James T. Cleland - "Classroom and Chapel" (March 9, 1958; April 20, 1958)

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-	Let the words of my mouth	0:06
	and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable	0:10
	in thy sight,	0:14
	oh, Lord our strength and our redeemer, amen.	0:16
	Have you ever run across a sentence	0:31
	in your serious or (indistinct) reading	0:35
	which made you bite the end of your pencil	0:41
	or chew on your pipe	0:47
	or screw up your eyes	0:52
	as you tried to think the thought out of it?	0:56
	Here is such a sentence,	1:03
	a comment made by a student at Edinburgh University,	1:06
	one which must have been echoed	1:12
	on this campus over and over again.	1:14
	I quote for memory,	1:19
	the greatest difficulty which confronted me as a student	1:23
	was the prosecution of my academic studies	1:31
	along with the maintenance of my spiritual life.	1:36
	The greatest difficulty that confronted me as a student	1:43
	was the prosecution of my academic studies	1:49
	along with the maintenance of my spiritual life.	1:54
	Now, the more thoughtful and the more devout a student is,	2:01
	the more likely he, she is to undergo such an experience.	2:07
	Now, this sentence came to my mind	2:15
	as I was thinking of the relationship	2:18
	between our undergraduate classrooms in religion	2:21
	and the university service of worship in the chapel.	2:27
	I must limit this consideration	2:33
	to the undergraduate classrooms in religion,	2:35
	though realizing that other problems arise	2:39
	when we consider the relationship of science and philosophy	2:43
	and psychology to the fact and content of corporate worship	2:49
	that one sermon can tackle only so much.	2:57
	There are some students here at Duke who cannot accept	3:03
	both the critical study of the Bible	3:08
	and the content of the service.	3:12
	They therefore reject one or the other,	3:16
	sometimes even both.	3:21
	There are others who accept both,	3:26
	but separate one from the other,	3:30
	keeping each in watertight compartments.	3:33
	For them there is no relationship between the	3:39
	dissecting room where spiritual autopsies are conducted	3:42
	and the public affirmation of God and Jesus Christ.	3:50
	There are yet others who manage	3:57
	to run corridors between the two,	3:59
	watching the interplay of study upon devotion	4:03
	and of adoration upon research.	4:09
	And then there are those mature souls	4:15
	who can worship in the classroom	4:21
	and study in the chapel.	4:27
	Now let us look together at these phenomenon.	4:32
	The classroom in religion and the chapel.	4:37
	What is the purpose of each?	4:40
	What does each have to say to the other?	4:43
	What is the job of the classroom in religion?	4:49
	It is the same as that of most other classroom.	4:55
	The objective search for truth in a given field.	5:02
	It is the attempt to discover the agreement	5:10
	between the facts submitted and the conclusions drawn.	5:14
	The purpose is not to make the learner religious,	5:22
	but rather to make him, her,	5:30
	a student of the data of religion,	5:33
	able to observe, to compare,	5:38
	to select, to reject,	5:43
	and then to construct hypothesis	5:48
	which will integrate the material scrutinized.	5:51
	Such a student gains knowledge about religion,	5:57
	about religion, its origins, its development,	6:04
	its influence on contemporary culture,	6:11
	its susceptibility to contemporary culture,	6:14
	its radical and its conservative tendencies,	6:19
	its place in the history of man and ideas.	6:24
	And so, instead of reading one chapter of the Bible	6:30
	per night required by father or requested by mother	6:35
	as a fill of spiritual duty,	6:41
	the student begins to ask questions of the Bible	6:44
	and to frame answers, tentative but plausible.	6:50
	Why is there a double story of the creation	6:58
	of man and woman in the early pages of Genesis?	7:02
	In one, man and woman are created together	7:09
	as the climax of creation,	7:14
	in the other man was created first of all creatures	7:19
	and woman was literally a last resort.	7:25
	Someone has said whimsically, purely a side issue.	7:32
	Now, why?	7:40
	Why are there varying accounts	7:45
	of the numbers of animals taken into the ark by Noah?	7:48
	One account says two of each kind,	7:54
	the other says seven	7:59
	of the type of bird and animal seven pairs	8:02
	which can be used for sacrifice, why?	8:07
	So one tentatively realizes that Genesis	8:13
	may be a composite volume added to, edited,	8:19
	re-edited in one begins to talk learnedly	8:24
	about the JE&P document.	8:27
	If Isaiah lived around 740 to 700 BC,	8:35
	why is he so well acquainted with the conquest of Cyrus?	8:45
	Those dates are around 540 BC.	8:53
	Did he foresee and foretell the possibility	9:00
	of a return from exile 200 years before it happened?	9:04
	In fact, before the Jews went into exile?	9:10
	Or were there two Isaiahs?	9:14
	As a matter of fact, scholars now think there were three.	9:18
	Now, the reason they say this is not to upset you	9:22
	or your grandmother,	9:27
	but because such a hypothesis seems to make more sense	9:31
	of the chronological, historical,	9:36
	and theoretical theological discrepancies	9:40
	than the assumption that one man back in the eighth century	9:46
	could write in such a variety of ways	9:51
	over such a range of history.	9:55
	Why do you think it is that the Romans are quite washed	10:01
	in the book of Acts and the Jews are blackwash?	10:06
	I don't know,	10:14
	but I do know one reasonable hypothesis to account for it.	10:15
	Acts may have been prepared by Paul's friends	10:22
	for his lawyers	10:29
	before he appeared before the supreme court in Rome,	10:33
	'cause you remember he appeared	10:40
	on a charge of being a public nuisance to the Roman Empire.	10:41
	Well, if it could be shown	10:46
	that he never had been a public nuisance,	10:48
	that no Roman judge had ever found him guilty,	10:50
	in fact that he was a Roman citizen,	10:53
	then you've got an argument for his case,	10:55
	is that why Acts was written in such a way?	10:58
	You will make much more out of the book of the Revelation	11:06
	if you stop thinking about it as a photograph	11:11
	of a hot shimmering, metallic heaven,	11:14
	full of noisy almost nonstop singing,	11:20
	and consider it a pep talk for the faithful	11:25
	in time of persecution at the end of the first century.	11:31
	This is the job of the classroom,	11:38
	not to make your faith or break your faith,	11:41
	but to help you understand the books of the Bible	11:47
	in their own time, in their own environment.	11:50
	The only test is truth.	11:54
	If you're a devout person that shouldn't scare you	11:59
	because God is truth,	12:03
	the search may lead to him,	12:08
	it can, it has, but whether it does or not,	12:10
	the classroom's job is still as Elton Trueblood has put it	12:16
	to work round and round the available material	12:22
	until it is found gradually to fit into place	12:28
	and make a coherent scheme.	12:34
	The purpose is evaluation.	12:39
	The technique is study.	12:43
	The method is contemplation.	12:47
	The outcome is tested truth willing to be retested.	12:51
	Now of course there are two unpleasant	13:03
	byproducts of such study.	13:07
	One is an ivory towerish detachment	13:12
	which fails to realize that the biblical men and women	13:17
	so loved and so lived	13:21
	that they killed and died	13:25
	for the ideas now studied in religion.	13:28
	When objectivity becomes insensitiveness	13:33
	and contemplation is metamorphosed into torpidity,	13:38
	then these dry bones won't rise again.	13:44
	The other byproduct is just the opposite.	13:51
	It is an impassioned allegiance to a tentative hypothesis	13:56
	which shocks the Orthodox	14:03
	and causes letters to be written to the trustees.	14:06
	Some of us were discussing Judas the other day.	14:11
	Just why did Judas betray Jesus?	14:15
	Now, the suggestion that he was money crazy	14:21
	does not seem to fit all the facts.	14:25
	And De Quincey, the English essayist,	14:30
	popularized a German hypothesis of the last century,	14:34
	it went something like this,	14:38
	Judas was the only disciple	14:42
	who appreciated the possibilities	14:47
	in the messianic preaching of Jesus,	14:50
	especially it's apocalyptic implications.	14:54
	Now let me explain that.	14:58
	God literally, literally, would send thousands of angels	15:01
	to initiate and instigate the kingdom of God	15:08
	if Jesus would but give the sign for its inauguration.	15:13
	But Jesus couldn't make up his mind.	15:21
	He suffered from the Hamlet cramp, to be or not to be.	15:25
	And so Judas decided to force his hand.	15:33
	He would betray Jesus to his enemies	15:39
	and then the angelic host would swing into action.	15:44
	The kingdom would be established.	15:49
	Jesus would reign,	15:52
	and Judas would be rewarded as the agent	15:55
	in the divine catechism.	16:00
	The plan backfired,	16:04
	there was no supernatural intervention.	16:08
	Jesus was crucified for high treason,	16:12
	and in remorse,	16:16
	Judas committed suicide.	16:19
	Now, if I were Judas, I would brief De Quincey	16:23
	to be my lawyer before the bar of heaven.	16:27
	That's a fascinating hypothesis,	16:31
	but you can imagine the consternation	16:35
	among the Orthodox elect	16:38
	when this is promulgated at Christmas or spring vacation	16:41
	by a freshman or a sophomore	16:47
	as the gospel preached at Duke University.	16:51
	The job of the classroom is the search for truth	16:58
	and not insensitive enough to Bible issues,	17:05
	nor premature commitment to tentative theories.	17:10
	Now what's the job of the chapel?	17:18
	It is basically different from the classroom.	17:22
	It is not primarily the place	17:26
	where one sets out on an objective search	17:28
	for true data about religion.	17:32
	The chapel is that portion of space,	17:36
	fittingly enclosed, where at a given time,	17:42
	a company of the like-minded may gather	17:49
	to express corporately their commitment to the God	17:53
	revealed in the religion which they have accepted.	17:59
	The public worship of God is an act of dedication,	18:05
	or re-dedication to him who is the be-all	18:11
	and the end-all of the lives of the worshipers.	18:17
	There is a place for teaching in the service,	18:22
	but not in the first part of the service.	18:28
	Sunday by Sunday, by Sunday,	18:34
	the service opens with the vision of God	18:37
	as we are called again and again into his presence,	18:41
	because of his majesty, we revere him,	18:48
	because of his holiness,	18:51
	we confess our creaturehood and our sin to him,	18:53
	because of his love we are corporately grateful	18:59
	that we are allowed to stand in good relations with him.	19:03
	Only after that is sensed and acknowledged,	19:09
	do we move on to an examination of what his truth	19:14
	and his intentions mean for us in our day to day living.	19:19
	Moreover, this is not primarily a matter	19:24
	of the use of the intellect,	19:28
	our brains, our gray matter, though they are involved,	19:31
	it is the commitment of the whole person,	19:36
	heart, mind, will, cognition and emotions.	19:40
	This is total and trust me,	19:46
	the result is not knowledge about God,	19:51
	but knowledge of God, sometimes referred to as faith in God,	19:56
	somewhat comparable to the difference between	20:06
	a study of friendship like (indistinct)	20:10
	and the appreciation of a friend	20:18
	like the relationship of David and Jonathan.	20:22
	Now the religion recognized here at Duke is that which	20:28
	centers in the God preeminently revealed in Jesus Christ	20:32
	and in the activity of his holy spirit.	20:38
	It's somewhat different	20:42
	from that to which most of us have have been accustomed,	20:43
	in that it is consciously and officially	20:48
	interdenominational,	20:54
	that word is printed in the front of the program.	20:56
	Now, if it's going to be interdenominational,	21:01
	it's almost inevitably going to be eclectic,	21:04
	(indistinct), Methodist hymns, Episcopal	21:10
	and Presbyterian acts of Jesus,	21:16
	carefully interwoven or else haphazardly tangled,	21:21
	(indistinct).	21:25
	Nevertheless, the central fact is clear,	21:30
	God as found in the Bible,	21:35
	interpreted by the Catholic Church,	21:40
	and reformed in the Protestant heritage,	21:44
	him we worship,	21:48
	him we know,	21:51
	him we seek to worship more worldly and know more surely.	21:53
	Now don't let this fact of commitments scare you.	22:00
	It's in line with so much of our lives,	22:04
	we are committed people to the United States,	22:07
	to one or other of the political parties	22:13
	or to some splinter group,	22:16
	to dear old to Duke, to fraternity or sorority,	22:20
	we cannot live without commitment.	22:25
	We can debate and argue and propose and amend,	22:30
	but regularly comes the moderator's voice.	22:38
	It is now time to vote.	22:43
	Even though we long for more evidence	22:48
	or desire more discussion,	22:51
	life has a habit of saying, cast your vote,	22:53
	vote for on the knowledge you have	22:59
	and the wisdom you have acquired,	23:02
	and remember action follows the vote.	23:04
	We have to be committed to something	23:11
	if we claim to be alive.	23:14
	And so the chapel is different from the classroom.	23:18
	We come here making certain affirmations.	23:23
	It is the business of a chapel both to declare	23:28
	and to interpret these affirmations,	23:32
	but before they are evaluated and expounded and applied,	23:35
	they are affirmed.	23:41
	I wish that we had an affirmation of faith in this service.	23:44
	Well, I know that many of us both have the thought	23:48
	of standing and declaring the Apostles Creed.	23:51
	I wouldn't want that done	23:56
	without a series of sermons interpreting it first.	23:57
	But the important word in the phrase,	24:03
	born of the virgin Mary, is born, not virgin.	24:05
	That the resurrection of the body	24:13
	is not the same as the resurrection of the flesh.	24:16
	Either could be an interesting study on the phrase,	24:22
	he descended into hell,	24:25
	with the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians	24:29
	also decline to descend into hell with the Methodist.	24:32
	But we do need an affirmation of faith.	24:41
	It would remind us of what the chapel stands for	24:47
	the commitment of the whole person to God	24:50
	as he is understood in the reformed Christian tradition,	24:54
	for man's chief hand is not to study religion,	24:59
	not even to study the Bible,	25:03
	but to glorify and to enjoy God.	25:06
	Now let's go one step further.	25:11
	Both classroom and chapel have a valid place on this campus,	25:14
	a necessary place	25:18
	according to the trustees of the university.	25:19
	Each by itself is good,	25:23
	but each in empathy with the other is better.	25:26
	The chapel needs the classroom	25:32
	because faith alone can become self deceived, arrogant,	25:37
	and unwilling to stand the test of objective analysis.	25:45
	The shoddy pulpit needs the rebuke	25:50
	Of the disciplined classroom,	25:55
	as to why to be able to give reasons	25:58
	for the faith that is within us,	26:00
	the classroom tells the chapel	26:04
	that it may be good to be devout,	26:05
	but that it's better to be honest and devout.	26:08
	It says do not forget	26:14
	that in addition to the power of the committed heart,	26:16
	it's well to have the same balance of the trained heads.	26:21
	It reminds us that it's not enough	26:26
	to thump the pulpit Bible and say, it is written,	26:28
	or to hold the Bible up and say, the Bible says,	26:33
	because someone will say where in the Bible is it written	26:37
	and by whom, and perhaps point out	26:43
	that it's contradicted in another passage,	26:46
	and please, which should we believe if either?	26:49
	And to answer such a statement	26:53
	that we are children of the devil	26:56
	lays one open to the biblical answer,	26:59
	judge not that you not judged.	27:01
	Some biblical knowledge,	27:07
	sound biblical knowledge in acts Jesus and exposition	27:08
	will define and refine, prune and curl,	27:13
	cultivate and enlarge the doctrine we learned	27:19
	at our mother's knee,	27:23
	and make it somewhat more in keeping	27:25
	with the rich learned heritage of the faith.	27:28
	But the classroom needs the chapel.	27:33
	There's always the danger that with the stress on knowledge	27:37
	there will grow up the unlovely attitude of arrogance.	27:40
	I've watched Bible scholars	27:45
	shatter the religious confidence of immature students	27:48
	by their merciless pounding on the facts	27:54
	discerned by the scholars,	27:57
	in complete oblivion of the spiritual heart	28:01
	and the heart wariness of the bewildered pupil	28:04
	as he moves for the no man's land	28:08
	of the lower and higher criticism.	28:11
	It may be factually accurate	28:15
	that the miracles of Jesus can be understood	28:18
	in scientific terms or explained away, that may be true	28:21
	by the wise teacher who himself because of the chapel	28:29
	knows the joy of commitment,	28:35
	we'll go on to ask, but,	28:37
	what manner of person was this Jesus	28:40
	who made such an impression on his followers	28:45
	that they could not explain him in ordinary terms,	28:50
	but had to resort to the miraculous	28:55
	to account satisfactorily for him?	28:59
	It's not difficult to show the confusion	29:04
	and the contradiction in the evidence for the resurrection,	29:06
	but a teacher who has sent something	29:12
	of the joy of the Easter service	29:14
	will go on to talk about the horror of death	29:16
	in the first century	29:19
	where the average span of life was 32 years,	29:21
	how death was known to Paul as the last enemy,	29:26
	and then revealed to his class	29:30
	how the whole Christian movement found its raise on death	29:32
	in the unshakable confidence that Jesus	29:36
	was was not holden of death	29:39
	with the ensuing hope for the believer.	29:42
	Now in such a classroom, the student will be willing	29:46
	to wrestle with the confusions and the contradictions	29:49
	of the biblical records because he has confidence	29:54
	in the good will,	30:00
	as well as in the professional competence of the teacher	30:02
	and such a teacher will be Paul's phrase become incarnate,	30:07
	speaking the truth in love.	30:13
	I sometimes think if that Edinburgh student	30:23
	had been at Duke,	30:26
	he wouldn't have had the same difficulty	30:29
	in maintaining his spiritual life	30:31
	while prosecuting his academic studies	30:35
	because here we rightly speak of classroom and chapel.	30:37
	I think our Lord would give this his blessing.	30:46
	He came teaching and preaching,	30:50
	and he would've sympathized with you who are undergraduates	30:56
	in your effort to deny neither of the study of religion,	31:00
	nor commitment to religion,	31:06
	because when he was a boy,	31:10
	he stayed for once for three days in the temple,	31:12
	his father's house.	31:18
	While we may assume that he worshiped,	31:21
	the record tells us that he sat among the teachers	31:24
	listening to them,	31:30
	asking them question.	31:33
	And the story concludes with the statement that	31:36
	Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature	31:40
	and in favor with God and man.	31:46
	Perhaps Duke is trying to repeat that in its motto	31:50
	(indistinct).	31:58
	Amen, let us pray.	32:06
	Oh, God, who are thy self the truth	32:16
	and the teacher of all who seek the truth,	32:19
	grant us boldness to examine	32:24
	and faith to trust all truth,	32:27
	courage to admit all fresh truth	32:33
	and honesty in combining it with the old	32:36
	through him who loved the truth,	32:41
	even Jesus Christ, our Lord.	32:44
	And the grace of the Lord, Jesus Christ	32:48
	be with you all this day and forever more.	32:52

Item Info

Title:

James T. Cleland - "Classroom and Chapel" (March 9, 1958; April 20, 1958)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r49023h50

Date:

March 9, 1958
April 20, 1958

Speaker:

Cleland, James T. (James Tough), 1903-1974

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0048
ref5315_l83
uachapelsermaud
duke:628473
dcrau002091
ark:/87924/r49023h50
ee1e8cd0-a142-446a-95b5-492dc5a6bf00

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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English

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United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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James T. Cleland - "Classroom and Chapel" (March 9, 1958; April 20, 1958)

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