Review of Current Religious Thought: November 10, 1961

Tarkio, Missouri, where I am presently engaged as a professor, is noted for the following four things although not necessarily in the following order: Tarkio College—a fast growing Presbyterian liberal arts school, two banks, popcorn, and pellets. Colleges and banks you somewhat understand, and maybe popcorn, but then did you know that the popcorn is largely controlled by a theater chain—when you integrate business you have to control your sources of supply—and could you know that Tarkio may well be the popcorn center of the world?

Pellets are something else again, so in due course I went down to look upon the Tarkio Pelleting Plant. Pellets are little units of food mixed and molded about the size of the last joint on your little finger. At the top of the plant are great bins filled with various grains and grasses and somewhere in the arrangements of bins and conveyors there are binders such as molasses. By a judicious playing upon certain buttons at the floor level of the plant, grains, grasses, and binders move through the giant mechanism to come out at the end of the line as molded pellets of food exactly balanced to suit the needs of fresh cows or baby steers or fat pigs. There is no guessing here; first-rate farmers, county agents, and state university agriculturists are constantly looking in on these matters, and it is pretty well assumed that all hands know exactly what they are doing in the feeding of pigs and beef at every stage from the cradle to the grave, and by the looks of the animals around here they are running a very successful enterprise in this part of the country.

Now to some current religious thoughts. From the wide doors of the pelleting plant one looks across to a huge metal building and I went to see this building. The inside floor area looked about the size of half a football field, the height of the building was better than three stories, and this huge building was about half filled with shelled corn, not needed by the pelleting plant, not needed by anybody apparently; it was just stored grain. Inquiry brought the information that the farmers would still be bringing more shelled corn and that the building could not possibly hold it all. “Yes,” I said, “I can see that this year’s yield will be very heavy.” “Not this year’s,” they told me. “They will be bringing in last year’s crop to store here to have room to store this year’s crop in their own bins.” And from the door of this huge building we could look up a little rise to rows and rows of the round grain storage bins there—all of them full. Along with corn and popcorn, pigs, steers, and horses, the storage bins for grain now characterize the landscape in any direction you may look in the rich central grain states of our blessed rich country. The end is not yet; this year’s crop “they say” will be the biggest ever.

The man who runs the storehouse came out to meet us. “Do you know what?” he said before introductions, “I just figured out that a megaton has the same power as a heap of TNT a mile square and three miles high.” Thus he had been whiling away some of his spare time on a bright brisk afternoon in Missouri. The storage bins and the megatons began to chew away at me and they began to interlock in my puzzled and sometimes addled brain.

H. L. Mencken suggested one time that the really large problems facing humanity are insoluble, and I always thought of this as another of his cynicisms. But the problems of farm surplus and atomic bombs, together or separately, have me on dead center in my thinking time. I try my best to keep informed and to pass rational judgments and I try to think what the Christian church and the Christian minister can speak to these amazingly awful problems which are amongst us. There is no use carping and criticizing; no one knows any good answers yet and I sometimes suspect that we shall only discover the answers in a context of absolute repentence and waiting on God, but then it appears that most of the people who are deciding our grain and megaton problems are not yet ready for godly fear or godly sorrow, which leaves one with the historically-sound guess that only terrible tragedy can once again bring us to our knees and no one likes to think about that or even preach about that.

Meanwhile, quite bright and decent men are making money not raising grain, or raising too much grain, or selling storage bins, or hauling surpluses now here and now there, and other bright fellows are thinking up ways of putting this or that foreign megapolis “on target” and figuring out meanwhile whether to press the fatal red button first or take a chance on pressing the red button a very close second. And all the while you have the eerie feeling that some not-so-nice people are just a bit trigger happy to send us on our way.

Frequently I try to solve problems by imaging what I would do if I had all power and authority. That way I wouldn’t have to worry about getting people to do things and would have to think only about ends and not means. Then when the ends and goals are clear I can think about the ways and means, the possibilities. But on surpluses and megatons I can’t think of any answers at all. The senselessness of our surpluses in the midst of world need leaves my religion in utter frustration; the impossibility of imagining either winning or losing an atomic war makes me ashamed of either answer in terms of the Christian hope; the requirements laid upon me as a father of a family who ought to provide for the safety of his children leaves me with the choice of staying out in the open to be hit or to be eaten away with fallout and the equally frightful choice of bringing my family into the open, crawling out of our bomb shelter into the world that has been bombed. What is responsible loving care in such a case? Could it be in God’s merciful and sufficient wisdom that the surplus bins are to take care of the people who last the blast and that these bins should now be coated with some covering to protect them from fallout? Is that why the bins stand ready? And what provision is anyone making for the water supply?

Tertullian said that he believed Christianity because its is “absurd.” What he meant in his day was that if his world made sense then he was looking for an answer that didn’t make sense in this world’s sensibleness. In the absurdities of our day are we ready for the radical answer of Christ, the “absurd” answer, the “foolishness of God.” Along such lines we shall have to begin to look for our answers and our message. God has given us the desires of our hearts—riches, brains, power—and we have “confusion of face” because our desire has not been for him. So read a “non book” and eat some “non food” and peradventure we shall soon be nonexistent.

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