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     My Greek is not good enough, that I would want to try to
decipher any text without having available a reasonably literal
translation to supplement my meagre knowledge.

     As to the choice of texts, I would like, at least initially
that you select it. After reading your letter, I scoured my
bookshelves for my copy of Barth's Roemerbrief. I finally found
it, double-shelved behind the collected works of George Berkeley.
To each section of his exegesis, Barth prepends a translation of
the text, a translation which I do not recognize. Presumably it
is his own; and a comparison of that with the original and with
other translations might be very revealing.

     My attempt to read was not very successful.  I stumbled over
the second word of Saint Paul's letter: doulos.  In the Gospels
we read of mathetai not douloi; and Jesus appears as rabbi, not
kuros or Caesar, certainly not as the master of slaves.  What
legitimizes this metamorphosis?  What does it mean? The
theological tradition has overlooked the harshness and the
cruelty implicit in the master-slave relationship. Doulos appears
to be generally (mis)translated into German as "Knecht", into
English (slightly) more accurately as "servant".

     I spent some years in a sectarian (Lutheran) secondary
school.  My Bible teacher, I remember her vividly, a dark
complexioned tall, slender young woman, Lilliana Bartholomei, for
whom the Lutheran Church, - or so I inferred, - had served as the
ladder on which Miss Bartholomei escaped from a lower class Roman
Catholic, Italian ghetto in Cicero, Illinois, Miss Bartholomei's
proof of the existence of God was the miraculous, or quasi-
miraculous appearance of a pair of silk stockings for which she
had fervently prayed. I remember asking her, in a different
context, what the word "mysticism" meant. She couldn't explain
it, and told me to go look it up, which I have in fact been doing
intermittently for the past fifty-five or so years. Once, I
remember, when I challenged some facet of her theology, she sent
me out of the room, to stand in the hall until the end of the
class, with the justification that I had been undermining her
authority.

     I am very respectful of your religious convictions, so much
so that I am not sure that it is prudent to subject them to the
assaults which a theological dialogue might entail. There are
many non-religious texts that we might read together about our
convictions are less acute.

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