Alan Walker - "Life Has a Purpose"; Michalson - "Sociological and Psychological Dimensions of Unbelief" (March 5, 1956; March 7, 1956)

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Chairman	Monday, March 5th, 5:45 pm.	0:07
	Dinner for graduate students, Men's Graduate Center.	0:12
	Dr. Michalson speaking on some social	0:16
	and psychological dimensions of unbelief.	0:20
Carl	The chairman, fellow students,	0:25
	this thing you read from here is a direct transcript	0:29
	of a little blurb that the public relations office	0:34
	at Drew gets out for occasions like this.	0:38
	It's the first time in my personal history	0:40
	that anybody has ever taken it	0:43
	with this complete seriousness. (laughs)	0:44
	(students laughing)	0:46
	Truth is, as you say, I worked up	0:54
	until I became an associate. (laughs)	0:57
	(students laughing)	0:58
	I worked.	1:02
	The only thing is I,	1:03
	the public relations office doesn't know that two years ago,	1:06
	I became a full professor,	1:09
	this, we must bring this up to date. (laughs)	1:11
	(students laughing)	1:13
	This incidentally,	1:17
	this book to which we refer on Christianity	1:18
	and the existentialists has a chapter in it	1:20
	by J. V. Langmead Casserley	1:22
	on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel,	1:25
	which is enough to commend the book to anybody.	1:29
	Now,	1:33
	I would like to say some things to you	1:35
	that I hope won't sound too prosaic to this learned body.	1:39
	I'm greatly exhilarated to have the privilege of entering	1:46
	into your exalted fellowship here.	1:53
	I'm going to attempt to say some things that may help	1:59
	to relate to several of the different disciplines	2:05
	in which you graduate people are engaged	2:08
	so I will not be including all	2:11
	of your professional concerns,	2:14
	I trust I will be speaking at least	2:16
	to some of your personal and cultural concerns.	2:19
	The 19th century, Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard,	2:27
	when he was a young man thought he would like	2:31
	to become a policeman.	2:35
	He thought that the clever crafty wit	2:39
	of the criminal would be a very apt foil for his own wit,	2:42
	until he discovered that the work	2:47
	of the policemen was almost entirely taken up	2:49
	with the petty cares of the people.	2:52
	So then he decided rather he would become a preacher	2:56
	until he made the same discovery about being a preacher.	3:02
	The work of the preacher was almost entirely taken up	3:04
	with the petty cares of the people and this, as he said,	3:07
	he found too loose a ground	3:11
	on which to place the lifting jack of religion.	3:13
	But now that was the 19th century and	3:19
	in the 20th century,	3:24
	it can scarcely be said that the cares	3:26
	of the people that they are petty.	3:27
	In our time,	3:31
	the world has shrunk to the point where whole groups	3:32
	of people rubbed together in the friction	3:37
	that we call injustice	3:42
	and when this friction becomes intense,	3:44
	society breaks out in crime or open war.	3:47
	And surely within our time,	3:51
	the temple of life has become so sped up	3:53
	that in our effort to keep up with it,	3:57
	we fall in the fatigue that is known as neurosis,	3:59
	and when this fatigue becomes acute,	4:07
	we break in serious mental disease, psychosis.	4:10
	Now, some people,	4:21
	when they feel this neurotic tendency coming on,	4:23
	decide that the spatial or temporal conditions	4:27
	of life are too intense for them,	4:31
	they were really made by God to inhabit a garden,	4:33
	society has forced them to live in a metropolis.	4:37
	So to save themselves,	4:41
	they move themselves out into a quiet countryside	4:43
	and the people	4:47
	in the tobacco-odorous Durham you see move out	4:48
	into the quiet hamlet of Duke environment to here.	4:53
	And they make this astonishing discovery	4:58
	that the problem moves with them	5:03
	and that all the ills they were escaping,	5:06
	re-emerge in their midst, even under quieter conditions.	5:09
	Because indeed the trouble with a man is not to be located	5:17
	in space or time, but in what Adler,	5:20
	the psychologist calls the marathon runner in the soul,	5:24
	the sort of thing everybody is familiar with,	5:30
	who has ever driven a car for instance,	5:32
	You're riding along a highway	5:35
	and someone begins to pass you,	5:38
	well, you're not going anywhere,	5:40
	but your foot just automatically goes down	5:42
	on your accelerator, you will not be passed.	5:44
	Or the feeling you get when you look	5:49
	at a list of names, alphabetically arranged,	5:51
	and you wish your name were Anderson, rather than Zep,	5:54
	or you look at the list arranged in order of seniority	6:00
	and you would virtually die to be first.	6:05
	Matter of fact, you'd almost have to.	6:08
	(students laughing)	6:09
	Well,	6:13
	these are the problems,	6:15
	these interior problems	6:17
	of the soul are the problems of unbelief,	6:19
	we will not be superseded	6:22
	and when we pursue this insistence on being ahead	6:25
	to the point where even if we're coming in second,	6:29
	we feel as if we're coming in last,	6:33
	we discover that even God is our competitor,	6:35
	and this is the meaning of unbelief.	6:40
	Now, its these three problems	6:44
	that I'd like to talk about,	6:46
	ad seriatum, injustice, neurosis, and unbelief	6:50
	and attempt to establish some relation	6:54
	between these problems	6:57
	and indicate how unbelief is in some sense	6:59
	at the root of these other sociological	7:02
	and psychological problems.	7:05
	Well, to begin with, injustice	7:08
	or the problem of the alienation of man from man.	7:10
	The person who has helped the Christian church understand	7:16
	this problem, the best I suppose, is Walter Rauschenbusch,	7:19
	a baptist clergyman and professor of church history,	7:23
	who is the father of the social gospel.	7:27
	When he was a small boy,	7:31
	he used summer in upstate New York in a community,	7:32
	a kind of Mennonite community,	7:35
	I think it was Mennonite, some kind of a secretarian group	7:38
	where they had the practice in this farming community.	7:41
	And any time a farmer would bring in pure milk	7:45
	to the creamery and he would have read labels put	7:47
	on his empty milk cans,	7:53
	the silent accusers on the road home	7:56
	like Hawthorne's red letter A, adulterer.	7:59
	He saw this happen to a farmer once	8:02
	and he heard the farmers swear an oath.	8:04
	And the next Sunday,	8:07
	the farmer was brought up before the congregation	8:08
	of his church for possible excommunication.	8:10
	Now, the question is, what were the charges against him?	8:14
	For as Rauschenbusch says,	8:18
	introducing cow dung into the intestines	8:20
	of innocent little babies?	8:23
	No, not that at all,	8:26
	but rather the charges against this farmer were	8:27
	for referring to the damnation of the wicked	8:31
	in an unetiological way.	8:34
	(students giggle)	8:36
	Now it was at a time like this, that Rauschenbusch,	8:37
	even as a boy began to sense the gross disproportion	8:41
	between petty sins of impiety	8:47
	and the larger social abuses.	8:50
	Later, when he was a minister New York City,	8:53
	he used to spend some time every Saturday afternoon,	8:55
	reading the accounts of,	8:58
	newspaper accounts of youth group meetings the next day,	9:03
	and preacher's sermon topics the next day	9:07
	and these, he found to be the prevailing themes	9:10
	that were being treated in the churches of New York City,	9:13
	drinking, smoking, card playing, gambling, theater going.	9:18
	These were the great sins in the capital city	9:24
	of an economic system that	9:28
	at that very moment was breaking the back	9:30
	of an entire class of people.	9:32
	And it was then that Rauschenbusch began	9:36
	to alert the conscience of the church	9:38
	to some of the deeper social abuses.	9:40
	And where did Rauschenbusch get his help?	9:44
	Well, he learned from the eighth century prophets	9:49
	and the teachings of Jesus, but probably principally,	9:52
	it was Karl Marx who helped him	9:55
	to understand the social implications	9:58
	in these prophecies and teachings	10:00
	about the great social abuses,	10:02
	for it was Marx who began to call attention	10:04
	to this thing in society that had to be called by him,	10:08
	the alienation of man from man or injustice.	10:13
	Fewer and fewer people were getting richer and richer.	10:20
	More and more people were getting poorer and poorer.	10:23
	Now, said Marx, you can stretch this rubber band	10:26
	of society only so far	10:29
	before it snaps in social revolution.	10:31
	Actually Marx's prophecy didn't come true,	10:37
	the revolution in this country at least did not happen.	10:41
	Thanks to the benevolent administration	10:45
	of the democratic party,	10:48
	never said with a straight face.	10:49
	(everybody laugh)	10:51
	Oh, I mean it profoundly. (laughs)	10:53
	Thanks to this benevolent administration	10:55
	for 25 years of the Marxian prophecy was averted.	10:57
	This doesn't mean Marx wasn't a prophet	11:01
	or a prophet doesn't just predict he, he fore warns	11:04
	and if you do something about the situation,	11:08
	there's no reason why the judgment has to come.	11:10
	At the same time,	11:15
	there's still a lot in the Marxian prophecy that obtains,	11:16
	or it was Karl Marx who reminded us	11:20
	and his disciples are still reminding us	11:22
	that society was meant to be a community	11:25
	and we have made of it, a marketplace.	11:29
	Whole units in society were meant	11:34
	to be built on the basis of the love nexus,	11:36
	but we have chosen rather	11:40
	what William James has called the cash nexus,	11:41
	even such affectional units as the family.	11:46
	I wasn't married two years before my wife insisted	11:51
	on having a brand new automatic washing machine that's $300.	11:53
	Whereas love used to be enough.	12:00
	(everybody laughing)	12:02
	Yep, of course,	12:07
	this Marxian prophecy is a double-edged thing,	12:08
	for Marx has said,	12:11
	the bourgeois man has made of his wife,	12:13
	a mere instrument of production.	12:17
	Now, not so long ago,	12:22
	I was going through a subway in New York City	12:24
	at 4:30 in the afternoon,	12:29
	it's a very bad time to duck down into a New York subway	12:32
	because all New York City is there.	12:34
	And in my effort to get inside one of the subway cars,	12:38
	I had a collision,	12:43
	very unsuccessful about negotiating my way	12:46
	into these cars when there's such a crowd,	12:48
	but I had a collision that left a bruise on my side.	12:52
	I think I could still show you evidence of that bruise	12:56
	and I say it was a lady,	13:02
	a woman who collided with me with her elbow	13:04
	and she got in and left me standing for the next train.	13:08
	(student laughs)	13:11
	I don't blame that lady, that woman.	13:12
	(students laughs)	13:15
	Actually I blamed the subway system	13:18
	because it's utterly stupid	13:21
	of the New York City transportation commission	13:24
	to expect this subway system to bear the brunt	13:28
	of the entire city's traffic in one half hour.	13:33
	If there were any social intelligence	13:37
	in the city administration,	13:40
	they would stagger the hours of dismissal in the offices,	13:42
	or they would widen the doors of the subway.	13:47
	(students laughing)	13:50
	Or they would do as they do in the Paris subway system,	13:52
	the metro, you know, there's this,	13:55
	the French people are famous for their chaotic politics,	13:57
	but at least in Paris, they have a,	14:00
	an orderly situation in the subway.	14:03
	As soon as the train comes into the subway station,	14:05
	a door closes on the entrance to the station	14:08
	so that only the people that are on the platform have	14:11
	to worry about getting into the subway, right?	14:14
	Intelligent.	14:17
	Every, in every social injustice,	14:19
	there's the possibility for remedial activity just	14:24
	through social intelligence.	14:28
	There are socially intelligent ways	14:29
	of reducing social injustice.	14:31
	My way up here, I was in a restaurant	14:34
	where I was very embarrassed	14:37
	by the fact that a cook was arguing with a waitress	14:39
	and they saw me there,	14:45
	they hushed everything up	14:46
	because customers watch your language, that kind of thing.	14:48
	Now that that sort of thing doesn't have to obtain,	14:53
	I mean, this is an elementary sociological thing.	14:55
	I've seen social engineers go into a place like this	14:58
	and completely size up the situation in an instant	15:02
	and have a wall built	15:05
	between the kitchen and the dining room	15:07
	so waitresses never have to come and touch with cooks.	15:09
	Just write out the order on a slip	15:12
	and put it through a slot in the wall	15:15
	and where there is no social contact,	15:17
	there is no social friction.	15:18
	I say there are socially intelligent ways	15:20
	of handling social injustice.	15:24
	But about this woman,	15:28
	I recall that she jabbed me with a force,	15:31
	all out of proportion to the requirement	15:36
	for getting her into the subway,	15:38
	(students laughing)	15:40
	which leads me to suspect upon analyzing this situation	15:42
	that not all the problem was in the situation,	15:45
	but some of the problem was in the woman	15:49
	and it's at this point	15:54
	that another great prophet has helped us understand some	15:56
	of the dimensions of the human problem,	15:59
	Sigmund Freud, who has suggested,	16:02
	that in all injustice, there is some neurosis.	16:04
	In all alienation of man against man,	16:10
	there is some alienation of man against himself.	16:12
	Father comes home from work at night, he's all tired out,	16:18
	he's had a bad day at the office,	16:21
	a little boy meets him at the door,	16:22
	he sweeps the little kid aside and strides	16:25
	into the dining room and orders his supper,	16:27
	"Why isn't it ready?"	16:28
	I act this out with feeling,	16:31
	it's because I know about these things.	16:32
	But why does he do that?	16:34
	Because he hates a little boys?	16:36
	No, he hates himself.	16:39
	And he projects himself into the little boy	16:42
	where he can strike at himself.	16:44
	Or a political demagogue attempts	16:48
	to eradicate a whole race of people, why?	16:51
	He hates Jews?	16:53
	No, he hates himself.	16:55
	Fantastic as it may seem,	16:57
	the only way he can adequately deal with himself is	16:59
	to project himself into that race of people	17:02
	and strike at himself there.	17:05
	Now this is what Freud helped us to understand,	17:08
	you remember,	17:10
	his picture of the human personality as the iceberg,	17:11
	where just a little peak of consciousness juts out	17:15
	above the surface of the water and the rest,	17:18
	the great subconscious element	17:22
	of the personality underneath.	17:24
	And there is a law in the conscious	17:28
	and the law in the unconscious	17:30
	and these two laws are at war with each other.	17:31
	Two laws warring in our members,	17:34
	two conflicting desires	17:36
	so that when a man wants	17:39
	to pull himself together for some wholesome activity,	17:40
	he doesn't have the interior mobility,	17:44
	every effort to do something wholesome	17:47
	just breaks him apart.	17:49
	You people know about these things	17:52
	because the truth of the matter is	17:54
	at your particular stage in life,	17:56
	you're going through all three of the situations	17:57
	in which a person is most likely to break down.	18:02
	Formal education which requires your whole concentration	18:08
	and if you're not whole, then the effort	18:14
	to pursue formal education simply illustrates	18:16
	your brokenness.	18:19
	Vocation.	18:23
	You're just beginning to move	18:25
	into your vocational, your professional life,	18:26
	but the, but here is where a man	18:29
	or a woman gives his whole life away to one job.	18:31
	Fantastic, if you're not whole,	18:34
	the demands of this vocation illustrates your brokeness.	18:36
	Marriage.	18:40
	A person gives himself wholly to another person,	18:42
	but if he's not whole, then the demands	18:44
	of the marriage relation just illustrate the brokenness.	18:47
	Now, when Freud talked this way,	18:53
	the people said	18:59
	that actually what Freud was doing was try to,	19:01
	trying to size everybody up in terms	19:04
	of the few abnormal cases that came to his medical office.	19:06
	Now, in order to scotch that rumor,	19:11
	Freud wrote a little book,	19:13
	which you can pick up at the news stands	19:14
	for 30 cents paper binding now.	19:16
	The psychopathology of everyday life in which he showed	19:20
	that there are in each of us,	19:24
	however normal we think we are,	19:26
	there are in each of us,	19:28
	the ingredients for the development of neurotic symptoms.	19:30
	He virtually said, there is none good, no, not one.	19:35
	And he picked such,	19:41
	some such cases as these things that happen to us daily	19:42
	that illustrate a kind of a structure in our personality,	19:45
	which when carried	19:48
	to certain extremes can break us inwardly.	19:49
	For instance, innocent little things like loss of memory.	19:52
	Now, why do you forget things?	19:58
	For once, I was walking along the street	20:01
	in New York City with my wife shortly after we were married	20:02
	and I ran into an old girlfriend,	20:05
	that's the girl all the way from Minneapolis,	20:08
	you wouldn't have expected, not,	20:10
	and I had introduced my wife to her	20:12
	and I couldn't remember her name.	20:15
	Why?	20:20
	Well, the suddenness of it or the embarrassment of it,	20:21
	or maybe I was tired.	20:25
	These are all plausible, but they're not profound.	20:28
	How would you expect me to remember in one moment,	20:32
	what for two years I had been trying to forget.	20:35
	There are two logs warring in our members	20:40
	so that when we try to pull ourselves together	20:43
	for some kind of whole activity,	20:46
	we're immobilized inwardly, ambushed from within.	20:49
	This civil war inside,	20:54
	this war between the states of our consciousness,	20:57
	we become the victims of it,	21:02
	or take it an illustration of the slip of the tongue.	21:05
	Why do you say things sometimes that you don't really intend	21:10
	to as if you had no control over your tongue?	21:13
	You see, my mother-in-law was visiting with us	21:16
	and in a kindly effort to be conciliatory,	21:19
	I said to her,	21:25
	"Maryanne, isn't it a shame we don't live closer apart?"	21:26
	(students laughing)	21:30
	Now, what did I mean?	21:33
	Well, in a sense,	21:35
	I meant both with two laws warring in my members.	21:36
	Sometimes this turns out more beautifully of course,	21:44
	as you may know about Otto Rank's studies	21:47
	of Shakespeare's famous slips of the tongue,	21:50
	from a psychotherapeutic standpoint,	21:54
	the instance in the Merchant of Venice, for instance,	21:56
	when Portia wants to communicate to Bassanio	21:58
	in the presence of the casks,	22:02
	that it matters to her that he choose the right cask.	22:04
	So she says to him,	22:08
	one half of me is yours and the other half yours or mine,	22:10
	I mean, but if mine then yours, so I am all yours.	22:14
	It's beautiful but it illustrates the brokenness	22:20
	in our personality, which says we are not always in control,	22:23
	we are often the victims of our own personality structure	22:27
	of the laws warring within our members.	22:32
	A woman weeps interminably at the funeral	22:36
	of her husband, why?	22:38
	Because she is so sorry he is dead?	22:41
	Not necessarily.	22:43
	It may well be as the late Joshua Liebman said,	22:44
	because she is so sorry, she is so glad he is dead.	22:47
	I don't mean to be grim here	22:51
	but this is something that has to be reckoned with.	22:53
	A soldier leaves an important battle station	22:58
	under the heat of battle.	23:02
	Why?	23:03
	Well, the commanding officer says he's a coward	23:04
	and wants to discipline him.	23:07
	The medical officer said, says he's got battle fatigue	23:09
	and wants to hospitalize him.	23:13
	Who is right?	23:14
	They're both right in a way.	23:16
	Or as Dostoevsky has said,	23:19
	a man goes crazy on purpose as a defense	23:22
	against intolerable circumstances.	23:26
	Now, since then, battle fatigue is a form of neurosis.	23:30
	You may not think you know about this kind of thing.	23:36
	Why do you sleep in class?	23:38
	Hey, I stayed up too late the night before.	23:41
	That's a superficial reason.	23:43
	You sleep because there is such a thing as neurotic sleep,	23:45
	you choose to sleep as a defense	23:50
	against intolerable circumstances.	23:52
	(students laughing)	23:54
	Now,	24:01
	this basic immobility in the personality expresses itself	24:04
	in aggressiveness toward others.	24:09
	This alienation within expresses itself in an instability	24:12
	through which we fall against others	24:17
	in aggressiveness and injustice.	24:20
	But what is it that accounts for the neurosis	24:23
	or the inability to be whole?	24:26
	We get a very important clue to this	24:29
	in Jesus, double command.	24:33
	Thou shalt love the Lord thy God	24:38
	with thy whole heart, soul, mind, and strength	24:41
	and thy neighbor as thyself.	24:44
	You get that chain relationship?	24:46
	As Dostoevsky says again, you do not love God,	24:50
	you do not believe in God or Christ,	24:54
	therefore you are so eaten up with pride	24:56
	that you will probably end by devouring one another.	25:00
	Get that chain reaction?	25:04
	If you have fallen away from God,	25:07
	chances are you will fall apart inside	25:09
	and then fall against your fellow man.	25:11
	If you have fallen away from God in unbelief,	25:15
	chances are you will fall apart inside in neurosis,	25:18
	and then you will fall against your fellow man in injustice.	25:21
	These are the sociological	25:28
	and psychological ingredients in unbelief.	25:29
	Now let me just briefly,	25:34
	when I'm through with this,	25:36
	I understand you'd like to have a time of discussion.	25:37
	Let me give you a short analysis	25:41
	of unbelief in this setting.	25:43
	What is the nature of unbelief that it contributes	25:47
	to this kind of psychological	25:50
	and sociological instability and aggressiveness?	25:52
	I give you one simple formula.	25:58
	Well, come to think of it, it's not so simple,	26:00
	it's kind of complex,	26:02
	but I hope to break it up into three simple parts	26:03
	and analyze each of these parts.	26:06
	There is at the root of our lives an anxiety	26:10
	to secure our existence.	26:16
	Now this is the meaning of unbelief.	26:21
	Now, let me talk about the three elements in this,	26:25
	the root of our life for instance.	26:27
	This is what we have	26:29
	and this is what faith deals with,	26:31
	the hidden root of our life,	26:34
	the image of God in man,	26:36
	the responsibility ingredient in the human nature	26:39
	that says man's life is incomplete apart	26:42
	from a transparent relationship with God.	26:45
	If we do not deal with this,	26:49
	we are not dealing with our being as men.	26:51
	I once saw a dancer who was able	26:56
	to put her forearms like this on a table	26:59
	and so skillfully arch her spine	27:03
	that she could bring her feet down.	27:05
	I tell you this, not to confess the places I frequent,	27:07
	but there's a real point here,	27:11
	(students laughing)
	she could bring her feet down before her eyes	27:13
	and dangle her feet in front of her eyes.	27:17
	And now when I watched her do this,	27:20
	I noticed that from the way she looked at her feet,	27:23
	she had the, she communicated the sensation	27:25
	that she was thinking she was contemplating herself	27:29
	in her feet.	27:33
	And isn't this what happens in culture at large?	27:36
	Don't we look at our great feets and say, oh.	27:39
	(students laughing)	27:42
	Don't we look at our great cultural, social achievements	27:44
	and contemplate ourselves there	27:49
	in our technological society,	27:52
	in our asthetic accomplishments	27:54
	and neglecting all the while the hidden root	27:57
	that binds us in responsibility to God,	28:00
	the group that really constitutes us who we are.	28:04
	I was in, you delineated some of the places I been at	28:08
	for religious emphasis weeks.	28:12
	Well, I'll tell you one,	28:13
	I was at the University of Georgia last fall,	28:14
	and down there, they did what they do at many other places,	28:17
	they made me go from class to class talking	28:19
	about the religious perspectives	28:22
	in these various academic fields.	28:27
	And one day they sent me to horticulture one	28:30
	(students laughing)	28:33
	and I had
	to give the religious perspectives	28:35
	for horticulture one.	28:37
	And as I was tromping up and down the hall	28:38
	in the horticulture building,	28:40
	trying to figure out what I'd say,	28:42
	I noticed a great long bulletin board,	28:44
	almost the length of the hall,	28:46
	down there in the University of Georgia	28:48
	and on it was every grass that grows in Georgia	28:50
	but the interesting thing was that there were no roots	28:54
	on any of these grasses and this possibly,	28:57
	it seemed to be a basic misrepresentation	29:00
	because of, a grass should have everything,	29:02
	seeds, stem, and root,	29:05
	but here they put the roots.	29:07
	But the more I looked that board,	29:09
	I noticed that at the very center of the display,	29:10
	a quotation from the Book of Deuteronomy,	29:14
	which said, it is the Lord who gives the grass.	29:16
	Well, that's the root.	29:20
	And this is what we mean,	29:23
	by the image of God in man,	29:25
	our life is constituted by him.	29:27
	He is the hidden root of our life	29:29
	and unless we openly acknowledge his being,	29:32
	then we are living at less than our privilege	29:36
	and responsibility as men.	29:39
	Well, there is at the root of our lives an anxiety	29:43
	to secure our existence.	29:47
	Existence, it's the second word.	29:53
	This is what we are, an existence.	29:55
	God does not exist.	29:59
	Is that blasphemy?	30:03
	No, God does not exist,	30:05
	as Kierkegaard says, God is eternal.	30:07
	Animals don't exist.	30:10
	They say, to say that one exists,	30:13
	is to say that he reaches beyond himself.	30:16
	(speaking in foreign language)	30:21
	to stand beyond.
	Animals don't reach beyond themselves	30:25
	because in the opaqueness of their impulses, they can't.	30:27
	God doesn't reach beyond himself	30:32
	because there is no one beyond him to whom to reach.	30:34
	But man is a being who exists, he reaches beyond himself.	30:37
	He is a being who depends upon a being other than himself.	30:42
	Now this is what we say	30:48
	in the Christian doctrine of creation,	30:49
	God has made us ex nihilo out of nothing.	30:51
	So you'll see by ourselves, we are nothing,	30:55
	we have to reach beyond ourselves	30:58
	for sources of our authenticity	31:00
	so that this little equation that was given originally	31:04
	by Samuel Taylor Coleridge	31:08
	and appears again in William Temple	31:09
	is the mathematics of the religious life.	31:12
	Man minus God equals nothing.	31:16
	God minus man equals God.	31:22
	But man minus God equals nothing.	31:25
	We are, as the Indian proverb says, but skin about a wind.	31:29
	And if God were to withdraw his creative breadth,	31:34
	we would be nothing.	31:38
	Now this is what we won't settle for,	31:42
	we will not be nothing.	31:44
	And this is why there is	31:46
	at the root of our lives an anxiety	31:49
	to secure our existence,	31:52
	to make our way on our own basis,	31:53
	we will not confess our nothingness	31:56
	and live a life of dependence upon God.	31:58
	So we make our way,	32:01
	we refuse to be as Adam, a steward,	32:02
	we want to be a proprietor.	32:07
	We refuse to be as Adam, a gardener,	32:09
	we want to be manufacturers.	32:13
	So we leap very high in our own imagination	32:15
	like a ballet dancer will leap very high into the air	32:19
	and we would like to perpetuate the illusion	32:23
	that we are not just a man	32:27
	but something that transcends humanity.	32:28
	Or we are like as Kierkegaard says,	32:32
	that the orchestra leader, he waves his arms wildly	32:33
	and as he hears the beautiful music,	32:37
	he likes to perpetuate the illusion	32:39
	that he is not just directing the music,	32:41
	but he is creating it.	32:43
	We leap very high into, in our own imaginations	32:45
	until our heads tend to trade an atmosphere	32:49
	that is uncongenial to our lungs	32:54
	and we dizzy, and we spin, and we fall,	32:56
	and we throw out our arms to break our fall	33:01
	and in that moment, we crush others beneath us.	33:04
	Get this chain reaction?	33:08
	You fall away from God,	33:10
	chances are you dizzy and spin, and fall apart inside,	33:12
	and then you fall against your fellow man.	33:16
	Think of the profound ethical implications	33:20
	in this chain reaction.	33:23
	Two merchants	33:26
	on the same street corner,	33:30
	on how one merchant doesn't seem to be able to exist	33:31
	without the economic murder of the other.	33:34
	Or two brothers	33:38
	in the same family.	33:43
	You get a letter from your brother.	33:45
	He says to you,	33:48
	I've just been made a vice president of my company.	33:49
	Just for one moment, you're having sharps dab of envy	33:55
	and then you're,	33:59
	you've regained your equanimity	34:01
	and you sit down and you write him a letter	34:02
	of congratulations and you mean it.	34:04
	The question is, how should you forget that instance?	34:06
	Or two nations in the same hemisphere	34:13
	or two hemispheres in the same universe or two races	34:18
	or two business interests, labor management.	34:24
	My friends, there is a law and a gospel in life.	34:29
	There is a law that says life cannot be well lived	34:34
	on the basis of self sufficiency.	34:37
	And there is a gospel that says,	34:42
	God is continually reaching his hand into our life	34:45
	to reconcile us to himself	34:50
	so that through spiritual faith,	34:54
	we are given psychological health	34:58
	and through psychological health,	35:01
	we contribute to social peace.	35:02
	You may feel that my analysis has been incomplete	35:08
	and maybe a little over pessimistic.	35:13
	My personal feeling about it is	35:17
	that 90% of therapy is proper diagnosis.	35:19
	And I feel a little about what I've said,	35:28
	I feel a little like what Francis Thompson,	35:33
	a Catholic poet must've meant	35:37
	when he said of this kind of groom,	35:39
	is not this groom shade	35:44
	of God's hand outstretched caressingly?	35:47
	Well, Mr. Chairman that's end of the analysis.	35:58
Chairman	All right.	36:02
	With this conclusion,	36:04
	the group remained for a discussion for about 45 minutes	36:06
	and then the group was dismissed.	36:10
-	Testing, testing, testing.	40:53
	1, 2, 3, 4, testing.	40:55
	Testing, testing,	41:07
	testing, testing.	41:09
	1, 2, 3, 4, testing.	41:11
Professor	Oh, I hate that interrupt this,	44:28
	but we all ran of time and some folks	44:29
	that may have other things they need to get to.	44:31
	I'm sure that Dr. Michalson would be glad	44:35
	to continue this discussion	44:36
	after the...	44:39
Carl	Speak for yourself.
	(everybody laughs)	44:40
Professor	If he's not too busy and if he is,	44:44
	I'll let him beat his own retreat there, elsewhere.	44:46
	(everybody laughing)	44:47
	I want to thank you all again for being here	44:50
	and express our appreciation in entirety	44:51
	to Dr. Michalson for a very interesting	44:53
	and stimulating discussion.	44:55
	Thank you, sir.	44:57
	Testing, testing, testing.	55:46
	1, 2, 3, 4, testing.	55:48
	(bright piano music)	1:00:41
	(piano music drowns out speaker)	1:00:42
-	So that's how you work it.	1:00:53
-	That's how you get the two hours.	1:00:54
	This is hour going one way and hour going back another.	1:00:57
	(piano music drowns out speaker)	1:01:00
-	You got (indistinct) to work there.	1:01:08
-	I don't know a thing about it.	1:01:10
	(bright piano music)	1:01:11
	It's a lot easier to push it.	1:01:13
	(bright piano music)	1:01:14
	(piano music drowns out speaker)	1:01:16
	This has to go there.	1:01:18
-	Right.
	(bright piano music)	1:01:20
	Yes.	1:01:23
	(bright piano music)
	(piano music drowns out speakers)	1:01:31
-	I am still four feet away talking in a normal tone,	1:01:42
	and the volume is at halfway base	1:01:49
	where I think it sounds best	1:01:57
	and the treble...	1:02:01
	I'm still here.	1:02:12
	I think we just put the treble halfway	1:02:15
	and see how it sounds.	1:02:17
	The record level. (laughs)	1:02:20
	I think it's all right.	1:02:25
	So we are running it back.	1:02:26
	Cut it off, man.	1:02:27
	Run it back.	1:02:28
	Good bye.	1:02:30

Item Info

Title:

Alan Walker - "Life Has a Purpose"; Michalson - "Sociological and Psychological Dimensions of Unbelief" (March 5, 1956; March 7, 1956)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4jh3j37p

Date:

March 5, 1956
March 7, 1956

Speaker:

Walker, Alan

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0019
ref5261_5lh
uachapelsermaud
duke:628007
dcrau002072
ark:/87924/r4jh3j37p
06f34820-a5b2-412f-8b11-f02a558cf285

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Alan Walker - "Life Has a Purpose"; Michalson - "Sociological and Psychological Dimensions of Unbelief" (March 5, 1956; March 7, 1956)

Transcript

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Duke University Archives

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