Religion: The Wise Guy’s Christianity

“On a recent evening you participated in a bull session with a number of the boys downstairs being neighborly . . . When the conversation turned to religion, the House Wise Guy was all set. Adjusting his horn-rimmed spectacles and propping his white bucks on the table, he opened his mouth and said: ‘Now let’s get this religion stuff straight once and for all—especially this Christianity that some of you fellows seem to be worrying about a little more lately.’ ”

So began the final exam for one of the most popular courses at Amherst College —Religion 22. Students were not particularly surprised: Episcopalian Professor James Alfred Martin Jr. is celebrated for his offbeat exams. (Once he directed students to write TV scripts for the program You Are There at the Council of Nicaea and the Diet of Worms.) Last week, in reprinting Martin’s most recent final, the Amherst Alumni News provided readers with a thought-provoker and argument-starter of uncommon ingenuity. As the exam question continues, the beer-guzzling Wise Guy gives this racy history of the Christian faith:

“Jesus was a mild Jewish reformer who was primarily interested in social revolution . . . But somewhere around the middle of the first century a Jew named Paul of Tarsus got converted to the movement and right away proceeded to get it all fouled up with theological nonsense. He made Jesus out to be the hero of a mystery religion, and went around preaching the gospel that all men could be assured of a niche in Heaven if they would only accept him as Lord and Savior.”

Gloomy Gusses. Just before the fall of Rome, continues the Wise Guy, “a sexually repressed monk named Augustine wrote a book called The City of God in which he assured the Romans that their adoption of Christianity was not the cause of the downfall of the Empire, and that anyway it did not matter what kind of society they lived in on earth, since their destiny was a City of God in the sky.”

St. Thomas Aquinas worked out “an amazing rationalization of Christian dogmas in which he convinced the scholars of Christendom that philosophy and science are not dangerous if they are not taken too seriously, and that Christian theology is based solely on the superior truths of revelation, which must be accepted in blind faith . . .

“Of course the Roman Catholic religion still exists, but there has been very little further development of dogma within it since the Reformation . . . Most of its believers go to Confession as a way of easing their consciences without seriously changing their lives, and to Mass out of fear.

“And Protestantism is still around too, though it’s power is steadily weakening … Of course there are still some people around who can’t face the facts of life, and so they turn anxiously to Gloomy Gusses like Karl Earth and Reinhold Niebuhr as an escape. But their brand of revived Fundamentalism obviously will not survive the present wave of postwar hysteria. In general, it seems to me that modern man is slowly but surely waking up to the realization that in order to move forward towards a scientific and democratic civilization he must rely on intelligent faith in himself.”

Better Than Confidential. Professor Martin’s exam paper ended by inviting examinees to comment on the Wise Guy’s speech, “trying to show where he spoke the truth, where he spoke half-truth, and where he spoke nonsense.”

Martin’s students rose to the occasion. Some answers:

¶ “I’d hardly say that Jesus was a mild reformer—after all, he made a lot of people angry, and he wound up on a cross. Nor would I say that he was primarily interested in changing social conditions; he was after something deeper and more difficult—changing the human spirit.”

¶ “To call Augustine a ‘sexually repressed monk’ is just too funny. Have you read his Confessions’? Parts of it are better than Confidential. But the point is that, through wrestling with the problem of sexual lust, he came to discover God, and to discover himself in the presence of God.”

¶ “It is silly to say St. Thomas stood for ‘blind faith.’ He sought to show what man can know about the existence and nature of God by reason alone, and then to show what more may be known through faith.”

¶ “It is true that many intelligent people of good will now think that man must rely entirely on himself, his science, etc. to improve his lot. I am inclined to think that way myself. But I think we have much to learn from the traditional Christian view of man and his destiny, and I now wonder whether it may not be more profound than the liberal humanism I’ve learned from my parents.”