The American Dream
Moltmann, Jurgen
I Ill IIlll Ill I Illlll I I I THE AMERICAN DREAM JURGEN MOLTMANN Translated by M. Douglas Meeks Without hope in community, the American identity would dissolve I The American Passion After...
...The dream of freedom, equality and happiness for all human beings--"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness"--is a human dream...
...It has done this theology in its churches and synagogues as well as through political ideology in public acts...
...Pharoah and his army had to be destroyed so that Israel could be free...
...In apocalypticism the Pharoah of history becomes the antiChrist, the beast from the abyss, the whore Babylon...
...They are engaged in permanent war and crusade against evil...
...By apocalyptic we mean here a future anxiety which is combined with faith in the realizability of its worst fears...
...It is fear, not hope...
...To live as a Christian with the American dream can only mean to combine the dynamic of the provisional with the pathos of the final, and in place of the experimental lifestyle, to develop a lifestyle which combines the outline of hope with '.he sacrifice of love...
...What they sought, they greeted as the hopeful "New World...
...Accordingly, morality becomes the foundation of politics...
...The covenant of rule thus presupposes the covenant of the people and can be made only within its boundaries...
...The fascinating mobility of the American legs costs the bitter rootlessness of the American soul...
...Are they alternatives or do they both live out of the same basis...
...White Americans are an immigrant people...
...The second covenant is the contract of rule...
...It remains vital only so long as the people and the individual citizens lay claim in a crisis to their right to resistance, and for the sake of their conscience (as in the case of Daniel Ellsberg), hold fast to the truth that "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God...
...Death is not an experiment, for one cannot make a new beginning with it...
...This messianism was fermenting in the Great Awakening, the democratic movement, the Social Gospel Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement...
...How otherwise could one resist destruction and will life against the threats of death...
...It is a political system in which power cannot be used without a common agreement of law...
...But it has also suffered from its dream, because the promise which is deeply embedded in it can neither be fulfilled nor discarded...
...One Commonweal: 495 lives in the future, inquires about the realm of possibilities, and thereby depreciates what is real and present...
...The saints are the soldiers of God...
...Only if one can live, love and sacrifice life here with one's whole heart does one really trust in the resurrection of the crucified Christ...
...The famous covenant sermon which John Winthrop preached in 1630 before landing in the new world concludes with the summons of Moses: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse...
...The second "front" of the American dream was the natural resources and power which became available for technology...
...The human dream cannot be Americanized without being falsified through the ideological self-justification of the American empire and the free enterprise of the multinational corporations...
...This religious covenant is at once the constitution of the common life and the guarantee of the covenant partners' rights of freedom...
...Voluntarily or involuntarily they left their homeland in Europe and followed up a promise...
...What they all carried with them, however, was no new idea and also no different system but simply the promise of open space...
...But it is also to be found in the "ideology of national security" with which the world is plunged into permanent civil war...
...If a ruler breaks the contract of rule or if a contract of rule is executed which is in opposition to the covenant of the people with God, the offender must be removed in the name of God...
...This was so because the Calvinist fathers had in mind a two-fold covenant established on the Old Testament model: God makes the first covenant with the people whom he elects and whom he has freed from slavery...
...Everywhere one sees the remnants of past times...
...From both, it came into the Women's Liberation Movement...
...The mood that brought them into being, a sense of alienation from or even hostility to the chacnery, to "the establishment," has been replaced by a positive sense of modest, but purposeful mission to bind up wounds, to bless, to carry on, with a confidence in themselves and their place in the larger community...
...They represent the hope for a rebirth of the nation out of the spirit of its founders...
...DOUC;LAS MEEES /S Associate Pro~essor of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Eden Theology Seminary, St...
...Exodus precedes covenant...
...The phrase, "All things are possible," in itself means only the frenzy of power...
...But only the oppressed and restless human beings are interested in liberation and exodus from slavery...
...therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live...
...No other country on earth--with the possible exception of Russia--has so intensively disseminated messianic eschatology as the United States...
...History gives ample pro0f: "The covenant is broken...
...Consequently, the American dream did not represent a hope limited to America but had universal significance for all people who sought America as the fulfillment of the hope for freedom and justice...
...It is the fulfillment and the disappointment, the continuation and the reshaping of the European dream of America...
...It promised to each the "unlimited possibilities" for the fulfillment of his or her wishes...
...Then it is no longer a question of an experiment but an emergency...
...In order to acknowledge the campaign's promises in the face of the underestimated passion of the people, even hard-boiled bureaucrats in Washington had to become soft...
...Dominated by religion and morality, his campaign showed that the old hopes of the American people are directed toward the unknown populists and Baptists from the South...
...History as experiment is the challenge and response method...
...One needs only to compare the farmland in the Middle West with Asian farming villages to see that here also a new relationship with nature has emerged...
...Messianic eschatology stems from the exodus story of the Old Testament...
...The United States is the "covenanted nation...
...Thus, the President said in his inaugural address: "Two centuries ago our nation's birth was a milestone in the long quest for freedom, but the bold, brilliant dream which excited the founders of this nation still awaits its consummation...
...Life as experiment costs not only this price of loneliness in one's own life but also the sacrifice of many other lives...
...The apocalyptists projected this experience into the future...
...Thus, the test question for United States foreign policy will be: will the "moral conscience" (Jimmy Carter) be realized in the demand for liberation and the respect for human rights in Latin America, Asia and Africa, or will the interests of American big business be further served through the ideology of "national security" (through the National Security Council) at the cost of other peoples...
...Because there was no tradition or common past which united them, a multitude of immigrants, slaves and oppressed minorities in an unlimited, even if certainly not uninhabited, continent could only find social community and the unity of the state in the futureoriented religion of political messianism...
...This can be rather clearly recognized in the two faces of American eschatology...
...The exodus motif was universalized by the Pilgrim Fathers...
...It is an ambiguous promise as long as human beings are ambiguous creatures who not only have life-wishes but also death-wishes...
...Today is the day of salvation...
...In this assumption lies not only the danger of ideological camouflaging of the real conditions but also an excessive demand on human beings...
...Where else and among whom else should the "thousand-year reign" be inaugurated, in which Christ and the beings are to reign over the devil and all enemies...
...What they left behind, they cast away as the hopeless "Old World...
...But one must pay a high price for this life as experimerit...
...Making an experiment means leaving everything open and in suspension...
...Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans could avoid the religious archetypes of the people...
...I have no new dream to set forth today, but rather urge a fresh faith in the old dream...
...Those whose church is rigidly ordered by infant baptism, the residential district and state do not experience the free zone of community...
...The enlightened fathers of the American Constitution began with the concept that all human beings are by nature free...
...If human beings who are enslaved in the economic, social, political, or religious dimensions are confronted with the covenant call to decision: "Choose life or death, blessing or curse," then the covenant will become a curse for them and lead them to death, for they are not able to choose in freedom...
...Yet, precisely at this point there lies already the first ambivalence of the American dream: the ambiguity between universalism and particularism, between messianism and Americanism...
...America can expect its renewal as covenant and democracy from them: from the blacks, the Indians, J August 1977~ 494 the poor, the women, for they still have their exodus in freedom before them...
...Out of such apocalyptic representations of the end struggle, without which there is to be no exodus into freedom, is born the idea of "total warfare...
...In the church, the anti-Communist apocalyptists stand over against the liberal improvers of the world, while in politics, the civil war ideology of "national security" stands over against the civil rights ideology of the liberation of the people in politics...
...Life as experiment is the trial and error method...
...But these agreements of law by which the use of political power is limited and controlled go back to the religious idea of the covenant...
...Time has also become short here...
...The end of the world is coming, not after this time, but already in it...
...The exodus motif and the end struggle motif have a common root in Old Testament memory and expectations...
...How much of the biblical, particularly the Old Testament, symbology dominates this political ideology is a matter that has also been extensively investigated...
...This modern history of traditions framed into the exodus motif is going far beyond Christianity...
...On the other hand, it can only live in the postponement in which nothing is done in a final way but only in a provisional and experimental way...
...Apocalyptic eschatology can also essentially be traced back to the exodus of the Old Testament...
...The messianic dynamic of the p~ovisional creates the strength of America, but the provisional lile is also the weakness of America: To live with a dream and a hope in its realization is something great and extraordinary...
...Americans were glad enough to keep things growing and moving...
...But this life in dream is also something very unreal...
...But freedom of choice presupposes real liberation precisely in that area in which choice is to be encountered as received responsibility...
...The freedom for this decisicn of the covenant had brought forth the exodus from Europe...
...If it is correct that its paganization and its general politicizing stem from the Puritan Revolution in England, then there lies hidden in the modern spreading of this motif a certain "Americanization" of the world...
...In former times natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, pestilence and starvation were made into "signs of the end" in order to engender a belief marked by apocalyptic anxiety...
...One of the most striking characteristics of these primarily experimental groups, in fact, is their positive sense of themselves...
...Every present is burdened with the past...
...Freedom in space," as Sydney Mead calls it, was the clarion call of America...
...Yet after five to ten years, some of the experimental religious groups have taken on lives of their own, and in several instances suggest a form for changes incorporating the needs and hopes of a changing Catholic constituency that is only infrequently aware of or attentive to the National Council of Catholic Bishops or to the legislative language of Canon Law...
...The memory of liberation also ruled the hope of the prophets in the new messianic exodus...
...It can only be fulfilled by humanity as a whole...
...It anticipates the eschatological separation of the sheep and goats in the decision for Christ against the anti-Christs...
...Untold numbers who came after them entered into and experienced emigration according to this archetype...
...Negative experiences of the present are gathered, bewailed and hysterically escalated until one recognizes in them the threatening presentiments of the global end of the world...
...One can learn from errors in order to try again from scratch...
...The messianic life has both elements in itself: On the one hand, it is able to draw the future into the present and to do already today what will be tomorrow...
...Theologically, this ambivalence of the American dream can be dissolved only if messianism and apocalypticism are resolutely Christianized...
...Yet, it is better to have politics with a bad conscience than politics without any conscience at all...
...William's parish gym, on November 29 of that year...
...Here lies the unsolved problem of political democracy...
...The first "front" of the American dream was the open space which stretched westwardly across the continent...
...It also cannot be fulfilled as an American dream...
...IV America as Experiment: Success or Catastrophe...
...The question of the costs of the liberation of the people remains open in the Old Testament: must Pharoah, alien peoples, or part of Israel be sacrificed, or does the God who liberates take upon himself the suffering which is necessary...
...Next to one of these nations America appears as an artifact...
...It is to build the kingdom of the good world after the destruction of the evil world...
...One needs only to compare an American city wifh a European city in order to observe that "city" is no translation of "polis," "citta," or "Stadt" but designates a new phenomenon...
...American cultivation and management of land is an experiment with the possibilities of space, of which we spoke at the beginning...
...2) The right to the formation of the congregation through voluntary union...
...Only a liberated people can be a "land of the free...
...The ability to fulfill almost all desires through technical fabrication was, for another one hundred years, the call to freedom, i.e., the freedom of power...
...The American dream is basically nothing other than the transferral of the European dream of America to American soil...
...Today, however, they appear, especially in the United States, principally in opposition to one another...
...The work of the Community reflects careful planning and broad involvement by many people, with the determined effort of the usual, dedicated core...
...Among several obvious models for such experimental change, the Community of the Living Spirit, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, provides a useful example...
...If the United States understands itself as "this nation under God" (Abraham Lincoln) or as the "champion of democracy," then ambiguities inevitably arise...
...In Europe both forms of eschatology are perceived to be typically American...
...It would be better for politicians to abstain from political experiments...
...They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something, but away from something" (p...
...Vance Packard has described this Nation of Strangers with an abundance of statistics...
...Very little of the religious idea of the covenant is left over in the democratic consciousness...
...The Commonweal: 493 covenant is sacred, because contracts must be kept for the sake of the honor and credibility of the partners: Pacta sunt servanda...
...Without readiness for sacrifice, America remains an ambiguous promise...
...For Israel, the covenant with God and with one another became possible only on the basis of the experienced liberation from slavery...
...It lives from the power of the vision to be "a new nation conceived in liberty" (Abraham Lincoln...
...If the time of fulfillment is beginning, then what is impossible for other human beings is now made possible...
...In local parishes, on the other hand, about the only vestiges of attempts to change the old centralized patterns are the gesture of peace after the consecration, the stilted official English translations of the Mass, and an occasional lay person, now deaconized, but rather thoroughly confined by the usual clerical routine...
...But no other country on earth has at the same time so penetratingly disseminated apocalyptic eschatology...
...To many Europeans who for centuries have been used to the arrogance of power, the moral claims of American politics seem dishonest and mendacious...
...For one hundred years the call to go West was the call to freedom, i.e., freedom in space...
...On the contrary, apocalyptic eschatology sounds pessimistic...
...Although it began as a liturgical group, its most original characteristic at this time is organization--not so much what it has developed in its liturgy, but how it has developed as a congregation...
...The political idea of the covenant has a theological prehistory in the Calvinist tradition...
...Was the Vietnam war really executed for the freedom of the Vietnamese people or for the United States' own interests...
...Therefore, life is also not an experiment, for it is once for all...
...Thus, for non-Americans to understand the political ideas of the United States, it is all the more important to grasp why they are collectively called "the American dream" and to recognize their religious roots in the JudeoChristian tradition of biblical hopes...
...According to sociological investigations it is the dearest dream of every American to own his own house on his own land, and on the national average every American moves at least every five years...
...At first glance the two eschatologies have nothing to do with each other...
...What remains leads the shadow existence of what we call today "civil religion...
...It anticipates hell in the destruction of the world...
...There is scarcely an apocalyptic terror of the soul without a spark of hope: "a remnant is converted" and saved...
...But, if one is to be awakened from the dream of individual guilt and leave the collective delirium behind, then one must hold all the more firmly to the messianic dream...
...For many people throughout the world America represents the great experiment...
...This hope is fulfilled by God, by "God with us," and then also by one "nation under God...
...If there is an American lifestvle which is spread throughout the world today, it is this shape of life which is open to the future, enamored of risk and experimental...
...Whatever else the American dream might be, at its core it is directed toward superabundance: unlimited possibilities, unlimited freedoms, unlimited powers...
...As an American dream, however, it makes the human dream impossible...
...Since the summer of 1971, in a city of 50,000 people twenty miles west of Milwaukee, the Community has worked to combine reverence with relevance and to maintain a non-geographic parish, with an ambitious educational program for adults and children and numerous activities expressing fundamental social and political concerns...
...There is death before life...
...Through its dream it became united, active and successful as no other people...
...Culture and nature have become a unity...
...Hope is to be fulfilled not only after this age, but immedately, here and now...
...In a very short time after its independence the United States was constructed out of the will and the reason of immigrants...
...This was the dream of the politically oppressed, the religiously persecuted, the socially humiliated and the racially defamed...
...It can evidently be taken over by other peoples only if at the same time the concept of "voluntary religion" is legalized...
...Therefore, I want my freedom--now...
...The discovery of unused human potential is inspiring the Commonweal: 491 human potential movement and the personal growth movement...
...It is simply not possible to maintain "America as covenant" on the basis of an unimagined equality of human beings and an abstract freedom of choice imputed to all...
...Americans: National Experience, p. 1...
...Whoever is declared the phantom of the "anti-Christs," whether they be the Catholics, the liberals, the socialists, or the Communists, are always the current enemies of religion, the state, or the class...
...Life as experiment means not to accept any piece of reality as final and closed but to go forward in the dynamic of the provisional...
...He found: "While the footlooseness of Americans as pioneers was a source of vitality and charm, several of the new forms that the accelerating rootlessness of Americans is taking should be the cause for a!arm...
...for as a nation, a world power and a culture, America must take part in the alienation, separation and oppression of human beings...
...Unfortunately the open space and the unlimited possibilities say absolutely nothing about whether this spatial, technical and spiritual power is used for fulfilling or destroying human life...
...Democracy presupposes citizens who have come of age not only morally but also religiously...
...III America as Covenant: Blessing or Curse...
...His most recent book is The Church in the Power of the Spirit (Harper & Row...
...Thus, almost every president begins his administration with a confirmation of the messianic ideals of the political religion of this people...
...By "messianism" we mean here a future hope which is combined with faith in its own realizability on earth...
...For Christians, only the recognition of the suffering of God in the Cross of Christ makes eschatology unambiguous and hopeful...
...Forty-million Americans per year change their address...
...As the Great Experiment, America can only be a society of torn roots...
...For this reason, on the other hand, an international discussion of the American dream is not 5 August 1977:490 an illegitimate meddling of "foreigners" in the "internal affairs" in the United States...
...But "America as a dream" was dreamed in Europe...
...I Ill IIlll Ill I Illlll I I I THE AMERICAN DREAM JURGEN MOLTMANN Translated by M. Douglas Meeks Without hope in community, the American identity would dissolve I The American Passion After the horrors of the Vietnam war, Watergate and the CIA plots, Jimmy Carter has appeared on the political scene in Washington like an angel of light out of the depths of the people...
...Beginning with Calvin and John Knox and continuing with Olevian, Cocceins, Althusius and Hugo Grotius, the human relationship to God as well as to society was repeatedly understood not as pure rule but as a convenant based on mutual freedom...
...This optimism is a dream from which one must be awakened in order to become historically conscious and shrewd...
...From the Pilgrim Fathers it was transferred to the advancing pioneer frontier in the West and to the liberation struggle of the black slaves...
...Political power is not a natural event to which one is simply subjected as to the sun and rain (cf...
...For Europeans there exists a simple beginning point for understanding the American dream: before there was an American dream there was America as a dream...
...Traces of it are also found in Maoism...
...The world becomes the great battlefield of God on which Michael and his angels struggle against the dragon and its seed...
...Democracy means the rule of the people as opposed to a state of ruling authorities...
...In order to awake from the dreams of collective guilt, a nation should know that this is even more the case under God...
...The hope which is born out of the resurrection of Christ prepares one to live fully in the present and with ultimate love that life which is once for all...
...This is its meaning...
...The experimental lifestyle corresponds to the open environment...
...Without hope in community, the American identity would dissolve into its old ethnic identities...
...From where do these two faces of American eschatology come...
...From its very inception America was a great experiment, and up to the present day it understands itself as a Great Experiment" with nature, society, the future, with God...
...In his book The New England Mind, Perry Miller shows that this nation was created out of the covenant which its citizens formed with God and one another...
...Liie as experiment means, try it again and again, the future is open for you and the future is gracious to the virtuous...
...In the presence of God the people make this covenant with their king (or the government...
...America's political contribution to world history is rightly regarded as democracy...
...The external covenant of democracy requires and yearns for a renewal of the internal covenant, that is, the "religion of freedom...
...As Boorstin has said, "America lived with the constant belief that something better might turn up...
...Here, much more was at stake than "Realpolitik...
...When before had men got so much faith in the unexpected...
...Rather, they presupposed an abstract freedom to which, of course, only a small elite could actually lay claim...
...In the land of unknown possibilities one must experiment in order to probe its latent energies and to discover the best possibilit~.es...
...The apocalyptists become dangerous because they support the very powers that cause these signs...
...As a human dream, the American dream is a true and necessary one...
...The Puritan pilgrim fathers experienced and interpreted as an exodus their emigration from European oppressions into the freedom of the American wilderness...
...What about the dead then...
...As long as human beings are alienated from each other by class, caste, race and nation...
...The city is an experiment with the possibilities of society...
...But the Americanization of the human dream also makes the United States a burden for other peoples...
...But when it comes to a matter of life and death, then the point of no return has been reached...
...When one transfers this experimental attitude to real life, one can immediatebr see its limits...
...The future, ultimate exodus struggle is the final struggle of God against his enemies...
...State and national churches nowhere create a climate which is friendly to democracy --quite the opposite...
...The United States has twice entered world wars "to rescue the world for democracy...
...He is author o] Origins of the Theology of Hope (Fortress Press...
...Truth, not the authority of rule, shall make the laws...
...Parallel to this is the method of "psychological combat" against the internal enemy...
...Just as messianic eschatology anticipates the kingdom of God in democracy and salvation in the earthly happiness of the greatest possible number of human beings, apocalyptic eschatology anticipates the judgment of God 5 August 1977:492 in the total criticism of the present...
...Those whose religion is predefined for them through tradition, family and state do not learn this freedom...
...Louis, Mo...
...Not to be able to live, to love and to die with one's whole heart but to be able only to experiment with life, love and death is the kind of detached lifestyle to which one is forced by the messianism with which America has entered the stage of world history...
...In its initial proposal, presented to the archdiocesan priest senate of Milwaukee, in June, 1971, a group of people, most of them from a traditional Catholic parish, asked for a year's trial period "for a Waukesha community mission parish to form and function," pledging themselves "to teach our members about their faith, become more aware of the spiritual and corporal needs of our fellow man, and bring the Church to people who have abandoned this part of their lives...
...But in order to be a person in movement, one must cut off one's roots and live without relationships...
...The "free state," that is, the democratic state of law, demands a "free church," that is, a voluntary congregation of the people of God...
...Not political power but rather the Constitution according to which the country must direct itself, has authority...
...Americans thus transform every hope into a program, every opinion into a message, every task into a mission, every struggle for the good into a crusade, and every new experience into a resurrection...
...The United States has done this through theology in hundreds of sects as well as through doomsday prophets in bestsellers...
...Messianism in America is constantly combined with millennialism...
...As John Steinbeck set out on his Travels with Charlie he saw in the eyes of his neighbor something he was to discover everywhere in the nation: "A burning desire to go, to move, to get underway, any place away from Here...
...What else beside this dream of "life, freedom and happiness" can give ambiguous human beings orientation and courage for life, freedom and happiness...
...The germ for the community existed from early meetings in I970, with the first expreimental liturgy performed in St...
...To leave life and death in the suspension of the experiment will mean to miss death but also life...
...II America as Promise: Paradise or Doomsday...
...The ambivalences which are found in the American dream also become plain when it conflicts with American reality...
...Therefore, save yourself, whoever can...
...But can one save oneself when the doomsday is assured and already coming...
...All things possible"--that is the American promise...
...This nation entered world history, two hundred years ago with all of the passions of political messianism...
...It was and is the dream of freedom for every human being: the land of unlimited possibilities and of justice without privileges...
...i i II A PEOPLE'S PARISH MICHAEL TRUE The W/sconsin Community of the Living Spirit At a time when many people are dissatisfied with the state of liturgy in the Catholic Church, the survival and continuing strength of a religious group that has developed its own style of liturgical celebration deserves special attention, if not outright commendation...
...This form of constitutional democracy emerged out of the conceptuality of the religious covenant...
...An experiment is only an attempt...
...It is the conviction of messianic eschatology that the time of fulfillment is already beginning as never before, and that it is beginning with us as with no others in the world...
...Socialism" is falsified through the self-justifying terms of Russian hegemony...
...American democracy arose along with the American free churches...
...Of course nothing on earth is without limits, but there are always new fronts on which one can glimpse the boundless sea of possibilities...
...The humanization of the American dream would make the United States a blessing for other peoples...
...Now, unpleasant political events are used for that purpose...
...He has thereby overlooked, I suspect, the fact that modern rootlessness is the consequence of the old footlooseness and the necessary price for an experimental lifestyle...
...As one member, Dolores Kosednar, a nurse and mother of nine children said, "Each time the community seemed about to come apart, something happened to pull us through the crisis and back into shape...
...One should, therefore, take into account the failures...
...The Vietnam war led to dangerous internal disintegrations...
...The exodus from slavery in Egypt into the freedom of the promised land was the root experience of Israel...
...Was Vietnam merely a military experiment...
...One cannot experiment with catastrophe...
...The presuppositions for free churches are two in number...
...In this relatively short history the American people has experienced both the good fortune and the misery of political messianism...
...Since then, it has become the motif of wandering and mobility...
...It was not poetry but pure realism which motivated Roosevelt to say in 1933: "When there is no vision the people perish.'" With this observation the New Deal Program began...
...The democratic covenant realizes and preserves freedom...
...Without voluntary suffering for others, no power becomes the authority of life...
...as long as they live against each other and not for each other, this dream cannot be fulfilled...
...Religion exists, therefore, to be realized...
...Thus it is becoming all the more clear that "America as Covenant" cannot continue to exist without "America as exodus...
...Much has been written about the political ideology of the United States...
...On all three fronts America does not awaken any new hopes, but it promises the fulfillment of all existing hopes...
...In open space the human being fulfills not only his or her best hopes, but also his or her worst impulses...
...Even "with God" and Jimmy Carter the human being is no guiltless creature...
...The truly pious will not be denied by God...
...In the intervening six years, they have found various 5 August 1977:496...
...MXCHAEL TaUE is an associate 9rofessor of English at Assumption College and lecturer at Clark University in Worcester, Mass...
...This apocalyptic ferments generally in fundamentalism and particularly in those missionary groups and crusaders which, for a hundred years, have made the world unsafe...
...From that point to now, the growth and development has been steady, but trying, risky, and slow...
...Insofar as the "American Revolution" proceeds on this way, it repeats and tu!fills nothing other than the promise with which it first set out...
...That the political power of biblical faith experiences and hopes remains unbroken by the secuJURGEN MOLTMANN i$ Pro/essor o/Systematic Theology at Tubingen University, Germany...
...Conversely, a "free church" demands a "free state...
...The end struggle can be concluded only with complete conversion or the complete destruction of all evil...
...Today can be the day of calamity...
...Without inner renewal the democratic institutions of the covenant remain empty and are quickly filled up with the bureaucrats of administration who take over the decisions from the citizens and rob them of freedom...
...America as covenant arose politically, namely, out of the free and voluntary union of its citizens through the practice of justice and the preservation of their freedom...
...Out of the ideology of the United States it is today wandering into Latin American liberation theology...
...1) Personal freedom of choice and personal responsibility...
...They did not take into consideration the factual slavery of the blacks, the Indians, the poor and the women...
...America as dream" was also, to be sure, Wanderlust, gold fever and Karl May romanticism...
...At the time, one could hear both claims...
...Medical experiments on the living, which can lead to life or death and which can leave behind irreparable damage, are morally suspect...
...It also lies at the heart of normal American pragmatism: "If it can't be done, it's not worth thinking about...
...Without the will for a common future this nation would certainly have been destroyed and even today would no doubt disintegrate...
...Melancthon in the "Apology for the Augsburg Confession"), but rather a moral task of the whole community...
...Through their traditions of thousands of years most of the other nations understand themselves as a piece of nature...
...One must be able to repeat an experiment...
...This struggle can come to an end only with the victory of good and defeat of evil...
...Only economic and social liberation will fill political democracy with new power...
...And now, as one can hear in California, the third front of the American dream is opening in the unlimited possibilities of the soul...
...But it was in every case a European dream which motivated the emigration...
...The destruction of the anti-divine powers also belongs to Israel's root experience...
...Involved here basically is a contradiction which is similar to that of Soviet ideology: the "establishment of socialism in one country" destroys through race identification the socialism or humanity...
...the state of law as opposed to the state of power...
...It is fasc'_'nated by the realm of possibility and is itself fascinating...
...Numerous attempts to discover a new language for Christian worship over the past twenty years have either died as "underground churches" or "guitar Masses" or (as in the case of traditionalists' effort to continue Tridentine Masses) have been systematically suppressed...
...There is a life before death...
...Messianic eschatology sounds optimistic...
...larization process, was proved again in the 1976 campaign...
...Liberation movements in Africa, socialist movements in Asia, but also the destruction of democracy in Chile and South Korea, or the undesirous conclusion of the Vietnam war fill the role quite nicely...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 16
