The gospel is moving out of the pulpit and into the public consciousness in many unorthodox ways—through jazz and rock Masses, plays, and even electric-light shows. Three current examples of imaginative means being used to interpret the Word in the vernacular:
TELEVISION. A series called One Reach One, created by the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation, is being shown on stations in 35 U.S. cities. It goes considerably further than other worthy religious programs in examining modern moral problems with the help of frank, uninhibited dialogue and a realism that is almost painful.
One of the series' twelve half-hour episodes, Love in a Sexy Society, focuses on a discussion of premarital sex by four coeds at Northwestern University. "Everybody's sleeping around," says one. "If it goes on in the adult world, what's wrong with us doing it?" The case for chastity is made by another girl, who says of her relationship with her boy friend: "I've got him on a pedestal, and he's got me on a pedestal. It's kind of hard to jump into bed when you're on separate pedestals."
Another episode, played by professional actors, dramatizes matrimonial alienation. A scene shows a wife in the kitchen, husband in the living room, thinking their separate thoughts. She: "This must be the three millionth time I've washed this dish. John, tell me to break it. Ask me to sit next to you for a while." He: "Jane, forget that silly dish. Come and sit with me and tell me that all my fears are untrue." But neither utters a word. "Contact can hurt," concludes Narrator Ralph Bellamy, "but not as much as non-contact." ∙BOOKS. A paperback with an unlikely title, The Cotton Patch Version of Paul's Epistles, has just been published by Association Press, a Y.M.C.A. affiliate. Written by Clarence L. Jordan, a Southern Baptist minister who helped found Koinonia Farm, an integrated colony of whites and Negroes in Georgia, the book transposes the writings of St. Paul into a modern-day setting, the U.S. South. Galatians thus becomes The Letter to the Churches of the Georgia Convention, while 1 Thessalonians is translated as The First Letter to the Selma Christians.
Jordan's freewheeling paraphrase tries to catch the colloquial, contemporary quality of the Pauline letters. As translated in the King James version, Romans 2:9 vows "tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile." In Jordan's phrasing, the threat comes out: "Hellfire and brimstone upon every son of a gun who works for the wrong, whether he's a 'superior' white or a Negro." Romans 1:25 excoriates those "who changed the truth of God into a lie"; this becomes, in Jordanese, "These wise guys swapped God's truth for an outright lie." 1 Thessalonians 4:3 states: "For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication." Jordan puts it: "God's will—that which makes you different—is that you hold back from catting around."