COLLAGE
Thanks to Picasso, collage is now regarded as a fine art as well as a kindergarten pastime. Recently a New York Times critic objected to the technique of a Swiss collagist who wadded up pasted paper to resemble oil paint. It reminded him of a woman who achieved newsreel recognition through the unusual occupation of making pictures from pellets of chewing gum.
Ecclesiastical collage is a deserving subject for thesis research. Comprehensive surveys of the undersides of pews would reveal collage creations accumulated by generations of discreet chewers. Chemical analysis of deposits might indicate when Wrigley displaced peppermints as sermon solace.
Pulpit collage is even more fascinating. Few pulpits have parked chewing gum undercoatings, but sermon collaging is a diligently practiced art. To understand the popularity of outlandish scissors-and-paste theories of biblical criticism, we need only to scan the sermon notes of the more gullible divines.
There are three main types of homiletical collage: the anecdotal, the quotational, and the sampler. The anecdotal is the most common and the most varied. It presents a sermon collage of stories, usually from the minister’s own experience, real or imagined. The personality of the preacher determines whether the selection is humorous or lugubrious. Favorite classifications are: Personal Problems I Have Solved; My Summer Travels; Happy Memories of a Former Charge. A good anecdotal collage will not average above one minute of connective material between stories.
Quotational collages require either a wide acquaintance with literature or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Long quotations from Shakespeare are favored; hymn quotations are excellent, particularly if the hymn has seven verses. This method has been falling into disuse, however, and is seldom found in churches with pew collages.
The sampler collage is a craftsmanlike assembly of paragraphs from various printed sermons that have some possible relation to the subject in hand. Fortunately there are manuals with material for this kind of thing. A firm artist’s hand is necessary to hold the seams together.
There are many ways of expressing your appreciation of artful pulpit collage. Attempts at source criticism will show your alert interest. You may murmur, “Your sermon was simply mosaic! Wasn’t that last issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY stimulating?” Or you may whisper confidentially, “My cousin was a member of your church in Kankakee, and I was intrigued by your imaginative description of her neurosis.”
Your contribution to our gallery of pulpit collage will be appreciated.
EUTYCHUS
CHURCH TAX
Your editorial (Jan. 4 issue) concerning Dr. Eugene Carson Blake’s suggestion that churches should voluntarily pay taxes is an excellent statement of the many facets of this complex problem.
As I see it, the central issue is the question: What should the government subsidize?
Very few will disagree that government should subsidize national defense and police activity for this is the proper function of government. Beyond that, disagreement begins. When Dr. Blake’s suggestion is limited to houses of worship, many questions arise. What about the almost endless list of other government subsidies in our shored-up economy? If Dr. Blake were to demand the abolition of all subsidies including tax exemption for churches, libertarians would applaud his consistency.
However, since Dr. Blake does not appear to be willing to abolish public education, TVA, public housing and many of the other subsidies Americans have grown to accept, I am constrained to ask: “Why should a religious leader wish to give the churches a greater handicap than any other cultural institution in our subsidized economy?”
IRVING E. HOWARD
Christian Freedom Foundation
New York, N. Y.
In the eyes of the state the church is performing a function and is being paid for that function by being released from the obligation to pay real estate taxes and the like. It is when the churches cease to fulfill that function which the state demands that the religious organizations of this country should be taken to task and made to pay the tax.
JOHN H. FRYKMAN
Philadelphia, Pa.
Having wrestled with the taxation problem for many years as a vestryman and churchwarden, let me list some specific decisions of our vestry, out of which a philosophy can be read:
1. Some of our funds go to aid a struggling country church, whose members contribute time and labor to till the church’s small landholding, bringing in produce which is either sold or given away. We have felt that neither the value of the land nor the produce should be taxed.
2. We have vigorously supported the program of our Diocese to “Raise Our Sites,” designed to acquire 5-acre plots in areas of anticipated community development, before prices go out of sight. We do not consider this a land-grab—just prudent planning. Since these lands do not produce income, we do not think they should be taxed.
3. An opportunity arose recently to purchase a close-by walk-up apartment building, which would have saved us a lot of annual expense and also produce some welcome revenue. We refused to do it because we could no longer certify that we received no rentals.
4. Our dear ladies developed a plan to open an “opportunity shop” on the church premises, mainly for the redistribution of children’s clothing and accessories. Although the women pointed out many instances where this sort of praiseworthy activity is going on, we could not in conscience permit it and still claim tax exemption.
5. Whenever the women put on a bazaar or the like, we do collect and pay the local sales tax.
The emphasis which you have been giving to the church taxation matter is most timely and objectively intelligent.
JOHN H. DONOGHUE
Old St. John’s Protestant Episcopal
Washington, D. C.
The Church is here neither to serve the State financially nor to be served by the State financially. I am disturbed over the way Dr. Blake, Stated Clerk of our General Assembly, materializes the Church, “the Body of Christ,” in his article “Tax Exemption and the Churches” (August 3). To talk as he does about taxing the body of Christ appears to me to be the latest long step down the secularist road away from the perfectly unique spiritual reality of the Church. The average American church with its average of 200–300 members, these small divine communities, isn’t the “large and rich” institution Dr. Blake fears it is, especially where these evangelical congregations are sending away to mission fields all they can spare from their current expenses.
It is tragic that a churchman can be so obsessed with ‘this worldliness’ as to blur principle like this and thus plant such effective propaganda against God’s business as if His business were no different from the world’s. Fortunately, a Stated Clerk in our United Presbyterian form of government has never been regarded as a spokesman in himself for the Church on matters theological, moral or spiritual!
ROBERT W. YOUNG
North Presbyterian
Pittsburgh, Pa.
WHITHER BAPTISTS?
In reviewing Harrison’s book, Authority and Power in the Free Church Tradition (Dec. 21 issue), it is noted that the author “grants to separationists that ‘organized Christianity’ represents a ‘compromise of the Gospel.’ ” One could hardly expect a Baptist and an Episcopalian to agree on polity, but I wonder if those who consider all ecclesiastical organization to some extent a betrayal of the Gospel can legitimately quarrel with any historical developments of institutional leadership, such as that taking place in the Baptist fellowship.
STANLEY R. SINCLAIR
St. John’s Church
Roseville, Calif.
I cannot agree with everything you say, since I write from a somewhat different theological perspective, but I deeply appreciate your careful reading of the book and your general appraisal of it and share with you the hope that these issues will be discussed, whether or not this particular book is used as a foundation for the discussion.
PAUL HARRISON
Princeton University
Princeton, N. J.
The author has explicated what should be obvious to all concerned, namely that an exaggerated conception of local autonomy has hindered the Baptists from developing an orderly relationship to their agencies. The fact that power resides in the hands of bureaucratic experts is not the result of an evil conspiracy, but the inevitable outcome of a system which delegates responsibility without assigning and delimiting authority. Pure autonomy of local congregations not only frees them from external control, but it denies them the opportunity of providing controls which would make their agencies responsible to them.
In several places you suggest that Baptists can solve their problems by a return to their distinctive principles. There is no contradiction between a recovery of our heritage and the proposals offered by Harrison. The difficulty is that so many Baptists seem to think that slogans like “soul competence” and “local autonomy” represent classic Baptist doctrines, whereas they are only caricatures of Baptist views. Baptists do need a more adequate view of the Church than they commonly have today, and they can find guidance toward such concepts in early Baptist confessions of faith. Many early Baptists were much more “ecumenical” in their understanding of the Church than are some contemporary Baptists.
NORMAN H. MARING
Eastern Baptist Seminary
Philadelphia, Pa.
It is quite futile to suggest that the situation be corrected by a return to an insistence upon local autonomy, for it is an insistence upon local autonomy that has produced the present concentration of irresponsible power within both the American Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention.
Actually “local autonomy” is a twentieth century term rather than a New Testament term. The idea of local autonomy among Baptists, to lie sure, antedates the twentieth century. It was partly the product of the Lockean philosophy of individualism and it was partly the product of the agitation of some nineteenth century Baptists who seized upon it as an ideal instrument by which denominational societies could be controlled by a denominational elite. It is hardly a New Testament concept nor a distinctly Baptist concept. Indeed, the old-line Baptists opposed it as an innovation.
What the early Baptists emphasized was the fact that a local church was fully the church, and fully equipped to minister Christ in the place where it was set without having need to derive either authority or power from any bishop, synod, or presbytery. This they believed to be the New Testament concept of the church. But this did not mean that these churches should remain isolated from one another. Nor did it mean that the joint concerns of local churches should not be carried on jointly in an ordinary fashion, with clear lines of authority by which those who administered the joint activities could be held responsible by the local churches.
WINTHROP S. HUDSON
Colgate-Rochester Divinity School
Rochester, N. Y.
CRITIC OF CHALCEDON
“Have We Outmoded Chalcedon?” (Dec. 7 issue). My own answer to this question is: Yes, long ago—insofar as concerns the authenticating by that council of the heathenish, yes, blasphemous epithet “Theotokos” for Mary, mother of Jesus.
MEYER MARCUS
New York, N.Y.
WORLD RELIGIONS
Your [Dec. 21] issue containing a symposium on Christianity and World Religions was generally very good.… It seems to me unfortunate, however, that in the article on Judaism no mention was made of the Hasidim or of Martin Buber, which represent a current of faith within Judaism that I think is much akin to the spirit of Protestantism within Christianity, and something from Which many Protestants could refresh their faith—or in any case an optimum point of contact for interfaith dialogue. It is all too easy for us to speak of Judaism as legalistic and Christianity as liberated from legalism, when in point of fact much of Christianity suffers from legalism and there are such currents as Hasidism alive within Judaism. This is not to equate Judaism and Christianity at all, but to indicate that the superiority of the Christian faith is not something to be lightly established by comparing Christianity at its best with merely normative Judaism.
WILLIAM ROBERT MILLER
Managing Editor
Fellowship
Nyack, N. Y.
Thank you for the symposium.… This comprehensive presentation helps the readers understand more clearly that the church, at its heart, is mission, and that Christianity is challenged today by powerful, dynamic faiths. Man needs a renewed dedication to proclaiming God’s Word—Christ—unto the far corners of the globe.
JAMES W. CARTY, JR.
Bethany College
Bethany, W. Va.
