McMurry S. Richey - "Honesty to God in Pulpit and Pew" (May 23, 1965)

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	(organ music playing softly)	0:05
	(crowd chatting indistinctly)	0:17
Preacher	Unfathomable complexity	0:32
	of God's wisdom and God's knowledge.	0:34
	How could man ever understand his reasons for action	0:39
	or explain his methods of working?	0:44
	For who hath known the mind of the Lord,	0:48
	or who hath been his counselor,	0:52
	or who hath first given to him	0:55
	and it a shall be recompensed to him again?	0:58
	For of him and through him and unto him are all things.	1:02
	To him be glory forever.	1:08
	Amen.	1:11
	What ought we to believe about God?	1:16
	Nothing.	1:22
	Ought not we to believe the creed?	1:26
	No.	1:30
	The Bible?	1:32
	No.	1:34
	The church?	1:36
	No.	1:38
	Nor ought we to believe the preacher,	1:40
	including this one.	1:45
	Before you conclude that I have been engaged	1:49
	in reading too many term papers	1:53
	or engaging in preparing diabolical examinations,	1:58
	I no longer know who I am or where,	2:04
	let me go on and explain in what sense	2:10
	I have been so dogmatically, anti-dogmatic.	2:12
	Believing because we ought to	2:19
	is not really believing what we profess to believe.	2:24
	If I ascent to doctrines under parental pressure	2:30
	and continue to knuckle under intellectually	2:35
	to this in the past,	2:40
	or for group membership in the church or other organism,	2:42
	or to secure or keep approval of those I want to belong to,	2:50
	or to escape thinking further or hide my doubts,	2:57
	or to be right.	3:02
	This is not authentic belief,	3:06
	certainly not Christian faith.	3:08
	What I really may believe in such cases	3:12
	is simply that I am under pressure to conform,	3:16
	to ascent to something that doesn't make sense	3:22
	and doesn't ring true.	3:26
	And what I say I believe may have little or no connection	3:30
	with how I live.	3:35
	Indeed, because I've accepted it	3:37
	when it didn't seem real to me,	3:41
	but only because I've been told I ought to believe,	3:45
	I may inwardly or outwardly rebel	3:50
	and renounce it in my action,	3:54
	may even cut myself off from the truth	3:57
	that may be represented in such doctrine.	4:00
	Coerced belief, then,	4:04
	or belief for what it gets me,	4:07
	may be rank unbelief.	4:10
	What I may need then, uncertain creature that I am,	4:15
	ignorant, as you are,	4:21
	what I may need if I am to be open to what is real,	4:25
	rather than hiding behind spurious words,	4:31
	is some freedom to discover what I really do believe.	4:36
	What has authenticated itself to me?	4:42
	What experience has warranted for me,	4:47
	and indeed why I may be seeking or evading the truth.	4:51
	I need an accepting fellowship	5:00
	I can trust to let me be honest.	5:03
	The church might be this.	5:09
	Only we don't perceive it so,	5:14
	and sometimes it isn't.	5:17
	It might forgive my uncertainties,	5:20
	my wild notions or rebellious atheism	5:24
	as it forgives my other unfaithfulness to God.	5:30
	Surely God and the church of God	5:36
	can be as patient with the honest seeker	5:40
	or even the continuing evader	5:44
	as that old tale,	5:47
	which Benjamin Franklin once called	5:49
	the 51st chapter of Genesis.	5:51
	You may recall that Abraham, according to the story,	5:55
	received a stranger with traditional Oriental hospitality	6:01
	and offered him water to wash	6:08
	and a bed to sleep in	6:12
	and food to eat	6:14
	only to discover, when the time came to eat together,	6:16
	that he blessed not God as Abraham did,	6:20
	whereupon Abraham became wrathful and asked him	6:26
	why he did not bless God.	6:29
	And the stranger replied that he did not believe	6:33
	in the God of Abraham.	6:35
	So Abraham wrathful more, drove him out into the wilderness,	6:37
	only to hear the Lord say, Abraham, where is the stranger?	6:42
	I drove him out into the wilderness, Lord,	6:49
	because he worshiped not thee.	6:51
	Ah, says the Lord,	6:54
	all these 70 and nine years, I have suffered him.	6:56
	And you cannot put up with him one night.	7:02
	In the spirit of one great	7:08
	theological spokesman of our day,	7:10
	perhaps we could suppose that while an atheist	7:14
	doesn't take God seriously,	7:18
	God may not need to take atheism very seriously either.	7:23
	Knowing something of the dynamics that lie behind,	7:30
	suppose the belief or unbelief	7:34
	or with another of our theologians,	7:39
	perhaps we could recognize a sort of justification by doubt	7:42
	dovetailing into justification by faith.	7:48
	That is, a recognition that honest probings	7:53
	and integrity about truth	7:59
	are after all the beginnings of a basic faith.	8:02
	We might even exhume from Victorian limbo,	8:07
	a Tennyson struggling with death and nature,	8:11
	red in tooth and claw,	8:17
	irrespective of human beings like Tennyson's friend	8:19
	and say,	8:25
	there lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me,	8:28
	than in half the creeds,	8:34
	not too far from existentialist realism	8:38
	about death and nature, after all.	8:43
	But if we of the church are insecure about our faith,	8:50
	we may be intolerant of others' views,	8:58
	their doubts, their uncertainties,	9:03
	and we may share in putting them under pressure.	9:07
	They ought to believe for if they don't,	9:11
	our own beliefs are threatened.	9:17
	If we really have a faith to share,	9:20
	a reality to witness to,	9:23
	we shall welcome inquiry and colloquy,	9:26
	not insist that others ought to believe as we do	9:31
	to bolster us in our anxiety over being right	9:35
	or keeping going.	9:39
	It is salutary then that we have come into	9:43
	a new okay mood of theological honesty.	9:48
	That little book, Honest to God,	9:55
	by Bishop John A. T. Robinson	9:57
	put into popular form and circulation,	10:00
	the recent decades' reopening of fundamental questions.	10:04
	Never fear, we aren't reviewing Honest to God	10:08
	here in the pulpit today.	10:11
	despite the sermon title.	10:13
	After all, it would be like chit chat	10:15
	about the book of the month, two years late,	10:19
	or even confessing that one is conformist enough	10:21
	to read the book of the month	10:25
	because he ought.	10:27
	But Robinson's book did render the meritorious service	10:29
	of prompting widespread popular recognition and discussion	10:34
	of the nature and limitations	10:42
	of our religious thought and language	10:45
	and showed us how little they may mean to the secular world.	10:49
	The world that doesn't have much truck	10:55
	with such archaic myths and stuff.	10:57
	The newer okay books of course	11:02
	are about the secular city	11:04
	or the secular meaning of the gospel	11:06
	and how God is dead.	11:10
	One of niche's heroes may have been buried	11:14
	in the Berlin bunker,	11:17
	but another dictum has come into its time.	11:20
	So this is a time for theological honesty	11:26
	or modesty	11:31
	or humility, perhaps even humiliation.	11:34
	We may not want it,	11:38
	either in pulpit or in pew.	11:40
	After all, if the trumpeter is uncertain,	11:43
	how can we know when to gird for battle?	11:46
	We've easily taken that trumpeters role,	11:50
	particularly in pulpit and theological study.	11:54
	I have.	11:59
	And some hearing have felt they ought to believe,	12:02
	even the luxury of overplus of traditional language	12:08
	encasing fundamental beliefs.	12:15
	I've told before here, but repeat	12:20
	the story of a little boy and my first pastorate,	12:24
	whose teacher not really knowing what she was doing,	12:29
	asked her class one day,	12:35
	these seventh graders about egg production	12:38
	and one little boy, just 12,	12:44
	but already coming into something of that stentorian tone	12:46
	one has intermittently at that age	12:50
	said with an authority that carried	12:54
	even the teacher with him,	12:56
	a good hen could lay 12 eggs a day.	12:57
	All it takes is a ringing tone of authority for some.	13:03
	Thus, many of us in pulpit and study	13:12
	had a "12 eggs a day" kind of dogmatism.	13:17
	We were thrilled with the powerful new reinterpretations	13:24
	of biblical theology,	13:28
	which seemed especially relevant to us	13:30
	in our wartime predicament and after.	13:33
	We may have proclaimed these words.	13:38
	Proclaim is one of our favorite terms,	13:41
	with an authoritarian ring, like 12 eggs a day,	13:45
	and put others under pressure to ascent.	13:49
	And we may have exerted that "ought"	13:55
	with a sort of borrowed divine authority.	13:57
	It was the word of God	14:02
	and who would be presumptuous enough	14:04
	to question or resist.	14:07
	We might even personally express some of the supposed	14:10
	divine asperity over such unbelief.	14:14
	We could trumpet surely of man's inhumanity to man	14:19
	and our anxiety and inner bondage.	14:26
	These are pretty existential after all,	14:30
	whatever terms we use.	14:34
	And then we went on to proclaim the mighty acts of God	14:37
	for our salvation.	14:42
	Only sometimes we might hide from ourselves,	14:44
	even in the intellectual community,	14:49
	our uncertainty over how the ancient biblical story	14:52
	made sense in our modern world.	14:58
	Now that we are aspiring to be more honest to God, however,	15:03
	the same stridency and stentorian tone not to believe	15:11
	he's heard from the new crop,	15:19
	throw one bunch of theological rascals out,	15:22
	and you've got another.	15:24
	After all the pulpit is only human.	15:26
	Some of this problem of our thinking about the faith	15:31
	is represented in theologian Langdon Gilkey's article	15:36
	recently in the Christian century	15:41
	on disillusion and reconstruction in theology.	15:43
	I still have in my files,	15:48
	a poignant journal excerpt from the time	15:50
	when Langdon Gilkey as a young theologian	15:54
	was confined in a concentration camp	15:57
	under the Japanese in China.	16:00
	And as with whimsical, but theological acumen,	16:04
	he analyzed the reactions of the fellow members	16:11
	of this concentration camp.	16:15
	We could see the relevance of the Christian doctrine of man	16:20
	in his predicament of self-centeredness	16:26
	and need of salvation.	16:29
	And Langdon Gilkey confesses that he was one who found	16:33
	in the time after that	16:36
	a new authority in the great surging,	16:41
	strong biblical theology of recent times.	16:46
	Only now as he thinks with others about the secular world	16:52
	and its inattention to such traditional language	16:58
	and the analysts of language themselves,	17:04
	with their questions about what these really mean,	17:09
	and the tests of many things we have claimed,	17:16
	tests in action.	17:20
	Only now he begins to feel the disillusion	17:22
	and the need for reconstruction of such theology.	17:28
	He does not despair.	17:33
	He finds at the depths of man's experience,	17:35
	a recognition of an ultimate claim upon him.	17:39
	He discovers in the figure of Jesus Christ,	17:45
	an answer to man's predicament.	17:51
	But with a great deal more modesty than before,	17:54
	he begins the task of theological reconstruction.	17:57
	This is no new theological predicament.	18:02
	It's quite redolent of those words of Paul	18:07
	read this morning.	18:10
	And I read them again with the feeling	18:12
	that they belong to our time.	18:15
	This is a ministry which God in his mercy has given us	18:18
	and nothing can daunt us.	18:22
	We use no Hocus Pocus,	18:24
	no clever tricks,	18:26
	no dishonest manipulation of the word of God.	18:27
	We speak the plain truth.	18:30
	And so commend ourselves to every man's conscience	18:32
	in the sight of God.	18:35
	If our gospel is veiled,	18:37
	the veil must be in the minds of those	18:39
	who are spiritually dying.	18:41
	The spirit of this world has blinded the minds	18:43
	of those who do not believe	18:46
	and prevents the light of the glorious gospel of Christ,	18:48
	the image of God, from shining on them,	18:51
	for it is Christ Jesus as Lord whom we preach,	18:54
	not ourselves.	18:58
	We are your servants for Jesus' sake.	19:00
	God who first ordered light to shine in darkness	19:04
	has flooded our hearts with his light.	19:07
	We now can enlighten men only because	19:10
	we give them knowledge of the glory of God	19:13
	as we see it in the face of Jesus Christ.	19:15
	This priceless treasure, we hold, so to speak,	19:18
	in a common earthenware jar	19:21
	to show that the splendid power of it	19:24
	belongs to God and not to us.	19:27
	After all we have said about this matter,	19:34
	let us go on to say in another way	19:39
	that we ought to believe.	19:43
	We ought to be open to, responsive to, faithful to	19:47
	what shows itself ultimately real.	19:54
	It has a claim upon us, not for pressured belief,	19:58
	but for honesty to God in a positive sense.	20:02
	So there is another sense, a positive one,	20:06
	of being honest to God,	20:10
	one of integrity, of responsibility,	20:13
	of concern for what is real	20:16
	with eyes wide open to the mercies of God.	20:21
	Then I beg you to consider three things.	20:26
	First, the Christian community	20:31
	in which we find ourselves more or less belonging	20:36
	is a bearer of much more than we individually	20:42
	have been able to test.	20:47
	As in a university working in one department,	20:50
	we're aware that other departments can be trusted	20:54
	to carry on their work,	20:59
	even though we know too little about it.	21:00
	So we can recognize in the continuing Christian community,	21:04
	the possibility of mutual witness and reinforcement	21:09
	in respect to a reality some others have experienced	21:13
	more than we yet may have recognized.	21:17
	This is not to say a priori that it's all true,	21:21
	but it's also to raise the question as to	21:25
	why we may not even be open to examining its truth.	21:28
	It is always possible that our descent is not brilliance,	21:35
	but evasion.	21:41
	We may not want to meet the claim,	21:42
	such a gospel embodies.	21:46
	But if we are to hear it	21:50
	and hear it with an acceptance,	21:52
	which isn't an "ought to believe,"	21:54
	someone of this community will need to open the way	21:57
	for dialogue and discussion,	22:01
	perhaps like that kind of coffee house ministry	22:04
	that has risen in campus after campus	22:08
	throughout the country.	22:11
	Wully's magazine a couple of months ago	22:13
	had an article about this kind of evangelism	22:15
	and with typical lack of restraint,	22:21
	the assertion that this was the only way	22:24
	to reach the modern mind,	22:28
	but discounting that, one can recognize	22:30
	two important features of this new ministry.	22:33
	One, the opening of opportunity	22:38
	for frank and candid exploration	22:42
	of what we do think, not what we ought to think.	22:46
	With the coffee house, Christian evangelists,	22:51
	listening to, going along with, accepting	22:57
	persons who might be,	23:01
	to quote the article, slobs.	23:04
	But only in that kind of acceptance and belonging	23:09
	might these resistant and deviant characters	23:14
	begin to open up to what is true,	23:23
	not something maintained with dogmatic power by the witness,	23:28
	but explore.	23:33
	And secondly,	23:35
	there was a possibility in these coffee house outreaches	23:36
	to look into some of the literature	23:42
	or the music, the art of our day	23:44
	with a kind of detachment yet openness to engagement	23:48
	through which reality might raise questions	23:54
	and offer answers yet.	23:59
	Secondly,	24:02
	the Christian community has as a part of its story,	24:05
	part of its story that shapes its real essential self.	24:10
	What President Knight called the other day, an inside story.	24:16
	We were here honoring Bishop Kilgul	24:22
	at the time of the dedication of a new portal.	24:25
	And these words were spoken about him.	24:30
	Called of God, preacher of the word,	24:33
	wise counselor of youth,	24:35
	champion of the liberal mind,	24:38
	defender of academic freedom,	24:40
	teacher of social enlightenment,	24:43
	opponent of sectionalism,	24:45
	full of the provincial spirit in church and society,	24:47
	committed to conscience above policy,	24:51
	upholder of Christian truth,	24:54
	servant and Bishop of the church.	24:56
	It meant something to us to hear	25:00
	a Bishop of our church today	25:04
	standing in this pulpit	25:07
	celebrate the resistance of this great former president	25:09
	of Trinity college,	25:15
	to some of the encroachments of what might have been called,	25:17
	if they had had the term for it then,	25:21
	the radical right,	25:23
	and maintaining academic freedom	25:25
	and integrity and excellence.	25:27
	And we had a feeling that this was part of our story	25:31
	and we could appropriate it as one of the elements	25:35
	that shapes the character of our school today.	25:40
	There's much else we can recall from the past	25:43
	that we would not want to shape our present character.	25:47
	And so you see we are selecting.	25:51
	But is there something moving within us	25:55
	that awakens us time and time again,	25:59
	to discern what is	26:02
	rightly grasping us out of the inner history	26:06
	of our community?	26:11
	If you looked the other night	26:14
	at that television representation	26:18
	of the dedication of the Kennedy Memorial in England,	26:21
	this simple memorial	26:25
	on a place where there was no other memorial	26:28
	to an even greater event of the past,	26:32
	the Magna Carta,	26:36
	perhaps you were reminded of	26:38
	one of the great central traditions	26:40
	in our own inner history as a Western community	26:44
	that helped to shape the persons we are	26:48
	even when we are ignorant of it, unresponsive to it,	26:51
	the Magna Carla has engaged us.	26:55
	So does the age-long biblical witness	27:01
	in language of another day, perhaps,	27:07
	concepts foreign to our secular world,	27:10
	tell the story of one through whom	27:14
	God has shaped the historic community	27:18
	and begun to shape our lives.	27:23
	And so we come to a third and final point.	27:26
	If our eyes are wide open to the mercies of God,	27:30
	we may be grasped today by such inner meanings.	27:37
	They center into,	27:43
	in what the Honest to God theology has called	27:45
	the man for others.	27:49
	They involve his followers in similar ministry	27:52
	of love and service in our day.	27:57
	They strip away many of the traditional accoutrements	28:02
	of belief and cultus,	28:07
	even as Jesus in his day	28:11
	often shunted aside what did not belong	28:14
	to authentic love and service.	28:19
	And somehow this part of our story of our inner history	28:24
	becomes normative for all the rest.	28:31
	And we feel ourselves grasped.	28:36
	Ought we to believe anything about God then,	28:40
	or the creed or the scriptures or the church	28:42
	or the preachers?	28:45
	Still no, not ought.	28:46
	But we may.	28:49
	We may be given accepting support,	28:51
	enough to begin to be free,	28:54
	to discover what really claims us in this world	28:57
	and assess its worth and hear other witnesses	29:01
	and probe beneath their ways of saying	29:06
	to what really engages them	29:08
	and allow that man for others to become the one for us,	29:11
	showing us what real man who it is	29:18
	and exposing our evasions of such heights,	29:22
	forgiving our defections from such efforts,	29:27
	enabling our loyalty and response.	29:31
	This is what we mean after all by faith.	29:37
	We may enter into the real meanings	29:43
	of the creeds and scriptures and church	29:47
	and preaching of the ages	29:50
	until with the historic church,	29:52
	we can join in that great Te Deum,	29:55
	which we now make our prayer.	29:59
	Let us pray.	30:00
	We praise thee, oh God.	30:06
	We acknowledge thee, to be the Lord.	30:08
	All the earth doth worship thee,	30:11
	the father everlasting.	30:13
	To thee, all angels cry aloud,	30:15
	the heavens and all the powers therein.	30:17
	Holy, holy, holy Lord.	30:20
	God of Sabaoth.	30:22
	Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory.	30:23
	The glorious company of the apostles, praise thee.	30:27
	The goodly fellowship of the prophets, praise thee.	30:31
	The noble army of martyrs, praise thee.	30:34
	The holy church throughout all the world	30:38
	doth acknowledge thee,	30:40
	the father of an infinite majesty.	30:42
	Thine adorable, true, and only son.	30:45
	Also the Holy Ghost, the comforter.	30:48
	Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,	30:51
	The love of God,	30:55
	the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.	30:57

Item Info

Title:

McMurry S. Richey - "Honesty to God in Pulpit and Pew" (May 23, 1965)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4736r36w

Date:

May 23, 1965

Speaker:

Richey, McMurry S.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0298
ref5801_bu0
uachapelsermaud
duke:628098
dcrau002297
ark:/87924/r4736r36w
2cbb4739-80df-45b4-8e1e-af37981a7c17

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McMurry S. Richey - "Honesty to God in Pulpit and Pew" (May 23, 1965)

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