In these candid comments on the American scene, Dr. D. Elton Trueblood, the distinguished Quaker philosopher, discusses the unconscious assumptions that now shape the American outlook and the new opportunity this offers for evangelical advance. This issue ofCHRISTIANITY TODAYalso carries an excerpt from his book “The Incendiary Fellowship.”
Dr. Trueblood is now in London for a year of research and writing, and the interview below was taped in Washington just before his departure. He served Earlham College for twenty years as head of its philosophy department and is now professor at large. For two years he was religious adviser to the Voice of America. He was interviewed by Editor Carl F. H. Henry.
Question. Dr. Trueblood, in 1944 inThe Predicament of Modern Manyou singled out two ideas ruling the American outlook that had undergone recent revision, the inevitability of progress and the essential goodness of man. Do you think either of these controlling ideas has regained some of its former influence on the American mind?
Answer. I would not say that neither of these tenets has come back precisely in its earlier form; but I do think that we now have unargued assumptions that have some affinity with these, and that we need to know what these new unargued assumptions of our time are.
Q. What would you single out as the reigning tenets of our time?
A. The first of these is the extreme belief that all our problems are new. I would call this, really, the disease of contemporaneity. Shall I give you an example? Last winter I was speaking to a group of pastors in a certain state, and I advised these men to study Augustine’s Confessions and the Imitation of Christ and Pascal’s Pensées, and John Woolman’s Journal. Right away one of the leading clergymen said, “Oh, those were all very well for another day. But so much has happened now that their appeal is utterly undermined. We are in a new world, and these books have nothing to say to our situation at this moment.”
Q. What does this point of view imply for tradition, and for the Judeo-Christian heritage? And what does it imply for the relevance of our own discoveries or commitments to the generation that comes after us?
A. It means that we cut ourselves off from the wisdom of the ages, including that of the Bible. It means that, if this is taken seriously, we are really an orphan generation—an orphan generation that takes itself far too seriously, that is too much impressed with changes that may be only superficial. And of course, if this is true of our generation, as your question indicates, there is no reason why it will not be true of another generation. Therefore, whatever we gain would naturally be rejected by our descendants. No civilization is possible this way. Contemporaneity when it is a disease is a very damaging disease, because it destroys the continuity of culture.
Q. Besides this passion for contemporaneity, do you discern some other ruling tenets of our time?
A. Yes. Associated with it is a really terrible conceit. I actually hear people say, “What could Abraham say to us? After all, he never went faster than a few miles per hour. And any of us can go 600 miles an hour if we want to now.” “What can Socrates say to us? He never saw a university with 30,000 students. He never saw a really big city. He didn’t see any advanced technology. Therefore obviously his answers are not answers that are relevant to our day.” This, if it applies anywhere, is bound to apply all across the board. And what I want to say to these men is this: they have not really considered carefully enough the nature of the human problem. I want to say to them that a man can hate his wife at 600 miles an hour just as much as at six miles an hour, and that the temptations to compromise with integrity are not really changed at all. Men have always had them; men will always have them. They are part of the predicament that man is man. And the notion that we are living in such a fresh time that wisdom has “come with us” whereas nobody ever had it before—this I find to be an absolutely intolerable conceit.
Q. Would it be fair to say that in place of the notion of the inevitability of progress the man of the 1960s is prone to substitute the notion that progress has now reached its peak or its near-peak?
A. Yes.
Q. And for the notion of the essential goodness of man he is prone to substitute the idea that no experience is superior to his?
A. I think that is very well said. You see, this modern heresy is stated for many people in Bonhoeffer’s terms, that “man has come of age.” Now, I have pondered that statement a long time, and I have heard a good many efforts to defend it. I want to say that, so far as I can see, it is absolutely errant nonsense. It would be far better to say that man is in the kindergarten. It would be more honest and it would be more humble. In fact, this tendency to erect every word of Bonhoeffer’s into a new orthodoxy seems to me to be one of the chief evidences of the faddish mentality. I do not believe that man has come of age. I recognize that there are a great many people who believe this, and I think that probably no threat shows both the superficiality and the wrongheadedness of modern man more than this one.
Q. You seem almost to suggest, Dr. Trueblood, that all our scientific advances and modern insights amount to a vast backdrop that spectacularly exhibits the fact that modern man has really fallen from the heights rather than risen to new glory.
A. Yes. The notion that human life is made good because of technology simply will not stand examination. Now, I am glad for technology. I’m glad that we have antibiotics; I hope that they will be available to as many people on earth as possible. I’m glad we have hybrid seed corn. I’m glad I can raise hybrid tomatoes in my garden. I am grateful for every one of these advances. But at the same time I want to warn people against the notion that these of themselves bring the good life. They simply do not.
Q. Do you see a third mass idea that tends to shape modern American life?
A. What is that?
Q. What about the notion that the essence of life is to be found in things—in the infinitude of things. Or possibly in an infinitude of sex. Do you think that these ideas tend to shape our culture?
A. They probably do, but in a special way. It is not merely the old paganism, nor merely the old materialism, which both sound a little bit out of date now. All this has a particular slant that is represented, let us say, by the computer. This is our new idolatry. And I would like to say that I think that these are very poor idols. I buy a great many books, and I find that the book companies that have instituted computers now are three times as slow in delivering books as they were when they had people. Only yesterday, Dr. Henry, I was at a New York airport trying to arrange to come down to see you. The computer kept sending back no answer, and the poor chap back at the desk finally had to call on some human being to find out whether the plane was going. They discovered that there had been an error in printing in the whole system, and that the flight they told me about didn’t even exist! Well, I believe it’s a good thing for us to find this out. You see, when you have false gods the thing to do is to find out that they are false. So the notion that just by having bigger cities and speedier planes and more expensive cosmetics we will therefore have a good world—this just won’t hold water.
Q. In these last twenty years, have you sensed any significant change in the American outlook on security and the attitude toward big government?
A. Oh, yes, I certainly have. Of course, I have had to interview a great many young men wanting to come to teach. And I’m a little bit shocked to find that the first question they often ask is “What is the retirement plan?” Now thirty-nine years ago, when I began teaching in North Carolina, this didn’t even enter my head. Little did I care, because I was perfectly sure that if one thing didn’t work out, another one would. And I had not supposed that it was up to other people to take care of me. I thought perhaps I’d better get to work. But today we find that security is a dominant idea, apparently in all classes of society.
Q. What of the attitude toward work?
A. At the same time we see this decay. We owe a great deal to the Protestant—or more specifically, the Puritan—ethic in this country, concerning the dignity of work, and the notion that each man has a holy calling and that his task is to render a good account before God of the powers that he has. I still think that this is the noblest conception of work that there is. And I think our whole civilization here in the West owes much more to this ideal than we know, or than we admit. But today I see this breaking down at many points. I know a great many people who don’t feel that they have any real responsibility in their work. The main thing is to put in the time; leave as soon as they can; get as long vacations as they can. Work is something in which they do not rejoice. It is something from which they would like to be emancipated.
Q. Can we gather together, perhaps into some single motif, these elements of the longing for security, the exaltation of material priorities, and the increasing emphasis on leisure and particularly on the life of sex? Can we correlate these into another unconscious force that gives form to the American view of life today?
A. Yes, I think that all of them can be united under the idea of an oversimple view of freedom. Freedom from worry, freedom from work, freedom from moral inhibitions. All of these are delusive. The more we think about it, the more we see that although freedom is a great thing, and we are right to mention it as a very important element in the Gospel, it is always wrongly seen when it is seen by itself. Absolute freedom is absolute nonsense because then there is no inner control. If freedom means the freedom to seduce the other man’s wife, if it means the freedom to steal if one thinks he can get away with it, the time will come when we will have no stable civilization. I’ve just been talking with some businessmen who tell me that the stealing by employees in department stores is now getting to be a serious problem. Have you heard that, Dr. Henry?
Q. Yes, shoplifting not only by customers but also by employees.
A. In fact it has gotten so bad that many prices go up because of this. You see, we as Christians ought to be hardheaded enough to see that many of the so-called economic troubles are really moral troubles. If the stealing increases, then the prices will have to go up for every one of us. I’ve just been in a town where they have to keep the high school students in the school all through the noon hour because they stole so much from the nearby stores during that hour.
Q. What has happened to religion, and particularly to the religion of the Bible, in American life today?
A. Well, for many people this is simply old hat. It has ceased to seem exciting. It is something that they think was relevant only years ago. It was all right for the little church in the wildwood, but has no significance for people in great modern cities. The majority simply think it obsolete. This bears on our earlier point about contemporaneity.
Q. Do you think that the trend is also encouraged by the readiness of men in public life to dismiss Christianity as a religion of personal piety only, without any significant implications for national or public life?
A. Precisely. You see, they are wholly willing to be tolerant of this kind of religion. I would call this “segregation religion.” If they can segregate it to one’s own personal wishes or even to one’s own personal prayers, nobody objects. Hitler didn’t object to that, you know. The Communists in Russia don’t object to this. They say, “This is fine if you want to do it; we want you to be free.” What is objected to is that kind of vital religion that affects the way men work and the way they govern and the way they teach and the way they learn and the way they make love and the way they keep up their families. Intolerance never arises until our religion is pervasive of the whole social order.
Q. Do recent rulings of the Supreme Court encourage this segregation of religion?
A. The attitude of the Supreme Court is very striking on this. I have read over and over the Supreme Court decision, based upon the cases in Pennsylvania and Maryland, on whether Bible reading and prayers are legal in the public schools. You will remember that the decision was that this is forbidden—at least this is the way the language seems to read. I admit it has a certain ambiguity. But the strange thing about this is the statement of the court that the state must be neutral in regard to the religious life, neither for nor against—tolerant, if it is kept in its place, within the church, say; but it mustn’t be in the schools. You see, Dr. Henry, that this is exactly what we mean by tolerance of segregated religion, and obviously I’m not talking about race at this moment. I think too often we have thought of segregation only in regard to race.
Q. Since you were religious adviser to the Voice of America in 1954 and 1955, let me take another tack. What emphases compatible with separation of church and state can properly be made to reflect the great realities of our religious heritage on the world scene?
A. The main thing is to tell the truth. And if you are going to tell the truth about America, you have to tell the truth about a man like William Penn, who set so much the tone of our lives when he called his commonwealth “an holy experiment” in government. We cannot explain why it is that we want liberty and justice for all, equality before the law, due process of law, the dignity of the individual, unless we explain the deep biblical roots from which these came. The fundamental ideas that we call the ideas of democracy today did not come from Greece, important as ancient Greece was. They came much more from the biblical heritage, and if we do not say this we are not getting the truth told.
Q. Are you wholly convinced as a professional philosopher that it is impossible to sustain these convictions on the basis merely of evolutionary naturalism?
A. I’m sure that it is not. I believe with all my heart in the organic metaphor, namely, that you cannot keep the flowers alive if they are separated from their sustaining roots. I said more than twenty years ago that our great danger is that of trying to establish a cut-flower civilization. I believe this now more than I did then, because the evidence has accumulated. Look, for example, at our immense growth in crime, when we have poured out billions for education and for the renewal of our great cities. In many places we are doing worse instead of better, and I think this is exactly what we can expect if we are not naïve. I believe that much of the danger of modern man lies in naïvely thinking that you can get something for nothing. I do not believe that you can.
Q. An associate professor in the humanities in Stanford University, where you yourself once taught, has written that the controlling philosophy of the American campus is naturalistic; that the most influential faculty members on our campuses are committed to the philosophy that nature is the ultimate real, and hence that man is essentially only an animal, that there is no immortality, that there are no enduring moral values or unchanging truths—that God is not. If this be so, is there within the American university milieu the intellectual resource for an effective confrontation of the Communist alternative?
A. There is, but it is not now united. Scattered around are men of great intellectual powers and very deep reverence. But they are very conscious of being out of the mainstream. And I can hardly think of anything more important than to help them to have a sense of buttressing one another. They are a minority, of course, but remember that Christianity was a minority in the ancient pagan world. This is the role that Christians can play and play very well. But they need to know what they are, and they need to be able to have the help of one another. This will not be done by voices crying in the wilderness.
Q. Recently there have been proposals for an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies that would bring together evangelical scholars so that they would be able to give time not only to completing their creative projects but also to an exchange of mind and heart and a sharing of mutual concerns and convictions about the contemporary scene. Do you feel that this proposal has anything to commend it?
A. I think it has a great deal to commend it. In fact, something like this will have to be done. We must interpret and speak to the intellectual life of modern man. Just giving nice little devotional talks won’t do the trick. For one thing, the opponents of Christianity don’t mind these nice little devotional talks. They write them off and are perfectly satisfied. What we need is somebody to challenge naturalism with all the toughness exhibited by the late Archbishop William Temple in Nature, Man and God. I think this can and must be done by men in our generation now, as it was by Temple a generation ago.
Q. Do you think that evangelical scholars have a remarkable opportunity now that the liberal and neo-orthodox wings of contemporary Protestantism have largely taken an anti-intellectual tack?
A. Yes. You see, both of them are clearly in decay, and the reign of neo-orthodoxy is over. We are now in a kind of intellectual vacuum in which somebody could fill the space if he would. It would probably have to be a group, a group who are strongly rational at the same time that they are deeply committed and unapologetic in their Christian commitment. Now I believe here is the new style of leadership that is just on the edge of coming to the front—and, oh, I want to see this in the coming days! I hope to live the last third of my life in the period in which this is emerging, and I shall do all I can to further its emergence.
Q. What about the role of religion and the teaching of religion on the state university campuses?
A. Here is where there is probably real hope. I believe in the small college, of course, as you know; this is why I left a very large university to go to a small college twenty years ago. And I’m glad I did. But I will have to admit that today some of the most vigorous Christian intellectualism is to be found on the state university campuses rather than in the old-line denominational colleges. Many of the old-line denominational colleges think of Christianity as old hat, so they revolt against it.
Q. And they tend to peddle the contrary ideas of the secular university climate against which the best advocates of historic Christian theism are able to hold the line on some state university campuses.
A. Now isn’t this a paradox? So that perhaps the great secular state university is coming to have people who are in revolt against it and the natural revolt would be that of those committed to Christianity.
Q. How acceptable do you think evangelical scholars will be in the religion departments of state universities? Do you think the pluralistic emphasis tends to discriminate, especially against anyone committed to an absolutist point of view?
A. It probably does. This is why my biggest hope lies in having such scholars stationed in a great variety of departments. I want to see them in biology, in psychology, and in philosophy. Professor Jellema’s great work at Indiana University is a marvelous example of how this is possible. I think he probably did ten times as much in philosophy as he could have done if he had been teaching religion, where all of these prejudices that you mention might have appeared.
Q. Do you think that America can fulfill its highest national destiny if its people are unfamiliar with, and do not care about, the great biblical teachings?
A. Oh, there is no chance whatever. For example, they cannot even understand the great issues, if this is the case. How in the world can a person really appreciate our best literature, including that of Shakespeare and Milton, if he does not know the biblical images? How in the world can we understand what is meant by the assertion that all men are created equal—which is what the Declaration of Independence says—unless we have some idea of the meaning of creation? So, the notion that we can cut ourselves off from all of this and do just as well—this is an example of the naïveté that I mentioned earlier. You see, the Christian today doesn’t have to be the representative of obscurantism. He is the representative of rationality. What he is objecting to is superficialism and mere emotionalism and naïveté. Isn’t it nice to have the tables turned this way?
Q. Despite rising church membership, competent studies show that the laity by and large have been increasingly critical of the institutional church. Do you think that the strong emphasis on political and social matters in preaching has been a cause of this?
A. No doubt it has been part of the cause. I believe that the period of rising memberships is all over, and it is perfectly clear that the period when it was easy to get good crowds in public worship is over. We are in a period in which committed Christians are clearly in a minority and will be more so. And I want to take this as our basis of hope and not of despair. I believe that what we will need is the kind of preaching in which people are not afraid of dealing with the fundamental issues of the human heart. If preaching is merely political, of course, it is very mixed up. Now, you know I am not saying that we must avoid the permeation of the world. I’m saying we must permeate the world, but we must permeate the world from a solid center.
Q. Are Sunday school materials also to blame for the prevalent unfamiliarity with the Bible?
A. I think they are. Now some effort is being made to change that in the various denominations. But I will admit that some of the Sunday school materials have been almost purely naturalistic, and mostly about flowers and birds.
Q. To what extent does the secularization of the public school contribute to the decline?
A. Oh, it contributes very greatly, because if people are convinced that the biblical heritage has nothing to do with the world of knowledge, of course they are not going to pay any attention to it. And everything we are doing makes it seem as though it doesn’t have anything to do with the world of knowledge.
Q. How much of the fault belongs to the American home, rather than external agencies?
A. A great deal. The Jews are right, of course, that the chief religious education ought to be in the home. The fact that our modern homes have capitulated is a very great basis of sorrow.
Q. In recent years working hours have diminished and leisure hours increased, and this tendency is being greatly accelerated by automation and cybernation. Do you think that as a result Americans are becoming a pleasure-seeking and fun-loving people? Are we Americans using leisure time responsibly?
The committed Christian is not now thrown to the lions, as were the Christians in Rome long ago, but there are nevertheless, subtle forms of contemporary persecution. A man who takes Christ seriously is often looked upon as a hopeless fossil and is considered an enthusiast or a fanatic. In short, he is an oddity. This is not because Christian values are entirely rejected in the contemporary world. Indeed, there are many evidences which show that several Christian values survive for a while after the abandonment of the faith from which they first emerged. A striking illustration of this is seen in the contemporary drive for social justice. Much of this effort clearly stems from Christian roots even though the connection with those roots has now been severed.
It would be foolish to deny that many of the characteristic men and women of our age are decent people. Though they would find it fairly laughable if they were accused of being unapologetic agents of Jesus Christ in the world, they are often fair, and they try to be just. Though we do have, in our time of unparalleled affluence, a striking rise in the crime rate, most of the people are not criminals. They give to the community chest; they maintain an uncostly membership in some church; they have some degree of fidelity to their marriage vows. Very few of these people would steal your purse if you made the mistake of leaving it behind and not many are extreme in cheating the government of its lawful revenue. The strange fact is that these people, who constitute the obvious majority, are almost universally opposed to the kind of Christianity represented by the New Testament. The claims are too strong; the price is too high; the fire of evangelism is too hot. The crucial fact is that all evangelism is faintly embarrassing. The spirit of the Book of Acts makes us uncomfortable. We are discomfited by the young Mormon missionaries who come to town and we find it necessary to minimize the effectiveness of Billy Graham. Though the New Testament describes a hot fire, we prefer the damp wick.
One possible response to the minority status of the Christians is for interpreters of the Gospel to try to make the Gospel conform to what the world already respects. Thus we are told very loudly that Christians must give up all of their ancient language, including the language used by Christ himself. The advice is that we must no longer speak of sin, though we can perhaps speak of maladjustment. We must not speak of truth, for that is too harsh. There are high officials in the churches who now express the view that the Christian message must be altered to make it acceptable to the men and women who, they affirm, live in a wholly new age.
The Human Situation
It is time to challenge the confident talk about the radical discontinuity between our generation and all the preceding ones. It is true, of course, that we move physically with greater speed, but this is only one phase of the total situation. A little thought should make us aware that a man can hate his wife just as much while traveling six hundred miles an hour as when traveling six. We have, indeed, some education, but only the very immature suppose that we are consequently wise. Furthermore, technical knowledge does not necessarily make men good or compassionate or loyal. It is time for someone to say clearly that the ultimate human situation has not changed at all. Undoubtedly, we shall place men on the moon, but only the naïve could suppose that such a feat would alter human motives. All thoughtful readers can be grateful to James Burnham for his contention in The Suicide of the West that, in the words of Billy Graham, highly educated people “have inward drives, greeds, compulsions, passions and a lust for power that are not eliminated by any known process of education” (World Aflame, Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1965, p. xiv).
The truth is that modern man is overimpressed by his own achievements. To put a rocket into an orbit that is more than a hundred miles from the surface of the earth takes a great deal of joint thought and effort, but we tend to overstate the case. Though men who ride a few miles above the earth are called astronauts, this is clearly a misnomer. Men will not be astronauts until they ride among the stars, and it is important to remember that most of the stars are thousands of light-years away. The Russians are even more unrestrained in their overstatement, calling their men cosmonauts. Someone needs to say, “Little man, don’t take yourself quite so seriously.”
It is clear that if Christians are to bring the power of Jesus Christ to the world, they must make themselves understood, and this involves difficult intellectual labor, but this is not the same as making the lines fuzzy in order to make the Gospel acceptable. We are far more effective if we know that the Gospel will never be entirely acceptable, and that the Christian Movement will continue to be a minority movement. The Gospel must seek to penetrate the world and all of its parts, but it cannot do so unless there is a sense in which it is in contrast to the world. Herein lies the central paradox.
The denial of the paradox comes in many ways, the chief of which is the increasing tendency of the Church to be identical with the world. To many outsiders the Church appears to be a thriving business, the appearance of worldly success accentuated by our constant emphasis upon promotion. The pastor often becomes more a business executive than anything else, with the operation seeming to center on the mortgage or the budget. People who are urged to give to God are naturally disturbed when they find that they are chiefly giving to human salaries. Those who attend worship out of a deep sense of personal need are often disappointed when they note the importance of the announcements and realize the extent to which these are frankly promotional. Attendance is being whipped up for the next meeting or the next dinner.
The stranger who is visited by a representative of the Church frequently gets the impression that he is being viewed as a prospective customer, a potential addition to the numbers or the income, rather than a person who is approached for his own sake. Part of the shame of the contemporary Church is that it seems to be motivated by self-interest. We need to be reminded that the Church exists for men and not men for the Church.
Never Optional
One of the great theological gains of the twentieth century has been widespread recognition of the necessity of the Church in any vital Christianity.… The fellowship is intrinsic and is never optional, if the life of Christ is to make an impact on the world. But it is possible for the Church to exist, with a show of success, and still fail in its essential function. It is always failing when it becomes an institution which is bent on saving itself. It cannot save the world if it demonstrates an obsession with material things.
When the pastor is an entrepreneur and the Church is a business, the Christian community develops a majority consciousness and thereby ceases to be the saving salt. As Christ predicted, it is easy for the salt to be dissolved away. Without its salty character the Church is not good for anything, because it has lost its reason for being. To be distinctive it must recognize its minority status and accept the consequences of that recognition. What the world desperately needs is a redemptive fellowship centered in Jesus Christ, as an antidote to the evils of civilization. The problem is not that of organizing a congregation, which is easy, but rather that of seeing to it that salt does not lose its savor. The crucial question now, as in the beginning, is “How shall its saltness be restored?” (Luke 14:34).
A. Here you’ve got a great topic. Going into New York I noticed by the side of the road a great big board with the words, “Swing a fun loan!” Fun is now the center of everything. I see page after page in the newspapers advising of places where one can have more fun and pay nothing down. Well, this really is very convenient.
Q. Credit is legitimate and to a certain extent necessary within a capitalistic system, but do we not tend more and more to go into debt for recreation?
A. Oh, yes. Buy now, pay later. This is the whole message. So then, we are getting a group of people who are made frenetic by the fact that they have more bills at the end of the month than their salaries will cover. But then they have to borrow more in order to go out and have fun, so you see it just gets worse and worse. What a sad people it must be that must put this much emphasis on fun!
Q. Automation is creating unemployment and yet increasing the possibilities of leisure. What is the way out?
A. The way out is for those of us who care about culture to see these free hours as the hours in which we do the real human job. The time is coming when we won’t need very many hours to raise enough food for everybody or to make enough clothing for everybody. In this we stand in great contrast to our ancestors, who had to use all their hours to survive. But all this means that the real business of mankind can now be our business: truth, beauty, goodness. The alternative to unemployment is employment in a higher sense.
Q. The humanities and philosophy and literature have taken a back seat to science and technology. To a considerable extent, this result has been encouraged by government grants.
A. Yes. Now that also must change, because if you have technologists who don’t know what life is about, instead of making life better they may make it worse. Again, you see, it’s a kind of adolescent view of what the human situation is. The adolescent is always more concerned with gadgets than with anything else.
Q. The young people of today are in many ways a rebel generation. Is this a causeless rebellion? Is relativism its byword? Is cynicism increasing? And what can be done?
A. What I think is that young people simply have responded to propaganda—and part of the propaganda, including that of the advertisements, is that youth is a better thing than age. So they conclude that seventeen-year-olds naturally are wiser than their fathers and mothers. They really believe this, you understand. Now, they’ll get over it. The wonderful thing about cockiness is that it can be overcome by a little maturity.
Q. What do you think of the new pacifism—pick and choose your war?
A. Well, I think this is just plainly immoral. The Christian kind of pacifism, which is that of my Quaker tradition, is one of very great courage, in which one is convinced of what the will of Christ is for him. This is a very different thing from picking and choosing your war. Picking and choosing is like saying that all moral values are subjective, and that we may choose whatever we prefer. Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. I believe that the moral values are objective.
Q. What are the possibilities for world peace generally?
A. The possibilities now as always are dim. We will go through long turmoil before we have anything like a really established peace on earth. This is hard to accomplish, and anybody who has the simple answer is bound to be wrong.
Q. Is the conflict between races worsening on a world scale, or are you optimistic about the progress we have made?
A. Well, I would say every intelligent person has to combine some hope with some fears. I see places where we’re gaining, cases of real development of equality of opportunity. But on the world scale, I think the danger is immense.
Q. Theology seems to be fishing around for a pond in which it can catch a following. Where do you think theology will go in the next generation?
A. I think it will go in the direction of an unapologetic theistic realism. I think the day will come when the fellow who calls himself a Christian atheist will be regarded as a confused child, and we will almost forget that there ever were such people. It will seem so crazy! I believe in the truth, in short, and the real issues are too solemn to be faddish.
Q. Where do you think the Gospel of Christ most effectively cuts across modern man’s outlook?
A. Especially in this, that Christ says the wise householder brings forth things new and old. This is a strangely overlooked text. He combines humble respect for the ancient wisdom with the contemporary statement of the truth. Here is where Christ transcends both the obscurantist and the merely contemporary existentialist.
Q. You have traveled around the world a great deal, Dr. Trueblood. What virtues still characterize the American man and woman?
A. The chief virtue that I see is that, in spite of the moral rot, the majority of our wounds are still the wounds of fidelity. The majority of our people are honest, and have a sense of trying under God to do the task to which they are called. The leftover of the biblical view of man is really strong, and for this I am extremely grateful. I want to be sure that we do not become complacent and lose it. And I want to be sure that we keep renewing it, because it will not renew itself. So you see, my life is a life of both memory and hope. I thank God for the memories of the wise and good from whom we can learn. And I hope that we can apply this to our own present generation. I believe if enough of us think together, we can.
Q. On the university campuses many students seem to be ahead of their professors in a reaching for spiritual ideals and for religious reality. Is there any exhortation that you would present such young people in regard to their commitment to Christ and the opportunities for Christian penetration in the oncoming generation?
A. Yes. I think that the way they will “make a difference” is by binding themselves into small groups where they pray together and share together their way of penetrating the academic society around them. I believe that the strength will come in these small cells and that these can be established anywhere. I would like to get as many young people as possible to follow the practice of reading reverently, thoughtfully, humbly, and intellectually a passage of Scripture every day of their lives. I’d like to build up a hard core, a kind of Gideon’s band, of people who accept such a discipline, and I believe that they would “make a difference” wherever they are.
Q. If the young people in our universities were to commit themselves fully to Christ, how much of an impact do you think they could have in the molding of a new generation?
A. They could have an enormous effect, especially if at the same time they are among the most hardworking and able scholars—so that nobody can pooh-pooh them. Then they will make a real difference, because they will be respected.
Q. Your plans will now carry you to London for nine months. How will you invest your time there?
A. My major task in London is to write a book on Robert Barclay. I have had it in mind for a long time. Barclay has not been fully appreciated by subsequent generations. He was appointed the first governor of East Jersey because of his high moral standing. He wrote a book called An Apology for the True Christian Divinity Held by the Quakers (1608). This very able book gives as deep an insight into God and man and Christ as I know in all of our literature. What I want to do now is to make something as big and strong as this really available. I want many of our people to begin to realize that some of the very best things are not things that have come out during the current year, but things that have weathered the generations, and that people who lived in another stormy time have something to say to us in our stormy time. I want to tell as many people in our generation as I can that there is a sound center. Archimedes said you could lift anything if only you had a solid fulcrum. I will say frankly that I find this fulcrum in Jesus Christ. This is the center from which I start. I believe the One who said, “Come unto me.” I do not think that this is the least bit outdated or that it is any less relevant to our time than to other times.
