THE USES OF GOD
Garvey, John
THE USES OF GOD JOHN GARVEY Billy Graham knows exactly what to do about sexual immorality, cheat-ing in business and government, and all sorts of moral problems. During the Vietnam war he was...
...Another item: a pleasant young woman tells me that because of a book I've had a hand in publishing (Buddha and Jesus, by Carrin Dunne, Templegate, $2.95) I am cooperating in a work of the devil...
...This is their message: the job of Christians is not to bring the world to God...
...work and its function in an idolatrous world...
...This sort of thing is lapped up by millions...
...Do noth-ingl"' And that is when we know we're coming through...
...37214...
...The Church has tried to effect reconcilia-tion where there already is recon-ciliation, while the only thing that God ever asked of the Church was to live thanksgiving for others, and so express thanksgiving for what he has done for us...
...The Committee of Southern Churchmen publishes the fine journal Katallagete/ Be Reconciled, which is available for a donation of $2.00 to $5.00 from the Committee at P.O...
...and our worship of politics...
...What can we, as Christians, do to help?' is the peren-nial question that the oppressor de-mands of his victim...
...Com-pared to their honesty most of what passes for theology or religious writ-ing seems frivolous at best...
...That is when we say: 'Brothers, just nail that down...
...On other occasions he got all cryptic about the war: it was one of those mysteries of man's depravity, one of those original sin things, and was apparently different in kind from adultery, cheating and all of those mysteries of original sin, since Graham's implicit recommenda-tion was that Christians ought to mourn the war while doing every-thing to carry it on...
...Now you have the message...
...The problem is that politics (of the right, left, or middle) has become our idol, and a good deal of the religious publishing which goes on today reinforces one set of idols or another...
...His answer was that he was "a New Testament evangelist, not an Old Testament prophet...
...Cardinal Spellman play-ing soldier is a classic case, and not too long ago the National Catholic Register headlined "God Approves of Capital Punishment...
...Katallagete served as the source of books Introducing Jacques Ellul (ed-ited by James Y. Holloway, Eerd-tnans, $2.45), The Failure and the Hope (edited by Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway, Eerdmans, $3.95), Up to Our Steeples in Pol-itics by Campbell and Holloway (Paulist, $1.95), who also edited Callings (Paulist, $1.95) and And the Criminals With Him (Paulist, $1.25), all of which are available from the publishers...
...Both men have spoken as clearly as it is possible to speak about the stance Christians must take before the world...
...and then look at the people who have been and are involved with the Committee of Southern Churchmen (though it isn't their authority they would want you to notice): among them are the novelist Walker Percy, the writer Julius Lester, and the late Thomas Merton...
...Do noth-ing...
...The latter might surprise you, but the point of the Committee is that reconciliation is for all, and the Klansman suffers from the lack of it as much as any other human being...
...It is up to us first of all to recognize it, then to live the consequences of reconcilia-tion...
...You'll know...
...It appeared originally as an issue of Katallagete, it is about prison, and was written by people (black and white, militants and Klansmen) who have suffered there...
...There is still another idol in the neutrality which allows social evil to continue, by act-ing as if the business of being Chris-tian could never intersect with the area Caesar has claimed as his own...
...There is another voice which should be better known than it is...
...You'll know...
...The Committee of Southern Church-men is headed by Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway (it's an amorphous kind of organization and I suspect Campbell and Holloway would object to the words "headed by," but they are the two people most responsible for it), and it has issued a number of books over the past several years which bring the kind of thinking Stringfellow and Ellul have been doing to bear on such issues as racism...
...The message and the service come from being reconciled, not from trying to make it happen...
...The Catholic uses of God are different in style but not in content...
...God has accomplished that reconciliation in Christ...
...Some of the people who have written for the Committee's publications are Robert Coles, Wil-liam Stringfellow, Vine Deloria, John Howard Griffin, Jacques Ellul, Fannie Lou Hamer, and a number of other men and women who have been active in political and social activities ranging from the civil rights and anti-war movements to the Ku Klux Klan...
...The idea that revolutionary movements or the social action committees of the churches are idolatrous is uncomfortable: it hits too close to home...
...As a continuation of the issue the Committee of South-ern Churchmen set up a fund which has as its sole aim the service of all prisoners, whether they need some-thing for themselves, for a lawyer, their families, or bus fare for a wife's visit...
...Be something.' A friend of ours, Tom Merton, liked to remind us that 'Bonhoeffer himself said it was an "Anglo-Saxon failing" to imagine that the Church was supposed to have a ready answer for every social prob-lem.' Another friend of ours, John Howard Griffin, gave the best inter-pretation we know of what that good Trappist meant...
...The re-conciliation the Church is seeking to accomplish has already been wrought...
...Hal Lindsey's Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and The Late Great Planet Earth (both $1.50, from Zondervan) sell millions of copies, offering literalistic interpreta-tions of the apocalypse which fre-quently and not very surprisingly echo right-wing definitions of what threatens us...
...It would have been nice if the next day headlines had read, "Millions Convert to Ju-daism Following Graham State-ment...
...Before you do a damned thing,' Tom would com-ment, 'just be what you say you are, a Christian...
...The goals of the contemporary Church are blasphemous...
...Box 2215, Nashville, Tenn...
...then no one will have to tell you what to do...
...prisons...
...There are a couple of counter trends...
...What would they have Christians do...
...During the Vietnam war he was asked why he had not been outspoken about that particular moral problem...
...Quite apart from the loony notion of prophecy here, the point is that she meant it was all right, since it was prophesied, and a govern-ment did it, all things working to the glory of them that love God...
...Before you dismiss this as sim-plistic, anarchist, unworldly, too evan-gelistic, think first of all of the fact that it seems to be Paul's own mes-sage about the Church, as spelled out in the epistles...
...They may not all agree with the Committee's vision of things-which is prophetic and so determinedly anti-idol that it will strike some as revo-lutionary and others as reactionary, depending on where they're at-but they all reinforce its work by reveal-ing the dimensions of the problems which have not been answered by the state or by any ideology, because they can't be...
...Toward the end of the ques-tion and* answer period," they write in Up to Our Steeples in Politics, "someone usually shrieks: 'Why, you're saying, "Do nothing...
...What the Committee is final-ly about is the unfashionable work of taking the Word of God seriously, judging the world in its light...
...Thus we talk about the Christian community in apostasy, for we believe that when the Christian community tries to do what God has already done it is living a lie...
...The writings of William String-fellow (see especially his fine essay "Christ and the Powers of Death" in Free in Obedience, Seabury, $1.45) and Jacques Ellul (The New Demons, Seabury, $9.95) have had a good audience, and there is something en-couraging about that...
...What the Committee encourages will look revolutionary to some, to others it will look like drop-ping out...
...Her talk works around to taking the Bible literally, and when she pushes Romans 13:1-that's the one about being subject to the government- she doesn't deny that she would have gone along with the Nazi slaughter of the Jews, "because that was prophesied...
...It is easy to see how stupid all of this is when the other side had a hand in it, but is it easy for people who baptize the revolution and the politics of the left to see that theirs is a similar idolatry...
...The last book tells something about the way the Committee does things...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 14
