I have already lived in three different theological climates, during three periods marked by quite different hopes and expectations for the future of humanity. I am not sure whether or not we are entering a fourth period, but the pattern of both commitments and hopes is less clear than it seemed to be in the recent past.

Before 1930 and back into the late nineteenth century there was the period of the Social Gospel, which was a great force in the churches and which reflected the secular expectations of progress that were general at the time. I was part of this movement myself and to a large extent shared its hopes, though I never believed that progress was inevitable or irreversible.

Not long ago if you mentioned to academic acquaintances that you were studying China missionaries seriously, the response was one of surprise and a quick change of subject. In the world of China analysts, missionaries were dismissed as a horde of fanatics or as a club of wellintentioned but impotent meddlers.

Today, as more attention is paid the transnational influence of service organizations, China missionaries are, if not precisely in vogue, becoming a respectable field of academic inquiry. In January, 1972, the Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the American Historical Association sponsored a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on China missionaries. Assorted historians gave papers on theology and American foreign policy, the corporate structure of the missionary movement and its influence in China, theories of missionary imperialism or lack thereof, among other topics. (The papers are to be published by Harvard in a book edited by John K. Fairbank, organizer of the proceedings.)

It is not necessary to carry a torch for the colonels who seized power in Greece in 1967 to suggest that they evoked from the start in much of the Western world a sense of shock and hostility beyond their obvious deserts. Their coup was bloodless, after all, and scarcely unexpected. Their authoritarian style was more typical than the preceding parliamentary system had been of the prevailing trend in other countries with similar historical, economic and social weaknesses; and in purely Greek ferms it could be seen as a comprehensible and characteristic, albeit depressing, response to a genuine national crisis. The changes in the Greek economy which had ensued from the postwar period of reconstruction, the accelerating drift from the land, the startling growth of Athens, the soaring emigration figures, and the termination of American aid had all imposed great new strains upon the country.

In the past two decades most discussions about Indian foreign policy dealt with the nature and limitations of nonalignment. The discussions usually had an air of remoteness. In American perceptions, India as a policy area was peripheral to America's immediate political and strategic interests. Even when humanitarian motives were invoked as factors for political consideration there was a feeling that India was too bulky, too riddled with immense problems. Thus, Americans were never sure whether intimate political ties with India were probable or even desirable from America's point of view. If this was the general picture accepted by liberals in America, conservatives asserted that India was “wishy-washy” toward the Communist bloc. India's refusal to join the American alliance system confirmed this suspicion.

We are forced now to return to an earlier, Pascalian pessimism, to a model of history whose logic derives from a postulate of original sin. We can subscribe today, all too readily, to De Maistre's view that the barbarism of modern politics, the regress of educated, technologically inventive man into slaughter enact a working out of the eschatology of the Fall.” Thus George Steiner in his remarkable In Bluebeards Castle. Unfortunately, the return and subscription mentioned are only a literary flourish, for Steiner does not imagine that anyone would seriously agree with Pascal and De Maistre. He is wrong. Those for whom the dogma of Original Sin is not mere metaphor have always seen the landscape differently. The believer lives in a world he finds familiar but in which he does not feel at home. Where does an alien go to register?

Mr. Peter G. Peterson, Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs and frequently called the President's “economic Kissinger,” must be credited at least with candor when he recently stated: “I believe we must dispel any ‘Marshall Plan psychology’ or relatively unconstrained generosity that may remain. This is not just a matter of choice but of necessity.” In a hungry world, unfortunately, an American imperial policy of unmitigated self-interest is not made more morally palatable by the candor with which it is proclaimed. Mr. Peterson's recommendations would remove the ethical linchpin of the Jewish-Christian tradition (and of the American experience at its best), namely, the belief that the rich are accountable to the poor and the strong to the weak. As “idealistic” as they may seem, it is the better part of realism to recognize that such ideals are an essential ingredient in holding together the experiment that is American society.