Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

Download
- Rights
- Limited Re-Use
  Educational Use Permitted
  More Rights Info
- Files (1)
- MP3
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
Share

Embed Code
<iframe src='//idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4g15zc43?embed=true' height='125px' width='100%' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' allowfullscreen></iframe>
Permalink

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4g15zc43
Skip to Item Info

Loading the media player...

Files for this Item

Transcript

Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.

-	I would like to make it clear	0:20
	in the beginning of this sermon,	0:22
	that I am not planning	0:26
	for this sermon to go into triple overtime.	0:28
	In fact, because I more or less lived through,	0:36
	triple overtime yesterday,	0:42
	I'm not sure that I shall have voice enough left	0:46
	to go through even the regulation length sermon here today.	0:50
	I do not know which way you will hope about that,	0:56
	but we will leave it uncertain at the moment.	1:00
	On this same theme,	1:04
	let me say that Steve Vandenberg	1:06
	has a wit that is as sharp	1:09
	as his basketball shooting.	1:13
	At a luncheon day before yesterday on Friday,	1:17
	Steve handed me $4 for his membership	1:22
	in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.	1:27
	And you will recall that yesterday afternoon,	1:31
	it was his basket,	1:33
	which put the duke score	1:35
	out of Carolina's reach in the	1:38
	closing seconds of the third overtime.	1:40
	On Steve's way out of the stadium,	1:45
	he spotted me in the crowd,	1:47
	cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled at me,	1:49
	"That's the best $4 I ever spent."	1:53
	(laughing)	1:55
	I would like now to shift from basketball to track	2:02
	for a starting point in the sermon,	2:06
	Joel McClure was a broad jumper and he was a good one.	2:10
	He selected his track shoes with extreme care.	2:15
	The pair he chose this particular year served him well	2:21
	through the winter and the spring practice.	2:25
	They gave him unfailing sure footage security	2:28
	through the dual track meets,	2:33
	through the preliminaries of the conference track meet	2:35
	and even through two of the three final jumps	2:40
	of the championship contention.	2:43
	He was within striking distance of the championship.	2:48
	He made his final run and had measured his stride perfectly.	2:54
	He felt that with one last burst of energy,	3:00
	he could make the winning jump.	3:06
	But on the step before his leap,	3:10
	the string of his jumping shoe broke.	3:15
	At a very crucial moment,	3:21
	a very essential piece of equipment failed.	3:24
	That track shoe string can be a symbol	3:30
	of the clarity of our concept of God	3:35
	and the sign of our relationship to God.	3:40
	Because the time in which we live	3:45
	is crucial and the extreme.	3:48
	Our cities have been torn with riots,	3:52
	and we have just been told	3:55
	that there may very likely be more to come.	3:56
	Our nation is engaged	4:02
	in a fantastically expensive war in Vietnam,	4:04
	which is killing off our sons	4:09
	and dividing the sentiment of America	4:11
	as it has never been divided	4:14
	over a foreign conflict before.	4:16
	Inflation is robbing the savings of our retired people,	4:20
	taking food out of the mouths of the poor.	4:26
	Nuclear weapons are spreading	4:30
	from the United States and Russia to other nations.	4:32
	And mankind stands at the edge of possibly total catastrophe	4:37
	for the first time in history.	4:42
	Just at the moment,	4:46
	when a great forward leap of faith is needed	4:50
	to rescue man from the perils which beset him,	4:56
	the shoestring of faith has broken.	5:01
	Western man has become more confused	5:07
	in his thinking about God	5:11
	than at any previous time in history.	5:15
	And yet his sureness of God	5:18
	is the center of reference.	5:21
	Western civilization today lacks the firmness	5:26
	of theological footing,	5:29
	which is needed to support	5:32
	a mighty forward leap of faith.	5:34
	Now perhaps this morning,	5:38
	we can sketch the dimensions of this confusion	5:40
	and point to some ways by which	5:44
	we can in the coming months work our way	5:47
	to a clear and meaningful faith in God.	5:49
	At this point, let us remind ourselves	5:55
	of what it was at Western civilized man	5:58
	believed about the nature of God	6:03
	before the erosion set in.	6:05
	There've always been a minority of classical atheists,	6:09
	agnostics, DS, pantheists,	6:13
	but the overwhelming majority of Christian man	6:17
	in Western civilization have believed in	6:20
	a divine creator who is personal.	6:24
	Who continues to be active in the universe,	6:29
	which he brought into being.	6:33
	And whose character and whose purpose	6:36
	were revealed by any in Jesus of Nazareth,	6:40
	who is called Christ.	6:44
	Without laboring the point,	6:47
	I should simply mention	6:49
	that until this present generation,	6:51
	it was taken for granted that	6:54
	members and ministers	6:57
	of all churches held to this belief.	6:59
	And that most people outside the church	7:03
	had such an intellectual belief as this as well.	7:07
	Whether their intellectual belief	7:12
	was taken seriously in their lives or not.	7:13
	In the United States for instance,	7:18
	Gallup polls have shown in the past that as high as 97%	7:20
	of the American population acknowledged	7:25
	such a God to exist.	7:28
	However, no honest student of the contemporary scene	7:31
	can say that this situation exists today.	7:38
	In addition to the old line atheist outside the church,	7:43
	we now have new line atheists inside the church	7:48
	who call themselves Christian atheists.	7:52
	In addition to the familiar non-Christian agnostic,	7:57
	we today have a variety of agnostics in the church	8:01
	and some of them are among its leaders.	8:06
	It was reported that at the recent meeting	8:10
	of the national council of the churches of Christ	8:12
	held in Miami beach,	8:15
	a third of the delegates present	8:18
	were unwilling to affirm unqualified belief	8:21
	in a personal God.	8:26
	A Bishop of the church of England,	8:29
	J.T Robinson feels it is time to uproot the notion	8:31
	of a personal God.	8:36
	Other prominent theologians	8:39
	such as Tillich, Van Buren,	8:41
	all Tiser boatmen have dismissed from their thinking	8:42
	the reality of a supernatural God.	8:47
	Well now it would be confusing enough,	8:52
	define church leaders and theologians denying	8:55
	the existence of a personal God	8:58
	If this were the full extent of the confusion.	9:00
	But unhappily it is not.	9:03
	Many of those who reject the notion of God	9:06
	as a divine person nevertheless use the term God,	9:08
	and even spell it with a capital G.	9:13
	What is God?	9:17
	For some of them God is the ground of all being.	9:20
	He is the life force that runs through everything,	9:23
	et cetera, et cetera.	9:27
	For others God is the hungry masses longing for bread.	9:30
	A recent edition of a publication distributed	9:37
	by the ecumenical Institute in Chicago,	9:39
	quoted with approval,	9:43
	a piece written in 1925 by a Marxist	9:44
	could defined God	9:49
	as the rioting looting and burning mops.	9:51
	He did not write that God was at work in that mob	9:59
	or that service to such a mob	10:05
	would be equivalent to serving God.	10:07
	Rather he wrote God, is that mob.	10:11
	No more no less.	10:16
	Well the same thing has happened	10:20
	to our word for God,	10:23
	that has happened to the word barbecue.	10:27
	The word barbecue originally referred to the process	10:31
	of cooking meat in which the entire animal	10:34
	was cooked at once over an open fire.	10:39
	That's what it meant.	10:45
	The word barbecue referred to that and to that alone.	10:48
	However, because certain sauces and spices	10:54
	were sometimes applied to the meat	10:58
	while it was being barbecued	11:01
	and because this meat has	11:04
	sometimes been served in drive in restaurants,	11:06
	one may today find about any kind of meat offering	11:09
	that you can imagine being called barbecue	11:14
	provided it has been artificially flavored,	11:18
	or if it is served out of doors	11:21
	or you may buy it at a drive in restaurant,	11:24
	regardless of how the meat was cooked.	11:27
	So we often find the word barbecue	11:32
	applied to the incidentals rather than	11:35
	to that widget originally described.	11:39
	Same is true of our name	11:44
	for the personal being who created	11:46
	and who creates today.	11:48
	The father of our Lord, Jesus Christ.	11:50
	The name of God is applied to everything	11:53
	all the way from the creator of the universe,	11:55
	to the kitchen sink.	11:57
	It is important that we seek	12:01
	to clarify the meaning of the word. I think.	12:03
	Is it important that we determined whether faith	12:08
	in a personal God is viable today?	12:11
	I believe it is.	12:16
	And I believe that we can see how it is	12:17
	by turning Tennyson's prayer lines around 180 degrees.	12:20
	You will recall that in Marty the author, he wrote	12:29
	"for what are men are men better than sheep or goats	12:33
	that nourish a blind life within the brain	12:37
	If knowing God, they left not hands of prayer."	12:40
	Now, if we were to turn Tennyson's thought	12:50
	exactly around it would read this way	12:55
	"for what are men better than sheep or goats	13:00
	that nourish a blind life within the brain.	13:02
	If lifting hands of prayer, they know not God."	13:05
	Or in other words,	13:14
	when non-theistic theologians	13:17
	and other church leaders conduct	13:20
	services of worship in the church,	13:21
	why do they call the congregation to prayer	13:24
	If they believe there is no God	13:29
	in existence to hear the prayer.	13:32
	And yet we find that strange phenomenon happening.	13:36
	Is not such a procedure in very truth,	13:42
	that nourishing of a blind life within the brain?	13:46
	Without spending more time on those considerations,	13:52
	let us now move to a consideration of the idea	13:55
	of the existence of a personal God.	13:59
	How do we know God is a person?	14:02
	Well, perhaps in a certain sense,	14:07
	we do not know it.	14:09
	However we can infer	14:13
	the person who'd have got	14:16
	in the same way we infer the personhood of man.	14:18
	That is by what he does.	14:22
	If we were to find ourselves shipwrecked	14:26
	on a small island in the south Pacific,	14:28
	not a bad idea these cold days.	14:32
	And if we were to set out	14:36
	to discover whether the island	14:37
	were inhabited by persons,	14:38
	we would look for telltale evidences	14:42
	of activities which only man could enterprise.	14:46
	If on the beach we came upon the skeleton	14:53
	of a partially devoured fish,	14:56
	this could be the work either	14:58
	of an animal or a man.	15:00
	So this would not be conclusive evidence	15:03
	of man on the island.	15:06
	But if we were to come up on a thatched hut	15:11
	with a rack of fish meat drying in the sun	15:14
	and with cold smoldering, underneath a pot,	15:17
	most of us would conclude	15:21
	that human intelligence was at work on the island.	15:23
	While this would perhaps not constitute positive proof	15:29
	of man's inhabitants of the island,	15:32
	we could reasonably infer it.	15:35
	The exact same situation prevails in the universe	15:40
	while there will never be positive proof	15:46
	for a man who refuses to be convinced	15:49
	until he has seen a bearded Santa Claus type	15:53
	fleshly figure arresting one foot on Mars	15:56
	and the other on Jupiter.	15:59
	Those who can appreciate the signs of intelligence	16:01
	at work in a vast universe and in the world,	16:03
	will believe there is reasonable evidence	16:08
	for faith to build an assurance of things hoped for	16:10
	and to proceed from a conviction of things not seen.	16:14
	While of course we humans are in some	16:20
	significant sense flesh.	16:22
	We can believe that as persons,	16:25
	we are also demonstrably spiritual as well.	16:26
	Therefore it seems in escapable	16:30
	that the atheist who insists	16:33
	there cannot be a personal God	16:35
	because we have not caught	16:37
	his physical body in any of our telescopes,	16:39
	he is raising an unnecessary barrier in his logic	16:43
	and he's reasoning in contradiction	16:48
	to our experience with the personal existence of man.	16:50
	Of course it's understandably difficult for some	16:56
	to comprehend how God can exist as a person	17:00
	without a physical body.	17:03
	That's granted.	17:06
	Some do not have the ability	17:08
	or the imagination to visualize	17:10
	what Jesus meant	17:12
	when he declared that God is a spirit.	17:13
	And there's a real sense	17:17
	in which I am not able completely	17:18
	to conceptualize or visualize this.	17:19
	'Cause when you visualize something,	17:22
	you're visualizing things in the material world.	17:24
	And by definition, Jesus said,	17:27
	God is not the material world. He is spirit.	17:29
	But perhaps one way to conceptualize	17:33
	what admittedly is a mystery,	17:35
	is to commence with the hypothesis	17:37
	that man too is a spirit.	17:40
	Indeed this is clearly the teaching	17:46
	of the new Testament and of all	17:48
	the central theological thought	17:49
	of the Christian Church.	17:51
	From new Testament times until our own time.	17:54
	Assuming that man is in his deepest	17:59
	and most personal sense of spirit,	18:03
	how can we conceptualize this?	18:06
	Okay, one way is to show	18:11
	that the person hood of the man	18:16
	is something which transcends his physical body.	18:19
	A few years ago,	18:27
	the president of the Duke Chapel Choir	18:28
	was a young student	18:30
	by the name of checked Mater's head	18:32
	Some of you will remember him.	18:34
	After he graduated from Duke,	18:37
	he went into the armed forces	18:40
	and while he was overseas,	18:42
	there was a horrible accident,	18:45
	which resulted in the necessity	18:48
	of both of Chet's legs,	18:51
	being amputated as high as possible on his body.	18:54
	But the personality and the personhood	19:03
	of Chet Mottershead I know by personal experience	19:08
	is as fully intact as when he had two good legs	19:14
	and saying in this choir.	19:21
	He is the same person.	19:24
	Though much of his physical body has been cut away.	19:27
	Two months ago in South Africa,	19:32
	Dr. Christian Barnard transplanted	19:35
	the blood pumping organ from	19:39
	a dead man into the body of a dying man.	19:41
	The dying man lived.	19:45
	And now, two months later, members of the family	19:48
	of the patient Philip Boulevard has been unable	19:52
	to detect any change at all	19:56
	in the person of the man with a new heart.	19:59
	Without legs, with a different heart,	20:07
	with all kinds of physical changes, the same person.	20:13
	So, that even in the case of finite personhood,	20:18
	when we can see a physical body through	20:22
	which the spiritual person functions,	20:25
	it is possible to conceptualize a real person	20:27
	who is not dependent for his personhood	20:33
	upon the various organs of the body	20:35
	and who has a personhood which transcends them.	20:39
	How much more possible is it therefore,	20:45
	for a divine person of infinite spirit	20:48
	to exist without a physical body	20:50
	that can be seen in a telescope.	20:52
	On the Russian cosmonaut	20:56
	God in his spaceship and circled the earth,	20:58
	he returned to earth and announced	21:00
	that he found it just as he expected to find it.	21:03
	A universe empty of God.	21:06
	The Christian could agree that he found it just	21:10
	as he the Christian would have expected also.	21:15
	Well during the past 1900 years,	21:19
	Christians have understood that God is spirit	21:21
	and theistic Christians would have	21:25
	been as surprised as the Russian cosmonaut.	21:27
	Had he found a visible god out there.	21:32
	Well, next,	21:40
	some people have argued that it is meaningless	21:41
	to talk about a personal God on account of the fact,	21:44
	we're not even sure what human personality is	21:50
	\|granted or not.	21:54
	But to raise this objection from a parallel	21:58
	is to ignore the implications of the parallel itself.	22:00
	True, we are not certain exactly what human personality is,	22:05
	but does that keep us from talking	22:08
	meaningfully about it and from relating	22:11
	to other personalities,	22:13
	the essence of which we are unable to define.	22:16
	Most of us simply agree with the cart that (indistinct).	22:20
	I think therefore, I exist	22:27
	and proceeded to describe	22:31
	the ways in which human personality functions,	22:33
	whatever the essence of it may turn out to be.	22:35
	And a man of Christian faith applies	22:39
	the Cartesian formula to God	22:41
	and assumes that since God has revealed	22:43
	his thoughts to man, he exists.	22:45
	Moreover, even as psychology delineates	22:49
	the ways by which human personality functions.	22:51
	So theology,	22:55
	delineates the ways by which the man of faith	22:56
	has observed the divine person to function.	22:58
	Therefore, unless we are simply predetermined	23:02
	to be permanently uptight with epistemology	23:08
	and semantics in our thought about God	23:11
	when we are not this way about anything else,	23:13
	there is no reason why an open-minded individual	23:17
	may not legitimately and logically entertain	23:21
	the possibility of a personal relationship	23:24
	between a human person and a divine person.	23:28
	Well, to say just one short word	23:34
	about the use of the term God,	23:36
	to apply to the foundation of life,	23:38
	the ground of being and all that,	23:40
	let me express the belief that both clarity of thought	23:43
	and the interests of faith are better served	23:48
	when we use words in the sense	23:52
	they have always been understood	23:54
	rather than using them in such a way	23:58
	as to spread confusion of meaning.	24:00
	Any day,	24:04
	I would rather talk with an honest atheist	24:05
	than with a man who uses the word God	24:08
	to mean only what he himself is willing	24:10
	for that word privately to mean.	24:13
	Picture a house if you will.	24:18
	There's two young sisters in bed,	24:21
	in their bedroom at 10 o'clock at night.	24:24
	One of them asks the other,	24:28
	If there is a father in the master bedroom of the home,	24:31
	she replies that she doesn't know for certain.	24:36
	And they discuss the matter back and forth	24:38
	and finally they agree	24:40
	that since neither one of them had seen him	24:42
	before they went to bed,	24:44
	they won't assume that they have a father.	24:45
	That's all right.	24:50
	One of them finally volunteers,	24:51
	we do indeed have a father, the floor of the house,	24:53
	the foundation underneath it and the roof overhead.	24:56
	These are our father.	24:58
	Well, one might raise questions	25:03
	about the confusion which such talk creates	25:06
	in the realm of semantics.	25:09
	One could even question the honesty	25:11
	of the use of words which have a clear meaning	25:13
	being applied to realities with a different meaning.	25:16
	But the point which would tower above every	25:19
	other consideration in that situation,	25:21
	would be that the very effort	25:26
	of those children to assign the term father	25:27
	to something in their universe,	25:30
	eloquently proclaims their empirical hunger	25:33
	for a personal father.	25:37
	"As the deer pants for the water brook," said the Psalmist,	25:39
	"So my soul cries out for Thee, O God."	25:44
	The attempts which have been made	25:49
	in the current generation to assign the term God,	25:50
	to everything from the ring around Saturn	25:54
	to the basement furnace,	25:56
	do indeed be speak man's need for the living God.	25:58
	Augustine's famous words take on a new significance	26:03
	in the letter, "Half of the 20th Century"	26:07
	"Thou hast made us for thyself,	26:10
	and our hearts are restless until	26:13
	they finds their rest in thee."	26:15
	Fritz Buri has recently written a monograph entitled,	26:20
	"How Can We Still Speak Responsibly of God?"	26:23
	He concludes that very interesting monograph	26:28
	published in one of our seminary journals,	26:31
	by saying that,	26:34
	"Responsible discourse about God	26:35
	is a discourse about God which arises in	26:40
	and gives evidence of a discourse with God."	26:44
	This leads us to a fresh understanding	26:51
	of the high priestly prayer of Jesus.	26:53
	A portion of which was read	26:55
	as our scripture lesson this morning.	26:57
	"Christ argued no doctrine of a personal God	27:00
	rather he prayed a doctrine of a personal God."	27:03
	Read again,	27:07
	the entirety of John 17	27:08
	from that standpoint and watch the wording.	27:10
	You will be impressed with the intentionally	27:13
	personal element in Christ talk about God.	27:17
	Perhaps, if we will think carefully	27:23
	and clearly about God	27:25
	and if we will have discourse with God,	27:29
	we can recapture a firmness in our spiritual footing,	27:32
	which will enable us to make the great leap of faith,	27:37
	which are times demand of us.	27:42
	Let us pray.	27:46
	Oh God, our personal heavenly father,	27:48
	some of us in this chapel	27:52
	have our earthly fathers seated beside us.	27:53
	And we are aware of them and we know them as persons	27:57
	and we have a relationship to them.	28:00
	Sometimes there is tension between us.	28:03
	Sometimes there is judgment and at other times,	28:06
	forgiveness and love	28:09
	and understanding and acceptance,	28:10
	but always we have this relationship.	28:13
	All of us,	28:18
	whether our human fathers are here with us or not,	28:19
	look to Thee now as our heavenly father to be beside us.	28:24
	Sometimes we are under the eye judgment.	28:28
	Sometimes we are judged harshly and sternly and rightly.	28:31
	Then in contrition, we come to Thee and ask	28:37
	for the relationship to be restored.	28:40
	And that us forgive us.	28:43
	Help us to be more sure of thy presence,	28:45
	to be more clear in our thinking about Thee	28:49
	and more responsive to thy I approach to us.	28:51
	We asked this in the name of Him	28:57
	who has said to us that when we have seen him,	28:59
	we have seen the even Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.	29:03
	(piano music)	29:11

Item Info

Title:

Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4g15zc43

Date:

March 3, 1968

Speaker:

Wilkinson, Howard C.

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0420
ref6043_tif
uachapelsermaud
duke:628335
dcrau002412
ark:/87924/r4g15zc43
b14aae2b-1e1f-436d-8b84-a46f35c74f4b

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Related Resources:

See below

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

Format:

Provenance:

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

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

Educational Use Permitted

Rights Note:

This material is made available for educational and non-commercial use. This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the license indicated here. Copyright in this material has not been transferred to Duke University. For other reuses of this material beyond those permitted by fair use or otherwise allowed under the Copyright Act, please see our page on copyright and citations https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

Sponsor:

Sponsor this Digital Collection

Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

Transcript

Item Info

1. Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

Duke University Archives

More Info & Options

Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

Transcript

Item Info

Related Item

Duke University Archives

More Info & Options