REVIEW SECTION 249

Though the above point is more than a mere matter of semantics, the
value of this work is such that it is not significantly diminished by it.
Everyone seriously interested in the education of ministers today, and
in the church itself, should read this book. Not that it has all the an-
swers; indeed, it ends with a series of questions. But as Thornton can-
didly tells us, he was converted from an attitude of wanting to "domesti-
cate" clinical pastoral education to one of wanting "to fan the fires of
adventuresomeness . . . to tend the radical spirit . . ." (p. 232) by the
long process of data gathering and writing. I believe a reading of the
book will have a similar effect on many readers, that of encouraging them
to trust more in the intuitions of student rebels of today-tempered by
the knowledge that the more cogent insights of early leaders such as
Boisen, Cabot, Guiles, and Brinkman are the ones that have survived.
JAMES N. LAPSLEY
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey

REVOLUTION, PLACE AND SYMBOL, edited by Rolfe Lanier Hunt. New

York, International Congress on Religion, Architecture, and the Visual
Arts, 1969. $5.95.
In any serious sense, reviews of books of this kind are impossible. Too
many people said too many things that required review, yet mention-
ing them all is useless. To pick out what seem to me the "highlights"
would end up, as I probably will, reporting the conference as though its
main purpose were to develop my opinions.
Meetings like this have their own unplanned character and person-
ality; all discussions and seminars create and develop from this climate
of character and are not very intelligible to those who were not there.
Thus Sections VI and VII, "Highlights of Sessions and Seminars" and
"Published Reports and Evaluations," are primarily of internal interest,
although there is much rather aphoristic material culled from notes that
probably can start the reader very profitably on his own way.
The weakest section is the first, "Locating the Problem: The Situation
in Which We Find Ourselves." Abbe Francois Houtart surely wins the
Rip van Winkle Award of the Year for saying "Time now becomes not
only philosophically, theoretically, but ethically in the life of man a
linear concept with a past, a present and a future" (p. 10). He also says
we have to reach the people where they are. This is, I judge, not just
incidental silliness; much of this paper and many others assume a "we,"
i.e.) the church, meeting "the people" who are, apparently, something else.
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250 THEOLOGY TODAY
At a decidedly different level, Joseph Sittler offers a characteristically
elegant and enlightening report on the theological situation. But he
ends (p. 31) "What then does one do when he does not know what to
do but must, nevertheless, do?" He supposes the rest of the people are
in the same predicament, which seems true of most of the theologians
but hardly at all of the artists and the architects. For all their disagree-
ments the artists, including the architects, seemed to know very much
what they are about.
There is something painfully pathetic about men at the end of their
careers finding the meaning of their work so problematical; it is not only
pathetic but dangerous to the whole enterprise to find so many younger
theologians at the same impasse. I am not a theologian and I not only
feel no such despair, no such alienation from my own purpose, I find
others in all fields who are happily and creatively at work. This leads
me to suspect that the trouble may be more with the way theologians are
doing their work or even with the way they define their work rather than
anything central to the work of the mind. This ceases to be pathetic
and becomes oppressively dangerous when these men decide that, because
they do not know what to do, then no one else can be permitted to do
anything, which has caused as many creative people to be fed up with
"the church" as the apparently more stultifying bureaucracy.
Section II, "The Religious Community and the City," was more use-
ful in reporting where we are because, presumably, it did not deal with
abstractions but descriptions. Harvey Cox seems to have popped up
all over the conference and most usefully here in his essay "Man's Re-
ligious Visions," a brief but commanding statement of the interaction,
the mutual shaping, of religious visions and the spatial environment of
the cities. He begins to do for space what other theologians have done
with time; space is a theological language:
"Man needs a new vision of the city in order to assume a mastery of
it which is not a violation of the order of the gods. Man also needs to
plan his cities in order to provide the experience out of which a confident
religious vision can emerge. The two processes are simultaneous and
complementary. Therefore our movement toward planning our cities
for man is a religious undertaking before any temple is constructed" (p.
51). There is much debatable material, but in my judgment the ques-
tion is here being put in the proper terms.
In my judgment, the best and most useful essay in the book is Richard
Rubenstein's "On the Meaning of Place" which introduces Section IV,
"Building for Religious Communities." He avoids the tangle theologians
so often get themselves into when their deductive analysis collides with
what actually happens with men. In this case, what happens, despite

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 REVIEW SECTION 251
theorizing, is sacred space, not just place. Since Americans are nomadic,
"I would caution architects against the futility of attempting to create
American sacred places through art, imagination, and invention. Men
can never deliberately create sacred precincts" (p. 150). "Nevertheless,
as long as people are born, pass through the course of growth, matura-
tion and death, they are going to need structures and institutions in
which they can celebrate times sacred to them" (p. 152). And "The re-
ligious edifices of America must be constructed primarily for the purpose
of sharing sacred time." "Tents of meeting are all we can construct in
nomadic America" (p. 151). "Above all, the architect must not attempt
to force the gods. We live in a godless age, whether we call it the time
of the death of God, or the time of no religion. The architect cannot
create the holy; he can create structures which meet the actual needs of
the religious community to create a structure in which sacred time can
be shared" (p. 152).
For all the diversity and disunity of the book, there is much else of
merit that I cannot take space to note. It would be nice to report that
some common policy emerged but that was hardly to be expected. I
rather imagine that the total effect of the congress was both greater than
and other than the sum of its (mostly excellent) parts. The congress is
triennial; the second is to be held in Brussels this fall. If enough of
the same people come back to give the deliberations some continuity
there might be some advance toward corporate understanding. Re-
ports that come to me indicate that the program will be more nearly a
workshop in the avant-garde techniques. This is usually a mistake since
ecclesiastical agencies are usually as much as two fashions behind when
they are trying to be avant-garde; if I forget to read Art News I sometimes
miss out on a fashion altogether. By running hard, New York based
churchmen sometimes manage to keep up better than that but such a
congress is not likely to accomplish as much as this one. I hope I am
wrong, for it is a most promising enterprise.
JOHN W. DIXON, JR.
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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