DISHONEST NAME-DROPPING
By ROBERT MEYERS

When the Quaker folk have a “concern,” they feel compelled to speak or act. I am not a Quaker, but I do have a “concern”—a very deep and grave one. It has to do with a form of dishonesty which is spreading rapidly throughout the largest segment of the Church of Christ brotherhood.

Not long ago I heard a friend speak on the subject of archaeology. His thesis for several nights was that this science confirms our belief in the veracity of the Bible. He cited many examples of the ways in which scholarly diggings had thrown light upon some Biblical text, or indicated that the Bible record was more reliable then some scholars had thought.

So far, so good. The disturbing thing for me was the general impression left with the audience by my friend’s manipulation of his material. He spoke often of his own former teacher, the renowned William Foxwell Albright, and stressed that Dr. Albright has now reached a “more conservative position” with reference to Bible accuracy. By wording his comments carefully, my friend left the impression that the Church of Christ approach to the Old Testament is now being vindicated by such men as Albright.

I sat in the auditorium acutely uncomfortable, thinking how distressed the audience of orthodox Church of Christ folk would be if they really knew the views of the man being quoted to them. Far from supporting their fundamentalist approach to Scripture, he is by their definition a flaming liberal whom they would discredit immediately. They would have rejoiced not at all over his corroborations of certain Biblical names and events; instead, they would have been upset that so radical a scholar was being used at all.

This seems to me a most reprehensible form of intellectual dishonesty. It is a form of cheating and insulting audiences. They are cheated because they do not learn how much such great international authorities disagree with them, and they are insulted because the speaker counts on the fact that they will never bother to read the technical works he quotes from. He knows that they will complacently accept his words to mean that here is one more proof of man’s capacity for reaching the truth (i.e., Church of Christ viewpoints) if he studies long enough.

This pattern, this exploitation of authority, this name-dropping is steadily increasing in the mainstream segment of the Churches of Christ as it sends its young men off to sit under scholars with worldwide reputations. Since we have no such men, and are not likely to have any under our present system, we are forced to make use of famed scholars in order to produce Ph.D.’s for college accreditation purposes. We make much in our college literature of our young Ph.D.’s who have studied under such men, and we tacitly encourage them to become name-droppers who exploit among congregations the reputations of their scholarly teachers and by cautious speech permit those audiences to go away thinking that these scholars support Church of Christ literalism in reading the Bible.

Frankly, I prefer an out-and-out anti-intellectualism to this despicable form of slick cheating. It seems more honest to be on Reuel Lemmons’ side and bemoan any formal education that is non-party. This, at least, gives us a degree of consistency. If we do not read ourselves, and intend to pay no real attention to those who do, our best bet is to proclaim that formal education ruins gospel preachers and that the world’s famed scholars are betrayed by their worldly wisdom and lost.

But when we send our young men off to be specialists and then hire the specialists to come back and tell us only those things which they know we want to hear, we are cheating ourselves terribly. And we are doing something far worse that that: we are feeding our complacency.

Our brotherhood needs several things, but heaven knows it does not need any more complacency. It is already so smug in many areas as hardly to know the rest of the religious world exists. To hire a man to come in and select very carefully the right food for feeding that arrogance is dangerous, even for the man who does the feeding. For the complacent arrogance he thus nourishes may one day turn and rend him if he should ever dare to deviate, or reveal too much about his own secret sympathies.

I observed the audience carefully and I think I am not mistaken about what my friend did for them. He bandied great names to impress those present with the idea that the Church of Christ is now touching elbows with the scholarly great—and the audience, hungry for scholarly esteem which proves the Church of Christ was right all along, ate it up. He told them how men like Albright and Nelson Glueck were voicing “more conservative points of view,” and by saying no more than that left the impression that both men would have felt quite at home in the Church of Christ building that night.

It is true that Albright and Glueck are more conservative about some matters than they once were, but the comment means nothing unless one knows how liberal they once were and how liberal they still are. The truth is that both men are so liberal by Church of Christ standards that the joyously complacent atmosphere created that night would have been rudely shattered had the facts about the two been known. If my friend had told the audience that Albright does not believe in verbal inspiration, in the infallibility of the Scriptural record, or in a literal reading of the creation story, they would have been so shocked that they would have closed their ears to the rather minor archaeological confirmations of events, place names, and locations.

I am aware that it is not necessary to tell an audience everything an authority believes when one is quoting him to support a specific point. But when one constantly speaks of how “conservative” such a man has become, and when that word is known to have certain connotations in the Church of Christ, it is dishonest not to let the audience know at some point how far removed from their ideological world the man is. Some of us who were present had been publicly excommunicated as liberals several years before, yet we sat in an audience basking in self-congratulations because of the implied approval of a man far more liberal than any of us!

I could not help wondering what the reaction from the audience would have been if I had risen with my copy of Albright’s From the Stone Age to Christianity (often quoted from during the lectures) and read something like this:

“The situation can be explained satisfactorily throughout if we suppose that the story of creation in Genesis 2, the story of Eden, the accounts of the antediluvian patriarchs, the Flood-story, and the story of the Tower of Babel were all brought from north-western Mesopotamia to the West by the Hebrews before the middle of the second millennium” (p. 238).

My present readers are aware of what Albright intends to imply when he keeps using the word “story,” I am sure. And they see that this little extract suggests what other passages in Albright explicitly say, that the Hebrews adapted mythologies from other cultures and transported them when they came to their Palestinian home.

I went home after my friend’s lecture and browsed through Albright for a while. Here are some of his views: that the patriarchal stories in Genesis are essentially but not entirely accurate (the “essentially” is the mark of his new conservatism!); that the books of the Old Testament were edited and reedited, with many changes coming into them; that the numbers used in the Old Testament are often unreliable; that monotheism was a product of gradual evolution; that Moses did not author the Pentateuch and that the documentary hypothesis is essentially a plausible explanation of their origin; that there are conflicts in different versions of the same story; that Moses is to be viewed as the “founder of Yahwism,” and so on, ad infinitum.

I have before me as I write the page numbers which substantiate every comment made above about Albright’s views. Yet if the audience had had any inkling that Albright felt so, they would have lost their happy assurance that even the greatest scholars eventually come over to our side and would have chided my friend for making use of the man.

Had there been a question period, one might have risen and tumbled the whole flimsy house of straw with one simple interrogation:

“Please tell the audience whether Prof. Albright believes that God literally made man as Genesis 1 says He did.”

The answer would have stunned the crowd and ruined the partisan spell being cast over them. Only one contingency could have been more electrifying: that is, if Prof. Albright had walked in and sat down to hear the use being made of him by his former student.

It is difficult to believe that the mainstream Church of Christ folk really want a priesthood that screens what they can know and carefully makes no mention of what might disturb their complacency. Yet there are moments when one feels there is no alternative.

I have not been more specific about names and places because I am interested not in personalities but in general tendencies. My friend is a good man who is not conscious of involvement in the practice I am indicting. What I am calling intellectual cheating he would rationalize to his complete satisfaction. But I plead with him, and all like him, to stop exploiting scholarship for party reasons. It is not fair to brandish quotes triumphantly when they agree with us, and hide them discreetly (and dishonestly) behind our backs when we think of those enormous areas in which they disagree with us profoundly.

If such men as my friend do not start being more open with audiences, and getting them ready for increasing numbers of graduate students in the pulpits, there will soon be a chasm between scholars and non-scholars in the Church of Christ which will ruin us. We must bridge the gap by being honest about what scholars really believe, and we must occasionally indicate with humility that these men are not fools who have come to such different conclusions from our own. Only so can we lay hold on humility and be saved from that damning arrogance which supposes that only ignorant or insincere men could possible differ from us.—Friends University, Wichita, Kan.