Travel Letter . . .

IN THE CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY

If you are buying the "See America First" bit (not many of us have a second choice!), then you should by all means include Montgomery, Alabama on your itinerary of travel. Governor George Wallace's big "White House" and Jefferson Davis' little "White House" are across the street from each other — and where else can you find the likes of that in all our 50 states? Wallace would rule the nation from the one as Davis sought to rule the Confederacy from the other, wheelchairs and Union soldiers notwithstanding. It is a lovely old city, dotted here and there with historic shrines already restored or in process of restoration. This includes the elegant old railway station, which will be a museum and from which one can take a tunnel to the Alabama river for a ferry ride up through the city and countryside. The main street is unusually wide and has new covered walkways, gardens, and old buildings with new colorful facades. The church could learn a lesson on what renewal means!

But the most attractive thing in this cradle of the Confederacy to me is a growing band of free and happy Church of Christers, who invited me to come and do my thing for a weekend. These are mostly young, successful business and professional people who are at the second level of leadership in the church. They arranged for me to address their assembly, one of the older churches that moved from downtown to the suburbs, and I was prepared to do so, but the elders felt they should drop the plan when some of the preachers felt threatened, which I was also prepared for. So we had gatherings in different homes, with eager listeners from wall to wall, and an evening session at Methodist-related Huntingdon College. The Sunday I was there I went along with the others to the Highland Church of Christ in Carriage Hills.

They are presently "between preachers." I, too, sometimes get caught between preachers, but the metaphor here is different. This gave me a chance to hear one of our less professional voices, though nonetheless elegant. He spoke with love and conviction. The young elder who presided had a glad heart and a winsome smile. No wonder he has taken a fledgling business and turned it into a 50-million dollar a year enterprise. The song leader stood up there and smiled just as if he were happy, and even praised the Lord right there before all of us. At our house sessions he got all happy about the promises of Jesus and even said a few Amens. Well, this was the land of Dixie and he can be forgiven. They embrace each other and talk about how they love one another. It beats all you ever saw.

As I sat in the assembly that morning I thought about how something different is happening among us. Those who want to change things or who have different views are not leaving and starting "a faithful church," a fallacious practice that has divided and sub-divided us all these years, including Montgomery, Alabama. There I sat as one of the most controversial figures among us, but I was there as a peacemaker, and they all knew this or most of them. In a way I was rejected, in that I was cancelled out of the pulpit, but for the most part I was loved, accepted and appreciated, and this was evident even on the part of those who led the service. They subscribe to this journal and share my concerns. One of the elders commented after hearing me in one of the homes, "It is too bad all our congregation can't hear him." But I could in no way be recognized, not even to pray to the Father. But no one bothered to apologize in that we all understood. Politics. Our elders, some of them at least, are conditioned, not unlike Pavlov's dog, to yield to clerical demands. They have a morbid fear of being ostracized by other congregations.

In such instances, and they are not infrequent, I have the odd experience of being both accepted and rejected at the same time, of being both loved and feared, and of winning even when I appear to be losing. It is descriptive of a revolution, a war of ideas and principles, a fight for men's minds, a struggle for freedom. In this case a few preachers had the church's blind loyalty, as a kind of reflex action in the face of implied threats; but I (or what I stand for) had their hearts. They really want what I envisage for the Church of Christ rather than what certain preachers demand, but the thought of change makes them uneasy.

One of these bright young Turks, John Land, conned me into sitting in on (but not actually teaching!) his Sunday School class, which is presently making its way through Campbell's Declaration and Address. He has one wall of his classroom covered with a chart and dateline that shows all the important events of the Restoration Movement, including the dates when the major colleges began. Would you have guessed that our folk are doing things like that these days, studying Campbell's famous magna charter each Sunday morning?

I pointed out to them that there are two important facts in our history that have broad significance. One is that our people, Alexander Campbell in particular, were the first to give the American church a modern translation of the New Testament, and in a day when it could hardly be imagined, and as early as 1827. Goodspeed in his book on the English Bible gives Campbell credit for this. When Campbell was giving some of the old politicians a hard time on the slavery question in the 1829 Virginia Constitutional Convention, John Randolph advised his colleagues that the young clergyman bore watching since Almighty God's Bible doesn't even satisfy him for he has created one of his own!

The other notable fact is that of all the mergers in the history of the ecumenical movement, and there have been about forty, our people brought about the first one in the uniting of the Stone and Campbell churches. We have a heritage for which we can be thankful — and one that we should know something about.

But I got myself in trouble with one or two in the class when something came up about the state of those not yet baptized for the remission of sins. "Birth is not the beginning of life," I reminded them, a physical fact that our folk are reluctant to recognize in the spiritual realm. The believer has life — even eternal life according to Jn. 5:24 — and will not come into condemnation. He yet needs to he formally inducted into the family through baptism for remission of sins. "But is he saved before he is baptized?" they wanted to know. I then quoted Campbell's distinction in the MacCalla debate: "Paul was really justified when he believed, formally justified when he was baptized." That was Campbell's way of harmonizing the many passages on the sinner being saved when he believes with those that require baptism for remission of sins. Campbell insisted that baptism is not pardon-procuring but pardon-assuring, using his terminology.

Well, this upset a few of them. Some folk are made uneasy by new ideas and really don't like to think all that much. They especially dislike hearing those quotes from Alexander Campbell where he sounds so unlike what they've always heard in the Church of Christ. For instance, in the Rice debate, Campbell quite frankly admitted, "In any event I do not believe that baptism is absolutely essential to salvation." It just doesn't sound like one of those "sound" sermons in a gospel meeting at the Fifth and Izzard Church of Christ in Little Rock!

Some minds among us are disturbed by teachers who seem to vacillate. They like certainty, not equivocation. They want clear-cut consistency, not the slightest ambivalence. The sinner is saved before he is baptized or he isn't, now which is it? — and never mind this "in a sense" business. Those who talk this way don't know what to think even of themselves when they admit that the believer does have life before he is finally born of water. They themselves are now equivocating.

In my study of Restoration literature I have noticed that our most dedicated, truth-seeking leaders have been less than dogmatic on the subject of baptism, and it is, by the way, a subject upon which our people have never seen eye to eye. We gain nothing by dogmatism. And we must recognize that the man who equivocates may do so out of strength of character, not weakness of character. He may be making an honest effort to reconcile different emphases in the scriptures. We do such ones, as well as ourselves, a great disservice by insisting that they must be certain about everything and have no doubts whatever. There are certainties to be sure, but this fact does not give us the right to be certain about everything.

 Montgomery is a city of two cultures, one white and one black, and segregation is as real as it ever was, civil rights legislation (and the Christian imperative!) notwithstanding. On Sunday my friends took me to a country club for dinner — private, no blacks except those that served us. Blacks could join by law, but to be a member one must be recommended by at least two others. And what black man would care or dare to break into such a circle when he knows he's not wanted. There are many such private eating and playing clubs in the city, deliberately arranged to preserve the two cultures.

The black brother is not supposed to play golf anyway, of course, or to take his family out for dinner, or to go out for a swim. The white kids have private clubs all over town where they can swim and dance or whatever, but the blacks have nowhere to go, for there are not even any public swimming places. Private schools are also doing well for the same reason, even though blacks and whites are somewhat integrated in the public schools.

I raised this question with my friends while we dined. "I can come along with you because I'm white," I reminded them. "Doesn't it bother the church that such as this exists?" We never think about it, was their candid reply, not meaning to be indifferent. It should disturb believers terribly that their own brothers and sisters cannot go out for dinner and for a swim to a decent place, like they can, because they are black. I reminded them that such injustices are almost certainly more important to God Almighty than whether or not a church has instrumental music.

It only shows how much the world has influenced the church instead of the other way. Yea, the church reflects this worldly attitude, being more conformed to the world than to the Nazarene who would not only dine with blacks but would even wash their feet. It is ironical that the church, whose Head is the Great Revolutionary, should throughout history be one of the world's most conservative institutions. The church in the south, with but a few noble exceptions, has actually aided and abetted segregation and racism. I asked a young Christian business man if the blacks got a fair shake in the business world. No! was his reply. The church not only does not raise its voice against such injustice, for the most part, but has actually helped to create the condition. Montgomery is a classic example of what the President's Commission of Racism reported some years ago. "This nation is becoming a nation of two separate and distinct cultures, one white and one black ..." This is hardly the unity for which our Savior prayed. If the church is not concerned, who will be?

 But when one sees with his own eyes the underground Church of Christ here and there across the country, such as those I met in Montgomery, there is reason to hold on to that love that believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. The Church of Christ of tomorrow, like many other of God's people, is going to be different. The present-day remnant is going to make it so.    — the Editor