A Case for Progressive Orthodoxy: Horace Bushnell, Parts 2-3

Remembering the “Progressive Orthodoxy”

of Horace Bushnell, Part 2/3

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/08/remembering-the-progressive-orthodoxy-of-horace-bushnell-part-two/

by Roger Olson

August 13, 2012

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Bushnell was self-consciously a mediating theologian. He stood against the stream of New England Unitarianism and the accommodating liberalism while at the same time resisting the rigid orthodoxy and incipient fundamentalism of neo-Puritanism and the [arising] Princeton Theology (Alexander and Hodge). He strongly defended belief in the supernatural, including Jesus’ miracles (although he felt no need to defend every biblical miracle story), while at the same time defending the need to adjust Christian doctrines to the changing cultural context. He infuriated both liberals and conservatives. The latter attempted to expel him from the local Congregational association, but his church withdrew to protect him. The former heaped scorn and ridicule on him for being out of touch with modern thought.

 

Like Barth and Niebuhr in the next century, Bushnell never earned a doctoral degree; he was a seminary graduate and pastor. His only academic teaching involved tutoring Yale students. Yet he wrote many books of theology that sold well and were widely read, reviewed, discussed and sometimes condemned (especially by his opponents to the right such as Hodge and to the left). His main philosophical-theological influence was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the enigmatic English romanticist poet and essayist whose book Aids to Reflection greatly inspired Bushnell. Like Kierkegaard, but without any obvious influence by him, Bushnell believed spiritual truth usually comes clothed in paradox; and, that many of theology’s pathologies arise from attempting to make everything rationally satisfying.

 

Among Bushnell’s most influential books (besides Christian Nurture) were God in Christ (1849), Nature and the Supernatural (1858), Christ and His Salvation (1864) and The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866). The latter book created the most controversy as there he tried to work out an objective doctrine of the atonement that would avoid the penal substitution theory which he thought portrayed God as cold and vindictive. He became dissatisfied with what he had written about the atonement there, so he revised his doctrine of the atonement in his last book Forgiveness and Law (1874). Essentially, he held that Jesus’ death was the cost of forgiveness by God. I won’t get into Bushnell’s mature theory of the atonement here as the details of his doctrinal proposals are not my focus in this post.

 

One cannot understand anything about Bushnell’s approach to theology and doctrinal reconstruction without realizing that he considered all language, not only theological language, metaphorical. All nouns outside of mathematics, he argued, are “faded metaphors”—images. Words about things never match them perfectly. And that is especially true in spiritual matters where we are talking about things unseen. Therefore, according to Bushnell, all God talk ought to admit that none of its words perfectly match the Reality they seek to express. This is more than merely affirmation of analogy; it seems to me that Bushnell’s theory of religious language takes a position somewhere between equivocal and analogical. The upshot was that for him, all creeds and doctrines must be held somewhat lightly because none of them correspond exactly to the spiritual realities they attempt to describe. Some words about God and salvation (etc.) are better than others, but all are like arrows shot toward a target too distant to hit. Some go right toward it but fall short; others go way off in a wrong direction entirely.

 

Also, one cannot understand anything about Bushnell’s theology without realizing that he considered religion, including Christianity, primarily about experiencing God. For him, the essence of Christianity is spiritual communion with God through Christ. “A few dull propositions” can never do justice to that life even if they are necessary. For him, there is a qualitative difference between that communion with God and doctrines that inevitably flow from it. Doctrines are secondary; personal communion with God is primary. Critics charge Bushnell with repeating Schleiermacher’s subjectivism, but that’s not correct. Bushnell did not believe in a universal “God consciousness” that serves as the criterion of all religious belief, including Christian belief ....

 

[(coincidentally, Process Theology sounds these same themes in attempting to reconcile all the world's religions with one another, which is yet another reason that I do, and do not, like Process Theology, preferring rather that all the world's religions, including Christianity, comes to Jesus, and not to some nameless, eternal "Source of All Reality" - res)].

 

... In other words, he did not acknowledge any “religious a priori” to become a Procrustean bed (look it up) for Christian doctrine. Nor did he think doctrines are subjective expressions of individual or corporate experiences; he held the Bible to be the source and norm for doctrine. However, he thought the Bible communicates spiritual truth through poetry and parable and even its didactic writings (e.g., Paul’s letters) are metaphorical such that they must be interpreted anew in each generation ....

 

[(... a postmodernist will recognize the fluidity of language respective to the interpretive eras and social cultures of its residence. - res)].

 

... For example, the New Testament uses the metaphor “ransom” for what Christ accomplished on the cross. That spoke meaningfully to people in the ancient world filled with slavery; it speaks less meaningfully to us in the modern world. The theologian’s task is to develop new accounts of the atonement that are nevertheless faithful to the original images.

 

Bushnell was appalled at the vicious theological debates tearing churches apart in New England ...

 

[(not unlike today's inflammatory rhetorics being heard. Part of my pulling away from Evangelicalism was in my disappointment with Evangelical response to Emergent Christianity - res)].

 

... Much of what he was about was trying to provide ways of thinking about doctrines that make such heated debates unnecessary. To that end he developed (or at least began developing) what he called “Christian comprehensiveness.” Contrary to what his critics charged, he did not advocate throwing out all creeds and confessions of faith. However, he said of them “the more, the better.” All express something of the truth; none express truth perfectly. “Christian comprehensiveness” was Bushnell’s ecumenical endeavor; he thought a major task of theology is to draw out the truth in all the major, historical forms of Christianity and hold its various expressions in tension with each other.  Unlike liberals, he was not interested in finding the “kernel within the husks” (essence of Christianity separated from all its historical forms) and discarding the husks. For him, there is no culturally neutral, transcendent propositional truth to which we have access. All expressions of Christian belief are culturally shaped. And all are metaphorical.

 

All this is vague without an example. Much of the heat of New England Protestant controversy in Bushnell’s time centered around Calvinism versus Arminianism. Bushnell argued that there is truth in both and neither is true alone. They need each other. His approach to this and other controversies among equally God-fearing, Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Christians was “both-and” rather than “either-or.” He rejected both Calvinism and Arminianism insofar as they were represented by their adherents as closed systems; he accepted both insofar as they are viewed as human attempts to express equally important truths of revelation. Both agree that God is sovereign; both agree that humans are responsible for sin and evil. The problem that gives rise to the controversy tearing churches apart, he argued, is that defenders of both go too far in speculation and deny the truth in the other's soteriology. He knew that inquiring minds will inevitably seek to explain mysteries, but he believed these explanations ought to be held lightly and not as fortresses to be built up and defended and used as bases for forays against the “enemies.” He wasn’t in favor of Methodists giving up Arminianism or Presbyterians giving up Calvinism; he was in favor of Christian comprehensiveness in which both and all sides can come together, admit that their systems of belief are human attempts to understand something about God that humans cannot fully comprehend and unify around the truths about which they agree—that God is sovereign and humans alone are responsible for sin and evil. By “unify” he meant at least stop fighting each other and have fellowship and cooperation.

 

I think if Bushnell were alive today he would find himself most at home in a postliberal, narrative type of theology. Many things he wrote about doctrine anticipated that. I’m not saying he would agree with any specific theory of doctrine such as Lindbeck’s, but I think he would agree heartily with Hans Frei’s approach to the Bible and doctrine. The Bible, he would say (I think) is not a not-yet-systematized-systematic theology. All systems of theology are human attempts in a certain time and place to bring the truths of the biblical narrative to expression. More important than that, however, (and I’m not sure Frei would agree) is spiritual communion with God through Jesus Christ. It is that that the Bible is meant to create and promote and govern by its stories, parables, poetry, images and, yes, propositions. I think Bushnell would agree with Moravian leader Zinzendorf who, about a hundred years earlier, said that "Whoever attempts to put Christianity into a system kills it." He would certainly agree with Alfred Lord Tennyson who said, 

 

“Our little systems have their day;

they have their day and cease to be.

They are but broken lights of Thee,

and Thou, O God, art more than they.”

 

Of course, predictably, both liberals and conservatives of his day accused Bushnell of relativism. (It might be difficult to conceive that liberals would accuse him of that, but it’s important to know that the liberals of his day were, like the conservatives, under the influence of Scottish Common Sense Realism. Both liberals and conservatives then believed that propositions can correspond to reality (they just disagreed about what propositions correspond to reality.) I consider him to have been a precursor of critical realism in theology. He certainly was not a relativist even though he admitted and argued for the relativity of all human propositions—especially about God and spiritual realities. He believed in absolute truth; he denied human absolute knowledge of it.

 

An excellent example of Bushnell’s approach to theology is the atonement. He believed that Scripture does not communicate a “theory” of the atonement; it expresses what Christ accomplished on the cross with metaphors: sacrifice, conquest, ransom, cancelling a debt, etc. In his time and place, liberals and conservatives had staked out theories of the atonement and opposed each others’. Liberals by-and-large promoted a subjective view of the atonement called the moral example or moral influence theory. Conservatives virtually all promoted some version of the satisfaction or penal substitution theory. (Many Arminians and Wesleyans promoted the so-called governmental theory, but to Bushnell that would be just a modification of the penal substitution theory.) According to Bushnell, both (all) theories express some aspect of the truth of the atonement. Their faults lie in their claims to be comprehensive and exact as if they could look right into the mind of God and know what was going on between Father and Son before, during and after the death of Christ on the cross.

 

Bushnell believed a new theory of the atonement needed to be constructed—one that would take up the truth in both subjective and objective theories and avoid their problems. But his own constructed doctrine of the atonement, expressed differently in two books (mentioned above), was not to be final, closed or total. It was to be a new arrow, so to speak, aimed in the direction of the truth from a particular social, cultural context and frame of mind. In developing it he used a lot of the budding science of psychology as well as recent theories of justice. Basically, in a nutshell, his theory was that forgiveness is always costly and the death of Christ was God’s experience of the cost of forgiving. He thought that all Christians could rally around that even as they might hold onto their own theories as other arrows aimed at the truth. None hits the target’s bullseye. But Bushnell thought his own came closer to that for his own time and place.

 

In Part 3, the final installment of this series, I want to suggest ways in which Bushnell might be a model for contemporary theology.

 

 

* * * * * * * *

 

 

Remembering the “Progressive Orthodoxy”

of Horace Bushnell, Part 3/3

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/08/needed-a-new-progressive-orthodoxy-for-the-21st-century-part-three-final-of-series-about-horace-bushnell/

by Roger Olson

August 15, 2012

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Needed: A New “Progressive Orthodoxy” for the 21^st Century: Part Three (Final) of Series about Horace Bushnell.

 

In the first two installments of this three part series (cf., A Case for Progressive Orthodoxy: Horace Bushnell, Part 1 ) I talked about what Gary Dorrien calls Bushnell’s “liberal-leaning experiment in progressive orthodoxy” with special focus on the 19^th century theologian’s theological method. Here I want to suggest some ways in which Bushnell’s progressive orthodoxy can be helpful today.

 

As in Bushnell’s time and place (New England in mid-19^th century), Protestant Christianity in America today is deeply divided between conservatives of various kinds and liberals of various kinds. And, among evangelicals, a gulf is widening between those I call postconservatives (including progressives and moderates) and neo-fundamentalists (conservative evangelicals). Notably missing is viable, attractive, influential middle ground.

 

In my estimation, what American theology needs is what Bushnell (and a few others) provided in mid-19^th century New England: an attractive mediating theology that takes orthodoxy seriously but is willing to explore new horizons and frontiers in doctrinal reconstruction. Theologies of retrieval abound and are attracting many conservative-minded young people. These are either paleo-orthodox (retrieving and renewing ancient Christian teaching) or neo-fundamentalist (retrieving and usually entrenching the “received evangelical tradition”). Needed is a vision of orthodoxy in which it is living. Jaroslav Pelikan quipped that “Tradition is the living faith of the dead while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” Too often, I fear, orthodoxy today is the dead faith of the dead. Progressive orthodoxy is the attempt to breathe new life into it and make it relevant (without relativism) to contemporary people.

 

Theologies of revision also abound. Among so-called “mainstream” Protestants there is new interest in process theology and various left-leaning political theologies of inclusion and social transformation. Among evangelicals, many younger people are attracted to revisionist theologies as espoused by some of the more progressive emerging church gurus. These often seem to repeat the liberal Protestant experiments of the later 19^th century and early 20^th century.

 

In the midst of the theological convulsions shaking New England Protestantism in the mid-19^th century Bushnell attempted to provide a middle way, a via media, that took seriously the new knowledge of the sciences and new paths of philosophy while at the same time holding on to crucial doctrines of orthodoxy such as the Trinity. (Bushnell was a strong defender of the Trinity against the growing Unitarianism of his time and place.)

 

When people hear the phrase “progressive orthodoxy” there are usually two reactions. Conservatives hear only the “progressive” part and are deaf to the “orthodoxy” part. They react to it as if it were nothing but a new form of the old liberalism. Bushnell was no liberal. He believed in and defended the supernatural, the deity of Christ, the atoning death of Christ as more than a moral example. He was not a reductionist nor was he anxious to rush into accommodation to “modern thought.” Although he did believe it important to moralize dogma, he was not interested in reducing Christianity to ethics (which was the trend among the true liberals of his day).

 

The second reaction is from liberals who only hear the “orthodoxy” part and are deaf to the “progressive” part. They react to it as if it were nothing but a new form of fundamentalism. But Bushnell was no fundamentalist. He did not believe in biblical inerrancy (a concept he thought was foreign to the nature of Scripture as narrative and imagery), every biblical miracle (although he believed some biblical miracles are necessary such as Jesus’ resurrection), or that correct doctrine is the essence of authentic Christianity.

 

Like Bushnell, a new progressive orthodoxy would be a conscious via media between neo-fundamentalism that elevates correct doctrine to the sine qua non of authentic Christianity and neo-liberalism that reduces doctrine to unimportance. This new progressive orthodoxy would acknowledge that certain beliefs are necessary to holistic, mature Christianity in every place and time, namely the deity and humanity of Christ, the supernatural (that God sometimes acts in ways that transcend the laws of nature), the grace of God in salvation, and the Trinity (to name the most important ones). However, progressive orthodoxy would be open to reconsideration and revision of the ways in which doctrines have traditionally been formulated and expressed.

 

The new progressive orthodoxy would, like Bushnell’s, regard communion with God as the essence of authentic Christianity, and emphasize spirituality as equally important, if not more important, than correct belief. It would recognize the distance between all human doctrinal formulations and the reality they aim to express. It would encourage Christian engagement with culture (science and philosophy especially) without capitulation to secularism or consumerism or “New Thought.” It would encourage the ongoing process of devout and faithful theological research that critiques and reconstructs traditional doctrinal formulations while at the same time holding firmly to the basics of the faith “once for all delivered.”

 

Bushnell’s lifelong work on the atonement is the best example of his own progressive orthodoxy at work. He refused to reduce the cross to a moral example and influence; he knew the biblical imagery of Christ’s sacrifice required an objective achievement that affected God as well as sinners. But he was dissatisfied with the traditional Puritan doctrine of penal substitution because it went beyond Scripture and portrayed God as a cruel judge who demands blood before he will be loving and forgive—also an unscriptural view of God and the atonement.

 

Bushnell’s proposal may not have been correct, but it was a valiant attempt to push on the frontiers of doctrinal achievement and break through impasses to something new and faithful and satisfying to both traditional theology and modern sentiments. (It’s important to remember that up until Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo ,the majority of medieval church leaders and theologians thought of the atonement in terms of a ransom paid by God to the devil. Anselm’s “satisfaction theory” was initially greeted with horror because it was new and culturally sensitive. During his own lifetime, however, Anselm’s theory caught on because it did take into account biblical images of the atonement not accounted for by the traditional ransom theory and it made sense in feudal society better than the ransom theory.)

 

Another example of Bushnell’s progressive orthodoxy is his open belief in the suffering of God. He was one of the first Christian theologians to affirm that God himself, not just the incarnate Son of God, suffers. It was Bushnell who first said (so far as I have been able to determine) that "before there was a cross on the hill of Calvary there was a cross in the heart of God". (This is an image that has been much repeated in 20^th century theology and attributed to many different poets and theologians; it belongs originally, so far as I can discover, to Bushnell.) There’s no evidence that in this he was at all influenced by Hegel who talked about a “speculative Good Friday” in God; and Bushnell certainly did not mean anything like what Hegel meant by God’s “suffering.”

 

Bushnell was not afraid to break out of the confines of classical Christian theism when Scripture, spiritual experience and reason called for that. He was accused by critics of “patripassionism,” of course, but he steadfastly held on to his idea that God can and does suffer the sufferings of the world, and especially of his Son on the cross, against the overwhelming weight of traditional ideas of God’s immutability and impassibility.

 

Like Bushnell’s progressive orthodoxy, a contemporary one would seek to be reasonable while respecting and preserving mystery. It would attempt to take into account many different perspectives on Christian truth (“Christian comprehensiveness”) and unite them as much as possible. It would value imagination and creativity in theology without falling into relativism. It would keep an ear to the ground of culture and adjust doctrines to culture without reckless accommodation or capitulation. It would regard theology as a series of research projects rooted in tradition and community.

 

Who are some theologians working today along the lines of progressive orthodoxy? I’m not comparing them with Bushnell in terms of specific doctrinal formulations; I’m only comparing them with him in terms of approach and ethos.

 

One obvious example is N. T. Wright, although he is primarily a New Testament scholar. However, his work on justification is a good example of progressive orthodoxy. Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg are other examples. The late Stan Grenz was one, in my opinion. But the field of candidates is not cluttered. We are living in a time when only extremes get attention. Look at the ubiquitous use of the word “extreme” in entertainment. Radical proposals get more attention in politics and cuture generally (than moderate proposals). If a political candidate is perceived as moderate he or she had better do something quickly to appeal to the extremists in his or her political camp.

 

While I most certainly do not agree with every position Bushnell took, I think his example of moderate progressivism or, progressive moderation in theology, is a model for contemporary theology today. May his tiny tribe increase.

 

* * * * * * * *

 

 

Please Refer to the postscript following Part 1

pertaining to Emergent Theology & Emerging Christianity -

 

A Case for Progressive Orthodoxy: Horace Bushnell, Part 1

 

 

A Case for Progressive Orthodoxy: Horace Bushnell, Part 1

Remembering the “Progressive Orthodoxy”

of Horace Bushnell, Part 1/3

 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/08/remembering-the-progressive-orthodoxy-of-horace-bushnell-part-one/

 

by Roger Olson

August 11, 2012

 

 

One thing I like to do here is point readers back to neglected theologians. As a historical theologian I find many “new” proposals in theology are not that new. Often they echo theological ideas of the past even as their promoters advance them as new. There’s some truth to the old sayings that there’s nothing new under the sun and that history repeats itself. In fact, sometimes it becomes downright wearisome to hear or read about an allegedly new idea or movement in theology that isn’t really new at all.

 

One theologian of America’s history many of whose ideas reappear in new forms (and perhaps they were not new with him, either) is Horace Bushnell (1802-1876). He was an original thinker that found ways to express older ideas that seemed to many to transcend the divides in American Protestantism.

Unfortunately, in spite of his tremendous influence on American Protestant theology, Bushnell has been largely forgotten as his books have gone out of print. (I believe only one of his books is still in print: Christian Nurture. Others may be printed by publishers who print runs for specific needs such as a class in a university or seminary.) I would say that America has only produced a few world class theologians who stood out as especially influential as somewhat original thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder. (I don’t include Paul Tillich because Germany really “produced” him even though he wrote his Systematic Theology in America.)

 

Of course, each one of them stood on the shoulders of previous giants; none introduced totally new theological ideas. Each, however, produced theological proposals that seemed original and innovative enough to draw attention and gained broad followings because they seemed to solve some pressing problems, at least for a time.

 

Earlier here I questioned Edwards’ greatness. What I really meant to question was the unbelievable renaissance of Edwards as demonstrated in the new studies of his theology being published every year and in his popularity through his popularizers such as John Piper. I’m not at all sure Edwards deserves the attention he’s getting right now [(sic, cf. A Christian Humanist Manifesto, Parts 1-3, by Roger Olson, November 14,15,16)].

 

Just as great, in my estimation, and just as neglected as Edwards is remembered (both responses undeserved, in my opinion), is Bushnell. Relatively conservative, broadly evangelical Protestant Christians, theologians, pastors and students, could learn much and be enriched by rediscovering the New England theologian. I have begun that process, I hope, by including a chapter on him in my forthcoming book on modern theology.

 

I consider Bushnell to have been a “mediating theologian.” I think it’s unfortunate that he is usually categorized as liberal by both conservatives and liberals in theology. In my opinion, the best description of his theology, overall, is “progressive orthodoxy.” It’s a label attached to his theology by scholars of American Christianity and theology. I’m not sure who first labeled it so. I disagree with Gary Dorrien, renowned scholar of American liberal theology, who rightly calls Bushnell “America’s greatest nineteenth-century theologian” but wrongly (in my estimation) describes him as “the theological father of mainstream liberal Protestantism.” (The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805-1900, p. 111.)

 

Now, if all Dorrien meant was that Bushnell was misunderstood by some of his followers (e.g., Theodore Munger) such that mainstream liberal Protestantism afterwards came to consider him their theological father, fine, I can agree with that. However, Dorrien treats Bushnell as a true liberal, even if somewhat inconsistent, and with that I disagree. He certainly displayed liberalizing tendencies, especially compared with the Old School Princeton theologians (e.g., Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge), but his main target for correction was Unitarianism which was growing by leaps and bounds in New England (Bushnell’s territory) and the “Victorian liberalism” that was accommodating to it in order to counter movements of thousands of Congregationalists away from traditional churches to it.

 

Dorrien defines the essence of “liberal theology” as “the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority.” (Ibid., p. xiii) Later, he describes the “liberal Victorian gospel” as “The good news of…the triumph of spirit over nature as mediated by the example and teaching of Jesus. Under the influence of Jesus, the perfectly God-conscious redeemer, human beings are liberated from the selfish impulses of their animal nature and transformed into persons in right relation with God. To be saved is to experience the fulfillment of one’s moral and spiritual personality through the triumph of the indwelling spirit of Christ over nature.” (p. 402)

 

I prefer historical theologian Claude Welch’s definition of liberal theology as “maximal accommodation to modernity.” However, I don’t think Bushnell himself, as opposed to some of his followers, fit any of those definitions. In fact, after reading Dorrien’s own discussion of Bushnell (almost 70 pages!), I don’t see how he can categorize Bushnell himself (as opposed to his followers who misinterpreted him) could treat Bushnell as truly liberal. Almost all scholars of Bushnell I consulted for writing my chapter on him agreed that his followers created the impression of him as liberal. Bushnell himself was far from liberal when stood alongside later liberal Protestants such as Harry Emerson Fosdick.

 

By no means do I agree with everything Bushnell advocated. For example, I disagree with his idea of “Christian nurture”—something he is usually remembered for, especially by those in the field of Christian education. Bushnell argued in his book by that title that normally children raised in Christian homes and churches simply grow up Christian, if they are spiritually formed correctly; they have no need of a dramatic conversion experience or radical decision of faith. He was opposed to viewing children of Christians in the church already as a mission field. I disagree with him about that, but that’s not directly relevant to my argument here—that Bushnell was no liberal theologian in either Dorrien’s or Welch’s sense of the word.

 

Now, I’m going to stop here for now and post a follow up message soon about Bushnell’s theology. What I want to warn about now and here, however, is that I will not post comments arguing that Bushnell was “liberal” JUST BECAUSE he didn’t believe in the penal substitution theory of the atonement ...

[(at last count Relevancy22 has reported on 6 viable theories of atonement, each as biblical as the other: cf. the postscript, "Kurt Vonnegut and the Sacred Solidarity of God with Humanity," - res, 1.8.2013)] -

... or JUST BECAUSE he didn’t take Genesis 1-11 literally, or JUST BECAUSE he didn’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, etc., etc. I’m well aware that some of my valued readers are very conservative theologically and will inevitably consider Bushnell liberal just for those reasons (as they will consider anyone liberal just for those reasons).

 

When I deny that Bushnell was truly liberal I mean in the classical sense as defined by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, the two leading 19^th century liberal Protestant theologians, and especially as defined by Gary Dorrien and Welch above. Without any doubt Bushnell, like almost everyone in his time, was accommodating, rightly or wrongly, to some aspects of modernity. I argue in my forthcoming book that even Hodge was doing that.

But the question is whether Bushnell truly deserves his reputation as the “father” of American mainstream liberal theology. Can a straight line be drawn, for example, from him to Fosdick? I say no. And he does not belong in the same category as the real liberals of his time such as William Ellery Channing and Henry Ward Beecher and later real liberals such as Washington Gladden and Harry Emerson Fosdick.

 

My argument will be that Bushnell was a mediating theologian—attempting creatively but faithfully (to the gospel) to bridge the divide between orthodoxy and progressivism in American religion.

And I will argue that what we need today is a new Bushnell, a new mediator between true liberal theology (e.g., process theology) and neo-fundamentalism (e.g., conservative evangelical theology that requires belief in inerrancy, penal substitution, etc.).*
 

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 

 

POSTSCRIPT

 by R.E. Slater
January 8, 2013

 

 

Horace Bushnell was a 19th century evangelical theologian who strayed between the lines of conservative evangelicalism and the neo-orthodoxy of 20th century yet to come. As such, some would claim Bushnell's theology as too "liberal," which I think confuses his legacy with what it really was... a precursor to early neo-orthodoxy.

In many ways Bushnell was a good illustration of a theologian who was burden for his generation's biblical literacy and worked faithfully at pushing the contemporary boundaries of biblical thought from both sides of the floor - attempting as he might to "fill the gap" between evangelical Protestantism and Liberal Theology. For his effort he was loved by the Congregational churches of his day and defamed by others both right and left of his contemporary positions.

Here at Relevancy22 we too are attempting to speak to the contemporary issues of the 21st century created by the gaps between present day conservative evangelicalism and neo-liberal theology pulling at each end of the ecclesiastical spectrum. With the advent of Karl Barth and other neo-orthodox theologians during the middle of the 20th century the bar has been set, and reset, multiple times in a continuing balancing act to speak to the Scriptures faithfully pertaining to the issues confronting the church of the modernistic era (an era birthed in the Enlightenment some 200 years ago). Some tell of themselves as progressive evangelics; others as progressive (as vs. mainstream) denominationalists, some as neo-Anabaptists, neo-Lutherans, neo-Catholics, and so forth.

Thus, to avoid confusion (and perhaps create a little bit more!), we have adopted the term of Emerging Christians who presently are undertaking directional discourse and studies for determining what an Emergent, Postmodern Theology can mean to Christianity today. Which is not unlike the similar undertaking once found in Bushnell's early efforts of speaking a more progressive, perhaps even a neo-orthodox, message of Christ as the church's theology waggled between the conservative and liberal issues and doctrines of its day.

Hence, this blogsite here is an instance of the dozens of names and organizations - both old and new - each attempting to bridge the moderating gap between divisive modernistic forces. Between forces fighting to remain staid and irrelevant, wishing for the grand old days of 19th Century Enlightenment, against other Christian voices and groups equally desiring to push beyond today's old timey pulpiteering rhetoric to the undiscovered lands of postmodernistic opportunities and renewing Christian witness. And sometimes too far, beyond biblical reach and the orthodox understanding of theology.

And while this author here of Relevancy22 has shown time-and-again how Emergent Theology itself can stand within this middling ground of mediation, some would say that it is not so, accusing Emergent Theology as too liberal. As unbiblical. As dishonoring to Christ and His Word. While proponents to the left would go too far, speaking in the more liberal tones of Continental Philosophy and Theology, of revisionist church history, of describing the person and work of Jesus in humanistic overtones. Blithely preaching redressed Christian heresies obdurately unaware of their theological divide with past Christian orthodoxy. An orthodoxy that needs renewing. That needs a Postmodern resurrection out of its overlong modernistic grave. Into this scenario has come an Emergent, Postmodern Theology to temper the fires both right and left of the Gospel of Christ (an impossible task that seems doubtful at best to accomplish!). A theology attempting to bring solidarity to the church of God fractured in its divisional exuberances and heighten revisioning for the world as it struggles to determine what this Age of Postmodernism means to its doctrinces, dogmas, practices and ministries.

At Relevancy22 we have attempted to take the middling road between what is truly biblical without becoming obtusely mired in Evangelicalism's ideological dogmas - nor uncritical of Emergent Christianity's fanning flames for Jesus fraught with their own passions and historical revisionisms. It is true, that Emergent Theology does think-and-feel differently from that of its conservative Evangelical, and Progressive Denominational, neighbours, through no fault of its own. Nor should Emergent Christianity and its developing theology be jettisoned because of past popular Evangelical mis-statements, nor because of the exuberances of its over-zealous proponents seeking to defend their beliefs. And yet ultimately, Emergent Christianity wishes to speak to the loss masses of humanity that is unhindered by Evangelical stereotypes and its modernistic excesses (sic, its business culture for one, and consumerist mindset, as another) using Emergent-speak to construct a vision of God's love and reach. A vision that may be non-threatening when spoken from its American, Westernized cultures, and pacific and sympathetic towards Third World countries and cultures.

Hence, Postmodernism has rightfully claimed its illuminating affects upon any Christian thinker wishing to depart modernistic, secular, theologies for a redefined version of a postmodernistic, postsecular Christianity. And in the process uncover infrastructural linkages to their ecclesiological past requiring patient deconstruction (as well as insightful reconstruction) in the name of Jesus. I believe this movement to be led by the divine guidance of God in the renewing effort of Spirit-burdened prayer. Under a fruitful biblical scholarship committed to Scriptural observance while investigating and integrating accumulating, accretive, academic disciplines to the Christian faith. And amassing under the mesmerizing energy of affiliating Emergent believers desperate to share God's redeeming mercy and forgiveness, love and healing, in purity of heart and social common cause. A message that surely must be resurrected and preached by words of action and hearts true.

Consequently, Emergent Theology will be different from Evangelical or, conservative Protestant, Theology. But rightfully so, given its differing era with its differing, viable, postmodern social needs, language, thought-forms, and comportments. While at the same time maintaining an ever faithful allegiance to the Word of God, and to Jesus as Lord and Savior, pitting it against any liberal theologies wishing to apply to it. And from this fiery furnace we will find a God who is redeeming a remnant for His name, purified for His use, and charged with the task of sharing the gospel of Jesus into the many lost worlds of humanity. Grown closer by communication and technology, industry and transportation, expanding trade and finance, growing infrastructures and corresponding energy vacuums. With equally growing ecological realizations to preserve rapidly diminishing resources that are irreplaceable, that require better governance relative to the burgeoning needs both humanitarian and educational, and a vision filled with the rapidly expanding global communities and civilizations of this world in mind.

As such, Relevancy22 is an attempt to lift up the Emergent discussion and theological trajectory in ways that remain true to biblical orthodoxy, while uncoupling itself from past (perhaps, self-sustaining) Evangelical dogmas, folklores, and ideologies. While in its reinvigorated explorations of theological research and application, uncover orthodox theological linkages to the past that can themselves be uplifted into today's postmodern discussions of the Christian Gospel's message and mission. Yes, Emergent Theology will be radical, but it should not be considered as a departure from old-line Christian orthodoxy. But one that is simply a resurrected orthodoxy that is under development and being respoken in postmodern terms.

Lastly, into the contemporary Emergent folds has come its corresponding Evangelical counterpart known as Radical Orthodoxy. Both are postmodern in perspective, and so will be similar in this regard, but with Radical Orthodoxy's introduction seemingly comes the heavy philosophical structure of neo-platonism coupled with the biblical structure of neo-Calvinistic Reformed Theology. Which at this junction limits hermeneutical boundaries to the claims of biblical literalness; prefers the Calvinistic doctrines of God's power (TULIP) over His love (the Arminian DAISY); propounds Evangelic dogmas and practices wishing to hold on to limiting versions about God, humanity, sin, hell, and judgment, gender inequalities, and bigotries; and any number of other contemporary discussions that we have been holding here at Relevancy22 since its inception. As such, we must also research Radical Orthodoxy to its claims and birthrights, directions and purposes.

However, it is the current estimation here that to recover orthodox Christianity does not necessarily mean that we recover evangelical Christianity. As such, we're more in favor of starting anew under a new banner and industry, known as Emergent Christianity, much as a son or daughter begins anew from their family, thanking their parents for their help (or non-help) and pushing on to make their own distinctions and narrative. Such is how we feel here at Relevancy22.

If Evangelicalism wishes at all to be helpful, than let it contribute to their son-and-daughter's spiritual future and not to their spiritual demise. Each may learn of the other as each has much to give. Let us then learn to speak in softer tones of love and grace when books like "Love Wins" would draw out the rancorous religiosity of our spirits and not the humility found in Christ....

And with that let's proceed to Dr. Olson's review of Horace Bushnell, 19th century reformer and theologian, Parts 2+3.

R.E. Slater

January 11, 2013

 

ps... By way of a personal note, I would like to tell of my family's own linkage to the Beechers of Boston, include Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame. As social activists they crusaded against bigotry; human trafficing and slavery; organized for women's suffrage rights; temperance; Darwinian evolution; Chinese immigration into the United States; and, for a number of other urban causes pitting the Gospel's influence over the rights and perogatives of contemporary Christian soothsayers.

 

And it was because of their Congregationalist's beliefs that their heart and timely Bostonian message to the populace of America was one of social reform and the rightful recovery of human dignity. In the Slater tree of ancestry we are glad to part of this continuing effort of the gospel of Christ for the Kingdom of God's resurrection and recovery for human rights and reform, social justice and human dignity.

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

continued -

 

A Case for Progressive Orthodoxy: Horace Bushnell, Parts 2-3

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-case-for-progressive-orthodoxy-horace_8.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Magazine's Editor Christian Wiman Discusses Faith

Exclusive: Christian Wiman Discusses Faith

as He Leaves World's Top Poetry Magazine 

 

Wiman's Baptist faith lay dormant until love and cancer unearthed it.

 

Interview by Josh Jeter

posted December 7, 2012

 

 

Image: Photo by Jim Newberry | Christian Wiman Discusses Faith as He Leaves World's Top Poetry Magazine

 

In the afternoon of his 39th birthday, less than a year after his wedding day, poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable cancer of the blood. Wiman, who announced Wednesday that he will step down in June as editor of Poetry magazine, the oldest and most esteemed poetry monthly in the world, had long ago drifted away from the Southern Baptist beliefs of his upbringing. But the shock of staring death in the face gradually revived a faith that had gone dormant (a story he first told publicly in a 2007 article for The American Scholar).

 

Wiman's new book of essays, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), took shape in the wake of his diagnosis, when he believed death could be fast approaching. These writings come from someone who is less a cautious theologian than a pilgrim crying out from the depths. They divulge the God-ward hopes (and doubts) of an artist still piecing together a spiritual puzzle. San Francisco-based lawyer and author Josh Jeter corresponded with Wiman about his new book, his precarious health, and the ongoing challenge of belief in God.

 

How did you arrive at your Christian faith?

 

I was raised in West Texas as a Southern Baptist, in a culture and family so saturated with religion that it never occurred to me there was any alternative until I left. Then it all just evaporated in the blast of modernism and secularism to which I was exposed in college. Or, it didn't evaporate, exactly, because I never would have called myself an atheist. But religious feeling went underground in me for a couple of decades, to be released occasionally in ways I never really understood or completely credited—in poems, mostly.

 

'There's no question that illness has brought a great urgency to my work:

One speaks differently when standing on a cliff.'

- Christian Wiman

 

Then about 10 years ago I fell into despair. There is no other way to say it, really, nor do those words do anything but hint at the abyss. Whether it was cause or effect, I went through a writing drought unlike anything I had ever known—three years of it. In the midst of this—miraculously, it now seems to me—I fell suddenly and utterly in love with the woman who is now my wife. I still couldn't write, but the despair was blasted like a husk away from my spirit.

 

We found ourselves saying little prayers together before dinner. They were almost jokes at first, and then, increasingly, not. We'd been married about eight months when I got a surprise diagnosis of an incurable cancer, and the encroaching darkness demanded that the light I felt burning in me acquire a more definite and durable form. One Sunday morning we wandered into a church. A couple of days later I started to write. I don't think it's quite accurate to say that I had a conversion or even a "return" to Christianity. I was just finally able to assent to the faith that had long been latent within me.

 

You have three vocations: poet, editor of Poetry magazine, and, most recently, spiritual essayist. How did you decide to begin writing spiritual essays?

 

I've always written prose, and I can now see how God's absence—or, more accurately, my refusal to admit his presence—underlies all of my earlier work (poems as well).

 

But you're certainly right to point out a change. My work—prose and poetry—is still full of anguish and even unbelief, but I hope it's also much more open to simple joy. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann once wrote that all theology, especially a theology of hope, had to be conducted "in earshot of the dying Christ." Abundance and destitution are both aspects of God—or, more accurately, aspects of our experience of God.

 

Soon you will release a set of essays. How has your turn to faith shaped or influenced these essays?

 

After my diagnosis, I wrote a short piece trying to make sense of all that had happened to me. It was published in a relatively small magazine, The American Scholar, but the response to it was pretty overwhelming. I began to realize there was an enormous contingent of people out there who were starved for new ways of feeling and articulating their experiences of God. I wanted to have a conversation with these people.

 

I also wanted to figure out my own mind. I knew that I believed, but I was not at all clear on what I believed. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being that drives you both deeper into, and utterly out of, yourself? What might it mean for your life—and for your death—to acknowledge the insistent, persistent call of God?

 

You have had some very difficult health issues the past few years, and according to one essay, have recently been "close to death." How is your health now? And what have your health struggles meant for your work?

 

I've been through a multitude of treatments, culminating in a bone-marrow transplant last fall. There's no question that illness has brought a great urgency to my work: One speaks differently when standing on a cliff. Then again, I have always had little patience for art that is not elemental, art that doesn't take on the major questions of our existence. Perhaps my own inclinations have simply been intensified by my illness.

 

As for that illness, it's gone. For now. I haven't felt this healthy in eight years. I hope I am now faced with the difficult task of learning to live without my familiar miseries. "Our torments also may, in length of time, Become our elements," says John Milton. "[T]hese piercing fires [a]s soft as now severe." There is always some devil in us—that's a demon speaking the lines above—who makes us think we love or need our pain.

 

Sometimes your essays feel like you are arguing with yourself. Do you write them for yourself or others?

 

I've never thought of my essays like this, but I see immediately that you're right. W. B. Yeats defined rhetoric as the quarrel we have with others. Poetry, he said, comes out of the quarrel we have with ourselves. Prose isn't poetry, obviously, but I've always felt the two arts to be raveled up with one another for me.

 

I read a lot of theology, even though I am almost always frustrated by it. Thomas Merton once said that trying "to solve the problem of God" is like trying to see your own eyes. No doubt that's part of it. There is something absurd about formulating faith, systematizing God. I am usually more moved—and more moved toward God—by what one might call accidental theology, the best of which is often art, sometimes even determinedly secular art.

 

I am moved by works of art that don't so much strive to make meaning as allow meaning to stream through them: Bach, certain poems by T. S. Eliot, the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the late work of the American sculptor Lee Bontecou, even less conventional religious writers like Simone Weil or Sara Grant. People can occasionally embody and enact this kind of meaning as well—we are, after all, works of the very greatest Creator's hands.

 

How much is spiritual experience—prayer, solitude, and the like—a part of your artistic process?

 

I think poetry is how religious feeling survived in me during all those years of unbelief, and it remains the most intense experience I have of another order of being entering my own. But poems are not contemplative or peaceful times for me; they're chaotic and can wreck my life for a while. They're also few and far between, and you can't (or I can't) build a spiritual life on that kind of intermittent intensity.

 

So I try to pray every day, usually in a little chapel near where I work, sometimes in a cathedral because I like the huge estrangement of it, the volatile silence. I feel no connection between prayer and poetry, except for the poems that I have written as prayers. Poetry is a much more powerful experience for me than prayer, but I feel this to be a weakness in me. I'm still just learning how to pray.

 

In your essays, you often appeal to the work of Christian mystics (like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, Marguerite Porete, Weil). What draws you to the mystics?

 

Partly I feel envy. I want to be taken over by God. I want to have the kind of disciplined inwardness that allows the ego to be annihilated. I want the kind of revelation that precedes all doctrine and dogma, is the reason for all doctrine and dogma. Christ's life is one long revelation; everything after that merely grows up from it.

 

But then, too, all of these writers have an artistic consciousness. I understand the language they speak, though I don't quite speak it myself, or maybe speak a different dialect. The energy of art may be prior to religion, but religion, paradoxically, is a way of sustaining and surviving the psychic storm of that original energy (just as ritual and doctrine are ways of stabilizing and preserving the awful power of mystical revelation). Art for its own sake, art that has no answering "other," will eventually eat you alive.

 

You have written that one measure of a genuine spiritual experience is the extent to which it "demands uncomfortable change." What kinds of "uncomfortable changes" have you experienced in your life?

 

That's what my wife always asks me!

 

I would like to think of this new book as a viable answer to your question, but solitary writing is quite natural to me, and we should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

 

More relevant, maybe, are the many speaking engagements, including sermons, I have taken on at religious schools and organizations in the past few years. This is new to me and, while very gratifying, has at times been quite discomfiting. I have also become deliberate about being open and honest about my thoughts of God. Maybe not so honest in secular settings. That, too, has provoked some useful but uncomfortable exchanges.

 

Still, the question is a thorn in my brain. I feel that I spend too much time agonizing over what faith might mean, rather than simply acting in accordance with my instincts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that only the person who obeys believes. It is a hard road, but the right one. I will probably end up as a preacher after all.

 

Your faith does not come across as breezy in your essays, which you occasionally grace with levity. For example: "If I ever sound like a preacher in these passages, it's only because I have a hornet's nest of voluble and conflicting parishioners inside of me." Does your faith ever express itself as peace?

 

Rarely, which I see as a weakness. I do feel that some people may be called to unbelief—or what looks like unbelief—in order that faith may take new forms. Emily Dickinson is a good example of this, or Albert Camus. But I also believe that God requires every last cell of yourself to bow down.

 

Or perhaps that verb, requires, is wrong, or that it's God doing the requiring: It's more like your nature requires, in order to be your nature, that every last cell of yourself bow down. There is still some satanic pride in me, for which I pay a high price.

 

And yet, I have certainly experienced peace in poems that in their sheer givenness seemed to reveal something of God to me. I have written poems that begin in great anguish and explode into joy. As psychically difficult as the poems may have been to write, certainly I have felt peace and presence in their wake.

 

There are other moments, too, which are simply moments of life. Simply! I think of the poet Paul Eluard: "There is another world, but it is in this one." I have 3-year-old twin daughters. It would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to pretend that they don't at times drive all thought of God out of my head and make me want to write a series of sonnets in praise of celibacy, but it would be equally insane for me not to acknowledge that they are the source of my greatest happiness. Father Zossima, in The Brothers Karamazov, defines hell as "the inability to love." I have known that hell, and I should probably spend my remaining days thanking God that I am free of it.

 

- CT

 

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Amazon Listings

 

Christian Wiman's books and editorial contributions -

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=christian+wiman

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

January 2013

Google Listings

 

The American Scholar: Mortify Our Wolves - Christian Wiman

Tere comes a moan to the cancer clinic. There comes a sound so low and unvarying it seems hardly human, more a note the wind might strike off jags of rock ...

 

The American Scholar: Gazing into the Abyss - Christian Wiman

Though I was raised in a very religious household, until about a year ago I hadn't been to church in any serious way in more than 20 years. It would be ...

 

The American Scholar: My Bright Abyss - Christian Wiman
And there the poem ends. Or fails, rather, for in the three years since I first wrote that stanza I have been trying to feel my way—to will my way—into its ending.

 

The American Scholar: Hive of Nerves - Christian Wiman
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming, That unrest formed a heart. —Paul Celan. During a dinner with friends the talk turns, as it often does these ...

 

Christian Wiman's Remarkable Essay in The American Scholar ...
Oct 31, 2012 – Back in April, we blogged about Christian Wiman, a member of the Washington and Lee Class of 1988, for two pieces of news. He had just won ...

 

Evil Is What Humans Do: An Interview with Christian Wiman: The ...
Mar 12, 2012 – Christian Wiman is one of America's most important poets. ... year reading your essay “Gazing into the Abyss” from the American Scholar and it ...

 

 

 

 

Reconstructing An Emergent Theology that is Postmodern, Postsecular, and Orthodox

 

....this will be an evolving post through this week and will not be finalized until this statement herein has been removed... - RES, 1/6/2013

 

 

After 20 months of writing on Emerging Christianity it has become obvious that there are many directions we may attend to - from the expression of pure ideas to that of pure practice, from a variety of forms pertaining to church and worship, to social activism and community engagements, and all parts in-between and beyond. Consequently, I wish to begin revisiting previous observations made on this blogsite in a determinative, directional fashion based upon what has been learned and where we might go from this point forward. I'll begin by forming a list of topics that may be prayed through and investigated. That show Scriptural support using the latest methods of interpretation. And by attempting to express Emerging Theology within a Postmodern (and Postsecular) context that may lead to some form of metaphysical-existential authenticism and socio-cultural participation.

 

It has been said that an emerging/emergent Christian may fall into one of three groups. Whether this is a true statement I do not know but will use it initially to set pace to this discussion. Thus, an emergent may be one who is either:

 

1 - Relevant, that is, who wishes to update postmodern culture around all things Jesus;

 

2 - Reconstructivist, meaning one who wishes to update Christian Evangelicalism into a postmodernistic orientation;

 

3 - Revisionist, suggesting one who wishes to reorient Christian orthodoxy towards postmodernism, while also taking all that is orthodox from within Evangelicalism and pushing it forward, leaving Evangelicalism's modernistic/secular elements behind.

 

From this list I would place myself in movements 1 and 3, but not in 2 having no interest to reform Evangelicalism except to move it back towards its orthodox center, and away from its ideological dogmas, platforms, and statements. Having been birthed in the Modernist stream of secular culture, Evangelicalism has heroically fought for the Christian faith while at the same time become absorbed within its very streams of secularism.

Hence, as good postmodernists, we wish to remove ourselves from all things modernistic and secular. Which means reclaiming Christian orthodoxy and pushing it forward into a postmodern, postsecular Christian expression. Perhaps in this way we might lend help to those involved in the second movement charitably as our brothers and sisters in Christ, and not as opponents. For true Christianity seeks unity and grace, forged by alliance based upon Christ, true biblical scholarship, and not ideological whim or whimsy (which we all seem to fall prey from one time or another).

Thus, we will need to define some terms. Specifically, what does it mean to be postmodern and postsecular? And what might it mean to be an Emerging, if not Emergent, Christian (in my mind these are similar terms, and do not bear separate meanings - one as ideology and the other as a church movement). From this basis we might produce an evolving list of philosophical and theological inquiry, church observance and practice, asking how Emergent Theology may assist in expanding Christian witness and mission. And, I suspect, it will be a broad list, encompassing many ideas and practices, if it is to serve a more pluralistic, global audience uncoupled from regional outlooks and parochial mindsets.

As such, I wish to request helpful replies from our readers that is informed, emergent in perspective, short, to the point, easy to be understood by the reading public, and Christ-oriented in scope and theology. If you wish to participate in this project please provide your email address with a sample paragraph or two of your intended focus of discussion through the comments section. I would like to publish these with editorial largess with your help and contribution. I intend to be selective, prefering demeanor and tone, as much as content.

Otherwise, I fear what little good Emergent Theology may provide may be lost upon the rocky shorelines of progressive ideology (and not orthodoxy) on the one side, and neo-liberalism on the other. As Emergent Christians we look to foundations and cornerstones, not pillars and columns, nor facades and decorations. Once the foundation is set aright all other superstructural elements will fall into place. A foundation that is progressive, and biblical, and that may expand our previous discussions held here in Relevancy22 since inception.

Thank you for your help and contribution.

 

R.E. Slater

January 6, 2013

 

 

A List of Evolving Emerging Theological Topics

 

What Does it mean to be Secular? To be Postsecular? Where is Kant in all of this?

 

What Is Radical Orthodoxy other than what one suspects to be an eclectic version of Emergent Theology aimed at reforming Evangelical ideology, dogmas, and practices? How is Radical Orthodoxy, and Emergent Theology unified in the study of postmodernism. And how are they distinguished from one other?

 

What is Contintental Philosophy? What is Continental Theology? Can either of these be helpful to a postmodern Christian? Or do they more substantially correlate to a postmodern form of Liberal Theology?

How can Emergent Theology utilize Radical (Continental) Theology. How should it not? (Statedly, Radical Theology is not to be confused with the Evangelical form of postmodern Radical (Reformed) Orthodoxy).

 

What is Neo-orthodoxy and in what forms does it survive in today's Christian culture? How does Karl Barth contribute to its survival other than in its historical forms of distinguishing Christian Orthodoxy from Liberal doctrine?

How is Modernistic Dualism rejected in Postmodernism? How is it kept in the Enactment of Creational Free Will?

 

How has Dualism contributed to the ideas of good v. evil, right v. wrong, both helpfully and unhelpfully? How would Monism help to see human beings as essential parts of God's creation, rather than in contextual terms of wickedness and condemnation?

How does Monism, Unitarianism, etc, contribute to the idea of all things being created from the one God Himself? That apart from God can nothing exist? How have these movements departed from Christian orthodoxy?

How does Pantheism, Panentheism, Deism contribute, or not contribute, to an Orthodox Christian understanding? How does Theism, Trinitarianism, Relational Theism contribute to the same?

How is "Ex Nihilo" creationism both helpful and unhelpful both to the scientific/theological understanding of God and creation; as well as to the various branches of Christianity that has since evolved?

 

Where does the Anthropic Principle in all its forms (strong v. weak v. eclectic) contribute to the discussions of evolution, creation, science and the bible?

Should God be viewed as Power or as Love? Is divine power coercive? Is divine love uncoercive (sic, Jurgan Moltmann)? Where does divine intervention, or redemptive sovereignty, enter in to God's attributes?

 

What is Platonism (One Source)? NeoPlatonism (demiurge)? Augustinianism? Thomaism? How does it related to today's modern vs. postmodern discussions? How is Radical Orthodoxy like or unlike this?

How is Determinism related to any of the above? As versus Open Theology's Open Future of Relational involvement with the Divine?

 

...Left Open for further addition, and erudition! :) ...

 

 

Continue to -

 

Index to past articles on "An Emerging Theology"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being the Face of God, the Presence of God, Who Through Us Binds and Heals

Why, God?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/opinion/dowd-why-god.html?_r=0

By MAUREEN DOWD, Op-Ed Columnist, Washinggon
The New York Times
December 25, 2012

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

When my friend Robin was dying, she asked me if I knew a priest she could talk to who would not be, as she put it, “too judgmental.” I knew the perfect man, a friend of our family, a priest conjured up out of an old black-and-white movie, the type who seemed not to exist anymore in a Catholic Church roiled by scandal. Like Father Chuck O’Malley, the New York inner-city priest played by Bing Crosby, Father Kevin O’Neil sings like an angel and plays the piano; he’s handsome, kind and funny. Most important, he has a gift. He can lighten the darkness around the dying and those close to them. When he held my unconscious brother’s hand in the hospital, the doctors were amazed that Michael’s blood pressure would noticeably drop. The only problem was Father Kevin’s reluctance to minister to the dying. It tears at him too much. He did it, though, and he and Robin became quite close. Years later, he still keeps a picture of her in his office. As we’ve seen during this tear-soaked Christmas, death takes no holiday. I asked Father Kevin, who feels the subject so deeply, if he could offer a meditation. This is what he wrote:

 

How does one celebrate Christmas with the fresh memory of 20 children and 7 adults ruthlessly murdered in Newtown; with the searing image from Webster of firemen rushing to save lives ensnared in a burning house by a maniac who wrote that his favorite activity was “killing people”? How can we celebrate the love of a God become flesh when God doesn’t seem to do the loving thing? If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives?

 

The killings on the cusp of Christmas in quiet, little East Coast towns stirred a 30-year-old memory from my first months as a priest in parish ministry in Boston. I was awakened during the night and called to Brigham and Women’s Hospital because a girl of 3 had died. The family was from Peru. My Spanish was passable at best. When I arrived, the little girl’s mother was holding her lifeless body and family members encircled her.

 

They looked to me as I entered. Truth be told, it was the last place I wanted to be. To parents who had just lost their child, I didn’t have any words, in English or Spanish, that wouldn’t seem cheap, empty. But I stayed. I prayed. I sat with them until after sunrise, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking, to let them know that they were not alone in their suffering and grief. The question in their hearts then, as it is in so many hearts these days, is “Why?”

 

The truest answer is: I don’t know. I have theological training to help me to offer some way to account for the unexplainable. But the questions linger. I remember visiting a dear friend hours before her death and reminding her that death is not the end, that we believe in the Resurrection. I asked her, “Are you there yet?” She replied, “I go back and forth.” There was nothing I wanted more than to bring out a bag of proof and say, “See? You can be absolutely confident now.” But there is no absolute bag of proof. I just stayed with her. A life of faith is often lived “back and forth” by believers and those who minister to them.

 

Implicit here is the question of how we look to God to act and to enter our lives. For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did over 2,000 years ago.

 

I believe differently now than 30 years ago. First, I do not expect to have all the answers, nor do I believe that people are really looking for them. Second, I don’t look for the hand of God to stop evil. I don’t expect comfort to come from afar. I really do believe that God enters the world through us. And even though I still have the “Why?” questions, they are not so much “Why, God?” questions. We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not.

 

One true thing is this: Faith is lived in family and community, and God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be God’s presence. When my younger brother, Brian, died suddenly at 44 years old, I was asking “Why?” and I experienced family and friends as unconditional love in the flesh. They couldn’t explain why he died. Even if they could, it wouldn’t have brought him back. Yet the many ways that people reached out to me let me know that I was not alone. They really were the presence of God to me. They held me up to preach at Brian’s funeral. They consoled me as I tried to comfort others. Suffering isolates us. Loving presence brings us back, makes us belong.

 

A contemporary theologian has described mercy as “entering into the chaos of another.” Christmas is really a celebration of the mercy of God who entered the chaos of our world in the person of Jesus, mercy incarnate. I have never found it easy to be with people who suffer, to enter into the chaos of others. Yet, every time I have done so, it has been a gift to me, better than the wrapped and ribboned packages. I am pulled out of myself to be love’s presence to someone else, even as they are love’s presence to me.

 

I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.