Any God Will Do

The idea of God, said the U.S. Supreme Court last week, is undergoing an "ever-broadening understanding" in the modern religious community. In deciding unanimously that unorthodox believers qualify as conscientious objectors under the Selective Service Act, the court dealt at length with the nature of a Supreme Being, and produced a ruling studded with references to the Vatican Council, Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, and Anglican Bishop John Robinson's Honest To God.

"Goodness & Virtue." The decision involved three men of such individualistic faiths that their draft boards did not credit them with having "a belief in a Supreme Being" as the draft act demands for exemption from duty. New Yorker Daniel Seeger is an agnostic who believes in "goodness and virtue for their own sakes," and has no faith in God "except in the remotest sense" Arno Sascha Jakobson, also of New York, accepts a creative "supreme reality in which "the existence of man is the result." California's Forest Britt Peter believes in "some power manifest in nature which helps man in the ordering of his life."

These vague faiths were good enough for the court, which unanimously agreed that all three cases passed the act's test of Supreme-Being belief (the court specifically avoided the question of whether an atheist could qualify as a conscientious objector). Associate Justice Tom Clark argued for the court that Congress did not intend the act to apply only to orthodox members of organized churches. He cited Protestant Theologian Tillich, "whose views the Government concedes would come within the statute." Tillich firmly rejects the God of traditional theism in favor of a "God above God" who is the "ground of all being" and the source of man's "ultimate concern." Bishop Robinson likewise rejects the traditional notion of a God "out there" who exists "above and beyond the world he made."

"A Ray of That Truth." Even the Roman Catholic Church, according to the Second Vatican Council's draft declaration on non-Christians, is willing to respect views of the creator less specific than its own. "The Church regards with sincere reverence those ways of action and of life, precepts and teachings which, although they differ from the ones she sets forth, reflect nonetheless a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men."

The diverse manners in which beliefs may be articulated, Clark concluded, indicate that Selective Service examiners have no right to interpret the law narrowly. The only consideration is whether a conscientious objector's religious belief, however vague, has the same place in his life as God has in that of an orthodox Christian or Jew.

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