OUR NEED FOR SELF-CRITICISM

The following speech was delivered by Robert Meyers to the Unity Forum which met in Dallas in early July, 1963. Many segments of the Churches of Christ, Christian Churches, and Disciples of Christ were represented at the meeting. The difference between the spoken and written word necessitated some very minor changes in the text.

Any dynamic group expects criticism from the outside, but criticism from within is always a shockingly different matter. A man’s business acquaintances may chide him often without any real effect, but the strictures of his wife may be an intolerable thorn in the flesh. It is like this with religious groups. So long as rebukes come from beyond the party walls, some degree of reason tempers the response and the opposition is likely to get courteous treatment. But when the criticism comes from one’s own fellows within the walls, emotions explode and gentlemanly conduct may disintegrate in the blast.

Some of us within the Church of Christ segment of the Restoration Movement have felt it necessary to be critical of ourselves. We have come ro believe that because of our tightly-knit organization the only effective censures must come from the inside. Yet no matter how fair we may have tried to be, no matter with what reluctance we may have made the criticisms, we have heard this charge repeatedly: You have no right to expose the failings of the Lord’s church to the sectarian world.

Some of us have heard this so often, and have had it impressed upon us in so may ways, that it seems worthwhile to attempt a reply. If we are indeed critical without justification, if we are merely venting spleen rather than exposing a hidden disease on the body of something we love, then we have no adequate reply. It is a duty to ourselves to ask whether we criticize in hope of improvement of a fine people, or whether we criticize because criticism has become a stimulant without which we cannot be happy.

I can state at once how I feel about all this. I am convinced that we cannot do the work we seek to do unless we first expose, however painfully, the weaknesses and inconsistencies which we in the Churches of Christ share with other religious groups. If those of us who criticize worked with a group famed for humility and recognition of their own faults, our problem would be different. But some of us have worked for years with Christians who have been taught to feel superior, to believe that they held all truth in their hands, and to look with condescension upon other believers. Until this group can be shown its kinship with other mortals, no plea for unity can ever hope to succeed, or, indeed even hope to be understood.

One of the great sayings of any century was spoken by Socrates some 400 years before Christ. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The philosopher was a great examiner of his own life, constantly subjecting his ideas to the insights of others to see whether they could stand the test of honest and intelligent opposition. Please turn the sentence in your minds for a moment, so that its enduring greatness may be completely absorbed: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The life unwilling to look at itself honestly, the life that escapes self-criticism by looking forever outward upon the defects of other men, is a life so poor in quality that one may be said not to be alive at all.

Now hear the words of a later and greater Teacher: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye, with never a thought for the great plank in your own? . . . First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck Out of your brother’s.” There is no real difference between the truth spoken by the Greek and the truth spoken by the Son of God, except that the first statement is prose and the second is poetry. And the poetry, with its vivid metaphors and its rhetorical balance, makes the Son of God’s utterance all the more memorable and piercing.

“First take the plank out of your own eye.” I am talking tonight about the need for self-scrutiny, for self-examination, for honest and intelligent self-criticism, and this text gives me not only the justification for it, but tells me also something about priority. It answers the first question I want to raise about self-criticism: that is, when is it right to criticize one’s own group?

My answer is that self-criticism must come first, before there is any criticism of others, and that having once been made, is should be repeated as often as necessary to guard against complacency and self-righteousness. This should be no surprise, because we expect no less than this from any gentleman. A gentleman is one who minimizes the failings of others while generously conceding his own. He lives in such poise that the recognition of his failures does not throw him off balance. The faults of others are no crutch upon which he must lean to keep his footing. He stands upright not because he is proud and arrogant, but because the burden of pretense and hypocrisy has been lifted from him.

What a gentleman does, a Christian gentleman ought to do better. But the sad truth is that many of us have grown up knowing how to analyze others, but refusing to analyze ourselves. We have talked knowingly of the motives of others, but seldom of our own. We have publicized gleefully the apostasies of other religionists, while we rebuked any who dared confess in public that we have our share.

And this excessive interest in the failings of others has blinded us to our own, and stunted our spiritual growth. We have often become grotesques, stumbling about looking for specks of sawdust while planks protruded from our own eyes, distorting and blinding our vision. If men of humor and intelligence occasionally laughed at us, we were too preoccupied with our fun to hear them.

I had a dear friend who taught in a Church of Christ college. He disliked reformers, but he seemed to appreciate saints. It was a while before I understood him. The reformer has his eyes fastened on the sins of his neighbors, and being only human, this preoccupation can cause him to forget the obstructions in his own eyes. It is not long before he is seeing badly. But the saint is embarrassed about his own sins; he has looked first within — and deeply. Seeing clearly what he is, his eyes are washed clean and clear to see better what the real needs of mankind are.

So then, self-scrutiny must come first. That is the when of it. We may consider the next question: Why examine ourselves? The answer has been suggested, but let’s consider it at greater length. The simplest way to put it is that we must criticize ourselves in order to avoid corrosive pride. A man who sees himself clearly will not be misled about his worth. Whatever his talents, and however candidly he may be able to assess them, he will know his defects too well to grow the cancer of pride.

Most of us know why we concentrate so on the shortcomings of others. We get from that activity a sense of virtue which helps us forget the nagging in the back of our minds. We forget how often we are failures. We find some other believer deficient in ritual or understanding, so that the desert sterility of our own hearts will not burn us so.

We can do a great many good things for ourselves by honest self-scrutiny. We can learn how senseless and unChristian our race prejudices are. We can preserve ourselves from pride of social place, that “amazing pride,” as Buttrick once put it, “which assumes that a man whose chairs are upholstered in velour can have no dealings with a man whose chairs are upholstered in plain board.” The truth is that we stratify the church in hundreds of places on the basis of social position. Our only hope lies in confessing it, and being embarrassed about it.

We can save ourselves through self examination from the silly belief that our economic position is inevitably the result of our superior merits. Most of us can see after awhile that it is not so much that we are better than other men as it is that we have been luckier, blessed with better health, granted more timely opportunities. Pride vanishes, and one is humbled, to have been undeservedly fortunate.

We can save ourselves, although it is a little harder, from that arrogance which often accompanies some forms of intelligence and formal schooling. We can weigh the unschooled man’s virtues against our faults, and remember that brilliance without morality or purified purpose is far worse than a barn full of poorly educated men who possess good will and honorable intentions.

But above all, self-examination can save us from Pharisaism in religion, that greatest single problem for most of us in my segment of the Restoration Movement. Pharisaism — that disease that drains the world of variety and causes the eye to see its own exaggerated image everywhere it looks — Pharisaism — that cancer which riots in the spirit as it feeds its swollen conceit. Pharisaism — about which Jesus spoke two of his most desolating words: “They have their reward,” and, “Let them alone.” The first because they sought a sense of superiority, and they found it; the second because they are beyond any help until the cruel plowshare of pain or loss has torn the hard ground of their pride apart and made a way for the seed of humility and the quickening rain of God’s mercy.

Because many of my own people have been unwilling to submit to self-criticism, we exhibit to the world today some glaring inconsistencies. If I cared only to amuse myself about them, my proper course would be to keep laughing and say nothing about the cause of my laughter. But because I want to see them removed, I have to call attention to them. And because my people have been strenuously trained not to see their own defects, I am afraid that. we must sometimes shout to be heard. So that you may be in no doubt as to what I mean, let me cite some of the crippling pharisaisms in the group of Christians I know best.

We plead for congregational autonomy as the New Testament way, and we point happily to ourselves as practitioners. We invite all who are harassed by centralized authority to get relief by coming to us because we have no headquarters, national or international. But surely there are few present here who do not know that one may pay lip service to congregational autonomy and individual freedom while violating them both in many subtle ways. And “subtle” is not a synonym for “ineffective.” It really does not matter in the least to me whether a board in New York tells me what to say and do, or whether the less obvious but equally effective pressure of church papers and the collective opinions of prominent names does it. In either case I have lost freedom.

In my city, the Christian churches of the “cooperative” persuasion withdrew from the advertisement box in the Saturday Eagle. Now there are two boxes, both listing Christian churches. It is embarrassing to some of them, because it indicates a lack of tolerance of differences. I could make hay of this in my non-instrumentalist pulpit, except for one embarrassing thing: the same thing has happened within the Churches of Christ. We list an anti-church all by itself, and 14 or 15 orthodox churches together, and then there is Riverside, in a box of its own — and not from choice.

We must make some serious attempt at self-examination on this matter, learning how much pressure groups mold opinion, how authoritative the voices of prominent preachers are, and to what a degree church journals mold and maintain opinions among us, before we laugh scornfully at our neighbors. As some of you have said in print, I also much prefer the open centralized authority and the written statement of faith to a hidden and hypocritical one. One may at least know where he stands, and can make appeal to some ultimately responsible object.

We like to talk of our objectivity. We are willing to see all sides, we say. We feature the testimony of those who claim to have investigated various religions and turned to us because all the others were lacking. I wish it were truer that we really try to see the other side. Eugene O’Neill has a play, The Iceman Cometh, in which an alcoholic named Larry sits at a bar and says to another beside him: “I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you are damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it’s all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything . . . you have to wear blinkers like a horse and see only straight in front of you.”

These cynical words have an enormous amount of truth in them. It may sting a bit to paraphrase them as I am about to do, but self-criticism demands it. How many preachers have learned that to be a success, they must wear blinkers and see only straight ahead?

A striking example of this may be seen in a letter which I received recently from a young man who is both a Church of Christ minister and a Church of Christ college faculty member. He speaks of a desire to talk and says: “Many of the conclusions at which my wife and I are arriving are ones which cannot completely be enclosed within the traditional Church of Christ frame-work. I am a young minister and I am aware of the necessity of caution in making religious decisions and changes, since many accuse younger men of ‘going off the deep end.’ Generally, it is not advisable to talk openly with ministerial or faculty colleagues concerning significant religious matters . . . It seems to me, though, that Christians composing free churches should always have this privilege.” The incredible statement in this letter should be repeated: “Generally, it is not advisable to talk openly with ministerial or faculty colleagues concerning significant religious matters.” This young man is no cynic. The whole tone of his letter disproves any such charge. But he knows that among his people it is dangerous to have new insights or try to share them with others. What an indictment of our vaunted objectivity!

Someone told me the other day of a well-known Church of Christ minister who was asked to teach a class on whether it was all right to use instrumental music. He said: “Very well, I’ll teach it, but I can’t promise how it will come out.” There was instant objection to this, and the class decided that if he felt that way it would not go through with the study. They wanted to play at being objective, but they really wanted a controlled study that would move beautifully toward a pre-determined conclusion. The thought that all the evidence, or a more honest look at it, might modify that conclusion frightened them, and they gave up.

In a Vacation Bible School at Riverside recently we invited five speakers to address our adults in the evening sessions. They included a Mormon, a Lutheran Social Service Worker, a Methodist minister and mental health expert, a minister of Unity Church, and a Mennonite minister. This horrified most of our Church of Christ brethren in the city. It is all right for one of us to represent those faiths and services, but not for one of them to represent it himself in our midst. We prefer our objectivity to their bias, we would say. And of course it is not hard to know why. Like any other strongly convicted group, we consciously or unconsciously emphasize the weakest positions of those who differ with us, and minimize their strengths until it is clear to all that no sensible person could possibly believe that way. We do not sympathetically inform ourselves about the views of others, and so we are inevitably inaccurate. To see Presbyterianism through our presentation of it is not to see what appeals to those believers as it comes to them through the mind and lips of a convinced and intelligent Presbyterian. Our refusal to measure our best against their best, and to confess our weaknesses as no less obvious than theirs, is to put the lie to our claims of objectivity.

A year or so ago I read in the pages of one of our widely circulated church newspapers a story about some nuns at a Roman convent who disgraced themselves by getting into a fight. I think they even pulled at one another’s garments and had to be subdued. The implication of this report in our paper was that here was proof of the perfidy of the Roman Catholic Church. What else could you expect to come from a group in such hopeless error? It is no overstatement to say that I was appalled by this article. It bothered me more than anything I had seen in a long time. I thought of the psychological explanations for such outbreaks among people cooped up and closely associated for long periods of time. I remembered the sudden unreasonable fights that broke Out among my soldier colleagues in war time. I pitied the nuns, who undoubtedly were shamed and embarrassed because of their human lapse.

And then I remembered the Church of Christ minister in Texas who floored one of his elders with one punch, but whose lapse never got into the editorial page of this church paper. And the Church of Christ minister whose three-time robbery of a supermarket and subsequent prison term was never once thought of as proof that Church of Christism is a perfidious religion which could only be expected to turn out robbers.

And about then, the big Texas grain storage scandal broke. One of the most prominent Church of Christ members in Texas was at the center of it. Yet I looked in vain for any comment in this paper. The defections of a man who swindled hundreds, instead of merely pulling at someone’s clothing, did not prove our religion wrong. I do not mean that we have to publicize the failings of our own. To throw the mantle of silence over their fall need not be wrong. But to say nothing of their defections and to trumpet loudly the defections of those who differ with us, is an abominable thing. To print gleefully the tales of a Baptist minister who runs off with a choir girl, but to keep conspiratorially mum about that minister of ours whose cottage meeting activities finally got him imprisoned for life for double rape, is to cheat against all rules of gentlemanly or Christian conduct. We absolutely must see ourselves clearly on this point, and stop using human failures among our religious neighbors as proof of their religious error, when human failures among our people are hushed up and forgotten.

And it is not different with respect to unity, the very theme of our conference. We plead for people in other religious groups to come Out and associate with us, so that there can be unity. We have the only proper basis for unity, we tell them, and we leave the impression that it has worked with us. We conceal that fact that our own group is split into 15 or 20 factions, each claiming to be the true church and each claiming to have the only right philosophy for obtaining and securing unity. We not only conceal it, but we castigate serve rely any who dare to tell it openly. I am convinced that Carl Ketcherside’s most grievous sin is not that he has changed his mind, or even that he is persuasive, but that he has made it so embarrassingly clear how inconsistent we are. We can tolerate anything but that. The man who confesses humbly to his religious neighbor that we have not achieved unity in the Church of Christ, that we have split over music, over premillenialism, over colleges, over cups, that we are splitting now over church cooperation, and that we will split tomorrow over something else, because we have a built-in splitting philosophy — that many may as well expect to be pilloried as one who betrays the Lord’s church.

What can we conclude except that we are unwilling to examine ourselves honestly? That we live in a dream world, and prefer it to reality. I used to wonder why I did not see some things when I was a militant young preacher which seem so clear to me now. I think the answer is that I lived in a dream world. Have you ever been dreaming, a secure and pleasant little dream, and threatened to wake up? Some outside noise probed intrusively at your joy? Have you ever pulled the cover over your head, settled a bit more deeply into the pillow, and gone back into the dream by sheer force of will?

Well, I was able to do this religiously for awhile because I liked the way that had been mapped out for me. It was intoxicating to be patted fondly by older men and told that I would be a great defender of the faith some day, and it probably put me off from honesty by several years. I awoke out of my dream of a simple, uncomplicated way and an infallible set of interpretations to which all men might easily come if they just would, but I awoke reluctantly and with much pain. Self-examination is never pleasant at first.

I have asked and tried to answer these two questions so far: When should we criticize our lives, and why? Self-examination means a looking in, and I have said I think it is our only hope. But I am aware that introspection without some counter-balancing awareness can cause people to become morbid and even masochistic. How can one look in with such intense honesty and still keep his health? I think there may be an answer in this sequence: look in, and then look up. Remember that however much reason may help us to understand ourselves, we can only do that finally in the light of God’s love for us. It makes no sense intellectually that He should love us, but if after I have gazed with troubled look into my own heart I can then step past reason and accept the fact of His love, I can live my life in a new dimension.

So then, after you have looked in, look up to find that God loves you in spite of what you have just seen in your own spirit. Then the wonderful thing happens. You can begin to look around at others whose defects have been so apparent to you, and you can say with deep conviction, “Yes, my friend, I know . . . I am weak like you. I have misunderstood, and betrayed my clearest insights, and failed to use my opportunities, and I am astonished to look up and find He still loves me. It humbles me, and I can see your failures now in a new light, a light from above. Perhaps he who loves me in my littleness and inconsistency, also loves you.”

Look in, look up, and then you may safely look around. We began by quoting the words of Christ about the plank that gets so grotesquely in the way of our seeing compassionately and clearly. We can identify that plank now. It is lack of love for others, and too much love for one’s self. I know this is so, because when I look at my child, whom I love, his splendid virtues shine like giant suns in my little universe, and his faults are like specks of cosmic dust. Love makes all that difference in our seeing. If it didn’t, God could not tolerate us when He looks at us from above. Jesus understood it when he said that to love is to pass from one world to another. Some of you here tonight live in a different world from the one you once occupied, and you live there, across that almost incomprehensible gulf, because you learned at last what it means to love others who seek to follow your Lord, however imperfectly.

I feel that my own people are in a critical time right now. A great change is in the air. Those who have vested interests, who would have to reverse a lifetime of word and action if they moved across to another world are fighting desperately to isolate my people from these ideas. They must preserve the system, because it is under the system that they have grown powerful and prominent and it is under the system that they can enjoy the heady excitement of guarding orthodoxy and punishing those who offend.

But as Tennyson’s prologue to IN MEMORIAM says:

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day, and cease to be

They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

Our little system has had its day. We must stop talking about The Truth as if we possessed it in some tangible form and there were nothing else to break in on us. We are but broken lights, and our systems are but broken lights. It is our Lord who is whole. We are fragments. His truth is eternal, indivisible, and imperishable. Our system is our apprehension of that truth, forever partial and incomplete. The light has come into the world, but we have dark corners yet unreached. So have our friends. Let us be gentlemen, confessing our dark corners, acknowledging the light we see in others. If we do, our humility will breed humility in others, and with the party spirit diminished we may all move closer to the center where the light may flood us.

Perhaps all that has been said can be boiled down to this summary: We have emphasized modes and manners, legalisms and loopholes too much, and our unwillingness to see ourselves honestly has kept us from the self-knowledge that would save us. Our only hope for a breakthrough — I believe this profoundly — now lies in a greater possession of the gracious Spirit of Christ. That Spirit can teach us to be honest about ourselves and to be compassionate toward those whole failures are, after all, no worse than our own failures. The movements of that Spirit are now clearly to be seen among us and a brighter day is ahead. Nothing can stop the dawning, but we may see it sooner if we will desist from hunting specks in our neighbors’ eyes and concentrate on the planks in our own.