I have been reading John Calvin, and in the process my thoughts have turned
briefly to Bill Clinton. In our official Reformed-Roman Catholic dialogue (which I am co-chairing on behalf of the PCUSA) we are focusing on the sacraments, and after several years on baptism we are now turning our attention to the eucharist.

When John Calvin shifted, in his lengthy discussion of the sacraments in Book Four of his Institutes, from baptism to eucharist, he immediately switched opponents. When discussing baptism Calvin argued exclusively with the Anabaptists, who rejected infant baptism; but when he focused on the eucharist his arguments were exclusively with the Roman Catholics.

Here is the Clinton connection. In a much-derided statement that the president gave during his grand jury testimony about the Monica Lewinsky affair, he offered this reply to a question: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Given the context, Mr. Clinton deserved the derision. But in making a general point about “is” the president could have claimed John Calvin as an ally. In arguing against the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, Calvin spends several pages on the meaning of “is” in Christ’s statement about the bread: “This is my body.” How we understand this “copulative verb,” Calvin insists, is of utmost importance in grasping the significance of the eucharist.

My guess is that there are a number of extremely important issues in life that hang on how we understand “is.” Bill Clinton was not wrong about the importance of the question. His error was that he tried to avoid admitting guilt by raising what is in other contexts an important theological-philosophical issue.

My favorite “is” story has to do with a situation in which its removal from a sentence made all the difference in the world. In the early 1970s I was at a planning meeting in New York City. It had to do with an ecumenical project, and one of our members was the great Jesuit theologian (now a cardinal) Avery Dulles. Father Dulles reported with some irritation about a gathering of what he called “new style Catholics” he had been invited to address the previous week. When he arrived in the lecture hall, he noticed that the podium from which he was to deliver his talk had a banner hanging from it that said, “Love is God.” He told the organizers that he wanted the banner removed. “Love is God” is heretical, he said; what the banner should say is “God is Love.”

The organizers refused to remove the banner. So Father Dulles went and found a blank sheet of paper and a pin, and when he got up to speak he reached over and used the paper to block out the word “is.” Throughout the speech, then, he told us with a clear sense of spiritual satisfaction, his audience was confronted with the mandate: “Love God.”

“Is” is an important theological word–so important that sometimes our only recourse is to make it disappear!

I haven’t seen any evangelical comments yet about Norman Mailer’s legacy, although many others have been expressing their views since his death on Nov. 10. So, in an attempt to fill the theological void, I will offer some brief thoughts—for what they are worth.

I’m no Mailer expert, but I did read him often in the 1960s. I dipped into his fiction a bit, but mainly I concentrated on his essays, which were collected in books like Advertisements for Myself and Presidential Papers. His range of cultural commentary was broad: boxing, the military, race relations, political leadership, the entertainment business, and literary crticism. I was enough of a fan that I once took public transportation to downtown Chicago, during my grad school days, to slip into a plenary session of the Modern Languages Association convention, where Mailer and John Cheever addressed a standing-room-only audience of academics.

In his later years Mailer took on religious topics, and he seemed to be a spiritual seeker of sorts. But during the years when I was reading him regularly he was a thoroughgoing pagan. However, he did inspire at least one lasting theological thought for me.

Mailer was fond of dividing human beings into mutually exclusive categories. One of his scatological formulations had it that everyone was either to be identified with a certain barnyard substance or with those who went around kicking that substance. But the distinction that impressed me was one he came up with in his commentary on the Kennedy presidency. All leaders, he said, were either sheriffs or outlaws. Mailer liked only the outlaws, and he placed JFK clearly in the sheriff category.

After Kennedy was assassinated, however, he revisited his two categories. Having dismissed Kennedy as a sheriff, he confessed, he was not prepared for the deep sense of loss that he experienced when Kennedy died. This mystified him: outlaws were not supposed to be devastated by the deaths of sheriffs. Not that this motivated Mailer simply to reclassify Kennedy. But he did make a move that has stuck with me. He had been right to label Kennedy as a sheriff, Mailer insisted. But what he had failed to see was that Kennedy had been “an outlaw’s sheriff.”

While Mailer was literally sticking with his exclusive categories, he was in fact adding an important nuance that in effect created some middle ground. There are sheriffs and outlaws—but some sheriff’s need to be thought of as outlaw’s sheriffs.

I regularly find myself making parallel moves in my theological explorations. Ultimately the human race is to be divided into two clear categories: those who are in Christ and those are are not in Christ. But as Abraham Kuyper once put it, the redeemed often act worse than we expect them to, while the unredeemed often surprise us by acting better than we expect. Or, as one wag put it more recently: “I don’t like to pray with many of the people that I like to party with and I don’t like to party with many of the people that I pray with.”

Here is my evangelical tribute to Norman Mailer. He was clearly an outlaw. But I have to add that in my way of classifying people he deserves to be labeled as a sheriff’s outlaw.

Some commentators are saying that it is time for Mitt Romney to give a “Houston speech,” although there are also reports that several of Romney’s key advisors oppose the idea. I tend to agree with the advisors, but not because I think there is nothing important to say about Mormonism and public leadership. I’m just not convinced that Romney is the one to offer the explanation. It has to come from the LDS leadership.

The allusion to Houston, of course, refers to the speech that John F. Kennedy gave to a group of Protestant pastors at a crucial point in his campaign for the presidency. When Kennedy ran for president in 1960 there was much opposition from the Protestant leadership. Norman Vincent Peale, for one, in a rare political statement, warned against a Roman Catholic in the presidency. But Kennedy put many of the worries to rest when he told the gathered pastors in Houston that he refused to believe that he was automatically barred from the presidency on the day of his baptism.

The fact is, however, that the Kennedy position did not really solve the problem. The real objection was that there was something basically incompatible between Catholicism and American pluralistic democracy. What Kennedy was clearly implying in his Houston address was that he would not be influenced by his Catholicism, which actually reinforced the notion that Catholicism was intrinsically incompatible with democratic values. The real work on this subject in the American context was done by the brilliant Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray. His basic position is laid out in his classic work, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (published in 1960 and still in print as “A Sheed & Ward Classic”). Murray drew on specific themes in the Roman Catholic tradition to lay out an understanding of how Catholicism could in fact be seen as encouraging democratic pluralism without sacrificing its basic convictions.

Murray’s story is a fascinating one. He got in trouble with the American Catholic hierarchy for his political views, and was forbidden to publish further on the subject. But then in 1962 Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, and when in the fourth session, begun in 1965, the bishops addressed the questions of religious freedom and democracy, they called Father Murray to Rome and his views became the basis for the new positions of the Roman Catholic Church—as laid out, for example, in the Council’s document Dignitatis Humanae. Today, while there obviously continue to be some tensions between Catholic teachings and widely accepted practices such as abortion-on-demand, few people claim anymore that there is something fundamentally incompatible about a Catholic political leader in a democratic society.

The Mormon leaders owe us a similar kind of rationale for Mormon public leadership. It is regrettable that the most folks can hope for from Romney is that he would say that his Mormon views will not influence his public leadership. And, frankly, by remaining quite silent on the subject of Mormonism and democratic values, the LDS leaders look like they are encouraging this verdict. Not only is that unhelpful to Romney’s cause, but it is a failure to take advantage of an important “teaching moment” for Mormonism.

Here is what I think should happen. In the near future the LDS leadership should sponsor, very privately, a Vatican II-type project on the question of a Mormon theology of democratic pluralism. They should appoint a Mormon scholar to do the John Courtney Murray thing—he or she should actually read Murray, along with the relevant Vatican II documents, to get some clues about what the big questions are that need to be addressed. It would be great if the scholar could draft something and invite some others, including some non-LDS scholars, to refine the perspective. And then the LDS leadership can turn the basics into an official document on, say, “Mormonism, Pluralism and Democratic Values.”

Since I am already meddling, I will push the point even further. What Murray did for Roman Catholicism was to show that there were themes in traditional Catholic thought that could be adapted for the sake of a robust defense of American political values. In Roman Catholicism this was an important strategy, since the Catholic tradition places a premium on the idea of “organic development” of its doctrines: anything new has to be shown to be an “organic” outgrowth of past teachings. The favored image here is botanical: the relationship of a “new” doctrine, such as the Immaculate Conception of Mary, has to be seen as connected to an older doctrine, such as the Virgin Birth of Jesus, as a flower is to the seed out of which it grew—the flower was already “there,” implicitly or potentially, in the seed.

Mormon theology has a challenge to overcome in this area if it is going to make its case, and the challenge has to do with the primacy of the prophetic office in Mormonism, in contrast to Catholicism’s primacy of the teaching office (magisterium). Father Murray could argue that all he was doing was drawing out implications that were “organically” implicit in Catholic teaching all along. The standard non-LDS reading of Mormonism, however, is that a similar move is not possible for the LDS. Here I am talking about popular impressions which go like this: anything new in Mormonism does not have to be shown to be organically related to any past teaching. To the outsider it looks like on one day polygamy was fine, and the next day it wasn’t. Similarly, on one day blacks were inferior, and then the next day they weren’t.

To put it crudely, the common (and I think uninformed) worry is that if a Mitt Romney were president, suddenly the Mormon church would come up with a new position that contradicts its past commitments and Romney would have to knuckle under—even though there would be no rationale for the new view except that it has now been “revealed” to the holders of the prophetic office.

If there is a plausible Mormon alternative to this widespread picture of Mormonism, it needs to be spelled out theologically and made explicit in a clear pronouncement about the role of Mormonism in a pluralistic democracy. It is time for the LDS leadership to see the present situation as an important teaching moment. And in formulating their teaching on this subject, they would do well to draw on the wisdom that is available in historic Christianity, especially the resources available in Catholic social thought.

At a scholarly conference last week we were discussing some important contributions to the field of ethics and Paul Ramsey’s work figured prominently in the discussion. Ramsey taught for several decades at Princeton University, and wrote influential works in medical ethics, just war theory and other topics in Christian ethics. He also gave early leadership to Yale University’s project–still going on–of editing and publishing the collected works of Jonathan Edwards.

I never studied formally with Paul Ramsey, but he was one of my mentors. As a young scholar, just getting started in my teaching career, I wrote and asked him for advice on a project, and he not only wrote back immediately, but he nurtured the relationship, drawing me into a circle of younger ethicists whose work he encouraged.

Ramsey once told me that he had started off as a fairly liberal theologian, but he had increasingly become more orthodox. Those of us who spent time with Ramsey enjoyed passing around stories about his fondness for needling Christian scholars and church leaders who struck him as lacking appropriate seriousness on theological matters.

One of my favorite stories along those lines was about a time that Ramsey was asked to address a gathering of denominational officials on peacemaking in the nuclear age. Throughout his presentation he regularly referred to the nuclear arms race as “the second biggest threat to the human race.” In the question and answer period that followed, a bishop who was known for his liberal theological views posed the obvious question to Professor Ramsey: “You kept referring to the arms race as the second biggest threat to the human race, but I don’t think I heard you tell us what the first biggest threat is.” “Oh, yes,” Professor Ramsey replied. “The first biggest threat. Well, it is something that you probably don’t know anything about. It is the problem of unbelief!”

I regularly remind myself of the lesson contained in that remark. I follow closely the declarations of mainline Protestant leaders, especially those of my own Presbyterian denomination. There are many of those declarations with which I agree. Indeed, I doubt that anyone can fault me for failing to take at least some of the issues they care about quite seriously. On many occasions I have joined others in speaking out about peace in the Middle East, global warming, torture, the war in Iraq, and racism–to name some of more obvious topics.

These are important issues to address. Working to promote justice and peace is a high priority for followers of Christ. But as urgent as these issues are for the health of the societies in which we live, we need to be clear about the fact that they are symptoms of a deeper problem–the unbelief that is in turn an expression of a rebellious spirit that permeates all of our lives, including the systemic dimensions of human interaction.

I wish that we could hear a clear word about unbelief from those Christian leaders who make much of the political and economic ills of our times. Paul Ramsey had it right. Unbelief continues to be the biggest threat to the human race. And the remedy isn’t some sort of free-floating belief. Rather, it is the belief that is set forth so clearly in the familiar words of John 3:16: “whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”