Robert E. Cushman - "The Bell Tolls for Whom?" (May 1, 1966)

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	(instrumental music)	0:00
	(clears throat)	0:22
-	Let us pray.	0:25
	Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts,	0:28
	oh God, father, son and Holy Spirit,	0:35
	be acceptable in thy sight.	0:42
	Amen.	0:46
	(clears throat)	0:49
	Thanks to the mass media,	0:53
	religious issues have lately become table talk,	0:57
	and theology or something like it is a sort of tinder	1:04
	for animated discussion of the household.	1:10
	Not for some time, I think,	1:16
	has God talk received such space in the public press.	1:18
	Hopefully, it might have been better informed,	1:24
	both in its sources and in its journalistic vehicles.	1:27
	But such as it is, we have it,	1:32
	and God, or some kind of fact similarly,	1:36
	is receiving unaccustomed attention.	1:40
	The issue that is being aired and kicked around	1:45
	might perhaps be stated thus,	1:50
	whether God is a hypothesis	1:53
	of which we have longer any need.	1:56
	And of course, the answer is	2:02
	that this depends upon what we are attempting to explain,	2:04
	to understand, or to render intelligible.	2:10
	Laplace, the 18th century French physicist	2:15
	was probably right in his mechanistic application	2:21
	of Newtonian gravitational theory to the solar system.	2:26
	He did not have need of God's intrusive power	2:32
	to explain the phenomenon.	2:37
	Given the Newtonian principles,	2:41
	he had enough data to explain all the operations and effects	2:44
	within the range of his prevailing interest.	2:50
	Now, while the prevailing interests may vary,	2:55
	it is very much the same, I think,	3:01
	with the earthbound and mundane among us	3:03
	whose whole preoccupation centers in buying and selling,	3:09
	in fabricating and using.	3:14
	Within this range of interests and endeavor,	3:18
	of goods and services, of supply and demand,	3:22
	the God hypothesis can and does become tenuous	3:28
	and often irrelevant.	3:32
	Not finely perhaps, but rather decisively.	3:34
	At length, men find themselves the solitary centers	3:40
	and in a limited sense,	3:45
	the sufficient cause of their own world,	3:46
	that is, the world of their own making, the made world.	3:49
	If they must accept also the social character	3:55
	of their existence within this universe	3:59
	of goods and services, of utilities and competitive claims,	4:03
	then salvation consists in contriving the greatest good	4:10
	for the greatest number of claimants.	4:15
	Social control becomes the instrument	4:20
	and the planned or perhaps the great society offers itself	4:24
	as a sort of substitute for the dissolving face of God.	4:29
	In such a system too, the words of Laplace apply.	4:36
	Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.	4:42
	That is, for my present purposes.	4:47
	In short, I think we ought all to understand	4:51
	that for certain purposes	4:55
	and from frequently occupied perspectives,	4:57
	it is quite possible	5:01
	to entertain often imperceptibly and unwittingly	5:02
	a kind of practical and practicing atheism.	5:07
	It is simply that from some vantage points,	5:12
	as indeed Francis Bacon long ago knew and said,	5:15
	"God is not a useful hypothesis from some vantage points."	5:20
	From quite a different perspective	5:27
	and with the poets eye for human interests and values,	5:30
	words worth voiced his misgivings	5:35
	about the shape of 19th century	5:38
	mercantile English society and complaint.	5:40
	The world is too much with us late and so.	5:45
	Getting and spending, we lay waste our power.	5:49
	Little there is in nature that is ours.	5:54
	For this and for everything we are out of tune,	5:57
	we have given our hearts away assorted boom.	6:00
	Great God, I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed out war.	6:05
	So might I standing on this pleasantly	6:11
	have visions that would make me last for long,	6:15
	have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,	6:19
	or hear all Triton blow his wreathed horn.	6:23
	Now, in the Psalmist, standing under the night sky	6:29
	on some escapement of Judean Hills	6:33
	contemplated the vast canopy of heavens	6:38
	and contrasted the puniness of man with the splendor	6:42
	and majesty of the creator.	6:46
	You might say he got things into perspective,	6:49
	but we quite miss the Psalmist point.	6:54
	Unless we understand that the movement of his thought	6:58
	was not from heaven to earth,	7:02
	from this idea of splendor to the human frame,	7:04
	quite the reverse.	7:09
	The God of the Psalmist was first of all the God of Abraham,	7:11
	of Isaac and Jacob, the God of Moses and prophets,	7:17
	and Psalmist before this Psalms.	7:24
	God was first known in his visitation with man.	7:30
	He was first known in his approach to man	7:34
	in a kind of divine human encounter,	7:38
	such as an an encounter his God had with Moses at Sinai,	7:41
	or with Elijah on Mount Horeb, with Amos at Tekoa,	7:47
	or Isaiah in the temple.	7:54
	These men, as we view them in retrospect,	7:58
	were the human instruments,	8:03
	the harps of the human mind and spirit,	8:05
	the harps of God whose strings God picked and made music on,	8:09
	in which go on resounding for those who have ears to hear	8:17
	through the centuries.	8:21
	No, the astonishment and the amazement of the Psalmist	8:24
	is the same that of Augustine and Pascal.	8:29
	Not that I found thee, but that thou first found me.	8:34
	That is the amazement and wonder.	8:42
	What is man that thou are mindful of him,	8:45
	and the son of man that thou visits thee?	8:50
	The problem in our knowledge of God	8:55
	has to do with our controlling interests and perspective.	8:58
	It is the position we occupy.	9:03
	It is the preoccupation of our attention,	9:06
	the direction of our gaze and our predominating look.	9:08
	So, Plato had better be heard again in our time.	9:13
	He likens the lot of the generality of us	9:19
	to men in perpetual bondage.	9:24
	It is the bondage of the cave.	9:27
	Here, men sit and chained with their backs to the light,	9:30
	obsessed and preoccupied by shadows, passing figures,	9:35
	which these men in their ignorance of bondage	9:41
	confound with true realities.	9:45
	Their ignorance is in no way relieved	9:48
	just because they have a complete system of error,	9:52
	coherent and self consistent in itself.	9:56
	Whether for Plato or for Isaiah, the knowledge of God,	10:03
	the attainment of truth about reality	10:10
	requires the emancipation of the whole mind	10:12
	and the whole man.	10:16
	It requires a revolution of perspective,	10:19
	a complete conversion of interest and attention.	10:22
	Thus for Isaiah, the blindness of man to God	10:26
	is in the end, a perversity in the soul,	10:30
	as in Plato, it is a lie in the soul.	10:34
	Therefore, Isaiah says, "Go tell this people,	10:39
	here ye indeed but on understand not,	10:43
	and see ye indeed what ye perceive not."	10:47
	For both Plato and Isaiah then,	10:53
	ignorance of God is inattention,	10:57
	inattention fundamentally to the moral nature of man.	11:01
	It is ignorance of man's own calling.	11:06
	Man does not know who he is.	11:09
	He is deaf to the summons of God.	11:12
	He does not know, as Jesus said, the time of his visitation.	11:15
	His blindness is a moral problem.	11:20
	It is also a problem of improper self-knowledge.	11:23
	He does not know he is a moral being.	11:27
	He is called to responsible existence, but he does not heed.	11:30
	He can only know God	11:36
	in the acceptance of his responsibility to God.	11:38
	And it is for this reason, my friends,	11:43
	that Jesus taught, "Blessed are the pure in heart,	11:46
	the single-minded on God, for they shall see him."	11:51
	Now, some of us, most of the time,	12:01
	and most of us some of the time	12:03
	have trouble about God because in a manner of speaking,	12:05
	we don't look in his direction.	12:12
	Or further, we may look in his direction	12:14
	but we can't discern him because of airing	12:16
	but stubborn preconceptions about God's identity.	12:20
	Often, because of ignorance of our own	12:26
	essential nature is men,	12:28
	we don't know what we're looking for,	12:31
	or even yet again, we don't find God	12:33
	because we look in some place outside us, outside ourselves.	12:37
	God is already partly excluded	12:43
	from his proper place inside ourself.	12:47
	He has been barred from our flabby consciousness,	12:54
	overgrown and obscured by unintentional	12:59
	and intentional neglect.	13:05
	We might have learned from Elijah on Mount Horeb,	13:09
	if we had ever heard of Elijah or Horeb,	13:15
	that God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake,	13:19
	not in the fire,	13:24
	but that God had something to do with a still small voice.	13:26
	The God of the wind, the God of the earthquake,	13:32
	the God of the fire was in a manner of speaking	13:36
	dead with Elijah on Mount Horeb,	13:40
	but the still small voice was alive.	13:46
	It made Elijah a part of that resolute company.	13:49
	And despite the powerful social pressures of the age	13:54
	that would not bow the need to Baal,	13:58
	that is to the conventional gods of the peer group.	14:01
	Knowledge of God, and as opposed to knowledge of the Baals,	14:07
	is a matter of choice.	14:12
	Elijah knew it, and therefore,	14:13
	he called out ringing for decision,	14:16
	"Choose ye this day whom he will serve.	14:20
	If God, serve him, if Baal, him."	14:23
	Elijah knew that when the knee is bowed	14:29
	to the God's of the peer group,	14:33
	men have already cease to he,	14:35
	and therefore, know the God of Abraham.	14:38
	They may hear, but they do not understand.	14:42
	They may see, and yet they do not proceed.	14:45
	The Baals, the gods of this world,	14:50
	are always with us and never lack our patronage.	14:55
	They're the gods of all sorts of aims and interests,	15:00
	shorts of the final interest and the ultimate concern.	15:03
	They're the gods of gain of affluence,	15:09
	of technological achievement,	15:13
	of some politics and most partisanship.	15:15
	They are the gods of acquisition and comfort,	15:19
	and in some part of the American way of life,	15:22
	especially in its thirst to proffer itself to the world	15:25
	as a divine panacea.	15:29
	These Baals are mammon, and we were long since warned	15:33
	that we cannot serve God and mammon	15:39
	without pleading to the one and despising the other.	15:42
	In short, I say again, the knowledge of God,	15:47
	the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob,	15:53
	the God of Moses, of Jesus Christ,	15:58
	is in the end a moral choice and there is no evasion of it.	16:01
	You cannot serve God and mammon.	16:07
	But if in the great society, man opt for mammon,	16:12
	for the gods of self maintenance and self enhancement.	16:16
	Then, of course, for them and the trend of their motivation,	16:20
	God is dead.	16:25
	Either men affirm and assert their natures	16:27
	as moral, responsible beings, which means beings under God,	16:30
	or as Saint Paul declared,	16:36
	they worship and serve the Creator,	16:39
	rather than the created.	16:43
	Either they affirm their nature as an image of God,	16:45
	or they acquire the likeness of their idols.	16:50
	As a matter of fact, they create many of us	16:58
	are like Augustine, the sainted Bishop of Hippo	17:02
	who in his younger days prayed,	17:09
	"Lord make me one with thee, make me thy know but not yet."	17:11
	With this same Augustine,	17:20
	after long struggles and resistance,	17:23
	there came a decisive moment.	17:28
	Postponement could sustained no longer.	17:30
	The holdout and evasion was broken through	17:33
	and Augustine declared,	17:36
	"Thou has made us for thyself and our hearts are restless	17:39
	until they find the rest and leave."	17:44
	This is self knowledge.	17:47
	A divided spirit was resolved in favor of the God	17:51
	by whom Augustine knew himself long to have been visited.	17:55
	His converted soul began a new life	18:01
	under different auspices.	18:05
	Augustine, at length, gave he,	18:07
	and thou accepted the calling,	18:11
	the responsible existence to which all along	18:14
	he had had in suppressible intonations.	18:17
	In him, the still small voice had his way.	18:23
	Or in the metaphor of Francis Thompson,	18:29
	the hound of heaven of relentless feet	18:34
	had overtaken its quarry.	18:38
	For Augustine, it had been true.	18:42
	I fled him down the nights and down the days,	18:47
	I fled him down the arches of the ears,	18:52
	I fled him down the Labyrinthine ways of my own mind.	18:55
	And in the midst of tears, I hid from him,	19:00
	and under running laughter up fisted hopes I sped	19:03
	and shot precipitated the down Titanic blooms of chasm fears	19:09
	from those strong feet that followed after.	19:14
	But with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace,	19:20
	deliberate speed, majestic instancy they beat,	19:24
	and a voice beat more instant than the feet.	19:29
	All things betrays thee who betrays me.	19:33
	Read Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven.	19:40
	And I wager that you may come to understand more	19:44
	about the way of knowledge of God	19:48
	in its birthing and in its delivery,	19:51
	than many books of theology will disclose,	19:54
	and you may come to share the insight	19:58
	of the saints in all ages that the knowledge of God	20:00
	is not doing so much as it is receiving,	20:03
	that it is less an achievement than a gift,	20:07
	less a searching than a being found,	20:10
	less a capturing than a being overtaken,	20:12
	and above all,	20:15
	less annoying than as St. Paul said, a being no.	20:16
	You may learn that first of all,	20:24
	the knowledge of God is squaring up with yourself,	20:29
	leveling with your own inmost nature.	20:34
	Or you may learn that it is a congruence	20:38
	between your real being and your essential aspirations	20:41
	and highest calling.	20:45
	You may even come to see	20:47
	or better to understand with Socrates,	20:49
	with St. Paul, with Augustine, with Pascal,	20:52
	and with Francis Thompson,	20:55
	that the surest sign of God's presence	20:57
	is just the absence of that faithful	21:00
	and dismaying contradiction between the good that we would,	21:03
	as Paul said, and the evil that we do,	21:08
	even if it is only complicity in so little things	21:11
	as mean innuendo of insinuating words about our friends.	21:16
	So it is that most of the time	21:25
	we look for the tokens of God's presence in the wrong place	21:30
	and in the wrong direction.	21:33
	They're not, first of all, in the heavens.	21:36
	The Psalmist knew they are first of all in ourselves	21:39
	and must be honored.	21:43
	Most of us some of the time turn to the world without,	21:46
	rather than to the inward human world,	21:51
	to that battleground of the soul	21:54
	where the struggle between good and evil,	21:56
	between right and wrong,	22:00
	between faithfulness and unfaithfulness is forever waged.	22:02
	Here, in the warfare soul,	22:07
	is the surety of the divine presence.	22:10
	Here it is that the triumph, the righteousness in us	22:14
	is the passing into existence of the being of God,	22:19
	the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, man.	22:23
	That is why in Jesus Christ,	22:33
	in the final triumphs of the divine righteousness,	22:36
	God is truly fully and finally manifest.	22:39
	He is manifest in a personal life.	22:45
	So in Christ, the author of Hebrews,	22:49
	in the text that was not read this morning,	22:53
	finds also the answer to the Psalmist searching query,	22:57
	"What is man in the perfect obedience of Christ?	23:00
	Is man's answer about his own and real identity?"	23:05
	Do we remember that we are in this Easter season,	23:16
	as Christians, invited to share in Christ likeness,	23:26
	share his victory, and partake of his righteousness?	23:34
	And when we do and in the measure that we do,	23:40
	God is present to us and then manifest among us.	23:43
	This is what the Christian community is supposed to be,	23:49
	a vehicle of the presence of God,	23:53
	for God is present in the shape, structure,	23:55
	the radiance of human lives	24:01
	that are becoming living sacrifices,	24:04
	that is, vehicles of his grace.	24:07
	And listen, God's eternal being,	24:13
	in itself unfathomable and incomprehensible,	24:19
	becomes existence and comprehensible in Jesus Christ.	24:24
	If you wish to say so, but in a figure of speech,	24:30
	God is alive in Christ holy.	24:34
	Yet it is better to say simply that God is manifest.	24:38
	So also again, in a figure of speech,	24:43
	God who is not manifest in life, in the lives of men,	24:46
	in the lives of the faithful may still in a figure	24:51
	be spoken of his dead.	24:54
	But in truth, this only means	24:59
	his eternal being is not manifest in us or among us.	25:02
	He does not yet have existence in us,	25:09
	in our time, in our society, in our nation,	25:12
	and perhaps not in our churches or in ourselves.	25:16
	God's essence, his eternal being, has not become existence	25:21
	in historical time.	25:28
	This is what is meant by complaining in an unfamiliar	25:32
	and dismaying and shocking idiom that God is dead.	25:37
	Then the complaint is as old as Isaiah,	25:41
	as true as Christ, and as Orthodox Saint Paul	25:44
	or Saint Augustine.	25:47
	But if this is so,	25:51
	then the complaint is pointing fingers at the wrong party.	25:54
	It is not God for whom the Baal told, it is man,	25:59
	from who so, the life of God is shut out by man's own doing.	26:06
	But man is not abandoned in his waywardness,	26:13
	in his flight from God.	26:17
	We may flee him down the nights and down the days,	26:19
	evade him in the labyrinthine ways of our minds	26:24
	and hide from him under running laughter,	26:29
	we may flee from those strong feet that follow after,	26:32
	yet with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace,	26:37
	deliberate speed, majestic instancy they beat,	26:42
	and a voice beat more instant than the feet,	26:46
	all things betray thee, who betrayest me.	26:51
	My friends, if I am not mistaken, in our time,	26:59
	we have found with near utter certainty	27:04
	that all things do betray us.	27:08
	May it not be time to stop running and be overtaken of God.	27:14
	Amen. So be it.	27:24
	Let us pray.	27:28
	(soft instrumental music)	27:30
	Now I want to hear who is eternal, immortal, invisible,	27:40
	the only just and all wise God,	27:45
	be glory and honor, dominion and power, now and forever.	27:50
	And may the blessing of God almighty, father, son	27:57
	and Holy Spirit pursue you and be amongst you,	28:01
	and abide ever with you.	28:07
	Amen.	28:10
	(liturgical music)	28:13

Item Info

Title:

Robert E. Cushman - "The Bell Tolls for Whom?" (May 1, 1966)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4gm85p91

Date:

May 1, 1966

Speaker:

Cushman, Robert E.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0336
ref5877_jny
uachapelsermaud
duke:627914
dcrau002333
ark:/87924/r4gm85p91
038b3e1f-d8c6-49da-86e4-fba578c22a57

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Robert E. Cushman - "The Bell Tolls for Whom?" (May 1, 1966)

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