Bishop Earl G. Hunt, Jr. - "New Testament Christianity" (October 30, 1966)

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-	O God, mercifully regard the gifts which we bring,	0:04
	the prayers which we offer, and the lives	0:09
	which we now dedicate to thee,	0:12
	that as our gifts lie upon thy altar,	0:15
	the fires of pure devotion may burn in our hearts	0:17
	and that throughout this week, throughout our lives,	0:21
	we may glorify thee by our witness for thy son,	0:25
	our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.	0:29
	(solemn music)	0:34
-	My dear friends, the passage,	0:55
	which is our text upon this homecoming occasion,	1:00
	is a cluster of verses concluding the second chapter	1:08
	of the Book of the Acts,	1:15
	from which President Knight read so impressively	1:18
	a while ago certain excerpts.	1:23
	I read now the 42nd through the 47th verses.	1:27
	They met constantly to hear the apostles teach,	1:34
	and to share the common life,	1:39
	to break bread, and to pray.	1:43
	A sense of awe was everywhere,	1:47
	and many marvels and signs were brought about	1:51
	through the apostles.	1:55
	All whose faith had drawn them together	1:57
	held everything in common.	2:00
	They would sell their property and possessions	2:04
	and make a general distribution	2:07
	as the need of each required.	2:09
	With one mind they kept up their daily attendance	2:12
	at the temple, and breaking bread in private houses,	2:15
	shared their meals with unaffected joy,	2:20
	as they praised God and enjoyed the favor	2:26
	of the whole people.	2:30
	And day by day, the Lord added to their number	2:33
	those whom he was saving.	2:39
	May God bless again the reading of his word.	2:43
	One who was present has told of the occasion	2:50
	when Toscanini walked toward the podium	2:56
	to conduct his final concert.	3:01
	He was 85 years of age	3:06
	and they had built a slender railing for him.	3:09
	He touched it gently with the fingers of one hand	3:13
	and then he raised his baton.	3:18
	The large orchestra, as a single man,	3:23
	moved easily into the first quiet movement	3:29
	of the great symphony.	3:35
	Then, as the volume developed,	3:38
	one by one, the first violin, the viola, the cello,	3:41
	and the bass lifted eyes from the notes in front of them	3:48
	and fastened those eyes upon the face of the maestro	3:56
	standing there with a wistful little smile	4:02
	upon his countenance, and all the music they had in them	4:07
	swept up toward that face.	4:14
	There is, in this story, a suggestion at least	4:20
	of the sense of fascination and of the unutterable loyalty	4:27
	to the risen Lord, which characterized the little company	4:35
	of Christians who had gathered together	4:40
	on the day of Pentecost.	4:44
	The second chapter of Acts records it,	4:46
	for it is the story of the beginning of the Christian Church	4:50
	and of the inauguration of its witness.	4:54
	It is the story of the coming of the spirit of God.	4:59
	Now the spirit of God had come before this,	5:04
	but he had never come in this fashion before.	5:08
	This was a new departure in the economy of God.	5:15
	He came intimately and fully into the lives	5:20
	of certain apostles and women,	5:25
	and Matthias and Mary and the brothers of Jesus	5:29
	who were together upon that occasion,	5:35
	and the experience of his coming	5:39
	must have been something like the experience	5:42
	that caused Saint Paul to cry out in his letter	5:44
	to the Galatians, "I am crucified with Christ.	5:48
	Nevertheless, I live.	5:52
	Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me	5:53
	and the life which I now live in the flesh,	5:56
	I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me	5:58
	and gave himself for me."	6:02
	And all the music they had in them swept up	6:05
	toward that face.	6:11
	I would have us explore together	6:14
	in these brief morning moments	6:16
	certain identifiable characteristics	6:19
	in that early Christian Church,	6:21
	which it seems to me are reproducible in our time.	6:25
	First of all, I would suggest	6:29
	that New Testament Christianity had a sense of community,	6:31
	a sense of community based upon a common teaching,	6:38
	a common ritual, a common fellowship, a common prayer life.	6:43
	There is strength and vigor in community,	6:48
	and every good enterprise must retain the moral adrenaline	6:52
	of its own purposeful identity	6:58
	if it is to focus its efforts meaningfully.	7:02
	The Christian Church's deliberate merger	7:07
	into the total community of a secularized society	7:11
	may be something like the dropping of a tablespoonful	7:16
	of white paint into a gallon of black paint.	7:21
	The white is no longer discernible at all	7:27
	and the black is still black.	7:30
	The Christian community, moving properly	7:35
	out of its pious cloisters, must exercise every caution	7:40
	that in its response to the challenge of secular society,	7:46
	it does not sacrifice the sacred character and countenance	7:51
	which have always produced for it	7:56
	its accuracy of insight and its thrust of power.	7:59
	Sometimes when we speak of listening to the world	8:05
	or of permitting culture to compose the agenda	8:10
	for Christianity in our time,	8:14
	I think we are inviting the vast peril of a lost identity,	8:16
	a well-intentioned, but ultimately fatal, capitulation	8:23
	to Harvey Cox's intriguing idolatry of secularism.	8:29
	Somehow I simply cannot picture the prophet Jeremiah	8:37
	as tempering his mood to the extent	8:44
	that he would've been able to celebrate the anonymity	8:48
	and the profanity of his native Anathoth,	8:52
	or of turbulent Jerusalem during the malpractices	8:56
	under King Jehoiakim.	9:01
	Jeremiah kept always his identity	9:04
	as the prophet of the Lord and he never insisted	9:08
	that his religion be made subservient	9:13
	to the secularism of his nation's dying days.	9:16
	New Testament Christianity had focused power	9:23
	because it had a sure sense of community.	9:28
	It never forgot, even for a moment, what it was,	9:33
	and then in the second place,	9:38
	I'm impressed by the fact that New Testament Christianity	9:41
	kept its sense of wonder and expectancy.	9:46
	It is extremely difficult for men to believe in God	9:53
	in an age which has lost, to so large an extent,	10:00
	its awareness of beauty and mystery, and its sense of awe.	10:05
	Modern philosophy has so little of the beautiful in it.	10:16
	So it is with modern fiction and drama and poetry.	10:22
	The contemporary poet, James Dickey, came to the campus	10:28
	of Emory & Henry College a few years ago	10:32
	to give readings from his works.	10:35
	After his program, we were having coffee together	10:38
	and I recall that I asked him the question,	10:41
	"Why did 17 of your 24 poems, Mr. Dickey,	10:45
	deal with the idea of death?"	10:53
	He was startled, he said,	10:58
	"I didn't realize that this was so,"	11:00
	but then he smiled and rejoined,	11:02
	"I suppose it is the times in which we live."	11:05
	A student came to my office at Emory & Henry one afternoon	11:12
	and very courteously requested permission	11:17
	to attempt to convert me to the Existentialism	11:21
	of Jean-Paul Sartre.	11:24
	I had no ready excuse which would make this experience	11:28
	less likely to occur, so I acquiesced,	11:34
	and for two hours, he sat in my office	11:38
	and with a kind of obsession, with occasional logic	11:41
	and with frequent eloquence, he pled his cause.	11:48
	Finally, he looked up into my face and said,	11:54
	"Now what do you think?"	11:58
	I reacted with absurd oversimplification.	12:00
	I said, "I think, sir, that there is not sufficient place	12:04
	in your thought for the beauty of a rose	12:09
	or for the song of orioles and golden robins."	12:14
	I read in an old essay the other day	12:22
	a statement one man made about another.	12:25
	It was this.	12:30
	"He seemed always to sit loose	12:31
	with regard to the things of time."	12:36
	What a beautiful, beautiful description	12:40
	of a human personality, and yet, my friends,	12:45
	in a world of color television and automatic toothbrushes,	12:49
	it isn't easy for a man or a woman to sit loose	12:53
	with regard to the things of time.	12:58
	Contemporary philosophy and the scientific method,	13:03
	with all of their great validities,	13:07
	operating as they do in the context of present-day luxury,	13:11
	make it extremely difficult for religion's awe and wonder	13:15
	to stay alive in a modern Christian soul,	13:21
	and this is one of the fundamental problems	13:25
	the Church confronts in our time.	13:29
	Then in the third place, New Testament Christianity	13:33
	met human need head on and dealt with it effectively.	13:37
	I've never believed that this passage	13:43
	constitutes a New Testament documentation	13:46
	for the idea of communism.	13:50
	As a matter of fact, every public religious feast	13:52
	in Jerusalem had a temporary community of property.	13:56
	No man purchased lodging.	14:01
	Lodging was shared for such an occasion.	14:03
	Our passage says they sold their possessions	14:07
	and parted them, and surely this means	14:10
	that this little company of Christians had had to remain	14:13
	in the city longer than they had planned	14:17
	and some adequate provision for their physical needs	14:20
	had to be arranged.	14:24
	There seems to be ample evidence in the Bible,	14:26
	particularly in Paul's Corinthian correspondence,	14:30
	to suggest that the Church in Jerusalem	14:34
	never had an absolute community of property,	14:38
	unless for a very short period of time.	14:43
	What this passage really means	14:46
	is that New Testament Christianity,	14:48
	at its earliest institutional moment,	14:51
	met human need head on and dealt with it effectively.	14:54
	L. P. Jacks has given philosophical expression	15:00
	to this action in his definition of the Church	15:04
	as the union of those who love	15:07
	for the sake of those who suffer.	15:11
	There have been a great many things said about the Church	15:15
	in recent years that I do not understand	15:17
	and some with which I cannot agree, but to me, at least,	15:21
	the most authentic word that has come about the Church	15:25
	in modern days is the word which describes it	15:29
	as the servant Church, and this means that you and I	15:33
	who are Christian people must move out	15:39
	of the vaulted architecture of our elegant sanctuaries,	15:43
	out into the ghettos of human suffering and human sin	15:48
	and carry with us the message of the love of God	15:55
	revealed in Jesus Christ.	16:00
	It means that human values must always have priority	16:03
	over property and prestige and power.	16:09
	It means even that the institution itself	16:13
	is legitimately expendable for the sake	16:16
	of the cause it represents.	16:20
	Someone put it memorably when he said,	16:24
	"The Church exists for the sake of those	16:27
	who are not yet in it."	16:30
	When I was a student at university,	16:35
	I remember one of my professors said,	16:38
	"87 cents out of every $1 raised by the Church	16:42
	goes for the purpose	16:47
	of keeping its own machinery in motion."	16:49
	If this is so, my friends, there is no wonder	16:53
	that anti-institutionalism is rampant in our day.	16:58
	No, the servant Church must go out	17:04
	wherever there is human distress,	17:08
	wherever there is human sin,	17:10
	wherever there is ignorance and illiteracy,	17:12
	wherever there is disillusionment and dismay,	17:16
	and the Church must relate itself relevantly	17:20
	to those conditions in the name of God	17:24
	and in the spirit of Jesus Christ,	17:28
	but it must not go to save itself.	17:31
	It must go because there is where its mission lies.	17:36
	And again, I am convinced that New Testament Christianity	17:44
	had always a sense of joy and fellowship.	17:51
	A man or a woman cannot live without this, my friends.	17:57
	I suppose I have held the two loneliest jobs	18:02
	that the Methodist Church could give to a person.	18:05
	I've been a college president and now I'm a bishop,	18:11
	and I must confess to you	18:17
	that I do not believe very many people	18:18
	really care a great deal for either.	18:22
	Sometime last year, the oppression and the loneliness	18:26
	of my task closed in around me like a dismal cloud,	18:31
	and I went to my study	18:36
	and called a university made of earlier years,	18:37
	a minister in another city.	18:41
	I said to him, "I don't want anything	18:43
	except to hear you talk a while."	18:46
	He said to me, "Well, that's a switch."	18:49
	And it was because I don't remember	18:54
	ever having wanted to hear him talk a while before,	18:57
	but I needed the sense of companionship and fellowship	19:02
	that came across the wires and through the miles.	19:07
	Years ago I heard the distinguished editor,	19:11
	Dr. Orien W. Fifer, tell an interesting story	19:14
	of an occasion when he was concluding a Pullman journey.	19:19
	He was coming down the steps of his car early one morning.	19:24
	Standing at the foot of the steps was an old negro porter,	19:28
	administering to each of his passengers as he departed.	19:32
	In front of Dr. Fifer, there was a gentleman	19:35
	who evidently had had a rough night,	19:38
	and as the old porter began to brush him,	19:42
	this man commenced to curse him.	19:46
	After a while, the cursing ceased,	19:51
	and the old porter only smiled and said to the man,	19:54
	"Well, anyway, sir, I hope you have a good day."	19:59
	Dr. Fifer reached the foot of the steps next	20:04
	and he said to the old negro porter,	20:07
	"I must ask you, my brother, how it is	20:11
	that you can hear a fellow human being curse you	20:13
	as this man just cursed you and make no retaliation."	20:19
	The old porter was silent for a moment	20:25
	and then he began softly to sing,	20:27
	"I'm living on the mountain underneath the cloudless God.	20:31
	I'm drinking from a fountain that never shall run dry.	20:38
	I'm feasting on the manna from a bountiful supply	20:44
	for I am dwelling in Beulah Land."	20:49
	Very quietly he turned to Orien Fifer and said,	20:55
	"I have some of God's poetry in my soul."	20:59
	This is true of the Methodist people at their best.	21:06
	The only valid book of theology the Methodist possesses	21:11
	is the "Hymnal."	21:14
	We have always been convinced	21:17
	that we ought to sing our great doctrines	21:20
	rather than systematize them or debate them,	21:22
	and therefore there has always been,	21:27
	at the root of our theology, a kind of doxology,	21:29
	a spirit of authentic joy.	21:35
	It's this, dear friends, that helps a man or a woman	21:40
	to stand when the storms of life and the persecution	21:43
	break across his or her life.	21:48
	Finally, I am persuaded that New Testament Christianity	21:53
	had constantly the ability to influence men toward God.	21:58
	Evangelism in our time must be more ingenious,	22:05
	more subtle, more insistent, more hope	22:10
	than ever before.	22:15
	It may be that some of the old methods won't work anymore,	22:18
	although as Bishop Kennedy has recently reminded us,	22:21
	"Not all of us should be sure	22:24
	because we haven't really tried them."	22:26
	The real peril of evangelism in our time	22:29
	is our own debilitating lack of Christian faith.	22:32
	The problem is theological and not methodological.	22:39
	We are simply no longer sure that God is a redeeming God	22:45
	and that man is lost without that redemption.	22:49
	The experience of salvation does not mean enough to us	22:54
	to cause us to covet it for other people.	22:59
	Real evangelism is always that spontaneous,	23:02
	irrepressible desire to share with another person	23:07
	a possession so precious	23:13
	that it simply cannot be selfishly hoarded.	23:15
	The method of the sharing is always secondary to the fact	23:19
	that it must be shared.	23:23
	Compassionate compulsion will find a way, either old or new.	23:26
	Cleverly, we have developed	23:34
	a sophisticated philosophical rationale	23:37
	for our unevangelistic doubt.	23:41
	It has two points.	23:45
	The first is that any attempt to persuade another person	23:47
	to a particular religious point of view	23:51
	constitutes an invasion of his privacy	23:54
	and an abrogation of his liberty.	23:56
	The second point insists, without any regard	24:00
	for historical evidence to the contrary,	24:04
	that a man's inner life can be transformed	24:07
	through the alteration of his environment.	24:11
	Thus it is that evangelism becomes the civil rights movement	24:14
	and the war on poverty.	24:18
	Now granted that these are important	24:21
	and basic considerations in our time,	24:23
	it does not require a great deal of spiritual insight	24:26
	for people like you and me to determine	24:30
	that these positions are poles away	24:33
	from the New Testament teaching about evangelism.	24:37
	Receiving people by transfer into your membership	24:42
	from another denomination, relocating new residents	24:45
	in the community where they now live	24:49
	may be important pastoral functions of a Church	24:52
	but they are not evangelism.	24:55
	Evangelism is leading a sinner to God.	24:59
	Evangelism is convincing a doubter.	25:04
	Evangelism is persuading a socially insensitive man	25:08
	to make his business ethic, his racial attitude,	25:14
	and his politics Christian.	25:18
	Evangelism is persuading an avid secularist	25:21
	to consider spiritual values.	25:29
	Evangelism is reminding a disillusioned person	25:31
	that there is still meaning in life	25:35
	and an atheist that God is yet alive.	25:37
	Church will have great problems in this area	25:42
	in the years just ahead.	25:48
	I mention only two.	25:50
	In the era of a more inclusive Christian fellowship,	25:53
	how will the Church to determine to evangelize	25:57
	with regard to social class, to race,	26:00
	and to national origin,	26:07
	and what method and message will be determined effective	26:10
	for the conveying of the gospel to the academic community,	26:18
	to the working man, and to the world of arts and letters,	26:25
	three conspicuous examples of the Church's failure	26:31
	to communicate in our time.	26:35
	Long years ago, John Wesley said,	26:39
	"The only thing you have to do is to save souls,"	26:41
	but I doubt if even he realized how delicate	26:46
	and how difficult and how demanding	26:49
	that task could be in 1966.	26:52
	However, beyond statistics, beyond architecture,	26:55
	beyond program, the authentic measure of the efficiency	26:59
	of a Church is still its ability	27:03
	to influence men and women toward God.	27:06
	Let me close with a story.	27:11
	When I was a university student, I had a friend	27:13
	who was the proctor in our dormitory,	27:17
	at least most of the time he was my friend.	27:20
	There were occasions when I violated his rules	27:22
	and the friendship was suspended,	27:26
	but this afternoon, everything was all right.	27:28
	I came in from the library and passed his room.	27:31
	I saw him lying on the upper bunk of a double-decker bed,	27:34
	waved to him, and then I did a double take.	27:40
	He was reading the "Methodist Hymnal."	27:45
	No, I knew him fairly well.	27:49
	He was a grand guy, but he wasn't religious.	27:51
	I'd helped him upon many occasion to fix his tie	27:54
	as he was prepared to go out for a party or a dance	27:57
	a particular evening.	28:01
	He motioned me to come into the room and to be seated,	28:03
	and then he began to read to me "The Korean Creed,"	28:07
	and as his voice marched bravely down	28:14
	those magnificent sentences,	28:18
	a spell of awe fell on both of us.	28:22
	Finally, when he was through, he tossed the book aside	28:26
	and he said, "Earl, you know,	28:29
	I'm proud to be part of an outfit	28:33
	that believes something as great as that."	28:37
	That was all, went on to my dinner,	28:42
	but two years later, I remembered,	28:45
	when LeRoy Walton went down in the waters of the Pacific	28:48
	during World War II, I remembered what he said.	28:53
	"I am proud to be part of an outfit	28:59
	that believes something as great as that."	29:01
	If God will help you and me	29:07
	to realize afresh the implications	29:10
	of being part of an outfit that believes something	29:14
	as great as that, then perhaps,	29:18
	as was true the night his musicians played for Toscanini,	29:22
	all the music that is within us will sweep up	29:27
	toward that face.	29:35
	Grant to us, O God our Father, clarity of mind,	29:46
	warmth of heart, and resoluteness of will	29:52
	that in our time, we may recapture,	29:58
	for the Church we know, certain qualities	30:03
	which the Church of long, long ago possessed.	30:08
	In the name of Jesus Christ,	30:13
	now make grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father,	30:16
	God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit	30:20
	be among us and abide with us forevermore.	30:23
	(congregation singing)	30:33

Item Info

Title:

Bishop Earl G. Hunt, Jr. - "New Testament Christianity" (October 30, 1966)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4br8rh9z

Date:

October 30, 1966

Speaker:

Hunt, Earl G., Jr., 1918-2005

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0359
ref5921_3kv
uachapelsermaud
duke:628674
dcrau002355
ark:/87924/r4br8rh9z
57d35758-d46f-4aea-87dd-6f16f7520bef

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings

Language:

English

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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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