Campbell Lecture 1969-11-26

i'd like to say that there is some design the series and the fact that they do indicate that it hasn't killed and i'd like to tell you where we've been as i see it or we can do what in many ways is the desert tonight and this book by dr davies we began with runners book on justice on the social order and i think we mentioned that mike that many of us have been in church schools and in church experiences across the years and really cannot recall ever had a ever having had a series of all on what they just think is a christian is required to do and spend more and society and so we brought a printer out to indicate that there has been some protestant thoughts on the subject and they were not simply to play it by year as it were when we get into the labyrinth where corporate justice is demanded of us and luhrmann's book is by all odds the most of a cover for a

very happy soul all copies that we had mr lloyd don't wanna go any further with that woman makes the contribution to us of sending the current movement towards secularity in its broadest possible context showing that the christian church well it has some legitimate fears of secularity most also take both credit and blame for having watched that in the world last week we came to chile take one particular slice out a contemporary american life to see how the secularity movement and the quest for justice comes into the personal level this time in the life experience of jail complex not tonight we come to this book in search of myself why david richard davies i hold it up because my regret this book is no longer available in rent i had the feeling that mike

mullen made the initial run and that the initial run was reasonably well disposed of but there wasn't probably sufficient demand to have them go through another press run i'm willing to concede that this book why objective standards would not draw anything like the great notices of the others in the series three were exceedingly well reviewed in their time and i think we'll be found in libraries of the christian world for years and years to come this one however does have a very strong subjective hold on me and i hope that this will become apparent as the night goes on because i'd like to win you to an affection for this man i'll even go so far as to offer to let my company called if you promise to let me have your watch glee ryan loughran when you're raised in the presbyterian tradition you that you are not to trust anybody i

really i never did see a review no friend never put me next to it it was never under any kind of vocal mailing list and to my knowledge it has never been in anybody's top ten but i was doing a bit of rummaging one day in a store in ann arbor book store and there was the remainder in sale going on and i'm always drawn to these remainder in sales thinking that i might stumble on a bargain and when i saw the name dr davies i didn't live up because i had been very much impressed by an earlier book of his down peacock feathers and that engaging tribal introduces a volume that is only anglican general prayer of confession and dr davies came to oh a rather profound discovery of the radical quality of sin in human life and down peacock feathers as the title suggests

indicates that there is no room for private man down with the feathers up with a confession to gawk and so having been helped by this book i commend this to believe that this one is still available i was selling for the unbelievable prices i'd like to believe that there is some problems in the way we're introduced to things of this sort i read it recommended it to a number of my minister friends because i think as i said earlier that it does say something to us in the church date this book actually was a series of autobiographical notes these were found after this man died in nineteen fifty eight and they were published posthumously by his wife in nineteen sixty one david richard davies was born in nineteen eighty nine he was the last man as you might suspect from the name he was born in a place called glam

morgan wales which i checked out on a map and found to be near the bristol channel he was born to an exceedingly poor family and this is important to an understanding of this man's sociology and theology later on this family was poor but it was also a devout and he pays tribute to his mother who was unable to in dallas impoverished home with dignity and those are his words this family i think maintained itself because of its faith as did lots of mining families in wales at that time notice a touch here for example as he recalls those early years he said in our daily family life there were family prayers every night before going to bed which for a youngster was late my father read a portion of scriptures and my mother offered a prayer i never forget the fervor with which she prayed we were

four children of whom i was the youngest we all had a meal which i often found kirk's in what something of eternity came to me through those prayers every night i have to be present for a family worship for absence meant was that fear of which exercise greater compulsion than the most absorbing games contrarian this is an interesting point contrary to many of the generalizations of the new psychology i declare that i had never any emotion of hatred for prayers then or later i accepted them as a fact my mother taught me the catechism from a little work by dr thomas charles which exercise a profound influence in wells religious life for many years it was entitled rod mom mothers get and the most desperate agony of my later life it was the memory of my mother's teaching from that little book the overwhelming she

incorporated christian don't know by question and answer and no nonsense kristen gardner why question and answer a psychologist would say that she ran down my throat and she did learn a lot in value and significance its value and significance did not materialize until i was approaching fifty as i still tell the reader in the proper place and we can anticipate that to this extent by saying that at one point when he was forty eight years of age he actually was in the act of trying to take his own life and one of the things that came back to him was what he had learned in this catatonic away and his own poll i used to discuss with paul austin will distinguish minister the brick church for so many years is news i'm kristen education although that was something of a loner he did not believe that it was wrong to teach a

child religious truth in words with the child wouldn't fully comprehend he felt that you could start with a child almost memorizing the road and look for the day when life's experiences would help round out and interpret what had been thus learn and taking that position he differed sharply from those who are intent upon using know symbols or words that a child cannot fully comprehend at that time i would say that the babies experience here would be on the site of paul austin wall and grab some of us who think back to definitions and scripture verses that we learned when we were young that came on in later life into full blown and headed a new ministry at that time for us i think it's important to understand that the poverty into which she was born severely that dr davies it's important because he did become a

very radical man politically and sociologically later on you would look around and notice that other youngsters in this community whom were able to buy candy without being a severely limited as he was he was limited in the clothes he had like the fact that his mother did the best he could to provide the family with adequate of tyre and he developed a grudge against society that he should be almost single out among particularly abrasive experience of poverty this development him a mindset that stay with him for a long time he said having a growing fostered my native pride and egotism and later life the fact of this childhood poverty enable me to justify myself i'm holding on himself will comprise that for me made a habit of shifting responsibility for the failure and disasters

of light onto other shoulders like poverty violated the first principle really sound education which according to get your car is to allow the soul to be molded by responsibility my soul was molded by your responsibility it was my father's fault or somebody is fault that i had only ethically a week by the time i reached man but i had come to assume that the blame always lay somewhere else never with myself i had to pass through and insanity have suffered before i realized the fundamental moral role of personal responsibility the family was so poor that his older brother was forced to go down into the pit as they said in those mining communities at a very tender age of thirteen dr davies was not much or twenty and so when i'm really tells how that was only on the weekends that he ever saw any daylight or because these men went down in the

mines before the sun came up and when they came out of the mines that my son had already gone down he talks about how much of a treat it was for him to be able to get off at twelve noon on saturday to actually get outside and seen the sunshine pouring down on the landscape this man had the conversion of sorts at the age of probably fifteen or sixteen this came in connection with the great welsh revival which was conducted by a man called even roberts' man who is still very highly cherished by wolfman on both sides of the atlantic dr davies get into the flow of this revival because his sister was chosen as the soloist for this evangelist the effort in wales and yet as he comments on his own conversion he does so it's rather

remarkable remarkable objectivity yet it's estimated evan roberts in his own home and apparently this was an overpowering sort of personality li says that this time my conversion such as it was did not as far as i can remember make much then a technical difference to me it intensified me emotionally and made me say prayers i read the bible passage or was late i carried pocket new testament to work i became really put that in quotes religious i developed theological zealotry of the fundamentalist kind and i started preaching what am quite certain that there was no depth and the experience i simply reflected my environment many of us who has ever lived in communities where the revivalist commanders felt once a year will know in most communities certain

expectations are developed and all along the qualifiers and religious in the proper sense he must at least give some evidence of going through that same kind of experience and apparently this is what it was that dr davies experience at that time however we must acknowledge that this conversion however shallow it might've been issued in his feeling called rage and so he said and so becoming a minister in the congregational church i mention that because if our colleague here being so close to the congregational probably there are some interesting developments that awareness as we consider some of the pastoral experiences of this rather fortune and turbulent individual he went to all school college in a place called the martin in wales and there he met a unitarian friend who convinced him that unitarian of them was the be all and end all of theology i think we can already

sense that it was a more stable of individuals his father and mother virtually ostracized and when he decided to train instead of the congregational minister of trying for a unitarian minister as an interesting comment though about this because this man did have a peculiar way of knowing how to get inside whatever it was he gave himself to i believe that we have been selling avon products he would have been the star salesman of the time men would have been allowed in that so grid were but it makes the point that an order to understand any reality or ideology really happened feel it from within there's a very fine book on this subject by a man paul woolford cantwell smith who teaches at harvard and the school religion you make the point in this book that one reason why amanda as trouble relating to a

man of a different flavors because we're not only inside feeling it with another person and what we have to do is to reunify the other person's faith that is to say we can or sacred faiths and how often do you pray and how often do you pray and carelessness makes the point of all of this is really quite superficial because it never gets un on the inside of this religion and we do the same as other people the us at this point we really why the other man's religion he said it became a totality carrying on my life insurance at his unitarian ism i came to know you know terrorism not only is the form of belief for anyone can get to know that without being a unitary i got to know him as a spirit of light which is only possible from the inside i came to realize what it meant to be unitary what unitarian thought how we felt ali

regarding reacted to life by getting sidelined identification and that has been the way in which i've since come to know and understand different creeds philosophies and as it is that is how i got to know marxism many years later i then thought as a marxist felt as a marxist from the inside though i am no longer marxist by nevertheless know how a marxist feelings and that is a price list for that one can only get to know a system of thought in life like being the thing itself while living in the inside he goes on to lament the fact that he would not live long enough however to be able to enter into that kind of life situation for all of etiologies and religions that he might like to know it had a lot of reading of this time and martin o n l p jack's theodore a partner channing and a lot of other unitarian writers eventually

went to unitarian college of manchester you read very heavily in economics and obviously he was a point at this point between the native of faith that could command him intellectually which apparently the revival this place was not able to provide id also needed an outlet for the agitation he felt towards the owners of the mines for what they had done for the poor people of his hometown and so he drifted into an experience with socialism alongside these trade union activities when keen political workers well i became a member of the international labour party which in those days was a strong an influential part in none of the chairmanship of care for it a part to someone of the character of a religious groups say that satisfied my religious puritans for socialism became a religion which i develop an unquestioned dogmatic think its future triumph i

never doubted it would solve all problems and put everything right i'll look upon the party leaders as heroes and props while he was beginning to find that he had yes because in joining the international labour party they soon discovered that this well from unlike so many had the gift of oratory great impressions speech and so he went up and down the countryside trying to stir up some interest among the workers and identifying with this part however he was fed up with his life at home and when his father recovered from a brief illness he decided to leave home which he did for some six or seven months you did a lot of things like picking fruit in the english countryside he became a stalker i'm afraid are going over to the united states not just about finished only said it was about the poorest way ever to see the world the lookout for volvo stokers orders on a freighter at that time

finally we return not having written to his mother mind you in seven or eight months and the mother still somewhat trusted that he had been holding a flirtation with unitarian ism he says this about the reception that he got he had a hot bath reading and in some part of my favorite dish at bread and butter and kidney beans and sid talk to me that was typical she saw that my physical needs first then addressed herself to my soul i shall never forget her words don't you see my boy that the way of the center is far sargent also one complaining so full of mercy and compassion shiite or not a single word to blame she was overjoyed to have a home again safe and sound from the day i had left she had kept the door unlocked wonderful mother he went on to radford university for his theological

course that's cool that time was a unitarian school now starring ethel more interesting for our purposes when the other is upon his first pastor at a place called raven's store where he became the minister of a little congregational church he was ordained in october of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen he served in this church until nineteen twenty two he says they were five years of storm with fit for animals of sun shot he really did have a rough time because where he was politically and sociologically his people were not and he tells about this in ways that i think have some remarkable parallels for us in the church today whether we are ministers were lame the main thing he confesses here was an optimism that was based more on the enlightenment or the renaissance and the kind of optimism that is grounded in an

understanding of the christian gospel he said i was possessed of an input charitable optimism which i sat down here to my amazement symptomatic not only of my own personal blindness when as a child of my time oh it was in the midst of the world war my confidence in human power to fashion utopia was on that my gospel was a human gospel the good news heralded by christ was the native goodness and potentialities man this and then overlay by the morbid deviations of theological orthodoxy and by any christian capitalism the classic concentration of once in an obscure the originals sonny's simple gospel of jesus i have fallen victim to the whole modernist development especially the german contribution that poor of the preaching was the unquestioned capacity of mandeville the kingdom of god upon earth this was to be

done by social action by embodying what i thought of as the principle of love and the structure of the state and social institutions more and more i came to think of jesus as the social revolutionary with a program of political action the objective of which was to establish an honor of a perfect civilization therefore my first task as i conceived it was to inoculate my congregation with a set of ideas and for five years i will fully persisted and my offensive on those tough yorkshire brains and as the story goes on he indicates that he really wasn't concerned about people within the church but some very hard lines based on class distinctions were formed it was really only interested in it is and not in men and women and it's rather remarkable how candid he is in in making this confession he says my gospel was nothing but a system of

ideas to which the rank and file of my church did not respond beyond these ideas i have nothing to say i became more and more on this another words as i understand what you say and there was no shared common experience of the grace of god or the awareness of the transcendence in the powerball simply a matter of playing a kind of ideological scrabble but those who were unable to receive his ideas at that level were not able to be minister too why this man is likely enormous range of the talents with which brought a less to me he finally left there perhaps practicing at what john ohman has called the forgotten sacrament which is shaking the dust off your feet when you're an effective and moving on somewhere else he went down to this place in southport all the hawk side street church

and there he just once been sold marxist literature because he still believe that the kingdom was within his own production and within his own management and it was really in this voice that he began to show transform that church that it no longer resemble what the church really should look like he said a one stroke i was swept away from any pastor addition to the members of the church and congregation i came to think of them as obstructive reactionary why my energies into factions were concentrated on the new people who attended the service i idealized them these were the outsiders in the churches fail to attract and low here i was attracting that these were the people who were seriously concerned about real things churches i must appeal to these people who were all of socialist and trade unions

and i must get to know them look at the numbers in the church membership the old guard were hopeless they try to convert them would be wasted time anyhow they would be terminus got the new development owen and violent hostility between myself and the church officers blew up which drove me more and more of the newcomers i became the slave of my social gospel no preacher ever trim his sails to the prejudices of the wealthy membership more than i trim my sales to that new socialist incursion from my church one thing i have come to understand about this period he goes on to say my development that the opposition of the old guard of my church was giving expression to the deep and precious feeling but the gospel have been perverted much about opposition was bitter petty and vision was because the people who oppose working on very young what is white and that it was intuitively

write those good narrow minded conventional congregation was seven of the heresy to my preaching and activity they became aware that something definitely vital is being jettisoned under the circumstances they were utterly right hand wringing about my resignation it was a service of the church plato socrates pages about how he turned the church run around with those fresh one from the outside he said i got dizzy among the newcomers encouraged upon them a duty to join the church which made it in sufficient numbers to secure image our am i support the church maybe secretary treasurer resign and these and other offices were filled by my supporters so far as numbers when we were secure but financed through to be a different matter most of the older members really reduced or ended their subscriptions fairly people have pledged tensions then

even as they do now which had been generous and place of their palms and killings of pennies of the greater numbers were an inadequate compensation voters began to accumulate debt which in a short time its own serious proportions in the end typically diverse that's the most important for the night would be this one it reflects one last time on the situation in the south or church that you're getting all these people and after almost literally changing the terms of subscriptions thought that was part of a resemblance between minnesota testament by them what he was offering in its place they have the power to do this to save money because of the polity of the church the result was no i did not realize it at the time that they were admitted into church membership scores of people who care less than nothing for the new testament gospels and who were innocent of any fundamental christian

experience in effect the church degenerated into a branch of the labour party services were predominately political ends prayers the lessons are equally red from outside the bible and the sun especially the sun he says the main purpose of jesus was to create a new social order are used to say that trump has is the church was to advocate against capitalism which was the chief obstacle to the new order this was the catholic church if christ mission was to create a new social order on earth if i can name of god he meant nearly a new civilization what i did with the draw simply and directly the essential logical conclusion from that idea now until there were the general rap on congregational following he assists a nice to tell you now that when he finally left the ministry and eventually came back came back for a very brief time in the congregational church and

eventually found its way into the anglican church and whose service he died apple they point out in passing what seems to me the truth that my ministry in nineteen twenty six to twenty eight was that we don't deal at a certain of the congregational church practice running water utility the theory that the church is constituted by the local congregation so long as i can get the support of a congregation there was no farting congregation was him paul made took out an unconventional church a note to that story of the local but anyway insistence then i converted to a christian church into a political organization and remain congregational i was sincere course what i had betrayed the gospel with neither authority nor dog as my

case through the gospel and the church are defenseless against the vagaries and moods of the individual those are hard words but i think they're worth trying and i'm sure the case and the other side would balance some of the judgment of the mexican his story at this point he resigned at this point in his life he felt he couldn't go on with it there was a general strike that broke in wales in may of nineteen twenty six when the new owners of the mine's walk out the workers and this made him feel all the more that he should become involved in a trade unionist cause there are some one and quotations about during all these years he had seized the brain didn't feel the need to pray because the kingdom of something that he and he and others could bring him really without the assistance of god so he broke with the church in the fall after listening to numbers

of friends that he could easily go to london and your job as a writer ms malloy my father locations that weekend strength through an emergency but he found as he walked up and down the streets that the publishers who had been building and i was just waiting for what he could do or simply not there and when they were he was pretty with the pink slip saying it all into regrets and he amassed a quite a collection of his regrets and editors and one of the saddest parts of this section of his life the fact that he had to sell as librarians and three or four thousand volumes and he tells you can almost feel it the heartbreak within the sentence is how we went down the foils in london and parcel by parcel he sold his library in order to pay the rent and have some food to eat i met a man an isis followers one of the weirdest and most interesting men i think in a novel book a foul call but by the name of that fernando who was apparently

caught up in the moment all the new britain moment howard and they are showing various some instability seemed to be open to more than any because that will give some shape and direction and meaning to his life this man believe that there should be a federation of states in your view of the survey and he wanted a united europe fundamentally secure was a community a person's i'm always governmental agencies dividing lines were in opposition to the spirit man and he wanted this to be achieved not true any violence of all about through a revolution of twenty four order and spear and apparently this man was possessed of unlimited money because he found they are at the very early death that his party took a man driven the meals and so on and end into doing things that they meet didn't think he was capable and that he stands on homeless man later on and admires the way in which he manipulated people and that even though he did it for a good at

least it was the master manipulator he would find something that a person could do just praise and incessantly of all for example at the meeting together a mature speaker and this man would write a little note and present down the babies and then i would say i think you'd better respond we need a really qualified speaker to handle this and of course babies with a swell driving and wait to get to his faith more right on a course the maurice walton morning was enmeshed in this particular moment which in britain was known as the new britain moment well one of the things about this moment that is worth reflecting on is the fact that this man apparently and he did a lot of our contemporary psychologists by believing in uniform of that it believed in what some would call stewing or what he calls in this book group meeting where twenty or twenty five

people working in the movement would meet late at night because then the un conference and the czechs wanted man and i would meet and so they break and usually one person would be singled out of the top and usually it was this man mr knobloch who led off and during these wooing sessions they saw a different side and as soon as he lit into an individual who was the target of the night and the others would what would get thirsty for that same glut and he tells know how really this almost crawled in the total despair as frequently for reasons he couldn't understand he was the object of the grouping sessions and he says that while larger the end everybody in the group of the promise always to tell the truth and never to resent by the other person's sounds very closely on the surface but then when people begin to peel off homebuyers of the onion and get down to whether something a week about a dozen white sign five

seven six or seven of us would meet recession or three or four hours generally late at night sometimes on through the night and the deep waters would be dredged for signs of earlier failures so he says we start anywhere and arrive know where there were times when i hated the group members and the journal that most of or when he said it didn't show him when he finally emerged from that experience at that show him that he never really get have an honest insights and it was on life nor was he ever totally honest in his understanding of other people that is he never trusted his own judgment as being infallible and beyond correction when it came into his own self interpretation or his knowledge of other people not i suppose is a lesson that would be worth a little pained learn because the temptation is for us to feel that we're only objective while

the other person is bogged down in it in the sense of subjectivity least he got that not government and became very professional later on in political life via live there with columns for only could see rather easily because he understood something of human nature he was also invited my maternal weight to submit to psychoanalysis and here he raises some hackles and yet i think it's not altogether half breaking two to second guess psychoanalysis uses of anything i was worse that original losses it was rather like a rheumatism from which i had suffered earlier when i began my hydrographic treatment for before i was able to walk when it finished i was prepping i had been assured that a chorus of analysis would solve any of my problems it did not solve one i was the same and regenerate all that i'm actually exhausted talking about in the bottom layers of my unconscious as before and this is this key statement here the

uncovering of a man's complex is is not redemption it makes allowance for what it is and he's generous but it's not prevention a writer that i looked at this summer's said that psychoanalysis is very good on genesis look very poor on accidents can tell you where things began but it can't necessarily reviewer i am now such a fool us to dismiss psychoanalysis as a place which seems to me to be much less their acuity and diagnostic i'm always of the solos not lend itself to scientific truth theology is more relevant i learned a great deal more on the practice and the various psychology in those hectic absorbing years part of what a summary for what i learned i should say that abnormal psychology from which we also for more or less as a demonstration of the mechanism of a deep seated will to self destruction

an ideal state for some of us but i think if we had a time we can open it up i think if you start with that oscillates your in better shape than if you start with a rather naive postulate that there's no such thing as a bad boy we'll hear that much anymore as events of panic rush to have a well to be interested in all four purely local reasons that one of the things that eventually polaroid for a marxist the other remarkable infatuation for martin anthony still to his dying day a great respect for st mark's is a perception that they're going to pull them away eventually was reinhold niebuhr somebody in the party mind you it that unintentionally or deliberately giving him a copy of reflections on the end of an era by reinhold niebuhr and i think we know rival neighbors

thought well i'm not the site at least that's the rival neighbors major contribution was that he made the radical nature of evil believable again in the sophisticated world in other words the theologians are gone before i pretty much fallen into dr davies trap of believing that somehow man had it in himself to establish the perfect utopia never makes the point you know in many places that the reason why american democracy has worked is because it has taken seriously the cinnamon but it's wrong to say that the muck christie works because it believes in the perfectibility of people like to counter the whole system of checks and balances as an indication that the fathers of the constitution really didn't trust anybody with one minute now and this was a neighbor is great

contribution that there isn't anybody wise enough to have all the power or good enough to make all the decisions and so you do have your legislative branch checked by the judicial and legislative and so on around and this of course began to get through the armor of dr davies says he was caught up in its time in the euphoria of human perfectibility and there are several references to neighbours after his really dramatic conversion at the age of forty eight the first manned he took up to read again was made mara a man in our society and a host of others he went from there the bible he went from there to worship him back in the ministry so i don't know whether a doctor a neighbor ever met this man one would hope that they met because of any human figure was involved in this man's redemption certainly it would have been the plan of

reinhold niebuhr well and they come to you the section that deals with his rather dramatic rescue from a suicide attempt i will not read this is fully as i had intended but he got disillusioned with marxism nineties ideas about bringing in not only from libor but also for reading about the trials that when on in russia that we referred an hour three of the trial the kurdish as russia in his mind and critically to begin with was the place where it was really happen and when he read about the systematic elimination of people but here in humanity and he became disillusioned he also went on a peace mission the spying during the days of the spanish civil war and for the first time in his life he was

actually in the presence of life that was expendable he was actually out an alliance where men were killing each other and the apex of that trip for him was when his guide said would you like to go through this thought he was that in a hospital behind the lines though when he said he would like to go through the manager to mature more than he talked about the silence about long row and the reality of evil and the fact that there was something more wrong with a man on a simple adjustment and a constitution of the country or even the change of economic system would she and so i came back this time very disillusioned when he decided to go back to a place called southern down which was down near the coast or it had not been for some thirty seven year lifetime there was as a boy it's his wife this

was a second wife his first wife had died back in the london days and one night he slipped away from his wife and child and move out into the waters and ask the question why not into law by not empty as i face that grim question i recovered vitality their surge through my being in ecstasy an actual taste of it cries out no never he began deploying two purposes that he had once known is on to talk about realizing how dark it was and how real the waves were but he came back after being carried out always so i felt my feet touched bottom and waited out up beyond the reach of the time he was now on the beach i sat down and broken a convulsion of wheat suddenly be unaccountably mccain in my mind so vividly a picture of my mother to jimmy the catechism from the little book rob morrow it was so powerful and

clear i saw the kitchen in the armchair in which my mother sat so the spectacles halfway down or notice all the alliance plan which i set the hike beside it and i heard her saying who is jesus christ which i answer jesus christ as my savior it was just like that but the piece literally the piece which the world and even give your takeaway flooding my entire being that was indeed does this parent i came face to face with god is that at all surprising and christian experience i haven't repeated the classic christian discovery in all ages what would st paul named by his dark ride all wretched man that i am why haven't guessed and suffered before light came to him why was the condition of what was the condition of francis of assisi when he sees to be the young man about town

that marvelous ad of his later life was rooted in dark despair throughout the kierkegaard past before he came to certainty my own experience confirms so wonderfully the truth of the bible and the comprehension of the church that no man or woman can pass from death to life without first realizing utter despair no one can find god as redeemer who still flirts with the possibility that one can redeem one cell and so this was before real life there's no way of imagining what you might have achieved had this experience in his earlier but then this is to imagine that's what would have been psychologically if not realize it really impossible at an earlier time it talks about how we have this new curiosity to read the scriptures and he makes the

point that when you read the scriptures from the point of view of revelation he says no commentary on the bible is so illuminating as the sharing of effect there we come out it's often analytically as a name we must understand the media the words and phrases and so on but we've experienced what the summit has experienced the thing becomes alive this is why theologically illiterate people and sometimes rise to what the bible means more quickly than a professor of biblical linguistics not just a matter of knowing academically and objectively put of experiencing an assignment in the same way your own heart what the one in scripture is speaking to he had this great need to worship as i say he won on back first to the congregational church they were not too happy or haven't yet been a disruptor before church was on hard times the banks are a little of the future of the congregational church over there and in britain let

me give you one summarizing paragraph from an ornament one or two observations and then have some discussion from you about this or any of the any of the books in the series and what does the significance of such a narrative incest where there's the story of nearly one isolated human individual it would not have been worth the telling rightly or wrongly i'm persuaded that my story is a microcosm of a generation here on the smaller scale of an individual existence can be studied the history of npr except the president or the conclusion i experienced in my soul a better death of the illusions of the generation into which i was born and lost myself in those illusions but after that death i rose again four i found myself in finding god what i was searching for was my own identity and without knowing at my search was forgot i had to give up my self exactly as i was in the chaos and

disillusioned and it which i had fallen to find him i found him and became a new man i think in many of our so called mainline churches where we tend to move in a more sophisticated way and the discharge of our mission there is always the possibility that we will lose our confidence and god's ability to make people whole and so we come to read the gospels about how jesus was able to do this and win more let's say to ourselves well that was another time and another day and the result is that frequently be authentic excitement and joy of christian experience can be far more often in a pentecostal meeting in a storefront building in a can and some

of our more ordered religious society now this doesn't mean that we ought to go down to the store fronts and lose what we have won it does mean that we are short somewhere in our understanding of the christian faith we have lost our confidence and the reviewing how of the love of god i mean it's really that simple when a person finds that he or she is loved all kinds of transformations take place but cannot take place under much likes or taste if you never had a teenage son you'll know that there are those times that you can remember where you tried to get him to comb his head or to keep a price for war to see if there was a better chance of getting more likely reason the press but also no avail until one day some drama

class look so and then you find that you can get to the marin the more straight year on trial because what goes for love at that level as move in now when you write this logic and translated into adult terms it's just about me and it positively soul shattering to discover the god really loves and cares and this i think is where babies your whole system of remembrances going back to what his mother were talking about when he was just four the other question is this turkish posters are an injury rights to combine its face and its confidence in this life changing gospel of jesus christ and at the same time to justice and so far it has it has the power to do it

i didn't understand it why this book has meant a lot to me having grown up in a tradition that really cared nothing seriously about justice anyone in those rates would be interested in making a correction and one of our problems as human beings not to mention as christians as the fact that we tend to over correct and it was very interesting to me at seminary to find that there were men who were raised in what might be called a traditional piety or trying desperately to understand harvard law school could be relevant in political and social life well in the same summer there there were men who had been raised in that tradition who are trying to understand what investment when he found god so precious to his own stall and i continue to believe that it is possible for

one church to represent well sorry but it takes a lot of patience on the congregations are non the ministers are because some only say the gospel as being personal in nature away believing that everything that doesn't tie that is extraneous and iran and maybe even suspicions while those who are interested in and making an out so this is a church out of this or any other turks tend to be impatient with anything that has to do with worship or devotion or the study of the scriptures are many things that bother us a bit kerry anderson flies thick himself did not speak to feel numbness that i picked up one of his earlier books i'm a millionaire ali said that there were basically two gates through which people entered in the mccain i've got

one was the gate of the personal individual crisis experience and the social concerns and social ones but with his characteristic humor he said the problem is that too many once they get in continue to hang on the gate that admitted to the person that god in with a great personal experience of god is on that data doesn't go any further and the person who is all for making the church relevant and the public zones of life tends to stay there and i think the answer is that we both need each other young people are impatient today were gospel is only person but let it also be said in fairness to the judge and that man like tammy cox and others insist that one of the reasons

why young people are moving toward drugs it's because they want to kind of immediacy of experience that the church ought to be writing giving them which the church has failed to give he cites the outbreak of plus a limit on some american campuses and these are not campuses of the southern baptist convention necessarily or groups where you might expect this kind of heat but this is an adjustable presbyterian centers where boys are gathering in small uproar rooms do you remember they're realistic estranged from now the possibility of even doing this are hearing this does not excite me and i'm not advocating off the limit but i am saying that when young people move in that direction some of our best and seminaries that may be trying to tell us something that we've lost sight

of the most exciting thing about it which is what god can do with an individual life when it reaches the point of despair and surrenders its management at him and so one would hope that together in this place we could be ambitious to do well to provide a place where hope can be extended for those whose lives do not make sense on their own and at the same time to be a force to be reckoned with in the political and social areas of our life together