Changing Theologies for a Changing World

There is a very practical reason why we as Christians need a theology of revolution. Without it we will be at a total loss about what to do for the rest of the century. --Carl Braaten, The Future of God

(1969)

FOR many who are revolutionizing the ministry, action is its own imperative. They feel no lack of any underpinning theology; a pressing social need is Gospel enough. For others, the words of Jesus are a better rationale: "As long as you did it for one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it for me." Yet secular involvement is an enterprise that brings many unfamiliar encounters; it can profoundly disturb the cleric who comes to it without a theology. For such men, contemporary theologians are seeking to develop a new understanding of the central relationships of human life, and in the process are redefining man, the world and the Multiform Presence that most of them are still willing to call God.

Like the revolutionary processes they are designed to complement, the new theologies conceive of a developing world where man is continually changing, and at least the concept of God is changing with him. Those shaping the new thought are natural heirs to a number of earlier schools of philosophy and theology that have attempted to explain man's role in the secular--Hegel and Whitehead, the process theologians, the existentialists and evolutionary thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The problematic relationship between the sacred and secular is described in Harvey Cox's influential 1965 book The Secular City as "the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the breaking of all myths and supernatural symbols." If anywhere, Christ might only be sought through humanistic action in the world.

For "Christian radical" theologians like Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, God was dead, and the sacred with him. Nietzsche had coined the phrase in the 19th century, but it was Altizer, the Christian atheist, who gave it new currency. The God of the Bible had died in Jesus Christ, he said, and lived on in the world only in man. There was not much more to say. It was the task of others to effect a resurrection.

Hope as the Principle

One of the most promising new developments--the theology of hope--rejects the death of God by stating, in effect, that God is alive and well in history. German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg cleared the stage for this movement by challenging Biblical Demythologizer Rudolph Bultmann, the dominant voice in postwar German theology. Pannenberg dramatically asserted God's past action in history by reaffirming that Christ actually rose from the dead, and established his future activity by making the eschaton ("last things") once again real and important: Judgment and Christ's Second Coming were the proper endpoint of history. But it remained for Juergen Moltmann, a young Reformed theologian in Germany, to articulate the future in a thoroughgoing, credible theology mindful of the present.

Moltmann makes his point clear from the very beginning of his work. The Theology of Hope. "Christian faith strains after the promises of the universal future of Christ. There is only one real problem in Christian theology: the problem of the future." As Moltmann sees it, the churches have neglected that central point of Christianity almost completely, looking wistfully back, instead, toward a vanished primordial paradise. "The Church lives on memories," Moltmann writes in a second book, Religion, Revolution, and the Future, "the world on hope."

Moltmann took his initial cue and much of his underlying philosophy from a highly unorthodox source: Marxist Philosopher Ernst Bloch.* Bloch is an atheist who nonetheless believes that man's hope for the future is the only transcendence in the universe: "Where there is hope, there is religion." Moreover, says Bloch, a hopeful future came into the world with the Bible.

Precisely, says Moltmann. What makes man's future so full of promise is not the modernist's idea of upward, evolutionary progress inherent in man but, quite simply, Christ's death and Resurrection. No matter whether the Resurrection is verifiable as a historical event; that "something" happened to give early Christians their immense hope is evidence enough. In addition, argues Moltmann, while the Resurrection may be "the sign of future hope," the cross itself--through Christ's sacrifice--means "hope to the-hopeless."

Johannes Metz, a German Roman Catholic theologian-of-hope who is working with Moltmann on a new book of political theology, makes a similar assessment of the Christian impact on the world. "The secularity of the world, as we see it today in a globally heightened form, has fundamentally arisen not against Christianity but through it," he writes. "It is originally a Christian event." So is it also, in a strikingly different way, in the thinking of Roman Catholic Theologian Gregory Baum. In a study called Man Becoming, to be published next spring, New York-based Father Baum perceives the promise of eschatology not so much in man's collective history as in each man's psychological nature. The "coming God," as Baum sees him, offers man a special freedom to rise above the determinism of his psyche. "Human life is open-ended," Baum writes. The Word of God is a summons to man to transcend his past, the Spirit is the gift of grace to answer that summons.

Might not such theological concepts impel men toward social revolution? Indeed, yes. U.S. Theologian Richard Shaull says that only at the center of the revolution can we "perceive what God is doing." His fellow romanticist Rubem Alves, a 36-year-old Brazilian Protestant, thinks man must meet the liberating event of Christ's Resurrection halfway, as "cocreator" of his own destiny (a Teilhardian notion) through the processes of political revolution. Moltmann frankly admits that hope leads to revolution, declaring that the Christian community ought above all to favor the poor and the dispossessed. But both he and Alves suggest that Christians should have a moderating influence on revolutionary ideologues, tempering their vainglory, curbing their violence, offering joy, perspective and humor.

The two theologians are hardly alone in recommending the rediscovery of joy to a new generation of believers. In fact, the emphasis on the Dionysian element in life--celebration, song, dance, laughter--is fast acquiring a theology of its own. In The Feast of Fools, Harvey Cox presents Christ as clown and Christianity as comedy, because the world "should not be taken with ultimate or final seriousness." Theologian Sam Keen, 38, pleads a similar case in Apology for Wonder. While he believes that "the wise man is a dancer," he insists that the "authentic" man temper his ecstasy with a sense of timeliness.

Inner Voyages

What might be next in theology? Philosopher-Psychologist Jean Houston, co-director with her husband R. E. L. Masters of the Foundation for Mind Research, believes that current experiments in deepening awareness by psychological techniques or with drugs (which she does not advocate) are already leading to a rise in what she calls "experiential" theology. According to Houston, the human psyche possesses a "built-in point of contact" with a larger reality that is experienced as divine. As the laboratory "improves upon techniques developed in the monastery," people will increasingly encounter this interior sacrality. Indeed, she claims, "theology may soon become dominated by men whose minds and imaginations have been stimulated by inner voyages of one kind or another."

Such a personal theology would naturally tend to blur the boundaries of denomination and discipline. It would lead creative theologians into increasing exploration not only into other faiths but also into other disciplines: anthropology, sociology, psychology--to say nothing of the physical sciences.

Whatever new or old doors theology enters, for many men the reality of God in the future may well remain as elusive as it has been in the past. For all of the hoping, God will still seem painfully far ahead; for all of the evidence at hand, the rumors of angels will often be too faint to hear. What then? In secular society, as in earlier eras, the question mark will remain. But so will the glimmers of answers.

* Little-known in the U.S. but highly respected in Germany for his multivolumed Principle of Hope, written in the 1940s while he lived in Philadelphia.

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