I. PROLOGUE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT#

The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been witness to some of the greatest accomplishments in the history of humankind.

• Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics set in motion a new scientific revolution.

• Humans explored outer space for the first time, even taking their first footsteps on the moon.

• Advances in medical science created new horizons with the development of genetic engineering, the mapping of the human genome, artificial hearts, and surgical procedures for transplanting organs.

• Antibiotics and vaccines have enabled millions to survive death-dealing infections and diseases of the past.

In the last century, more technological advances have been made than in all prior history.

For all of its vaunted accomplishments, these two centuries also have been the deadliest in history. The most important historical fact of the last century is that it was an era saturated with brutality and war.

• One author notes that there have been some two hundred wars— and that is only since the end of World War II.

• Five major twentieth-century wars claimed more than six million military victims.

If one takes into consideration all the collateral damage of wars (famine and disease), one estimate suggests that somewhere around 180 million people have died in the various atrocities—a far greater total than in any other century in human history.

World War II cast an ominous shadow over the second half of the twentieth century, and no aspect of civilization was unaffected by the specter of the bloodiest war in human history. In the wake of the Holocaust, the use of atomic weapons, and 60 million fatalities (20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians), any subsequent reflection about God could not possibly ignore the horror of human devastation and the apparent absence of God.

Perhaps no theologian’s life and theology were more intertwined with the two world wars than Karl Barth. His entire understanding of theology was turned upside down by World War I, and then he was one of the most unrelenting opponents of Adolf Hitler during World War II. Barth’s theology was shaped profoundly by his experience of war. The fact that Barth was the most influential theologian of the last century, when combined with his experience of war, makes him the theological referent for all modern theology.

The framework for this chapter has two foci:

1. the birth of Neo-Orthodoxy arising from Barth’s rejection of the dominant Protestant liberalism along with the main theological elaborations that drew inspiration from Barth

2. the theologies that have significantly gone beyond Barth and charted their own alternative trajectories

II. THE NEW THEOLOGICAL REFERENT: NEO-ORTHODOXY#

During the second half of the nineteenth century, European nations had achieved unprecedented political, economic, and military power that stretched across the globe. The unification of Germany created a new rival to the established European powers in Britain, France, and Russia. It was only a matter of time before these rivalries erupted in war.

After the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914, the so-called Central Powers, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (with marginal support from Italy), squared off against the Triple Entente—Britain, Russia, and France. (The United States joined the Entente in 1917.)

When World War I finally ended in 1918, Europe’s map would be redrawn.

• Austria-Hungary disintegrated into a half-dozen small states

• Germany became a republic

• The Russian tsars were overthrown by the revolutionary Bolsheviks

The Treaty of Versailles (June 1919) restored peace in Europe, but left intact lingering resentments — which eventually erupted in a second world war in midcentury.

A. Karl Barth#

War has always dramatically impacted the church and its doctrine. War was the beginning and the end of classical Protestant liberalism.

• In the aftermath of the Reformation, religious differences became religious wars culminating in the devastating Thirty Years War that left Europe looking like a desolate moonscape.

• The devastation of World War I dimmed the optimism of Protestant liberalism, and for the next half-century a new form of Protestantism, Neo-Orthodoxy, would hold sway.

In the wake of World War I, a young Karl Barth found he could no longer entertain the utopian aspirations of Protestant liberalism. He rejected the anthropocentric focus of his liberal teachers.

Barth would become the prime architect of the demise of Protestant liberalism. In place of a man-centered Protestant liberalism, he crafted a God-centered theological outlook, which came to be known as Neo-Orthodoxy.

1. Beginnings#

Born in Basel, Switzerland, Barth (1886–1968) spent his childhood years in Bern, where his father was a professor of theology at a Reformed seminary. Like his father, Barth went on to study theology under two of the most celebrated Protestant liberals of his day, Adolf von Harnack at Berlin and Wilhelm Herrmann at Marburg. After a short stint as a pastor in Geneva, he became a pastor of the Reformed Church in the small Swiss town of Safenwil on the border with Germany.

It was as a pastor that Barth first found that his training in liberal theology simply did not translate into meaningful ministry to the people of his small parish. His disillusionment with Protestant liberals was further exacerbated when his theological mentors publicly supported the German kaiser’s decision to go to war in 1914. Barth was bitterly disappointed when he saw Harnack’s signature on the so-called “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three German Intellectuals to the Civilized World.” Barth was profoundly traumatized by what he called “a black day.”

His disenchantment drove the young pastor to search St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans for answers to his pastoral and theological frustrations. There he discovered a “strange new world” —one that was “very ancient, early oriental, indefinably sunny, wild, original.” The result of this study led to the publication of Der Römerbrief, his commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in 1919. But it was his revised version published in 1921 that “fell like a bomb on the playground of theologians.”

The success of this first publication led to a career transformation from pastor to university professor. In the decade following the First World War, Barth was linked with a number of other theologians — including Rudolf Bultmann, Eduard Thurneysen, Emil Brunner, and Friedrich Gogarten — who also had reacted against the prevailing liberalism. This movement was originally known as “Dialectical Theology” (Dialektische Theologie).

Barth was invited to become professor of theology at Göttingen (1921–25), Münster (1925–30), and Bonn (1930–35). While teaching at Bonn, he began working on what would be his crowning theological achievement: Church Dogmatics.

The goal of this new theology was deceptively grand: to develop a “theology of the Word of God.” This project would remain unfinished at his death, but would rank with the great theological writings of Aquinas and Calvin.

2. Opposition to the Nazis#

In Bonn, Barth suddenly found himself on the forefront of world politics. With the rise of the Third Reich, he felt he had to sound the alarm, so he became the primary author of the Barmen Declaration (Barmer Erklärung), which rejected the influence of Nazism on German Christianity.

The declaration became one of the founding documents of the Confessing Church, and Barth was elected a member of its leadership council, the Bruderrat. Not surprisingly, he was forced to resign from the University of Bonn for refusing to swear an oath to Hitler.

He returned to his native Switzerland, where he assumed a chair in systematic theology at the University of Basel (1935–62). Writing to a friend in 1938, he described the Nazi regime as nothing other than a “revolution of nihilism” that must be resisted.

3. Church Dogmatics#

Barth’s reputation rests principally on his magum opus, Church Dogmatics (Die Kirchliche Dogmatik). Beginning in 1932 and continuing to his death in 1968, Barth published thirteen massive volumes. He stressed that theology properly belongs within the context of the church.

He developed his theological perspective under five theological rubrics: revelation, God, creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Each volume is characterized by detailed biblical exegesis and constant interaction with the history of the church. Unfortunately, Barth did not live long enough to begin the fifth topic on redemption, nor was he able to put the finishing touches on the fourth rubric of reconciliation.

In reaction to his liberal teachers, Barth’s work set forth a new christocentric theological method.

• On the one hand, he rejected unequivocally any knowledge of God by natural means.

• On the other hand, he was absolutely confident that God has overcome the epistemic chasm between heaven and earth by revealing himself uniquely in Jesus Christ.

For Barth, Jesus is the supreme manifestation of the knowledge of God

4. Revelation#

One of the most contested concepts in modern theology centers on the meaning of divine revelation.

• Protestant liberalism tended to emphasize the general revelation of God in nature or human experience, thus turning Christianity into a kind of moral code.

• Conservative theologians, supposedly under rationalist influences, tended to identify revelation with propositional content of the Bible, resulting in a tendency to identify Christianity with a confessional doctrinal statement.

Barth rejected both liberal and conservative approaches of divine revelation and established his theological system on the basic principle that divine revelation is God communicating himself to us in human speech. This approach underscores the conviction that revelation is one-way—from God to humanity and not the other way around.

Barth specifically identified three forms of divine self-disclosure: Jesus himself, the witness of Scripture, and the proclamation of the gospel.

• Scripture and proclamation are properly understood to be instruments of divine revelation

• Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s Word

Jesus is God’s perfect and complete self-disclosure, and all other vehicles of divine revelation depend on him.

The second form of divine disclosure is the Bible, but Barth was careful to stress that the Bible is not God’s Word in the same sense that Jesus is God’s Word. Jesus is the perfect and supreme revelation of God, and the Bible functions as the unique and divinely ordained “witness” to Jesus.

Barth did not accept the notion of biblical inerrancy or infallibility. For Barth, there was only one inerrant revelation: Jesus. To him, the Bible was the unique vehicle of God, but it was nevertheless a human document. An inerrant Bible was not essential for Barth, because throughout history God employed fallible witnesses by which to reveal himself.

Although he did not accept inerrancy, Barth held the Bible in very high esteem. His denials of inerrancy were not intended to demean the authority of the Bible, but rather to exalt Jesus above all things.

Barth recognized a third form of divine revelation: the proclamation of the gospel. For him, it is in the power of preaching and teaching in the church that God speaks and draws people to himself. The Scriptures maintain a special role in the church because they are the primary witness to Jesus. The church itself, insofar as it faithfully declares the gospel, is the special circumstance for the divine-human encounter.

5. Wholly Other#

Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of the “infinite qualitative distinction” was a mainstay of Barth’s theology. The challenge, especially of his early theology, is how to bring the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity into proper relation.

For Barth, this Creator-creature distinction meant that God is the “Wholly Other” and must be distinguished from “everything human, and must never be identified with anything which we name, or experience or conceive or worship as God.” Barth even defined faith with a distinctive Kierkegaardian flavor as “awe in the presence of the divine incognito; it is the love of God that is aware of the qualitative difference between God and man and God and the world.”

Like Kierkegaard, Barth believed that finite beings cannot fully understand God, and therefore theologians must resort to the nomenclature of “paradox” in order to talk meaningfully about the infinite mysterious God.

For Barth, if God is God, then finite minds cannot achieve a complete understanding of God. Human beings must simply embrace divine revelation and be satisfied that in Christ, seemingly opposed truths are yet true.

6. Double Predestination#

Barth offered a new twist on the controversial doctrine of double predestination that forged a path beyond the traditional options, an approach that accounts for the reality of divine wrath as well as divine grace.

As he interpreted it, predestination does not refer to the eternal destiny of humans but rather is bound up exclusively with Jesus. Predestination is a positive expression of divine love that finds its focal point in Jesus. But Barth also acknowledged a kind of soteriological symmetry where Jesus is at once both the object of God’s election unto salvation and the object of divine reprobation unto damnation — that is, Jesus is both the “elect and reprobate man.”

This is to say, in virtue of Christ’s absolute identification with humanity, all humanity is chosen in the election of Christ, and at the same time, Christ suffers divine reprobation on behalf of all humanity. On the cross Jesus manifested the full power of God’s grace, which ultimately exhausts the wrath of God.

Jesus “is elected to make the rejection of man ‘his own concern.’ In the election of Jesus Christ, God has destined election, salvation and life for man and rejection, damnation and death for himself.”

7. Apokatastasis#

Does Barth’s view of salvation imply apokatastasis — that is, universalism? The best interpreters of Barth disagree about this, but Barth himself always refused to embrace this descriptor. When asked whether he taught universalism, he responded, “Neither do I teach it nor do I not teach it.”

The inner logic of Barth’s doctrine of election would seem to imply universal salvation, as Hans Urs von Balthasar and many others assert. However, it must be remembered that Barth was a dialectical theologian and therefore cannot be pigeonholed. In the final analysis, the vastness of God’s ways is unfathomable.

Barth was thus content to speak of God’s loving freedom and to defer further explanation to divine mystery.

B. Engaging Barth#

Barth was not alone in his rejection of Protestant liberalism. Eduard Thurneysen and Barth were joined in this effort by Friedrich Gogarten (d. 1967), and the three of them founded in 1922 the theological journal Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times).

Perhaps Barth’s most significant collaborator in challenging liberalism during the early years was the Zürich theologian Emil Brunner.

In the 1920s and 1930s these colleagues became the vanguard of a theological reformulation that signaled the death knell of nineteenth-century liberalism and reverberated throughout the rest of the century.

1. Emil Brunner#

Although Barth was the primary advocate for Neo-Orthodoxy, he was ably seconded by his fellow Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966). During his tenure at the University of Zürich (1924–53), Brunner came to be regarded as one of the preeminent theologians of the twentieth century.

Drawing inspiration from the existentialism of Kierkegaard and the “I-Thou” approach of Martin Buber, Brunner developed a “theology of encounter,” which he considered the most distinctive aspect of his thought.

Brunner believed that this notion of truth as encounter was a biblical alternative to the liberalism of Schleiermacher as well as the rationalism of traditional Roman Catholicism and orthodox Protestantism.

• Against the former he rejected the liberal portrait of Jesus as a noble human being, insisting that Jesus was God incarnate and central to salvation.

• Against the latter he pointed out that revelation is not primarily a doctrine but an act.

• He criticized conservative Protestants for what he called “Bibelglaube” (Bible faith), that is, having faith in the Bible rather than Christ.

For Brunner, “God does not reveal this and that — he reveals Himself by communicating Himself.” Accordingly, this personal encounter with God requires a decision — for or against.

It was quite a shock when these two Swiss comrades in the new dialectical theology famously had a falling out and hardly spoke to one another for decades.

The flash point came in 1934 when Brunner published an article titled “Nature and Grace”, in which he criticized Barth’s rejection of natural theology. Although he fundamentally agreed that human reason can never reach God on its own, Brunner argued that the gospel provides a “point of contact” (Anknüpfungspunkt) for human nature.

Barth rejected all natural theology, all points of contact between the Christian and non-Christian, apologetics, and proofs for God’s existence. For him, the gospel is its own proof. The best apologetic is proclamation. On theological grounds, by allowing even a minimal natural theology, Barth felt Brunner had opened the door a crack for an implicit denial of salvation by grace through faith alone.

Brunner was deeply wounded, and this war of words led to a breach in their friendship that lasted until the twilight of their lives. The estrangement in the relationship was finally reconciled not long before Brunner’s death in April 1966.

2. Rudolf Bultmann#

In contrast to Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a more peripheral participant in the early dialectical theology of Barth. Bultmann did share with Barth a certain affinity for the existentialism of Kierkegaard as well as a mistrust of Protestant liberalism. But within a few years, it became clear that Bultmann was moving in a different direction.

As a biblical scholar, Bultmann believed the New Testament is not concerned primarily with the Jesus of history, but rather with the religious legacy of Jesus that arose from the faith of the early church — “the Christ of faith.”

• He rejected the literal resurrection, asserting that “an historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable.”

• Although he believed that Jesus really existed, what was important for moderns is the kerygma — the core message beneath the multiple perspectives of the gospel accounts.

Bultmann employed an approach he designated “demythologization” as the key to recovering the kerygma. By making use of Martin Heidegger’s existentialist philosophy, he sought to de-mythologize the New Testament and thus capture the essential character of the kerygma.

He was persuaded that very little could actually be known about the Jesus of history. However, to him, faith is not about one’s ability to gain knowledge about the Jesus of history; it is about an existential encounter with Christ.

True faith emerges in the moment when a human being, confronted with the kerygma of Christ, decides how to respond and then takes full responsibility for that decision. Most people avoid this existential decision, and thus they sink into “inauthentic existence.” It is only by embracing the kerygma that one can enter into “authentic existence.”

For Bultmann, the Christian gospel is that God has liberated humanity so that we can live authentically as human beings. In the final analysis, Bultmann went well beyond Barth, although he retained an appreciation.

3. Reinhold Niebuhr#

Like Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) was a refugee from Protestant liberalism. He was the son of German immigrants; his father, Gustav Niebuhr, was an evangelical pastor in the American branch of the Prussian Church Union (now part of the United Church of Christ).

Having imbibed Protestant liberalism at Yale, Niebuhr took his first pastorate at a small German-American church in Detroit, Michigan — Bethel Evangelical Church. Upon his arrival in Detroit, he began preaching the Social Gospel, which inevitably brought him into conflict with Ford Motor Company. Troubled by the demoralizing effects of industrialism on workers, he became an outspoken critic of Henry Ford.

His encounter with the auto industry brought the realization that the Social Gospel had a naïve understanding of sin and an unrealistic optimism. It was Barth’s Neo-Orthodoxy with its robust concept of sin that caught Niebuhr’s attention.

As Professor of Practical Theology (later Ethics and Theology) at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1928–60), Niebuhr had the opportunity to develop his ideas about sin and society, which established him as a leading member of the Neo-Orthodox movement. He worked out the social implications of the doctrine of original sin in one of his most influential books, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932).

In his Nature and Destiny of Man (2 volumes, 1941, 1943), Niebuhr employed the term “Christian realism” to describe his approach to ethics. Niebuhr was concerned to recover the language of sin and to account seriously for the full impact of sin on the human moral condition. In a world devastated by the experience of Hitler, Stalin, and the Holocaust, Niebuhr could say that “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” He argued for a realistic reevaluation of our ethical standards.

The task of the Christian realist is primarily one of crafting a way of living with the reality of sin and self-interest. A realist accepts that the ethical balancing of social and power disparities will necessarily entail coercion. A vital Christian faith must undertake a constant commerce with the culture of its day, borrowing and rejecting according to its best judgment. There is the promise of a new life in the gospel; but it is an eschatological hope.

4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer#

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born to a prominent family in Breslau, Germany, on February 4, 1906. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a distinguished professor of psychiatry and neurology at Berlin University. His mother, Paula von Hase, was the daughter of Countess Klara von Hase. Despite the fact that his family was not particularly religious, he announced to his parents at the age of fourteen that he intended to become a pastor and theologian. Dietrich received his doctorate in theology from the University of Berlin in 1927.

Bonhoeffer showed great promise for both an academic and ecclesiastical career, but that was cut short with the Nazi rise to power in January 1933. Like Barth, he was a determined opponent of the Nazis from the outset. Disheartened by the German churches’ complicity with the Nazis, Bonhoeffer became actively involved in the Confessing Church. He served as head of the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde (1935–37), during which time he wrote two of his best-known books, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together.

With the outbreak of World War II, in order to avoid conscription into the German army, Bonhoeffer became a lecturer in theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1939. But almost as soon as he arrived, he became convinced that he had made the wrong decision. Shortly thereafter he returned to Germany.

Soon after his return, he became active in the German resistance. Through his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, he was recruited to a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. In April 1943, the Gestapo arrested Bonhoeffer, not for his involvement in the conspiracy, but on suspicion of subverting Nazi policy toward Jews and evading military service. However, the failure of the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler (code-named Operation Valkyrie) led to the discovery of his connection to the conspirators.

Bonhoeffer was transferred to the concentration camp at Buchenwald and then to Flossenbürg. Even though the war was all but lost, Hitler ordered all the conspirators executed. He was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before American soldiers liberated the camp and a month before the end of the war.

Like Barth, Bonhoeffer had a distinctive Christological focus in his ethics as well as his theology in general. In The Cost of Discipleship, he distinguishes between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.”

• Cheap grace is a formalized Christianity by which one becomes a member merely by intellectual assent to certain doctrines, without any corresponding change in life.

• Costly grace is a rejection of mere theological assent, and a full-throttled call to self-sacrifice, obedience, and discipleship. To follow Christ is to boldly risk all for his sake.

According to Bonhoeffer, when assaulted by evil the Christian must oppose it directly. The failure to act is to condone evil. The ethical dilemma for such action is that in confronting evil, we have no prior justification for employing one response to evil over another. Nevertheless, the demand for action without any a priori justification is the moral reality Christians must face. Ultimately, all actions must be delivered up to God for judgment, and no one can escape reliance on God’s mercy. Costly grace entails risk, even risking one’s life.

Bonhoeffer is perhaps best known for his advocacy for what he called a “religionless Christianity.” In his judgment, the church now inhabited a world where God is no longer a working hypothesis. With the advances of science, the church retreated and sought to stake out the inner life of the individual as the realm of God. Bonhoeffer offered another vision, in which the gospel addresses the individual without them having to become “religious” in the conventional sense.

It must be stressed that “religionless” in no way meant “godless”; quite the contrary, the incarnate Christ was the vital center of his conception of a “religionless Christianity.”

5. The Roman Catholic Response to Barth#

In the second part of the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, Barth’s rather critical remarks did nothing to endear him to Roman Catholics. Hans Urs von Balthasar was the first Catholic theologian to see theological merit in Barth, but it was not until the 1950s that Barth found his most enthusiastic disciple in the controversial Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng.

With a remarkable boldness, Küng’s 1957 doctoral dissertation argued that Barth’s doctrine of justification is in fundamental accord with the Council of Trent. Barth actually wrote a congratulatory letter to Küng, which Küng included in his preface to the dissertation.

Although he warmly received Küng’s work, Barth remained somewhat dubious, stating, “Of course, the problem is whether what you have presented here really represents the teaching of your Church. This you will have to take up and fight out with biblical, historical, and dogmatic experts among your coreligionists.” In fact, Küng’s hopes for a substantial reassessment of the justification doctrine were rejected.

6. The Evangelical Response to Barth#

The initial American evangelical response to Karl Barth was quite negative. Among the first to read and assess Barth was Cornelius Van Til, Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, who declared Barth a “new modernist.”

In significant measure, Van Til’s denunciation of Barth determined the rather cold reception among most American evangelicals. Although most American evangelicals remained suspicious of Barth, a few — mainly academic voices — could be heard above the din, expressing appreciation of the Swiss theologian.

• Bernard Ramm of Fuller Seminary, initially an opponent, became an advocate.

• Others such as Donald Bloesch of the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary and G. W. Bromiley of Fuller Seminary found Barth congenial to evangelicalism.

It was not until the turn into the twenty-first century that a noticeable current of Barthian sympathizers began to emerge among American evangelicals. Some have even spoken of a “Barthian renaissance” in North America, Britain, and the Pacific Rim.

More recently, Barth has received considerable interest from leaders of the emergent church, and among mainstream evangelical scholars, Barth is no longer persona non grata. The legacy of Neo-Orthodoxy is still being assessed, but in general, evangelicals remain critical yet appreciative of Barth.

III. NEW THEOLOGICAL ELABORATIONS#

Barth’s bold theology cast a long shadow over subsequent generations of theologians. Among the first generation of theologians to emerge in the wake of the Barthian revolution were two fellow Germans, Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Although both felt a theological debt to Barth, neither was afraid to criticize him or develop their own theological direction.

A. Eschatological Theology#

One of the most influential new theologies emerging from Germany in the wake of World War II era was “eschatological theology,” closely associated with the writings of Moltmann and Pannenberg.

While their theologies are different in several ways, together they stimulated a new interest in an appreciation for eschatological realism in mainstream Christian theology.

• Protestant liberals talked about the kingdom of God, but they meant a human social order rather than the reign of God.

• On the other hand, fundamentalists tended to think of eschatology as a chronology of end-times events and often engaged in a wide variety of speculation about the return of Christ.

Both Moltmann and Pannenberg sought to recover a realistic approach to eschatology completely apart from a social order or end-times chronology.

1. Jürgen Moltmann#

As a young soldier in Hitler’s army, Jürgen Moltmann (1926 –) came to the dreadful realization that he had unwittingly served evil. As the war came to an ignoble end, Moltmann became a prisoner of war in Great Britain from 1945 to 1948. While a POW, he was shown horrific photographs of the Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps, and he fell into despair.

Amid his torment, he was given a Bible by an American chaplain, and in the Psalms especially he found renewed hope. As Moltmann tried to make sense of his painful experience in World War II, he found himself focused on the twin themes of suffering and hope, which in turn brought him to a theological consideration of the resurrection and the cross of Jesus Christ.

It was while reading the second edition of Barth’s Der Römerbrief that he came across an assertion that reoriented his thinking: “If Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever with Christ.” This insight led Moltmann to explore a new theological method in which traditional theological categories were reconfigured in the light of eschatology.

In his first publication, aptly titled The Theology of Hope (1964), Moltmann concluded that:

• Genuine hope is necessarily bound up with the resurrection

• The resurrection is necessarily bound up with eschatology.

His was not a “theology about hope,” but a “theology out of hope.”

When Moltmann speaks of eschatology, he does not mean the future as end-time events, but rather the announcement in temporal history of future possibilities. For him the future is not fixed, but open to possibilities. The theology of hope has a here-and-now focus, which not only gives hope to the believer in the present, but energizes the believer to actively work to bring about the promised future. This eschatological hope inspires a “passion for the possible.”

Even with his theology of hope, Moltmann still had the painful memory of the Holocaust. He realized he still needed to deal with the fundamental problem of suffering and evil in the world. He turned his attention to the cross, which entailed two dimensions:

1. Christ’s solidarity with sinful humanity

2. Christ’s solidarity with the Trinity

In his famous work The Crucified God, the divine promise of the resurrection addresses the suffering of the “godless and the godforsaken” by identifying the suffering of Jesus on the cross with the suffering of humanity, which encompasses both the “oppressed and the oppressors.”

Moltmann’s concept of the cross as solidarity with the suffering entails a revisioned concept of God. He sees the cross not only as Christ’s solidarity with suffering humanity, but also as the Son’s solidarity with the Father. Moltmann grapples theologically with the Father’s abandonment of the Son on the cross.

Jesus’ anguished cry leads Moltmann to conclude that not only did Jesus suffer on the cross, but so did the Father. In solidarity with the godforsaken world, the Son willingly surrenders himself in love for the world, and the Father willingly surrenders his Son in love for the world. At the deepest point of their separation, the Father and Son are united in their love for the world, and that becomes the very moment when the godforsakenness of the world is overcome.

This understanding of divine solidarity on the cross leads Moltmann to revolutionize the concept of God in two ways.

• First, he embraces the ancient idea perichoresis, that is, the mutual indwelling of the Trinity. If both the Father and the Son suffer on the cross, then there must be a deep mutual indwelling of the divine persons of the Trinity.

• Second, the divine suffering on the cross necessitates a doctrine of divine passibility — the notion that God experiences pain and suffering.

This runs counter to the traditional doctrine of God as impassible, which asserts that God does not express emotion since emotion necessarily connotes change and God cannot change.

For Moltmann, such a reconceptualization of the being of God is required by God’s love. Divine love is not merely the one-way relationship of active benevolence, but a genuinely two-way relationship in which God is so intimately engaged with his creation that he is affected by it.

Moltmann’s eschatological theology was a theology of praxis (oriented toward action). A right understanding of the resurrection and the cross necessarily leads to activism. The resurrection is “revolutionizing and transforming the present.” That is to say, for Moltmann, the resurrection inspires a death-defying protest against all forms of death in all dimensions of life — religiously, socially, economically, or politically.

Moltmann’s work took on a decidedly political cast. Working in collaboration with the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Metz (1928 –), he began to develop a political theology of liberation. It was not political in the sense of taking a particular stance, but it was political in that he insisted that the gospel requires activism.

This stress on liberation found a strong reception among theologians working among the poor in Latin America and indeed provided some level of inspiration to the emergence of Liberation theology.

2. Wolfhart Pannenberg#

Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–) emerged onto the theological stage with the publication of his book Jesus—God and Man in 1964. In it he affirmed the rational verifiability of the historical event of the bodily resurrection of Jesus — something dismissed as impossible or mythological by most German theologians of the modern era. Along with Moltmann, Pannenberg understood the resurrection of Jesus as an eschatological event — the prolepsis and promise of the future divine kingdom when God will finally reveal his lordship.

In later writings such as Theology and the Kingdom of God (1969) and The Idea of God and Human Freedom (1973) Pannenberg made the startling claim that “God does not yet exist.” This statement must not be misinterpreted. For Pannenberg, God exists in and of himself in all eternity, but he is “not yet” fully present as he will be in the future.

In his eschatological theology, God, in an act of self-limitation, freely chooses to grant the world its awful freedom until the future kingdom finally and fully breaks into the present. Evils such as the Holocaust occur because God’s kingdom has not yet come. However, God still exercises his lordship from his own futurity by sending Jesus and the Holy Spirit into the present world from the future to demonstrate his love and to release a spirit of anticipation into the stream of human history. In the end, God will come to his world and cancel out all sin and evil and make it his home.

B. Post-Liberal Theology#

Barth’s influence was also important for the emergence of what is called “post-liberal theology.” Originally developed by Yale theologians Hans Frei (1922–88) and George Lindbeck (1923 –), the term “postliberal” was first coined by Lindbeck in his classic text, The Nature of Doctrine (1984). It refers to a loose constellation of theologians affiliated with Yale, and thus it is sometimes referred to as the “Yale School.”

To call it a movement may be too much, since there are such varieties of emphasis and expression. Lindbeck may have coined the general term, but the true originator of the movement was Hans Frei, whose stress on the narrative structure of the Bible led to yet another designation: “narrative theology.”

1. Hans Frei#

Like many other German Jews, the family of Hans Wilhelm Frei fled to the United States in 1938. Following the advice of H. Richard Niebuhr, Frei attended Yale, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Barth’s doctrine of revelation. After returning to teach at Yale, he published his seminal work, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), which gave birth to the new theological perspective.

Frei observed that there were two main hermeneutical strategies by which modern theologians deciphered scriptural meaning.

• Liberal theologians looked for the real meaning of the Bible in the religious experience common to all humanity and otherwise deconstructed the biblical text into historical-critical fragments.

• Conservatives pressed for the literal meaning of the Bible and, as a consequence, turned the text into source material for doctrinal propositions.

Frei was convinced that both modern conservative and liberal approaches to the Bible missed the point of Scripture by locating its meaning in something other than the scriptural story itself. He believed that the narrative of the biblical text had been obscured by both liberals and conservatives, since both were guilty of imposing an alien interpretive framework on the text.

He argued that the scriptural narrative should be allowed a normative function. He observed that early Christians made sense of their lives by viewing themselves as related to and participating within the story told in Scripture. What is important is not whether the gospel accounts are historically accurate. The key question is, how do the stories reveal the character of Jesus?

2. George Lindbeck#

If Frei emphasized the primacy of scriptural narrative for theology, it was his Yale colleague, George Lindbeck, who insisted on the primacy of language over experience and added a theory about religion as a cultural-linguistic medium.

Lindbeck identified three general theories of Christian doctrine.

First, the “cognitive-propositionalist” theory lays stress on the cognitive aspects of religion, emphasizing that doctrine functions as truth claims. This approach is most often identified with conservative-evangelical theology. Such a view approaches the biblical text as “informational propositions or truth claims about objective realities.” Lindbeck maintains that this perspective rests on the mistaken assumption that it is possible to state the objective truth about God definitively, exhaustively, and timelessly in propositional form.

The second approach, the “experiential-expressive” view, interprets doctrines as noncognitive symbols of inner human feelings, which Lindbeck identifies with theological liberalism. This view holds that there is a common universal “religious experience,” which Christian theology attempts to express in words. The problem with this view for Lindbeck is that it is ultimately unverifiable.

In Lindbeck’s analysis, both the “cognitive-propositional” and “experiential-expressive” approaches that have dominated theology during the modern age have failed. Thus, he argued for what he called the “cultural-linguistic” approach. It stresses that the heart of religion lies in living within a specific historical religious tradition and embracing its ideas and values. He contended that religious traditions are culturally and historically shaped and are governed by internal rules.

In the case of Christianity, he asserts that it is scriptural narrative that shapes the cultural-linguistic world of the Christian community. Christian doctrines are not universalistic propositions or interpretations of a universal religious experience, but are more like the rules of grammar that govern the way we use language to describe the world.

Lindbeck argued that becoming a member of the Christian community entails learning a new language. Moreover, the meaning of Christian language can be found only within Scripture. Instead of trying to translate Scripture into extrascriptural categories (what he considered the mistake of both conservatives and liberals), Lindbeck proposed an intratextual approach. In this approach, the story of the Bible becomes one’s own story.

It followed for Lindbeck that Christian catechesis is a more appropriate emphasis for churches than the various modern strategies to make Christianity reasonable, attractive, or relevant. He pointed out that for the most part, early converts did not absorb Christian teaching cognitively and then decide to become Christians.

Post-liberalism positioned itself as a third way between liberal and conservative theology.

• With liberal theology, the post-liberal school assumes that the Bible is not infallible and that biblical higher criticism is fully legitimate and necessary.

• With conservative-evangelical theology, the post-liberal school emphasizes the primacy of biblical revelation, the unity of the biblical canon, and the saving uniqueness of Jesus Christ.

IV. NEW ALTERNATIVE THEOLOGICAL TRAJECTORIES#

Barth continued to be a theological referent throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although new theological innovations emerged that went so far beyond him that he would not have recognized any resemblance. These alternative theologies continued to develop in a context of global military conflict.

The 1960s was a period of profound cultural change. Galvanized by opposition to the Vietnam War, young people led a countercultural movement that significantly altered the social landscape of America. The Vietnam War was a significant stimulus to a cultural paradigm shift both in the United States and globally. Sexual mores were challenged, the drug culture emerged, youth movements and musical tastes shifted dramatically.

Each of the theological diversities included here claims to be Christian and attempts to translate the gospel into the present cultural context. Some of these theological movements have already fallen into obscurity, while others endure for the moment—and only time will tell if any of these movements have a lasting influence.

A. God as the Ground of Being#

Widely acknowledged as a giant of twentieth-century theology, Paul Tillich had influence extending from the Weimar Republic in Germany to the countercultural sixties in America. Tillich (1886–1965) was an early voice of opposition to Hitler’s Nazi Party and later to the turbulent 1960s in America. He was hailed as a “prophet of the death of God theology and bowdlerized by John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God” (1963). For a time he was the darling of the new radical theology, but as the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s waned, Tillich eventually fell out of fashion.

As with Barth, the thinking of Paul Tillich was shaped by the trauma of war. As a chaplain in World War I, close encounters with death led to two nervous breakdowns and a severe crisis of faith. During his tenure as professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, he was one of the earliest voices of protest against the Nazis and soon came into open conflict with them. Under increasing harassment, he accepted Reinhold Niebuhr’s invitation to Union Theological Seminary in New York.

A self-described “theologian of culture,” Tillich redefined God as the “ground of being.” Although controversial, Tillich insisted that God is not a “being” per se and therefore does not exist as beings exist. Rather, God is the power of being that is within every being, enabling it to exist and without which it would cease to exist. In Tillich’s conception, the world is not something apart from God; it is the medium of his ongoing activity. In this view of God, there is an ineffable mystery and the only way humans can speak of him is through symbols.

For Tillich, Jesus was the ultimate answer to the existential quest for meaning as the unique man in complete unity with God who overcame all the existential trials of life. Jesus is not the Christ because of his own nature, but because God was present in him. Jesus is the “new being,” and by following him, one finds the ultimate meaning of life.

Tillich’s theology is vastly complex and substantially at odds with historic Christianity. His understanding of God is quite explicitly panentheistic—God is the power of being that suffuses the created order. The Bible is not the Word of God, but rather a medium recording the final revelation of Jesus the Christ. The Genesis story is not to be taken literally, but as a symbol of humanity’s estrangement from God.

In addition, Tillich’s view of the nature of Jesus has a distinctly adoptionistic flavor.

• Jesus was not a divine person but a real historical man who overcame the despair and alienation of humanity by his self-sacrifice.

• By his self-negation Jesus became the symbol by which the finite being overcomes the existential estrangement and establishes the possibility of the new being.

• The only thing that distinguishes Christianity from other religions is that it is based on the revelation of Jesus the Christ as the final revelation.

In sum, Jesus is the answer to the existential dilemma, not because he was the Son of God, but because he exemplified self-sacrifice and thus points the way for others.

B. Death-of-God Theology#

The countercultural outlook of the 1960s was nowhere more theologically relevant than in the emergence of a uniquely American movement, variously called “radical theology,” “Christian atheism,” or the “Death-of-God movement.” Two young theologians took the lead: Thomas J. J. Altizer of Emory University and William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

At a core level, Altizer and Hamilton reacted (some say overreacted) against Barth’s absolute stress on the transcendence of God, to the diminution of his immanence. These theologians took divine immanence to the ultimate extreme.

To these two scholars, to say that God is dead was not just a symbolic statement, but an assertion of an actual fact of history. Altizer argued that God abandoned his divinity on the cross in order to become fully human in Christ. This was the ultimate act of kenosis, or self-emptying. In this act of self-annihilation, it is argued that God became identical with humanity, even to the point of death.

From this perspective, God’s death is viewed as a redemptive event. The death of Jesus was not final, but instead, like the phoenix rising from the ashes, the spirit of the suffering Jesus survives and inaugurates a new age in which Christians proclaim redemption by serving others. God is dead, but the spirit of Jesus continues in this world in the battle for justice and liberation.

Similarly, Hamilton argued that the death of God actually summons humanity to look to Jesus as a moral exemplar of how to live in our secular world. He defines Jesus not as a person but as “a place to be.” Christianity is therefore not located “before an altar; it is in the world, in the city, with both the needy neighbor and the enemy.”

It is notable that Hamilton and Altizer dedicated their provocative 1966 book, Radical Theology and the Death of God, to Paul Tillich, whom Altizer described as “the Modern Father of Radical Theology.” But the more direct influence on this movement was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had spoken of a “religionless” Christianity in a “world come of age.” Most modern scholars judge that both Altizer and Hamilton greatly misunderstood Bonhoeffer’s meaning, but his language did inspire them.

Within a few years of its birth, the Death-of-God movement had run its course and was widely rejected as too radical.

C. Secular Theology#

Sometimes associated with the Death-of-God movement is so-called “secular theology.” Although both movements share some common assumptions, they should not be lumped together. The two most prominent representatives of secular theology are J. A. T. Robinson, Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, and the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox.

Robinson’s popular book Honest to God seeks to combine three apparently incompatible theological strands identified with Tillich, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer. Robinson has been severely criticized, especially for his interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s notion of a “religionless” Christianity.

• For Bonhoeffer this phrase referred to true Christianity in contrast to a false religion.

• But for Robinson, this idea was taken as the basis for abandoning traditional understandings of a transcendent God.

He then turned to Tillich in defining God as the “ground of all being,” adding his own twist in arguing that Jesus “discloses and lays bare the ground of man’s being as Love.”

Harvey Cox became widely known with the publication of The Secular City in 1965. Although there was no direct connection with Robinson, Cox too saw a world that was increasingly secularized. He distinguished “secularism” and “secularization”; the former he repudiates, the latter he embraces.

• Secularism is essentially an ordering of life without reference to God.

• Secularization is the inevitable historical process of liberation from a tribal village society and, with it, traditional conceptions of God and traditional ecclesiastical authority.

In the modern world, humanity is now free to enter the secular realm of the city, which is indifferent to religion. However, according to Cox, “God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life.”

This view contends that the church should not oppose this historical development, but embrace it. Far from being a protective religious community, the church should be in the forefront of secularization in society, celebrating the new ways religiosity is finding expression in the world. By embracing secularization, the church is no longer focused on otherworldly metaphysics, but on the practical work of justice and reconciliation.

This secularized vision is a clear marker of modern theological trajectories in which immanence trumps transcendence.

Like the Death-of-God theology, secular theology was also short-lived. In later years, Cox stepped back from his earlier assertions and concluded that secularization was “a myth.” But Cox also felt that his work gave significant impetus to the liberations that soon followed.

V. LIBERATION THEOLOGIES#

Liberation theologies are contextual theologies, arising as they do from specific situations of social injustice as well as political and economic oppression. Working and living in such oppressive contexts led theologians to rethink their conception of the church and its theology. They concluded that any theology that explicitly or implicitly sanctions the exploitation of the poor or socially marginalized is not the theology of Jesus. Liberation theologies acknowledge the sinfulness of humanity, but they especially link sin to social, economic, and political injustice.

Fundamental to Liberation theology is the insistence that theological reflection follows praxis. That is to say, theology is a second act critically reflecting on the first act, which is commitment to and solidarity with the oppressed. This praxis is inspired by the guiding principle that God has a preferential love for the poor and oppressed. Theology is not conceived primarily as doctrinal principles logically derived from biblical texts.

Another significant tendency among liberation theologians is to think of “salvation” within a social construct rather than individualistically. In this they have much in common with the Social Gospel movement. However, they do look to the biblical message of the prophets and conclude that God sides with the oppressed and actively seeks to liberate them from all bondage, slavery, and inequality.

Liberation theologians believe the church is called by God to identify with the oppressed and marginalized people rather than with the rich, the powerful, and the privileged. Thus the Christian mission necessarily includes active participation by the Christian church in the liberation of oppressed people.

A. Latin American Liberation Theology#

The term “liberation theology” was first coined in 1971 by the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928 –) in his famous book A Theology of Liberation. This movement first emerged midcentury among Roman Catholic priests in Latin America. They were convinced that the overwhelming poverty they witnessed was caused by social and economic injustice. This realization gave rise to the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Latin American Episcopal Conference), also known as CELAM, established in 1955.

After the Second Vatican Council, CELAM held two conferences that were constitutive for Liberation theology: the first was held in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, and the second in Puebla, Mexico, in January 1979. The Medellín conference especially was influenced by liberationist ideas when it issued the famous declaration concerning the “preferential option for the poor.” Its proponents claim that Jesus was a revolutionary whose theology emerged from a class struggle against the religious and political oppressors of his day.

Liberation theology finds its primary source in Gutiérrez’s own personal experience of poverty in the barrios of Lima, Peru. He was a mestizo—part Spanish and part Latin American native Indian—and suffered as a member of this oppressed ethnic group. Gutiérrez recognized that his experience was not unique but that more than half of his countrymen lived in similar circumstances of extreme poverty and social ostracism.

In a sense, Gutiérrez’s theology is a plea to the Roman Catholic Church to recover its mission to the poor and disenfranchised.

• He criticizes the church for having too often identified with the wealthy and the militaristic governments that oppressed their citizens.

• He makes an explicit appeal to the Bible, asserting that “the entire Bible, beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, mirrors God’s predilection for the weak and abused of human history.”

Preference for the poor does not imply that God does not love the wealthy; it just means that the poor have a priority in terms of urgency.

There is for him an identification of “liberation” with the more traditional notion of “salvation.” In making this identification, he does not exclude the traditional meaning of the individual spiritual experience of God’s grace and forgiveness for sins; however, he does stress that there is more to salvation.

When he implicated the Catholic Church as one of the social structures that implicitly supported the forces of oppression, Gutiérrez found himself in trouble with the Catholic hierarchy. Under the auspices of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), the Vatican’s office for doctrinal orthodoxy, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), issued condemnations of Liberation theology.

The CDF denounced the tendency to politicize the Bible, but the most significant criticism was reserved for the use of Marxist analysis as an interpretative tool for understanding the causes of poverty in Latin America. Marxist categories of social analysis, the church argued, cannot be detached from its non-Christian (even atheistic) view of history and humanity. Liberation theologians responded that their use of Marx is no different than the use of pagan philosophers in the early church or Thomas Aquinas’s use of Aristotle.

Like most contemporary theological movements, Latin American Liberation theology has a variety of voices. Beside Gutiérrez, other leading voices include Catholic theologians Leonardo Boff of Brazil, Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay, and Jon Sobrino of El Salvador. Although liberation theology is closely identified with Catholicism, some of its leading theologians were Protestant, such as José Miguez Bonino of Argentina and Emilio Castro of Uruguay.

Whatever the validity of the criticism, these theologians have reminded Christians of the injustice and oppression that most often accompanies poverty.

B. Black Liberation Theology#

Black liberation theology was born out of the social struggles of African Americans for freedom and equality in America. The emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s signaled the growing frustration among younger African Americans with the nonviolent approach of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement.

In July 1966 the National Committee of Negro Churchmen (fifty-one black pastors) published a “Black Power” statement in The New York Times. The black churchmen made it clear that their message of Black Power was derived from their commitment to the Christian gospel. As Christians, they were morally bound to address the “gross imbalance of power and conscience between Negroes and white Americans.… This is more important than who gets to the moon or the war in Vietnam.”

As bold as the Black Power statement was, it seemed tame in comparison to the “Black Manifesto” published in April 1969. This manifesto, coming exactly one year after the assassination of Dr. King (and four years after the murder of Malcolm X in 1965), marked a new militancy.

One of the authors of the manifesto, James Foreman, interrupted Sunday services at the historic (and white Protestant) Riverside Church in New York, demanding reparations. The Black Manifesto linked reparations to the Christian notion of repentance. This linkage to repentance had the dual benefit of identifying with a fundamental Christian doctrine and at the same time insinuating a threat.

A third historic document on “black theology” from the National Committee of Black Churchmen in June 1969 specifically links black liberation with the gospel of Jesus. It is noteworthy that these statements of increasing militancy arose primarily from the African-American church. It was not until the efforts of James H. Cone that the academic world began to formalize the Black Liberation theology first expressed in the black church.

Cone grew up in Bearden, Arkansas, with its population of 400 blacks and 800 whites. White racism permeated Southern culture with its segregated schools and restaurants as well as political and economic inequality. Cone’s experiences led him to a very different approach to combating racism than Dr. King. Cone preferred to ally himself with the more radical Black Power movements.

Reviewing the course of the historical development of black liberation theology, Cone distinguished three stages.

• In the early period from 1966 to 1970 the movement was concentrated in the black churches.

• The second stage ranged from 1970 to 1977, and the movement shifted to academic institutions and theological reflection.

• Since 1977, black liberation theology has begun to engage with global liberation movements.

In particular, Cone and others became affiliated with the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT), an association of Third World theologians committed to the liberation of oppressed peoples.

It was the publication of two groundbreaking and highly controversial volumes justifying black activism that brought Cone to prominence: Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970). He found that the theologians he studied in graduate school did not provide meaningful answers for African Americans. Thus Cone developed a more radical theology, whose organizing principle was black liberation from white racism.

Black theology is defined specifically in terms of liberation. Blackness is the overarching theological metaphor that informs all theological rubrics.

“It is a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community … liberation is not only consistent with the gospel, but is the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

For Cone, revelation is more than divine self-disclosure; it is the promise of liberation. The “essence of biblical revelation” is that it is God’s declaration of “emancipation from death-dealing political, economic and social structures of society.” Hence, Cone draws on the biblical narratives of God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt and gospel accounts of Jesus declaring that he has come “to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18). Furthermore, Jesus is the black Messiah.

Salvation is reconceived in terms of liberation from racial injustice and is thus directed toward the social and political sphere more than the spiritual. To focus on the future reward of heaven is seen as an attempt to dissuade blacks from the goal of real liberation in the present. Cone’s liberation theology carries an ominous warning that black patience has run out, and if white America does not respond, “then a bloody, protracted civil war is inevitable.”

C. Feminist Liberation Theology#

Feminist theology, like its counterparts in Latin America and the African-American community, is a contextual theology with strong political overtones. That is to say, it arises from a deep sense of ongoing injustice and oppression in the North American cultural and ecclesiastical context.

North American culture is seen by feminists as another manifestation of a much longer history of patriarchy in the Christian church. Although there have been isolated movements and individual women who have resisted the patriarchy of the culture and the church, none was successful in overturning the prevailing tendencies until the twentieth-century suffragette movement in North America. Historically, feminist liberation theology is generally distinguished in terms of three “waves,” the first of which began in the mid-nineteenth century.

It was not until the 1960s that a more powerful women’s movement emerged in which women’s experience is the controlling presupposition to theology. Although feminist thought is multilayered, one can distinguish four broad categories of feminist theology: Post-Christian, Revisionist, Ethnic, and Evangelical.

1. Waves of Feminism#

Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in July 1848 marked the first wave of the women’s movement, which culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed by Congress in 1918 and ratified in 1920, granting women the right to vote. Although it was the law of the land, five southern states did not formally ratify the amendment until 1969 to 1971: Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Mississippi did not ratify it until 1984.

If the first wave of the women’s movement centered on the right for women to vote, the second wave addressed a range of legal issues such as gender discrimination in the workplace and, perhaps most controversially, reproductive rights. The second wave, variously labeled the “Feminist Movement” or the “Women’s Liberation Movement”, was inaugurated by Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-selling book The Feminine Mystique. Drawing from her own research as well as the earlier work of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxiéme Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949), Freidan sparked a full-fledged movement in the United States.

In 1966 Friedan founded the National Organization for Women, with the aim of bringing women “into the mainstream of American society [in] fully equal partnership with men.” The development of the birth control pill granted women, for the first time in history, nearly complete control over their reproductive capacity. A growing number of mainline Protestant denominations admitted women to ordination. Friedan was politically active and led efforts to secure landmark legislation and, most notably, the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade of 1973, which granted women the legal right to an abortion.

Third-wave feminism emerged in the early 1990s, but is especially resistant to easy categorization. While first- and second-wave feminism had defined goals, third-wave feminism is more diffuse. The third wave was in part a reaction to the perceived inadequacies of second-wave feminism, especially the failure to include women of different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds; it sought to challenge what it deemed the second wave’s “essentialist” definitions of feminity, which often assumed a universal female identity and overemphasized the experiences of upper-middle-class white women.

There was also an affinity to punk-rock culture. “Riot grrrl” is an underground feminist punk movement (begun in the 1990s) that stresses female identity. Its music addresses distinctively feminist issues such as rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, and female empowerment.

2. Post-Christian Feminism#

One of the most radical Christian feminists was the Boston College professor Mary Daly (1928–2010). She described herself alternatively as a “radical lesbian feminist” and “post-Christian feminist,” which was her way of declaring that Christianity is a primary cause of women’s oppression and the teachings of the Bible are the means by which women are subjected to male control and patriarchy.

Early in her career, although critical of ecclesiastical patriarchy, Daly believed that the Catholic Church was not beyond reform. By the early 1970s, her thought turned more radical with the publication of her second book, Beyond God the Father (1973), in which she criticized Christianity itself and rejected the ultimate authority of the Bible as misogynist. In the process of writing this book Daly abandoned Christianity altogether and issued a “call for the castration of sexist religion.”

In subsequent writings Daly became increasingly radical. In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) she moved beyond the history of patriarchy and argued for a reversal of power between the genders—that women should rule over men. In a magazine interview she declared, “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth.

3. Revisionist Feminism#

From the very beginning, feminist theologians have struggled with traditional Christianity. Many came to the conclusion that what was said to be normative human experience was in fact male experience. Feminists felt powerless and ignored in a religious world that is socially, sexually, ecclesiastically constructed by males. Although traditional theology acknowledges that God is neither male nor female, the Christian story largely has been told through the male voice from a male perspective.

In response, some feminist theologians like Daly have repudiated Christianity, while others have sought to revise it. Two of the leading revisionist feminist theologians, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, although critical of traditional versions of Christianity, have retained their Christian identification.

Ruether (1936–), like all feminists, is concerned about patriarchy within Christianity. Her book Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (1993) is one of the first feminist systematic theologies. Provocatively, she asks, “Can a male savior save women?” Her answer is no—maleness is not essential to his role as savior. She argues that traditional theology has been constructed based on male experience, and as such, it reflects a patriarchal outlook.

Some early feminists affirmed the normative authority of the Bible and placed the blame for patriarchy on male interpreters and translators. Some revisionist feminists such as Ruether argue that the biblical text is so thoroughly patriarchal that women must move beyond it in order to construct a meaningful theology.

In response to the perceived patriarchy, revisionist feminists created a “canon within a canon,” composed of biblical texts that have positive images of women and other texts from non-Christian sources. The Bible remains a theological resource, albeit not an exclusive one.

Fiorenza (1938–) is perhaps the most prolific feminist theologian at this time. A native German, she received her theological training at the University of Münster and became a professor at Harvard Divinity School. In her best-known book, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1994), Fiorenza argues for the retrieval of the overlooked contributions of women in the early Christian church and challenges the inevitability of patriarchy in the formative period of early Christianity.

• Inspired by various liberation theologians, she portrays Jesus as a liberator who challenges the dominant male structures that oppress the poor and women.

• Sin is reconceived in terms of social structures that alienate and exploit the disenfranchised.

• The image of God the Father is exchanged for the image of God as Spirit or as the Ground of Being.

Ruether, while critical of the intrinsic patriarchy in the Bible, nevertheless accepts that it does contain some liberating texts that are therefore authentic words from God. Fiorenza on the other hand, does not believe that the biblical text contains any divine revelation. Instead, she locates the revelatory role in the women-church community, which is “the hermeneutical center of feminist theology.” In this way, the worshiping community of women functions as the magisterium for theological truth.

4. Ethnic Feminism#

The growing presence of minority women was the single most important development in feminist theologies at the end of the twentieth century. These minority voices argued that the dominance of white women in the feminist movement mirrors the dominance of white culture. Speaking from their own ethnic context, African-American and Latina feminists developed their own distinctive kind of feminism.

African-American women used black theology and feminist theology as stepping-stones, but have embraced the more distinctive term “womanist,” first coined by novelist Alice Walker.

• Womanist theology refers to a theological stance whose point of departure is the experience of African-American women.

• Such theology focuses not only on liberation but also on survival.

• Hagar in the Old Testament is seen as a model for all women who go into the world to make a living for themselves and their children.

Believing that white feminist theology focuses on women alone, the womanist theology is shaped also by a concern for family and community.

According to Jacquelyn Grant, African-American women locate authority in the history of black women and their faith. The Bible remains an important source for theological reflection along with the experience of African-American women. Womanist theologians do not reject the Bible and its authority, for they find that it has been a source of comfort and strength for African-American women throughout their history. However, the communal experience of black women serves as an authoritative source for theology, alongside the Bible.

For black women, Jesus was seen as the divine co-sufferer and thus a source of encouragement during the civil rights movement.

Inspired by the Spanish word for woman (mujer) and the womanist community of African-American women, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, a Cuban-American theologian, coined the term mujerista to stress Latina experiences as a source for feminist theology. Latina women have developed a theological outlook that centers on their particular experiences. In contrast to the white-dominated feminist theology that tends to place emphasis on the individual, Mujerista theology, like womanist theology, gives greater weight to the family and community.

Isasi-Díaz has gone on the offensive against the patriarchal machismo so often characteristic of Hispanic culture. For Latina women, the suffering Jesus is a viable source of encouragement to those who have been oppressed. They are less concerned with elaborate intellectual systems of theology and more focused on the practical matter of everyday justice. They view sin as resignation in the face of oppression and unwillingness to envision a better future.

5. Evangelical Feminism#

As it developed in the twentieth century, evangelical theology has been known for its distinctive commitment to the authority of Scripture. Evangelical feminists, in keeping with that commitment, argue that when rightly interpreted, the Bible teaches the full equality of men and women and that all ministry roles are equally available to men and women.

This view, termed “egalitarianism”, is grounded in the Christian conviction that all humanity was created in the image of God and therefore all have equal responsibility in the home and church to exercise their gifts in service to God.

Historically, however, the Christian church has not been egalitarian but hierarchical.

• In the traditional view, women were excluded from leadership roles in the home and the church.

• Based on their reading of Scripture, it is argued that God has ordained the different roles for men and women.

The traditional view gained new impetus in reaction to the rise of twentieth-century feminism.

In 1987 the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was established to counter a perceived threat to the traditional structures of the church and family. In opposition to all forms of egalitarianism, they articulated what is now known as the “complementarian” view, which affirms that God has designed complementary roles for men and women.

In this view, both men and women are made in God’s image, but have different roles and functions. Men are viewed as the spiritual leaders in the home, and wives are to submit to the husband’s authority. In the church, women’s gifts are acknowledged, but must be exercised under male authority and are generally encouraged in women’s and children’s ministries. The formal governing and teaching roles are restricted to men.

Complementarians insist that male leadership and female submission in the home and church are to be implemented in the context of Christian love.

As evangelicals, both complementarians and egalitarians are committed to the binding authority of the Bible, yet each view stresses different biblical texts in support of their position.

• The complementarians give prominence to texts such as 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man”)

• The egalitarians put emphasis on Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”)

A high view of Scripture does not resolve these differences of interpretation.

Evangelical feminists have gained considerable ground in the North American evangelical world. Many evangelical denominations now affirm the ordination of women, and even most complementarian seminaries now admit women to their ministerial programs (MDiv), even if women are excluded from certain classes such as preaching. On the other hand, it is worth noting that even within those denominations (both evangelical and nonevangelical) that ordain women, obstacles remain. Ordained women still find it difficult to secure positions as senior pastors of larger churches.

With the emergence of the women’s movement in the 1960s (second-wave feminism), evangelicals began to reconsider the traditional views of women. Leading the way was Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy A. Hardesty with their 1974 book, All We’re Meant to Be, which was one of the primary inspirations for the evangelical feminist movement. That same year, the Evangelical Women’s Caucus International (EWCI) came into being. This group advocated what they called “biblical feminism,” which affirmed both the authority of the Bible and the availability of all ministry positions to women, including ordination.

By 1986, divergences began to emerge. At the seventh conference of EWCI in Fresno, California, a resolution was passed that favored “civil-rights protection for homosexual persons.” Opponents of the resolution feared that the real purpose was to approve a lesbian lifestyle as being congruent with Scripture. Many of the evangelical feminists believed that the Bible does not sanction homosexuality and therefore concluded they could not remain within the EWCI.

Led by Catherine Kroeger (1925–2011) of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a new organization was formed in 1988, Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE). The CBE mission was straightforward: The Bible is the final authority on matters of faith and practice, and based on their understanding of the Bible, all offices of the church are open to women. Furthermore, they affirmed that heterosexual marriage is the biblical teaching.

The breach among evangelical feminists underscores the conflicting interpretations of Scripture. Despite their agreement on the binding authority of Scripture, significant differences remain among evangelicals.

VI. PROCESS THEOLOGY#

Throughout church history, philosophy and theology have been in constant conversation, the one influencing the other.

• In the early church, Christian thinkers used Hellenistic categories to communicate the biblical message to educated pagans of the Roman Empire.

• Augustine borrowed heavily from Neoplatonism in his doctrinal formulations.

• In medieval theology, Aquinas viewed Aristotelian philosophy as the “handmaid” of theology.

• Liberal theologians embraced this notion of utilizing philosophy in the service of the theological enterprise.

One contemporary expression of a philosophically informed theology is “process theology.”

A. Alfred North Whitehead#

Process theologians have drawn their philosophical inspiration from the British mathematician-turned-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).

He did not take a traditional view of God as the creator, but rather as the great unifying presence. God is so closely identified with the world that Whitehead can assert, “… it is as true to say the world created God as that God created the world.” The world is viewed as the divine “body” while God is the world’s “soul” or “mind,” and the two are always inseparable and interdependent.

For Whitehead, God is neither omnipotent nor timeless. God is always evolving—that is, in every given moment God is becoming superior to himself.

B. John Cobb#

By the 1970s process theology was felt in various mainline Protestant seminaries and divinity schools. Claremont Graduate School of Theology (California) in particular became the center of process theology because of the most ardent advocate, John Cobb Jr.

Cobb’s theological orientation reveals some of the more distinctive aspects of process theology.

• First, God in his essence is relational and dynamic rather than static and immutable.

This dynamic relational understanding of God necessarily means that God is constantly changing as he interacts with the world. God does indeed have purposes and goals for the world, but is constantly revising them in light of his interactions.

• Second, there is an emphasis on God’s immanence.

Cobb stresses God’s personal nature, divine love, vulnerability, and suffering rather than divine power and sovereignty. In this regard, Cobb emphasizes the mutual relationship of interdependence between God and the world.

• Third, Cobb rejects monergism and any description of God’s work in the world as coercive.

Rather, God always works through persuasion. God calls the world to its own fulfillment, but free creatures decide whether and how to respond.

• Fourth, Cobb’s process theology is naturalistic in that it rejects the whole idea of supernatural intervention by divine power in the natural order.

While that does not rule out special persuasive acts of God, it does rule out the miraculous. God provides humanity with his vision for what they should become and seeks to lure them toward this vision, but God never interrupts the natural order of events or forces anything to happen against nature or free will.

• Finally, Cobb’s God cannot know the future with absolute certainty.

Because the future is ultimately determined by the response of individuals to God’s persuasion, it cannot be known. Accordingly, there is no guarantee that God will finally overcome human intransigence to his vision of good.

Cobb’s view of God falls outside the traditional understanding of Christianity. To contemporary liberal theologians, these tragedies (the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, unrelenting wars, and genocide) inclined them to seek a radical revision of traditional Augustinian notions of God’s power and sovereignty. They believed that the Christian God would have stopped the mass killings of innocent people if he could. Therefore they concluded it must be the case that he could not stop them.

Process theologians found solace in Whitehead’s concept of the God who suffers himself because of such tragedies, even if he cannot prevent them.

Because process theology differs considerably from historic Christian theology, many deny that process theology can be considered “Christian” in any legitimate sense. However, it is a mainstay in many liberal Protestant seminaries.

VII. CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGIES#

When the twentieth century dawned, Christianity essentially had become a Western cultural movement. With 90 percent of all Protestants residing in the West, the perception was that Christianity was a Western religion. With the midcentury demise of colonialism, Christianity grew exponentially in the Third World. By the 1970s, the center of Christianity had shifted dramatically from the West to the global South.

This geographical and political shift has had significant theological implications. New African, Asian, and Latin American nations emerged, and with a new sense of national identity came a desire to define themselves theologically.

While each nation in Asia or Africa has its own distinct historical heritage, it remains the case that theological developments have several cultural realities that generally characterize these nations and impact their conception of Christian theology.

• First, it must be recognized that abject poverty is one of the basic realities of life.

• Second, Christianity inhabits a religiously pluralistic culture—in some cases, a culture long dominated by another religious tradition.

• Third, lingering suspicion remains about Western attitudes of superiority.

• Fourth, the spirit world is taken much more seriously.

• Fifth, Asian and African cultures actually think differently.

If Christian theology is to be appropriately contextualized in the various cultures, these are some of the key issues that must be engaged.

A. Africa#

The growth of Christianity in Africa in the twentieth century was nothing short of spectacular. The African continent has the highest numerical Christian growth rate in the world. As one looks at the theological developments of Christian Africa, one must bear in mind three historical facts: the slave trade, European colonization, and conflict with Islam.

For more than three centuries (c. 1550–1870), the primary contact between Europe and Africa was the slave trade. As many as 15 million Africans were taken from Africa to the Americas before Christian abolitionists successfully won the public battle, arguing that slavery is inconsistent with Christian theological principles.

With regard to colonization, economic opportunity led to political exploitation by Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, and Belgium. Between the Congress of Berlin in 1885 and the early twentieth century, most of Africa was divided among these European powers. By the turn of the century, Africa effectively had been partitioned into regional fiefdoms governed by powerful European competitors.

The third and perhaps most significant historical factor is the growing tension between Christians and Muslims. In sub-Saharan Africa the two monotheistic religions have generally peacefully coexisted for centuries. However, with the advent of Islamic militancy, tensions have dramatically increased, especially in nations such as Sudan and Nigeria.

The great challenge for African Christians was to define the relationship between historic Western theology and African Traditional Religions (ATR) — that is, those indigenous religious beliefs and practices that predated the arrival of Christianity: Are there aspects of ATR that can be utilized legitimately as a cultural and linguistic vehicle for the gospel?

In general, the indigenous African religious worldview envisions a three-tiered reality.

• The highest realm is occupied by a single Supreme Being.

• The second spiritual realm includes a wide variety of spiritual divinities, including dead ancestors.

• The third—earthly—dimension has a wide range of human intermediaries between the spirit world, such as witch doctors and shamans.

African theologians argue that a biblically orthodox theology can appropriate these cultural forms in the service of Christian theology without becoming syncretistic.

South Africa faced a distinctive theological challenge. The struggle against apartheid gave shape to a more militant liberation theology rather than a theology of inculturation. South African theologians tended toward a more political protest theology that in part drew inspiration from the black theology of North America.

B. Asia#

The notion of Asian Christian theology is not a recent phenomenon. Efforts to present the Christian gospel in a way intelligible to the Asian context can be traced back to Mateo Ricci in China and Roberto de Nobili in India in the seventeenth century. In the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the issue again surfaced in India, where some Christian missionaries presented Christ as the fulfillment of the aspirations of Hinduism.

After World War II, however, many Asian theologies moved beyond indigenization to a more fully developed contextualized Asian theology. These theologians argue that just as God employed Jewish and then Greco-Roman cultures to reveal himself, so the gospel must be translated into the particular forms of Asian cultures.

Any consideration of Asian theologies needs to be fully aware of two primary contextual facts.

• First, Asian theologies often take place in the context of crushing poverty and economic despair.

• Second, such theologizing takes place in the context of multiple cultures and deep religiousness.

1. Water Buffalo Theology#

After receiving his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1959, a young Japanese scholar, Kosuke Koyama, served as a Protestant missionary in Thailand from 1960 to 1968. While in Thailand, he decided to read his Bible as if he were standing alongside a water buffalo in a rice paddy — which led him to conceptualize Asian theology from the perspective of life at the elemental level of a water buffalo.

Koyama stressed what he called “neighborology” — that is, sharing the gospel not as a formal theological exercise, but as a dialogue within actual relationships with real people.

Koyama’s “Water Buffalo theology” sought to express culturally the meaning of the gospel message while rooted in the Asian cultural context, but without succumbing to syncretism.

He defines contextualization in two respects: “First, to articulate Jesus Christ in culturally appropriate, communicatively apt words; and second, to criticize, reform, dethrone or oppose culture if it is found to be against what the name of Jesus Christ stands for.”

2. Minjung Theology#

Other Asian theologies draw significantly from Latin American liberation theologies. Latin American theologians focused on the structural causes of poverty, Western colonialism, economic exploitation by multinational corporations, institutional violence, and right-wing military dictatorships. In the 1970s Ahn Byung Mu, drawing lessons from the Latin American context, developed what he called “Minjung theology” (“theology of the people”) as a Korean response to the oppressive military rule of Park Chung Hee in South Korea.

In Minjung theology, Jesus is portrayed as the liberator of the oppressed from social injustice, economic exploitation, political oppression, and racial discrimination.

3. Dalit Theology#

An Indian version of liberation theology is the so-called “Dalit theology” of Arvind P. Nirmal (1936–95). Highly critical of the Brahmanic dominance of Christian theology in India, he believed that true, contextualized Christianity in India should reflect the struggle of Dalits, who make up about 70 percent of India’s Christian population. Nirmal drew primarily on the concept of the “suffering servant” from Isaiah 53 to identify Jesus as a Dalit.

This movement emerged in the 1980s and embraced liberation themes of Jesus’ preference for the poor and liberating the oppressed.

4. Third-Eye Theology#

One of the more intriguing Asian liberation theologies is the “Third-Eye theology” of Choan Seng Song. Borrowing from Japanese Buddhism, Song employs the language of the “third eye” to mean viewing Christ through one’s own cultural and spiritual context. With this goal in mind, he uses both traditional Asian stories and biblical stories, interpreting each in the light of the other. Jesus is understood as the God who suffers with his people, and as such, his story is the Asian story.

For Song, liberation entails both a political and spiritual dimension with Christians as the vanguard in the struggle for liberation.

• The Christian mission is not evangelization, but rather political liberation and the intersection of Christian and Asian spiritualities.

• The mission of the church is to engage other religions by “growing with them in the knowledge and experience of God’s saving work in the world.”

Echoing German Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s concept of the “anonymous Christian,” Song suggests that throughout human history “there are men and women who have gone about doing the king’s business without being aware that they are in the King’s service.”

5. Pain of God Theology#

Kazoh Kitamoiri’s “Pain of God theology” derives from the distinctive situation of Japan. In the devastating aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II, Katamoiri sought to develop a theology that would address the suffering of his countrymen. He drew the theological conclusion that the God of the Bible is the God of suffering and pain and can therefore empathize with the suffering and pain of the Japanese people.

He appeals directly to Jeremiah 31:20, where God declares to Jeremiah, “Is not Ephraim my dear son, the child in whom I delight? Though I often speak against him, I still remember him.” And then the operative phrase follows: “Therefore my heart is pained; I have great compassion for him.” Martin Luther’s own translation of this passage seemed to be confirmation: “Therefore my heart is broken” (“Darum bricht mir mein Herz”). Katamoiri’s God is the God of compassion and hope, a theme that later inspired Jürgen Moltmann.

C. Implications of Non-Western Approaches to Theology#

One of the striking implications of the interaction of African and Asian cultures with Western theologies is that they do not follow the conventions of Western logic.

Western theology tends to function on the supposition of the law of noncontradiction — that is, two contrary affirmations cannot be true at the same time. But Asians especially do not necessarily think in terms of “either-or” categories of thought. Rather, they tend toward “both-and” thinking, where two different affirmations are held simultaneously with each retaining its distinct identity. The one assertion is not necessarily viewed as a contradiction of the other.

In non-Western cultures, rational argument is integrated with intuition, emotion, and experience. Stories play an integral part in religious discourse. The telling and transmission of stories attend to the whole person — not only rationality but also imagination and emotions. Thus, the parables of Jesus are more natural to them than creeds and catechisms. For Africans and Asians, theology tends to be as much about spiritual insight as it is about knowledge.

VIII. POST-VATICAN II THEOLOGICAL TRAJECTORIES#

Among the constellation of innovative Catholic theologians such as Yves Congar, Hans Küng, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, none was more influential in the post-Vatican II period than Karl Rahner (1904–84). At the time of his death, the magnitude of his published works in Catholic theology was surpassed only by Thomas Aquinas.

If Thomas Aquinas was Rahner’s inspiration, Martin Heidegger was his “teacher.” Unfortunately, Rahner’s philosophically flavored theological reflections are extremely difficult to understand. What is abundantly clear is that his main objective was to demonstrate that atheism is ultimately impossible and that all human thought finds its ultimate source in God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Rahner is best known for two controversial theological concepts: the “supernatural existential” and “anonymous Christianity.”

Regarding the first concept, he posited that all human beings are gifted by God with a capacity to receive grace and thereby are by nature open to God’s self-revelation in Jesus. This constitutive element of grace within all humans he calls the “supernatural existential” (a phrase borrowed from Heidegger), and it constitutes the possibility of salvation for all.

But it is the second concept, which builds on the first, that has generated the most dispute. Rahner argued that those who receive and respond to the “supernatural existential” are “anonymous Christians.” That is, those individuals who embrace this inward grace (supernatural existential) will find full salvation whether or not they hear the explicit gospel message of Christ. Rahner does not overtly reject divine condemnation, but stresses that in order to be eternally damned to hell a person must explicitly reject God’s offer of saving grace. And even then, those who reject this divine offer could yet be saved if their rejection is based on a false understanding of the gospel and they live a morally upright life pleasing to God.

Although controversial, Rahner’s notion of the “anonymous Christian” was not so far from the teaching of Vatican II. Even though his theology was judged to be within the bounds of the Catholic Tradition, he was severely criticized by traditionalists and was even censored (1962) by the Catholic Church.

The combined influences of Vatican II and Karl Rahner’s theological reflections caused the boundaries between Catholic theology, modern philosophy, and Protestant theology to become more porous. The Catholic priests and theologians influenced or trained by Rahner tend to be much more open to modern thought generally and to critical revision of Catholic Tradition specifically. They often affirm the whole church as the people of God so that Protestants are included in the true Christian church.

IX. THE NEW ATHEISM#

A. Conventional Atheism#

This survey of modern theologies would be less than complete if it did not give some consideration to atheism. Although the term “atheism” originated in sixteenth-century France, it can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. Cicero identifies the Greek philosopher Diagoras of the fifth century BC as the first atheist.

• In the strict sense, atheism (from the Greek atheos, meaning “godless”) asserts that there are no deities.

• Some take a broader view that atheism is not so much an assertion but simply the absence of belief in deities.

• There is also a practical atheism (known as apatheism), in which one lives as if there are no gods. This is not so much a rejection as it is a lack of interest in the question.

In his famous book The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued that God is nothing more than a chimera — a human projection of human aspirations. Feuerbach’s view exercised considerable influence on Karl Marx and through him on twentieth-century communism in the Soviet Union, Albania, China, North Korea, and Cuba.

Although the demographics of atheism are difficult to quantify, it is estimated that atheists make up about 2–4 percent of the world population, while only 1.6 percent of Americans explicitly describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. Atheism is relatively common in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in former and current communist states.

Because of the complexity of definition, it is difficult to determine whether or not atheism is growing.

B. The New Atheism#

The twenty-first century was greeted with an aggressive advocacy of atheism through a series of best-selling books from the so-called “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.” They are the American neuroscientist Sam Harris, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the late British journalist Christopher Hitchens. They argue that it is time to take a far less accommodating attitude toward religion, superstition, and religion-based fanaticism than had been extended by traditional atheists.

There is little that is new about the New Atheism. However, its proponents have managed more than previous atheists to capture popular attention.

• First, the New Atheists have taken arguments against religion that were long familiar to scholars and have repackaged them for a popular audience, thus exposing them to millions who would never otherwise pick up an atheist book.

• Second, the New Atheists are unusually aggressive in public forums. They have been willing to debate opponents all over the world.

• Third, the New Atheists are convinced that advances in science have rendered religion unnecessary.

• Fourth, what is perhaps the most significant reason for the emergence of the New Atheists was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which demonstrated the danger of religious conviction.

Many people, including other atheists, have felt Harris goes too far in suggesting that “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” Critics have argued that such intolerance is as dangerous as the religious fanaticism Harris repudiates.

X. CONCLUSION#

As Christianity into the third millennium, it faces an uncertain future. If all the demographic studies are accurate, Christianity will be around for another millennium.

• But what form will it take?

• Will it become largely Pentecostal?

• Will it be further fragmented between the global South and the West?

• With the extraordinary growth of Christianity in China, will Christianity eventually become a Sino-centric religion?

• Will Western theology still have a voice?

• Will the orchestral cacophony of Christian theologies ever be able to make sweet music in this pitiful fallen world?

These are important questions that cannot fully be answered at this point. There is, however, one question that looms especially large for Christians in the third millennium: Can the two largest and fastest-growing religions in the world tolerate the other? Put more succinctly: Can Christianity coexist with Islam?