- We've reached the hour of four o'clock at which time this preliminary convocation of the Ecumenical Institute was scheduled to begin. It's my pleasure on behalf of the Kansas School of Religion as well as the University of Kansas to welcome all of you here to this convocation. There has been, as you all know, a great spirit of interest and progress in the ecumenical movement, particularly in our country, since Vatican Council II. It is our pleasure that three of the chief participants in the ecumenical dialog, which will continue here for the next three days, participated in Vatican Council II. Our purposes in this institute are to clarify thought about the ecumenical movement, one of the great movements of our time, consider its most recent developments, and to look for guidelines as the church, as well as the university, faces the future. It's appropriate, I thought--

- ♪ Hallelujah, Hallelujah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, Hallelujah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, Hallelujah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, Hallelujah ♪

- Tradition, and the condition of modern man. The Reverend Doctor Joseph Sitford.

- Thank you Mr. President, colleagues, friends of this university, ladies and gentlemen. I hope someone transmits to the members of the choir my own thanks, and I'm sure the thanks of my colleagues, for the beautiful music that began our convocation this afternoon. As it was a little nostalgic for me. When I was a young man I struggled manfully with that trumpet part for Heinrich Schutz' 150th Psalm. I must say that I did not bring it off so well as the extraordinary man to my left, who played a beautiful trumpet part. I heard this thing done three weeks ago at Lincoln Center in New York City, hey, indeed it is not. I've been given the task to make a general address this afternoon on the subject of Judeo-Christian tradition and the condition of modern man. It seems to me that the first thing one must do with this subject is to pare it down to size. The phrase the Judeo-Christian tradition includes so much that it is in danger of specifying nothing very clear at all. The subject was nevertheless chosen because it suggests a background against which our more instant concerns of this week have got to be projected if we're going to make much progress at all. Because this subject, the Judeo-Christian tradition, that is the first part of it, this subject suggests that that religiousness which has, for almost 2000 years, from very small beginnings, made its way in the western world, has its existential core and its historical and substantial core, in certain historical disclosures of God, which these communities, Judaism and Christianity, affirmed to have been indeed from God and without which understanding these communities can simply not be understood. And to this essential core the reality of Judaism belongs in priority, in substance, in conception, in culture and in actual historical fact. But Judaism is not identical with the religion of the Old Testament people, and one must therefore, here at the beginnings, say very clearly that what he intends when he talks about Judaism, in a hyphenated way, with the Christian tradition, must be understood thus modified. Christian is limited by the fact that, in its relation to Judaism, as that is understood also. And Rabbi Tanenbaum is here, both to point out, I'm sure, and to comment upon both the commonality in substance and the difference in development. And at the other end of the sentence I want to make a prefatory comment. The Judeo-Christian tradition and the situation of modern man. This too must be pared down as we begin. The phrase, the condition on modern man, stands, as I understand it, to suggest that the adjective plays upon the substantive with a certain specific character, that is; that man, by virtue of his modernity, is in a condition that bestows upon him a self-awareness that is particular and can be specified. Therefore I do not understand my subject as a kind of general wave of the hand at everything in general. But in an effort to specify what from this tradition, thus modified, plays upon, and is to be understood in relationship to man as he is specified according to what he knows to be his own modernity. I shall not attempt then a general statement about the many aspects of that, but try to pinpoint this afternoon several aspects that I think constitute the particularity of the self-aware modernity. A colleague of mine, in one of his books, has a beautiful sentence. He wrote, "Man's mind follows the fortunes of his body with an absolute seriousness. So that as man's body is moved about, made more and more mobile, more and more closely related to the actual physical existence of his fellows in the urbanized society, joins with his fellows in the creation of new forms. So man's mind follows the orbiting career of his body with an absolute seriousness." Now this triple perspective, the first of the changes I referred to, is the shift in man's understanding of himself. I think if it were possible to make a single statement about the most characteristic fact of western literature in the last 75 years, from Dostoevsky and Kafka to James Baldwin, one would say that this is on the whole a great confessional of man's new understanding of himself and his efforts artistically to come to terms with it and to give it an articulation, as Shakespeare says, a local habitation and a name. Because the fundamental fact and the shift in perspective, not utterly new, but new with a new breadth and scope and penetration of the common understanding is this: that man knows himself to be a self among selves. He knows himself to have no selfhood, save as that selfhood comes from the communion of selves in his creation. He is born by communion into the communion of self with the fellow selves. And his whole specification of his own identity is always in the transactions which he incessantly carries on, in fact or in recollection, with other selves, living and dead. One of the beautiful sentences in one of the works of James Baldwin is, "I say to you man, I am a self only when I am acknowledged in my selfhood." A most profound statement. That I am postulated into selfhood by the acknowledging acceptance as a self by other selves. And when that postulate is not given, or when that acknowledgment is withheld, a kind of murder of the self takes place. The deepest understanding of our civil rights controversy dare not stop short of that understanding of the self, that can not be a self if it is refused postulation into selfhood by the acknowledgement of the others. Now, the point in specifying this shift in perspective, in the context of the institute that here begins and the conversations that commence now. The point about doing that at the beginning is to ask this question: how can the great central words of the religious tradition, to which I have alluded, how can the great central terms of that tradition...