Heresy: An Outmoded Concept?

No sooner was Bishop Pike’s If This Be Heresy off the presses than the emergency theological committee of fellow Episcopalians announced that the concept of heresy is out of date. James A. Pike’s latest flinging down of the theological gauntlet, and the report from the blue-ribbon committee asked to decide how much Pike and others may disbelieve, converge on the verge of this month’s Episcopal General Convention, which meets every three years.

The convention will be asked to approve the committee’s conclusion that “the word ‘heresy’ should be abandoned” except in relation to the losers in the great theological debates of the early centuries.

In this key recommendation, the committee quotes a discussion of history by J. V. Langmead Casserley of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, one of four experts (Pike was another) who testified before the committee in April.

But Casserley disagrees with the committee’s conclusion. He is willing to keep things flexible for men struggling with “new theological questions.” But he objects “very violently to reformulation of ancient heresies and pretending that this is a new contribution.” To him, the Pike affair is not as much a case of heresy as “gross incompetence.” “If we are to have a serious theological debate, it can only be with real theological knowledge.” Thus, he opposes a heresy trial for Pike, which would also be “widely misunderstood by the public.” “The real heretics were great men,” he says, and Pike doesn’t deserve the compliment.

When the committee was formed in January, Pike tabled his move to force an investigation of his views to “clear my name.” He sought this study after the House of Bishops gave him a knuckles-rap last year. In his new book, Pike says he’ll have to wait and see what the committee and the General Convention do before he decides whether to force the investigation. One committee member believed that “nothing the committee said would have satisfied” Pike, and predicted that a publicity-garnering investigation was inevitable. But Pike said later he will call off the investigation if the General Convention accepts the committee recommendations.

Besides fears about dissension and damage and an Episcopal urge to keep things cool, another reason for the effort to avoid a trial may be the fact that other church leaders share some of Pike’s ideas. For instance, Pike says “a leading American bishop” urged him not to put his controversial views in print, saying, in effect, “We know these things, Jim, but don’t let ‘the little people’ know.”

The study committee was chaired by Bishop Stephen F. Bayne, Jr.,¹ former executive officer of the Anglican Communion, now chairman of the church Overseas Department, and a leading figure in the Consultation on Church Union. Bayne, relatively conservative in theology, was on last year’s Dun Committee, which proposed the censure of Pike. Bayne says his committee was “representative” of the denomination and unanimous in its report.

The trouble with the word heresy, the committee says, is that “it too often conjures up a picture of a static fortress of propositional theology that requires to be, and can be, defended by appeal to the letter of a theological statement.” The word implies inappropriate “theological pre-judgment” and “a set of theological categories unconditioned by their historical and cultural period.”

While concerned with encouraging theological experimentation, the committee recognizes that there are limits. The Church should do everything it can to hold its errant sons, but if they persist, “dis-association” of the Church from particular views is the way to handle it. Thus, they propose making it even harder to get a heresy action off the ground than it is now. “Heresy trials are anachronistic,” the committee decided.

The question arises, of course, who should be in the Church and who shouldn’t. The committee says “as much as humanly possible, the decision to maintain or sever the relationship” should be made by the individual critic of church beliefs. As for the Episcopal Church, membership does not involve “thinking alike,” but “doing the Christian things, including the liturgical acts.” So the normal test of membership proposed is “the willingness of a person to share in the worship of the Prayer Book with a consenting mind.”

The twenty-page committee report says the Church “first of all” has an obligation “to be related to, in constant communication with, the world.” It “also has an obligation to its Creator.” “The controlling motive in theological debate” is said to be “obedience to the Church’s mission.…”

The procedure of beginning with the horizontal rather than the vertical is even more explicit in If This Be Heresy, in which Pike struggles to say as much as he can about a personal God and life after death from an anthropomorphic base, rather than a revelational one. He is able to affirm both God and life after death from empirical data, though the stress on God’s becoming rather than his being, in the mode of certain Continental theologians, obscures whether God in fact existed in the past and raises the possibility that man created God.

The latest from Pike’s pen is by and large rather bland compared to some of his previous utterances.

Point by point, Pike attacks the authorities Episcopalians have traditionally used for doctrine: the Bible, the early church councils, the ecumenical creeds, liturgies, confessions of faith, and consensus. On the last point, he marshals opinion polls to justify his “sense of responsibility and pastoral sensitivity” to the “majority of Church members” who face a “growing sense of hypocrisy as the credibility gap is fast widening between unqualified Prayer Book statements and what seems to them plausible.” His main source of data is the Glock-Stark survey on anti-Semitism, but some polls are poles apart. Last month, Gallup reported that 83 per cent of Americans over 18 years of age believe in the Trinity.

In a sweeping generalization, Pike contends that “except for the very active and devoted members of the Fundamentalist sects, Christians as a whole read or hear very little more of the Bible than is read on Sundays in church.”

As a companion to the Pike book, Harper and Row is issuing The Bishop Pike Affair by “lay theologian” and lawyer William Stringfellow and poet Anthony Towne. The book, likely to ruffle some feathers within the House of Bishops, seems a tip-off to the approach Pike may take if the investigation proceeds. It discusses the development of dogma and authority, due process in the Church, and the history of charges against Pike. (The first one, according to Pike’s book, was sparked by a 1961 editorial in CHRISTIANITY TODAY criticizing views Pike had expressed in a Christian Century article.)

The most important new defense put forth by Stringfellow and Towne is that the Pike case is intricately bound up with his liberal socio-political views, and is an episode in the attempt of a “rightist, racist, anti-ecumenical, traditionalist” faction to take over the Episcopal Church. The authors consider such a takeover “a realistic, and imminent, possibility.” Similar alarums were sent abroad in the Nation earlier this year by the Rev. Lester Kinsolving, at that time a full-time diocesan lobbyist seeking to liberalize California’s abortion law. The Right is gaining fast in the Executive Council and the General Convention, the book contends. Thus:

“In such a context it becomes quite secondary whether James A. Pike is, in any rational reference, a heretic or not.”

Synod Speculation

He will. He will. He will. He won’t. That’s what “informed sources” said respectively to Newsweek, United Press International, St. Louis Review, and Religious News Service about whether Pope Paul would issue that birth-control encyclical in conjunction with this month’s Synod of Bishops in Rome.

Rumors were running that the Pope would moderately reaffirm current bans on artificial methods, but Newsweek said some fine theological distinctions would be made to permit some leeway.

Synod speculation centers even more on theological controversy in the Netherlands. There Father Robert Adolfs, an Augustinian prior, has unleashed an attack on the church’s aspirations to worldly power and pomp. Without reform, the church will dig her grave, he contends, and with it The Grave of God. Publication of his book with that title continues, despite a ban by the order’s superior.

Conservatives are also upset about the new catechism approved by the entire Dutch hierarchy (see November 11, 1966, issue, page 56). Some rephrasing was made after a special meeting with Vatican theologians. Now the reports are that new theology will be the first and major topic of the synod, where such matters as the celibacy requirement and social issues have been ruled out. Three weeks ago the Pope issued another of his warnings against post-conciliar types who “question fundamental doctrines.”

In other Catholic events:

• The Pope made his first important step toward reforming the Italian-dominated Curia (Vatican administration) by directing that each of the twelve major offices add seven bishops chosen from throughout the world.

• Father Patrick O’Connor reports for National Catholic News Service that Communists are “strangling” religion in North Viet Nam, particularly in towns and villages. Even in Hanoi, where churches are still open, church schools have been taken over by the regime and the seminary has been closed.

• A new catechism used in Chicago Catholic schools is under attack from a group called “Concerned Parents,” because it praises Martin Luther King.

• The “acting” top public relations man for the U.S. hierarchy since June, layman Jerry Renner, left in a huff and criticized the “mystique of secrecy” and antagonism toward the press among bishops. He was then named chief publicist for the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

John Courtney Murray

John Courtney Murray, 63, leading American Jesuit theologian, died in New York August 16. Murray played a major role in the Vatican Council II, through his work on its religious liberty decree. He was a professor at Woodstock College and director of the La-Farge Institute, a religious dialogue center in Manhattan.

“Dialogue is a contemporary way of presenting the Gospel,” Murray contended. He was a friend of many Protestant churchmen and well known for his efforts to reconcile traditional Roman Catholic views with American culture.

Free Church Ecumenism

The Baptist Unity Movement conference may have fizzled, but even so this was quite a summer for free-church ecumenism. It began with the Conference on the Concept of the Believers’ Church in Louisville, called “one of the most significant” meetings in the history of the free-church movement by Baptist Press veteran W. Barry Garrett.

It closed last month with a significant session of the Executive Committee of the Baptist World Alliance and a concurrent Baptist World Convocation. These meetings took place in Nashville, a city where various breeds of Baptists tend to run various offices in parallel isolation. Despite racial violence earlier this summer, the major rally featuring William R. Tolbert, BWA president and vice-president of Liberia, drew 6,000 persons in the city’s first major convergence of Negro and white Baptists.

Tolbert said Christians must replace “black” and “white” power with the power of love and seek “the salvation of the world.” “Then selfishness, intolerance, impatience, bigotries, prejudices, and hate and violence will disappear,” he said.

Participating in the one-day convention were the Southern Baptist Convention, biggest Baptist body in the world; the two separated National Baptist Conventions, which employ many Nashville Negroes in publishing operations and rarely get together; and the Nashville-based Free Will Baptists, a mostly white body not in the BWA that rarely gets together with anyone else.

Leaders of the four bodies issued a call for the convocation in the wake of rioting in a host of U. S. cities. They said, “In the face of racial disorders that are among the worst the nation has seen since the Civil War, we call upon our people for a demonstration of the power of Christ to change our prejudices.”

During the BWA meeting of subsequent days, the Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, president of the larger National Convention, said, “There is no way we can solve the nation’s racial problems by turning from law and order, and by burning, looting, and killing.… The Negro must return to the principles upon which this land was founded.”

Although all Americans share some blame for the riots because of limits on freedom and justice for Negroes, said Jackson, he also blamed Stokely Carmichael and other agitators, the press that builds such men up, public officials who wait too long before taking action, and churches that shun discussion in favor of picketing and “use of force to change society.” He said that “the Church must risk now its budgets, its fine buildings, and its power for the cause of racial justice.”

But the Rev. S. B. Kyles of Memphis said Negroes have made gains they wouldn’t have made if they had not resorted to violence: “For ten years we’ve been saying violence won’t work, and the Negro people finally got tired of waiting. When they tried it, it did work.”

Foy Valentine of the SBC Christian Life Commission said violence and anarchy are “tragic reflections of white racism tracing back for hundreds of years. Black-power racism has fed on discrimination, prejudice, unemployment, poor housing, poverty, deprivation, and all kinds of social disadvantages to create an explosive situation.”

At the end of the meeting, the executives issued an appeal to Baptists of all nations to work for world peace, racial justice, relief of suffering, and freedom for preaching the Gospel. After considerable discussion, the conferees decided to open up next year’s meeting for more consideration of current issues.

The Louisville conference was an unofficial assemblage of scholars from various denominational families in the free-church tradition, including members of eight Baptist groups, Pentecostalists, Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ, Quakers and Mennonites, Church of God (Indiana), Church of the Brethren, and Brethren in Christ.

Chairman James Leo Garrett, professor at the host Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the meeting was not “ecumenical” in the formal sense of having official representation and discussing merger possibilities. The approach to unity of his colleague Dale Moody, like that of several other speakers, was less rigidity on the matter of baptism and communion and more emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures. “The teachings of Scripture need to be put above all denominational traditions. Scripture is our one authority,” he said.

The Old Country Has Changed

The Mennonites of the world returned home to Holland this summer to visit their birthplace, but it was hardly a return to the past. The old Dutch mother church is by far the most liberal of all the daughters of Menno Simons, even though in recent years Karl Barth again drew its attention to the Word of God.

Nearly 4,500 guests from thirty-two countries gathered at the eighth Mennonite World Conference. They listened to eighty speeches and made a sentimental journey to Witmarsum, the hamlet in the Frisian dairy country where Menno was born.

The conferees formed a diversified group of conservatives and liberals, of separatists and conformists. Dutch Mennonites were amazed to see that many American women still cover their heads, but their own mini-skirted daughters must have shocked others. Yet the Amish Mennonites didn’t turn up, and the extreme Dutch liberals hardly spoke.

One Dutch newspaper labeled the conference a mini-ecumenical gathering. Much was said about the place of Mennonites in the world, little about their place among fellow brethren. Only two of the represented groups were members of the World Council of Churches, and there was little interest in ecumenical questions.

Responsibility in the world was the real theme. Speakers called for a stronger witness and stronger service. Reuben Short, secretary of the Congo Inland Mission, asked conference guests to evangelize. The same day, Elmer Neufeld called for service and personal sacrifices for “a world in need.” Little was done to combine these two calls; each stood on its own. The days are past, however, when Mennonites could be labeled as other-worldly separatists.

The most extreme voice was that of Negro leader Vincent Harding, an associate of Martin Luther King. He wanted a new conference, not somewhere in the West, but where the revolutionaries are, to study the problems of the Viet Cong, the Negroes, and other freedom fighters in the world who have lost their faith in peaceful resistance. But he spoke too late. The conference itself already had closed with a quiet message asking the governments of the world to give freedom and righteousness to their people in a peaceful way.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Quakers: One Peace

The 200,000 Friends (called Quakers by just about everyone) held their first world conference in fifteen years this summer in Greensboro, North Carolina. To no one’s surprise, pleas for peace were in the air.

By far the most publicized was from United Nations Secretary General U Thant, who rarely makes public appearances, much less speeches to religious gatherings. Thant presented one of his harshest critiques of U. S. policy in Viet Nam and urged a halt in bombing the North as a needed first step toward peace. Later, the delegates quietly reached a similar “consensus.”

The Greensboro meeting favored all efforts to get medical aid to all of Viet Nam, a policy that has created conflict between some Quakers and the U. S. Treasury Department. Soon after the meeting, Royal Canadian mounties seized some Hanoi-bound aid packages at the border. American Quakers have been sending aid to North Viet Nam by way of Canada. They earlier had been refused U. S. export permits at the border. Treasury is still talking about prosecuting a crew that sailed a shipload of aid to Hanoi earlier this year. Two of the crewmen participated in a protest vigil at the Pentagon in August. The Philadelphia group plans a return visit.

Retired federal Judge John Biggs, Jr., 71, of Wilmington, Delaware, quit as presiding clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting because aid-Hanoi activities were taken officially rather than by individual action.

Meanwhile, Quaker refugee-aid worker David Stickney, returning from eighteen months in South Viet Nam. charged that civilian casualties are three to eight times more than military-casualties there.