of the subsequent lectures, and for several years was a member of the committee nominating the Pfister lecturer. I said in my introduction that the Pfister lecturer was one selected because specially qualified, uh, for the lectureship.
Uh, I wish that I might have been a member of the committee nominating the Pfister lecturer this year so that I could take some credit for selecting such a beautifully qualified lecturer for 1964.
(applause and cheering)