5/30/54

Scripture: (Read Joshua 24: 14-18)

It is fitting that we take note of some of the moving and significant experiences of people at this season of the year. Parents have this morning presented their child in dedication to God; and we rejoice with them in the hope and promise of this young life committed to their care. Members of our families, and of our Church family, have arrived at a significant milestone in their education. Promotions, graduations, commencements are the order of the day for hosts of people. In particular, we honor here those who are about to finish their high school training and who will now commence the strenuous business of adult living in chosen vocation or advanced schooling. It is a time for warm congratulations and for eager looking ahead.

Further, at this time of year, we remember with honor those who have spent their lives for the safety and honor and opportunity of our nation. And we gratefully remember the lives of all our loved ones who now rest from mortal care after lives shared with us. Again we commend all - our babes and little children, our youth, our departed ones, and ourselves to the care of the Eternal God. Our commendation is more significant if we make it not just an impatient and a perfunctory thing, from which we turn with a kind of quick relief to some trifling concern of the day. But it is well to think earnestly on some of the attitudes and concerns of our time, in the light of what we have learned about abiding truth.

At this time of year, one hears sly remarks - and some not so sly - about the shedding of school responsibilities. Kids can hardly wait for school to be out; teachers can hardly wait for school to be out; mothers can! And a British bishop once wrote that: “The universities are a sort of lunatic asylum for keeping young men out of mischief.” [Mandell Creighton, Bishop of London]. What prompted his outburst, it is hard to know. But it would seem that he did not intend it to be taken seriously. The great task of a university is exploration for knowledge and, as well, the consecration of that learning.

The knowledge we acquire in school is not only useful, powerful, noble, but in some sense a sacred thing. It is not a commodity for barter, exploited for personal advantage. It is a gift to be shared, dedicated, used as a steward should husband it.

There is a strong bond between religion and knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge is a religious duty. And the exercise of intelligence in religion is a duty as well.

To think, think hard and vigorously, is a religious duty. Faith has no fear of truth when faith is a deep inner conviction that God is Truth. It does not ask us to believe what is irrational or what we know to be untrue. Its plea is for more education, not less. Its plea is not for more religion and less science but for more of both, with better correlation between the two.

One of the most passionate desires of the human heart was voiced by John Milton when he said: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, about all other liberties.”

The great creative periods of the life of Christianity have been marked by vigorous thinking. Paul and John were men of great intellectual stature as well as sincerity. They, and some of the early church fathers, labored to commend the Christian faith to the intelligence of people.

You find a Revival of learning after dark ages; and presently you find a Reformation of Religion. And the leaders of the Reformation were men of intellectual stature. See the stirring of minds in John and Charles Wesley. They were no street-corner, soap-box enthusiasts, nor even men of moderate training, but men of thorough university education. And with the stirring of their minds, came the moving of spirit that meant a great Religious Revival.

On the campus of Columbia University, a young fellow was intellectually coming of age. He was finding many of the traditional views of the Bible unstable, and he was distressed by is discovery. But he set his mind at search for a faith that would scorn to tamper with truth, a faith that would do no violence to intelligence. Then, for over forty years, New York City and the nations and the world, knew the vigorous ministry of Harry Emerson Fosdick, who reached millions with the spoken and written word, clarifying and challenging their thinking about things that matter most. Great things happen when one makes the pursuit of knowledge a religious duty.

Of course this is only one side of a tempestuous story. The darker side shows strong resistance on the part of influential numbers of people, to disturbing ideas. Think what happened to Galileo. What did the medieval church do to those who dared advance openly, the theory that the world is round and that it revolves about the sun, rather than that the sun revolves around the earth? The anti-intellectual temper still thrives in some quarters. Indeed it lays a stronger hold on hosts of people now than it did in the early part of this century!

A man went into a church and, visiting there that day, heard the preacher say: “Few things, my friends, have done more harm in this world than thought.” Then he proceeded to say: “Don’t, my dear friends, put me down as a thinker; put me down as a believer.” It is a false antithesis! For Belief without thought is superstition.

It is pathetic to see one adventure fairly well through part of a discussion of religious belief, arguing fairly well and capably on some matters, until some doctrine he has hitherto accepted without question is challenged. Whereupon he says, with stiffening reserve, “But there are some things you can’t argue about. You’ve just got to believe them. If you question that, you have nothing left!”

It is pitiable intellectual surrender for masses of folk to accept without further question the doctrine that some ecclesiastical authority has decreed is henceforth part of the dogma of that church which must be accepted by the faithful. Too often in history the so-called “defenders of the faith” have been the blind champions of dogmatic authority.

In 1913, Cambridge University Professor J. B. Bury wrote in “A History of Freedom of Thought” that the struggle of reason against authority had ended in an apparently decisive and permanent victory for liberty. His qualifying adverb, “apparently,” is about all that salvages his reputation as a prophet! For in the 40-year interval since then, reason has been put in chains, and freedom curtailed in vast areas of the earth.

There is no right of dissent in Russia nor the Soviet satellites today; no liberty to criticize. Can any men there write a book, start a periodical, hold a meeting, advocate an opinion, which in the judgment of the party dictatorship threatens the system? Education, art, music, drama, cinema, all the instruments of public opinion, are under government direction and control.

And as for the United States, the tendency to “fight fire with fire,” to oppose one kind of conformity with another conformity is assuming dangerous proportions.

A former president of the Rockefeller Foundation has said: “With the possible exception of John Adam’s administration, there is a risk today in being a liberal that has never existed before in the history of this republic. If you sign a petition to admit colored people to public housing developments, if you favor fair employment practices or are concerned about civil liberties, if you fight for the rights of the foreign born, if you oppose religious prejudice and Jim Crowism, if you sanction cultural exchange with foreign countries ------ you are apt to be suspected, in some circles, as a knowing participant in a communist front, or at the very least a witless dupe of Moscow’s hypnotic influence ---- Fingers are even pointed at organizations like the YMCA, the YWCA, and the defunct Epworth League. In many states, teachers and college professors have been frightened into sterile silence, and even the pulpit,” says he, “has not been free from fear.”

There is an anti-intellectual temper, and a pronounced trend in the direction of conformity that is a retreat from the adventurous search for truth; that is real liberty! Fear of communism is inclining us, as a people, to confuse treason with dissent. We become impatient with, and intolerant of, diversity of outlook and opinion. We consent to let our official inquiries become an inquisition.

Even though there is one church that claims the right of censorship, why should free churches assent to it? Why should vigilant committees and irate individuals demand the removal of many books from library shelves, both overseas ant at home? Our civilization is not so rotten as fearful. The cure for our ills is not suppression but more of the same responsible liberty that this nation has thrived upon.

I’m going to raise a question at this point that may at first seem off to some of us. It appears most likely that the pledge of allegiance to the flag of our nation will be changed by the addition of the words “under God.” It is a phrase that millions of us who have a religious faith have assumed, and have said in our hearts for years. Yet if, and as, we make it part of the law of the land, think on this. Only slightly over one-half of this nation’s people claim active affiliation with any church. Of that nearly one-half unchurched population, many think of themselves as nominally religious, though indifferent to the organized church. Some few are avowedly atheistic. We of the faithful have never been able to persuade them, nor has the Holy Spirit yet moved them to a belief in God. Not all atheists are communist, or in any other way subversive.

Shall we of Christian and Jewish religious conviction now be about to force all citizens to utter an expression of religious belief in the pledge to our national flag, on pain of being considered disloyal or treasonable? Most of us in this room have settled long ago our abiding loyalty to God. Are we going to interpret the proposed amendment to our pledge of allegiance as a requirement that all citizens of this nation be like-minded as we are? Does our unity as a nation still make provision for the uncoerced loyalty of minorities?

Vigilance is needed in our life and times. Not the watch-dog vigilance of dogma, but the vigilance of truth-seekers. The Bible is just full of admonitions to seek for truth and to hold it fast. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” [John 8: 32]. “Send out Thy light and Thy truth; let them lead me.” [Psalm 43: 3]. And truth is not delicate, but is as durable as the eternal hills. Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, “You needn’t fear to handle the truth roughly; she is no invalid.”

Let’s be “sobered up” of some of our wild suspicions. Let’s look for adequate proof of accusations. Let’s set ourselves after more, not less, of knowledge. And let us remember, not by compulsion, but by our free and determined testimony, that for us, Reverence for the Eternal is the first thing in knowledge.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” [Proverbs 1: 7].

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 30, 1954.