mid-century efforts at theological mediation

[gdeme...@msn.com]

Folks,

 

I'm working on a new writing project in which I intend to focus on critical issues in contemporary biblical theology related to a somewhat revitalized mainline religious identity.  The idea is a book that includes chapters on James I. Packer, Donald Bloesch, Gabriel Fackre, Walter, Brueggemann, and Jurgen Moltman, and a preliminary chapter on the Borg/Wright book that we've spoken of here.  If it does not become too ambitious I hope to lace the discussion of biblical theology throughout the book with the work of N.T, Wright.  The first chapter of which the following is a part includes a lengthy section on critical issues in 20th century US Protestantism.  One of my core arguments is that the modernist-fundamentalist great divide of the early decades of the 20th century has a persistent lingering effect across the theological and denominational spectrum both at conscious and unconscious levels that does much to deter any mediating theology from gaining substantial hold.  Consequently, any confessing Christ movement within the mainline denominations will only be successful to the extent to which it can exorcise this great divide without which any substantial revitalization of the reformed tradition within the UCC will invariably falter.  My objective is to exorcise this tension by entering right into the belly of the whale through an intensive focus on biblical theology, not for its own sake, but to grapple with what I believe is the most significant issue on the table; namely, on whether the strange new world of the Bible is a legitimate basis to interpret the world, or whether the world, namely the culture, provides the contextual basis to interpret the world.  While the issue is undoubtedly more complex than indicated by this stark polar statement, in the final analysis, I argue, one has to come down on one side or the other, and this is the issue I want to press on the mainline in general and the UCC in particular to directly confront without equivocation. 

 

Up to now theology has been an avocation, and, while it may be a bit of a stretch for me to take on such a project which is outside of my professional training, the muse is upon me to push this envelope.  This first chapter, in many respects may be the most difficult because of the wide ranging nature of the ground I am seeking to cover. In any event I offer for your consideration this section on mid-century theology, in part, both to get feedback on the accuracy of what I am saying and any comments people would like to share on the quality of the text for a work that I seek to write at a comparable level of sophistication of a Fackre or a Gary Dorrien in their best work.  As I'm pushing into some areas that are a bit beyond me, I would like to consider this list as a sounding board where I can surface some of this text in its works in progress stage, in part, too, so that the issues raised can have a real time context rather than something that only sees the light of day in some distant future, which, conceivably becomes a future that never comes into fruition.

 

George Demetrion

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

1940-1965

 

Neo-orthodox realism and the biblical theology movement, pervasive in the period between 1940 and 1960, sought to bridge the gap through an embrace of the reformed tradition in a manner that incorporated the major precepts of critical liberal scholarship.  Much exciting work in theology and biblical studies emerged in this mid-century period both in Europe and the United States that re-legitimized the biblical notion of God’s transcendence in a manner which, in principle, could be reconciled with higher biblical criticism.  The neo-orthodox/biblical theology movement revival played a major role in deconstructing the dominance of theological liberalism claiming adherence at the seminary and denominational level, which also had impact in the broader religious culture of the nation.  Notwithstanding this mediating resurgence, the forces unleashed in the early 20^th century which fueled the modernist/ fundamentalist divide were still in operation, which needed but little impetus to break out into open conflagration. The twin forces of neo-orthodoxy and the biblical theology movement carried some promise of modulating the tensions within mid-century Protestantism though the uneasy alliance between critical biblical scholarship and theological orthodoxy was a tenuous one that did not hold beyond the early 1960s.

 

The great divide was held in bay to some degree in this “consensus” period of U.S. history (Hofstadter; Hartz).  Yet, the enduring fissures between biblicalism and modernism re-exploded in the latter decades of the 20^th century, the result of which fundamental issues on the nature of Christian faith within the context of the modern world have remained in a highly contentious stage.  A critical factor in the breakdown of any budding neo-orthodox synthesis was the emergence of a highly indistinctive civil religion within the mainline in the early post-World War II period. This muted “civil” theology stood in stark juxtaposition to a rigorous biblicalism in the increasing merger of certain strands of fundamentalism and evangelicalism at the theological level, as reflected in the formation of the formation of Fuller Seminary in 1947 (Marsden, 1987), and the Billy Graham crusades of the 1950s.  With this re-polarization, the theological insights of the neo-orthodox theologians became viewed with increasing irrelevance in the Protestant mainline (Hershberg, Bellah), while Barth’s interpretation of biblical narratives as “sagas” and Niehbuhr’s reconstruction of biblical orthodoxy as “myth” were rejected by a broad swathe scholarly evangelicals, which brooked no compromise with biblical inerrancy.  

 

It was during this period that the United Church of Christ formed through a merger between the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian Churches in 1957.  Notwithstanding formal acceptance of the foundational grounding in the Protestant Reformation, the newly created denomination largely followed its congregational wing in the modernistic gravitation while muting any sharply-defined theological clarity reflective of the reformed tradition.  This was reinforced by a polity of local decision-making and an increasing focus on the inviolable sanctity of individual conscience, all of which melded with a civil religious ethos that further clouded prospects of theological precision within the UCC and more broadly within the mid-century Protestant mainline through the early 1960s.

 

Prospects of any broad-based conversion within Protestant theology and the healing of the modernist-fundamental divide were shattered by directions taken on both sides of the great divide from the 1960s to the present.  Mainline theology was infused by a broad stream of fresh thinking influenced in various ways by, but extending well beyond Harvey Cox’s (1965) The Secular City in which the ethos of modern urbanity became the context in which Christianity, if it were to have force in the modern world, would have to find its voice.  More radical were the writings of the “death of God” theologians who argued that the traditional notion of a supernatural, transcendent God was no longer a viable concept at least for the residents of the secular city.  Any rebirth of Christianity could only emerge through an embrace of the faith’s core symbol, the cross, in the death of traditional religious categories through which the spirit (or at least the “essence”) of Christ could re-emerge, but only within the context of secular experience, in which any notion of “God talk” was dismissed as irrelevant and obscurantist to its core.  This, of course, was roundly repudiated by fundamentalists and evangelicals who rejected the entire thrust of the secularization argument.

 

While the death of God movement did not have a large following even within the mainline denominations, it represented the culmination of a half-century of existential theology extending from Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and certain tendencies within Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although the latter remained an avowed theist through the course of his short and heroic life.  As a major proponent of “process theology” Langdon Gilkey integrated both existentialism and neo-orthodoxy in his search for the articulation of God’s immanence within the very fabric of “secular” history (Dorrien, 1997).  The searching and living out of this ineffable presence was viewed as the fundamental basis for any reconstruction of theological, biblical and church language in which the latter, based on traditional notions of the three story God (Robinson), impeded rather than facilitated the emergence of the spirit in the modern period.

 

Notwithstanding its secularist appeal, the rarefied terminology of death of God and process theologians was mostly too esoteric for direct appropriation in the mainline denominations. Through seminary training these influences invariably played into the religious formation of the clergy, who would generally find it exceedingly difficult to translate such insights, to the extent that they shared them, into inspiring pulpit sermons that spoke of a new theology of practice in the secular city.  Given the theological abstruseness of such work, to say nothing of the radical nature of their implications for traditional understanding of the Christian faith, one might assume that the gap between the seminary and the pew more often than not led to clerical avoidance rather than embrace of the hard work of rigorous theological clarity as a critical basis for adult religious formation. 

 

One result was that mainline congregants typically lacked substantial reasons at the level of cognition for their belief even though rigorous thinking in the professional life of the middle class required a direct analysis of facts and operative constructs at the level of where it counted in practical application (Drucker, 1954/1986).  Thus a dichotomous view of the relationship between the church and the world was all too characteristic of mainline experience in which neither the implications of existential nor traditional-based theologies held full force.  Particularly for adult male members of the mid-1960s, of mainline denominations, a widening experiential gap between the reality-based perception of the world of work and the “Sunday” experience of church could not be papered over by building projects and stewardship campaigns.

 

These various modes of existentialist theology spoke to broad currents in post-1960 mainline religious culture.  While certain key phrases about the need for “relevance” were appropriated into congregational life, little systematic work was accomplished in integrating these schools of theology within the context of the institutional life of the church.  A more dynamic relationship between the seminary and the pew emerged in the 1970s in an appropriation of the “identity politics” of black and feminist theologies. This was a double-edged sword. Those who embraced these more recent streams of religious thought were better able to translate theology into practical action than the advocates of the death of God and process theology.  Yet, this came only at the price of very sharp conflict between the advocates of the new political theologies and others of more modest inclination who remained less convinced, as well as among the more skeptical and overtly critical even within the mainline denominations. 

 

Thus, as the 1970s began, the broad-based consensus of the early cold war era, fueled by radically conflicting stances on the Vietnamese War, gave way to a polarizing tendency in U.S. culture between conservative and progressive forces.  These countervailing world views had sharply-defined gender, race, class, and theological components, which melded into conflicting ideological constructions, symbolized most fully in competing perspectives on interpretations of the “countercultural” decade of the 1960s.   While the following discussion focuses on the two central issues of race and gender, the broad themes that have given shape to theological liberalism from the late 19^th century are subsumed and radicalized in these two critical areas.

[Willis/Loree Elliott]

Good start, George.  And congrats on your courage!

 

1    Spell out, please, "the three story God (Robinson)."

 

2    Speak to the shift, in self-ident, from "liberal" to "progressive" (the movement PSR president Wm.McKinney identifies with in every email).

 

3    In your first paragraph, you don't mention Carl Henry, the crucial theologian in the transition from fundamentalist to "evangelical" & in the founding of Fuller Seminary.

 

Grace and peace--

Willis

[gdeme...@msn.com]

 

Thank you Willis for your recommendations.  On Carl Henry I have George Marsden's book on Fuller, which provides a good description of evangelical-fundamentalist tensions during that period, which will be helpful and also a fine book by Garry Dorrien, the liberal Christian historian, on evangelicalism. Marsden and Dorrien together provide an excellent overview of late 19th & 20th century US Protestantism, which I need to better absorb not only for this chapter, but for the book.  I'll also have to look at McKinney, who had been at Hartford Seminary, as you recommend and spell out some of the threads with more concrete description. 

 

My strategy for this first chapter is to write it precisely as possible at this point before moving on while realizing it may be substantially revamped after the additional chapters are written.  At this stage I'm basically trying to get the flow and into the rhythm of what I'm seeking to say and allowing those impulses to guide the book even in the invariable permutations the writing is likely to take.

 

This first chapter as I have it at this point begins with a several page overview of what I think the core issues are, which I've sought to lay out in various ways on this list and elsewhere, the historical overview from the late 19th century to the present, focusing on the modernist-fundamentalist divide.

 

I see two options for the final section, the first being an overview of the issues in biblical theology raised by the writers to be examined throughout the book. The other tack, which I'm more inclined at this point to take is to conclude this section with a close reading of Leslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society.  While Newbigin's focus in on English society, the issues he raises about the relationship between Christ and contemporary culture go to the heart of what I seek to grapple with throughout the book.  Taking this tack I can include a brief overview of the five biblical scholars and a bit about my purpose in selecting this group.

 

I have a lot on my late right now, so any completion of such a project as I'm describing would likely a good deal of time in which in any event its control is at best only in part within my ability to shape and complete.

 

George Demetrion

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Willis/Loree Elliott

Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 9:34 AM

To: Confessi...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: mid-century efforts at theological mediation

 



[Willis Elliott]

George:

 

Besides being the story of battles, history is the battle of stories (metanarratives) & of movements/ institutions.

A few notes easily missed by intellectual historians (i.e., tracers of idea-threads) such as you & (possibly) Newsweek's mang. ed. Jon Meacham (in his just-published GOD, THE FOUNDING FATHERS, AND...):

 

1    U.Chicago in 1893 replaced the 1866 Chicago Baptist Seminary, & the U.'s 1st 5 presidents were Baptist biblical scholars.  But to provide an orthodox Baptist track over against the U .'s radical Divinity School, the Northern (later, American) Baptists formed (1925?) Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (where Carl Henry & I taught 1942-3).  (I taught also in two other Northern Baptist counter-seminaries--in Philadelphia [Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, now  Palmer; counter to Crozer {MLKing Jr's seminary}, which later collapsed into Rochester-Colgate]; & Kansas City Baptist Theological Seminary).   (Carl said U.Chicago Divinity School  wouldn't give an evangelical a PhD, so he got his at BU; but that school gave me, as evangelical as Carl, the PhD.)

 

2    Carl & I were involved in the (Chicago 1942) founding of the National Association of Evangelicals for United Action (the last three words, later, dropped).  (Some fun writing its confessing of faith; I spoke up--unsuccessfully--for adding a Lutheran element to the overweighted Calvinism.)  It was the primary institutional impulse for the founding of Fuller Seminary.

 

Again, blessings on your courageous project!

 

Grace and peace--

Willis

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: gdeme...@msn.com

To: Confessi...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Friday, April 07, 2006 7:19 AM

Subject: Re: mid-century efforts at theological mediation

 

Thank you Willis for your recommendations.  On Carl Henry I have George Marsden's book on Fuller, which provides a good description of evangelical-fundamentalist tensions during that period, which will be helpful and also a fine book by Garry Dorrien, the liberal Christian historian, on evangelicalism. Marsden and Dorrien together provide an excellent overview of late 19th & 20th century US Protestantism, which I need to better absorb not only for this chapter, but for the book.  I'll also have to look at McKinney, who had been at Hartford Seminary, as you recommend and spell out some of the threads with more concrete description.... 

[herb.davis]

Dear George, What a great project.  Such an overview will be helpful for all of us who try to understand where we are and how we got here.  Hope you can clean your plate and get on with the project.  Peace, Herb

 

---

From:

[Brett Becker]

Willis Elliott wrote:
(Carl said U.Chicago Divinity School wouldn't give an evangelical a
PhD, so he got his at BU; but that school gave me, as evangelical as
Carl, the PhD.)

Dr. Elliott,
I'm very curious to know how (aside from God's preserving grace) you
maintained your evangelical beliefs while earning the PhD from U.
Chicago.
Sincerely,
Brett Becker

[Willis/Loree Elliott]

Brett:

 

Love your question! 

 

1    Mainly, "God's preserving grace."

 

2    Carl & I were both eager to witness, but he was less eager to learn than I was: he was chip-on-shoulder combative, which indeed would have got him nowhere at UCDS.

 

3    In CANTERBURY TALES, Chaucer speaks of a cleric who was eager to learn & to teach.  No teacher can turn away an eager-to-learn student no matter the student's religion: my teachers everywhere loved me, & I loved them.  To trope a scripture, my teachers might have said of me "We love him because he first loved us."

 

4    I put more energy into loving sinners than into hating their sins.  I hated Henry Nelson Wieman's rejection of God as personal, but I loved him; &, good-naturedly, he wrote on all my papers "A--but must you believe in a personal God?"  Answer, YES, & I argued it with him vociferously!  (He got fired for adultery, & his daughter married Huston Smith.)

    Truth calls us to orthodoxy, love calls us to generosity (for, as St.Jn. of the Cross says, "When the evening of life comes, we shall be judged on love").  Since my 1935 conversion from modernism, I've tried to practice what's now being called "generous orthodoxy."  And if I were better at loving, I'd probably not've told you that Wieman got fired for adultery.

 

5    As a protection against boredom (his & ours), the Lord makes us all different.  My mind's poetic, Carl's was prosaic--& we had a joshing relationship, with much laughter.  His heart was more generous than his mind, which--as you can see in this blurb on the back of my (Eerdmans/95) FLOW OF FLESH, REACH OF SPIRIT--was cautious:  "For every reader who applauds, another disavows.  Stimulating, insightful, and provocative, this informal one-person think tank [i.e., my "Elliott Thinksheets"] continues to challenge and leave its mark."

 

6    In the best book on childhood-&-adolescent psychology I've ever read (MY DEAR EGO), the great Christian psychiatrist Fritz Kunkel used animals as stand-ins for personality types.

UCDS could give endoskeletal Rabbit Willis the PhD, but not exoskeletal Turtle Carl (but, yes, the tortoise won over the hare: Carl, a writer [newspaperman long before "newspaper person"], out-influenced Willis, a conversationalist).  (Ken Woodward of Newsweek ended his Foreward to my FLOW... thus:  "You're in the presence of a great conversationalist.  So let the conversation begin.").  (Come to think of it, in light of George's suggestion that I become in some medium a memoirist: the best description of my spirit, mind, intention is Ken's Foreword.)

 

7    At the risk of being too memoiristic in this post, I'll conclude with a Carl/Willis story some on this listserv have heard.  In '43, in the seminary in which he & I were teaching, the students set up a hermeneutic contest: which, Carl or Willis, was the better hermeneut?  Each was to give the other a short text to expound extemporaneously for ten minutes.  Carl gave me Paul, & I gave him Shakespeare.  If I had given him Paul, I'd've lost: his mind was archetectonically superior to mine.  Though he gave a magnificent, cathedralic exposition of the Shakespeare

I'd given him, he lost: he'd assumed textual integrity, but there was none: I took phrases & sentences from here & there in Shakespeare, & Carl's expo was bogus, its structure only in his head (& pressed down into Shakespeare's head!).

    My point?  How much Bible hermeneuting is more eisegetic (reading into the Bible) than exegetic (reading out of  the Bible)? Architectonic (structured-dogmatic) thinking (e.g., the Scofield Bible) gives security, but what's the truth-content of the structure (& so the un/reality of the security)?  Poetic, I live more in my heart; prosaic, Carl lived more in his mind.  (Wordsworth: "Let knowledge grow from more to more--but more of reverence in us dwell that heart and mind, according well, may make one music as before, but vaster.")  The devil has both the runaway mind & the runaway heart; the Lord has those who let heart & mind humiliate, humanize, love one another.  (The dogmatic tendency is greater if one is limited to one language.  I'm not so limited & have less dogmatic tendency because daily, for more than 60 years, I've read the Holybook in Hebrew, Greek, & Latin [+, often, some modern language, especially German--right now, Luther's].)

 

Brett, when you get very old, you too will give long answers to short questions.

 

Grace and peace--

Willis