Systematic Theology

"But Billy Graham is simply stone-age," he laughed condescendingly. His Radcliffe date lapsed into silence at this, and he quaffed the rest of his scotch with an indulgent chuckle.

At first I thought he was from Princeton, there were so many of them around that weekend. He held a pipe in his teeeth, had a Scotch in his hand, and was dressed like the incarnate ideal of Ivy Magazine. But squelching a Cliffie with a crack like that overcame my initial repugnance, so sidling over, I soon put in a friendly word for Bertrand Russell.

"Oh, that anachronistic imp," he smiled, giving me the same amused look he'd accorded the mention of Billy Graham. "Superficial, smart-aleck, shallow. And outdated. Agnostics are eighteenth century."

He pushed our way through the crowd to the liquor cabinet, where he poured himself some more Sooth.

"Tillich," he said to me. "Tillich. That's the stuff you want to read. Sophisticated. Twentieth-century. The cutting edge of knowledge. All the insights of White-head, Freud, Jung, Buber, Langer, Kierkegaard, Satre, et cetera. And more," he said looking me straight in the eye.

"God," he said solemnly.

"You want a drink?" he asked.

I said not just then and he led me back to where we'd left his date.

"You see the trouble with you atheists--as well as Graham," he resumed, classifying me without warrant, --"is you take the Creed and the Bible and so forth literally, as if all they meant was just what they said. Like the resurrection, I mean. I suppose you think that means somebody actually, physically, rose up from being dead."

I admitted that was how the resurrection had always sounded to me.

"Well, far from it, far from it indeed," he smiled heartily.

He sipped his Scotch and looked far away. "The thing is, that you've got to allow for a connotational semantic, non-discursive elements forming a nevertheless meaningful Gestalt....Atheists, fundamentalists, they all talk about God as if He was a finite object, as if He were a thing."

"But isn't everything a thing?" the girl asked naively. He sighed with exasperation, then broke into a smile.

"Look, I can't go into it all now," he said to me. "But come by Emerson next Thursday at eleven. He's talking on the Ground of Being then: that's God. Emerson H."

And he, the girl, and the Scotch melted into the crowd of cocktails.

That was on Saturday.

On the following Thursday, the largest room in Emerson Hall was nearly filled to capacity. There had been standing room only earlier in the year.

From high on his platform in front of us, the voice of the theologian rose and fell in a slow, hypnotic monotone.

"...Ze problem to vich all true philozophy must give an answer is ze question, 'Vat is ze meaning of Being as Zuch?' Or, in other vurds, 'Vy is there zomthing instead of nodthing?'"

In row upon row, people leaned forward to catch every word, feverishly scribbling in their notebooks. The mesmerizing drone of the theologian lifted them, trance-like, beyond the everyday world of corporeal men and concrete things. It carried them high, high into the tenuous stratosphere of abstraction, where the earth below could be glimpsed only briefly and dimly, as the ponderous metaphysical clouds parted for a moment, then coalesced in still thicker obscurity. Through the shadowy haze, however, they could sense the mammoth struggles that the voice affirmed were raging all around them. From far off they could sometimes catch the sound of the straining ontological tensions: the grunts and heaves of Destiny striving with Freedom, of Dynamics with Form, of Essence with Existence, and Boundlessness with Finitude.

For a chilling moment, they hovered over the black, terrifying abyss of Utter Non-Being; for a thrilling second, all were ultimately concerned.

The bewildered frowns dissolved into warm smiles, however, and the room burst into applause as the theologian uttered his last words. Chatting happily, the audience moved up the aisles and out the narrow doorway into the hall.

"I'm so glad you came," my friend of last Saturday said, pressing over to me through the crowd. "He really had them today, didn't he? That mystery of non-being always gets 'em. You see what I mean about God, now, don't you? No one thing, but the ground of it all. Sheer transcendence itself."

He pulled out his pipe and mentioned the theologian as he struck a match. "Fabulous, isn't he? Depth psychology, symbolic meaning, Hegelian dialectic, expressionist art, existentialism, and all twentieth-century: complex, bold, systematic...Everything."