So We Believe So We Pray

SO

WE BELIEVE

SO WE PRAY

George Arthur Buttrick

Foreword

THESE LINES ARE written in sight of pine trees and a lake. Our world is set in monstrous contrast. Here is quiet; in the city where I work is Babel—raucous headlines, the tattoo of anonymous feet on streets the lonelier for being crowded, men called to war, the frenzy and the fortitude—and above Babel a Damocles blade suspended by a thread. By what right do I find surcease, while other men are beset by the instancy of hunger and fear? Yet such a book as I have tried to write is not remote, for faith and prayer are the world’s life breath. We cannot live on doubts, and we are not sufficient to ourselves, as our chaos tragically tells. We live by faith, and the well-spring of faith is prayer. If faith should fail, our yearned for brotherhood would be but a ghostly light before the final thundercrash.

So this book discusses the main avowals of Christian faith, and then the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. As for the faith, according to my conviction our only real culture has been nurtured in it; and every generation has need for a restatement of faith in its own words and bent of mind, a need doubly urgent in our time of dull factual-isms and specious hopes. As for the Lord’s Prayer, it is prayer’s pattern and fountainhead; and our newer knowledge of the Gospels almost demands its reinterpretation, especially now when men at their wit’s end cry out on God. The linking of the two discussions, far from being forced, is in the nature of things; for prayer becomes blind unless enlightened by the Faith, and faith dies unless nourished by the Prayer.

The chapters on belief are based on lectures given before two groups: The Ministers’ Conference held in Texas Christian University in January, 1948, under the leadership of Dr. M. E. Sadler; and The Ministers’ Convocation, under the auspices of the Southern California Council of Churches and the leadership of Dr. Wilbur C. Parry, held in January, 1949, at the University of Southern California. The substance of the chapters on the Lord’s Prayer has just been offered in lecture form at The Ministers’ Conference of Union Theological Seminary, under the leadership of Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, president, and Dr. Laurence Fenninger, dean of the summer school. The welcome and constructive comment of these groups and their officers have been a large asset. Indebtedness to many writers is shown and acknowledged in the notes: Other men labored, and I have blessedly entered into their labors. Gratitude is due and here heartily given to my secretaries, Miss Ethel Elizabeth King and Mrs. W. Clark Schmidt, who have typed the manuscript; and to my wife, Agnes Gardner Buttrick, who has corrected copy, prepared the notes, compiled the index, and stood by in constant encouragement.

Only false modesty in an author could pretend that his book has no value. Many years of study, together with the pastoral experience of a busy parish, have gone into these pages. With such forging and tempering they should have some modicum of worth. I cannot but hope they may find readers, even that they may be a matin bell summoning to a more gracious day. But no man can judge his own work; this book may soon pass like a leaf on the wind. That issue, with all human hopes, is in Christ’s hands; for He must reign, by shining or untoward event, till he hath put all enemies under his feet of holy love. Let Him do as He will: His will is our peace.

G.A.B.

Sequanota Club

Charlevoix, Michigan

Contents

PART I

So We Believe

   I   Born to Believe

  II   Faith in God

 III   Faith in Jesus Christ

 IV   Faith in the Holy Spirit

  V   Faith in the Church

 VI   Faith in Forgiveness

VII   Faith in Life Eternal

PART II

So We Pray

VIII   The Lord’s Prayer and Our Prayers

   IX   Our Father

    X   The Hallowed Name

  XI   The Coming of the Kingdom

 XII   The Will of God

 XIII   God and Our Daily Bread

 XIV   The Prayer for Pardon

 XV   The Prayer for Deliverance from Evil

XVI   The Doxology of the Prayer

References

Index

PART I

So We Believe

CHAPTER I

Born to Believe

For the which I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.

II Timothy 1:12

A MAGAZINE editor, who has both chance and desire to keep his finger on the public pulse, tells of a comment made by a member of his staff. It was spoken, not as from reporter to editor, but man to man in half confession: There’s a vague change. People want to believe something. But what? They look at the church, then look away again—it is not there. What can a man believe?

Actually, the change is not in the fact that people want to believe something, for human nature has always harbored that want. However much people may want to question and know, far more eagerly they want to believe. Faith is as instinctive as breathing; skepticism at long last is an affront. People not only want to believe; they do believe—something or someone. If they do not believe in God, they try to believe in success or in themselves. When faith in Christ is thwarted or shelved, faith does not cease; as well might a man resolve not to breathe. No, he then sets his faith on gadgets or Hitler or scientism. Modern man, while repudiating the sentimentalism of religious belief, may have sold out to a vast fiction; perhaps he worships his own arguments as the final test of truth. So the change indicated by the reporter is not in the fact that people want to believe something, for that basic want can never change, but in the fact that people are growing tired of modern nostrums and are searching for a better faith.

I

Why do we now desert our belief in progress and the cult of power? Nobody can make accurate appraisal—we are too close to the picture—but a provisional answer can be given. Modern man vaguely knows that there is value in selfhood which totalitarianisms do not honor. Free enterprise has not honored it either, for capitalism has stressed acquisitiveness and so invited strife; and therefore the swing to some form of commonalty need not have surprised us. But communism in its German or Russian form virtually erases the individual; he is fodder. For what? For some forthcoming aggregate of individuals. Thus totalitarianisms not only make no sense but are an insult to the soul. Bricks may be used to prop the social structure, but people are not bricks. People are more even than intricate meshings of bone and nerve and brain: they have value. Modern man does not clearly know what he means by value; it is one of the words by which he tries to shut out the mystery of God. But he is dimly aware of resident worth, and knows that it must be kept. He is looking for a faith that will keep it—on a better level than acquisitiveness.

There are other causes of the vague change. Our materialism has become surfeit to those who have profited, and mistaken envy in those who have been denied the world’s dubious goods. Meanwhile our scientism has left us with arid minds, and has been desecrated to ends of destruction. That latter perversion has hastened the change. For modern men have been obliged to confront a strain of demonism in human nature, an evil that can turn brilliant brain to the manufacture of H-bombs. The demonism may be doom. Does it come from some subliminal unconscious, or is it the work of some devil? It is also guilt, if we regard man as having any responsibility. What to do about demonism and guilt? Is there a structure of grace over against the dark unconscious, a shaft upward as well as a shaft downward? Our modernisms have collapsed, not merely because in some selfish utility they do not work, but because they leave us bereft in our essential nature. That is why there is a vague change.

The change was sure to come. People are born to believe. They cannot live on questionings. For a man to say in honesty, I do not believe that dogma, may be a virtue, provided he can add with radiant mind, Yet I do believe this . . . But without some positive avowal his negations become only darkness, for belief is as native as breathing. People cannot live on facts. Facts are not faith. Of late we have had a windfall of facts, in such multitude that man’s mind can hardly count them, let alone comprehend their meaning. This inability is a portent that university education refuses to confront. It raises the whole problem of essential curriculum, and makes clear that a windfall of facts can be a famine of faith. Facts are like bricks. Modern man now spends his time analyzing the bricks to make sure they are sound. Thus the house is never built, and the spirit of man is left naked to the storm. Facts cannot supply their own meaning; only faith can give them meaning. A poor faith will give them a low meaning—atomic power will become H-bombs.

Suppose our questionings were all answered (it would be dubious gain!), a positive faith on the level of the mind only would still be forlorn. For such a faith would not be faith. It would hardly be better than a proposition in geometry. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but what of it? It is not food for the spirit. Let no reader construe this comment as a plea for an obscurantist faith. Faith must never be counter to reason; yet it must always go beyond reason, for the nature of man is more than rationalism. Faith is emotion as well as reason. Faith is a valor daring the unknown. This Hitler knew. He rushed in to fill the vacuum made by our scientific negations. His speeches were ranting nonsense, but they had fervor; and if choice must be made between rationality and fervor, men will choose fervor. His cause was nihilism, but at least he provided pageantry and a vow unto death; and if men must choose between a scientific order of life on the one hand and nihilism plus banners plus a dangerous commitment on the other, they will choose nihilism. We can learn from our apocalyptic time that men must believe with emotion as well as with brain. Emotion is e-motion: motion out. Emotion is in very fact our motive power. So there is a vague change. Beyond totalitarianism and capitalism, beyond materialism and demonism, beyond negation and an arid mind, people want to believe something. But what?

They look at the church, then look away again—it is not there. Perhaps that averted glance is just, and perhaps unjust. The Church is compromised, for wherein has it been very different in these latter years from the mass of mankind? The Church, far from fertilizing a worldly desert, has been reduced to a trickle by the surrounding sand. The church in Czarist Russia was thus almost suffocated. The church in Germany failed in any strong and instant protest against Hitler; though, it must be added, the measure of protest that did rise came from the church. The church in America: has it not been dyed in the colors of competitive materialism? Yet the survival of the Church, in view of its timidities and even treacheries, becomes more strange; there must be life at its heart. It has dared tyrannies and cannibal isles, without much benefit of money or prestige, and has printed the sign of the Cross on our planet. Admitting that the Church is largely husk, there must be some heart of living grain. Perhaps if we could find that, our vague change would have direction and goal.

II

I know whom I have believed. The word is clear, like the sound of a finely tempered bell. It is sure and decisive; this man, we guess, had cut through his doubts, as sunrise cuts through gloom. Who is he? The modern cliché brands him a dogmatist who fettered the free spirit of Christian faith with chains of coercive theology. That charge is caricature. Paul was a prisoner of his date, as is every man, and so he interpreted his faith in the thought forms of his time and training; and to us these forms seem harsh. Yet he wrote with such pristine light that each succeeding age has been his debtor. His mind is a university—no thinker can ignore him. His statesmanship welded groups of freemen and slaves into a world-wide church. His humanity was so large and warm that friends would walk miles with him rather than leave him, and then weep in very sorrow when the parting could no longer be stayed. His courage is consternation to any weak will. His poetry—Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love¹—has been a sky above man’s journeyings. The modern man who patronizes him as a dogmatist would be comic, if he were not so deformed.

"I know whom I have believed." Whom is the arresting word. We ask, as the reporter asked of the editor, "What can a man believe? Paul might answer: If all you believe is ‘what,’ belief or disbelief will not greatly matter. We are men of energetic hand, and therefore we have looked for the magic formula or the perfect scheme. We shall never find them, and if we did, they would kindle no flame in us; for men cannot rouse a crusade for atomic power or some economic plan. We are men of mind, and therefore we have looked for a philosophy to answer all our questionings. We shall never find it; and if we did, it would condemn us to live in a cold house. Hannah Arendt takes issue with the religious tradition as follows: I would really like to know who among the great philosophers since Spinoza and Descartes—outside of Catholic philosophy—accepted ‘traditional religious beliefs.’ "² The petulant conceit in such a statement is hard to miss. Of course there have been great Protestant philosophers, but that fact is beside the point. This is the main issue: so long as a man is merely a philosopher, he cannot believe. The world always exceeds his mind, and he himself is more than mind. If he brings to belief no more than his mind, he is no longer a whole person, and fractional men cannot believe. Any worthy faith must enlist mind and hand and heart.

The object of belief is whom, not what, Someone may retort that an atheistic artist can live in passionate faith. Yes, but only because unwittingly he regards beauty as a living thing. Dr. N. E. E. Swann argues that we may tear out Mahomet from Mohammedanism, and even Buddha from Buddhism, but that Christ cannot be cut from Christianity.³ Perhaps he has overproved his case. Perhaps we cannot tear out a Mahomet or a Buddha from his faith. Is not each of those two faiths named after the man? We cannot tear out personal loyalty from any cause, least of all tear out Christ from Christianity. It is a striking affair that communism, while insisting that it is an economic salvation because mankind (it argues) is economically determined, should almost deify Marx and Lenin. Principles never take life except in a person. There would have been no single-tax movement but for some Henry George.

The object of belief is whom. Men will turn from machines, plans, and platforms whenever the true leader comes; and if no true leader appears, they will follow a false leader rather than a correct creed, provided that leader has guile and glamor. For we are persons, and real faith must enlist the whole man. That is to say, faith must be personal faith. Our real need is a leader who is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, who has the common touch and shares our burdens, yet is not disfigured by our sins or stricken by our transience. It is a large order! Does it not crave the incarnation of all that men at their holiest have meant by God?

III

Functional psychology no longer wins favor; man is one, not a loosely knit collection of faculties and powers. Mind, emotion, and will flow into one personality; we can demark them only as we demark an eddy or a bend in a stream. But, by some necessity o£ our nature, the demarcation must be made; and it has value if we bear in mind the essential wholeness. Paul believed with his mind, for the whom satisfied his intellect. Christ would satisfy our mind, if we would come to Him to learn. The Incarnation is not alien from our physics-philosophy that tells us of every event that it is contingency, an up-rush from the ground of life, for Christian faith has always maintained that Christ is the transcendent and seminal Event. Does someone say that our physics-philosophies will change? Nothing is more sure. But age after age Christ has found a home in each new philosophy wherein it holds truth, and He will not be stranger to the verity in any coming philosophy. Meanwhile, if we mean by mind the acid that eats away the falsities in any culture, does not Christ win the mind? Or if we mean by mind the vision to forecast the future, according as a man follows this path or that path, is there not penetrating light in the mind of Christ? Or if we mean by mind a power to frame a doctrine of man, the world, and God, do not men return to Him age after age from their mistaken wisdom?

Paul believed with his emotions also, for Christ kindled in his heart a passionate flame. Not at first, for Christ at first may repel a man of strong feeling. Who is this Leader who rebukes the natural man, takes sharp issue with our cherished customs, yet suffers insensate tyranny with seeming gentleness? It is not strange that Paul at first persecuted the Christian faith as a madness and Christ as an impostor. But Christ cannot be denied, and His gentleness hides an unstayed power. In a movie⁴ which shows only His shadow or His cross moving above a crowd, the hint of Him is more trenchant than the actual presence of any other man. The trumpet praise of a Hallelujah Chorus, the poetry in stone of a Rheims Cathedral, the crucifixion scene on a Tintoretto canvas, when they are duly pondered, become an almost unanswerable apologetic. Who is this Man who has so won the heart of all men?

Paul