-- LenHockley - 18 May 2010

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Religion: The Thereness of It All

Friday, May. 04, 1962

"Life is a cruel joke, and sooner or later I'm the punch line. Life is just the way it is — the thereness of it. The gift of arthritis. The gift of heart attack. The gift of the isness of life." The speaker was a lecturer at the Christian Faith and Life Community, a training center for undergraduate students of the University of Texas at Austin. His woebegone view of things, he warned, should not lead to despair but to Christian salvation. The man willing to accept "what is ugly and cruel and guilty as well as the contrary" is receiving Christ's message, and discovers that "this is the way it is, I am not what I thought I was, but I can live with my guilt." To hear this unorthodox theology, ministers from university campuses across the nation come to study at Austin's community in the heartland of religious orthodoxy. They hear God discussed as the "void," and the traditional dogmas of the Virgin Birth, Resurrection and Holy Trinity dismissed as so much deadwood in the lumberyard of faith. Fundamentalists, in turn, dismiss the community as heretical, but the leaders of the group consider themselves to be "in the middle of the Christian tradition." How to Be a Layman. Now ten years old, Austin's community is a radical Protestant version of the Catholic Newman clubs, which serve to provide guidance to Roman Catholic students at secular colleges across the country. The goal is to train students to become active Christian laymen as thoroughly as the university trains them for worldly careers. Each year as many as 100 students (including a few Negroes) sign up to live within the community's two residence halls. They pay up to $750 a year for room and board, supplement their academic studies at the university with interdenominational prayer services and lectures in theology. Everywhere—in the halls and in every community teacher's home—students are confronted by Picasso's Guernica, from which many lectures in theology are given.

Founder of the community is the Rev. Jack Lewis, 46. a Presbyterian minister who began serving students at the University of Texas in 1946 after a wartime tour of duty as a Navy chaplain. Lewis soon found that his students "didn't see the relevance of Christian faith in daily life." He quit his Texas chaplaincy in 1950 to take graduate divinity studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland, "the Valhalla of all Presbyterians." In Europe he encountered a number of religious training centers for student laymen, decided he had found the way for the church to reach undergraduates back home. He returned to Austin, rounded up a few thousand dollars from local businessmen, and with the cooperation of university officials, set up the "Austin Experiment" outside the campus gates. The community's present budget approaches $200,000 a year, most of it coming from gifts and donations. Said a Texas oilman who gave Lewis $5,000 last year: "I've studied over what you have, and I don't know that I know what you're doing, and I don't know that you know what you're doing, but I'm a student of the Bible and I know that Abraham and Moses were not sure of what they were doing either." Permission to Live. The community's theology ranges far from the orthodox, is wildly eclectic, although its teachers have borrowed much of their religious vocabulary from existentialism and from Harvard's Paul Tillich. Talk at the community is dense with jargon—the "over-againstness" of God, the "Christ-Event," "gatheredness" and "scatteredness." From the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the community has taken the Christian's utter commitment to life. Man, according to Austin Experimenter James Wagener, "gets cosmic permission to live out his life as a guilty man." God, says Wagener, "deflates our balloons, collapses our dreams, crushes our illusions," but ultimately calls man to belief—and to work in the world as a believer: "Is God dead?" asks a student, and answers: "Do you mean the God of the Sweet By-and-By? Yes, and good riddance." On balance, the Austin Experiment has made more friends than foes. Over the year, 570 ministers and laymen (mostly Methodists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians) from across the country have crowded into the community's guesthouse for symposiums; most go home impressed by the intensity of the program and the zeal of the students. Thanks to the community's work in the past, other "experiments" have been organized on nearly 50 other U.S. campuses from Brown to Wisconsin. But perhaps the best measure of Lewis' success is his group of "lost laymen": of the 1,500 students who have lived at the community since its founding, one in ten has taken Christian life seriously enough to enter the ministry.

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