REPLY TO PROFESSOR BALES
By J. P. SANDERS

My good friend, J. D. Bales, has written for this paper a review of my little essay in Voices of Concern. Leroy Garrett invited me to respond.

I do so with considerable hesitation, doubting that it is in good taste for one who has left a denomination to turn and address himself to its people. However, the correspondence that has come to me as a result of the essay leads me to believe that there is a widespread restlessness and seeking of spirit to which I may conscientiously speak.

I certainly do not wish to get entangled in a continuing dialogue. I have no desire to persuade any to follow in my steps out of the group or to disturb anyone who is satisfied where he is. If my words can, though, speak with light or hope to any who are at this moment struggling as I struggled, these words come with every good wish.

It is clear that when J. D. and I speak, we are standing on different ground. This fact makes fruitful communication between us difficult. He appeals to the Scripture texts for proof—while it is this very use of Scripture which I hold needs to be proved as valid. For me, he proves by that which is to be proved. This was the basic point of my essay.

The passages which J. D. quotes in his review are, of course, familiar to me. I at one time used them in that manner and in that reference myself. My change came, not because of a different interpretation of the passages but because of a growing conviction that the Bible is not to be used in that manner at all. Thus the real disagreement between us is on the doctrine of the Word itself. What is the nature of the Bible and what is its legitimate use? All else is on the periphery. With disagreement on this, discussion is like two men trying to agree on the definition of a word while they appeal to different dictionaries.

When I look at the Bible, I see sixty-six books of unequal value. They were written over a period of many centuries by many men with many different viewpoints, philosophies, and problems. None of the writers was consciously writing Scripture. Each wrote for his time and place and for his own purpose. The reverence toward the writings and their authority came much later.

In the Bible I see some exquisitely lovely religious lyrics, some repugnant nationalistic verse, some incomparably beautiful erotic poetry, some profound mythology, some colorful and at times amusing folk lore, some legends and fables, some great rules for community life in an ancient society, some tiresome regulations of ritual and diet, some dazzling—if schizophrenic—visions, some dull didacticism, some dynamic and moving preaching. Nowhere—nowhere—do I find a consistent diagram or blueprint of what life should be or what the church should be. I see in it man’s sorrow and anguish, his despair and hope, his loving and living, his hating and dying—but I do not find a schematic program of salvation.

When Paul wrote a letter, he evidently wrote as we would write—to certain persons about certain questions. He wrote about eating meat offered to idols, about cutting hair and shaving the head, about letting women speak in the church, and many other matters that were then vital but which have no relevance now and have not had for centuries. With intelligence and conviction Paul moved in on the problems at hand. If he had confronted other problems, our New Testament would have been different. If he had been writing a century later or a century earlier, our New Testament would have been different. It appears to me that our task is to approach our problems in our time with his same intelligence and conviction but not with his first-century answers.

Trying to put the diverse and unrelated materials of the Bible books into a unified system is, it seems to me, futile. It is like gathering up scattered pieces of several jigsaw puzzles with the hope of making one coherent pattern of them.

This is indicated in the fact that Fundamentalists, all of whom hold that the Bible contains an exact pattern given by supernatural revelation, cannot agree among themselves what that pattern is. Each group picks up the pieces, but no two groups put them together in the same manner. The supernatural should do better than that.

If the Bible was given to man from the outside as a perfect pattern, why was its way not spelled out in clear, unmistakable one-two-three order?

The church lived from several centuries with no Christian Scriptures to guide her. One church had a letter, another church had another. Eventually Paul’s letters got bound together in one corpus, but even then there was considerable controversy and much scholarly disputing as to which writings were actually from the great man. Even today we are not sure of some of them. It was not until the fourth century that the New Testament as we know it—twenty-seven books, no more, no less—was accepted as the rule. Some of the books that finally made it had a hard time—such as 2 Thessalonians, 2 Peter, Jude, Revelation. There were some other books in high repute in the early centuries that did not make it in the end, such as the Shepherd of Hermas. We now list such books as apocryphal, but the early church used many of them alongside the ones we call canonical and even above some of those now in the canon. All of which is to say: where was the pattern for that early church?

At least one of Paul’s letters is lost to us as mentioned in I Corinthians. What if some vital part of “the pattern” was contained in that lost piece?

Actually, any religion which lives accumulates a literature. It is inevitable that it should be so. Sooner or later in any religion one of its believers with a flair for poetry will sing of his faith in that form; some other believer with a skill in narration will tell the stories of the faith or put its teachings into myths and parables or write its history; some legal mind will codify and legalize its doctrines; and preachers will preach their sermons. After centuries this writing becomes quite a collection. The best and most authentic pieces will be used again and again and will gather the force of authority as expressive of the orthodox faith; those pieces of less value will gradually drop away into an apocrypha.

Human nature being what it is, a religion will take its own literature and exalt it as unique, special. It is then only a short step to saying it is from God and has his authority.

Why can we not celebrate the Bible simply for the magnificent literature and wisdom that it is? Even as the sun shines, as rivers flow, as birds fly—so do men write of their dismay and hope. All these things are, I think, of God. Why must we make the Bible something supernatural? It seems to me that the natural and the human are as much of God as the supernatural and the miraculous.

The Bible, like all other sacred literature, comes to us rich with man’s experience of living and loving, of hating and hoping, and dying. It is filled with his ignorance, his frailty, his wonder, and his splendor. It is great because it is so human. It speaks to me as an existing individual because it is the language by which others described how life looked to them where they lived it.

The writer of I John caught it, I think, when he pointed out that “No man has seen God at any time.” Yet he has hope of knowing the divine, because he says “He who loves is born of God and knows God.” Now love is between human beings, it is a natural and human thing. This poet seems to be saying that God is really known only in the ordinary, the human, the everyday. Since we cannot see God “out there”—and I agree with this writer—we must see him “in here” where we live our lives with each other. The word became flesh-in-deed it always becomes flesh when men love one another. Our true spiritual worship is to present our bodies to each other and for each other in living sacrifice in our common life.

Jesus saw this, too, when he said the divine king would say “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.” Here the divine was found unexpectedly in the midst of the human. The unseen which cannot be seen must be found in the things that are seen. Revelation of the divine was not in a supernatural miracle or sudden overwhelming of the natural order but rather in the hungry face of a man needing to be fed.

“Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” said Jesus, “I will be in their midst.” Gathered together for what? We have usually assumed “gathered together for worship,” but he did not say so. We might be gathered together two or three for lunch or for work or for planning or for play. When we honestly open our lives to each other in love and concern, this, I think, is in his name who lived so—at such times of being truly present to each other—he is in our midst. His presence again is not in the supernatural and extraordinary but in the common and the natural. Bonhoeffer caught it in a happy phrase when he called God the “Beyond in the midst of our lives.”

This Beyond in the midst of our lives is the divine within the human, the holy within the profane, the word in the flesh—and so is the Eternal revealed. Why cannot the Bible—in all its warm humanity—be such a revelation?