Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Seminary has the privilege of welcoming three new professors to its resident faculty. And each of them has the privilege of delivering an inaugural address. Today we are to hear the second of these by Dr. Richard Kimble Fenn, the Maxwell M. Upson professor of Christianity and Society. Dr. Fenn is an ordained priest of the
Episcopal church. He received his education from Yale College, the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Bryn Mawr Graduate School. Since 1973 until 1985 he was professor of sociology in the department of sociology and social work at the University of Maine at Orono.
His publications include two books, Liturgies and Trials, and Toward a Theory of Secularization. Although an academic, for the greater part of his career Dr. Fenn has served as vicar in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, and as a diocesan assistant in the Diocese of Nagpur in India. He is married, and he and Mrs. Fenn have three children. It is a great personal
privilege for me today to introduce to you Dr. Richard K. Fenn, whose inaugural address is entitled "Sin and Guilt in the Modern World: A Sociological Reflection." Dr. Fenn.
FENN: Thank you very much. This may be the last time I can really see you, because sin of pride has kept me from bifocals.
I trust that won't appear in the Quarterly. Being an Episcopalian, I was weaned on these words. We erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have done that which we ought not to have done, have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health in us. But Thou, Lord, have mercy upon us miserable
offenders. Now these were not words that came easily at the time to my tongue, nor were they words that apparently came easily to a people inclined to believe that they are basically healthy and can improve their individual and collective lives by various pragmatic strategies. Instead of these anguished statements, the modern right simply acknowledges, rather tersely, various failures in thought, word, and deed. It's a fairly matter-of-fact suggestion of the need for renewal and reform.
In any event, collective expressions of remorse have fallen out of fashion. The United States, which used to have a national day of repentance, as well as of Thanksgiving, has engaged for the last century only in a day of Thanksgiving without repentance. And the church has failed to supply the missing rhetoric of repentance, that is I think still sadly lacking in the political rights of this nation. That failure is all the more remarkable since the American Episcopal church at least saw that its own life
stood as a sign of reproach to the nation. Indeed, the Standing Liturgical Commission not too long ago announced that, quote, "After 16 centuries since the time of Constantine, the church is once again placed on the level with the dispossessed and the powerless." That was a statement to the House of Bishops in '72 signed by Massey Shepherd among other people. That statement did not mean that the church had sold its real estate or
given away its portfolios, but it did mean that the church no longer felt it could enjoy the protections of a society that valued its contributions while giving only lip service to its values. Given what the church thought was its mission to lead its people out of their various captivities, the church might have wanted a more searing confession of collective, of national failure. In this century there are particularly good reasons for such a strong statement of collective sadness and remorse. Why, then, did the church propose
to adopt a more sanguine mood, and in part this paper is an answer to that question. There were enough voices on this subject to fill several volumes of lament. Here is one typical Cri de Coeur. If we must change, why not change to the words of Scripture rather than substitute our own perfunctory admission that we have not done good? The point of the confessions is that we cannot do so without God's help. And in the age of the concentration
camps, of the H-bomb, Vietnam, Ulster, universal terrorism, universal disorder, why should we resent a confession of our own part in all these as miserable offenders against the truth of perfection which is what our faith asserts? It is a cry for collective repentance that could have moved the church to voice its sorrows, in order that one day it may have sounded a note of common rejoicing. Since it considered itself at one with the dispossessed, the Episcopal church
could have led the nation in collective remorse and atonement. Atonement, for instance, for the lives of Indochinese and Americans squandered in the Vietnam War. We are still bringing home the ashes, still sifting for meaning in those remains. Instead, the Standing Liturgical Commission decided that the church is now living in a different culture. That was the word that the commission chose. A different culture from the one in which the Book of common prayer was first written.
The Standing Commission cited a number of social factors, indeed, to make its point. For instance, the Commission thought liturgical references to, quote, "foe or peril" were out of place in a world where dangers are more general and more abstract, and city streets are lighted at night by electricity. Memorandum nine, June '70. Now, there's nothing general or abstract about napalm or dioxin. There is something abstract about
the terms of American foreign policy. The rhetoric of sin, and therefore also the social reality of sin and of absolution, have become quiet, and peaceable, and reasonable. I take that to mean that the secularization of the prophetic tradition, also, has penetrated to the heart of the church itself. It is paradoxical that the
Anglican church which has maintained in its prayer book an antidote to perfectionism and to liberalism with regard to the understanding, at least, of sin, has now decided on both sides of the Atlantic to abandon the phrase, "There is no health in us." It is paradoxical, because as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, it is this phrase that illustrates the Anglican church's grasp of the prophetic tradition. Niebuhr said that it typifies the spirit of the prayer of general confession,
and explains along with, quote, "The influence of Christian history," unquote, why the Anglican tradition's prayer book piety has been able to resist the secularization that I have been describing. At its best, Niebuhr argued, the Anglican church manages to combine all facets of the Christian doctrine of Grace more truly than other churches. Without this phrase, however, and other similar emphases on the prophetic understanding of both sin and grace, the Anglican church
resembles Niebuhr's description. That is, a compound of liberalistic moralism and traditional piety. The secularization of the doctrine of sin is paradoxical in still another sense. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Liturgical Commissions engaged in revision found various reasons for muting this confession. For instance, the new estates won't stand for it. Well, that's a phrase applied by the Liturgical Commission in England to the suburbs near London.
It sounds a dour note in the service of baptism to refer to original sin and the possibility of damnation. The Scotch won't have it. Times had changed, also, in America, where the Liturgical Commission wanted to sound a more triumphal note. As I have already mentioned the Standing Commission here, in discussing a traditional petition to save the people of God, quote, "from all the perils and dangers of this night," heard that modern amenities have largely expunged
the terrors of darkness. The questionable theology and the questionable sociology of that time appear paradoxical in their optimism, in view of our current record of tragedy and of disaster. It was just such a record that moved some in protesting the softening of the sense of sin and the prayer book to call for a more intense expression of sinfulness. Those, on the other hand, who understood that the doctrine itself precedes -- this is Niebuhr speaking again
-- precedes the experience which validates the doctrine, precedes then the experience of what Niebuhr called the seriousness of sin, they argued that the liturgy should not be determined by current tastes and sensibilities. To paraphrase Niebuhr, one might say those who take neither sin nor history seriously do not realize what has been lost in the liturgical secularization of the prophetic tradition. The paradox, is that in seeking to find a way of speaking that will resonate in the modern
era, the modernizers may well have failed to utter that one word that is most needful to tap whatever residual and latent sense of sin survives underneath the surfaces of a bureaucratically administered society. To put it in terms of the perennial debate between sociology and pragmatism, one might say it this way. The ecclesiastical pragmatists, in their preoccupation with the putative social reality they considered modern, failed to understand what is both primitive and universal
in social life. Failed, I would argue therefore, in the central task of the church itself. On some level, even the modern individual knows that there is no wholeness or holiness in us. In a position, then, neither to speak a word of grace or of profound judgement, the church has nonetheless been outspoken in addressing issues in the public sphere or in addressing individuals about their spiritual growth and development. In addition to the gap between religious and political discourse, the
church faces a world which is in part its own creation. A world very serious about the Word, about the competence to speak with authority on specific topics, and about the rules for evidence. That world encourages the churches to speak out on the moral dimensions of issues while not exceeding, quote, "their area of competence," by specifying, quote, "legislative details that turn on technical and empirical findings." That's Reichley from the Bookings Institution that I'm quoting in a recent article in the Wall Street
Journal. Conversely, in urging individuals to develop themselves and to engage in projects of spiritual growth, the churches still leave the individual as the center and the object of concern. The churches connive in forms of self-delusion about the importance of the self. Again, Niebuhr put it this way, "By asserting these contingent and arbitrary factors of an immediate situation, the self loses its true self. It increases its
insecurity, because it gives is immediate necessities a consideration which they do not deserve, and which they cannot have without disturbing the harmony of Creation. The self is afraid of being discovered in its nakedness behind these veils and of being recognized as the author of the veiling deception." In these postures the church is not likely to bring either individuals or institutions in this society to judgement, nor is it likely to be able to speak of forgiveness with
authority. Even recommending specific forms of legislation with genuine competence is no substitute for a prophetic declaration of moral judgment on the pretensions and the illusions of the powerful. Close attention to spiritual growth that leaves the individual still in the center of attention is no substitute for a prophetic pastorate. The question is whether the church is still able to speak a prophetic word in a language that it appears not to have forgotten. My answer is in the negative.
I need to clarify two assumptions at this point, before explaining why I'm pessimistic. The first assumption is that our understanding of sin depends on the circumstances of our social life. It is a very basic sociological assumption, and yet it's too easily overlooked if we think of sin as something universal and inescapable as a human propensity. Our knowledge of the truth about sin may therefore distract us from noticing
the changes in what might be called the social reality of sinfulness, that is what societies take to be sin is a social product. The church has clearly lost its monopoly on the production of sin, and it has been relegated to a relatively minor role, at least in American society. Is it a sin to poison the water supply? Is it a sin to falsify information on the dangerous consequences of drugs? Or to lie about currency
transactions? Or to buy politicians? Or to bomb hospitals on Christmas? Or to finance death squads? Or to refuse sanctuary to refugees? Or to drive whole groups of people to despair? The lack of a coherent public discourse and of a clear public answer to that question illustrates the gap that has emerged between what this society understands to be the reality of sin, and what the church knows to be the truth of sin. That gap
allows the society to remain unclear about our responsibility for life and death, and to obscure the question of guilt. We have amnesties, presidential pardons, agreements not to contest, a decree, and other trivial settlements in public life where the church might yet prefer to pass judgement or grant absolution. I say might prefer, because it is one thing to describe some aspect of the world as evil, quite another to declare and pronounce them to be anathema to all Christians.
The church seems to prefer to describe to recommend, to suggest, to remind, even occasionally to exhort, but not to bind and not to loose. My second assumption is that arrangements for the social production of sin serve the interests of certain classes more than they serve the interests of other classes. And this is another sociological truism. For the past few years, however, the public has been focusing on the guilt
of Vietnam War veterans. Guilt because they have guilt. Guilt because they may have enjoyed killing. Guilt because they have survived while their friends have died. And guilt because they have considered impure by citizens whose hands are relatively clean. Our high culture has produced a literature on the anguish of those who survive. The positive and the sensitive work, for instance, of Robert Lifton, not only on our veterans but on survivors of Hiroshima, is a case in point.
There has not been a commensurate interest in bringing American war criminals at the highest levels of government to trial. What the Christian faith knows to be sin becomes shaped, then, in public discourse into another sort of reality. A personal form of guilt. A human reaction to trauma. A reaction to the loss of social honor, and the experience of the scapegoat. Such definitions obviously provide certain exemptions to those who initially decided on the carnage.
The same definitions also provide employment for those who are professionally trained to listen and to respond to sorrow, remorse, and anguish. The people get the killing fields or Rambo. One or two who had the most power to get others to die for them receive a pardon or sue the media for libel. Our actions are savage, but our institutions for dealing with savagery are not primitive or powerful enough to define such suffering and tragedy in terms of collective sin and guilt.
Other institutions and other interests, from the entertainment industry to professional counselors, have managed to produce a discourse in which suffering ceases to be sinful, in either its cause or in its effect, and calls for no lasting interpretation or judgement. Death loses its power to sting the authorities. So much, then, for assumptions. Now let us turn to the question of whether the church can yet provide a rhetoric for collective sin that includes both judgement and absolution.
The course of secularization makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for the church to set the terms of public debate. On the other hand, the prophetic tradition makes it very clear that the heart of all social life, including that of modern social systems, is riddled with sin, and subject not only to divine providence but divine judgment. My argument is simply that the prophetic tradition has itself become too secularized
to pronounce any judgement at all. In the process of secularization, individuals become increasingly aware of their obligations to themselves and to others, but those obligations are increasingly limited. Limited by job descriptions, by professional standards, or by public policy. The individual can be trusted to work out his or her own salvation, but only in a way that is either irrelevant to, or at least not inconsistent, with the values of the larger society.
Religion, then, becomes private in the sense of not interfering with one's duties. Contrast that social reality with these social facts. Death is always painful. Death generates passions that may shatter communities and families. It may estrange parents from children, Jews from Gentiles, males from females.
Death may separate people from their own leaders and from their own traditions. Primitive in the passions it generates, death requires the binding of powerful practices and institutions. Deaths are not finished until the last word has been spoken, and some require more speaking than others. A murder or a suicide, for instance, are not done until there is nothing more on the subject to be said or done. Some anthropologists have noted the ingenious techniques of divination and of
trial that primitive societies even today will adopt to resolve what is otherwise unfinished at times of death. Questions like this: did a kinsman die naturally or because of somebody's ill will? Was that ill will conscious or unintended? Was the malicious feeling transmitted through magic or sorcery, or through legitimate means or through foul? The dead person's soul, like the matter itself, will not rest until the last word has been spoken.
In such a society, divination would disclose the presence, the source, the intent of the magic, and when the rites are properly performed, the community would later rest its grievances. Various rites, from the wearing to the scattering of ashes, would enable the dead and the living to carry on. In a modern society, of course, the autopsy is separate from the trial. The trial is separate from the funeral. Public speculation and recrimination continue, because the last word is seldom spoken. A final inclusive judgment on the meaning
of certain actions seldom given. And societal pressure for a final test, therefore, continues to accumulate. Such pressure can eventually shatter the containers of ritual and release hatred and a desire for revenge throughout social life. Rambo and the Death Wish become serials in a continuing story when justice is never done. A nation without the capacity to define actions in terms of good
and evil, without a coherent public discourse that transforms mere actions into well-defined acts, will be unable to bury the hatchet as well as to bury the dead. All actions will be in progress, and the only sign of progress will be continuing activity. A peace process where there is no peace. Nothing is done once and for all. Acts disappear in a sea of actions that continually pass away. Such a society in its pure form is purely secular. It is the quality of the secular always
to be passing away. To the eyes of faith, the world of such continuous [transience?] is headed for death. That is why it is crucial that the church restore to the public sphere a discourse that can define sin and guilt. Our collective integrity and salvation in the face of death depend on it. Translated into more conventional language for a sociologist, my argument simply insist on the difference between questions of truth and of reality. I stand in a sociological tradition opposed to pragmatism.
At least to a pragmatism that confuses two kinds of questions, questions of truth and of reality. Just as it is opposed to a nihilism that relativizes every social reality and begs the truth, the same prophetic attack on pragmatism informed C. Wright Mills's attack on John Dewey for his tendency to see social life as proceeding from the interaction -- this is Dewey speaking -- "the interaction of liberal individuals well-endowed with substantive rationality," unquote. C. Wright Mills argued that Dewey placed his hypothetical
individuals in situations where they were relatively isolated, isolated either from class conflict or from bureaucratic regulation, as they sought to arrive at the most appropriate course of action. Pragmatism endowed individuals with an imaginary freedom and a hypothetical rationality not enjoyed by the majority of us who work under pressure or under coercion, and who make judgments endowed at the best with purely formal rather than substantive rationality. The majority of people did not make the big decisions, Mills argued.
These decisions are made under the pressure of events, in settings where bureaucracies pull and conflict tugs, not in fireside chats, a stroll through the woods, illusion. But an internal war carried out in bureaucratic chambers and on the streets, reality. The ideology of pragmatism holds the truth question in abeyance, and makes no room for the church to set the terms of public discourse and to pronounce its own judgments in its own language and in its own precincts, on sin, guilt, and salvation. It was this resistance
to questions of truth, this vacuum in discourse, that moved Reinhold Niebuhr to give such very short shrift to sociologists writing in the pragmatist tradition, to Cooley in particular. The same vacuum makes the church's rhetoric of guilt, sin, and absolution seem too elitist for those who apparently have no opportunity for big decisions or big transgressions.
I can summarize these fairly obvious general observations by quoting Brian Wilson. Religious perceptions and goals, religiously induced sensitivities, religiously inspired morality, and religious socialization appear to be of no immediate relevance to the operation of the modern social system. Planning, not revelation; rational order, not inspiration; systematic routine, not charismatic or traditional action
are the imperatives in ever-widening arenas of public life. Wilson also reminds us that the achieving of spiritual heights by a religious elite always has the effect of secularizing the little decisions of daily life for ordinary individuals who cannot find in such rarified religious teaching a rhetoric for the expression of their deepest motives, or of their most fearful impulses. Religious elites make the big spiritual decisions and leave the average individual more than ever confined
to the mundane. C. Wright Mills would agree. Under these conditions, the church's traditional rhetoric for sin does seem out of keeping with the surface experience of everyday life, for those who have no big decisions to make. To make spiritual achievements or political and economic decisions the privilege of an elite hardly enlightens or liberates the individual, confined by bureaucratic routines or the highly limited responsibilities of the laity. Managers and professionals who govern the requirements of a specialized ordering
of work may enjoy, quote, "privileged communication" or sacred relationships with their clients. But professions and bureaucracies offer little opportunity or scope for most of us. To confess what is on our hearts would delay hold of our salvation in the world of work and politics. Certainly secularization has reduced religion's authority to define the expression of human motives in specific actions. The more secular the society, the more likely are strong personal motives, the very stuff
of the sacred, to be kept private. Watergate became a symbol for American social life not simply because of official lives and theft, but because of official cover up and stonewalling. It took time to see through that office, through the role of the President, but it takes time to see through all offices and all roles, through the roles of bank manager, and welfare administrator, or police official. Official roles are like stone walls.
But in the Nixon who resigned from the Oval Office, the nation finally saw an individual who had hated his enemies, had wished to eliminate them, had observed few legal limits on the extension of his office's power, had felt the President to be above the law, had acted as if he had fantasies of indestructibility or near-omnipotence in his use of the armed forces. In him the nation saw itself writ large. In a president who uses his office to express a hatred thinly disguised by language and lengthily defended
by procedural arguments, in one who realizes that this man indeed represents the people themselves in their work and their politics, to the extent that their roles similarly cover and similarly preserve their own destructive motives and intentions. Social life conceals, but at the same time, then, it provides a vehicle for motives that may be aggressive as well as affectionate, destructive as well as serviceable to life.
Societies and institutions may therefore express murderous impulses without attending to them, or without taking responsibility for them. One can act as if one is merely doing one's job or duty when one is in fact acting out hostile or aggressive wishes. By the making of policy, one can act impersonally to create or to destroy. One can make new categories of persons ineligible for benefits, or liable for service and punishment. Who, then, now judges the state for eliminating from its rolls
thousands of individuals who, discouraged in the pursuit of jobs, drop from official enumerations, drop out of the labor force entirely. Or, invisible in the city, drop from the census. It is crucially important to solemnize grief and rage, hostility and greed, to allow them to cross the threshold of consciousness, for these emotions then can find symbolic expression and relief. These passions are no less present for being subliminal in modern societies. In a subliminal
state, they may be acted out in ways as harmless, although incomplete, as entertainment or sport, but they may be acted out indirectly in the more harmful routines of the office, and through more direct forms of acting out in illness or in violence itself. If the primitive survives in modern societies without being brought to the light in the church's own proceedings, these destructive motives will cause untold damage, and will generate equally destructive motives of revenge.
More primitive societies do enact, in symbolic form, irrational impulses of hatred, envy, rebellion, and murder. The enemy or victim to be overcome or sacrificed may be anyone who threatens the individual's essential supply of food or protection, self-esteem or love. More complex societies like ours often provide a more muted expression of murderous impulses. Magical thinking and the impulse to eliminate all competition from one's life do not disappear
even when the modern adult learns to speak rationally, or appears to take responsibility for his or her own life. I think of the studies of people, migrants, West Virginians, Mexican-Americans, people studied by Robert and Anne Coles, for instance. Some were born in Boston, some worked their way up from the working class to the middle class. In every case, they are haunted
by families they have left behind and by a self that they will never yet become. Witness our fascination with journeys to outer space, or with video games that feature a haunted pursued creature in a labyrinth. That Labyrinth, whether it is a modern maze or the original creation of Daedalus, is still a fitting symbol of the unconscious and its tortuous control over life. In the absence of adequate solemnizations, individuals find their own
personal pathway, and they absolve themselves of their own guilt. The lack of a corporate absolution and of a common pathway leaves the individual with an unprecedented burden of responsibility without either the promise of fulfillment, and without release, and without a corporate yardstick for measuring self-deception. In relatively simple communities the same people regularly came together at the same time and at the same place for a variety of activities. For planting and eating, dancing and love-making, or to choose a new leader.
Apportioning different activities to different times at the same place is essential to avoid confusion over whether the time is right for sewing, or for dancing, and loving, and electing. Certain actions must finish before the new ones can begin. Actions, in other words, must become acts. In these simpler societies it is the same with promises and threats, planting and killing, harvesting and giving birth, growing up, growing old. These actions, whether they are words or deeds, are done, but done only when someone says and sees that they are done.
Parting is done properly, but only with a blessing. Otherwise, one leaves without permission or pardon. Until the action of parting is completed, one cannot go on satisfactorily to the next thing, and the next thing may not prosper. More complex societies rely more on organizational authority, rather than on custom. They deploy symbolic markers to determine where people belong, and when things will be done. Take a modern office building, and look at the movable partitions
that subdivide a very large space into different places for different actions, actions that may go on simultaneously. Play or recreation in one corner, where office workers are eating or talking, a mixture of work and play near a coffee maker, and varieties of work in a large number of cubicles. But the partitions are movable. There is no clear demarcation of what's appropriate in any particular time or place. The stages of life, also, in a society like ours are marked by
flexible and movable partitions. The rites of passage vary from abandoning chastity and owning automobiles to being confirmed in a religious tradition or to taking academic degrees. But who can say with final authority when adulthood has arrived? Even maturity does not arrive at a certain time but becomes a lifelong project. We can still trace the patterns by which the young find mentors, we can still see ways in which the middle-aged train their successors, but the age for promotion, like the age for retirement,
varies, and the markers for each age shift in response to economic and political pressures. Who can say, then, when we are done? Who can say that we have done enough? The transition from life to death also becomes a matter for careful analysis and legislation. We have a dying process and a death process. New ideas and techniques have changed the popular and the legal understanding of when death has occurred and new life begun. Modern societies do have markers for the stages in life, but like the
partitions in the office building, those markers are very flexible indeed. In the new English Alternative Service Book, one of my favorite rubrics says, quote, "local custom may be established." Established by functionaries with their own interests, no doubt, with the help of those who are willing to be so ordered. In a society where taboos have been softened into law, and custom can be shaped at will, there is no apparent occasion
for transgressions, at least for those transgressions that we know are profoundly offensive or dangerous. So what? That is, is this drastic reduction in our public discourse on sin and salvation, is this dangerous? Does it pose in any way a threat to our society? Yes.
What harm is there in defining the basic tragedies and flaws in human life in terms that lie outside the language of faith? Great harm. Who suffers if we define sin and guilt in terms of a social reality that is indifferent to whatever the church claims to know about the truth? I'm asking whether a society which defines sin and guilt in terms that beg the question of truth will suffer serious losses of public trust and commitment? Will such a society encounter conflict from individuals and groups,
who then either take justice into their own hands or seek to impose their own conceptions of sin on the public? Obviously these are rhetorical questions. They are all to be answered in the affirmative. Public trust and commitment have declined steadily, year by year, for the last 30 years, as individuals increasingly suspect the integrity of their leaders and their institutions. Some individuals and groups are now taking the law into their own hands, and they are meting out justice or preparing for a domestic Armageddon. Some religious
communities are seeking to impose their own definitions of sin on the public, in the absence of public discourse on sin. Nonetheless, the question goes further and deeper. The question is how long can a society that begs the question of truth, how long can it endure? And whether, once the question of truth is put to such a society, whether that society can stand? It is tempting to be lulled into a false sense of security by fluid,
and yet formal, reasonable, and indefinite organizational arrangements for managing social life. It's easy to be lulled until there's an explosion that kills and maims like the explosion in Bhopal. Or in West Philadelphia. In both situations, the state had its own ceremonies and rites for licensing and inspection. Rites that, in the Indian case, were observed, and in the American case, were not. In both cases, the state was to provide for safety and warning. In both
cases, it provided neither. In both cases, it is exceedingly difficult to establish motivation and to pinpoint responsibility. In both cases, the proportion of the disaster beggars the imagination. Indeed, despite public warnings in the press and debates in the legislature, the state officials of Madhya Pradesh said they never imagined that it could have happened. Failure of imagination, ambiguity of motive, indeterminate responsibility, indifferent and irresponsive administration
, the legality without moral authority, speech without persuasion, testimony without conviction, grief and outrage without satisfaction, a new generation of fear and hatred. These are the marks of public discourse that cannot solemnize debate over sin and guilt. How long can it go on? Indefinitely. A society may die in the meantime, but a social system might survive. Those who take the law into their own hands will also die.
There is indeed an undercurrent of self-destruction in many acts of despair and rebellion, at least in our society. In the meantime, who will speak a truth that transcends, and even shatters, the limits and the quiet surfaces of public discourse? Who will reprove and convict? Not of maladministration, or misspeaking, or manslaughter, but of guilt and of sin. If limits are abstract, must judgments also be stated only in terms of high moral principle? The truth comes in more homely and
accessible forms. Of course, many people still feel relatively trusting of one another. They still have no backlog of grievances to satisfy. They're relatively confident of their own futures. Among them, anger and hatred are likely only then to simmer quietly. But among people whose confidence is low, whose memories are long, long enough to recall ancient grievances, among relative strangers who can quickly learn to mistrust and to hate one another, it's a different story.
These latter emotions are the more likely to disrupt the fragile discourse of work, or the market place of politics in the state, and even in the church, when our language and our rights fail to enable us to come to judgement. Certainly, in our country at this time, there is a famine of right and of rhetoric for repentance at the level of the nation. No wonder that some groups still apparently wish that America could rid itself of certain impure elements in the body politics. Perhaps through a final and violent
confrontation. The nation has reason to fear the revenge of those it has at times wished to eliminate from its social obligations, or whom it has maimed in battle for unworthy ends. Vengeance only belongs completely to the Lord, and the past can be completed and finished, done with and undone, transfigured once and for all. There are indeed sins which require collective expression, remorse over self-deception and repentance for the sin of unbelief. The last few decades
have been especially ruthless to national illusions. Nations have been extraordinarily ruthless in their demand for power and glory in the present, rather than in some distant future, which is the object only of faith. Now nations may be tempted to panic, and to take divine judgement into their own hands in a test, a final test. And if there is then a level at which the collective expression of guilt and remorse is most necessary and least likely, it is the nation itself.
Thank you very much.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Dr. Fenn, and thank all of you for coming. Good day.