- Of the follow-up, if not follow-through on his introductory remarks, having had to disappear after his opening address and having also to do the same thing this morning, we're gonna revise the schedule a bit, so that immediately after his address this morning, we will be able to have some time for questions or discussion with him. One can't help but think on the basis of what's been happening since we began, whether this conference has been dealing so much with the moral quandaries of students as with the moral quandaries of chaplains. (audience laughs) We have sweat, I think, as much as any student sweats, some of the problems by which we're confronted, we have sweat the ambiguity in which we live as chaplains. Perhaps the only way by which we can survive is suggested by the story of the famous opera singer Gigli who, on one occasion, went up to Boston for the first time in their opera house to sing in "Faust". And on the occasion, when Mephistopheles descends into hell with Faust, they had set up the stage so that at the appropriate time they could get there, and then a button would be pushed and this would go down and symbolize for everybody watching that they were going down into Hell. Well it so happened that the mechanical contrivance didn't quite work and about halfway down, it stopped. And they tried like mad to sort of crawl down out of sight, but this even didn't come off and they were suspended on their descent into hell, right there in the, you know, view of all the audience. It's reported that an Irishman, way up in the balcony who had one too many before he came, saw this and jumped to his feet and shouted out, "Thank God, I'm safe, Hell's full." (audience laughs) And after our discussions, I think the only reprieve we may feel is that hell is getting fairly well filled up by the contemporary college students, and maybe the chaplains can't get in Waldo Beach is going to bring his address, and then we will move immediately into our discussion. Dr. Beach. You know, I don't know, since I'm among friends here, in order to assure you that this is not gonna be a lecture and address, I don't know whether it be more easy for you, and for me, if I just sat down and chatted, maybe I can operate this way standing up, but I hate the informality of both giving a lecture, and being incarcerated on tape. There's a sort of a irremediable finality about this taping business that makes one feel one is supposed to utter prose of the style of a papal and cyclical. And what I have to deal, what I have to say is good deal less memorable than the utterances of John 23rd. I apologize, too, for having the other day to duck out after our discussion, after my presentation, I was not able to take part in the discussion 'cause I had a class and a hit-and-run procedure isn't very ethical. I would like today to have a few minutes to talk, and for discussion after what I have to say through. I have about 30 minutes to provide redemption from Hell for the college students who are now there, waiting. I don't think I can do any better than to move them up to a kind of limbo, or Purgatory, but at least I want to try to say something positive about tasks of a college chaplain in meeting the moral quandaries of the college student. On Tuesday, I tried to make a kind of descriptive profile of Joe College. His anomie, supposedly his immorality, which on closer look appears to be a function of his false and abortive attempts to realize himself and find his identity. The things that are so troublesome about his behavior, his excessive drinking, his destruction of property, his leching, if we can use a nice verb from the 17th century, which has a different connotation now, all represent a kind of passion for security to belong in his fraternity. In his utilitarian view, in his passion for economic security, in his utilitarian view of his college education. Now today, perhaps I can provide some normative guidance, derived from the Christian faith, which we as teachers, as chaplains, as counselors, may be able to provide. Where does the Christian faith now become relevant to illumine these moral quandaries, to lead the student to some kind of self understanding, some identity, some inner sense of moral control without providing just nostrums and palliatives and quick remedies, quick pills that really don't solve the problem at all, and without providing the kind of tight legalisms, rules of saying, "Now, this is what you should do," which have course he at his stage of life resists. I think we are, at this juncture, well advised to follow a kind of double movement. One is a movement back to the Christian faith, to a clear understanding of the frame of reference, provided by Christian theology, from which the student can draw his own moral answers. The other direction, is to get the student out of his tight circle of moral self concern and get 'em across the tracks, so to speak, out into the world. This double movement, I want to try to develop a little bit like to show you what I mean, the first is the movement back to the recovery of theology. My claim here is based on the thinking of, again of Augustine, and more precisely and immediately of Richard Niebuhr, that the recovery of a sense of ethical responsibility is the fruit of a recovered theological faith. What's called for, what's presumed here, is the ethics of response. We do what we do out of what we respond to, to what we take to be so. Our moral norms are always a function of our expression, of what we feel to be ultimate reality. The problem of goodness, then, the problem of criteria of right and wrong reverts back to the question, "Who is the Lord? Who is the Lord of my life? What is the ultimate good?" Is a question that refers itself down the hall to the ultimate question, "What it is ultimately so?" And there's no point in talking about being ethical, or being good, without an understanding of the ground of goodness. The way to recover inter-moral responsibility is then by the articulation of the lines of the Christian faith. Procedurally, here we start from scratch and worse than that, from behind the line of scratch, because what we encounter is a theological illiteracy on the part of a college student, which is cosmic in its proportion. He likely brings with him, and may even acquire at school, a bundle of misinformation and debris, old wives tales and Bible verses, which constitutes his body of theology, his misinformation. Seems to me the main job, prior to ethical recovery, underneath ethical recovery, to recover in liberal arts education, a basic theological literacy. How is this done? Well it's best done in the curriculum, and with the same standards of intellectual integrity as all the other subjects that the students taking. But as many of you know, who are working, maybe in a state university situation, or in your own chaplain situation outside the curriculum, it may be only possible to do this in an extracurricular way, in the Lay Scholar movement, or a study group program. And I know all of the working difficulties involved here. The great difficulties of starting out bravely with a study course program in Christian faith and Christian ethics, or church in the world, strong start in October, peters out by Christmas, students have too much to do. Materials of this particular course become expendable in light of their curricular pressures. But where carefully done, well taught. This can become an exciting experience, and I think it's fair to say that if you look at these extracurricular study programs on some campuses, the motivation for study is there, and because it's intrinsic, a student doesn't have to do this, and for that very reason may have an excitement about it for it. Most important in this whole study area, study of the recovery of the Christian faith, is the necessity for critical intellectual analysis of the problems of faith, and belief. In working on problems of the nature of the Christian faith, Christian theology, Christian anthropology, to overcome the dualism in the student's mind between scientific thinking and religious thinking. He may acquire a great sense of excitement and interest, and curiosity, when he recognizes that to think well is to serve God in the interior court, as Traherne phrases it. The awareness of the necessities of careful, radical, critical scrutiny never occurs to him as appropriate to the field of religion. When he discovers that not only is this permissible, but it's necessary, when he gets out from under the Sunday school mentality about the study of religion, it then takes on appeal. Perhaps his task here of the teacher, of the counselor, of the chaplain, as teacher, is a double one. One is the maieutic role, of shaking up the pious, the comfortable, and the complacent, whose prefatory word to all religious utterances is, "I've always been taught that," and so forth, or, "What we learned at church was that," and so on. That maieutic role, on the one side, against, or towards the pious lad who runs to the safe copy-book answers, is necessary to lead him out from the escape answers. It is in a very tight, pious, stuffy, over-churched campus, what's needed is Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Get 'em all shook up. On the other hand, toward the skeptic, in the sophisticated, emancipated campus, where kind of positivistic, humanistic scientism is the established religion, established church, towards the student in this situation, that searching skeptic, who was always more entrancing, and really more winsome, than the pious complacent lad, towards him, the maieutic method is to indicate that his very skepticism is a way of affirming truth, and his very doubt is meaningful against the background of an order of truth, that his skepticism is much closer to the kingdom of God, the kingdom of truth, than the pious and proper church answer. Give him Tillich. Work towards the positive underpinning of his skepticism by showing him how doubt is an angel, not the Devil. In the job of recovering theological literacy, one of the main procedural problems is how you go about it program-wise. What do you set up for the conference on a campus? What about this whole deal of "Religious Emphasis Week"? As a battered grizzled veteran of many such weeks, I would testify in general that it would be much better to retire the term and the event entirely. Seems to me, this institution is kind of an artificial revivalism. It presumes that religious faith is taken for granted around and needs only to be emphasized, or recalled, or revived, When actually this is real artificial to the true situation. A much better pattern, which is a growing one on many campuses, where growing successful is, instead of the "Religious Emphasis Week", is the symposium, or conference, or parley, or whatever, on some vital, current secular issue that is of great moment, great urgency, then planned to include in the panel of perspectives, brought to bear upon that problem, as one perspective on it, the Christian theological approach. What does the Christian faith have to say to this particular issue, along with what other points of view, what other perspectives have to say to this particular issue? This is much more true to the realities of the polytheism of the American campus. Christianity is one faith system, along with other major faith systems, with positivism, and scientism, and suburbanity, and Americanity, and the other major religions of our day. Still in the same direction, toward the theological recovery, once confronted with a whole problem of the meaning of worship, the recovery of authentic worship, for the springs of ethical renewal lie here in renewed worship at the altar, where the total self is brought face-to-face with the mystery and the awesome Holiness, and the forgiving mercy of God. Many chapel services, on many universities, desecrate the function of worship by being purely secular exercises set within the college calendar as convenient times to get the children together, and give them some kind of sense of togetherness, or loyalty. And this is sprinkled with a little bit of holy water, in the form of an invocation and a benediction. This isn't worship at all. The need here to recover authentic worship, I think is a very, very central one, one in which we fumble a great deal, which was great deal of need for searching and rethinking. Basically it's a dialectical need. On the one side, the conservative need to recover the tradition of the classical forms of worship in the richness of Christian liturgy. And there's a great deal of that going on, and it's very exciting, and very valuable, in the realm of music, for instance, on American college campuses, we have of at last gotten up, I think, most of us, except perhaps at some Southern schools, from the horrors of the 19th century drivel that passed for church music, back into the richness of the Baroque, and classical, style. But while we have done this, and recovered objectivity of our authentic worship, there is need at the same time to recover the relevance of all of this; the point of connection between this kind of worship and the student where he is, between the form of worship and the existence of the worshiper. I'm much impressed for instance, by the way, in which college choirs nowadays have been in Protestant schools, recovering the mass form, and with great feeling and power sing the Kyrie Eleison. "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi" Without the slightest notion of what Kyrie Eleison means. (audience laughs) I won't embarrass anybody here by taking a nose count, or a hand count, as to what Kyrie Eleison means. But, for many students, it's really just about as meaningless as for the boy who reported home after church, that the closing hymn song was, "The Cross-eyed Bear." This is about as much as it meant to him. Great fervor singing about the cross-eyed bear without knowing what theologically it really meant. Well, this recovery of authentic worship by explaining, by working at the explanation of the objective meaning of the mass and what Kyrie Eleison means for the worshiper who stands in need of the mercy of the Lord, is much needed. The other direction of worship is the experimental one. One is the conservative direction, the other is the experimental one, of working with new worship forms, the dance, jazz mass, the vernacular, to indicate the way in which the sacred appears in the secular. You have to distinguish all this very carefully between secularism and the secular, and a Protestant motif of worship always is the appearance of grace in the secular, just as Bach used German drinking songs as the basis of his corral tunes. So the sense of the judgment and grace of God can be recovered in contemporary college students experience through exciting secular forms. You remember so vividly instances of this in college chapels where, well, one in particular comes to mind, worship at Hollins College, a magnificent chapel there, where the chaplain, Al Beardsley, is a master of the use of ritual of the classical sort, but he casts his prayers, usually in the collect form, often in striking vernacular. One occasion, I remember there, chapel, after a party weekend or something, where his use of the vernacular was real earthy, talking about how, "Here we are, God, before thee, with bellies distended, with too much food." And so on, this was a little bit less elegant than the King James, or Elizabethan English style, but it had a certain compelling vividness about it that I feel strongly involved the worshiper deeply in the worship, in the experience, in the encounter. Well, all that I've said thus far is in the direction of the recovery, through the study of the Christian faith, and through the recovery of objective and relevant worship of the grounds for moral renewal. But now the other direction, the other movement, this seems to me, the movement to get the students across the tracks, made aware of the social revolutions that are going on, the world's hunger, the world's need. This fraternity lounge lizard and the sorority queen, in their fantastic world of array of sports cars, and beer cans, and bouffant hairdos of various delicate pastel shades, these characters need to be shook loose from their comfort and their ease by the awareness of how the other nine tenths of the world lives. Dumped into an awareness of the desperate poverty, which prevails maybe not five blocks away, more than five blocks away from the campus. You're all aware of these needs and the projects that lead, that provide guidance in this direction. Many of them, summer service projects, American Friends Service Committee projects, Operation Crossroads, for summer youths, but then during the school year more immediately projects in town, companion, much impressed, can at Wesley, with this companion program in the hospital, where students go and give regular time through the whole year as companions for people in the hospital who are desperately lonesome and have no contact with the outside world, or the tutoring programs for Negro students in Southern communities, as well as in Northern communities, where kids, well, college students will give hours of time to help, tutoring with Negro students to high school level, to bring them up to, help to bring them up to levels of adequacy for a college admission, to newly integrated schools, or boys' club work, or social projects in the town. This kind of activity is a necessity. It's not just an extracurricular luxury. It's the redemption, in reality of the student, from the artificiality of a good deal of his current, existential, Christian lingo. It's the okay terms that these students love to talk about are, terms like the abyss, or involvement, or encounter, or dread, or dialogue. But this talk's pretty artificial and fancy. I overheard one comment recently after both sessions from a darling looking little campus cutie, who said, "We had more fun talking about despair!" (audience laughs) Well, image of a good deal of this lingo is that of the well-heeled boy who was sitting in the sports car with beer can in hand, looking over this abyss of meaninglessness, you know, 
(audience chuckles) but all he does is artificially look over. Another way, another moral imperative to if one can't get the student or himself across the tracks, or to bring to the campus from across the tracks, those young ministers who are working on the problems of the inner city church, for instance, the east Harlem, and similar projects, or the new Negro leadership in the church. I think people like Martin Luther King, and Jim Robinson, and many others, who represent in the place of the older campus evangelism visitors, the new leadership emergent out of the church, who have escaped the suburban captivity of the churches, such people like Kermit Meyers, from New York, represent a very compelling appeal of the strenuous, the difficult, the stringency, the scandal of the gospel, and students, I am persuaded, respond morally with honest, honest support and conviction, to the scandal of the gospel. They are, by and large, fed of course, on the sweetness of the gospel, in their own suburban backgrounds, and where they can see, and this is good reason why they are repulsed by the usual church line, and why, as I mentioned the other day, they are strongly drawn toward theology and strongly opposed to the church, but they should be made aware of the new churches that are appearing. The moral point of all this shock treatment and exposure is not just to shock, for the gospel is scandal, and redemption, grace, but it has to be bad news before it becomes good news. The point of this all is not just to remind students how lucky they are that they don't have to live there, where these other people live, but to create in them a sense of guilt, and moral responsibility, an obligation, under the great commandment, to make use of their education, to serve the common wheel, and to discover a Christian vocation in the secular professions of teaching and medicine and government service, in public life. I hope that it's not wishful thinking for me to say, that I think there is emerging, a kind of new character type, beyond the operator, and beyond the cautious, smoothy, and beyond the beatnik. And I will call him the new Puritan, not the old Puritan, who's worried about moral trifles, but the new Puritan, Puritan in the sense that he is one who lives obediently to an inner moral principle, that he is guided by a sense of deep moral obligation. He's not Riesman's other-directed man, certainly, he's not even Reisman's inner-directed man. He's the upper-directed man. He's not Tillich's heteronomous man or Tillich's autonomous man, but he's Tillich's theonomous man. He's morally serious about the Christian witness to be made to public issues in the realm of racial and economic and political life. And he's so involved in political affairs, running, so to speak, with New York Times in one hand, and the Bible in the other, that he's taken out of his preoccupation with matters of pietistic morality, on matters of drinking and smoking and sex. In this realm of morality, he has a mature, sort of take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Take-it-or-leave-it, nonchalant about these matters because he's more involved with prior matters, weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. To somewhat to my embarrassment, I noticed after I finished jotting down these scratches about remarks I wanted to make, that the theme for this conference was the search for a new morality. Well, this late stage of the game, I'm afraid I have no wisdom to offer, as to a new morality to propose. I suggest the search for a new morality would take us back to an old morality, biblical morality, if you like, the morality of the love of God and neighbor, transcendent of the irrelevant, pietistic morality of the churches, transcendent of the innovated, liberal morality, of the theological period that nurtured most of us, a morality grounded on the transcendent, the morality obedient to the great commandment whereby we can help as teachers, as ministers of grace, to recover in our own campuses, campus communities, something of the integrity of the Christian life, in responsible obedience to God's will. (microphone scraping) I don't know how to turn this jigger off. Maybe you wanna leave it on for our discussion, but let's take a few minutes to talk some of this back and forth, maybe? Can anyone turn this off? Yeah. 

- You want to leave that on? 

- Well you can't pick out the sound 

- Have to turn it off, so 

- I don't know whether you have really seen-