REPLY To PROFESSOR BALES
CHARLES E. WARREN

In making comments on Mr. Bales’ response to my essay I would like to express appreciation for the good spirit in which he writes. I’m flattered that he remembers our meeting in Chicago more years ago now than I like to remember. My remarks will be something like “painting with a broom” in that they will be too hasty and general in conclusion.

Mr. Bales gives some room for the “right to question” and does not consider this bad as such. He shows a lot of good concern that persons going through periods of unsettling questioning be helped with right attitudes and the best possible knowledge. Yet when such questions are asked as “What is the authority of the Bible?” “What is the authority of Christ?” persons of equal sincerity and ability will differ. I suspect that I found the “room to differ” more cramped in the churches of Christ than the “room to question.”

The questioning mood likely reflects a concern for present personal reality more than abstract or distant concern with authority. Jesus said, “My Father is working still, and I am working.” (John 5:17). I take this to affirm God’s “personal” involvement with the world and his people in all ages and places. Under law God stands at a distance as judge, but in Christ he stands near as Father. It seems to me that much of Church of Christ thought and preaching are more concerned to “lay down the law” in the name of God than to offer acceptance, love, and sustaining fellowship in the name of God. I remember that while I was still in the Church of Christ one of the marks often claimed to make the soundness of a man’s preaching suspect was that he talked more about love than he did fear and law-keeping. Yet the reality of personal well-being can exist only in a sense of being loved, both in a human and beyond human reality.

Personal reality also includes an “openness” to life in our times and life in the world as the creation of God. Preoccupation with 1st century Christianity and with the one true church seem to encourage a “shut-up-ness” or a “split-in-to-ness” of living. It can encourage making a radical contrast between being a Christian and being of the world, and retreating from hallowing fully the simple goods, affections, and satisfactions of life. It may allow defining some things as religious and other things as secular, where God is thought to be pleased by certain “religious activities” but having no concern with how we make our living, vote, or try to out-do or out-shine others.

I believe that it was C. S. Lewis, who was at one time an unbeliever, who said that his new found Christian faith helped him be more tolerant and accepting of others. It gave him more openness to his fellow human kind. Our faith should give us more graciousness in affirming God’s grace for others.

Church of Christ teaching has emphasized “Let’s go back!” It would make more sense to me to stress, “Let’s be awake and alive to the living God—now.” If God is God he isn’t back anywhere! The Christian faith should help us be more open to our own times and to the future.

The gospel witnesses to and makes possible our rebirth and participation in eternal life. Jesus Christ himself is the gospel, the intrinsic quality and reality of who he was, and what God has made possible through him. And when God through this man Jesus Christ gives us new birth in trust, love, and hope, we are given a great deal of freedom of thought and action. In Christ the hostile split between orthodoxy (“my-doxy”) and heterodoxy (“your-doxy”) are not God-given. “For He (Jesus Christ) is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility . . . and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross …” (Eph. 2:14-16). It would really be something if we could or would let God in Christ’s Spirit do this for us.—1311 W. 22nd St., Lawrence, Kan. 66044