The Beauty of the Beast
By Carlyle Marney
[Dr. Carlyle Marney, now deceased, was founder of Interpreter`s House at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. Before that he was pastor of the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. after serving for several years as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Austin, Texas. Well known for his preaching, Marney preached this sermon, across the length and breadth of the land. And now though "he being dead yet speaketh" (Hebrews 11:4).
I.
The most dangerous beast? He is neither lion, nor tiger, nor buffalo, nor elephant. MAN is the most savage of the beasts. His bite is poisonous; his hand is a club; his foot is a weapon; knives, clubs, spears become projectiles to carry his hostility. Nothing in nature is so well equipped for hating or hurting. His brain, which trebles during his first few months, is a literal storehouse for keeping destruction and pain-making. His logical powers mean that he can organize for doing harm. His tool-making means that he can invent ways to increase his ability to be hostile. His social nature means he always releases his venom in groups. His powers of communication make him able to mis-communicate; and mis-representation is a means of revenge. He can even make a weapon out of gossip. His memory means that he can brood and stir up malice. And his ability to see that this is like that, his ability to generalize, means that he can wrongly generalize, wrongly associate, and draw conclusions to his permanent fixation in prejudice. His judgment means that he can mis-judge. His very inventiveness makes him a bomb-maker; and bomb-makers are rarely caught, for the bomb-maker is miles away when his hatred goes off. His legal powers open the door to his illegality. And his great capacity for self-awareness is his great capacity for suicide. His socializing tendency gives him an arena for wider harmfulness. Confuse him and he may lash out at everything. Crowd him and he kills, robs, and destroys, for his crime rate increases in proportion to his crowding. Deprive him and he retaliates. Impoverish him and he burns villas in the night. Enslave him and he revolts. Pamper him and he may poison you. Hire him and he may hate both you and the work. Love him too possessively and he is never weaned. Deny him too early and he never learns to love. Put him in cities and all his animal nature comes out with perversions of every good thing, for greed, acquisitiveness, and violence were so long his tools for jungle survival that it is only by the hardest that these can be laid aside as weapons of his continued survival.
If you should suspend for a single ten years the processes of education, his civilization would be devastated. If you destroyed all that is past the memory of our generation–the etiquette, the laws, the patterns of civilized conduct–he would be a swamp creature again. Excite him, frighten him, anger him in a crowd and he is devastating–more than locust swarms or herds of animals. I rode up unexpectedly on a herd of seventy young horses in a mountain glade and they ran as one animal and the earth shook under me. And 200,000 Peruvians at a Soccer match stamping their feet in unison registered a disturbance of earthquake size on a university seismograph miles away. A bad decision by a referee so angered a crowd of spectators that they trampled hundreds to death.
Man–greatest and highest of animals is our most savage beast. And nowhere is he more savage than at home. For here he maims, or wrecks, or destroys, or hurts, or lashes out. Nowhere is he more dangerous than in his lair; nowhere is he more destructive than to himself. Society is a composite picture of his great power to harm.
II.
As a bulwark against this savagery, to protect us from us, it takes all of our mighty oppositeness. To beat-down and subdue our own powers of destruction requires all our strength. This is what law is for. This is what civilization is about. Art, Culture, Philosophy, Order, Religion, all our powers are needed to cage and tame our strength for evil. St. Paul says, "I beat my body black and blue to keep it under subjection." St. Augustine, having resolved his concupiscence by shipping his mistress home, says that he had daily to cut the throat of his appetite. In every city there is a constant threat from the spill-over of our savage capacity for evil. It takes all our powers of the opposite to preserve us alive in a semblance of law and order.
Now the civilizing force of the Christian Gospel is incalculable. But the Christian Gospel did not begin this business of controlling savagery. Such beginnings are far behind us. And, so far as I know, not for 2000 years have we come across a really new weapon for controlling our evil unless it be tranquilizers. Techniques like fingerprinting and police cars with radio capacity have been helpful; but electric chairs and gas chambers are only less bloody than the guillotine–they are not more effective.
In his war against himself, Mankind came some thousands of years ago to some very high concepts and ideals: the great old code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments of Moses, Assyrian codes, Egyptian codes, Hindu laws, the Oriental Yin-Yang, and the acceptance of one`s culture, the great corpus of Roman Law, Stoic Philosophy, the Greek notion of man, all these were civilizers and all these had a high purpose. We benefit from every one of them although we may be largely ignorant about them.
But the idea in our Christian past, the BIG idea is, that whatever the gulf in us, it could be fixed. We could become a new creation. We could be re-made in Christ Jesus into one new Creature. We could be a new human race. In the Man, in the only Man who appeared among us as the New Adam, Adam II, the Christ of God, we could be made over in his image and could associate ourselves into a society of made-over men. Into churches we could come and live as whole men and while doing it we could keep the world out. We could keep the beastliness out. We could keep the savagery out with one hand and bring the world in with the other, until all were in.
III.
Our failure, our utter failure is at both points, for we have neither brought the world in nor kept it out. This is the plain situation of the modern church–we have neither kept the world out nor brought it in. As Douglas Branch said on the day he was inaugurated as secretary of our denomination in North Carolina, "If all the world were Baptist we would have every problem we have got." And this is so.
And worse, we Christians are now a shrinking minority in an exploding world population. This is the modern crisis of Christendom. We can neither keep the world out nor get it in from here. For millions it means the Gospel has run out. For millions it is perceived to be the failure of Christianity and the Church. For many commentators it is the "Post-Christian Era" that we are entering. This is why there can be mega-churches of up to 15,000 members in a city and the existence of the huge church makes almost no difference to the City.
There are four-hundred churches in Charlotte–little closed communions, ghettos, refuges of sick and miserable people clinging for some kind of mutual confirmation, self-affirmation, but reproducing in their own bodies and within their own walls nearly every crime and beastly capacity; and, on the large scale, essentially not much different from those who are outside. This is the crisis of modern Christianity and it is a dreadful crisis.
It is not just a failure of nerve–it is not just a failure of morality, it is a failure in direction. It is not just a failure in goodness–we are as good as the people who are outside the church–it is that the church is inward oriented. It survives to keep itself going. It is no longer sought. It is a subjective, inward, defensive, closed, self-concerned corporation and it is a moral failure on the broad scale. If this continues it would be the death of Christendom as it is already the death of the institutions of Christendom, for the inward-oriented church will not hold the tide back. Our little ghettos will not contain the beast. Our little institutions will neither civilize nor redeem nor save nor make. This is the end of the world the Book of Revelation talks about. The Church Herself becomes a beast or as Revelation puts it "a harlot and the mother of harlots."
IV.
Here in our time and place we have set out on a new venture. We are not alone. We do not all understand yet what it is that we are up to. Vestiges of the old inwardness cling in globs to us, too. There is on us daily the pressure to put all our energies into keeping house and building up the ghetto. We need 3,000, not just 1,700, just to keep our camp ground clean. The need to be successful, the need to be comforting, and the need to be encouraging are fantastic pressures to make us like the surrounding churches and to ignore the failure of Christendom to be Christian.
Add our own agonized awareness that six full time ministers cannot repair the damage done downtown and at the production centers of the culture. The damage is done there, but it is acted-out in the bedrooms, and schoolrooms, and kitchens, and playgrounds of the surrounding suburbia. Add to this the agonized inability of a professional clergy to get at the root of the trouble where it lies in the vaults and foundries and manufactories of our values. This becomes a different situation.
Nevertheless, a new direction is represented here. We are not alone–but we were among the first twenty years ago to see how God will work to bring his beauty to his beast. How urgently important it is now that we begin to understand what we are up to.
With this kind of conviction, with this kind of analysis in our bonnets, Mr. Carroll and I went to New York for a pair of TV presentations. We did not know how we could say it, or whether we could say it at all. We were teamed opposite the pastor and a layman of perhaps the most successful Protestant Church in America. Thousands of members, hospital beds, old folks homes, camps, teams, projects and as Andy Griffith would say, "I don`t know what all!" More than this we were teamed opposite the most winsome, hard-working, gifted organizer-administrator in the American Church. But more, he is an altogether admirable, lovable man who has been triumphant over great personal suffering and loss–he is a man to be like–a great gaunt Swede of giant proportions in his city.
But worse, we were pitted against two dreadfully wrong ideas: if you can`t get them there you can`t help them! And–the church ought to be as well organized and as successful as General Motors. Both ideas are utterly false. As a matter of fact you can`t help them if you do get them there–don`t make me prove this from the rolls of my own congregation! You have no guarantee whatever that you can do them any good if you can "get them there." They have to be helped where they are and you can`t hire enough hands to go where they are! Nor does anything in the nature of our task require a successful Church! As a matter of fact, nothing in the Gospel requires more of a church than a cell-group of response where you get the strength to do the work of God. This changes what church is for. Changes it utterly, no longer a ghetto for defense you become a center for redemptive witness where the world is.
Some convictions are basic for our existence, if this is to be the new shape of relevant Christianity, if this is to be how the beauty comes to the man-beast in society.
We believe in the power, effectiveness, and worth of the new creation in Christ Jesus. But we believe in the salvation of the world–not the salvation of the church. Read John 3:16.
We believe in the salvation of the inhabited world of men. To this end, the salvation of the world, the church is a tool to release the beauty of the beast. But church is tool–not receptacle or vat.
We can never get all the world to agree with nor to join us. We wouldn`t know what to do with them if they did. Redemption is by permeation of whatever structures are already there–not by incorporating into our own structures a double sewer system to take care of the evil of the world.
The necessary reversal of flow involved here means that our whole living together these years has been an attempt not to bring everybody in and change them but to send changed people out to change. Not to maintain you as church members where you are–though this has its needs–but to transfer you out there where you can save.
The new concept of church now is clearer. The new creation has to happen where the old creation resides. You can`t catch a beast on Tryon Street–they just don`t go there! The beast has to be dealt with where he lives. The gospel has to be lived at the bank, the stores, the schools, the houses, the prisons, the rental offices, the government offices, the factories and mills, the slums, the streets, the race pens and the rabbit hutches of the modern metropolis, you can`t get these rabbit pens to come into the church.
This means that the new creation calls for more ministers to serve as vehicles for transfer–it means the world needs a priest at every elbow, every desk, every sink, every bedroom, every turning lathe, every knitting machine, every steering wheel, every golf course. Quit asking me to be all those places. You are there! And that is all God needs.
Salvation is created out there in the permeation of their values–not brought into this factory. We church members are service men in-the-field. No professional priest can do this. Where you are skilled in the bank and its workings I am an utter ignoramus and have been so told. Where you have the training of 40 years of professional calling I am an utter idiot. The priest at every elbow is what we have mistakenly referred to as "just a layman." And what we have been calling our by-product has been our main business all the time!
What is this center for? To repair the damage to the ministry of the laity. We are a shop, we are a mother, we are a healer, and we are a teacher to make ministers. The big burden for the pastor is not to make you happy–the big burden here is not to satisfy you until you are contented and altogether healthy. The big burden here is not to make you lawyers–our burden is not to teach you to be doctors, or teachers, or salesmen, or even parents. Our burden is to learn with you and to help you to be able to live like competent interpreters in your world to redeem it: to give you the tools we have been given for understanding what God has done, is doing, and will do in you.
Our great joy is the calling to become persons with you in this place for the sake of those at that place. We may never get them here. We need you there! And this is the new church. It is a hope for the beauty of this magnificent beast of God that we may get you there in such position that you know what is going on and can be both redeemer and priest.
