Chapter 4 – The 1960s

      There is a general agreement that the 1960s was a momentous time in the Western world and especially in North America.  Perhaps future historians will judge it to be of as great a significance as were the American Revolution and the Civil War for the development of American culture.  Certainly, such old foundations as patriotic idealism, national confidence, traditional morality, and biblical theism were severely shaken, challenged, changed, or even abandoned.  The winds of modernity blew at gale force and affected virtually all institutions, not least the old-line Protestant denominations.

      To prepare our minds to understand modern theologies we shall reflect on the 1960s.  Then, with this general context in mind, we shall look at a book entitled Honest to God, published in a small edition in early 1963 in England.  Its author, John Robinson, the bishop of Woolwich, anticipated that he would be accused of being radical and heretical by fellow scholars, but neither he nor his publishers expected the book’s bombshell effect on the mass of ordinary readers.  In just a few months Honest to God was a runaway best seller and available in nine languages.  On both sides of the Atlantic the book provoked debate and discussion, ranging almost from ecstasy to deepest anguish and condemnation.  It is a safe assumption that a best seller tells more about the market than the product, and this was true with Honest to God. Probably at no other time than the early 1960s could such a book have had such a phenomenal success.

      Indeed, this book brought to the notice of many people the names of three theologians – Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich – who had deeply influenced Robinson, and who also were to be very influential in theological education and discussion in the 1960s.  So we shall also look briefly at what these German-born theologians taught.  Finally, we shall notice two further theologies that came into prominence in the late 1960s – process theology and the theology of hope, both of which helped pave the way for various liberation theologies of the 1970s.

THE TWO 1960s

      On January 3, 1994, Newsweek provided descriptions of each decade of the twentieth century from the thirties to the nineties.  Under the heading “The ‘60s: Tornado of Wrath,” the article began:

The’60s split the skies.  Only the Civil and two world wars so neatly clove our history into a Before and After.  And the ’60s were more divisive than World War II, which drew people together for the war effort.  The ’60s drove people apart – husbands from wives, children from parents, students from teachers, citizens from their government.  Authority was strengthened by World War II.  It was challenged by the ’60s.

It proceeded to see much good arising from the “tornado of wrath” and claimed rather dubiously that “the ’60s play the same role in conservative political thought that the Fall of Man does in Christian theology.”

      For a more balanced study of the 1960s from a religious perspective we turn to an essay by Leonard I. Sweet under the title, “The 1960s: The Crises of Liberal Christianity and the Public Emergence of Evangelicalism.”  He argues that there were really two “sixties.”  The first (roughly from 1960 to 1967) was bursting with belief, fresh hope, and high ambition; the second (roughly from 1967 to 1971) was comprised of polar opposites with broken dreams, worn-out emotions, shattered institutions, fragmented selves, and failed communes.

      At the beginning of the 1960s the old-line denominations (Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and so forth) provided a major part of the vital center of American life and morals.  However, the way in which these churches came to terms with the questions of authority raised in the first sixties “led to a profound loss of Protestant identity and consequent evacuation of meaning, confusion of purpose, and frustration of mission in American religious life” (Sweet, “The 1960s ...,” 31).  For the first time the authority of the church was widely discredited in American religion.  Instead of the churches’ being seen as the institutions that set the standards for society, they were increasingly seen as being there to meet the needs of society.  This was a remarkable and far-reaching change.

      It was not that there were no authorities in the first sixties.  There was, however, a turning from ecclesiastical to cultural authorities, from the Bible and tradition to the new Zeitgeist (spirit of the age).  Sweet thinks that the best example of this trend was the great enthusiasm for relativism in morals, known as situation ethics.  The so-called new morality taught that all you bring to a moral situation is “love” (love was defined more by the culture than by the Bible).  Liberation comes when you forget the bondage of the Ten Commandments and simply bring love into the situation, for each situation is unique and autonomous.  An Episcopalian, Joseph Fletcher, wrote the book, Situation Ethics (1966), which came to reflect this thinking.

      But why did the churches dismantle religious authority and so quickly accept cultural authority?  Sweet suggests several reasons.  First of all, there was a deep desire not to be out of touch but to be with it.  So, whatever seemed alien to the modern mind had to go, and all that was not felt to be meaningful had to be dropped.  To change, and to change quickly, was the order of the day; and thus new was one of the pet words of that time.  Sweet remarks that “whereas an older liberalism had capitulated to the authority of the modern scientific world view, the liberalizing trend that characterized religion in the first sixties capitulated to the authority of a broader and more encompassing phenomenon of cultural secularization” (ibid., 34).

      Second, there was an enthusiastic embrace of secularity: the process of secularization was seen as being part of the general providence of God.  To cling to tradition was seen as holding on to a past that was gone forever.  And it was in this spirit that the secular theology of the sixties was produced, of which The Secular City (1965) by Harvey Cox is a pertinent example.  Cox argued that the process of secularization (guided by the transcendent God) had liberated man from the old supernatural images and made him free to create his own secular myths in and through which he could live consistently in a technological world.  Further, as Sweet remarks, “the dethroning of traditional religious authority and the brandishing of Christianity’s secular connection were seen as incitements to social action” (ibid.).  Christianity, for many people, meant flocking to the picket line to support civil rights or to protest the Vietnam war.

      Third, it was held that the old theological mold had cracked beyond repair, and a new mold (cultural authority) was immediately required.  Relativism and pluralism (often as egalitarianism) were embraced as the necessary expressions of this mold.  Thus, there were no obviously final answers to the really important questions about life because God was dead.  That is, the God of Christian or Jewish theism had been a projection of the imagination.  Jesus as a man for others was fine, but God was a problem.  The theological trend became to speak of Christian atheism as expressed in the writings of William Hamilton, Paul Van Buren, and Thomas Altizer (concerning whom see below).

      Fourth, the church as an institution was seen as being irrelevant to modern life and an impediment to social change.  The mandate of the clergymen and the theologian was to be loyal not to the tradition of his church but to the experience of love in the totality of human experience.  In effect, theology was divorced from the churches, and it effectively became sociology, anthropology, and psychology; also, the Bible became a closed book.  In the second sixties, when no distinct identity arose out of the new cultural authorities, there was confusion.  Ambiguity and uncertainty were proclaimed as values.  Inner sources of the self were affirmed as the ultimate authorities, and America came the closest in its history to suffering a national nervous breakdown.  Instead of the decade having been the golden sixties, it was seen in 1971 as the decade when almost everything went wrong.

      Since external authorities were discredited or lost, there was a turn inward to the self for authorization.  It became fashionable and acceptable to speak of self-love, self-affirmation, and self-acceptance.  One had to know self-love before one could love God and other people.  Psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists came into their own.  Expressions of the self as the new authority meant there were movements of self-help, self-discovery, and self-realization.  Subjectivism was also seen in the turn to Eastern religions and Eastern meditation, in an increase of the charismatic movement, and in the priority of feelings.  “Get in touch with your feelings” became common advice.  The pastor had to become the therapist.

      Where authority was not grounded in the self and subjectivism, it was centered in human relations.  New theories of management or styles of organization were developed and accepted by the churches, and the pastor had to become the manager.  Many found in goals and objectives a way of recovering the authority of religion without having to accept the seeming arbitrariness of that authority.  Sweet remarks that

the attempt to redirect ecclesiastical authority from the creeds, traditions, and offices of the church to human relations through a theology of church administration governed all the structural retooling that conventional Protestantism underwent in the beginning of the second sixties.  (Ibid., 39)

What was known as the church-management movement was the most significant call to order issued by conventional Protestantism after the chaos and bedlam of the previous vandalism of the faith.  From it has come, it may be claimed, the centralized bureaucracies of the denominations.

      The turn inward, along with the association with others in reaching for goals and objectives, led to a crisis of identity and, for the first time in human history, the belief in a right to identity.  The call was heard that society must be reformed in order to guarantee a sense of worth to every person.  This was not a call for freedom of speech or for better economic conditions.  Rather, it was a call for a right to identity.  Individual persons wanted an answer to the question, who am I? with provision for working out the answer in society.

      Historically, personal identity had been established by a sense of coherence (being a part of settled culture that gave meaning to life), a sense of commitment (a conscious belonging to a settled family, church, and community), and continuity (having a sense of roots in a family, community, and church tradition).  All three had been shaken by the first sixties, and so in the second sixties there was a crisis of self-identity and the search to recover what previously had been taken for granted in a very different cultural context.  So the call for community and koinonia became trendy items in the 1970s, for only in and with others could the individual self find identity and affirmation.

      Replacing the theology of Christian atheism, the teaching that God is dead and Jesus is his prophet, was the theology of hope.  We may see it as a natural successor to the theology of the death of God, for it spoke of a God not available in the present but waiting for us in the future.  Furthermore, it provided a way for discouraged and depressed Christians to forget the disappointments of the present and past, take up the cause of the future, and still believe in God.

      To date, we have only spoken of the effect of the 1960s on the liberal churches.  Conservative Protestantism, which had been pushed out of the center of American life by liberal Protestantism and neo-orthodoxy since the turn of the century, saw its opportunity at the end of the second sixties.  During the 1970s, evangelicalism emerged as the dominant force in American religion.  Once again a message of absolute truths, moral standards, and a message of heaven and hell had attraction for many people.  However, evangelicals who proclaimed the absolutes had lived through and had been affected by the 1960s, especially in the cultivation of subjectivism, the concern for social action, and the call for community.  Indeed, their general appeal was from a platform of a fusion of both traditionalism and modernity, and for a time they were very successful.  Yet, as has been noted earlier, evangelicals did not speak with one voice, and their triumph did not last long.

HONEST TO GOD

      By the 1960s, many clergy and some laity of the churches in Britain (particularly the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the Methodist and Congregational Churches) had been affected in their thinking and attitudes by three movements for reform – the biblical-theology, liturgical, and ecumenical movements.  The first had helped them retain the centrality of the Bible and its teaching while accepting higher criticism; the second had made them conscious of the need to make worship meaningful and relevant; and the third had given them a sense of belonging to a whole larger than their own denomination.  Much the same could be claimed for the old-line denominations in America.

      However, these movements hardly addressed questions of truth – Who is God? and What is the Gospel? – for people who were very conscious of living in a scientific age.  Thus, there developed in Britain, among those who wanted to express the faith in ways appropriate to a scientific age (and significantly in the early sixties), what was called Christian radicalism.  John Robinson, former Cambridge don and then bishop of Woolwich, called himself a radical and explained what Christian radicalism was in a BBC radio broadcast in February 1963.  Its essence, he said, was summed up in the statement of Jesus that “the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.”  A radical is neither a reformist nor a revolutionary, although he will have something in common with both.  The church always needs both reformists and revolutionaries, but it also needs (especially in troublesome times) the radicals.

      The radical seeks to go to the root of the matter.  He asks (as it were): What is the Sabbath for?  What human values does it exist to frame?  Then the radical attempts to ensure (at whatever cost to the institution or to orthodoxy) that it answers the questions.  Thus, the radical goes to the roots of his own tradition.  He must love that tradition, and he must weep over it, even if he has ultimately to pronounce its doom.

      Therefore, the bishops short book Honest to God, explaining his involvement in a reluctant revolution, is an expression of this British radicalism.  It is an attempt in the atmosphere of growing secularization to get down to the roots of the tradition found in Scripture and in the history of Christian theology.  He challenged traditional ways of thinking about God and God’s relation to the world, about the identity of Jesus Christ as both God and man, about Christian morality, and about Christian prayer.  He spoke of God as “the ground of Being,” of Jesus as “the Man for others,” of “the new morality” (nothing prescribed except to love), and of a form of “worldly holiness.”  And he quoted much from both Tillich and Bonhoeffer as well as referring approvingly to Bultmann’s famous essay from the 1940s, “The New Testament and Mythology.”

      Much water has flowed under the bridge during the thirty years since Honest to God first appeared.  What seemed outrageous, heretical, and intolerable to the traditional churchgoers in 1963 probably seems commonplace now, even though they did not like it when it was first published.  On March 22, 1963, the retired bishop of London, Dr. J. W. C. Wand, summarized the argument of Honest to God in these words in his review in Church Times:

The spacemen have searched the skies and have failed to find either the Christian heaven or the God who was supposed to dwell there.  The result has been to make our traditional way of thinking of God as someone “out there” quite outmoded.  If we wish to keep in line with modern scientific thought we must think of God as someone “in here” at the root of our being, or, better still, not as being at all but as the ground of all being.  It is believed that this will involve a radical re-thinking not only of Christian doctrine but also of worship and ethics.  Worship will belong not to some special department of life, but to all life: to work is to pray as to pray is to work.  Conduct will be regulated not by a set of rules given from outside, but by the need of love as the very spring of all our actions.  However, just as it is necessary to retain the name God in spite of the erosion of the personal element in describing the divine existence, so the rules and regulations are maintained in spite of the blunting of their fine edges by emphasis on the exceptions.  (The Honest to God Debate, 85)

To Dr. Wand there was not really anything new in what his younger colleague was saying.  He hoped, however, that the radical bishop would not continue to attack religion because, for the “man in the street,” public worship in the churches was an access to the possibility of faith.

      Writing in the [London] Observer of Sunday, March 24, 1963, and claiming to speak on behalf of the laity, Professor C. S. Lewis (whose books commending Christian orthodoxy maintained good sales) stated that

we have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven.  We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was officially condemned before our time....  We have always thought of God as being not only “in” and “above”, but also “below” us.

Then Lewis proceeded (with tongue in cheek?) to attempt to defend the bishop’s position:

The image of the Earth-Mother gets in something which that of the Sky-Father leaves out.  Religions of the Earth-Mother have hitherto been spiritually inferior to those of the Sky-Father, but, perhaps, it is now time to readmit some of their elements.  (The Honest to God Debate, 91)

Lewis’s words seem to have a prophetic ring about them as we look back through the years during which we have seen the arrival of Christian feminism and the calling of God “Mother.”

      While the bishop’s fellow radicals enthusiastically commended his theology, one (now well known) writer, Alasdaír MacIntyre, then an Oxford don, claimed that the second half of the book revealed that the bishop was “a very conservative atheist.”  Further, after commenting on the theologies of Tillich, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer as utilized by the bishop, MacIntyre asserted: “we can see now that Dr. Robinson’s voice is not just that of an individual, that his book testifies to the existence of a whole group of theologies that have retained a theistic vocabulary but acquired an atheistic substance” (Encounter, September 1963, in The Honest to God Debate, 215).  MacIntyre spoke from within the British school of the philosophy of language.  According to that school’s use of the verification principle, the bishop did not speak of God at all.

      In America, Theodore O. Wedel of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, explained in The Episcopalian of August 1963:

The Bishop of Woolwich is not committing a crime in revealing to a wider public what has been going on for a generation and longer in the world of advanced theological learning.  He is attempting to prepare the laity of the churches for readjustments in some of their naive, adolescent, often outdated, and even idolatrous conceptions of the Christian faith.  It is the business of our theologians to reinterpret the faith to each age of cultural change.  Honest to God is simply a bold and, as some theologians may say, premature opening of a Pandora’s box of theological novelties under debate among doctors of the schools behind the scenes.  (The Honest to God Debate, 180)

Dr. Wedel believed that the churches were in the midst of a Copernican revolution and it was necessary for them to adjust to it for survival.

      In the late fall of 1963, when the dust had settled and the initial reviews had been written and published, the bishop collected his thoughts, and they were published as the concluding part of the book, The Honest to God Debate.  In certain ways what the bishop wrote here is clearer than what he wrote in the book that led to all the excitement and debate.

      Dr. Robinson used the analogy of a currency crisis (e.g., of the pound sterling) to seek to portray what had happened from March 1963.  His book played a major part in causing a crisis regarding confidence in the value of traditional, orthodox Christian discourse – in the creeds, doctrinal formulations, moral codes, and liturgical forms.  The crisis centered on the questions: Are the doctrinal statements (e.g., “I believe in God the Father Almighty...”) to be understood objectively or subjectively?  Do the creeds describe God as God truly is – the eternal, infinite Being, who causes all being – or do they describe God (the Ground of Being) as we experience it/Him?

      The bishop certainly held that doctrinal statements are much more the result of reflection on religious experience than they are objective descriptions of God and supernature.

To stress this existential, experiential element behind all the Christian’s affirmations is not in the least to say that they are purely subjective, in the sense that they represent merely his way of looking at things....  They are expressions of a trust in a Reality which is trust-worthy, and the clauses of the Creed, the doctrines and forms of the Church, describe this Reality, not just the individual’s state.  But they are subjective in the sense in which Kierkegaard said that “Truth is subjectivity.”  For truth beyond the level of information cannot, he insisted, be apprehended in a purely objective, “spectator” relationship, but only as man is prepared to stand, as subject in an I-Thou relationship of engagement, trust, and commitment.  It is in this sense that Tillich can say that “all theological statements are existential”: they have all in the last resort to be referred back to this relationship, and their cash value tested by it.  (The Honest to God Debate, 244)

Even as in times of prosperity we do not much think about what lies behind our paper money, so likewise in normal times churchgoers do not ask about and question the doctrinal statements of the church.  In 1963, said Dr. Robinson, they were asking whether such discourse stood for anything real.  What is its cash value?

      When there is a currency crisis there are basically two ways of reacting.  One is to stress the value of the old money, engage in appropriate reforms, and try to extend its area of exchange.  The other is to admit that the old money has a limited life and to set about seeing how it can be replaced, while there is time, by another currency with as little real loss as may be managed.  In the theological-currency crisis, Dr. Robinson, as a Christian radical, insisted that Christians should not fear the crisis but face it honestly and openly – which he was seeking to do.  He sincerely believed that the process of secularization, with its distrust of any proposition’s going beyond the empirical evidence, was forcing the church to strip down its statements and be rigorously honest about what it could claim.

      The way in which the bishop explains the doctrine of the Trinity indicates clearly what he means by a radical restatement of classic orthodoxy.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not, as it has often been represented, a model of the divine life as it is in itself.  It is a formula or definition describing the distinctively Christian encounter with God.  Hence all the features in the Trinitarian formula are in the last analysis representations of elements in the existential relationship.  (Ibid., 254)

The Christian experience, he insists, is of one God in three modes of being, and yet they are not simply successive modes.  So,

positively, one can say that for the Christian the deepest awareness of ultimate reality, of what for him is most truly and finally real, can only be described at one and the same time in terms of the love of God and of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.  All these are equally true and equally deep insights into and understanding of reality, and yet they palpably express and define one reality, not competing realities.  (Ibid., 255)

      Yet, the doctrine of the Trinity is not the description of a or the specific, supernatural Being as He exists in his own eternity and infinity.  Rather, it is the description of Being as Being (not a or the Being) known in and through Jesus Christ.  Thus, the doctrine or dogma is to the experienced reality of Being what the map is to the earth or the model is to the scientist.  The truths of this doctrine are truths about the relational experience in and with Being and are readings from it; they are not statements about God-as-God-is-in-Himself, for that presumes an untenable view of God for modern man.  Humanity has left behind the three-deckered universe and cannot think of a great chain of being beginning with God as the first uncaused Being.

      In summary it could be claimed that the book Honest to God, and the debate it caused, was an important factor in the mid-1960s in opening the doors and the windows of the traditional old-line churches in Britain and America to receiving the new winds of doctrine that had been created in the minds of primarily German theologians.  It is to that which these minds produced that we now turn.

RUDOLF BULTMANN

      While Barth was the most discussed Continental theologian from the 1930s to the 1950s, Bultmann could claim that honor for the 1960s.  I was studying theology in the early 1960s in London University in England, and Bultmann was required reading in the faculty of theology – as he was in virtually every American seminary and university faculty of theology also.  Although Barth and Bultmann were allies in common opposition to liberal Protestantism around 1920, they drifted apart later.  So much so that Barth published a book in 1952 against Bultmann’s theology complaining that in it secular philosophy (from Heidegger) had the prominent position; thus, he (Bultmann) was taking theology back into an Egyptian bondage.  (See Rudolf Bultmann – Ein Versuch ihn zu verstehen [1952].)

      Bultmann was professor of New Testament at Marburg from 1921 until his retirement in 1951.  He pioneered the study of the Gospels via the new method of form-criticism; from this he taught that we learn from the Gospels more about the theology of the early Christian church than about Jesus Himself.  The value of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as biographies is minimal and negligible.  Like Barth, Bultmann rejected the way of Harnack and other liberal Protestants who looked for the real historical Jesus freed from the interpretation placed on him by the early church.  Bultmann’s theological aim was to interpret Christianity in such a way as to be radically skeptical about the historical value of the Gospels for a life of Jesus, yet continue to believe in the essential message of the New Testament.  That is, he held that there is a word of God addressed to man here and now via the New Testament.  His work as an exegete and interpreter is well seen in his Theology of the New Testament (1951 and 1955).

      Bultmann is probably best known for his view that the history of Jesus was quickly turned into a myth and it is this myth that we get in the Gospels.  That is, we hear of a divine, pre-existent being who came to earth, who was opposed by Satan and demons, and who made atonement for the sins of the world by His blood.  Then He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, from where He would shortly return surrounded by angels to inaugurate a new age.  Bultmann was sure that no modern man living with all the benefits of science and technology could believe in demons and bodily resurrection.  However, he was also sure that hidden within what he called the mythology of the New Testament was God’s word addressed to man.  That word, he believed, has to be released through the process of demythologization, which was hermeneutics, a method of exegesis and interpretation.  (The primary source for Bultmann’s proposal and the ensuing controversy is a series entitled Kerygma und Mythos, edited by Hans-Werner Bartsch and published in five volumes between 1948 and 1955 in Hamburg.  Part of this material was published in English as Kerygma and Myth in 1961.)

      Bultmann first formulated his program of demythologization in an address to the members of the Confessing Church in Germany.  They were all faced at that time with the massive challenge of German National Socialism with its mythological and ideological program.  Bultmann wanted to present the Gospel of the transcendent God without mythology.  He judged that the key to the hermeneutics was the concept of existence: what is the truth about human existence?  Man, unlike the animals, not only exists but also has some understanding of his existence.  In the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Bultmann found an exposition of human existence that he believed gave him the key to unlock for modern man the word of God in the Bible for all men.  So he was able to interpret in modern, existential terms what he believed was the essential message of the apostles concerning the purpose and meaning of human existence.  And he did this without reference to heaven and hell, Satan and demons, resurrection and second coming.

      In a letter that he wrote to the Sheffield Industrial Mission in England, Bultmann stated his understanding of the gospel:

By nature men live by their own will and want to achieve their security by their own power.  That is what the NT calls sin.  For the basic sin is not the breaking of moral commandments (this follows from the basic sin) but man’s self-will and his intention of trying to live by his own wisdom and power.  Need for acceptance also belongs to the life of man, and by nature man tries to satisfy this need for acceptance through his own power.

      The grace of God is grace for the sinner.  The kerygma tells the natural man (which we all are) that he can only find his security if he lets go his self-security and that he can only find acceptance if he lets it be given by God in the knowledge that without God he is nothing.  The grace of God releases him from all feverish searching for security and from all resentments and from the complexes which grow out of an unsatisfied need for acceptance.

He proceeded to insist that the kerygma requires the surrender of self-will and self-security as well as trust in the grace of God, which is the kerygma of the cross (The Honest to God Debate, 138).

      Obviously Bultmann’s attraction to many people was that he appeared to be retaining the faith in a truly modern way.  However, the question remains as to whether the process of demythologization (which he never was able to perfect) means in practice a total reductionism (as Peter Berger believed it did – see chapter six).  However, in the 1960s such demythologization was a popular, even if not fully understood, method of theology.

PAUL TILLICH

      Tillich was born in Germany in 1886 and, in the midst of a successful academic career as a philosopher, left there in 1933 in order to escape imprisonment by the Nazi government.  He had to learn English, but he soon established himself as a leading philosophical theologian while he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York.  He retired in 1955.  Then, with his appointment as university professor at Harvard, he was able to lecture on whatever subjects he chose and did so to large and enthusiastic audiences.  His influence has been both direct and indirect.  Certainly his theological method of correlation was influential in the 1950s and remains influential among theologians of the 1990s; further, through his popular addresses and sermons (as well as through those who, like John Robinson, used his ideas), Tillich’s way of speaking about God and Jesus Christ in terms of “Being” has entered into the ordinary discourse as well as into the liturgical texts of the old-line denominations.

      Thus, though he died in 1965 he was, as far as the general public and the churchgoers were concerned, at the height of his influence in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.  In fact, on March 16, 1959 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.  He was a man of many dimensions who had been a chaplain in the First World War, who had espoused Christian socialism, who enjoyed the benefits of capitalism, who was considered a wonderful Christian even though he rarely attended church worship, and whose public lectures and published writings have proved seminal for all kinds of theological movements since the 1950s.

      Tillich himself saw his intellectual work primarily in terms of the interpretation of religious symbols in such a way that secular man could understand and be moved by them.  He had little patience with theologies that attempted to throw a message at people like a stone (he had neo-orthodoxy in mind), without taking into account where people were and what their human concerns were.  At a popular level, Tillich made his hearers and readers feel important because he took their existential situation and questions so seriously.

      For Tillich, philosophy was indispensable because through philosophy the theologian was able to formulate precisely the serious questions being asked by people in order to answer them from the Christian revelation.  In particular, he believed that existentialist ontology (the analysis of those structures of being encountered by people as they faced reality in and around themselves) was indispensable.  For this ontology he looked not only to Heidegger and Sartre in Europe but back to Plato, Augustine, and German idealist philosophers.  How he saw philosophy’s serving theology is clearly set out in his Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (1955).  This appeared between the first (1951) and the second (1957) volumes of his Systematic Theology.

      Since Tillich wanted to be faithful to the historic Christian message as well as speak to modern, secular man in terms that made sense to him, he devised and employed a method of correlation.  To correlate is to bring two things into mutual relation (to co-relate), and so Tillich meant that he would explain the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and through theological answers in mutual interdependence.  So, through the insights of secular philosophy he formulated the existential questions being asked in a secular age, and through biblical and theological study he pointed to the answers within the Christian faith.  He criticized neo-orthodoxy for giving answers to questions that people were not asking.  But he also criticized the old liberal theology he had known in Germany as a student because it was one sided – “everything was said by man, nothing to man.”  He himself has been criticized on various grounds, not least for seemingly allowing secular philosophical analysis too much influence in the study of man and his existential questions.  Certainly he saw human beings as always in tension and in anxiety, threatened by nonbeing, yet finding courage and wholeness and (as the title of one of his popular books indicated) finding “a courage to be” in God, Being-Itself.

      When we turn to his exposition of the Christian faith, we find that it is also expressed in philosophical terminology.  He rejected talk of God as the supreme or ultimate or first Being and spoke instead of God in terms of Being.  In fact, he deliberately tried to distance himself from traditional talk about God as found in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions.  So he wrote: “God does not exist.  He is Being itself beyond essence and existence.  Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him” (Systematic Theology, 1:205).  That is, God as the supreme Being, the Final Cause, and the Ultimate One does not exist, for God is Being, or Being-Itself, or the infinite power of Being.  In his popular sermons he spoke of “God above God,” intending to say that the God who is Being-Itself is much superior to the God of traditional theism, who is a finite God because He is presented as personal and as a being.  Yet he explained that belief in a personal God, which he encouraged, is not belief in a supremely infinite Person.  It means that Being-Itself is the ground of everything personal and contains and carries within Itself the ontological power of personality.

      Tillich denied that he was a pantheist, equating the essence of the world with God.  He maintained that God as God is absolute and infinite, unconditioned and free.  Therefore, all ways of speaking about Him except in terms of Being-Itself are symbolic.  The word Tillich used in the third volume of his Systematic Theology to describe his view of the relationship of God and the world was panentheism (421-22).  That is, while God and the world are not identical, they are inextricably united.  The world is in God without being God.  Put another way, everything finite (natural, social, and personal) participates in Being-Itself.  At the same time, God as the power of Being transcends every being and the totality of beings (the world).  So, what precisely he meant by the transcendence and the immanence of God is far from clear.

      But what of Jesus Christ?  For Tillich, He was certainly not God made man.  Rather, He was supremely man, who in and through His humanity revealed a new order of being.  In the Christ the unity of Being-Itself and humanity was restored, and thus the Christ is “New Being.”  What occurred in Jesus Christ is what is needful for all human beings – true union with Being­Itself.  So the Christian symbol of Christ is the symbol of New Being appearing under the conditions of existence and yet conquering and bridging the gap between essence and existence.  Tillich wrote:

The New Being has appeared in a personal life, and for humanity it could not have appeared in any other way; for the potentialities of being are completely actual in personal life alone.  Only a person, within our experience, is a fully developed self, confronting a world to which it belongs at the same time.  Only in a person are the polarities of being complete.  Only a person is completely individualized, and for just this reason he is able to participate without limits in his world.  Only a person has an unlimited power of self-transcendence, and for just this reason he has the complete structure, the structure of rationality.  Only a person has freedom, including all its characteristics, and for this reason he alone has destiny.  Only the person is finite freedom, which gives him the power of contradicting himself and returning to himself.  Of no other being can all this be said.  And only in such a being can the New Being appear.  Only where existence is most radically existence – in him who is finite freedom – can existence be conquered.  (Systematic Theology, 2:121)

So for Tillich it is the case that “in all its concrete details the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ confirms his character as the bearer of the New Being or as the one in whom the conflict between the essential unity of God and man and man’s existential estrangement is overcome” (ibid., 131).  The paradoxical character of the being of Jesus as the Christ consists in the fact that although he has only finite freedom within the conditions of space and time, he is not estranged but is united to the ground of his being.

      The New Being in Jesus as the Christ is also the New Being in the spiritual community that is not to be simply identified as the historical church with its religion, even though it is closely related to the churches.  The spiritual community is real, unconquerably real, but also hidden, invisible, and open to faith alone.  Reflecting on the story of Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16), Tillich commented that “as the Christ is not the Christ without those who receive him as the Christ, so the Spiritual Community is not Spiritual unless it is founded on New Being as it has appeared in the Christ” (Systematic Theology, 3:149).  Apparently Tillich came to his Christology through soteriology, the experience of salvation/healing.  In fact, he called Christology a function of soteriology, for it was for him a function of the experiences of those who experience healing in the spiritual community that develops after Jesus.

      Although Tillich had many admirers and readers, and though he produced a fascinating and attractive philosophy of religion and spirituality, the question that one is left with is whether it is genuinely a recognizably Christian theology.  Put more simply, did he really believe in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ?

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

      On April 9,1945, Bonhoeffer was executed by the Gestapo just a few days before the Allies arrived to liberate the concentration camp.  “In the almost fifty years that I worked as a physician,” said the camp doctor, “I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God” (Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1970, 830–34).  During the 1960s it seemed that Bonhoeffer had a special – maybe unique – word to say to Christians through his Letters and Papers from Prison and other books.  Certainly some of his expressions and ways of describing the Christian vocation rang bells in peoples minds and struck chords in their hearts.

      Before his arrest by the Gestapo, Bonhoeffer had been in charge of the illegal seminary in Germany run by the Confessing Church (the church that had separated from the State Church because of that church’s support of Hitler).  Reflections on the communal life and sense of Christian vocation there lay behind two of his (later) popular books, The Cost of Discipleship (1937) and Life Together (1939).  However, it was the material he wrote in prison and that was edited by his student and friend, Eberhard Bethge, that seemed to speak most clearly to people struggling to make sense of Christianity in modernity.

      In The Cost of Discipleship he made a vivid contrast between what he called cheap grace and costly grace.  In the parishes of Germany, as elsewhere in the 1930s, Christianity was being made easy because forgiveness was being offered without the call to repentance, and absolution was being given without evidence of contrition.  Against such a distortion of the faith he advocated a costly grace that recognizes the cost to God of Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary and that calls for and expects radical obedience and discipleship in the world.

      A series of statements in Letters and Papers from Prison became part of the general Christian vocabulary during the 1960s.  It was conveniently forgotten (in most cases) that they represented tentative and obscure groping by a man living under the most difficult of conditions.  This was because they seemed to describe perfectly what radical minds and voices wanted to say.

      Speaking of the autonomy of man in the scientific and technological world and without any special sense of the presence of God, Bonhoeffer referred to it as the world come of age.  That is, modern man did not need God as the hypothesis to account for the world as science described it and as he experienced it.  He could get on quite well without such a hypothesis.

      Bonhoeffer also spoke of a religionless Christianity, by which he meant Christianity separated from the religion of the State Church of Germany that had supported Hitler.  Also, he had in mind that necessary rejection of human religion that his friend, Karl Barth, had so clearly commended in his writings.  Then, trying to find ways to speak of the living God that were not contaminated by apostate religion, he spoke, for example, of God as being the Beyond in the midst of our life.  Further, seeking to describe the life of true discipleship lived fully in the world with and for Christ he spoke of holy worldliness.  By this phrase he rejected the idea of a retreat into a pietistic or ecclesiastical enclave.

      Writing in prison on the theme of Christian worldliness and thinking in terms of the Christ who is the Creator and who also was crucified, he said:

Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.  This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions.  Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a Deus ex machina.  The Bible however directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.  To this extent we may say that the process we have described by which the world came of age was an abandonment of a false conception of God, and a clearing of the decks for the God of the Bible, who conquers power and space in the world by his weakness.  (Letters,164)

Regrettably, Bonhoeffer was never able to fill out these thoughts and develop a truly systematic theology of the suffering God.

      Without the threat of the Nazi regime and in the freedom of America in the 1950s and 1960s, Bonhoeffer’s choice expressions lost their original context and were filled – at least in part – with the content of modernity.  What Bonhoeffer himself would have made of the way his ideas and phrases were used (e.g., by Bishop John Robinson and the secular theologians) we can never know.  All that we do know is that they were used, and used widely, in support of the revolution in thinking about God, Jesus, and Christianity in the 1960s.  Certainly the radical theologians to whom we now turn saw themselves as continuing the insights not only of Bonhoeffer but also of another German, Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), who had also been close to Barth in the 1920s and had written on the nature of modern secularism (see his Reality of Faith, 1959).

FROM CHRISTIAN ATHEISM TO A THEOLOGY OF HOPE

      During the first sixties, the theology that attracted the greatest attention in the news media in America was the death-of-God theology.  Jesus remained a model for humanity, but the God whom He addressed as Father was gone, said the Christian atheists, who were lost in the process of secularization.  This theology represents the internalization of radical doubt within the churches.  It is clearly to be found in The New Essence of Christianity (1961) by William Hamilton, and also in his much discussed article entitled “Thursday’s Child” that appeared in Theology Today in January 1964.  Speaking specifically of the American (as contrasted with the European) theologian, he wrote:

He really doesn’t believe in God, or that there is a God or that God exists.  It is not that he is fashionably against idols or opposed to God as a Being or as part of the world.  It is God himself he has trouble with.  Can one stand before God in unbelief?  In what sense is such a man “before God”?  Faith, or trusting God, ought to produce some palpable fruits.  The theologian may sometimes see these, but never in himself.  Something has happened.  At the center of his thoughts and meditations is a void, a disappearance, an absence.  (“Thursday’s Child,” 487)

He went on to remark that in the past the theologian would distinguish among God, Christendom, Christianity, and church so that a different balance of yes and no could be said of each one.  Now he finds himself equally alienated from each of the realities conveyed by the four words and says no to each.  Thus, the theologian lives in the present with only love to guide him, love he sees in the life of Jesus.

      Thomas Altizer proclaimed that God died when Jesus was born.  That is, God as transcendent died, and God as immanent came into being.  So in his Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) he claimed that “the radical Christian proclaims that God has actually died in Christ, that this death is both a historical and a cosmic event, and as such, it is a final and irrevocable event, which cannot be reversed by a subsequent religious or cosmic movement” (p.15).  Therefore, the Christian proclaims the God who has totally negated or sacrificed Himself in Christ.  Paul van Buren had earlier argued in his Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963) not only that God had died, but also that the very word God had no meaning.  In fact, God-talk was really talk about man and human life and history.

      In 1966 in a book that he wrote with Altizer, Hamilton made it abundantly clear that by the death of God he intended to deny belief in the God posited and described by traditional Christian theism.

This more than the old protest against natural theology or metaphysics; more than the usual assurance that before the holy God all our language gets broken and diffracted into paradox.  It is really that we do not know, do not adore, do not possess, do not believe in God.  It is not just that a capacity has dried up within us; we do not take all this as merely a statement about the nature of the world and we try to convince others.  God is dead.  We are not talking about the absence of the experience of God, but about the experience of the absence of God.  (Altizer and Hamilton, 1966, 3)

Both Altizer and Hamilton insisted that only Christians can truly proclaim that God is dead.  They both saw themselves as disciples of Jesus, who stood against all dehumanizing and alienating powers (of which the traditional God of theism is one!).

      Looking back, it is now easy to see that the Christian atheists went too far; and though they caused a minor sensation in the first sixties, they were soon forgotten as the second sixties arrived.  They were so married to the spirit of the first sixties that they found themselves widowers in the second sixties as the mood of America changed.  By 1967 people were feeling the need to be able to look forward in hope to better times and to a God who would be there waiting for them.

      It was in 1967 that Jürgen Moltmann visited America and began to expound his theology of hope.  His book entitled Theology of Hope, originally published in German in 1965, became available in English translation in 1967.  He announced in the book that

God is not somewhere in the Beyond, but he is coming and as the coming One he is present.  He promises a new world of all-embracing life, of righteousness and truth, and with this promise he calls this world in question – not because to the eye of hope it is as nothing, but because to the eye of hope it is not yet what it has the prospect of being. (164)

Addressing the Harvard Divinity School in 1967 he further explained:

In a time when God was questioned, the Christian faith saw, in Jesus, God’s incarnation.  Not the resurrection, but the incarnation; not Easter, but Christmas stood at the center.  In a time when man began to regard himself as questionable, faith saw in Jesus true man, the creative archetype of the divine man.  Today the future is becoming more and more the pressing question for a mankind that is now able to destroy itself.  The Christian faith discovers today in God the power of a future that stems itself against the destruction of the world.  The God of the exodus and of the resurrection is the “God of hope” rather than “God above” [he refers to Karl Barth] or “the ground of being” [he refers to Paul Tιllich].  He is in history “the coming God,” as the Old Testament prophets said, who announces his coming in his promises and his lowly Messiah.  He is the “absolute future” [he refers to Karl Rahner] or, figuratively, the Lord of the future, who says, “Behold I make all things new.”  (“Resurrection as Hope,” in Religion, Revolution and the Future [1969], 60)

Here we note that Moltmann is seeking to preserve the reality of God as the transcendent One.  However, he is locating that transcendence not with Barth outside space and time in eternity and infinity, and not with Tillich through space and time as ultimate Being, but in space and time in the future.  That is, God belongs to the absolute future of His yet-to-appear universal, sovereign reign.

      The turn to the future (instead of looking above or below) was suggested not merely by the reality of social life in a scientific age with the prospect of nuclear war, but was also prompted by the growing interest in eschatology among students of the New Testament in the 1950s and 1960s.  Together with Moltmann, the other prominent names associated with the theology of hope were the Germans Wolfhart Pannenberg and Johannes Metz and the American Carl Braaten.  Although the theology of hope never had a wide following in America (in contrast to Europe), it became a catalyst for the emergence of both political and liberation theologies in the 1970s in North and South America.  Meanwhile, both Moltmann and Pannenberg developed new themes and theologies in their writings in the late 1970s and 1980s.

PROCESS THEOLOGY

      If it is the case that both the existential theology of Bultmann and Tillich and the neo-orthodoxy of Barth represent a conscious response to the shattering of the optimism of liberal Protestantism through two world wars, then it may be claimed that the second major force shaping theology in the twentieth century has been the revolution in the scientific worldview.  The first change came because of the theory of the evolution of dynamically developing forms of life associated with the name of Charles Darwin and with biology that spread through other sciences into physics, chemistry, psychology, and sociology.  The second change came because the theory of relativity associated with the name of Albert Einstein, and the subsequent development of quantum mechanics and field theory, had replaced the world of Newtonian physics.  The new physics looked on the subatomic world as a flux of energy and a network of relations.

      The influence of these new theories led quite separately to the process philosophy and metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and the evolutionary, cosmic vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  Whitehead had been a prominent mathematician in England before he turned his attention in America to producing a metaphysics that harmonized with the new science.  This metaphysics has since been used by theologians (e.g., Charles Hartshorne, Bernard E. Meland, Bernard M. Loomer, Daniel Day Williams, Schubert M. Ogdeп, John Cobb, Walter E. Stokes, and W. Norman Pittenger) to produce what has come to be called process theology.  In contrast, Teilhard was a geologist in search of man’s prehistory, living in China and the East.  From geology he turned to produce his own cosmological-theological vision.  As a Roman Catholic, Jesuit priest, however, he was only allowed to publish strictly scientific studies on geology and paleontology.  So his theological writings had to wait to appear until after his death in 1955.  They appeared first in French and then were quickly translated into other languages.  His best known work is The Phenomenon of Man (1965).

      The central but not the only theme in American process theology has been the doctrine of God and His relationship to the world, for here it most clearly is different from traditional Christian theism.  It proceeds on the criticism by Whitehead of three concepts of God found in traditional Christian theism.  These are the ruling monarch, in the likeness of Caesar (the King of kings and the Lord of lords), the ruthless moralist of the Hebrew prophets (the holy and righteous Lord), and the unmoved Mover of Aristotle (to whom the traditional arguments for the existence of God point).  Furthermore, it builds on what Whitehead called the Galilean origins of Christianity – those tender elements in the world that operate by love as seen in Jesus.

      Whitehead also speaks of the dipolar nature of God.  That is, He has both a primordial and a consequent nature.  In His primordial nature, God is the ground of actuality and is the eternal urge of desire.  In His consequent nature, God is actually consequent on the creative advance of the world.  That is, the world acts upon God; in fact, the world passes into the consequent nature of God where its values are made available for the ongoing process.  So, the love in the world passes into God and floods back from Him into the world.  God is the great companion of the world and its fellow sufferer.  Together with the world, God is caught up in creative advance into novelty.  In classical theism, God as God is not changed in His nature by his relationship with the world as Creator and Savior.

      Process theologians thus claim that their doctrine of God truly reflects the suffering, gracious God of Christian revelation and also makes sense in terms of modern understanding of cosmic evolution.  They insist that the world – man and human events – makes a difference to God, for the greatest reality in God is not His detachment or powerfulness but His persuasive and receptive love.  With this in mind, W. Norman Pittenger, the Episcopalian theologian, wrote:

Now if the basic dynamic in the cosmos is the energizing of creative love, ceaselessly working to provide opportunity for the actualization of more widely shared good, it is not absurd to think that the event of Jesus Christ is thus important.  For, as a matter of fact, that event did illuminate the past and make sense of the history of the Jewish people (and through them, of all other seeking for and responding to increasing good); it did, in its initial impact and its continuing movement into the lives of those brought within its ambit, stand out as a striking and notably stimulating moment in history; it did, and it still does, open up new possibilities, opportunities, and also realizations and expressions of creative good in man’s world. (1971, 211–12)

The event of Jesus Christ is a disclosure of God given not in theory or in speculation but in a concrete, historical human act.  As such it also provides not only insight but also stimulus for human existence, which can now be seen as potentially the possibility of responsive action to creative good.

      Obviously, process theologians insist that Jesus must be seen as genuinely in and of this world and truly and really a man.  He was not an intruder from some other sphere or realm and certainly not a divine visitor to this world.  He was the man for God and the man for others.  And it is in this man as a personal agent that God could and did work.  In the totality of the humanity of Jesus there was an activity of the divine.  Thus, “Jesus is the coincidence of God’s action or agency and man’s responsive action or agency, not in spite of but under the very conditions of genuinely human life – and that, Christians believe, in a degree not elsewhere known in human experience” (ibid., 211).  So Jesus is unique not in that He is the eternal Son of God made man, but in that He is the fullest and most wonderful example of a man who expressed God’s presence and action in what He was and did.

      Teilhard, who was not familiar with Whitehead’s philosophy, produced a kind of evolutionary mysticism, with Christ at its origins, center, and goal as the alpha and the omega.  He was concerned specifically with the role of Christ in an evolving and convergent universe.  He concentrates on the cosmic Christ, who is present throughout the physical universe where He draws all things toward a developing and converging unity.  Thus, Teilhard wrote in a piece entitled “My Universe”:

All around us, Christ is physically active in order to control all things.  From the ultimate vibration of the atom to the loftiest mystical contemplation; from the lightest breeze that ruffles the air to the broadest currents of life and thought, he ceaselessly animates, without disturbing, all the earth’s processes.  And in return Christ gains physically from every one of them.  Everything that is good in the universe (that is, everything that goes towards unification through effort) is gathered up by the Incarnate Word as a nourishment that it assimilates, transforms and divinises.  In the consciousness of this vast two-way movement, of ascent and descent, by which the development of the Pleroma (that is the bringing of the universe to maturity) is being effected, the believer can find astonishing illumination and strength for the direction and maintenance of his effort.  Faith in the universal Christ is exhaustibly fruitful in the moral and mystical fields.  (1968, 60)

This teaching on the cosmic or universal Christ proved very attractive in the 1960s and 1970s both to Roman Catholics and Protestants.  It had a devotional or spiritual attraction that the more cerebral process theology lacked.  Further, it has provided inspiration and substance to modern theologies of nature, of the environment, and of ecology, created in the 1970s and 1980s.  In contrast, process theology has also been utilized by the more academically oriented feminist theologians (e.g., Sally MacFague) as a way of developing panentheism (the world is in God and therefore God is appropriately thought of as the mother who births the world and expresses herself in the cycles of nature).

FOR FURTHER READING

Bethge, Eberhard.  Costly Grace. An Introduction to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.

—.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  London: Collins, 1970.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich.  Letters and Papers from Prison.  New York: Macmillan, 1963.

Bultmann, Rudolf.  Kerygma and Myth.  New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

Cousins, Ewart H., ed.  Process Theology: Basic Writings.  New York: Newman, 1971.

Edwards, David L., ed.  The Honest to God Debate.   Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963.

Ice, Jackson Lee and John J. Carey, eds.  The Death of God Debate.  Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967.

Mohmann, Jürgen.  Theology of Hope.  New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

Pittenger, W. Norman..  Process Thought and Christian Faith.  New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Robinson, John.  Honest to God.  Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963.

Sweet, Leonard I.  “The 1960s: The Crises of Liberal Christianity and the Public Emergence of Evangelicalism.”  In Evangelicalism and Modern America.  Edited by George Marsden.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984.

Taylor, Mark Kline, ed.  Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries.  San Francisco: Collins, 1987.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre.  The Phenomenon of Man.  New York: Harper, 1959.

Tillich, Paul.  Systematic Theology.  3 vols. in one.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Special note: From 1964 until 1973 a series of yearly anthologies were published.  They contained reprints of what was judged to be those articles and essays that contained significant explorations and directions in theology.  See Marty, Martin E. and Dean G. Peerman, eds.  The New Theology.  10 vols.  New York: Macmillan, 1964–73.

APPENDIX: ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN THE 1960s

      From 1962 to 1965 the Second Vatican Council met in Rome.  In terms of the development of Roman Catholicism, this was a momentous event.  While most of the preparatory material for the assembled bishops was finished by 1962 by theologians schooled in the neo-Scholastic method, the documents from the bishops reflected not only a pastoral approach but also, and importantly, what is best called the phenomenological approach.  That is, the bishops answered the question: Church, what you do you say of yourself?  By so doing, the Council encouraged a philosophical pluralism; not only Thomas Aquinas but other philosophers (e.g., Husserl and Heidegger) could be used by Catholic theologians.

      Since Pope John XXIII desired that the Council should relate the church more positively toward the modern world (the famous policy of aggiornamento), he urged that the bishops use such language as would communicate their message to people who were not schooled in technical philosophy.  By so doing the Council encouraged a positive attitude toward modernity (which was not evident in neo-Scholasticism) and toward pluralism.

      The Pope also desired that the Council contribute to Christian unity.  The bishops shared this concern; thus, to open possible dialogue with Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, as well as with the major Protestant churches of Europe, they spoke and wrote in terms that could be appreciated by these so-called separated brethren.  A common basis for dialogue was not to be found in neo-Scholasticism but rather in a return to the Scriptures and to the Fathers of the undivided church of the first millennium.  By so doing, the Council encouraged biblical studies and historical studies similar to those being pursued in the Protestant faculties of theology in Europe.

      Finally, the bishops (of whom about one half were from the Third World) wanted the faith to be stated in ways that would make sense to people outside Western culture.  This they did and by so doing encouraged the study of the connection of Christianity to other religions, to diverse cultures, and to people in different economic and social situations.

      Whatever the good intentions of the bishops were, the result of their opening the windows of the church to the winds of modernity was the speedy erosion of traditional faith and practice.  Neither the Pope nor the bishops were able to control the dismemberment and reconstruction of theology that took place after 1965.  This activity, encouraged by a hungry press and willing publishers, occurred as great changes took place in the parishes.  Instead of the Latin Mass came the vernacular, simplified Mass, and instead of the organ, guitars were heard.  Since 1978 under Pope John Paul, there has been somewhat of a reassertion of traditional authority, but it is of a limited nature.  The fact is that Roman Catholic theology is now much like liberal Protestant theology, encompassing a spectrum from neo-Scholasticism through to radical feminism, and there are few effective controls on what Roman Catholic theologians say and write.

      We await the results of the reception and use of the long-anticipated new Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) in the parishes.  It has been more than four hundred years since a catechism of such authority has appeared.  In 1566, as mandated by the Council of Trent, the last universal Roman Catechism (the catechism of Pope Pius V) was published.  The present one, which has already proved a best seller in Europe, was seriously delayed in its publication in America until June 1994 because within the ideological divisions of the Catholic Church there was no agreement among the bishops as to how it should be translated (e.g., whether inclusive language be used, and if so how much).  Produced by the more conservative elements in the church, the catechism represents an attempt to recover lost theological ground – to go back, as it were, to the Second Vatican Council.

      While Vatican II reflected two theological trends – aggiornamento (updating) and ressourcement (a return to the sources of Bible and Fathers) – the publication of the catechism, with the obvious agreement of the Pope, represents reaccentramento (recentering).  That is, the contents are meant to balance and include the two trends without submitting to the secularism of modernity.  In this achievement, the new catechism contrasts with certain national ones produced soon after Vatican II.  They tended to be so zealously modern that they minimized or left out traditional elements of Christian faith.  The Universal Catechism is divided into four parts – the Apostles’ Creed, the Sacraments, the Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer.  Although having a very traditional base and structure, the catechism does nevertheless address modern questions in a modern way without losing the essence of the faith.  Time will tell whether or not it succeeds in bringing a more conservative ethos and content back into Western European and American Catholicism and does for the church what Vatican II has failed to do.

Chapter 5 – Typology: Describing Modern Theology

      If we have now arrived at the point where we have some notion of the heredity from which, and the environment in which, modern forms of theology develop, then we are ready to face the problem of how to describe contemporary theologies.  This is no easy task, but we must make a valiant effort.

WHO IS GOD?

      One way of evaluating any theology is to ask of it, who (or what) is God?  We can all agree that this is a reasonable and basic question since theology after all literally means “the study of God.”  If we do actually ask this question not only of liberal theology but also of all the theologies that have been conceived from it and insist on receiving an answer in plain words, we then could claim – possibly to our surprise – to have a general introduction to the different forms of theism that have attracted Western minds in modern times.  We would have discovered that there is no general agreement as to who God is, even among theologians.  In fact, some theologians appear not to believe in God!

      Perhaps it can be claimed that before modern times most people in Western culture had, generally speaking, the same idea of God, even though their ability to express their belief widely differed.  To believe in God meant to believe in a supernatural Being or eternal Spirit who is other than the world and yet is somehow present in the world.  It was to hold that while God is present in and through the world He is not confined by the world, for He is the creator of the world and exists over against it.  So the older theologians spoke of the transcendence of God – God above and beyond the world; and of the immanence of God – God present within His creation; and they insisted that logically His transcendence is before His immanence.  That is, God was God unto Himself before He made both a spiritual universe with angels to dwell in it and a physical universe with mankind to dwell in it.

      Certainly the teaching of the medieval church and then, from the sixteenth century, of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches was clear concerning who God is, whether the answer was in philosophical or biblical terminology.  For example, the first of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England from the sixteenth century states:

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.  And in unity of this Godhead three be three Persons, of one substance, power and eternity; the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Here God-as-God-is-in-Himself (the transcendence of God) is given priority over God-as-God-is-toward/in-the-world (the immanence of God).

      Bearing all this in mind, one way to seek to make sense of modern theology from Schleiermacher to the present is to ask how each theologian or each school of theology handles the relationship of transcendence to immanence – as long as there is clarity as to what these terms mean.  If, for example, the theology is not historic, classical, Trinitarian theism but rather a form of unitarianism or panentheism (literally, “the world is in God”), then transcendence will not be the same concept for each of the three.

      Setting transcendence and immanence as two poles, Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olson seek to analyze modern theology in relation to them in their recent and valuable book, Twentieth Century Theology (1992).  Introducing their comprehensive description of twentieth-century theology (which covers both Protestant and Roman Catholic theology as well as everything from classical liberal theology through neo-orthodoxy to modern narrative theology) they write:

Because the Bible presents God as both beyond and present in the world, theologians in every era are confronted with the challenge of articulating the Christian understanding of the nature of God in a manner that balances, affirms and holds in creative tension the twin truths of the divine transcendence and the divine immanence.  A balanced affirmation of both truths facilitates a proper relation between theology and reason or culture.  Where such a balance is lacking, serious theological problems readily emerge.  Hence an overemphasis on transcendence can lead to a theology that is irrelevant in the cultural context in which it seeks to speak, whereas an overemphasis on immanence can produce a theology held captive to a specific culture. (11–12)

The authors maintain that the theology of the twentieth century offers an interesting case study in the attempt to balance these two aspects of the relation of God to creation.  As we noted in chapter two, the dominant theology at the beginning of the century and before the First World War was the optimistic emphasis on divine immanence, with the confidence that God was at work in the world and in human affairs.  Grenz and Olson maintain that the theological agenda of this century has been determined to a great degree by the aftermath of that war.

      Their method is to expound the emerging and various theologies of this century with respect to the two poles of transcendence and immanence.  A possible weakness of this method is that (1) it presupposes that there ought to be a balance between the two poles, and (2) it presupposes that the concepts of transcendence and immanence are constant.  In my judgment both suppositions are in question and would benefit from further clarity.  This said, Twentieth Century Theology is an extremely useful survey of different theologies.

AN ECUMENICAL PROPOSAL

      Those who have watched the progress of the discussions by theological commissions of member churches of the ecumenical movement (the World Council of Churches and National Councils of Churches) over the last thirty years have often been surprised by the announcement of agreements in doctrine.  Whether it be Anglicans and Roman Catholics, Roman Catholics and Lutherans, or Lutherans and Anglicans, the story has been much the same.  Theologians from the separate churches and claiming to hold to the doctrines of their churches have put their signatures to common statements in which doctrinal agreement on such topics as justification, the Lord’s Supper, and authority is claimed.  In other words, theologians involved in ecumenical dialogue have appeared to be saying two contradictory things – one in their own churches and another in the dialogue with other churches.

      Assuming the honesty and goodwill of these theologians, how can such apparent double-mindedness be explained?  This is where George A. Lindbeck of Yale University seeks to make a positive contribution in his much-discussed book The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984).  His proposals have occasioned debate within both academia and the ecumenical movement.  (See, for example, the book Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck [1990], edited by Bruce D. Marshall.)  Lindbeck’s approach is first to describe the way doctrine has been, and is currently, understood in the churches.  Then he proposes a new way of understanding it, claiming that this new way accounts for the theological agreements of those involved in ecumenical dialogue.

      As he surveyed the theological scene in the early 1980s Lindbeck believed that the most familiar theological theories of religion and doctrine could be divided into three types.  First of all, there is that traditional way of doing theology that emphasizes the cognitive aspects of religion and stresses the ways in which church doctrines function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities.  He recognized this approach in the classic orthodoxies of all the major Christian traditions, from Roman Catholicism through Russian Orthodoxy to Presbyterianism.  It was the approach of those who composed the doctrinal statements of the ecumenical councils of the patristic era, as well as of the Puritans who wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647.  Lindbeck also recognized this approach in a very modern form in the way that recent Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy emphasizes the cognitive or informational meaningfulness of religious utterances and statements (see, for example, D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, [1979]).

      In the second place, there is that way of doing theology that has been in vogue since the early nineteenth century that is based on the experiential-expressive dimension of religion.  Here doctrines are interpreted as “noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations” (Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 17).  Such an approach has characterized liberal theology since Schleiermacher defined religion in terms of a sense and feeling of absolute dependence on that Reality we call God, and since he proceeded to base theological reflection on the reported religious experience of men.

      In the third place, there is that hybrid way of doing theology that seeks to combine the first and second options.  That is to unite the cognitively propositional with the expressively symbolic approaches in order to get the best of both worlds.  Lindbeck found such an approach in the writings of distinguished Roman Catholic theologians – the German Karl Rahner and the French Canadian Bernard Lonergan.  (See further the appendix at the end of this chapter.)

      In terms of ecumenical discussion, those participants (and they tend to be few in the modern era) who hold to the cognitively propositional approach find it the most difficult to come to any agreements.  This is primarily because they cannot see how two sets of different propositions can be said to mean one and the same thing.  For example, how can the doctrine of justification by faith in the Lutheran Augsburg Confession of Faith be said to harmonize with the doctrine of justification in the Decrees and Canons of the Council of Trent?  Here doctrinal reconciliation seems to mean doctrinal capitulation by one side or the other.

      In contrast, those participants who are experiential-expressive symbolists are able to agree on meaning while disagreeing on doctrinal formulations.  For them, the truth is that to which the statement or symbol points; it is not contained in propositional form in the theological wording of sentences and paragraphs.  Here “the general principle is that insofar as doctrines function as nondiscursive symbols, they are polyvalent in import and therefore subject to changes of meaning or even to the loss of meaningfulness, to what Paul Tillich calls their death” (ibid., 17).  Here again doctrinal reconciliation seems to require capitulation either to the meaning proposed by the other side or to a new meaning to which the contrary sets of symbols point.

      On first sight, the theories that utilize both cognitive and experiential-expressive perspectives seem to be better fitted to find a way of showing how there can be genuine doctrinal agreement by those who have disagreed or do disagree still.  Lindbeck’s assessment, however, is that they resort to complicated intellectual gymnastics (and those who have read the more intellectual works of Rahner and Lonergan will understand this claim) and in the end are not convincing.

      As a result, Lindbeck stepped into the void in order to propose an understanding of doctrine and theology that makes the intertwining of invariability and variability in matters of faith easier to understand and appreciate.  His proposal was for a cultural-linguistic approach with the implied view of church doctrine as regulative, or functioning as a rule.  His claim is that a regulative approach has no difficulty in explaining reconciliation without capitulation.  He writes:

Rules, unlike propositions or expressive symbols, retain an invariant meaning under changing conditions of comparability and conflict.  For example, the rules “Drive on the left” and “Drive on the right” are unequivocal in meaning and unequivocally opposed, yet both may be binding: one in Britain and one in the United States, or one where traffic is normal, and the other when a collision must be avoided.  Thus oppositions between rules can in some instances be resolved, not by altering one or both of them, but by specifying when or where they apply, or by stipulating which of the competing directives takes precedence.  (The Nature of Doctrine, 18)

So far so good. Then he proceeds to seek to show that when doctrines are understood as rules (which apply here but not there or there but not here) there is no logical problem in understanding how historically opposed positions can (at least in some cases) be reconciled while remaining unchanged in themselves.

      This cultural-linguistic approach to religion with a regulative view of doctrine is most closely related to what is now called the Yale theology or narrative theology to which we shall return in chapter six.

THE USE OF TYPOLOGY

      Probably the method of presenting and describing contemporary theology that is both the simplest and the most profound is to make use of typology as used in the sociology of knowledge.  This was done with great effect by Ernst Troeltsch in his Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1911, 1931).

      Bible students are familiar with the word typology to refer to those persons, events, and things that pointed from the Old to the New Testament and that prefigured some person or thing revealed in the new covenant and order (the antitype).  Thus, David as king is a type of Jesus as the Christ, and the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt is a type of the deliverance of the new Israel from Satan, sin, and death.  Troeltsch, however, developed a different use of the word typology for social analysis.  He built on its mid-nineteenth-century meaning as pointing both to a perfect example or specimen of something and to a kind, class, or order of things, distinguished by particular characteristics.  For Troeltsch typology meant focusing on the structural features of systems of thought as they are abstracted from place, time, and circumstance.

      A near-perfect example of this method of typology is supplied by H. Richard Niebuhr in his Christ and Culture.  Here is his explanation of type:

A type is always something of a construct, even when it has not been constructed prior to long study of many historic individuals and movements.  When one returns from the hypothetical scheme to the rich complexity of individual events, it is evident at once that no person or group ever conforms completely to a type.  Each historical figure will show characteristics that are more reminiscent of some other family than the one by whose name he has been called, or traits will appear that seem wholly unique and individual.  The method of typology, however, though historically inadequate, has the advantage of calling to attention the continuity and significance of the great motifs that appear and reappear in the long wrestling of Christians with their enduring problem.  Hence also it may help us to gain orientation as we in our own time seek to answer the question of Christ and culture.  (43–44)

The enduring problem is, of course, the relation of the faith to culture.

      Most typologies are based on known systems of thought rather than on aprioristic constructions.  Thus, Niebuhr in proposing such options as “Christ against culture,” “the Christ of culture,” “Christ above culture,” “Christ and culture in paradox,” and “Christ the transformer of culture” created these types after the study of many individual theologians.  He also had specific theologians and Christian movements in mind for the illustration of each type.  Yet he knew, as his book clearly reveals, that this methodology is most successful where there is a limited number of general types and each one is markedly different and sharply delineated from the others.  Thus, in his typology there are two poles, the Christ of culture and the Christ against culture, with intermediate positions.  He was quick to admit that no single Christian thinker fits wholly into one type, for there are certain aspects of his thinking that burst out and reveal that he is a living being and not merely an intellectual construct.  Niebuhr also commended as a suggestive and illuminating use of typology the book Psychological Types (1926) by C. J. Jung.

      I think it is true to say that nobody trying to make sense of modern theology with its tremendous number of varying expressions can really proceed without some sort of typification or schema.  As we noted above, Lindbeck actually was doing this in his description of modern theological method.  It is true enough that no typology as such exists in the world of human beings in space and time, for it is always an intellectual construct.  A carefully constructed typology (as that of Niebuhr), however, is useful to the extent that it does help the student discriminate among empirically available cases and thereby assists in the process of both explanation and understanding.  As long as the student is aware of the rationale behind typology, there is probably no better way for him to approach the tremendous variety and apparent complexity of twentieth-century theology.  This said, it must also be emphasized that the typological cannot replace the work of the critical historian who presents and analyzes the work of individual theologians.  The typological stands alongside such work.

      Perhaps an example of the use of typology by a leading and eminently readable theologian will help to clarify the issue.  The Roman Catholic Avery Dulles, S.J. makes use of typology to good effect in his analysis of one major dimension of theology.  He studies revelation (i.e., the disclosure of God, His nature, and His will) as presented in modern theology in his book Models of Revelation (1985).  His five types are (1) revelation as doctrine, (2) revelation as history, (3) revelation as inner experience, (4) revelation as dialectical presence, and (5) revelation as new awareness.

      Looking at them briefly will provide both an example and a feel for this method of working.  Dulles writes:

Each of these five typical positions situates the crucial moment of revelation at a different point.  For the doctrinal type, the pivotal moment is the formulation of teaching in clear conceptual form.  For the historical type, the decisive point is the occurrence of a historical event through which God signifies his intentions.  For the experiential type (i.e., the type emphasizing inner experience), the crux is an immediate, interior perception of the divine presence.  For the dialectical type, the key element is God’s utterance of a word charged with divine power.  For the awareness type, the decisive moment is the stimulation of the human imagination to restructure experience in the new framework.  (Models of Revelation, 28)

Like Troeltsch and Niebuhr before him, Dulles insists that his typology does not rest on the assumption that every living or recent theologian can be neatly pigeonholed within one and only one of these five types.  If one is to understand hybrid positions, it is best that one first understands the basic types.  This said, it is obvious that specific theologians can be seen as belonging primarily but not uniquely to one type.

      It may be said that the evangelicals Carl F. H. Henry and J. I. Packer belong to the first type.  Here God is seen as an infallible teacher who communicates knowledge by speech and writing.  The recipients, as disciples, are to be attentive and faithful to the propositional truth written in Holy Scripture.

      It may be claimed that the late G. Ernest Wright, a biblical scholar, and Wolfhart Pannenberg, the German systematic theologian, belong to the second type.  Here God is represented as the transcendent agent who causes the revelatory events and by means of them makes signs to His people.  The latter are then seen as having the task of discerning and interpreting the signs.  So the Bible contains the signs and the interpretation of them by the people of God who saw and received them.

      Looking to Europe, it may be stated that two well-known names from yesterday, the German Wilhelm Herrmann and the English writer on mysticism Evelyn Underhill, belong to the third type.  God is viewed as the divine visitor, the guest of the soul, and He communicates by His presence.  The prayerful Christian is to be always open to the divine visitation.  The Bible is the primary but not the only repository of the records of such experiences.

      Again looking to Europe, it may be stated that Karl Barth and Emil Brunner belong to the fourth type.  Here, God is the merciful judge who pronounces an efficacious sentence of condemnation and of pardon.  Those who hear and know the power of the Word to convict and to pardon are to be submissive and obedient.  The Scriptures are the witness to the self-disclosure of God, whose voice is heard in proclamation from that witness in preaching.

      Finally, it may be claimed that the Roman Catholic priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the American religious educator Gabriel Moran belong to the fifth type.  Here God reveals by luring the imagination to construe the world in a new way.  Recipients are then to be bold and respond to the call to build a new world.  The content of the Bible is one but not the only source of the firing of the imagination.  History and nature somehow also become transparent to reveal God’s will.

      However, a major Catholic theologian such as the late Karl Rahner of Germany does not fit primarily into any one of the types, for he writes at times as though he belongs to type three (the experiential) and at other times to type five (the imaginative).  Some even think he also belongs to types one (the propositional) and two (the historical).

      As we noted above, Dulles calls his book Models of Revelation, not “Types of Revelation.”  Since the word model is much used in modern theology, it will be helpful to note how it is used and what is its relation to type.  Dulles explains:

As an ideal case, the type may be called a model.  That is to say, it is a relatively simple, artificially constructed case which is found to be useful and illuminating for dealing with realities that are more complex and differentiated.  A theological model might in some ways be compared to a tailor’s dummy, which represents a man or a woman of more or less average stature and build, and therefore assists in the manufacture of clothes.  But the clothes, when marketed, do not fit as perfectly as if individually tailored.  They usually have to be adjusted to the measurements and tastes of particular customers, who may be all judged tall or short, fat or thin insofar as they depart from the normative model. (30)

Therefore, his five types of revelation present five styles that characterize theologians in an approximate but useful way.  The typical cases first act as reference points; then each one can be treated as a model by which it is possible to submit a large number of individual theologians to simultaneous consideration.

      These five types cannot, of course, be transferred from their connection to one aspect of theology (revelation) to the whole enterprise of theology.  If Dulles were to write a book on types of modern theology, he would certainly construct a related yet different set of types to cover the larger field of inquiry.  Yet, our looking at his book prepares us to appreciate and to consider the construction of a set of types by writers who do attempt to cover the whole area that is contemporary theology.

THE TYPOLOGY OF DONALD G. BLOESCH

      In 1992 there appeared the first volume, A Theology of Word and Spirit, of a projected seven-volume set of books on systematic theology by Donald G. Bloesch, a leading evangelical theologian, with the series title Christian Foundations.  In the last chapter of the first volume Bloesch presents his own typology of modern theology.  This typology is inspired by and developed from that of Niebuhr, but it is carefully adapted to cover expositions of theology rather than the relation of Christianity to human cultures.  He presents four types: (1) a theology of restoration, (2) a theology of accommodation, (3) a theology of correlation, and (4) a theology of confrontation.

      The first type is found throughout the whole church and is the conscious return to a past position in which continuity with the tradition of the church is beyond doubt.  In the confusion of the modern Roman Catholic Church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, there is the conscious return to the supposed clarity and stability of, say, the theology of Thomas Aquinas or of the Council of Trent (1545–63).  Often this return is accompanied by the desire to see the revival of the Latin Mass.

      Likewise, in the face of modernizing trends in liberal Protestantism, there is a conscious return to known theological roots and foundations.  There are attempts to recover the theology of the confessions (e.g., the Augsburg for Lutherans and the Westminster for Presbyterians) or the theological exposition of these confessions by leading conservative theologians of earlier times – for example, by the Lutheran Francis Pieper in his Christian Dogmatics (1917, 1950–57) and the Presbyterian Charles Hodge, in his Systematic Theology (1872–73).

      Obviously, this restorationist impulse can be simplistic or sophisticated or somewhere between these points of reference.  In terms of Niebuhr’s typology, one could claim that it is a theology within the Christ-against-culture category because it is obviously not in sympathy with the modern (cultural) forms of theology and has deliberately chosen to stand over against contemporary theologies.  Critics of restorationism, however, claim that it is merely the choosing of yesterday’s culture in preference to today’s and thus it belongs to the Christ-of-culture category.  The point is that to stand against contemporary culture is to adopt a counterculture.  In this connection Bloesch cites the view of Emil Brunner (The Divine-Human Encounter, 1943, 170) that there is a basic similarity between fundamentalism and liberalism.  This is because in differing ways they both marry Christ to a particular cultural expression.  Liberalism is wedded to the larger scientific culture, while fundamentalism is joined to a minority, right-wing, or counter, culture.

      The second category is at the other end of the pole and arises from Niebuhr s Christ-of-culture category.  Accommodationism consciously attempts to present the Christian faith in modern concepts and symbols.  It claims that traditional theology is wedded to Greek philosophical terms and concepts and so cannot speak to the modern generation.  Liberal theology of the nineteenth century (see chapter two) is a good example of this approach.  Here the accommodation was to the scientific theories that were gaining ever-wider acceptance in Europe.  Today liberal theology is found in many forms, depending on what, specifically, is the contact point for the accommodation.  So there can be accommodation to major social concerns (e.g., feminism, thus feminist theology; ecology, thus environmental theology; and justice, thus political theology).  There can also be accommodation to a supposed universal, human experience and global consciousness (e.g., to religious or mystical experience in all religions, leading to a theology of religions).  Further, there can be accommodation to a specific modern philosophy – e.g., to existentialism or process philosophy.

      Obviously this theology of accommodation is a revision of the Christian message that brings it into harmony with prevailing views, beliefs, and attitudes.  Christians in the old-line denominations encounter this general approach regularly in such specifics as the accommodation of church teaching to allow abortion and to entertain modern, secular sexuality (the blessing of homosexual unions and the ordaining of lesbian women and gay men).  The accommodation is also present (though veiled in the so-called language of Zion) in the new forms of worship (liturgies) that use inclusive language both for God and for humankind.

      The third category, the theology of correlation, is a development of Niebuhr’s Christ-above-culture category.  The general emphasis here is that Christianity fulfills the deepest yearning and striving of the human race.  It perceives and then answers the questions that arise from the human condition in space and time.  So while human culture is not set aside or negated, it is nevertheless purified as it is related to Jesus Christ and the revelation and redemption of God in and through Him.  Therefore, though a gap between Christ and culture is fully recognized, that gap is seen as bridgeable; and so this form of theology is often in the form of an apologetic theology (as was the case with the late Paul Tillich).  Human reason finds its goal and fulfillment in divine revelation because divine grace is seen as directing the human quest of both heart and mind.

      In this approach, there is naturally a large place possible for philosophy in terms of being the means by which it is ascertained not only in what are the yearnings, strivings, and questions being asked within a specific culture, but also in what answers are being given to these movements of the human spirit.  A good example of this type is supplied by the theology of the ancient catechetical school of Alexandria in the third century (Clement and Origen).  Here the best of Greek philosophy was seen as both preparing for Jesus Christ as the Logos of God and also raising and clarifying the questions, which are only truly answered by Christ in His revealing and saving work.

      Today the best known proponents of this type of theology are the German Hans Küng and the American David Tracy (both of whom are Roman Catholics), as seen for example in their jointly edited book entitled Paradigm Change in Theology (1989) and in Tracy’s Blessed Rage for Order (1975) and Küng’s Theology for the Third Millennium (1988).

      Finally, we come to the fourth type, favored by Bloesch himself.  This is the theology of confrontation, which he relates to Niebuhr’s Christ-transforming-culture category.  Perhaps it is best to allow Bloesch to describe it himself:

A theology of confrontation is primarily kerygmatic, not apologetic: its first desire is to make known the claims of the gospel without any desire to bring them in accordance with the preconceived wisdom of the culture.  It is a theology of crisis rather than process.  It sees humanity as the question and the gospel as the answer.  But humanity can see itself as the question only in the light of the answer, which is given in revelation....  A theology of confrontation is ready and willing to enter the debates of the modern age, but it is not willing to bend its message to the spirit of the age.  It utilizes the language of the times without abandoning the biblical language.  (262–63)

So cultural images and symbols are not annulled; they are made subordinate to the symbols of Scripture and tradition.  The primary example in recent times of this type is, of course, Barthian and neo-orthodox theology in its various forms.

      In his final comments on these four types, Bloesch points out that the theology of restoration and the theology of correlation tend to converge.  The former can become a synthesis of theology and a culture of the past, while the latter is a synthesis of theology and contemporary culture.  He also suggests that the four could be reduced to two: a theology of identity (a modified theology of accommodation) and a theology of transformation (a modified theology of confrontation).

THE TYPOLOGY OF PETER BERGER

      Niebuhr looked to Ernst Troeltsch for inspiration to develop his typology, while Berger, as is appropriate for a sociologist, looked to Max Weber for inspiration to develop his typology.  Since Troeltsch and Weber said much the same about typology, so do Niebuhr and Berger.

      Berger s analysis of theology since the Enlightenment led him to suggest that, in the range of possibilities from Christianity identified with culture to Christianity against culture, there are only three basic types – the deductive, the reductive, and the inductive.  These intellectual constructs allow us to understand and explain the essence of all forms of contemporary theology, from extreme liberalism to dogmatic fundamentalism.  Berger explains the three options in the book to which we have already made repeated reference, The Heretical Imperative.  In the next chapter I shall develop and extend Berger’s three basic types as my attempt to present as simply but as accurately as possible the range and content of modern theologies.

      First of all (what we may call the right-hand pole), the deductive option is to reassert the authority of a religious tradition in the face of modern secularity.  The tradition thus having been restored to the status of a datum, of something given a priori, it is then possible to deduce religious affirmations from it at least more or less as was the norm in premodern times (1979, 61).  Obviously, this is similar to the theology of restoration in Bloesch’s scheme and to the cognitive propositionalism in Lindbeck’s scheme.  It can also relate to Bloesch’s preferred theology of confrontation.  It focuses, however, on what is done when the tradition is restored; deductions are made from it for the present.  One reason for the attractiveness of this method is that in the modern world it has “the cognitive advantage of once more providing religious reflection with objective criteria of validity” (Berger, 62).

      In the second place (what we may call the left-hand pole), “the reductive option is to reinterpret the tradition in terms of modern secularity, which in turn is taken to be a compelling necessity of participating in modern consciousness” (ibid.).  In this approach, there is something much more radical than the use of this or that modern intellectual tool (e.g., the historical-critical method in the study of the Bible), for there is an exchange of authorities.  The authority of modern thought and/or consciousness is substituted for the authority of the tradition (e.g., the Bible and creeds).  Thus, teaching and affirmations derived from the holy tradition are translated into terms acceptable to modern man and permissible within contemporary culture.  “The major advantage of this option is that it reduces cognitive dissonance, or seems to do” (ibid.).  Again we note that this is similar to Bloesch’s accommodationism, where Christ is made the Christ of culture.  Finally (at the center of the two poles),

the inductive option is to turn to experience as the ground of all religious affirmations – one’s own experience, to whatever extent this is possible, and the experience embodied in a particular range of traditions.  This range may be of varying breadth – limited minimally to one’s own tradition, or expanded maximally to include the fullest available record of human religious history. (Beгgeг, 63)

      The inductive method is here being used with respect to religious traditions (Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and so forth) that are understood as bodies of evidence concerning religious experience and the insights deriving from experience.  Holding a primary place in the body of evidence is, of course, the Bible, which is a primary record of religious experience as well as the insights based on it.  “The advantage of this option is its open-mindedness and the freshness that usually comes from a non-authoritarian approach to questions of truth” (Berger, 63).  This position may be said to be parallel to the center of the experiential-expressive approach described by Lindbeck.

      Berger himself, a genuine (old-style) liberal Lutheran, commits himself to the inductive option and writes about it with eloquence throughout his religious writings.

      As a classical Anglican, who deeply appreciates true, pristine liberalism in politics, and who, following Jonathan Edwards, places genuine Christianity in “the affections of the soul,” I am committed nevertheless to a modern use of the deductive option as practiced by the great patristic theologians and the classical Anglican divines (e.g., Richard Hooker and John Pearson).  Having nailed my colors to the mast, I shall try to present all three options (with a fourth) in a fair and reasonable way in the next chapter.

      I note that in his introductory exposition of theology for students, under the title Faith Seeking Understanding (1991), the Princeton theologian Daniel L. Migliore claims that there are only three basic methods of doing theology.  There is the Christocentric theology of Karl Barth, a theology of the Word of God (deductive for Berger).  Then there is the correlation method or the apologetic theology of Paul Tillich (inductive for Berger).  Finally there is the praxis. approach of liberation theology (reductive for Berger).  Migliore goes primarily with Barth but also pays attention to the other two.

      There are several ways of making the three options into five types.  For example, one such schema, whose two poles would be the Christian tradition (Bible and creeds) and the modern world, could look like this:

      1.  Totally reductive.  The concern here is primarily with the contemporary situation; thus theology is presented either as a secularist theology or a form of philosophy.

      2.  Generally reductive.  The concern here is to do justice to the Christian tradition by doing justice to the contemporary cultural situation.  Some weight is given to the Christian tradition in contrast to no weight in number one.

      3.  Basically inductive.  The concern here is to be wholly aware of the modern cultural situation without in any way making that situation an authority for religion.  Theology is based on the study of the experience of God in the Christian Scriptures and tradition.

      4.  Generally deductive.  The concern here is to do justice to the contemporary situation by truly doing justice to the Christian tradition.  Some weight is given to the contemporary situation in contrast to no weight in number five.

      5.  Totally deductive.  The concern here is only with the Christian tradition, and so theology is in a traditionalist form, taking no account of the advance of modern knowledge.

      My reader may want to keep this extended scheme in mind as he or she reflects on my exposition of the basic three types.

      Another way of presenting these five types is as follows:

      1.  Critical of the Christian tradition but uncritical of the contemporary situation.  The theologian looks at the Christian tradition wholly from the mind-set of modern culture and interprets it to fit into this.

      2.  Relatively critical of the Christian tradition but uncritical of the contemporary situation.  The theologian works from within the modern mind-set, but he is willing to grant that genuine truth is found in the Christian tradition.  Thus, his theology is not a totally secular theology.

      3.  Relatively critical of both the Christian tradition and the contemporary situation.  Here the theologian has a commitment both to the God of Jesus Christ and to the modern experiment (i.e., to the experiment of democracy with its values and culture).  He looks at both the Christian tradition and modern culture with a critical eye, seeking to be fair to each.

      4.  Relatively critical of the contemporary situation but uncritical of the Christian tradition.  The theologian is committed to conserving the truth of traditional Christianity, but he is desirous to admit insights into his thinking from modern, secularist culture.

      5.  Critical of the contemporary situation but uncritical of the Christian tradition.  The theologian looks at modern culture from within the mind-set of a traditional theological system.  His mind-set is fixed by the norms of a pre-modern approach to theology and truth; thus he rejects the norms of post-Enlightenment modernity.

      Again, my reader may care to keep this scheme in mind as we examine the three basic types in the next chapter.

FURTHER COMMENT ON TYPOLOGY

      Some of my readers may be a little confused at this stage by this use of the word typology.  To them I say: “Be patient.  Move on to read the next chapter, in which I explain each of the three basic types along with a fourth.”  I do not recommend at this stage that they read the rest of this chapter, for they will probably find confusing what comes next – at least at this point in our pilgrimage of understanding.  I ask them to bear in mind that in principle our task in introducing modern theology is an exercise chiefly about rather than within theology (although practically this distinction will not always be clear).

      By this stage in our pilgrimage of understanding, other readers may find themselves fascinated by the possibility of conceptual analysis of twentieth-century theology through typology and wanting to know more of its possible use.  To these readers I must now admit that the typology I shall use in the next chapter is somewhat basic and unsophisticated.  However, I believe that for beginners in the task of understanding modern theology, this simple (though profound) typology is the right one to use.

      At the same time, I am aware of, and am personally intrigued by, other, more complex typology.  I shall close this chapter with a brief explanation of two such typologies, leaving those who are intrigued by them to read the appropriate books that I cite.  The first is that provided by the late Hans W. Frei (1922–88) in his posthumously published Types of Christian Theology (1992).  He was known as a promoter of what has been called the Yale theology or narrative theology, which has certain affinities with the way Karl Barth used Scripture and did theology.

      Frei’s proposal of five types represents five intellectual attitudes about two modern descriptions of Christian theology.  These two descriptions have been well-known in academia since the Enlightenment and since the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1809, when there was debate concerning these two approaches to theology.  In the first approach, Christian theology is an instance of a general class of knowledge; therefore it must be subsumed under such general criteria as intelligibility, coherence, and truth – criteria that are shared by other academic disciplines.  Thus, its right to inclusion in the curriculum of an “Enlightenment” university is that it exemplifies these criteria of validity.

      In the second approach, Christian theology is an aspect of Christianity and is therefore partly, if not wholly, defined by its relation to the system that constitutes the religion known as Christianity.  In number one, Christian theology is defined by philosophical principles and cannot be contemplated except in relation to philosophy, while in number two it is defined by the character of Christianity and has certain relations to anthropology and sociology.  Further, because number two is inextricably related to Christianity as a religion, theology is first of all descriptive; it sets forth what have been called the first-order statements made in the course of Christian belief, worship, and practice.  First-order statements cover the theological content of the Bible, the liturgy, the Apostles’ Creed, and suchlike.  Yet, theology in number two is also critical reflection on the logic and content of the first-order statements.

      We are now in a position to list the five types and to notice how they relate to the two poles (the two definitions of theology).

      1.  Theology only as a philosophical discipline within the university.  Here there is little or no place for the analysis of religious experience within the church.  “God” is a metaphysical construct, and to study God is to search for ultimate and universal meaning.  As an example of this approach, Frei cites Gordon Kaufman’s monograph, An Essay on Theological Method (1975).

      2.  On the basis of a foundational philosophical scheme, the merging of theology as a philosophical discipline with theology as Christian self-description.  While the scales are tipped in favor of philosophy, a real place is allowed for the internal content of Christianity as a religion.  Frei’s primary example of this approach is David Tracy’s search for a “revisionist, post liberal, and post neo-orthodox theology fit for people in a postmodern situation” as set forth in his book Blessed Rage for Order (1975).  Tracy’s own formulation of the position is as follows: “Contemporary Christian theology is best understood as philosophical reflection on the meanings present in human experience and the meanings present in the Christian tradition” (1975, 34).

      3.  Without any supertheory or comprehensive structure for union, the merging of theology as a philosophical discipline and as Christian self-description.  Here there is the commitment to correlation (as in number two above); yet in this case it is correlation in an ad hoc way rather than on a specific foundation.  Frei’s primary example of this approach is Friedrich Schleiermacher from the nineteenth and Paul Tillich, a close second, from the twentieth century.  Both men were clear that theology is an academic discipline and also equally, and independently, Christian self-description within the life of the church.

      4.  The practical discipline of Christian self-description governs and limits the general applicability of general criteria in theology.  This is the reverse of number two, and unlike number three, it does not make use of correlation.  In this type, Christianity has its own distinctive language.  Thus, doctrinal statements are taken as having a status similar to that of grammatical rules implicit in discourse; however, their relation to the broader linguistic context within which they are generated remains only minimally specifiable.  Frei’s primary example is Karl Barth, for whom theology is neither founded on philosophy, nor is it subject as a systematic enterprise to universal formal criteria.  Theology has its own internal rules as to what makes it a science; it arises within the church and is accountable to God for its discourse about God.

      5.  Christian theology is exclusively a matter of self-description.  Here external descriptive categories have no bearing on, or relation to, theology at all.  This is because theology is, strictly speaking, the grammar of faith, the inside talk of the Christian church.  The criteria of what can be said about God are found within, not outside, the Christian tradition.  Frei’s primary example of this approach is the British philosopher D. Z. Phillips in his Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (1979).

      It is obvious that Frei’s typology is designed primarily to cover modern theology – that is, theology since the Enlightenment, and particularly since Kant.  The theological writings of the Fathers of the early centuries, the writings of the Reformers of the sixteenth century, and the tomes of the dogmaticians of the seventeenth century will not fit into this scheme.

      However, on several occasions in his book Frei places the well-known evangelical writer Carl Henry in type two along with David Tracy and Rudolph Bultmann.  Strange company indeed for Carl Henry!  The reason Frei does this is simple, and it is worth careful consideration, for it also applies to other evangelicals who share Henry’s philosophical approach.  Frei maintains that Henry bases his whole theological enterprise on a philosophical foundation that logically precedes his doctrine of the self-revelation of God written in Scripture.  “External and internal descriptions of Christianity,” says Frei, “are made possible by the same underlying transcendental philosophical structure” (Types of Christian Theology, 3).  We may also note that Donald Bloesch makes much the same point, not only concerning Henry but also concerning a cluster of “rationalist,” evangelical theologians including Gordon Clark, Edward J. Carnell, and Ronald Nash (Theology of Word and Spirit, 68).

      Frei’s typology has been subjected to criticism by Schubert M. Ogden (well known both as a process theologian and a translator and follower of Bultmann).  In Ogden’s review of Types of Theology, he insists that what Frei means by the two basic views of theology is not always clear, and thus his typology is not clear.  My reader may care to ponder Ogden’s suggestion that a better way is to use the criteria of the adequacy of witness and theology to their content – namely, appropriateness (in its relation to Scripture and tradition) and credibility (in its relation to the contemporary world of experience and reason).  Thus, his five types are: (1) theology understood as concerned solely with the credibility of Christian witness; (2) theology understood as concerned primarily with the credibility of Christian witness, but also – and precisely thereby – with its appropriateness; (3) theology understood as concerned equally with the credibility of Christian witness and with its appropriateness; (4) theology understood as concerned primarily with the appropriateness of Christian witness, but also – and precisely thereby – with its credibility; (5) theology understood as concerned solely with the appropriateness of Christian witness.

      To ascertain precisely what Ogden means by appropriateness and credibility one needs to read his book On Theology (1986), though I give my interpretations forthwith.

      By appropriate he means that a theological statement or claim is congruent in meaning with the witness of faith itself.  For him, the real meaning of the Christian witness of faith is the real meaning of the canonical Scriptures (as studied via modern techniques).  So to be appropriate, theology must correspond to and agree with the essential message of Scripture and tradition.

      By credible he means that it is congruent with the truth disclosed at least implicitly in human existence as such.  For him, the ultimate criteria for the truth of any claim must be common human experience and reason.

      In addition, Ogden holds that all theological reflection is of necessity tied to a historical, human situation:

Insofar as theology involves the same human understanding involved in any other kind of critical reflection, it is exactly like everything else human in being thoroughly conditioned both socially and culturally.  This means among other things, that theological reflection always and of necessity takes place in some particular, historical situation, in terms of its agenda of problems and of its resources for clarifying and solving them.  Consequently, while the demand remains constant that any sound theological claim must be supported by reasons purporting to establish both its appropriateness and its credibility, exactly what this demand requires is also always variable in that it is a function of different historical situations. (1986, 140)

Because this is so, reasons offered in one situation to establish the soundness of a claim may not necessarily be the ones sufficient to do so in another place and time.

      For Ogden, as for Frei, theology is a modern enterprise; thus his types are not constructed to make room for what Bloesch calls restorationist theology – e.g., traditional theology from the patristic or Reformation eras.  However, Barthianism and neo-orthodoxy would fit into number five in Ogden’s typology, while Tillich as the theologian of correlation would fit into number three (where Ogden would also place his friend, the Roman Catholic David Tracy).

FOR FURTHER READING

Berger, Peter L.  The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation.  Garden City, N.Y: Anchor, 1979.

Bloesch, Donald G.  A Theology of Word and Spirit: Authority and Method in Theology.  Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992.

Dulles, Avery, S.J.  Models of Revelation.  Garden City, N.Y: Image, 1985.

Frei, Hans W.  Types of Christian Theology.  New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.

Grenz, Stanley J. and Roger E. Olson.  Twentieth Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age.  Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992.

Lindbeck, George A.  The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984.

Niebuhr, H. Richard.  Christ and Culture.  New York: Harper, 1956.

Ogden, Schubert M.  On Theology.  San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986.

—.  “Review of Types of Christian Theology.”  Modern Theology, 9, no. 2 (April 1993): 211.

APPENDIX: TYPES OF MODERN ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY

      While the typology of both Frei and Ogden can be used to study modern, post-Vatican II Roman Catholic theology, it will be to our benefit to notice a typology specifically designed to introduce such theology.  This typology is propounded by Professor Francis Schussler Fiorenza of Harvard University and is found in his chapter “Systematic Theology: Task and Methods,” in the book that he edited, Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives (vol. 1, 1991), to which we made reference in the appendix to chapter two.  The ideal types that he describes are the transcendental, hermeneutical, analytical, correlational, and liberational.  He makes the same point as other writers on typology: “A specific theologian may predominantly follow one approach while at the same time borrowing insights, categories, and methods from other approaches” (Fiorenza, 35).  As with Frei and Ogden, so with Fiorenza – his typology does not include the dominant form of theology prior to 1962, the neo-Thomist or neo-Scholastic – theology that is deductive rather than inductive in approach.  In fact, his typology could be said to present only empirical (inductive and reductive) theology.

Transcendental Theology

      This is particularly but not uniquely associated with the name of the Jesuit Karl Rahner.  To understand the meaning of transcendental one must know how this key word was used both by Immanuel Kant and by Scholastic philosophy/theology.  For the latter it referred to what was applicable to all being.  Thus goodness is transcendental, for it applies to everything that exists from God, the Creator, through to the smallest part of the material world.  In contrast, Kant used the word to refer to the a priori conditions of possible experience.  Thus, for him a transcendental analysis is an investigation of the conditions and possibility of knowledge through an analysis of human cognition.

      We see in the revision of Neo-Thomism as transcendental theology that the meanings from Kant and Scholasticism are combined.  Following Kant, transcendental refers to the subjective conditions of possible knowledge, and following Scholasticism it refers to infinite horizons (but only of human knowledge).  However, as used in a theological context, transcendental refers to the conditions of human knowledge of God’s revelation.  Thus, a theological system is transcendental when it investigates the a priori conditions in man as believer for the knowledge of the truths of the Christian faith.  Man made in the image of God always expresses in one way or the other his relation to God, even when he is seemingly denying God.  It is this understanding of transcendental that informs Karl Rahner’s influential book Foundations of Christian Faith (1978).  Therefore, the major difference between Thomas Aquinas’s method and modern transcendental Thomism is that for the former the starting point and structure are theocentric, while for the latter anthropology is both the starting point and constant reference point.

Hermeneutical Theology

      This is particularly associated with David Tracy and his two books The Analogical Imagination (1981) and Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (1987).  It builds on the work in hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) by Hans-George Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.  It sees theology as the interpretative retrieval of the meaning and truth claims of the Christian classics (not only the Bible but the great books and traditions of the Christian church).

      A major difference between transcendental and hermeneutical theology rests in their interpretations of the relation between language and experience.  The transcendental approach sees language as expressive.  It expresses via creedal and doctrinal formulations interpretations of basic, religious experience.  The result is that the expression in words and concepts can change in differing cultural contexts.  In contrast, the hermeneutical approach sees language not only as expressive of religious experience but also as constitutive of it.  (This is what George Lindbeck argued – as we noted above – in his description of religion as a cultural-linguistic phenomenon.)

Analytical Theology

      Here Fiorenza offers two approaches.  The first underscores metatheory, specifically epistemology (the science of the method or grounds of knowledge), for method in theology.  The second underscores the significance of models and paradigms in theological reflection.

      The first approach is identified with Bernard Lonergan, who began his theological method by asking questions relating to the nature of human knowledge and the basic procedures of human cognition.  He answered these basic questions by providing an epistemological metatheory.  Further, he attempted to show that behind and through theological controversies are more general and perennial philosophical (epistemological) debates.  For example, in his description of the development of Christology in the early church, Lonergan sought to show that in the controversies, basic philosophical positions were dormant – e.g., with Tertullian, materialism; with Origen, idealism; and with Athanasius, critical realism (see The Way to Nicea,1976).

      In his Method in Theology (1972) and other books, Lonergan seeks to show that knowing involves a fourfold structure – the experience of data, the understanding of their meaning, the assessment of their value, and an evaluative decision.  Therefore, in theology there is the research (assembling data), interpretation (understanding its meaning), history (judging the implied assertions and data), and dialectic (clarifying the issues and making a decision or taking a stand).  This done – and importantly, with a stand having been taken and a religious conversion having taken place – one can move into foundational theology.  From there one can move forward into doctrinal, systematic, and practical theology.  The concept of conversion is crucial for Lonergan and moves his theology from a metatheory into transcendental theology (and thus come his similarities with Rahner’s transcendental method).

      We turn now to the second approach.  Already we have noted in this chapter the meaning of the use of the word model in theology in discussing the study of revelation by Avery Dulles.  In fact, his name is specifically associated by Fiorenza with the role of models and paradigms in theology.  In particular, Fiorenza points to Models of the Church (1974), in which Dulles identifies the models of institution (army, state, school), mystical communion (vine and branches, head and members), sacrament (Baptism and Eucharist), herald (messenger, preacher), and servant (healer, helper).  In the last edition he added community of disciples.  The value of this kind of treatment of any major area of theology is that it allows people, with a different outlook on the church, the possibility of appreciating one another’s viewpoint.

      In addition to the analysis of implicit epistemologies in theological systems and the analysis of theologies in terms of models, another way of analysis is that of the use of categories.  This last form of analysis is best seen in historical studies that seek to show the basic categories in which specific doctrines were set.  For example, with the Fathers who produced the Nicene Creed the major categories were ontological – substance, nature, form, accident, and so on.  In contrast, in much modern theology influenced by existentialism, the categories are known as existentials and are based on an analysis of human existence in its temporality.  An example of the use of category analysis is in the document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled Mysterium Ecclesiae (1973), written in response to the claims of Hans Küng in his Infallible (1971).

Theology by Correlation

      Already we have encountered this approach in our description of the theology of Paul Tillich.  It originated not with Tillich but with what was known as mediating or mediation theology in German in the mid-nineteenth century.  Its aim was to mediate between traditional theology (using a deductive method) and the theology of Schleiermacher (using an inductive method).  In modern Roman Catholic theology there are four uses of this approach that are widely followed by modern Catholics.

      From Holland, Edward Schillebeeckx (who was an adviser to Vatican II) speaks of a correlation between two sources of theology.  One is the tradition of Christian experiences (to which the Bible and the history of the church witness), and the other is present-day experiences (particularly those arising from utilitarian individualism in modern society).  The method is most clearly stated in his book about his earlier books – Interim Report on the Books “Jesus” and “Christ” (1981).

      From Germany, Hans Küng speaks both of critical correlation and critical confrontation.  His two sources or poles are the living Jesus (known through historical-critical research) and the present situation (characterized by bureaucratic modernity).  Küng’s method is expounded in his Theology for the Third Millennium (1988).

      From a leader of American Christian feminism, Rosemary Radford Ruether, comes the use of what she calls the prophetic principle.  She seeks to correlate this principle (which is a supposed biblical word on justice and equality) with oppression in its various forms – classism, racism, and sexism.  Her approach is best seen in her Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (1983).

      Again, from another American, David Tracy, comes what he calls a mutually critical correlation.  That is, he seeks to establish mutually critical correlation between an interpretation of the Christian tradition and an interpretation of the contemporary situation.  In doing this he develops and uses the distinction between criteria of appropriateness to the tradition and criteria of intelligibility to the present situation.  His views are similar to those of Schubert Ogden that were noticed above and may be read in his Analogical Imagination (1981) – which we made use of in chapter four.

Theologies of Liberation

      Liberation theology began with Roman Catholics and was initially a movement in and from South America.  It was a theological approach and critique focusing on the political, economic, and ideological causes of social inequality between Latin America and North America and was deeply influenced by the political theology of the German Johann B. Metz (see his Theology of the World, 1969).

      Latin American liberation theology has now been joined by a cluster of other forms of liberation theology – feminist, Afro-American, and Asian, for example.  Fiorenza explains that despite significant differences these modern theologies of liberation have several common features that bind them together as a family.  First of all, these theologies begin from an analysis of the social and political situation as they seek to uncover exploitation, alienation, and discrimination.  Their starting point is the experience of oppression.  From, and within, this position they proceed to look at Scripture and tradition.  Thus, secondly, they do not read these primary sources in terms of traditional exegesis and interpretation; rather, they approach them in a critical manner from the point of view of the oppressed.  They look for and commend that which supports justice and equality, and they offer a critique of that which supports inequality, patriarchy, and discrimination.  Third, as they do this, they seek to recover subjugated and suppressed knowledge – of forgotten symbols, neglected ecclesial practices, and ignored experiences – that supports their cause.  Finally, they see their recovery of a true theology as toward a way of life – a genuine praxis that has religious, social, political, and personal dimensions.  (We shall return to this general theme in chapter six when dealing with the reductive approach to theology.)

Chapter 6 – Four Types of Theology

      Here we shall examine four types of theology that help us to gain a general understanding of the range of contemporary theology from conservative fundamentalism to radical liberationism and feminism.  Following Berger in The Heretical Imperative (1979), I shall call the first three the deductive, the inductive, and the reductive.  To these I shall add the regulative, which is the appropriate word for the cultural-linguistic (or narrative) approach of Lindbeck.

THE DEDUCTIVE APPROACH

      “The deductive option,” writes Peter Berger, “is to reassert the authority of a religious tradition in the face of modern secularity” (1979, 61).  And when the tradition has been restored to “the status of a datum, of something given a priori, it is then possible to deduce religious affirmations from it at least more or less as was the norm before in premodern times” (1979, 62).  As a preeminent example of this option he then examines the mature theology of Karl Barth, whom we encountered in chapter two.

      Wherever we hear or read such statements as “the Bible says” and “the Word of God states,” along with “the church teaches” and “tradition declares,” we are most probably encountering theology of the deductive type.

      In the revival meeting, when the evangelist holds his black leather Bible in his hand and solemnly urges his hearers with biblical verses to repent and receive Jesus as Savior and Lord, he is making an important assumption.  He assumes that the words of Holy Scripture are the very words of the living God, and in this is his claim to speak directly to all who will hear him.  They are to stake their life on the Word of God.

      On the Lord’s Day, when the evangelical pastor at the Southern Baptist Church stands in the pulpit with the open Bible in front of him and preaches his exegetical or exhortatory sermon from a passage of Holy Scripture, he makes an important assumption.  And so do his congregants who sit with their Bibles on their laps.  They believe that the expounding of the Bible in the power of the Spirit – that is, the making of its message clear and plain – is actually the making available of the Word of God.  From it they deduce their present duties of faithfulness and obedience.

      If we go into one of the more traditional old-line churches – say, the First Presbyterian Church, it is not unlikely that the pastor will be of the neo-orthodox school who takes preaching (as did Barth, Brunner, and Niebuhr) very seriously.  For him it is nothing less than the proclamation of the Word of God (Jesus Christ) from the written words of Scripture that witness to Him, the Word made flesh, and to the Father’s revelation, redemption, salvation, and reconciliation in and through Him.  Here even though the Bible is studied via the modern historical-critical method, it is nevertheless seen as the witness to the Word of God and the sole means used by God in preaching to make known his Word.  The appropriate response to such proclamation is to trust and obey the Father through the Son by the Spirit.  The event of preaching is the event of the Word of God.

      Our next visit is to an Orthodox church (Greek, Russian, or Antiochene) to attend the Divine Liturgy that includes the preaching of the holy Gospel.  Here the emphasis may seem to be solely on ceremony and ritual, but we find that when the priest begins to preach he does so with great conviction.  From holy tradition (which for him is the Bible and the understanding of it within the holy mother church), he declares what is the truth and how that truth is to be both believed and obeyed.  It is as though one is transported back into the patristic period to hear one of the bishops or priests declaring the mind of God from the sacred Scriptures as that mind has been received through the interpretation of the holy synods and fathers as they were led by the Holy Spirit.

      Our final visit is to a Latin Mass in a Roman Catholic Church.  The fact that it is in Latin means that it is a traditionalist parish where the faithful have asked for and been granted the right to have the Holy Eucharist in this traditional form.  Again there is magnificent ceremony and a great sense of reverence as the service proceeds.  After the reading of the Gospel, the priest enters the pulpit and preaches the homily.  Treating the words of Scripture with the utmost reverence as coming from the Holy Spirit, he expounds them in the light of the tradition of understanding of the Western, Catholic Church.  And he does so in such a way as to leave no doubt that he is preaching the Word of God that is to be received as true, believed, and obeyed.

      In both the Greek and the Latin churches the Bible has been taken to be an authoritative collection of authoritative books.  Thus, what is read and preached from any of these books is an authoritative word, first from God the Father through the Son and by the Spirit, and second from the church as the bulwark and guardian of the truth.  The church deduces what is true from the Bible both for her own children and for the world.

      If we were to inquire of the Bible college what texts were used for systematic theology by the class of which the evangelist was a member, there would be no surprises.  It would be a book (or books) that claimed to provide a biblical theology (i.e., a theology deduced from the teaching of the Bible) and thus to be an account of the truths revealed by God.  An example of a textbook used in such colleges from recent years would be Charles Ryle’s Basic Theology (1986).

      Further, if we were to visit the seminary (either Southern Baptist or interdenominational) where our conservative evangelical got his Master of Divinity degree, we would also find that his textbook(s) in systematics also claimed to provide a biblical theology – that is, a theology that is both faithful to the teaching of the Bible and also arranged so as to present the truth of God in a rational form for today.  Examples of textbooks used in evangelical seminaries would include Millard J. Erickson’s Christian Theology (1986) and Carl Henry’s magnum opus God, Revelation and Authority (1979–83).

      In contrast, we would discover that the texts used at the seminary where neo-orthodoxy was the major theology were theologies of the Word of God.  Apart from the obvious centerpiece of Barth’s Church Dogmatcs we would probably find the writings of Thomas F. Torrance of Scotland (e.g., The Trinitarian Faith, 1988) and Hendrikus Berkhof (e.g., The Christian Faith, 1986).  All these texts presuppose that there is truth revealed by God.

      Turning to the orthodox seminary we would find that the primary texts were written a long time ago – e.g., On the Orthodox Faith by John of Damascus and the classic theological texts on the Holy Trinity and the person of Christ from the fourth and fifth centuries by such worthies as Athanasius, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nazianzus.  Modern orthodox writers whom they use to help in theological understanding include Nicholas Lossky and John Meyendorff.  Where a simple text is required, then such a book as Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition (1984) is available, written by Michael Pomazansky.  However, if pressed, the professors would tell us that the real text for theology is the Divine Liturgy (itself a basically fourth-century composition) because therein are contained all the great truths of our salvation and deification.

      Finally, arriving at the Roman Catholic seminary that trained priests for the traditional rite, we would find that regardless of the modern texts that students used, they first gained their theology from two sources – the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas and the collection of the teaching of the Councils of the Church known as Denzinger.  Amongst the modern (traditional) texts would be the writings of the neo-Scholastic theologians of pre-Vatican II vintage.

      One important way in which these examples of a deductive type of theology clearly reveal that they are deductive (not inductive or reductive) is in their commitment to the doctrine or dogma of the Holy Trinity and the placing of this at a pivotal or central point in their system of doctrine.  The teaching that God truly as God is actually One in Three and Three in One is a deduction made from Holy Scripture by the early church (and confirmed by the church in later times).  From the content of the truth of the revelation of the Father through the Son and by the Holy Spirit, written in Scripture, the classic statement of this dogma is made in the Nicene Creed as it was approved by the Council of Constantinople in 381.

      Traditional Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant (evangelical and neo-orthodox) writers all state that they hold firmly to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  This does not mean that they all precisely agree in their expositions of it.  Nevertheless, they all agree that it is a revealed truth that does give us insight and understanding (available nowhere else) concerning God-as-God-is-within-and-unto-Himself in His eternity.  Those evangelical writers who do not place any high premium on the teaching of the early church seek to prove the doctrine of the Trinity solely from the propositional truths (true statements) concerning the relation between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit found in the New Testament.  Those who belong to churches where tradition is taken seriously seek to show that the dogma set forth by the church in the Nicene Creed is truly a faithful deduction from the various strands of revealed teaching concerning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit found in Scripture.

      The Greek and Latin Fathers, followed by the medieval Scholastics and the Protestant Reformers, believed that by the self-revelation of the Father in and through His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, the church is led into genuine knowledge of God.  So the church is able to speak with great reverence and awe both of God-as-God-is-in-Himself and of God-as-God-is-toward-us.  It is because of who God is in Himself that He is truly the God of our salvation.

      So the Greek Fathers spoke of God the Father, and of the only-begotten Son of the Father (begotten before all ages) as sharing the same Deity or Godhead as the Father.  In addition, they spoke of the Holy Spirit, breathed out by the Father through the Son, as also sharing one and the same Deity and Godhead as the Father and the Son.  Accordingly, there are three persons and one Godhead.  For them, as for the writers of the New Testament, God (theos) normally meant “the Father.”  They spoke of the association of the Father with the Son and the Spirit within the Godhead and in eternity.  But they also spoke much more (as does the New Testament) of the relations of the three persons with the world and with the human race in and through creation, providence, redemption, salvation, and deification.  Here again there is the priority of the Father who creates the universe through the Son, who sends the Son to be incarnate of the Virgin Mary (the theotokos), and who sends the Spirit in the name of the Son into the church and the world.

      In contrast, the Latin Fathers (led by Augustine of Hippo in his On the Trinity) spoke of the one God (the Godhead) of three persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Instead of thinking first of the Father, their first thought when thinking of God in eternity was of that Godhead or Deity that all three persons share.  Consequently, they spoke of the One God eternally existing as the blessed Trinity in ordered relations in eternity.  Their doctrine is most easily read in the creed that is called the Athanasian Creed or, in Latin, the Quicunque Vult.  Because they worked from the one to the three, they were obliged logically to add to the Nicene Creed the extra words concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit; not only does he proceed from the Father but also “and from the Son” (filioque).  However, following the New Testament, their major teaching on the blessed Trinity was of the relation of God to the world as its creator, sustainer, redeemer, and judge.  In this teaching, the priority of the Father was more clearly seen; it is the Father who so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to become flesh of our flesh and provide a sacrifice for our sins.  Indeed, it is the Father who sends the Spirit in the name of the Son to make effective the redeeming work of the Son in the lives of humanity.

      Conservative evangelicals have in the main, like Roman Catholics, followed the Western exposition of the doctrine as provided in the Athanasian Creed and in the confessions of faith from the Protestant Reformation.  Barth and his followers have proceeded in a related way, insisting that God as He is in His revelation to us is truly identical with how He is in and unto Himself.  At the very center of Barth’s Church Dogmatics is the dogma of the Holy Trinity.  If such theology can be called deductive, it can also be called a theology from above (in contrast to a theology from below – the inductive approach).

      Finally, the use of the deductive method, of taking propositions from the Bible as premisses does not ensure that the results of the deduction are true.  There is, of course, more to classic orthodoxy than the use of the deductive method.  Not a few major heresies have also been based on the deductive method.

THE INDUCTIVE APPROACH

      Induction is arguing from empirical evidence, and this means two things.  It means, says Berger, taking “human experience as the starting point of religious reflection, and using the methods of the historian to uncover those human experiences that have become embodied in the various religious traditions” (1979, 63).  The great exemplar of this approach is Schleiermacher, whom we noticed in chapter two.  His lifelong enterprise was to formulate theology in terms of the experience of faith (a theology from below).  Barth, who greatly respected Schleiermacher’s intellectual achievement, called this inductive approach “a theology of consciousness.”  It was the first great example of liberal theology.

      Schleiermacher never taught that religious experience was nothing more than human self-consciousness.  Rather, he insisted that religious consciousness is in fact consciousness of something so much beyond itself that, explains Berger, “the human subject feels himself to be utterly dependent on that other reality or being at the center of the experience” (1979, 133).  So, to start with human consciousness does not mean that you actually end there.  At the same time human experience is before all doctrines and dogmas.  Of this approach pioneered by Schleiermacher, Berger writes:

The core of the inductive model is, quite simply, the assertion that a specific type of human experience defines the phenomenon called religion.  The experience can be described and analyzed.  Any theoretical reflection about religion (including the theoretical enterprise of theology) must begin with religious experience (so that, for theology, the unavoidable procedure is to go from the human to the metahuman, and not in the reverse direction).  (1979, 135)

Once this approach has been accepted, Christian theology is not immune from the questions raised by the modern study of history and other empirical sciences.  In this light, the Germanic nineteenth-century investigation of the history of Israel, the historical Jesus, the origins of the church, the move by the church into Greco-Roman culture, and many other themes can be seen as required by the inductive approach.  To have an accurate knowledge of how it really was, was preliminary to the inductive approach – and, of course, what began in the nineteenth century has continued into the twentieth.  To read the famous lectures of Harpack in 1899 on the essence of Christianity (published in English as What Is Christianity?, 1901) is to experience the great historian directing his attention to the experiences underlying the theological developments, which he as a historian has traced.

      Berger also suggests that a case can be made that Schleiermacher was also the father of the disciplines of comparative religion and the history of religion (Religionsgeschichte).  These disciplines have, of course, fed into the study of theology done inductively, for they may be said to provide the datum on which theological reflection works (cf. what was said in chapter one about experience).  Perhaps more obviously Schleiermacher is the father (or a father) of that discipline known as the phenomenology of religion associated with such names as Edmund Husserl (1859–38) and Rudolf Otto, whose influential study of religious experience, The Idea of the Holy (1923), is often cited by theologians.

      Liberal theology, in general, may be said to have followed an inductive method in that it speaks of God from the side of man.  That is, it takes the content of Scripture as being a description of religious experience in and among the Jews, Jesus, His apostles, and the early church.  It uses this – along with any other religious experience deemed appropriate (from the history of Christianity or from world religions or both) – as the basis for producing theology.  In other words, it does not begin by assuming that God has revealed true statements about Himself and His activity and that these are contained in the texts of the Bible.  Rather, it assumes that the Bible is the record of religious experience within a changing history and context.  At the very least, that history and context first have to be investigated, and then, on the basis of sound information gained by historical, comparative, and phenomenological studies, theological reflection can occur.  Usually accompanying this inductive approach to the Bible is an inductive approach to the phenomenon of the human spirit and its religious longings and strivings.  At the center of his being, man is seen as searching for the transcendent – even when he is not conscious of any religious quest.

      A typical example of a sermon that uses the inductive method would be of the kind heard in my own country and church (the Church of England) over the last ten years leading up to the eventual ordination of women as priests in March 1994.  The preacher would begin by referring to the changing situation of women in the modern world – how that apart from being mothers and wives they are also doctors and lawyers and engineers.  He would proceed by saying that it is obvious that men and women are equal – different but equal.  Therefore, if they are equal, and if the Christian religion is true, then the real Christian teaching must be that they are equal before God and in the church.  Accordingly, this is really what the Bible actually teaches – despite appearances to the contrary.  Where the apostle Paul seems to be teaching something different (e.g., relations of order in which the male is both first in order and equal in worth and dignity), that which is different to the modern doctrine is attributed to Paul’s rabbinical exegesis or to cultural relativism.  Such an inductive approach has been followed both by liberals and conservatives.  Sermons on other social themes often proceed in a similar way – from experience to principle to discovering that principle in the Bible or the tradition.  (See above chapter one, “The Anglican Way in the Process of Changing.”)

      Modern, post-World War II examples of the use of the inductive method by those who seek to be systematic theologians are provided by the late Paul Tillich (whom we briefly studied in chapter four) and Wolfhart Pannenberg, professor of systematic theology in the University of Munich, Germany.  From the Roman Catholic side, this method is clearly seen in the work of the Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, David Tracy, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Hans Küng, professor in Tübingen.  A recent study of the theology of Schillebeeckx by a team of his admirers has the revealing title The Praxis of Christian Experience (1989).  Schillebeeckx, like Tillich, Tracy, and Küng, adopts a method of correlation that seeks to relate to each other the modern world and the God of the Christian tradition.

      The inductive approach is also an important ingredient in the methods of theology pursued by the other well-known Catholic theologians, Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan.  It is closely related to their emphasis on the transcendence of the human spirit, which we noticed above in the appendix of chapter five.  Since Lonergan is so clear in his commitment to the inductive (empirical method), it will be helpful to quote from his essay “Theology in Its New Context”:

Theology was a deductive science in the sense that its theses were conclusions to be proven from the premisses provided by Scripture and Tradition.  It has become an empirical science in the sense that Scripture and Tradition now supply not premisses but data.  The data has to be viewed in its historical perspective.  It has to be interpreted in the light of contemporary techniques and procedures.  When before the step from premisses to conclusions was brief, simple, and certain, today the steps from data to interpretation are long, arduous, and, at best, probable.  (1974, 58)

Lonergan proceeds by insisting that the shift from a deductivist to an empirical approach has come to stay for Roman Catholics.  Further, with the shift has come a new vocabulary, new imagery, and new concepts to express its thought.  Because of this great shift he notes that at the very beginning Karl Rahner felt the need to issue a Theological Dictionary (1965), and Heinrich Fries organized over one hundred experts to collaborate and produce a two-volume Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe (Handbook of Theological Terms, 1962-63).

      Then, of course, the inductive approach is necessarily fundamental to those who move from process philosophy into process theology.  Here the empirical study of the cosmos via cosmology, anthropology, and other disciplines is taken for granted, and religious experience is interpreted through this framework.  Clear examples of this particular form of the inductive method are provided by the varied writings of Schubert Ogden and W. N. Pittenger.

      Moving out from those who are systematic theologians to those who write occasionally on Christian theology (in contrast to Old and New Testament studies and exercises in the history of theology) there are, of course, many examples of the use of the inductive method.  Take, for example, the book on Jesus Christ entitled, The Human Face of God (1973) by John Robinson, whose earlier book Honest to God we noticed in chapter four.  Robinson starts from the position that Jesus is a man, a real man, and on this basis shows it is possible to say divine things about Him without removing Him from his human context.  A functional or moral unity between the Father and Jesus (the Son) provides, claims Robinson, all that Christology requires to speak of Jesus, the Man, who perfectly reveals God in and through His manhood.

      As I indicated in chapter one in the discussion about modern Anglican liturgies, one place where the inductive method has made a major impact is in the theology of the new liturgies of the Protestant denominations.  In fact, the inductive method is behind the oft-repeated cry of lex orandi: lex credendi (the law of praying is the basis of the law of believing).  That is, we search through the new service books and hymn books, and understanding them in the context of the ritual of the worship services, we draw conclusions as to who God is, who Jesus is, and what the Gospel is!  The Episcopal Church claims to have done just this with the Catechism or “An Outline of the Faith” that is printed in its 1979 Prayer Book.

      The Catechism begins with a section on “Human Nature” – that is, a theology from below.  Older catechisms began with God!  Its next section is headed “God the Father,” but there is nothing about the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ there at all.  The whole section, in fact, is basically about God as the creator of the natural order and the freedom of human beings to enjoy the good creation and show respect for human life.  Then, in the third section, the covenant (of the Old and New Testaments) is explained not in terms of God’s sovereign action in establishing a covenant and then of calling people into it (as the Bible describes), but in terms of the modern social contract, where God is seen merely as taking the initiative.  “A covenant is a relationship initiated by God, to which a body of people respond in faith.”

      When we ask how theologians, who use the inductive approach to establish their doctrine of God, speak of the Trinity, we encounter a very different doctrine than that produced by the deductive approach.  Since all the data available to speak of God is truly human data (i.e., descriptions of and reflections on religious experience), there can be no talk of God-as-God-is-in-Himself.  All talk of God is based on reflection of what religious experience tells us of the God who is known and encountered in the world, in church worship, and in personal prayer.  Since this personal and communal experience consistently points to God’s being experienced in a threefold way – in Jesus as Man who manifests God, as the Father who is transcendent, and as the Spirit who is present in, with, and through the created order – then God is said to be a Trinity.  It is worth recalling that Schleiermacher dealt with the doctrine of the Trinity in an appendix to his Christian Faith (1821).  At least this suggests that it is for liberal theology a doctrine of the second rank.  Certainly it was so for Tillich, whose doctrine of the Trinity is in fact not teaching about God as God, but rather about the ontological relationship of God and man.  It is knowledge of God in terms of man’s own ontological structure, as his Systematic Theology makes clear (1:241ff.).  Another way of putting it is to say that the Trinity is a human symbol of what is in God (as Being-Itself): there is the element of abyss (Father), the element of form (Son), and the unity of the two (Spirit).

      Of course, there are many variations in the way this Trinity is described within modern, liberal theology, which has consciously rejected neo-orthodoxy and returned to an inductive approach.  These are carefully described and analyzed by William J. Hill, O.P, in The Three-Personed God (1982).  With respect both to Pannenberg and Moltmann (who are often referred to as teaching a theology of hope), Hill shows how dependent they are on the Hegelian heritage in terms of a philosophy of history and how for them, in contrasting ways, God is the God of the future (and only the God of history in the light of being the God of the future).  In Pannenberg’s teaching, for example, this God who, is Trinity is the Power of the Future operative in the present.  This is seen primarily in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  Yet, this God is not three persons (as in classic theology).  He is one person, who posits historically a human person (Jesus of Nazareth) as his other, who also belongs to the essence of his divinity.  God (the Father) then acts personally through the human history of that other (Jesus) on others (believers) as the Spirit, bringing them (believers) to full personhood.  Pannenberg’s theology is now fully accessible to English readers in his Systematic Theology (1991).

      Moltmann develops his theology of hope, which is the promise of a radically new future that contradicts the present, in a different way.  He declares that we must see the Trinity as event, the event of the Cross, and then think of it as history open toward the eschatological.  This is presented in his Trinity and the Kingdom (1981).  Moltmann teaches that God makes Jesus to be His divine Son in delivering Him over to death.  In this act of God, God in freedom makes death to be a phenomenon within (not external to) Himself.  At the same time, God makes Himself into “Father” in his adoption of Jesus as His Son.  The spirit of this sacrificial death then goes out from the (newly constituted) Father and Son and becomes determinate of the future (the climax of the age).  Insofar as this “spirit” is distinct from Father and Son and is the spirit of Father and Son, He is the Spirit.  Therefore, God becomes three through the Cross; and as such He is the God who will only truly be known in the future.

      Both Moltmann and Pannenberg engage in detailed study of the Scriptures and specific exegesis of important texts.  Unless one looks at their whole systems, one could think they were adopting the deductive approach.  In fact, they are working inductively and so are free to reject the classic formulations of the person of Christ and the Holy Trinity and refashion them in their theology from below.

      Returning to the Episcopal Catechism, which was discussed above, we find that it also only knows of the Trinity in terms of God as we experience Him, not in terms of God-as-God-is-in-Himself.  In fact, we get this definition: “The Trinity is one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”  That is, God is triune only in the sense that we experience Him this way.  If the Catechism had wished to speak in traditionally orthodox ways, it could have said, for example, “The Trinity is the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, three Persons, one God.”

THE REDUCTIVE APPROACH

      At the opposite end of the spectrum to the deductive approach is the reductive.  In general, it is true to say that the orthodox (or neo-orthodox) mind denies the cognitive challenge of secularized, modern consciousness and states the tradition or truth in classic categories from yesterday.  In contrast, the radical mind accepts the cognitive challenge of modernity and seeks to make a comprehensive translation of the tradition or truth of yesterday into the categories of modern consciousness.  We noticed in our study of the 1960s how this translation was undertaken by various writers, not least by those who, following Nietzsche, proclaimed the death of God (e.g., Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton).

      Berger chose Bultmann’s method of demythologization as a primary example of the reductive approach (we examined this in chapter four).  Mythology is a pattern of thought in which the other-worldly or the supernatural is seen as acting within this world.  That is, the empirical world is presented as penetrated or even invaded by forces from outside and beyond it.  And not only the world but human beings are seen as being influenced by good and evil spirits.  Bultmann saw all this mythology in the New Testament and saw it existing within the ancient cosmology of the three-deck or three-story universe.  Further, he asserted that the very content of the Gospel of God concerning Jesus is couched in mythological language.

      In a modern world, with a scientific worldview, Christianity is finished – it has no future – unless it can be totally translated into an acceptable modern form.  Modern man cannot believe ancient mythology.  So Bultmann attempted to present the Gospel in such a way that in its modern form (expressed in existentialist categories) it was the dynamic equivalent of the message of the New Testament (expressed in ancient mythology).  He went further than this, however, for he actually demythologized the act of God in Jesus Christ, making that act occur now in the meeting between the proclamation of the Gospel and the response of human faith.

      Reflecting on Bultmann’s bold program, and calling its result a “model,” Berger wrote:

The model always begins by what purports to be a sure analysis of the modern situation, or more accurately, of the consciousness of modern man.  This consciousness, supposedly, is secularized and ipso facto incapable of assenting to the traditional definitions of reality.  [Therefore] ... it jumps from the empirical diagnosis that modern consciousness is indeed secularized to the epistemological assumption that this secularity is superior to whatever worldviews (mythological or what-have-you) preceded it.  (1979, 111)

It seems not to have occurred to Bultmann that in certain respects modern man may be cognitively inferior to human beings in earlier periods of human civilization.

      Since the 1960s there has been an explosion of reductive theologies, or theologies that combine the inductive with the reductive approach.  Much (but not all) of what is called political, liberationist, black, and feminist theology is reductive.  That is, the aim is to translate biblical categories and teaching into modern categories and teaching and thereby to serve a fully modern, secular, political agenda.  It is assumed that what is being desired (a new society, a just order, equality of the sexes, decolonization, and so forth) is superior to what has been, and remains, the present state of affairs.  As a result, the Bible and the Christian tradition are used highly selectively to provide a model (e.g., exodus, deliverance) that is then translated into a secular model (e.g., social revolution) for modern society.

Black Theology

      In the late 1960s there emerged the beginnings of black theology, of which the most articulate spokesman has been James Cone.  His book A Black Theology of Liberation (1970) followed the earlier Black Theology and Black Power (1969).  In the latter he announced his general concern:

The task of black theology is to analyze the black man’s condition in the light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ with the purpose of creating a new understanding of black dignity among black people, and providing the necessary soul in that people to destroy white racism.  Black theology is primarily a theology of and for black people who share the common belief that racism will be destroyed only when black people decide to say in word and deed to the white racist: “We ain’t gonna stand any more of this.”  The purpose of black theology is to analyze the nature of the Christian faith in such a way that black people can say yes to blackness and no to whiteness and mean it.  (1969, 42).

The purpose of black theology, then, is to prepare the minds of blacks for freedom so that they will be ready to give all for it.  Further writing by Cone since 1970 has refined his call for liberation.

But what is the freedom that is the goal?  It is freedom primarily in terms of living in this world now.  It is to enjoy to the full the social, economic, and educational freedoms enjoyed by white middle-class Americans.  Obviously for a people who have been maltreated and despised such freedom is a goal worth desiring and achieving.  All fair-minded people can empathize with such hopes.  However, theologically speaking, it is not that freedom in the Spirit and in Christ of which the apostle Paul eloquently speaks in the Epistle to the Galatians.  It is a freedom within this world, not a freedom in Christ from this world and its sin.  (God of the Oppressed, 1975, 24)

Black Theology since 1969 has been ethnocentric, concentrating only on one part of the human race.  Further, it has elevated black experience of life to the norm and, on this basis, has interpreted the biblical themes of salvation and judgment in sociopolitical form in service of freedom for blacks.  So it has served a purpose of raising the sense of dignity among blacks, but unless theology can be said to be primarily about life in this world and about God as only immanent in the world process, black theology must be judged to be reductionist.

Liberation Theology

      Especially from its Latin American context, liberation theology has been a powerful force in the ecumenical movement since the early 1970s.  In Latin America it has had and still has some highly educated and articulate spokesmen.  They include Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru, Leonardo Boff and Hugo Assmann of Brazil, Jose Miranda of Mexico, Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay, and John Sobrino of El Salvador.  All these are Roman Catholics, but Jose Miguez Bonino of Argentina is a Methodist.  Not all that these theologians have written is reductionist, because they mix the inductive with the reductive method.  The tendency, however, is to allow their (often Marxian) analysis of the concrete social and political situation of the poor in Latin America to determine their use of the Bible and tradition.

      In the early days of the movement, Gutierrez gave an explanation of how and where he was doing his theology:

In a continent like Latin America ... the main challenge does not come from the unbeliever but from the nonhuman – that is, the human being who is not recognized as such by the prevailing social order.  These are the poor and exploited people, the ones who are systematically and legally despoiled of their being human, those who scarcely know what a human being might be.  These nonhumans do not call into question our religious world so much as they call into question our economic, social, political and cultural world. Their challenge impels us toward a revolutionary transformation of the very bases of what is now a dehumanizing society.  The question, then, is no longer how we are to speak about God in a world come of age; it is rather how to proclaim him Father in a world that is not human and what the implications might be of telling nonhumans that they are children of God.  (Frontiers of Theology in Latin America, editor Rosino Gillinin,1979, x)

Here we are provided with the essential theme or feature of liberation theology.  It is to humanize the downtrodden and oppressed peoples by changing the total structures and conditions in which they live their miserable lives.  The purpose of theology is not to understand God and His world; it is to change the world with and for God by right theory and appropriate action.  Such involvement in a particular situation, with a view to changing it, is what is called praxis.

      Thus, liberation theology has been in search not of orthodoxy (correct thinking) but of orthopraxis (the correlation of thought and action).  It is participatory rather than detached.  Therefore, Gutierrez described his influential Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (1971) as

an attempt at reflection, based on the Gospel and the experiences of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America.  It is a theological reflection born of experience of shared efforts to abolish the current unjust situation and to build a different society, freer and more human. (ix)

Class struggle is thus necessary, and Christians are called to share in the struggle by identifying with the oppressed.

      Segundo in The Liberation of Theology (1976) insisted that “there is no such thing as Christian theology or a Christian interpretation of the gospel message in the absence of a prior political commitment.  Only the latter makes the former possible” (94).  Sobrino argued that Jesus was involved in a political and social context similar to that of South America in his Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin American Approach (1978).  Bonino defended the right of Latin Americans to use Marxist analysis and categories for their action and theology in their political and social context in his Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (1975).  He claimed that theology

is not an effort to give a correct understanding of God’s attributes or actions but an effort to articulate the action of faith, the shape of praxis conceived and realized in obedience.  As philosophy in Marx’s famous dictum, theology has to stop explaining the world and to start transforming it.  Orthopraxis, rather than orthodoxy, becomes the criterion for theology. (81)

Liberation theologians use the Bible as a means to an end – the liberation of people in bondage.  Thus the Exodus, the deliverance of the tribes of Israel from Egyptian slavery, is taken as a central paradigm of God’s acting in history and as a promise for the oppressed people in today’s world.  While this theme occurs in the writings of the theologians listed above, it is particularly developed by J. Severino Croatto in his Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom (1981) and by Jorge V. Pixley in On Exodus: A Liberation Perspective (1987).  To the theme of God the Liberator is joined the theme of God who does justice.  Croatto, with others, insists that an essential message of the prophets of Israel was that to do justice and to do what is right is truly to know God.

      From the New Testament, the message of the kingdom of God in the Gospels provides another major theme of liberation.  Boff wrote:

Initially, Jesus preached neither himself nor the church, but the kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is the realization of a fundamental utopia of the human heart, the total transfiguration of this world, free from all that alienates human beings, free from pain, sin, divisions and death.  He came and announced: “The time has come, the kingdom of God is close at hand!”  He not only promised this new reality but already began to realize it, showing that it is possible in the world.  He therefore did not come to alienate human beings and carry them off to another world.  He came to confirm the good news: this sinister world has a final destiny which is good, human and divine.  (Jesus Christ Liberator, 1978, 49)

An essential point is that Jesus preached a kingdom that looked to a global transformation of the structures of the world.

      For those who wish to read an introductory guide to liberation theology as a world-wide phenomenon by a committed North American supporter, they will find that Robert MacFee Brown’s book Liberation Theology: An Introductory Guide (1983; reprinted 1992) fits the bill.  Here he provides eight comparisons between what he calls the dominant theology and liberation theology.

      1.   (a) The dominant theology (henceforth DT) responds to the nonbeliever whose faith is threatened by modernity.

            (b) Liberation Theology (henceforth LT) responds to the nonperson whose faith is threatened by forces of destruction.

      2.   (a) DT begins with the world of modernity and remains thought orientated.

            (b) LT begins with the world of oppression and becomes action orientated.

      3.   (a) DT is developed “from above” – from the position of the privileged, the affluent, the bourgeois.

            (b) LT is developed “from below” – from the “underside of history,” the position of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the exploited.

      4.   (a) DT is largely written by those with white hands, the “winners.”

            (b) LT is only beginning to be written and must be articulated by those with dark-skinned, gnarled hands, the “losers.”

      5.   (a) DT focuses attention on a religious world that needs to be reinforced.

            (b) LT focuses attention on a political world that needs to be replaced.

      6.   (a) DT is linked to Western culture, the white race, the male sex, and the bourgeois class.

            (b) LT is linked to the wretched of the earth, the marginalized races, despised cultures, and the exploited classes.

      7.   (a) DT affirms the achievement of culture – individualism, rationalism, capitalism, and the bourgeois spirit.

            (b) LT insists that the so-called achievements of culture have been used to exploit the poor.

      8.   (a) DT wants to work gradually, reforming existing structures by “supervision.”

            (b) LT demands to work rapidly through liberation from existing structures by “subversion.”

Although this comparison is somewhat of a caricature, it does convey the self-understanding of those who are supportive of liberation theology.

      One way of understanding Latin American (and other) theologies of liberation is that they do not attempt to say all that could be said about God, Jesus, the Spirit, the church, and so on.  Rather, they present themselves as a corrective to past theology by emphasizing and majoring on that which other theologies have failed to tell.  This interpretation has some worth, but it does not deal with the fact that the thrust of liberation theology is to reduce spiritual and eschatological categories to socio-political, economic realities.

Feminist Theology

      All agree that the rise and development of feminist theology is intimately related to the origins and expansion of feminism in Western society.  Contemporary feminism addresses and challenges everything that affects the lives of women.  Even as secular feminism is not monochrome but varied, so also is Christian or religious feminism.  This said, it is possible to see a commitment to various basic principles among feminist theologians.

      They all appear to teach:

      1.  That traditional theology – be it orthodox, evangelical, or liberal – is patriarchal.  It has been and still is written by men for men.  It has the quality of maleness both in what it says of God and what is says of humanity.  So a minimal, immediate requirement is that inclusive language be adopted by the churches.

      2.  That traditional theology has ignored or falsely represented women and women’s experience.  It has conveniently read the Scriptures with the tradition-wearing spectacles that see only, or primarily, male reality.  It is as though women have only existed in the shadow of men.

      3.  That traditional theology has had a major role in shaping Western culture and has thereby contributed to the subordination of women in both society and church.

      4.  That women must become clergy and theologians and begin to teach and write from the standpoint of women – that is, women who are not walking in the shadows of men.  This means presenting a new and challenging vision of God in female images and of the identity of women as being fully human and reflecting the image of God in their persons.

      So feminist theology is in its fullest definition a totally new presentation of religious experience from the standpoint of women.

      But where do feminist theologians begin their reflection?  Most seem to begin from within women’s experience, which may be subdivided into at least three aspects.  First of all, there is the experience of living in a woman’s body with its specifically female biology and activity – with menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding, and menopause.  Such experience, it is often claimed, places women nearer to the cycles of nature, making them aware of the interconnectedness of the world.  (So, to speak not only of mother earth but also of the mother god(dess) is a seemingly obvious development.)

      In the second place, there are the socialized reactions to feminine, bodily experience – that is, what the culture teaches or assumes about women as women, and which women (with men) accept and expect.  Predictable emotions include the fear of pregnancy among teenagers, the fear of infertility among older women, and the fear of rape among all women.  And all this is in the context of the assumption, deeply embedded in Western culture, that the whole worth of a woman is in the bearing and raising of children and of always being a helpmate in a subordinate position to a man.  (Knowing how others define women, the feminist theologian is well placed to offer her contrasting definition.)

      In the third place, the specifically feminist experience is a response to the socialized experience of women in a man’s world.  It is feminist because it is specifically from women who are thinking about and reacting to the way they are treated in a man’s world.  They are questioning all that they have been told about the nature, role, and vocation of women.  Women are speaking out against men’s dominance of women, against being excluded from their full potential, against being prevented from exploring the potential of their talents and interests, and against not being allowed to make genuine choices.

      One of the moderate feminist theologians, Pamela Dickey Young, writes:

It is on the question of women’s experience that there is most agreement in feminist theology.  It is our experience of patriarchy, our experience of ourselves and other women as oppressed, that provides the starting point of feminist theology in women’s experience....  I see the sexism in the Christian tradition that makes necessary the call for change, the call to take seriously and foster in theology the full humanity of women. (1990, 67–68)

It is significant that two leading feminist theologians, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Rosemary Radford Ruether, are both Roman Catholics, even though they do not teach in Roman Catholic, institutions.  The fact that they enjoy wide support in American Catholicism testifies to the power of the winds of modernity in their church since the 1960s.

      Having attended lectures by Schüssler Fiorenza I can testify both to the attractiveness and popularity of her teaching.  Her most influential books are In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983) and Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (1984).  Her approach is clearly reductive.  For her, women’s experience of oppression is not only the starting point but the norm of her theology.  In looking at the Bible she insists that only the “nonsexist and nonandrocentric traditions” within the Bible and only the “nonoppressive” traditions of interpreting the Bible are acceptable to feminist theology.  All biblical texts must be tested for their liberating content for women before they can be considered as revelation.

      Schüssler Fiorenza has left far behind the Roman Catholic doctrine of the teaching authority, the magisterium, of the pope and bishops.  In its place there is a new authority, that of women-church or the ekklesia of women.  This is the movement and/or community of self-identified women and women-identified men, whose goal is women’s religious self-affirmation, power, and liberation from all that which is deemed to be patriarchal alienation, marginalization, and oppression.  It is here, in this ekklesia, that she insists that there is revelation from God(dess).

      Within this community the Bible can be rightly interpreted and shown not to be supportive of patriarchy and the oppression of women.  In one of her essays Schüssler Fiorenza writes:

Feminist theologies introduce a radical shift into all forms of traditional theology insofar as they insist that the central commitment and accountability for feminist theologians is not to the church as a male institution but to women in the churches, not to the Bible on the whole but to the liberating word of God coming to articulation in the biblical writings.  (“Emerging Issues in Feminist Biblical Interpretation,” 1984, 35–36)

She also provides her feminist hermeneutics (principles of interpreting the Bible), which is a combination of four types, each of which functions in line with the others.  First, she advocates a hermeneutic of suspicion that assumes the patriarchal and androcentric nature of the texts.  From this she proceeds to a hermeneutic of proclamation that decides which parts or themes of the Bible can be used or are appropriate within the community of faith today.  Then she utilizes a hermeneutic of remembrance that seeks to recover biblical traditions from a feminist perspective – to see behind them and in them what male eyes had missed.  Finally, she advocates a hermeneutic of creative actualization by which women can enter into the biblical world through historical imagination, artistic re-creation, and ritual.  By this method the surviving intimations and remnants of traditions within the Bible that truly affirmed women (and have been edited by men!) can be recovered and given contemporary expression.

      But what of Jesus?  He is interpreted to become the man who proclaimed the kingdom of God in which there is true equality for all.  Jesus founded a movement that is truly egalitarian and therefore in which there is a full and rightful place for women.  What Jesus really intended and what His movement truly was about is not yet realized.  It belongs to the future.

      Rosemary Radford Ruether is also committed to women-church, as the title of her book Women-Church: Theology and Practice (1985) indicates.  In fact, since the publication of her book Sexism and God-Talk (1983), Radford Ruether has looked to a variety of sources, of which the Bible and Christian tradition are but two, for material to construct a theology of feminist experience.  These include heretical writings, the holy books of the religions of the world, and post-Christian philosophies.  Her method is eclectic.  She knows what she is looking for, and she goes in many directions to search for it.  It is because women’s experience is not at the center of the Christian Bible that she feels the need to go elsewhere in search of texts that affirm the dignity and equality of women.

      Again we ask, but what of Jesus?  Radford Ruether strips Jesus of the so-called myths of being the divine Word/Son and Messiah and reduces him to a teacher who is compatible with feminism.  In His relationship to God, trust and love are exemplified; and in His relationships with and treatment of women, true humanity is revealed.  But to think of Him as bearing and declaring the final revelation of God is mistaken.  God is constantly revealing God(dess) through our sisters and brothers.

      I have named only three feminist theologians, but there is an increasing group of them.  Familiar names include Letty Russell, Sally MacFague, Anne Carr, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, Catherine Mowry Lacugna, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Judith Plaskow, Carol Christ, and Patricia Wilson-Kastner.  Yet, as with the secular feminist movement, there is not one agreed-on agenda and aim, and maybe there never will be.

THE REGULATIVE (NARRATIVE) APPROACH

      To appreciate this approach, which has been expressed in a variety of forms in contemporary Christianity since the 1970s, several basic ideas must be grasped.  The first is the viewing of the content of the books of the Bible as being primarily and essentially (yet not completely) narrative or story.  It is the narrative of the relation of God to specific peoples – first the Israelites/Jews and then the church of Jesus Christ.  This relationship is rooted in historical events and personalities from its beginning in the ancient Near East (Ur of the Chaldees) to its expansion to the ends of the earth.  As a narrative, it is also the ongoing story of the checkered but vital relation to God of His adopted, covenant people.  At the center of the relation of God to this history and this people is the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah.  The passion narratives (which occupy about a quarter of each of the four Gospels) hold a unique place, providing the key to reading the whole Bible.

      The second idea is that each of us, every human being, also has a story – a story that continues and develops every day of his life.  We speak of “the story of our lives” and thereby admit a narrative interpretation of personal identity and personal history.  To avoid the bane of individualism, this story has to be connected to God’s story.

      The third idea is that the church, as the community of faith (i.e., the voluntary society of individual persons), also has a story that it tells each time it meets.  Although it has its own local and denominational story, this is not the story that it tells and hears.  The story that brings people together for worship and fellowship is God’s story – the narrative of God’s revealing, saving, and reconciling work as told in the Bible.  The local church enters into this unique story in its reading of the Bible, in its listening to sermons on Scripture, and in its act of worship recalling the mighty works and words of God.  Thus, it is this biblical story that gives meaning and purpose to a community of faith.  Not only the congregation with its own corporate, denominational history/narrative, but also each person with his particular, personal history/narrative is joined to the larger, definitive narrative and is thereby provided with meaning and purpose in life.

      The fourth idea is that revelation from God occurs as the worshipers enter into and become a part of the narrative of God’s gracious activity as told in the Old and New Testaments.  In the spirit of worship and in the joining of personal histories to the story of God’s saving involvement in human life and history, the stage is thereby set for the horizons of the biblical narrative and the horizons of the worshipers to fuse.  Spiritual and moral insight, illumination of mind, a sense of the presence of this God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a relationship with Jesus, and other expressions of revelation are experienced.  Primarily, however, the narrative in words makes possible the disclosure of the One who is the Word, even Jesus Christ.

      George Lindbeck proposed that a religion be looked at as “a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought” and said that its doctrines (in contradistinction to theological remarks) are best construed as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude and action.  What this means is explained in his The Nature of Doctrine (1984) in a somewhat technical way.  Put simply, doctrines are not talk about God but rather talk about the church’s talk about God, salvation, and so on.  The primary talk is what is heard in worship, essentially from reading the Bible.  Doctrines function like the rules of a game, regulating how the game is to be played – how we are to think, speak, and act Christianly.

      His general position may also be called “intratextual theology.”  Instead of translating Scripture into extra-scriptural categories, reality is to be redescribed in terms of the scriptural framework.  It is the text (so to speak) that absorbs the world (or my/your world), rather than the world absorbing the text.  Too often in the self-assured world of modernity, people have sought to make sense of the Scriptures instead of allowing the Scriptures to make sense of themselves!  Lindbeck’s general position is accessible to nonspecialists in his January 1988 lecture, entitled “Scripture, Consensus and Community,” given at the Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church and later published in Biblical Interpretation in Crisis (Richard John Neuhaus, ed., 1989).

      Looking back to the first days of the Christian church, Lindbeck pointed out that it was not a different canon of Scripture but a distinctive method of reading it that differentiated the church from the synagogue.

Christians read the Bible they shared with the Jews in the light of their at first orally transmitted stories of the crucified and resurrected Messiah in whose name they prayed and into whom they were incorporated in baptism and eucharist.  Jesus was for them the climax and summation of Israel’s history.  When joined to him even Gentiles became members of the enlarged people of God, citizens of the commonwealth of Israel (Eph. 2:12).  Its history became their history and its Bible their Bible.  It was not simply a source of precepts and truths, but the interpretative framework for all reality.  They used typological and, less fundamentally, allegorical techniques derived from their Jewish and Greek milieux to apply the canonically fixed words to their ever-changing situations. (Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, 76–77)

A key sentence here is, “It was not simply a source of precepts and truths, but the interpretative framework for all reality.”

      With the creation of the enlarged canon (the books of the Old and New Covenants) also came an explicit “rule of faith.”  This rule (creed) articulated what may be called a basic (but not sophisticated) Christological and Trinitarian reading of the Jewish Bible (in translation, the Greek Septuagint).  In fact, a certain way of reading and hearing Scripture accompanied and was inextricably united to the extension of the canon in the early church.  This reading was “as a Christ-centered narrationally and typologically unified whole in conformity to the Trinitarian rule of faith” (ibid., 77).  Thus, to read the Bible as Scripture was to read it in this way and in this framework and not in another way – e.g., not as Greek epic poetry.  And it is this Christian way of reading the Bible that Lindbeck wants to recover for the modern churches.  Such a reading takes for granted the work of scientific, biblical criticism, but it does not major on it.  Rather, it accepts the existence of the one canon of the one Bible and calls on the churches to read that canon.

      Lindbeck and his colleague at Yale, Hans Frei, held that in modern times there has been a serious neglect of the narrative meaning of Scripture (see especially Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 1974 for details of this).

In realistic narratives of the biblical type, the identity and character of the personal agents (viz. God and human beings) is enacted by the plotted interaction of intention and circumstance.  This is the Bible’s chief device for telling its readers about themselves, their world, and their God.  Definitions of essence and attributes and descriptions of inner experience, of states of consciousness, can perhaps be sometimes inferred from the biblical materials, but if these inferences are primarily relied upon, much of what the Bible communicates about God and human beings is lost.  (Ibid., 78)

That is, the loss of narrative meaning, through the sole or excessive use of the deductive or the inductive method, has the effect of weakening the glue that holds the canon together.  Also, it makes difficult the typological use of the Bible to shape the present communal and personal identity of Christian people.  Further,

Trinitarian and Christological doctrine lose their function as directives for Bible reading (e.g., Christ is to be understood in the light of the whole Bible and the whole Bible in the fight of Christ) and, especially for sola scriptura Protestants, become fragile and hermeneutically inoperative deductions from the text.  Thus when narrative meaning is neglected, the entire classic interpretative pattern crumbles.  (Ibid., 83)

Lindbeck thus emphasized the need to recover the narrative meaning of Scripture in modern churches and with the narrative meaning, the classic interpretation of the sacred text.  In this context the reading of Scripture within the community of faith would, he believed, be guided by doctrine (the Holy Trinity and Christology) and also generate doctrine (understood as communally authoritative rules of speech, attitude, and action).  So on this basis, doctrine is second-order language, being the result of reflection on the first order.  The latter is primary because it is that which is both within the sacred texts and that which is read and heard in corporate worship.  Theology is, at best, reflection on the first-order language; it is consideration of the content of the narratives as they bear witness to God, the Savior.

      Various theological streams have flowed into that of narrative theology.  They include the teaching of H. Richard Niebuhr and Karl Barth on revelation and Scripture and the concept of biblical theology developed by such scholars as G. Ernest Wright.  There have also been influences from the study of literature and anthropology.  Erich Auerbach’s book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) and Clifford Geertz’s book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) seem to have been particularly useful to both Lindbeck and Frei.

      Exponents of the narrative approach include Stanley Hauerwas, the moral theologian, George Stroup, the systematic theologian, and Geoffrey Wainwright, the liturgical theologian.  At least two evangelicals have also sought to utilize this approach – Gabriel Fackre, The Christian Story (1984) and Clark Pinnock, Tracking the Maze (1990).

      It is not only Protestants who have developed narrative theology; Roman Catholics are making use of it, though they prefer to call it by a different name.  Avery Dulles replaces the cultural-linguistic of Lindbeck with his own “ecclesial-transformative” and comments:

In the ecclesial-tгansformative approach, the primary subject matter of theology is taken to be the saving self-communication of God through the symbolic events and words of Scripture, especially in Jesus Christ as the mediator and fullness of all revelation.  A privileged locus for the apprehension of this subject matter is the worship of the Church, in which the biblical and traditional symbols are proclaimed and “represented” in ways that call for active participation (at least in mind and heart) on the part of the congregation.  The interplay of symbols in community worship arouses and directs the worshipers’ tacit powers of apprehension so as to instill a personal familiarity with the Christian mysteries.  (The Craft of Theology, 19)

Dulles adds that the symbolic language of primary religious discourse cannot be left behind if the dogmas and theological formulations of Christian faith are to be rightly appreciated.  The biblical narrative must be recognized as first-order language.

      Therefore, we see that what unites people from very different theological positions in the narrative approach is the commitment to the primacy of the canon as canon and to the first-order language of the Bible itself.  It is a way of rendering the doctrines of any denomination to be valid but only valid for that denomination in the sense that they guide or regulate its ways of worship, witness, and morality.  Where all agree is (or ought to be) on the centrality of the canon as narrative and as read from a basic Trinitarian perspective (as the early creeds – e.g., the Apostles’ Creed – declare).

FOR FURTHER READING

Berger, Peter L.  The Heretical Imperative.  Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979.

Brown, Robert McAfee.  Liberation Theology: An Introductory Guide.  New edition.  Louisville, Ken.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992.

Cone, James H. and Wilmore, Gayraud S.  Black Theology. A Documentary History.  2 vols. (vol. 1. 1966–1979; vol. 2.  1980–1992).  Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993.

Echols, Alice.  Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Ferm, Deane William.  Third World Liberation Theologies: A Reader.  Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1986.

Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler.  “Emerging Issues in Feminist Biblical Interpretation.”  In Christian Feminism: Visions of a New Humanity.  Edited by Judith Weidman.  San. Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.

—.  In Memory of Her. A Feminist Theological Construction of Christian Origins.  New York: Crossroad, 1983.

Frei, Hans W.  Theology and Narrative.  Selected Essays.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Gillinin, Rosino, ed.  Frontiers of Theology in Latin America.  New York: Orbis, 1979.

Hodgson, Peter C., and Robert King, eds.  Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Tradition and Tasks.  Rev. ed.  Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985.

—.  Readings in Christian Theology.  Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985.

Lacugna, Catherine Mowry, ed.  Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective.  San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Lindbeck, George.  “Scripture, Consensus and Community.”  In Biblical Interpretation in Crisis.  Edited by Richard John Neuhaus.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,1989.

McGovern, Arthur F.  Liberation Theology and Its Critics.  Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1989.

Marshall, Bruce D., ed.  Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck. South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1990.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford.  Sexism and God-Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology.  Boston: Beacon, 1983.

Young, Pamela Dickey.  Feminist Theology/Christian Theology: In Search of Method.  Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990.

Epilogue – Evangelical Theology

      Most books belonging to the area of systematic theology that claim to be evangelical are best seen (as we noted above) as belonging to the deductive type and approach.  However, there are some, as we also noted above, that claim to be of the narrative type.

      If we examine the theology implied by the popular books from evangelical presses that are widely read in evangelicalism, then it is not so clear that evangelical theology is primarily of the deductive type.  In fact, much of the experientalist-based popular theology is probably nearer to the inductive and reductive types than the deductive.  The reason for this seemingly strange judgment is that much evangelicalism has been deeply affected by the ethos and techniques of modernity and hardly recognizes that this has been so and remains so. Thus, while disclaiming modernity (or what is called secular humanism), it actually tends to express it in its general methodology and basic assumptions.

THREE CONSIDERATIONS

      American evangelicals have tended to be blind to the effects and dangers of modernity because their own identity is actually tied to modernity.  Under the leadership of Charles Finney and other evangelists during what is called “the Second General Awakening,” it became acceptable to use humanly engineered techniques to cause people to make a decision for Christ.  In fact, Finney defined a revival as “the results of the right use of constituted means” (e.g., nightly meetings, mass publicity, the anxious bench, and so on).  Instead of truth being uppermost, results were taken as the barometer of truth.  Put simply, what works replaced what is true; and what works was seen as what is true.  Where a method was “superficially” successful, principles were deduced from it and declared to be true.  Here is a kind of pragmatism.

      Evangelicals have also been partially blind to modernity because they have mistakenly held that its challenge is only in the area of ideas.  They have not reckoned with the fact that ideas do not succeed in history and culture because of their truthfulness but because of their inter-relationship to social processes (as we noted in chapter three).  If modernity (as we noted in the preface) is a social reality and a global culture created by capitalism, technology, and information, then it is possible to resist the ideas of modernity and still be caught up in its social processes.  It is then the case that one is using uncritically some or all of its features (technology, advertising, telecommunications, and so forth).  The medium can so easily become the message.

      Evangelicals have hardly realized that modernity is double-edged.  It has brought many benefits (e.g., air-conditioning systems and hearing aids for the deaf).  At the same time it has also made reality to appear to be that which is new, instant, controllable, measurable, predictable, and marketable.  The preaching of the Gospel and the doctrinal, ethical, and spiritual content of the Scriptures are often made to fit into reality as modernity delivers and expresses reality.  The truth is thereby squeezed into the receptacle provided by modernity and is in danger of being reduced or changed into something other than what it ought to be.

A TYPOLOGY OF EVANGELICALISM

      It has long been recognized by reflective evangelicals that what is called evangelicalism comes in a variety of shapes and forms in modern America.  I set out below a typology of twelve forms of modern American evangelicalism.  It is based on an unpublished paper by Kevin Offner of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and, being a typology, probably describes no evangelical group or school precisely.  Virtually every evangelical will claim to belong to two or more of the types.  This typology, however, covers the general range of possibilities and indicates where the theology is coming from.  After careful consideration I decided not to add names of theologians to the typology because certain types have no obvious systematic theology texts.

      1.  Reformed evangelicalism.  This claims to be doctrinally in the tradition of Calvin and the Reformed or Presbyterian confessions of faith.  It seeks to think Christianly, to transform culture, and to change institutions.  The tendency is to emphasize the cerebral and to underplay the experiential in religious practice; thus it encourages a deductive and a propositional theology.

      2.  Anabaptist evangelicalism.  This looks to the radical reformers of the Protestant Reformation (called Anabaptists and Mennonites).  It is countercultural and pacifist, emphasizing servanthood over against authority.  Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for Christian community, and its theological approach is usually that of the inductive type because it makes theological claims on the basis of both scriptural testimony and modern experience.

      3.  Neo-orthodox evangelicalism.  Obviously this is much influenced by the teaching of Karl Barth.  It makes the distinction between knowing God and knowing about God.  As a result, it tends to favor the narrative in contrast to the deductive approach in theology.

      4.  Charismatic evangelicalism.  This lives in the expectancy that God is speaking and will speak afresh today and that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit are present and available in the church today.  Personal and community experience of God in terms of His gifts and grace is very much at the center.  The theological approach is a mixture of the deductive from scriptural texts and the inductive, based on claimed experiences.

      5.  Theonomist evangelicalism.  Tending to be cerebral and with a great emphasis on God’s will for the family and country, this emphasizes the permanence of God’s unchanging law and is post-millennial in its eschatology.  Its theology is very much of the deductive type.

      6.  Fundamentalist evangelicalism.  This is self-consciously anti-liberal and tends to see all issues in terms of being right or wrong (there are few gray areas).  The seriousness of “external” sins is stressed.  It is extremely biblistic, using the Bible more as a glorious quarry or treasury of individual texts to be quoted as necessary rather than as a collection of holy books from different historical periods that are to be read in their totality.  Theologically it belongs to the deductive type, even if the range on which the deduction is made is limited.

      7.  Dispensationalist evangelicalism.  Tending to be nondenominational and pro-Israel, this reads the Bible through a grid (the system of dispensations) that effectively limits what is regarded as the Word of God for today.  There is usually a great emphasis on grace in contrast to works as the way of salvation.  It is both reductive and deductive in method, for it reduces that material (the content of Holy Scripture) from which deduction can be made.

      8.  Pro-American pietist evangelicalism.  This emphasizes civil religion and Christian country and hopes that the power of politics (in God’s providence) will bring change.  The political thrust is energized by emphasis on personal piety.  Theologically it is generally inductive in theological approach.

      9.  Anti-American, anti pietist evangelicalism.  This claims to speak for freedom over against such phenomena as the sinfulness of capitalism, too many rules and regulations, the right wing in culture/politics, and rigid fundamentalism in religion.  Its theological approach is generally inductive.

      10.  Therapeutic evangelicalism.  This emphasizes inner healing, sees sin in terms of sickness and dysfunctionality, and encourages self-knowledge through introspection.  The Bible is used as a support base for psychological theories.  Theologically it can be either inductive (creating doctrine from human experience) or reductive (reducing doctrine to psychological theory) or both.

      11.  Social-action evangelicalism.  This is much like the older liberal Protestantism where there was an emphasis on caring for the poor, teaching on physical-spiritual unity, and the claim that actions speak louder than words.  In its modern form it has also learned from modern liberation theology.  Thus theologically it can be a mixture of inductive (i.e., an empirical analysis of society) and reductive (i.e., meeting the needs of the poor) approaches.

      12.  Liturgical-sacramental evangelicalism.  This looks to the tradition of worship and theology of the period between the apostles and the Middle Ages.  It is favorably disposed to the better aspects of modern Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.  It rejects individualism and emphasizes the corporate.  In addition, it is ready to speak of the “real presence” of Christ in the Sacrament of Holy Communion and also of baptismal regeneration.  The theological method is both inductive (collecting and taking tradition in its various forms seriously) and deductive (deducing doctrine from Scripture and tradition).

      Offner makes the point that of all these, only the last form of evangelicalism is self-consciously Trinitarian.  Obviously the reason for this is that in the ancient liturgies from the patristic period (both the Eastern and Western rites) there is a very clear Trinitarian confession and structure to faith and worship – “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, both now and always, even unto the ages of ages, Amen.”

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO EVANGELICAL ORTHODOXY

      The title of this book claims both that the old liberal theology is dead and gone, and that this fact presents challenges to evangelical theologians.  It is appropriate to end the book with a few comments on these challenges.

      In the face of a variety of doctrines of God, the first challenge is to remain wholly faithful to the biblical doctrine of God as the transcendent, holy One who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  In the face of modern forms of modalism, deism, panentheism, and pantheism there is a great need to state with clarity and reverence the nature of the true, living God as the Blessed, Holy and Undivided Trinity.  The Church requires classical Trinitarian Theism.

      In the content of many different presentations of the identity of Jesus, the second challenge is to be totally faithful to the biblical doctrine of Jesus as the Christ, the Incarnate Word and Son, who for us and for our salvation became man, died upon the cross, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and there reigns as the Lord of lords.  Against those who deny His pre-existence and His post-existence, there is a great need to teach that Jesus is the eternal Son of God become man without ceasing to be God.  Thereby such heresies as adoptionism, Nestorianism, and docetism will be avoided and no gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith will be forged.

      In the presence of differing cosmologies and theories of creation, the third challenge is to be wholly faithful to the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo.  This means that while God sustains and upholds the cosmos He is not part of it and it is not part of Him.  With this high view of the created order goes the teaching that man is made in the image and after the likeness of God to enjoy and please Him, that mans relation to God has been broken by the disease of sin, and that man needs redemption.

      In the cacophony of voices claiming to proclaim good news in modern society, the fourth challenge is to have a clear view of what is the Gospel of God the Father concerning Jesus Christ, His Son, and to have an overwhelming desire to proclaim it in the power of the Holy Spirit.  This clear view of the Gospel is obviously related to sound knowledge of the content of the three doctrines outlined above.

      Finally, in the reality of the supermarket of religions and theologies in modern America, and with it the apparent need to major on minors in order to be distinctive in that market, the challenge is to stay joyfully with the proven orthodoxy – i.e., the Trinitarian and Christological doctrine of the content of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds – and thus major on majors!

      In order to face and meet these (and other) challenges, evangelical theologians will need to cultivate a spirituality and piety that flows from genuinely corporate worship, which is truly addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.  Theology originating and pursued in this atmosphere will be able to avoid the excesses of individualism and idiosyncrasy.  We learn from the experience of the Church in history that genuine theology usually arises in meditation upon God’s Word and contemplation of His glory.

      They will also need to be deeply learned in the Scriptures, in the whole Scriptures and their unity, in the way they were read and interpreted, used in worship and for theology by the Fathers in the early centuries and by the Reformers in the sixteenth century.

      Then they will also need to know their own culture and society and how much they are formed by it.  Western civilization has gone through many religious, cultural, social, and political changes since the emergence of Protestantism, and so theologians need to be aware of the relation of their own received denominational distinctives to these changes and the movements behind them.

      Finally, to come anywhere near meeting the challenges posed by the present situation in Christendom and in western society, evangelical theologians will need to cooperate more closely, to break down barriers caused by working in different disciplines, to engage in dialogue, prayer, and worship together, and to seek to offer what they do as a sacrifice of praise to the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit.

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