Helmsley Lecture Series; William Sloane Coffin

I'm bringing you a very well known, and as you will see, very articulate minister. We have asked another distinguished one to introduce him. Dr. Howard E. Hunter is associate professor of literature, of the literature of religion at Tufts University. We've been very fortunate at Brandeis to have him, even on a part-time basis, as chaplain of the Harlan Chapel, one of our three chapels. Dr. Hunter has taught at the Boston University School of Theology, he has written extensively, traveled widely. In a comparatively short time that he's been on our campus, he's already endeared himself to a great many people, begun to spark a Protestant-oriented program on campus, as well as interfaith and interchapel relationships with our two other fine chaplains, Rabbi Axelrod, who was here for dinner but couldn't stay, and Father Walsh. So without further ado, I give you the Reverend Howard Hunter, who will introduce our guest speaker this this evening. Dr. Hunter. [by way of introduction] [Audience applause]

I want to thank Dean Goldberg for those remarks. It's been said, and I think wisely, that a man is known by the dilemmas he keeps. And if this is true, and I think it is, our speaker tonight is known to be a serious, prophetic, religious spokesman. For he has conducted a ministry which is centered in the issues crucial to the survival of humanity, and the quality of the moral life of this nation, and the opportunities and problems of college students in particular. If a man is known in part by his dilemmas, he is also known by his critics. And if this is so, then our speaker receives excellent ratings in this department, too. As any reader of The New York Times -- and I think he wonders whether we read The New York Times up here -- but we get it a few days later, you know? [gentle heckle "No" by audience member] Ah th- [chuckles] As any reader of The New York Times, or the collected sayings of Kingman Brewster, or that other authority of God and man at Yale, Yale [audience laughs, speaker clears throat], need I say, Mr. Buckley, are well aware, our speaker

sponsors causes, and he causes responses. He is the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., who's university chaplain and pastor of the Church of Christ at Yale University. And he's been there since July 1st 1958. He has been active both in his country and abroad in the promotion of interfaith and interracial programs, stemming from a strong belief that church leaders should take an active stand in social and political issues. In addition to other memberships, he is a member of the board of the Legal Defense and Education Fund, Crossroads Africa, and Freedom Residence Fund. He's also a member of the President's Advisory Committee on Civil Rights for the state of Connecticut. He's traveled very widely. And in the summer of '64, made an extensive trip to Asia, where in particular he visited and lectured in universities in northern and central India. He's known very well for provocative sermons, and has written articles for a wide number of publications. In the summer of 1960, he led a group of students

to Guinea to work in part of the Operation Crossroads project in Africa. And when the Peace Corps was started, he was there, named as advisor and consultant, and organized and became director of the Peace Corps Field Training Center in Puerto Rico. He could write an article on "Jails I have known," I suspect, because in 1961 he was one of seven Freedom Riders arrested in Montgomery, Alabama. The group there, you may remember, were protesting local segregation laws. And, he argued with the others, that these were in conflict with the integration ruling of the United States Supreme Court. In '62, he was awarded the annual Americanism Award of the Connecticut Valley Council of B'nai B'rith. Last year, Welles- Wesleyan University awarded him a Doctor of Divinity degree, calling him an able preacher, writer, and man of action, man of God. Impressive chaplain at Yale, and to students across the nation. A prophet restless in the cloisters, or even in the marketplace, he entered the most troubled and turbulent social arena - that of Civil Rights. They called him a disturber of the peace, in the

cause of social and political justice. And they said that he had worked for others. Both in the heart and the hand of workers in the vineyard, he has labored. For legions of people, he has revived the message of the Cross, that man is his brother's keeper, whatever the price. He's a veteran of the Second World War, and is married to the former Eva Rubinstein, daughter of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. She is a dancer and actress, and they have one daughter and two sons. The subject tonight is The Modern Challenge to Religion. I am honored, Dr. Coffin, to welcome you. And, in turn, I present the students and friends of Brandeis to you. [audience applauds] [Dr. Coffin]: Thanks. [applause continues, then quiets] [Dr. Coffin]: Thank you. Thank you, uh [inaudible]. They say uh, generous uh, introductions introductions are not dangerous as long as you don't inhale. [audience laughs] So uh, I'll take it. May I, in order to uh, save uh, everybody's time, simply assume that you know, that I know, that it's

just a tremendous honor to uh, be part of this uh, [audience laughs] this very distinguished uh, lecture series. The uh, the uh, difficulty with being a speaker, as opposed to my father-in-law, a pianist, is that they feed you before you do y- [inaudible]. If you're a pianist, you don't eat ahead of time (at least most of them don't), and then they give you lobster bisque and all these other things afterwards. I'm not complaining, mind you, about what I was given for dinner, at all. But uh, [audience laughs] the speakers are given too much, as a rule. And then that they're hardly in any condition, to speak at all, when you have a very distinguished lecture series. I'm not used to distinguished lecture series, so I come in [chuckles] half-starved, and usually do pretty well. You know? [audience laughs] Uh, I did think uh, uh, coming here, of this story I once heard of two uh, Oxford under- uh, Oxford England undergraduates who were fierce competitors in their uh, student days. And uh, then in order to satisfy, I suppose, their aggressive instincts, one went into the Navy and the other went into the Church. And the latter quickly became a bishop. And in the course of many uh, such dinners, such as the one as I was just offered

offered over here at the uh, Sherman uh, Student's Center, uh, developed what's called in the trade trade, an "Episto-pot." And uh, [audience laughs] he came into Waterloo Station in London, in full Episcopal regalia, skirts flowing on the ground, and was about to alight, when he espied his erstwhile competitor, now an admiral, with what we used to call a vegetable salad crawling up over his chest and over his shoulder. And he sang out to him, "Oh, boy! Carry my bag!" The admiral looked up startled, uh, but immediately recognized uh, his erstwhile competitor, came running up grabbed the bag and said, "Madam, in your condition, you shouldn't be traveling a'tall!" [audience laughs] Well, in my condition I probably shouldn't be speaking at all. [audience laughs] But uh, here we are, committed one to another, for uh, some uh, serious moments. So uh, let's uh, let's get at it. Now, I'm sure all of you are well aware of the fact that the religious community is in pretty bad shape in this country. Of course, Christians have always been the best argument against Christianity. Never the central central one, however. Not, "What do you think of Christians?"..."What do you think of Christ?" is the central question

obviously. But uh, I think there i- , for the most part, an even better argument uh now than there used to be. And uh, well Jews... [chuckles] Jews are getting rich. And that's always a problem for the Synagogue. [clears throat] Uh... The religious community has what's been known as an Oedipus complex. It's uh... [audience laughs] It's been guilty of the bro- blood brother of apathy, which is an incapacity to give priority to what is important. In fact, the situation in the Church is, on the whole, may be so bad in this country that uh, America may eventually follow Europe's lead, eventually maybe in the next few years, where the vast majority of people go to church only three times in their lives: one to be baptized, two to be married, and three to be buried, which means that two out of three times they have to be carried in. [audience laughs] [coughs] [more audience laughter] On the other hand... On the other hand,

there are a great many signs of life in the religious community. Uh... For instance, Saul Alinsky, controversial organizer of the urban poor, never tires of saying, "Twenty years ago, when I went to Kansas City, at the invitation of the union, there wasn't a church within spittin' distance. Today when I go to Kansas City arrive ?through? Oakland or Brooklyn at the invitation of the churches, there ain't even a union within spittin' distance." [audience laughs] Now Saul Alinsky thinks the Church is the best things going in the country. That's not saying very much, and Saul Alinsky's perspective, but it's still saying something. And my own feeling is that religious issues are becoming increasingly uh, important, poignant, and that morally serious, intellectually-uh, serious students are beginning to face up to this fact, in a very kind of moving way. For instance, if we predict-uh, if we look ahead a few years, we'll have to say that automation is going to keep most of our economy going. The Protestant ethic will have to go, which is alright. We can say that for centuries,

man did the work of animals, and for centuries thereafter, the work of machines. Now, at last, animals will do animal work, machines will do machine work, and human beings will be free to do human work. But nobody is quite sure what human work is. And this is why the theologian Berdyaev, Russian theologian, was probably correct when he said, "Once bread has been assured, then God becomes a hard and inescapable reality, instead of an escape from harsh reality." This I think is what's going to uh, we're going to see increasingly, this kind of uh, situation develop. Now I don't want this evening to do a kind of sociological-uh,... journey around the religious community in this country. But I would much rather try and ask the question "What has theology, what has the religious community, in its own resources, and its own faith, got to say to the world today?" And of course I recognize

that a great many of you wouldn't count yourselves, at all, in the religious community. In fact, many of you wouldn't even dream of darkening the doorstep, darkening the door of a church, unless it was the Arlington Street Unitarian Church on October 16th, when we had a little liturgical revival movement there [audience laughs], which I think I saw some of you at. But, and let me quickly say that, while I consider it a gross misfortune if you're not a believer, I know that it's not an ethical default, in and of itself. Although sometimes it might be. Pascal said, "Why is it so hard to believe? Because it's so hard to obey." But I also know that a great many of you would feel that you were really committing treason to your own high ideals, were you to take any steps toward conversing. And we've noticed, in our own time, that the trail of martyrs has come much more from the Marxist side than it has come from the Jewish or the Christian side, at least in terms of religious community. Obviously the martyrs though Hitler represent something very special.

something very special. Now if we were to describe the world today in a kind of broad brush way I think we'd have to say at least these two things. First of all we have to say mankind is now an evolutionary fact. A unified A unified mankind is now an evolutionary fact, which is a pretty radical sort of thing to say because it is really saying that the utopians and "realists" are the scientists. We live in a world that We live in a world that an astronaut can encircle in an afternoon stroll, in orbital bomb will get around it without any trouble at all. If we think about the weather, If we think about the weather, we realize that pretty soon we're not only going to be able to predict it but to control it. And that means to scientists national boundaries are increasing inhibitions. We're living in a to be more convergent than divergent, whether we're talking about a unified economy, whether

talking about a unified system of thought, science, almost any way you look at it, you look at it, we really have to say that the world is moving toward unity. So that it's probably fair to say that a unified mankind is now an evolutionary fact. The second thing I think we'd have to say is, a rather obvious one, is that change is simply in its speed. History has reached a kind of flood tide. As Kenneth Boulding, the economist, says, "We've passed one boundary break after another. We can't get back any more. We don't know too much We don't know too much about the kind of future into which we are going, but one thing is certain, it's going to we know at present." So it seems to me that the question we have to address ourselves to tonight, then, is what does theology, what does faith say - Jewish or Christian faith, I'm going to restrict myself to those two - myself to those two - say to a spaceship

in which change is insistent as breathing. I say is an image of Kenneth Boulding, and I think that's a proper image for the world today. I want to talk about the today. I want to talk about the world. We have to talk about a spaceship laden with fragile it could be scuttled at any moment by the dissensions of the crew. So, what is this religious community to say to a spaceship on which change is as insistent as breathe. Well, let's talk for a minute Well let's talk for a minute now about the change. Because I think change that we face, all of us face today, because it's easy to talk about change about change. But it's very difficult emotionally to appropriate change. And the hardest thing of all is actively to affirm change by willing it. It's a funny thing. We know that change is inevitable. The art of life is to cooperate gracefully with the inevitable. And yet the

attitude of individuals and institutions and nations alike toward change is pretty much the same as the attitude of the caterpillar who said, looking up at the butterfly, "Huh! You'll never find me flying around in one of those crazy things." For instance, as an example of an institution, I'll just take the church. How many times in human history has the church mounted the barricades facing the wrong direction? Instead of seeing itself as a force, the church again and again has seen itself as a form, a fixed form with fixed liturgy and fixed purpose. Theologically speaking, if one wanted to be a little bit mean, in a Christian context one could say that the church has again and again tried to present God as some distant being high in the heavens in order to avoid the young man in constant circulation. Now when it comes to the question of the nation. Nothing could be more obvious than this

question of resistance to change. Here we are in a spaceship in which nationalism is the predominant sentiment. Understandably former colonial people want to tread on national soil. But even the communists are so darn nationalistic we really have to say we have not a decent communist around since Trotsky. And of course in our own country, I'm afraid that tribalistic chauvinism is really on the rise. Look at the question of armaments. Jerome Wiesner, right across the way here, every single scientific advisor to every president from Eisenhower on down has said the more we, the Soviets, the Chinese, the Americans increase our armaments, the more we decrease our national security - the very thing armaments are supposed to provide. And there is no technical solution to this problem. It demands a political solution. We must change, but what kind of resistance there is to this kind of change, on which depends our

entire survival. And finally when it comes to the individuals, we tend to think it's only the Yale alumni who resist change. But let's not let youth off the hook quite so easily. In my experience, the vast majority of American youth today are singing "For my status is quo." It's only a very small minority which is really pressing for change, and of the minority, many are more anti-establishment than they are pro-change. They don't conform to Camus's definition of a rebel, who is one who knows on behalf of what he's rebelling all together as much as he knows against what he is rebelling. So here we are individuals and institutions and nations faced with the necessity of change and yet incapable of thought of getting with it. Now one of the many reasons for man's intransigence is of course man's insecurity.

We all are insecure that's not that's not a question. The only question is "Where are we going to get our security?" And we all spend a great deal of time insecurity. But if we can sing, a mighty fortress is "A mighty fortress is" not my nation, not my family, nothing in my status quo at all. (Quoting a hymn) "A mightly fortress is my God, the sole bulwark which never fails." If one can sing that first line of that greatest of hymns, of Luthur's, then one can end that hymn, "Let goods and kindred go." goods and kindred go." All the things to which for security's sake we ascribe too much value and too much permanence. Let goods and kindred go. You mean, Negroes move into the neighborhood? Sure let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. You mean I go down to a Mississippi swamp and be killed in a good cause? Yes. The body they may kill. God's truth

The body they may kill. God's truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever. The body they may kill. Any man can live with nothing and he's free then to die for something. So then the body of a nation perish, so then the body of the Church perish. Nothing is more ironic than the way the Church hangs onto its body. When it uses the metaphor of the Body of Christ because it can head of the Church concluding a concordant with Pontius Pilot in order to save himself from crucifiction? Himself from crucifixion? Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill, God's truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever. That's Luther's great hymn. Great statement of freedom, which comes from having one's security not in any of the things of this world. That leaves you free to live with all the immediate insecurity that the world provides. We're celebrating this year for the 450th anniversary of Luther's our first great troubles, the great moment then warns when

Luther was asked. "Luther were you going to be when churches and princes and people turn against you? Where you going to be then?" "That is now in the hands of Almighty God." Next question. That is the freedom of a really deeply religious man be Jew or be Christian and it seems to me at this point the resources of the faith are really very real. If a man places his faith his trust to security in God then he can, he must accept all the inevitable insecurity of inevitable change. Now to the degree that the religious community is constipated, it cannot be free in any way. To that same degree, its shows its own lack of faith, its own betrayal of its own deepest convictions, its failure to use its own deepest resources. Because a really religious person is a truly free person. Now moving on now what about affirming change by actively willing? More and more now I'm beginning to see that the religious community has made a great mistake

in sort of presenting again and again a sort of image of an immovable force, an immovable God, versus ever changing Man. When in fact, it should be presenting the image of an ever-moving force, versus intransigent Man. Because it has long been the conviction of Jews and Christians, that it is the will of the Power by which all things are, that all things will change. And so we have to change the image and picture. This ever-moving Force in the world trying to move the world along, versus Man who wants to put the freeze on history. And one of the great theologians of our time is a Dutch one by the name of van der Leeuw who, in a very erudite book, has set out a basic thesis, which is simply that the ancient civilizations, the four great civilizations of the ancient world, were essentially static.

China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Egypt hasn't moved all that much, not compared to Saudi Arabia. But it was a static world in which people thought everything was part of the sacred whole and therefore something not something to fool around with. We can't picture an indigenous slave mounting a revolt against Pharaoh. Pharaoh believed that people believed that Pharaoh was divinely ordained. But then along came these pushy Jews, who didn't believe in a once-and-for-all order of Creation, but rather in an ordering force moving through Creation. The Jews were really the first to believe in history, in a history which was initiated by God and moved along by God every time man tried to put the freeze on history. You see this is the point of the story of the Tower of Babel, the Tower that was designed to have it tap into heaven. This was a

beautiful, flat-out human effort to build a from-here-to-eternity edifice. And the result was utter confusion. The same confusion that always ensues whenever men try to build eternal edifices be they of brick or ideas. And so the Bible pictures the Force by which this history is moved, now moving significantly to take Abraham out of static Mesopotamia, then Moses -let's be imaginative now, not get all hung up literally- and Moses out of static Egypt, and then we see the power of God picking up Judah and Israel, and then from a Christian perspective at work in the person of Jesus, which to Christians is a fulfillment in many respects. But in many more important respects, it's a new departure, is the promise of a new being, a new creation, a new Israel, a new departure to all four corners of the

Earth. And says van der Leeuw, "It is to the dynamism of this ancient religious vision of the Jews, and then more recently the Christian, to which we must attribute a great deal the dynamism of Western Europe, which is culminated now in this technology which is taking over the whole globe and unifying. And says van der Leeuw, because technology so successfully undercuts static individuals and institutions and nations, and so opens up not only copious expectations for the future for all men but also the promise of unity for all men, that we have to say my Christian perspective in technology Christ is present incognito. Now so much for a moment for change. Now we must move on pick up on this theme of unity and recognize

that a unified mankind has always been the goal of religious history. We can really say that Scripture is sort of dominated by two symbols, one we've already mentioned the Tower of Babel, that symbol of pride from which men are scattered in their process. But over against that symbol is also the other symbol of Mt. Sinai. The mount from which streams forth that light, that love, which alone is capable of more religious perspective, of uniting men and leaving them out of the wilderness that is human freedom. And again and again in Scripture you have these glorious visions of what Scripture calls the Latter Days. I forgot to bring a Bible - anybody? But again and again you know they have these visions of in the Latter Days this, and in the Latter Days that, the most famous one is the one of Micah which I probably can remember. And it shall come to pass

the Latter Days that all the nations will come to Zion. For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of God, gods, will go forth from Zion. All nations will come to the mountains and nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore, because the goal of religious history is that unity. Which means that the bloody contradictions which separate man from man, institution from institution, and nation from nation, will now be eliminated. The nations will remain and no longer bloody conflicts. So always you see there is this vision of unity in the future. So let me simply say now that the Temple in the Church must be conservative, we must be conservative, but we must conserve it not the structures of an outlived past with the ancient vision of an oncoming future.

The past is important. That's where we have our roots. But it is the future that shapes the present. We see the religious community should always be thinking in terms of the future shaping the present, not in terms of the past shaping the process. Let the dead bury the dead, that means let the dead bury the dead and not the living. And like Marxists, Jews and Christians should live in the grip of the future tense. Because I think now we can see tht thanks to this change which produced this technology and made a unified mankind an evolutionary fact, we can now say with a little bit of imagination but I think legitimately, that we are entering the Latter Days that the Bible talks about. We are now entering these Latter Days and entering them we must remember one thing about change, and another thing about unity. Now when it comes to change, what we have to remember, is that history is history. Which is the

saying no automatic escalator upwards and onwards. It's an escalation of possibilities only, and no one but only a fool could fail to see that we may be in the antechamber of hell as well as the antechamber of heaven. We are living in a world that's more and more able to slit its own throat in less and less time. So the other thing which if this were predominantly a bunch of Christians I would be tempted to spend a lot of time on, would be for God's sakes, let's get over this horrible theology of endless expiation, endless reparation, which fails to allow men to assume their responsibility and become co-creators with this power which religious folk call God, of this history which we should be moving in this direction. There's a wonderful line in Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy" when Prince von Berg, an Austrian Baron, Prince has been

finally convinced by LeDuc, the psychiatrist of his own complicity in the very evils he abhorred, and suddenly his sympathies which had been directed toward all these Jews who are going to be sentenced to virtual death in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, this takes place in occupied France, his sympathies move away from them and turn to the feelings of horror and shame at his own complicity. And at that point LeDuc turns around and said, "It's not your guilt I want, it's your responsibility." That's the word for the Christian community. Stop all this guilty. Get over it. Most Christians have only enough religion to make themselves miserable. And they refuse the absolution largely because they don't want to be responsible. It's hell to be guilty, but it's worse to be responsible. But the cry to the religious, from the religious community to the religious community is, that we are called to be response-able. Able, able to respond to the will of God because of the love of God which

says to us that ask Him for a thimbleful of help and you get an oceanful in return. There's more mercy and God than sin in us, so let's not get hung up endlessly about sin. This is one of very good sound reasons why a lot of youth today just find church and synagog terribly boring. Because there are all these people dragging along on the misery, instead of really being as excited as they are. Something happened the other day at the Riverside Church. A Negro woman from South Carolina came up and it has changed a lot since, it's a good church by the way, there are a lot of good things but they ushers are still boutonniered, and befrocked, it's a little anachronistic, and this lady was used to religion and had lots of life and vitality like a Lubavitcher community. You're a good Hassidic. And so when McCracken the preacher

made a good point why she just sang out, "Amen brother!" And then one of these boutonniered and befrocked ushers came running out and said, "Lady are you ill?" And she said, "Iin my mind I got religion!" and he said, "My God lady, not here!" was. I. A. Lot. So we are really called upon to be co-creators of this history about which we've been talking. Now the second thing that has to be said is concerning Unity. Unity has nothing to do with uniformity. Teilhard de Chardin, this wonderful French Jesuit paleontologist priest has written I think most movingly about this. He says we are one. That we are one, [partial quotation in French] mind to mind, body to body, but not yet heart to heart. And he points out that great mistakes have been made on this question of unity.

First by the Marxists, who have confused human unity with collectivization, and an imposed kind of unity, and then with Americans eminently who have not realized that to be an individual is to be very much part of a society. Sometimes I don't think Americans even believe in society. They think it's a figment of the socialist imagination. But Teilhard points out that the act the essence of a human being is not his individuality but his person-ality, his person which can only be fulfilled in union with other people. And his love, which is that which fulfills an individual within himself and also by joining him in that which is most profound in another person. And love is a kind of unity which both makes for the fullness of the individual and for the freedom of individuals to be individuals in society. Because when

all hearts are won, nothing else has to be won. That shows how we are far removed from Love in this country, because when all hearts are not won, then all kinds of other things simply must be won. And we have no idea how far we are removed in this country I think from the true freedom which comes out of this understanding of love. I remember last fall I received, I was really shocked into thinking about this once again by two Soviet citizens, who came to see me and I said, "How do you Americans do it.?" And knowing that they were just back from a visit to the great Midwest I thought they were talking about our agricultural achievements, because you know the Soviets are still eating that miracle wheat that you plant in the Ukraine it comes up in Canada. But they soon made it very clear what they had in mind was something quite different. They said, "We have watched CBS and NBC and the ABC. Now what's the difference?

We have listened to your American radio programs their monotony is absolutely breathtaking, that with the exception of editorials and such newspapers The New York Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Louisville Courier, and Boston Globe, the editorial policy across this country is fantastically alike. So how do you Americans do it? How do you achieve such a high degree of thought control without resorting to terror?" I thought "My word! What an irony the communist might be coming to our shores in droves to study more sophisticated methods of thought control." But the unity we're talking about has nothing to do with uniformity. For once again when all hearts are won, then nothing else has to be won. But it is a true unity of human beings. Now so much for change and Unity in a rather abstract or theological way. And if I bored you

with some of this theology I apologize. Theology is terribly important but prayer is a lot more important if you pray you don't have to worry about too much going on. Alas not true. But now the important thing is to see how this vision that we see in the Bible, this understanding of change and unity, really applies in very practical situations. All theology is practical theology, said Karl Barth. For instance if we say that the world, a unified mankind, is now an evolutionary fact, that men are being brought closer and closer together, both are about intellectual ways, social ways, economic ways, this obviously says something about international organizations. And eminently about the US. Remember in the beginning, I said the religious community was guilty of being the blood brother of apathy, which was an incapacity to give priority to what is important.

Well this is what I mean. The UN should be the center of attention of the religious community, because it is the nearest symbol or organization which expresses it all. The kind of unity which we believe in is the goal of human history. So I'm going to write a sermon on Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember if there had been ten righteous men, Sodom would have been saved. Well I think there were ten righteous men only the city wasn't saved because their righteousness wasn't relevant. And that's the problem with the religious community, here right now. As one Latin American diplomat put the problem of the U.N. very succinctly, "Around here he said things tend to disappear. If it's a small conflict between two small nations and we deal with it then it's the conflict that disappears. But it is a conflict within a small nation and a large nation then alas it's the small nation which tends to disappear. And then if it is a conflict between two large nations, then it gets really very dramatic because that is the

UN that disappears." Now why does the UN disappear? For one very simple reason. Not one of the absolute national sovereign powers of this world has surrendered to it one iota of its absolute national sovereignty, which is absolutely unbelievable given the kind of world that we live in. Absolutely unbelievable! And the two things that the United Nations ought to be doing at a great rate today, is of course, peacekeeping and economic development. Now when it comes to peacekeeping of course they've been able to be quite successful in some small areas. Well let us not even talk about Egypt and Israel at this point. We may find the U.N. will be able to play a useful role there again. But when it comes to the larger nations it has not a chance. And largely because it's been torpedoed by the larger powers and I think we have to say in all honesty by the United States as just as well as by the Soviet Union. Because the United States has moved from isolationism to interventionism without passing through internationalism.

And that's the big indictment of Vietnam. Thanks. Nothing is more tiresome than listening to Secretary Rusk justify Vietnam in terms of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, when it can't possibly be justified because a united South Vietnam isn't even a member nation of the United Nations, and that's what it talks about. And incidentally when people getting upset if I can just make a parthetical remark about turning in draft cards and other illegal acts on the part of part of hot-tempered, wooly, idealistic youth, let me point out to you that maybe there's been some other questions of legality. For instance, it is my reading of the United States Constitution that warmaking is the prerogative of the legislative and not the executive branch of the United States government. And yet we have a half a million men in Vietnam without any declaration of war without even a full discussion of this war in the United States Senate. We have 50,000 men in Thailand, in a landlocked aircraft carrier secretly for two years bombing the

North Vietnamese, secretly from the Thais as well as from the Americans. And we don't even have a treaty signed by the United States Senate. I once again if you look at the Constitution you find out that there's a very serious question of legality at that point. So let us not be hasty and pointing at people breaking the law without recognizing that the law has perhaps already been very seriously violated at the point of the Constitution. Not to mention the Geneva Agreements, SEATO, and the UN. Now it seems to me that as regards peacekeeping functions there is time that we ought to be moving a little bit toward a small standing army. We've been talking about civil disobedience, let me suggest you maybe ought to take a stand some day "I fight only for the U.N." That could be quite a moving stand. I fight only for the U.N. I think we can without too much trouble begin to push toward the notion of a small standing army and to begin to really suggest that if wars are begun, that they should never be

escalated outside of a UN context. That the only justification for any escalation of war would be within the U.N. context. That's a little bit more problematical in my mind. The question of economic development. Now economic development is very clear, that it would surely would be much better if it took place under U.N. auspices. That it would be psychologically much better for everybody. The only question is how do we get the United States to give at least 1 percent of gross national product for economic development? This was to be the decade of economic development. Remember [you thought] used to say this is going to be the decade when all these poor nations got (to the) takeoff point. And of course they're further and further from this point all the time. Now the practical thing it seems to me what the religious community could do for us it would be simply to suggest something. I'll just throw this out as something maybe you can want to take up and do something with. Why shouldn't we petition the United States Congress to allow us as individual American citizens, to give up to 10 percent of our

tax deductable income to the U.N. for peacekeeping and economic development purposes? And we would receive from the U.N. a statement saying that we've made that kind of contribution and we send it in on April 15th to the Treasury Department. Now it seems to me that all this is doing is picking up from our own American history where philanthropy preceded income tax, to start a little international philanthropy as the first step toward an international income tax. Yet it's clear we've got to have an international income tax we've got to have it just as quickly as we possibly can. If the whole globe is not going to fall apart, and it seems to me one first step might simply be a 10 percent peace tax, a 10 percent U.N. tax, which if we started it in United States will be picked up in Europe, and would be picked up everyplace, and this could be a first step toward perhaps the international income tax which we certainly have to have. Another area it seems to me where this understanding of change and unity has a lot to

say is in ideological differences. Now what we're saying when we talk about human unity in the fashion we've been doing is that all men have more in common than they have in conflict. All men have more in common than they have in conflict. And therefore we must separate out the more superficial differences from the more profound things that make for unity. And it is precisely when what we have in conflict is overriding that what we have in common needs to be affirmed, just free speech must be most highly prized when its exercise is most effective. Now very specifically, when we look as Americans at 750 million Chinese, what do we see? "Red" in both senses of the word. And this is what is so sinful because we should be able to see 750 million fellow human beings inheritors of the same travial and glory of this world who then happen to be communist and Chinese as we then

happen to be capitalists or whatever we are in America. But not to be able to see first of all what we have in common with them is a terribly sinful thing. And here the religious community has an enormous educational task to undertake. First of all for its own moment and then also for those outside insisting that ideological differences are not as profound as we make them out to be. We take ideological differences and absolute ties and that's what's called idolatry. And this I think is a terribly important thing to do and clearly it is a responsibility again in the religious community. Now just one word about working with communists. It seems to me that there's no problem for religious folk to work with communists, when that seems to be the right thing to do. For instance in Brazil I know lots of Protestants and Catholics, there not too many Jews down, there are lots of Protestants and Catholics who are working with Marxists feeling that Marxists have the only option

for Brazil. Now it seems to me that the goal of the Christians of that situation is to work hand-in-hand with the Marxists even becoming Marxists. You know this messianic atheism is excess baggage the Marxists don't need that. And they'll jettison that baggage as soon as they see Christians behaving the way Christians really ought to be behaving, as much concerned with humanity as humanists. Marxists will be able to jettison that baggage easily. And there are a lot already of Christian Marxists in Europe. So Christians ought to be able to work hand-in-hand with Marxists, even become Marxists. But whenever Marxists try to put the freeze on history, as Marxists have tried to do in betrayal of Marxism. Eminently under Stalin but also in other countries, communism been even worse than Americans on this, putting the freeze on history. At that point, Christians must keep on going through. Christians and Jews should see themselves as permanent revolutionaries. Always continuing the revolution

whenever other people want to say, "No this is it, we've got it made." This I think is the vision that the religious community ought to have of themselves as permanent revolutionaries, always moving towards that fulfillment in their own vision, and recognizing because they recognize human sin that always will have only approximations. There will always be problems every solution presents new problems and so forth. All right, one more area and I think I better wind up. And that is in the area of poverty. Now here the religious vision I think has a great deal to say to United States, because the United States has generally been dominated by the outlook of what we can call Social Darwinism. It has separated the haves from the have-nots. And the question that still is asking in this country is how much do the have-nots have? And if we can bring the have-nots up to a certain level then we have done our bit in terms of social justice. Laurens van der Post, a South African,

was in Indonesian at the time the Indonesians were trying to get the Dutch to go. And in a small book he relates a conversation he had with a Governor-General of Jave, who said to him, "I can't understand why they want us to go. When we came here there are only three or four million of them and now they're what 60, 70, 80 million of them. We cleared the shipping lanes of pirates. We gave an efficient civil administration. We have hospitals and schools and highways and railroads and still they want us to go. Why?" And van der Post said to him, "It's very simple. Whenever you look at them, you have the wrong look in your eye." Not the question of having, but the question of belonging, and here you see we're back at our religious base, which says that all men belong one to another and that's the important thing to affirm that they belong. And the haves and the have-nots is subordinate to the questionable of belonging. Does private property enhance our belonging one to another?

Or, does it do differently? The question of possession is second to the question of use, and the thing we have to keep asking is this question of do they or do they not belong? Now we can move to our own country and we see the situation exactly I think. We spent billions of dollars of federal funds municipal and state funds, moving the poor out of shacks and to brick-and-mortar, and instead of slum dwellers we now have "project people" and we still have the wrong look in the eye. This has not been a melting pot, this country. Jews never melted. Neither did the Negro or Puerto Rican. We've been a pressure cooker perhaps, but we've never been, never been a melting pot. This is a nation that was founded on genocide and it was brought up and developed in the sweat of 40 million slaves. And any American who thinks that he's got it made in terms of really affirming the belongingness of all American citizens is not a true patriot, in the sense that he hasn't taken his own American history seriously, learned its lessons, and seen its problems and determined he

will do something about it. This is where SDS has had some real insight. One, they talk about participatory democracy. The problem is participatory democracy is not a very effective agent for social change, but at least they grasp the important principle. The important point that people must be made to feel that they belong. But the problem of poverty is not getting people out of the slums, it's getting slums out of people. The bitterness, the hopelessness, the hatred which long existence in the slums and gendered within. This is why Community Action is the most important aspect of our poverty program and this is why it's correct that Alinsky has been hired by the religious community, because Alinsky in an unsystematic way, is trying to get people to feel that they belong. And this is why black power has to be understood, because black power is another way of saying we belong, too. And so far Negroes have simply been assimilated individually, but never have been integrated as a group. And Alinsky understands

this, black power people understand this, which is not to say that there are great many problems connected with both Alinsky and with Black Power. But the essential question when it comes to dealing with poverty then is not the question of having or not having but it is a question of belonging. I want sort of an Orthodox Jewish community which when they have fellows who have really fall upon hard days, put together a few beads and trinkets and things and they put them on a counter and they build a little kiosk around it, and I put the man behind the counter with all those little beads and trinkets and they stand around and put their arms around and they say, "Welcome to the community of merchants." It's an understanding, the problem is one of belonging. So it seems to me that there is much that the religious community can say, can offer to the world today. Its theology is very straightforward, God is constantly trying to make humanity more human. Religion is that dimension which

underlies all activites, it's not something separated out but, it's that which underlies all activity and is trying essentially to move all of human history, constantly, painfully, slowly, toward that goal of greater and greater unity, a unity that's given in the love which is understood as emanating ever finally from God itself. We're trying to say in the religious community I think that all men belong one to another. That's the way God made us. From a Christian point of view, Christ died to keep us that way, so we can say our sin is that we are constantly trying to put asunder what God Himself has joined together. The answer to the question "Am I my brother's keeper?" has always been "No. I am my brother's brother." Now the Brotherhood of Man is not something we're called upon to create. It's only something we're called upon to recognize. And to make manifest. So I suppose if you had to sum up the message of the religious community to itself and to Americans

generally, it would probably read something like this. "We Americans in recent years have learned to fly through the air like birds and to swim through the seas like fish. It's time we learn to walk the earth like that. Thank you very much.