A PLEA FOR “SWEET REASONABLENESS”

The term is not mine, for I borrow it from Paul Tillich, who saw it as the essence of Christian character. It points to qualities of both mind and spirit, and it is true that we so often neglect one or the other, if not both, in our relations with each other. It is man’s reasonableness that distinguishes him from the rest of the animal world, and it is his spirit that identifies him as one created in God’s image. It is appropriate for every man to be reasonable, Tillich observes, but it is the responsibility of the Christian to be sweet as well as reasonable.

Sweet reasonableness seems especially important during these times of change and revolt. Ours is increasingly becoming an irrational age. Even criminal acts have taken on the odd character of being both gruesome and meaningless. Reasonable behavior can hardly be expected in a court of justice these days. Much of the revolt on campuses across the land has lacked the old-fashioned virtue of good sense. Whether it’s beards or bare feet, guitars or long hair, there are those who are frantic to get something across to the rest of us. Our problem is trying to make sense of it all.

With much of what goes on most of us would be willing to settle for a little reasonableness. It wouldn’t have to be sweet. As college administrators are often tempted to say to disruptive students: You don’t have to be nice; just be sensible!

So my plea for sweet reasonableness is to those who are disciples of Jesus, for it is right to expect more of Christians than we do those of the world. It is in being sweet—tender, kind, compassionate—that we are most like Jesus. And yet it is a quality often absent from our lives, even in our relations to each other. Jesus is more eager to make us compassionate than he is to make us right. The sweet prostitute was more approved in his eyes than the right Pharisee. When the Bible talks about God seeing not as man sees, since God looks upon the heart, it means something like this: God looks deep inside man to see if he has tender and loving feelings toward his fellows. We usually judge by something else, such as whether one is in the right church, whether he has followed the proper ritual, whether he is doctrinally right. This is why one may be in good standing within most congregations and yet be rude in his treatment of others and less than exemplary in his personal life. We have succeeded to producing a people who consider it more important to be right than to be good.

Thomas Langford, now interim dean of the Graduate School at Texas Tech, in a recent visit with me in Dallas related to me a story that well illustrates the place of sweet reasonableness. It concerns the eldership of a non-class congregation that was asked to minister to a sick man by way of prayer and the anointing of oil. Despite the plain language of James 5:14, where the sick man is instructed to call for the elders for both prayer and anointing, these elders were not used to this sort of thing. Nonetheless they responded to the brother’s request, praying for him and anointing him with oil. A first for them. The sick man, who chose membership in their congregation though not of non-class persuasion, then revealed to them that he had had recent experiences with charismatic gifts, including speaking in tongues.

One would suppose that would have been too much for any orthodox eldership, but these men responded most graciously, assuring the brother that if God had dealt with him in such a way to his edification, they were happy.

Isn’t that a precious story! Here you have elders in an ultra-conservative wing of our brotherhood doing things that are no doubt surprising even to themselves. They are to be commended for growing. When we grow we help others to grow. It was a reasonable and scriptural response to a brother’s need. It was elegantly sweet and tender. They could have been so “right” as to be harsh and cruel. They could have destroyed a brother for the sake of doctrine. Sweet reasonableness recognizes that a man doesn’t have to be exactly right about everything before we tender our blessings to him. He can even be wrong about a lot of things and still be right in what really counts, in that he hungers and thirsts after righteousness.

But other instances of recent notice illustrate just the opposite of sweet reasonableness, and it is these that motivate my plea for a change of attitude toward our brothers who are hearing a different drumbeat. The case of Pat Boone is a noteworthy one, and part of his story has been told in recent issues of this journal. Poor Pat, he is something of an issue in the brotherhood now, which is other than what he would desire. His correspondence with the college professor, some of which appears elsewhere in this issue, reveals that Pat and the professor have long been friends; but now Pat, due to his experiences in the Spirit, is being both isolated and reprimanded. The professor plans to issue a book under some such title as Pat Boone and the Speaking in Tongues, drawing heavily upon information revealed to him in private letters and conversations. And all this despite Pat’s protests.

That isn’t all. A number of our journals have declared open season on the Boone’s. One brother’s kindness was so overflowing that he explained Shirley Boone’s experiences as a reaction to her father’s passing. But Pat points out in the book that Shirley was well into these experiences before her father’s death. Pat also tells us of the trials through which his congregation and its elders have been subjected from sources throughout the brotherhood. He thinks they have an opportunity to show the brethren what congregational autonomy means!

Only a shallow and immature people could react to public figures in the way our people have handled this Boone thing. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, and the professor in question should repent, preferably in sackcloth and ashes. We simply are not a free people so long as we refuse to allow a brother to be different from ourselves. Pat was all right so long as we could use him over the country in youth rallies and fund-raising affairs. Now that he tells us that his religion was not then real to him, and that it is now dynamic and exciting, we want to clobber him.

It is all right for our folk to suffer frustration and worry, to be tired and bored, and even to conform their lives to that of worldly people so long as they remain loyal to our unwritten creed. The Boone’s have had experiences that have transformed their lives. They are witnessing to others in Hollywood and immersing some of them in their backyard pool. The Boone girls are now excited over religion and it is something contagious among the youth of their acquaintance.

Pat is willing to share this excitement with anyone who cares to read his account of it, but he isn’t trying to convert anyone to his experiences. He wants to glorify the Christ in his life, not campaign for some new experience. Nor does he say that other Christians have to be like him. He just wants to be a free man in Christ.

In spite of this gracious attitude on Pat’s part and what all this has meant to him and his family, we have to respond by “writing him up” and setting him straight. Get out a book in order to set the brotherhood right!

A good dose of sweet reasonableness would be like balm to our people. Reasonable people do not always speak up. They often just listen. The bottom will not fall out of the brotherhood nor will Christ vacate his throne if for once we do not publish an article or a book to expose somebody. Sweet and tender souls are those who say: “It isn’t all clear to me, but if it means all this to you there must be something to it, for you are my brother and I love you.” Or even: “I disagree with you about the gifts of the Spirit, but I certainly agree with you about what Christ can do for us, and I thank God that in all of this he is dearer to you than ever before.”

Unless we can show more of this kind of spirit toward those among us who transgress traditional lines we are in trouble as a people. Not only will we keep losing our youth, but we will stifle growth and spontaneity. When a brother gets a new idea or has some thrilling experience in the Lord, he should have confidence that those in his congregation will joyously share it with him. He will not worry about how mistaken he may be in some viewpoint, for he will know that he will keep on being loved. And that he will be listened to, sweetly and reasonably.

The congregation is thus to be a community of compassion. It must create an atmosphere in which one is refreshed and encouraged. The fear that haunts one with “Maybe I am not right” kills the spirit of inquiry and thus hinders growth. Every child will stumble as he learns to walk, but we lovingly give him a hand and send him on his way again. Jesus describes the quest for truth as both narrow and difficult. One who embarks upon such a lonely journey needs the tender assistance of us all. When we see that he is wrong we will not press the panic button, but will realize that such is to be expected when one launches out on what is to him an uncharted sea. And each of us, if we really search for truth, must go his own way alone, Like Peter who was beckoned by the Lord to step out onto the water and walk to him, each of us must do his own thing, and in doing it we are to look ahead to Jesus, not down at the water and its dangerous waves, nor back at our brethren in the boat to see what they may be thinking. “Looking unto Jesus” is indeed a very personal thing.

Even as I composed the above paragraph Ouida brought to me another item about Pat Boone, sent to us in a letter from her sister, but originating in Lubbock. The Sunset Story for August 12 has boldface headlines reading “Pat Boone and Apostasy,” which in turn quotes two other sources that read poor Pat right out of the church. The article closes with “Let us now recognize that Pat Boone is, in truth, a false teacher and has left the fold of God.”

These brethren who are so simon-pure right about everything are not effected by Jesus’ warning about “Judge not that you be not judged.” And they conveniently ignore the apostle’s insistence that we are to “Forbid not the speaking in tongues.” They want to forbid Pat when Paul says not to forbid him. And that is the only charge leveled against him, that he now has “a prayer language,” to put it the way Pat does in his book.

We are indeed a peculiar people, and that is scriptural, you know! In his book Pat describes his old life in the Church of Christ, describing the conflict between his professional life and church life. He even began to drink and gamble; his marriage was threatened; his life in the church was that of “a hypocrite,” to use his term. But he was always at church on Sunday morning, however often he slept through a lot of the service.

He lived this way for a long time, but he never got into trouble with his brethren. Now that he is on fire for God, conducting studies in his home, calling on the sick at midnight, baptizing people in his pool, finding solidarity in his marriage and happiness in his family, we want to kick him out of the church!

The whole story is that Pat is now different from the rest of us, having experiences that run astray of our pre-ordained lines, and we can’t take it. Priestcraft never tolerates the man who builds an altar that it has not blessed. Dare any man challenge the prerogatives of the Church of Christ priestcraft! Like Diotrephes of old, our priests will run the man out of the church on a rail that dares to hear a voice other than theirs. Pat could drink, gamble, flirt with pretty girls, and sleep through church and still be “loyal,” but when his life bursts forth into a thing of beauty, radiating a love in the Spirit that he did not know was possible, we associate his name with “apostasy.” The charge? Not adultery. Not embezzlement. He now speaks in tongues. Big deal!

What is wrong with us? Paul spoke in tongues “more than you all,” perhaps more than Pat and Shirley put together. Are we going to disown the apostle?

The truth is that the Boones have not left the Church of Christ. They are members in good standing at the Inglewood congregation. The “hierarchy” in Lubbock and across the country should consult the elders of that congregation if they have any questions. And they should heed an old adage that makes Christian sense too: Mind their own business! It is not their prerogative to withdraw from the Boones and declare them apostate. One final note. Has it occurred to any of these folk that Pat and Shirley just might possibly be right? Is it remotely possible that they might have something that would enrich our own lives? Word comes from Nashville from a brother who sat in on a private meeting in that city with Pat, who agreed to explain himself to those assembled. Said the brother of Pat’s testimony: “I don’t know for sure what he has, but I sure wish I had it.

The Bible says something about our being “radiant with the Spirit.” Are we a people with that kind of radiance? Well, Pat Boone is, according to the Nashville brother. And he wants it.

So, I insist that my plea for sweet reasonableness is in order. It isn’t sweet to judge as apostate the brother who still loves Jesus and is doing his best to “walk by the Spirit.” It isn’t reasonable to arrogate unto ourselves such power over a man’s soul that with a brush of the hand and a stroke of the pen we brand him as a false teacher. Heavens, where is our decency?

What do you suppose Jesus thinks of Pat and Shirley Boone these days? That is, I dare say (and how risky this is!), more important than what Lubbock thinks.—the Editor

The unity of the faith which we experience deeply must be realized in worship. There is little use to speculate about forms of a United Church before we have attained the conditio sine qua non for such unity. I mean fellowship at the Lord’s Table.

—Nathan Soderblom, late Archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden

There is no reason for us to believe that we have more conflicts than our fathers. Each period of history shows its own conflicts. The question can, therefore, not be how man gets rid of his conflicts, but how he learns to use them in a creative and productive way.

—H. van den Heuvel, World Council of Churches, Geneva