Archives: Articles

Black Theology vs. Feminist Theology

The two most important expressions of liberation theology to emerge from the American experience in the late 1960s are black theology and feminist theology. Unfortunately, an undeclared war is brewing between them. First white male-dominated seminaries across the country adjusted their self-absolutizing perspective slightly to find a few crumbs for black studies More recently they divided these crumbs even further to create a parallel corner for women’s studies. Thereby these two expressions of criticism of the dominant social context of theological education have been set up to compete with each other.

The black caucuses, appearing a year or two earlier than the women’s groups, have generally denied reciprocal solidarity with the women’s movement. The second women’s movement, like the first, arose as women working for black liberation began to address the issues of their own liberation. Initially women analyzed their own oppression h comparing it to racism. Then, finding their own concern scorned by blacks, they withdrew in hurt alienation.

Are blacks correct in deriving solidarity with the women’s movement, and are feminists specious in comparing sexism to racism? I would argue that historically racism and sexism have been interrelated hut not exactly ‘parallel." Rather, they have been interstructural elements of oppression within the overarching system of domination by white males.

Moreover, this interstructuring has the effect of alienating white women, black women, and black men from each other. Each group tends to suppress the experience of its racial and/or sexual counterpart. The black movement constantly talks as though "blacks" means black males. The women’s movement fails to integrate the experience of poor and nonwhite women. Much of what it means by the "female experience" is in fact class-bound, restricted to the experience of a fairly atypical group of white, usually childless, women who are blocked in their efforts to break into the bastions of white, male. upper-class privilege.

We must understand these oppositions in order to understand the complexity of the interpenetration of racism and sexism in a class society.

Black Theology: Sexist?

James Cone is the most notable of the younger, militant black theologians. He appears to reject any coordination between black. theology and women. Cone has declared that women are not a ‘ "people" and do not have "church," implying that they cannot be a liberation movement. Recently he has indicated to this author that he does not negate the women’s movement as a legitimate liberation struggle. Nevertheless, he has come to symbolize for the women’s movement the pervasive rebuff by black caucuses. Why this tension?

The tension arise, not because sexism is irrelevant to black "manhood" but because it is all too uncomfortably relevant. However, this does not make black men male chauvinists in the same way as white men. Rather, the hostility springs from the humiliation of the black male at the hands of white males.

A white southern churchwomen recently sketched for me a model of the racist-sexist system of classical southern society. In this system the white, upper-class male ruled supreme. He dominated a society divided by sex, class, and race. White females and black females were made the opposite sides of each other. The white woman was the dependent ornament in the parlor; the black woman was exploited for sex and work in the kitchen.

The black male was at the bottom, reduced to an asexual beast of burden, denied any self-affirmation through sexual identity. It is this unnameable humiliation that rankles behind the inability of the black (male) movement in America to deal with sexism.

This situation has meant that the black church generally has played a different role in the sexual identity of the black minister than in that of the white minister. The white minister is often thrown into a confused posture toward his maleness. This is because white society considers religion and morality "feminine."

The black church has functioned in the opposite way. It was the one institution run and owned by the black community. It was their one place of public, corporate self-affirmation, the seedbed of whatever training was available for black politics and organizational development. In a society where black maleness was marginalized and placed under constant threat of "castration" (literally as well as figuratively) by the dominant sexist-racist society, the black minister became the one true "man" of the black community, the surrogate patriarch for a scorned manliness.

Functioning as a compensatory patriarchal figure for the whole community, the minister often became superpatriarchal, a symbol of pride for his people to whom they could transfer the privileges denied to them.

Black women have recently tried to challenge the tendency to make them the victims of this development of black manliness. They have tried to suggest that the strength of the black woman under oppression should be regarded with pride, not humiliation, as a part of the black experience. They have suggested that this strength makes possible an alternate paradigm for black male-female relations: They need not be patterned after white male dominance but can be truly reciprocal and mutually enhancing.

In the writings of black women one glimpses their fundamental experience of functioning as the "reality principle" for the entire race. They not only upheld the economic viability of the family unit, giving strength to the new generation, hut also bore the ego frustration of the black man. This experience grows the more bitter when the black woman finds herself rejected precisely at the moment when she feels compelled to reject the "feminine" role in order to assert her truthful character as the reality principle."

The black man, in turn, is constantly pulled after the white woman, who represents the illusionary "feminine" and the forbidden fruits of sexual dominance. No wonder these groups are constantly tempted to turn on each other -- the black man blaming the black woman, the black woman blaming the white woman, the white woman reacting in a hurt alienation that could change into a racist reaction -- instead of recognizing that despite the outwardly different conditions they share a common victimization under the superstructure of white patriarchy.

Black Theology: Middle Class?

In addition to representing the aspiration of the black community for "manliness," the black church has also been the traditional path toward the embourgeoisernent of the black community. Consequently, it also has had the tendency to lose contact with the actual condition of the masses and become an enclave of "respectability," alienated and threatened by the chaotic conditions of the impoverished blacks, especially in the northern city. The black masses, therefore, have often turned toward cultic, and even anti-Christian, movements to express their own experience of oppression. They have vilified the black minister -- respected as the "proper" spokesman for the black community by whites -- as a "crook" and an Uncle Tom.

The lower class has developed its own ways of affirming its different experience of sexuality. It is more comfortable with the non-bourgeois family patterns so deplored by Patrick Moynihan. This pattern is incorrectly described as "matriarchy," since the woman is hardly "dominant" in the usual sense of that word. But there is an autonomy and reciprocity quite different from the standard bourgeois model. Ultimately it is the woman who stands firm. She is the "ground of being" of the people in a way that finds its ambivalent celebration. Even as she is decried for her "lip," it is this toughness and realism that is the foundation of black survival. "Motherfucker" is a constant taunt, because it is also the most serious insult possible.

The tension between black churchmen and the women’s movement, then, seems to represent the defensive perspective of the black, middle-class, patriarchal church. It concentrates on confronting the racism of its counterparts in the white church. But it has not yet opened itself up to the disturbing countertrends in the lower-class black community that not only conflict with bourgeois male and female stereotypes but also are alienated from middle-class values and the Christian identity as well.

The Limits of "Black Caucus Theology"

These remarks do not discredit the validity of the theology being done by Cone in a particular context. His theology is an effective and appropriate instrument for its primary task. I would call this "black caucus theology." By this I mean that it is shaped to function in a confrontational fashion within a white power base. It places demands of conscience on white power and seeks to appropriate its advantages for the training of black leadership. But contrary to what Cone himself often declares, I think his kind of theology primarily addresses white people. Its content originally was little penetrated by the spirit of the black experience as an alternate source of theological themes. Its substance was taken from German dialectical theology, something Cone has continually defended as appropriate. He has essentially turned white theology upside down in order to reveal its hidden racist ideology.

Cone’s prophetic reversal of white theology remains too vaguely "universalist" for the concrete tasks of a radical black church. It may be inadequate for the integral self-development of the black community itself, i.e., as black theology for black people.

The black community needs the transfer of power and skills from white institutions. What is still not evident is whether this power and these skills will really be transferred. One wonders whether black caucuses are not being led in the centrifugal path of the black middle class in militant disguise. The new willingness of white society to promote the skilled black person to full citizenship creates the possibility of disenfranchising this leadership group from the poor black community. We are beguiled into thinking that racism is overcome because a small elite gains new visibility and honor. We are prevented from seeing that the black masses in the ghettos are experiencing a worsening condition that they can no longer tolerate.

A relevant black church must perhaps become far more integrally black if it is to address itself to this situation. It must transform itself to overcome the split between the bourgeois black church and the unchurched black masses. It must become more like the Black Muslims or the Garveyite movements in the sense of focusing on building communal structures of social cooperation by and for blacks within the black community itself. It must take the initiative, in a vast movement of new morale, in transferring resources from white society and building resources from within the black community to transform the "ghetto" from a place of deprivation to a place of positive black communal expression and development.

The symbols that the black church inherited from evangelical Christianity may be too limited for this task. It may have to reach much more toward "soul," toward symbols developed by blacks alienated from the church, and also toward the Caribbean and Africa to find a "blackness" that is not simply antiwhite but can rejoice in itself. Perhaps only Mother Africa can provide some symbols that the uprooted, stolen people cannot derive from the goodness of slavery: symbols for the soul-self, for the goodness of the body-self, for the integration of humankind in nature, the rootedness of peoplehood in the land.

Feminist Theology: Elitist?

The development of women’s caucuses in seminaries and feminist theology, parallel to that of the black movement, is a phenomenon of the last few years. However, already there is evidence that women’s caucuses may be creating a social encapsulation similar to that of black caucuses. This encapsulation, moreover, has social roots in the history of white feminism in America.

The women’s movement in America arose in the 1830s among southern elite and New England Brahmin women turned abolitionists. Its concept of the oppression of women was fueled by its sympathy with the antislavery cause. When the Fourteenth Amendment enfranchised the black male and excluded women, the more militant thought the amendment should he rejected until it included both race and sex. Thereafter they acquiesced in the increasing drift of the women’s movement away from equalitarian views toward a racist and class bias.

As the women’s movement became a mass movement in the 1880s, it was influenced by the general abandonment of romantic heroic reformism for a racist social Darwinism. Increasingly the movement drifted toward a view that women should he enfranchised in order to double the vote of the white, Protestant middle class and thereby assure the supremacy of this ruling class over the rising tide of blacks and immigrant Catholics and Jews. It thereby also took for granted the de facto reversal of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Jim Crow laws.

At the same time the women’s movement hacked away from its earlier radical confrontation with the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and the place of the woman in the home. Instead it accepted the stereotype of the feminine "lady," whose beneficent role in the home should now shine forth into the public arena.

The new women’s movement of the 1960s also arose out of an alliance with and, then, a traumatic experience of rejection by the black civil rights and white male radical movements. It has typically sought to go beyond the limits of the old women’s movement and to challenge the stereotypes of the feminine and the sexual relations of male and female in home and society. It seems little disposed, therefore, to fall for a new version of the "white lady" myth. Yet its alienation from other radical movements, especially black liberation, and its recourse to a kind of "separatist" ideology -- that talks about the oppression of women as more basic than any other form of oppression in a way that makes women a separate cause unrelated to other kinds of oppression -- may be working its own kind of subtle social encapsulation.

This separatist concept helps to obscure the way in which the oppression of women is structurally integrated with that of class and race. Sociologically, women are a sexual caste within every class and race. They share a common condition of women: dependency, secondary existence, domestic labor, sexual exploitation, and the projection of their role in procreation into a total definition of their existence.

But this common condition takes profoundly different forms as women are divided against each other by class and race. No woman of an oppressed class and race, therefore, can separate her female struggle from its context in the liberation of her own community.

Women of the elite class and race easily fall into an abstract analysis of women’s oppressed status that they believe will unite all women. They ignore their own context of class and race privilege. Their movement fails to connect with women of oppressed groups, and it becomes defiled by a demand for "rights" commensurate with the males of their group, oblivious to the unjust racist and class context of these privileges. It may not be wrong to seek such "equality," but it is dangerous to allow the ideology of the women’s movement to remain confined to this perspective.

Feminist Theology: Antifemale?

Theology done in the context of women’s caucuses in elite universities tends also to be alienated from the experience of most women. Motherhood is a negative trip. The elite woman, who competes with the career pattern of the elite male, is subverted at the point of her capacity to have children. She is usually forced to choose between the two. Absolutized, however, this perspective on motherhood really accepts the "phallic morality" (to use Mary Daly’s phrase) that women have decried. It accepts a feminist antifemaleness that loathes women at the point of the specificity of female difference.

Maternity has been the root of female oppression because it represents the one power that men do not have and upon which all men depend for their existence. Not to be able to rescue maternity as a positive symbol for women in a way that can be liberating is really a capitulation to the male false consciousness that tries to convert female potency into the female weakness through which women are subjugated. Sexism cannot he understood, historically or psychologically, unless it is recognized that it rests not on female weakness but on the suppression of female power. Sexism is an elaborate system of handicaps that males erect around women to make female potency appear to be the point of their weakness and dependency, thereby suppressing from cultural consciousness the truth of male dependency. Women who strive for an equality by accepting this male negation of the female remain encapsulated in male false consciousness.

Women’s liberation will gain general support from women only when it can be revealed as a necessity that also expresses the mandate of the woman as the foundation of the survival of the race, Male false consciousness has created an antagonistic concept of self and social and ecological relations that is rapidly destroying humankind and the earth. Not only have the personhood and cultural gifts of women been suppressed by this, but males themselves have been allowed to remain in an adolescent form of vainglorious psychology that is no longer compatible with human survival.

Women must reject male chauvinism at the point of the oppression of their own personhood and autonomy. But they must also reject it at the point of motherhood for the sake of the survival of their children. It is at this point that the dialogue between white feminism and black feminism is vital. Black women inevitably ground a militant feminism not only in their liberation as persons but also in the validation of woman as mother, fighting for the survival of her children.

The history of white male chauvinism, with its interstructuring of sexism and racism, is bent on alienating black women and white women and making their contrary experiences incommunicable to each other. When black and white women can penetrate each other’s experience and recognize each other as common victims of a total structure of white male domination, this will be the moral victory that will cut the gordian knot of white male dominance. An independent black feminism that can articulate the distinctive character of the black female experience in a way that can reveal this total structure of oppression, then, is the essential element that is needed to cut through the mystifications of white male power that set the three subordinate groups against each other.

Perhaps only black feminism can give us a strong image of womanhood before patriarchy reduced it to shattered fragments. The white patriarchal God has alienated us from our bodies, each other, and the earth. The black patriarchal God is prophetic on the side of the oppressed. He represents the transcendent Almighty who assures the weak that there is a power in heaven stronger than the mighty on earth. But absolutized, he promises more apocalyptic warfare in re

verse. The white lady of Mariology always lands woman on her knees before her "divine Son" as the sublimated, and the sexually alienated, servant of the male ego.

One needs to glimpse again the primordial power of the mother-symbol as Ground of Being to restore an ontological foundation to the "wholly other" God of patriarchy. The Christian effort to overcome gnosticism and apocalypticism and to integrate the God of the messianic future with the divine Ground of Being failed because it continued to be based on the patriarchal denigration of the female. Only a regrounding of the power of the future within the power of the primordial matrix can refound the lost covenant with nature and give us a theology for the redemption of the earth.

Catholics and Abortion: Authority vs. Dissent

On October 4, 1984, a paid advertisement appeared in the New York Times under the sponsorship of a group called Catholics for a Free Choice. The ad contended that there is more than one legitimate -- i.e. theologically and ethically defensible -- viewpoint on abortion within the Roman Catholic tradition. It called for a dialogue on abortion among Catholics -- a dialogue that would acknowledge this situation of pluralism, not only in regard to practice (Catholics have about the same proportion of abortions as Protestants in the United States), but in regard to the ethical state of the question. The ad explicitly asked for the cessation of institutional sanctions against those with dissenting positions on abortion. "Catholics -- especially priests, religious, theologians and legislators, who publicly dissent from hierarchical statements and explore areas of moral and legal freedom on the abortion question -- should not be penalized by their religious superiors, church employers or bishops."

The ad was published in the specific context of the presidential campaign, in which a Catholic candidate for vice-president, Geraldine Ferraro, was being characterized by Cardinal John O’Connor of New York as a politician for whom Catholics could not vote because of her mildly prochoice position on abortion. Thus, while the ad’s basic ideas had been circulating among Catholic theologians and ethicists for more than a year, those ideas were made public in this particular manner in order to defend Catholic legislators’ right of public dissent on abortion.

In the months following the ad’s appearance, however, its admonition that dissenters should not be penalized has not been heeded. Threats and penalties have rained thick and fast upon priests, religious and theologians from religious superiors, church employers and bishops. But the chief initiative in this repression has come from a source beyond that envisioned by the writers of the ad -- namely, the Vatican.

In early December 1984 there arrived in the mailboxes of the religious superiors or bishops of the four priests and brothers and most of the 24 nuns who signed the statement a letter from Cardinal Jean Jerome Hamer, O.P., head of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes. Dated November 30, 1984, this letter stated that the position taken in the New York Times advertisement was "in contradiction to the teachings of the Church" and that the ad’s signers were "seriously lacking in religious submission to the mind of the Magisterium." Pointing out that the revised code of canon law declares that anyone who procures an abortion incurs automatic excommunication, the letter then directed the superiors of each of the nuns, brothers and priests to demand that the signer under their supervision make a public retraction. Any signer who declined to make such a retraction was to be warned by the superior with an explicit threat of dismissal from his or her religious community.

The two priests and the two brothers quickly made pro forma statements of retraction and got the Vatican "off their case." None of the nuns who signed was willing to do so since, for them, such a retraction represented a serious violation of their moral conscience. It would also have violated the basic principles of their relationship with their religious orders, which in their view are not simply a part of a military-type hierarchy that could be ordered about from the "top." Since most of the women superiors of the 13 religious orders involved were not prepared to deal with this issue, an organizational meeting was quickly set up to allow the nun-signers, their lay fellow-signers and the religious superiors to sort out the issues together and create a collective strategy.

For a while, in the early months of 1985, it appeared that the collective strategy the women devised had thrown the Vatican off course. Vatican officials had assumed that each woman would be forced to conform or would be dismissed individually. When the nun-signers, through their religious superiors, indicated that they would not retract the New York Times statement nor would the superiors threaten them with dismissal, the Sacred Congregation appeared to back off; it asked only that the nuns affirm their support for the "teaching authority of the Church" -- a statement that might be construed in several ways. But by March it was made clear that this request meant that the 24 should affirm the church’s teaching authority on abortion -- i.e., the monolithic nature of the present official position. To date, none of the nuns has either fully complied with this request or been dismissed from her order. But the Vatican clearly is not pleased with this insubordination, and new efforts to gain compliance or dismissal will doubtless be forthcoming.

By January of 1985 it was evident that reprisals against the lay signers were beginning as well -- particularly against Daniel Maguire, professor of ethics at Marquette University, the male signer generally regarded as holding something close to official status as a Catholic theologian. Although Marquette itself refused to bow to pressure from Catholic conservatives to censure or fire Dr. Maguire, he began to receive cancellations of longstanding teaching and speaking engagements from other Catholic colleges. St. Martin’s College in Lacey, Washington; St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota; Villanova University in Pennsylvania and, finally, Boston College canceled speaking or teaching contracts. Maguire had clearly become persona non grata on the Catholic lecture circuit. The exact source of these reprisals is unclear, but apparently they were not the result of direct orders from bishops or the Vatican; rather, they came from college presidents engaging in self-censure out of fear of picketers from the "prolife" movement.

In addition to the reprisals against Maguire, four lay female academics at Catholic universities have been asked by their bishop to meet with him or his representative to discuss "doctrinal matters." In each case it was stated that the request originated with the Vatican. The Thomas More Society in San Diego had scheduled a speech by Jane Via, one of these academics, but later canceled -- by order, she was told, of the bishop of San Diego, acting in response to instructions from Rome to silence her. Via was also told that she would not be able to speak at any public Catholic forum in the diocese until she retracted the statement.

Kathleen O’Connor, a lay-signer and professor at the Maryknoll School of Theology, was asked to speak with the college’s president in response to a request from New York’s Cardinal O’Connor. In clarifying her position, Dr. O’Connor stated that although she personally condemns abortion, she believes that greater harm would result from its legal prohibition. So far this clarification appears to have satisfied the president and the cardinal. Mary Buckley, a tenured professor of theology at St. John’s University, was asked to meet with Bishop Francis I. Mugavero of Brooklyn, along with the president of the university and the chair of the theology department. She declined to do so unless she could have a legal counsel present, and the meeting was postponed until fall. A fourth female academic, who prefers to remain anonymous, also was told to meet with her bishop. She refused to do so unless the meeting’s agenda was disclosed. To date, no further action has been taken against her by the bishop or the university.

Several other scholars have received notices canceling jobs or speaking engagements under suspicious circumstances in which the signing of the New York Times ad was not specifically cited as the cause. But many signers, such as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, have simply experienced the "drying up" of speaking engagements from Catholic sources. Since the situation has moved quickly from one marked by cancellations to one in which no initial invitations are extended, it becomes difficult to trace the trail of reprisals against the signers.

These incidents have led the signers and their supporters to redirect their attention from the question of pluralism on abortion to the right of dissent itself. A network calling itself the Committee of Concerned Catholics is gathering signatures for a new ad which will appear in the New York Times sometime in October to mark the one-year anniversary of the previous ad. The new ad will repeat the first one’s statement on pluralism in regard to abortion, adding to it a statement of solidarity with the original signers and a defense of the right to dissent. The statement of solidarity reads:

Such reprisals consciously or unconsciously have a chilling effect on the right to responsible dissent within the church; on academic freedom in Catholic colleges and universities; and on the right to free speech and participation in the U.S. political process.

Such reprisals cannot be condoned or tolerated in church or society.

We believe that Catholics who, in good conscience, take positions on the difficult questions of legal abortion and other controversial issues that differ from the official hierarchical positions, act within their rights and responsibilities as Catholics and citizens.

We, as Roman Catholics, affirm our solidarity with those who signed the Statement and agree to stand with all who face reprisals. We shall become the dismissed, the disinvited and the unwelcome. "The ties which unite the faithful are stronger than those which separate them. Let there be unity in what is necessary, freedom in what is doubtful and charity in everything" (Declaration on the Church in the Modern World, Vatican II, # 92).

The solidarity statement thus takes its text from the defense of religious freedom affirmed at the Second Vatican Council. By seeking additional signers for such a statement, the "concerned Catholics" wish both to widen the support and to diffuse the targets of the Vatican and the bishops. To most Catholics it is less acceptable to censure those who defend the right to dissent than it is to censure those who appear to reject the official position on abortion. American Catholics are Americans culturally, and for them religious and academic freedom is part of the nation’s constitutional tradition. With a large increase in the number of dissenters -- including, doubtless, many nuns -- it becomes harder for the Vatican to take action against them in a consistent fashion.

Such a declaration would certainly "up the ante" on dissent; it would also make clear that the official Catholic rejection of abortion continues to be based on a rationale that rejects artificial contraception as well. Since the most effective way to avoid abortion would be to promote contraception, this double ban indicates that the real battle is not over the lives of fetuses or their mothers, but over the rights of women to be moral agents in the reproductive capacities of their own bodies. The ban on contraception means that the Catholic Church is willing, in practice, to see fetuses and their mothers die for the sake of the principle that women should submit to "nature" and "God" in matters of reproduction.

A declaration that the ban on artificial contraception is "infallible" was specifically ruled out by Paul VI when he issued Humanae Vitae. Paul VI, it should be remembered, reasserted the ban after the Papal Commission on Birth Control had arrived at a majority position upholding the moral acceptability of artificial birth control. Thus Paul VI was aware that the ban not only did not reflect the "sense of the faithful," but also did not reflect the view of the majority of his own experts.

Catholics have not grown any more docile concerning the reasserted ban on contraception in the years since 1968. Rather, it is generally recognized that this particular law is disregarded by the vast majority of Catholics who continue to practice their faith. An effort to declare the ban on contraception "infallible" would have the Immediate effect of focusing Catholic dissent on the doctrine of infallibility itself. Such an effect of the birth-control ban was anticipated by Hans Küng in his book Infallible? An Inquiry (original German edition, 1970), written after the publication of Humanae Vitae. For Küng, the pope’s declaration that the ban on contraception was still binding, in opposition to the majority vote of his own birth control commission, indicated that infallibility itself was the major block to church reform. In effect, the Catholic Church could not officially admit that any teaching asserted for some period of time in the past was wrong, or in need of change, as long as it could not admit that it could err.

Hans Küng suffered the loss of his official status as a Roman Catholic theologian (his missio canonica) as a consequence of having raised the issue of infallibility in his 1970 book. Most Catholic theologians declined to join him in his challenge to the doctrine of infallibility, deciding that it was better to ignore infallibility than to confront it head on. But any effort to declare "infallible" a teaching rejected by the majority of both practicing Catholics and Catholic ethicists -- such as the ban on birth control -- would make a confrontation inevitable.

It seems likely that the Vatican conservatives and Pope John Paul II himself are seriously out of touch with the mood of the global church on the birth-control issue, as well as on the wider question of the credibility of official church teaching authority. They do not seem to understand that a storm of dissent, and even ridicule, directed at infallibility itself would ensue from such a declaration. They seem to imagine that they face problems with a noisy handful of "insubordinates" who can be put down by methods used in earlier generations, while the "majority of the faithful" submissively look upward to the "Holy Father" for signals as to what to think and do.

Above all, John Paul II and his associates, such as Cardinal Hamer of SCRIS and Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition), seek to reassert centralized, unilateral authority, which they regard as essential to any order or authority in the church. They reject, in principle, the possibility of a pluralistic church in which the right to dissent on important matters of ethics or doctrine is respected. For them, "truth" is single, unitary and definable. There is one teaching authority, the pope, who both originates and finalizes such "truth," without having to listen to or be corrected by other sources of insight such as the sensus fideli (the actual beliefs and practices of the people) and the scholarly reflections of biblical exegetes and theologians.

Church councils also are seen as rubber stamps for papal policy, not as autonomous sources of teaching authority that gather up the wisdom of the global church. Thus papal absolutism contradicts much in the historical Catholic tradition that defends these more pluralistic sources of truth that engage in dialogue and make official definitions only when a broad consensus has been established on a particular issue. The Second Vatican Council, simply by being a church council, represented a reassertion of this more pluralistic approach to teaching authority, over against the papal absolutism of Vatican I. Thus, if the Vatican conservatives intend to rescind Vatican II at the November synod, they will be endeavoring to bury the conciliar tradition itself once again, as an alternative source of teaching authority which can check and balance papal power.

It is almost certain, however, that the "toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube," as one nun expressed the question of getting American nuns back into habits. The same slogan can apply to the efforts to get Catholics in America, and throughout the world, back into the habit of unquestioning obedience to authority, once they have gotten used to thinking that they too are the church. Ironically, the effort to make "truth" unitary and absolute, as a way of strengthening acquiescence to church teaching authority, has exactly the opposite effect. It means that the credibility of all church teaching is made to stand or fall as a whole. If the church can be wrong on birth control, it can be wrong on anything. If uncertainty exists about something which the church has taught with its full authority, then anything it teaches with its full authority may be wrong.

Catholics are thrown willy-nilly into deciding for themselves which parts of the Christian tradition are meaningful and which are not, with little guidance from bishops, priests or theologians. Thus Vatican absolutism promotes the very chaos which it most fears. There is no way back to the absolutism of the past. There is only a painful way forward to a church in which people try to listen to and respect differing opinions and to work, through a combination of experience and tradition, to develop teachings that have authority because they are credible to most Christians.

Weaving a Coherent Pattern of Discipleship

Like most Calvinistic Augustinians, I have difficulty drawing clear lines between philosophy and theology. My continual commerce between the two seems to me to be an instance of what Tillich meant by the "method of correlation." The Christian philosopher must attempt to find points of contact between the ongoing philosophical/cultural dialogue and those themes which characterize the life and mission of that community which seeks to live in obedience to the Word from God. On each of the agendas there are typical questions and answers. Sometimes the commitments of the community of faith will lead us to criticize the answers, and even the questions, of philosophy. At other times the philosophical dialogue will thrust questions upon us which will force the church to create new categories within its own discussions.

I

Political philosophers -- at least the ones I have been interested in since graduate school days -- have devoted considerable attention to three fundamental questions: Why ought human beings to participate in any kind of social relationships at all? Why ought human beings to submit to any kind of political authority? And what sort of political arrangements, if any, are best for human societies? As stated, these questions are in the order of logical priority. To ask what sorts of political structures are best for humans is to assume some account of the point of political arrangements as such. This in turn presupposes something about what social needs political processes are meant to expedite.

When philosophers ask these questions they are usually seeking normative justifications. They are not interested in how human beings actually come to be entangled in a network of social and political relationships; they are asking why it is right or good that this should be. The defender of philosophical anarchism, for example, will not consider it a relevant observation to be told that we are all in fact born into social and political units. He wants to know whether there are legitimate reasons to consider that to be a good state of affairs.

Philosophical questions often have an "irrelevant" feel to them. But not always. What in one era might be deemed a purely "academic" question will in another period be an urgent cry. Philosophical questions often acquire urgency in times of disillusionment. This is what has happened, or so it seems to me, to the questions of social/political philosophy in the past decade or so. On our recent cultural agenda they have been asked with reference to specific institutions: What is a classroom? What is it for? Could it adequately be replaced by, say, a large sandbox? Similarly: What is a marriage? What is a family? What is a church? The form in which the answers to these questions have come is not so much that of systematic treatises as of concretizations of alternative philosophical models: the open classroom, gay marriages, tire commune, house churches. Popular titles reflect a widespread conceptual exploration of the political dimensions of social institutions: The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Sexual Politics, The Politics of the Family, Churchless Protestantism.

Recent popular investigations of these questions have had a frantic and faddish quality that is easy to criticize. Nonetheless, the questions which have been raised in the past decade, even if in tones of anger and frustration, are ones that should not be set aside. They deserve careful philosophical discussion. They must also be given more serious theological reflection than they have received thus far.

II

After one year at a seminary in the early ‘60s I dropped out and decided to become a philosopher. Earlier, I had been enthusiastic about studying theology. I had also considered myself to be a "conservative evangelical" Christian. My decision to change to philosophy was in part a decision to suspend both of these commitments for a time. Two years of work at a university in western Canada, where I studied with Wittgensteinian defenders of "ordinary language" as well as with Trotskyites and non-Marxist socialists, provided the necessary distance in terms of both ideologies and miles.

When I returned to the U.S. for a Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, I began to reassess my evangelical roots. I was by then committed to various political causes, the most important having to do with my decision to refuse induction into the military. Even though my political attitudes were in conflict on almost every point with those which prevailed in the evangelical community, it seemed to me that my concerns were a proper extension of my evangelical experiences. I remembered lines from songs that we had sung with endless monotony at "evangelistic meetings": "I surrender all." "Is your all on the altar?" "Nothing between my soul and the Savior." "Break down every idol, cast out every foe."

Wasn’t it proper at least to raise the question of whether my draft card should be surrendered to the lordship of Christ? Shouldn’t nationalism be offered on the altar of sacrifice? Doesn’t racism stand between a soul and the Savior? Shouldn’t we be constantly on guard against political idols and economic foes? I could not understand why evangelicals did not want even to hear such questions. They had, it seemed, promoted a posture of radical self-examination about some things -- usually very personal patterns of behavior -- but they refused to extend their questions to systemic and institutional matters.

After a cautious re-entry into the evangelical community following graduate school, I discovered that I had not been alone in asking these questions. Strictly speaking, the "Evangelicals for McGovern" organization of 1972 and the 1973 Declaration of Evangelical Social Concerns were not the beginnings of a new evangelical activism; they were formal announcements of what had been happening in individual lives for at least a decade. When we regathered after the evangelical diaspora of the ‘60s, we discovered that there had been a significant number of scattered, lonely and frustrated "Evangelicals for Gene McCarthy." For such persons, to see the words "Evangelicals for McGovern" actually in print was an experience of sweet vindication.

The sense of vindication was even greater, for me at least, at the Chicago gathering that produced the Declaration of Evangelical Social Concerns. Here were persons whose names had been household words in my childhood -- Gabelein, Rees, Henry, Grounds, Ramm. In one sense their formal blessing was now too late. It would have been good to hear words of guidance and encouragement from them when we were wondering not whether, but how, to respond positively to Martin Luther King’s calls to justice, or when a letter from one of them to a draft board would have provided pastoral support.

But there were more important considerations. Each of us had been praying our own versions of Jacob’s plea: Are you not "the Lord who didst say to me, ‘Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good’"? Those prayers were now being answered. We were being assured, belatedly, that our agonies of the ‘60s had been proper evangelical agonies. And now another generation, this one struggling particularly over sexism and economic discipleship, would not have to operate in a vacuum. These young people can say to their parents, "See, we’re not strange because we care about these things. Even they think that these are important Christian concerns." For many of us, the suggestion that evangelicals are "Johnnies come lately" to social action has a hollow sound.

III

My book Political Evangelism (Eerdmans, 1974) was an attempt to devise a framework for political action that is compatible with evangelical theology and piety. In my exploration of the connections between an emphasis on "personal salvation" and a recognition of the need for extensive structural change, two themes have seemed to me to be important to stress: first, that a concern for "individual conversion," properly understood, should naturally spill over into a desire for political change. To borrow an example from my book, it is very likely that somewhere there is a fundamentalist slum-dweller who rents from a fundamentalist slum landlord. They will never be able to experience the "Christian fellowship" that fundamentalists claim to cherish without a change in the political and economic patterns that are presently barriers to genuine reconciliation. It is simply not true in such a case that "changed hearts will change society" unless those "changed hearts" concentrate on the need for structural change.

However, the argument must also move in the other direction: a concern for structural change must be rooted in an experience of personal liberation. This is a point on which, as some of us see it, theological liberals have often been inconsistent. They have quickly recommended divorce for "hopeless" marriages while firing off "Give peace a chance" telegrams to Washington. They have failed to proclaim that the work of the Prince of Peace must also apply to the "warring within." They have hated the Lord’s institutionalized enemies with a perfect hatred, while ignoring the need to have him search out the wickedness that originates in the rebelliousness of our own hearts.

Many of these things are in the process of change. Evangelicals who are committed to a broader application of the gospel -- a subgroup recently given the quasi-official label "Young Evangelicals" -- have been "discovered" by the larger world in the past few years. Indeed, we are one of the few groups (along with, perhaps, the UCLA basketball team) wherein a young, white, "straight" male could experience a sense of being "in" in recent times. We have been invited to ecumenical consortiums, consultations and off-the-record sessions. We have been quoted by the national press. We have been the subject of books and scholarly papers.

IV

For the most part, these developments have been good ones. But they have also been the occasion for a surfacing of some significant tensions. One such tension has to do with whether being an evangelical necessitates an adherence to the view of "biblical inerrancy" held by, e.g., Christianity Today and the Evangelical Theological Society. Others relate to disagreements over questions of life style (e.g., "voluntary poverty" versus "good stewardship"), triumphalist proposals of the "Let’s get organized and run candidates" type, and the proper relationship between activism and scholarship.

The most important tension, given my concerns (and my suspicion that it underlies many of the other tensions), is a theological one. Writing in the July 8, 1974, issue of Christianity and Crisis, Marlin Van Elderen rightly singled out the differences between Reformed and Anabaptist political perspectives as a crucial item on the evangelical agenda.

The Anabaptist position has as its chief evangelical defenders John Howard Yoder, Dale Brown and Arthur Gish; it is also given popular expression regularly in the pages of the Post American. Some of its most important emphases are as follows: The political order is presently under the control of the Pauline "principalities and powers." These powers were exposed at the cross as idolatrous. Their essential mode of operation is coercive and violent; this is also true of the political realm which operates under their influence. Christ confronted these powers, and assured their ultimate destruction, by "accepting powerlessness"; he refused to employ their tactics, and this refusal was the means of his victory -- it exposed the futility of their tactics. Christians, then, must follow Christ by imitating his way of the cross: they must fight "the Lamb’s war"; they too must accept powerlessness. This means viewing our actions not as ways of causing things to happen, but as effects of the cross. The Christian community is a "sign of the new order," the "first fruits" of the Kingdom which is presently visible only through faith. Involvement in the present political order -- except by "revolutionary subordination" -- is incompatible with living in "the new order."

Much of my recent effort has been devoted to an attempt at developing a plausible Reformed alternative to this perspective. I can only summarize here the major elements of that alternative. One crucial issue has to do with the degree to which Christians are called to imitate Christ’s confrontation with the powers. If his confrontation was to be the decisive one, Christ may have had to "accept powerlessness" completely in order to expose them for what they are. This having been accomplished, we are free to re-enter the domains of the powers, in the knowledge that they cannot separate us from the love of God. Because of the cross, then, we are freed to pursue justice and righteousness in the political order; and Christians can do so without experiencing the compulsion to use politics as a means of coercion and manipulation. It may be, of course, that the Christian exercise of political power will have the effect of coercing someone -- this is a feature, for example, of all acts of retributive justice. But if even the most modest accounts of "systemic violence" are correct, the question is not one of coercing or not coercing but of how we can promote just policies in the midst of a pervasively coercive society.

V

Another issue is the degree of continuity that exists between Old Testament outlooks concerning the state and those of the New Testament. Yoder argues that while Paul follows the advice to wives and slaves to "submit" with instructions to husbands and masters, his advice to Christian citizens is not accompanied by reciprocal instructions for political officeholders. Yoder infers from this that the New Testament does not contain criteria whereby rulers can be judged to be responding properly to the submission of the church. But if this is true, it is difficult to know what the "supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings" which Paul urges Timothy to offer on behalf of "kings and all who are in high positions" amount to. I suspect that these prayers must be viewed in the light of Old Testament petitions that ‘the king might exercise justice (see Ps. 72: 1-4). Without some content of this sort, such prayers would be meaningless.

A more fundamental set of issues concerns the status of political relationships as such in the various stages of the biblical drama: creation, fall, redemption, and future transformation. My interest in these issues has led me to pursue a variety of biblical-theological topics: the imago dei of Genesis, as discussed by Barth, Bonhoeffer and Berkouwer; biblical concepts of power; ecclesiology (especially the kinds of issues treated in Avery Dulles’s recent Models of the Church); authority, lordship and servanthood; apocalyptic perspectives on political units (e.g., Revelation’s opening description of Christ as "ruler of the kings on earth," and its final vision of "the kings of the earth" bringing "the glory and the honor of the nations" into a city which has a tree whose "leaves are for the healing of the nations").

All of this is really an elaborate attempt on my part to explore the specifically political dimensions of H. Richard Niebuhr’s questions in Christ and Culture: Is the present political order a "corrupted order" or is it an "order for corruption"? Is its present evil that of a perverted good or of a "badness of being"? These questions must be discussed in conjunction with philosophical reflections on the most fundamental issues of society and politics.

VI

The task of correlating the theological and cultural /philosophical agendas must be characterized by patience and tentativeness -- qualities which have not always been highly prized among conservative evangelicals. Fortunately, my immediate academic surroundings provide a healthy environment for cultivating such attributes. Calvin College, along with its supporting constituency, draws strength from an ethnic and theological tradition that promotes the kind of cultural and political involvements, scholarly pursuits, social mores, and liturgical patterns which allow for only a cautious partnership with Anglo-American evangelicalism. One of the patron saints of this particular community of Dutch Calvinists is Abraham Kuyper, who died in 1920 after a career as a philosopher-theologian, founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and prime minister of the Netherlands. Kuyperianism stresses not only the narrowly soteriological Calvinism of the "tulip" (Synod of Dort) doctrines, but also the sovereign lordship of Jesus Christ over all spheres of human activity.

The opportunity to explore these European roots -- from which my own family had been seduced away by American fundamentalism -- has been a refreshing experience. It has also been a disciplining task. The members of my department devote one afternoon a week to critical discussions of a paper written by one of our number. My involvement with the Reformed Journal provides a continuing education on a more general level; several of my fellow editors have been promoting a combination of sane orthodoxy and enlightened social concern for decades.

A growing sense of communal identity has generated the freedom to enter into dialogue with other Christian traditions. Many visits, brief and extended ones alike, to Catholic campuses have expanded my understanding of what it means to work within a confessional tradition. Gestures of friendly encouragement have come from previously alien circles, in a spirit that I would have thought unimaginable a decade ago. The invitation to write this piece is one such gesture. Richard Neuhaus and Peter Berger have prodded me to broaden my sense of proper ecumenical participation, without trying to make me exchange my own brand of theological stubbornness for theirs. The "Hartford group" occasioned the formation of some new loyalties and concerns.

VII

A recently awarded fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities will make it possible for me to study and write at Princeton University next academic year. This experience will also allow me to view many of my present activities and concerns from a critical distance. I have often argued that we ought to take the Pauline emphasis on the diversity of gifts and callings more seriously than we do -- and yet I myself have sometimes attempted to claim more than my allotted share. I look forward to a period of reassessment.

In a profound sense the task of "correlation" is coextensive with the Christian life in its entirety. Jesus Christ holds all things together; our response to his total lordship must be an attempt to make visible his work of comprehensive reconciliation -- by witnessing to the fact that he is the Lord of families as well as nations, by finding points of contact among diverse academic agendas, by weaving together the intricate strands of human roles and relationships into a coherent pattern of discipleship.

I am convinced that this kind of obedient response to the gospel must be undergirded by a high regard for the integrity and uniqueness of the biblical message. There are signs that some kind of consensus on this point is emerging out of the theological shambles of the past decade or so. If so, we may soon experience new and more profound ecumenical alignments than those of the past. Such developments may present many of us with a healthy challenge to reconcile our past loyalties with "things present" and "things to come."

Public Religion, Through Thick and Thin

Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation About Religion in Our Shared Life

 By Martin E. Marty with Jonathan Moore. (Jossey-Bass)



Sometimes I hear voices inside my head. I worry about that a bit. Not so much that I am afraid I’m going crazy -- I’m not ready to change my name to "Legion." The voices in my head argue with each other, but they do so rather calmly. And they argue mainly about questions of public policy. The thing that worries me is that sometimes two conflicting voices both make good sense to me. That means I don’t get along very well with many of the people whose theology is quite similar to mine, people who seem not to have any arguments going on inside their heads. Their pronouncements about public life are delivered with a tone of absolute certainty.

Martin Marty hears voices inside his head too. His voices are a lot like mine. Here is one of Marty’s examples: The daughter of Christian Science parents is very ill; she will die if not given medical treatment. The parents refuse to allow the procedure because of their religious convictions. One of Marty’s voices tells him that the courts should not interfere -- it is dangerous to infringe on the free exercise of religion. But another voice tells him the child’s life must be saved. Both voices make sense. A good judge will probably hear both of them. But the judge must act fast.

Another of Marty’s examples has to do with a fundamentalist university that faces losing federal aid to its students because the school discriminates against a specific racial group. The case for discrimination is made, with apparent sincerity, by quoting Bible verses. One voice tells Marty that the fundamentalists have a terrible theology. Another tells him that governments should respect sincerely held beliefs. Again, somebody has to make a difficult decision.

Marty encourages us to listen to these kinds of voices, both inside and outside of our heads. This book is a sustained plea for a wide-ranging public conversation in which many voices speak. It also frequently reminds us that in public life difficult decisions must be made.

I take seriously what Marty has to say about such matters. Because I have learned a great deal from his other books, reading what he has to say in this one is very reassuring -- and helpful -- to me. This is a good opportunity for me to say publicly how much I, as an evangelical social ethicist, have been influenced by Marty’s writings. I can’t think of any other nonevangelical commentator on American religion who knows as much about evangelicalism as Marty does. He knows not only our history but our jokes and in-group gossip. Consequently, I have always considered him a trustworthy guide to what is going on in the rest of American religious life.

Marty has also influenced the ways in which I think about social ethics. For example, I was struck by a provocative comment he made in a 1981 autobiographical book, By Way of Response. A problem in contemporary life, he said, is that the folks who are good at being civil often don’t have very strong convictions, and the people who have strong convictions usually aren’t very civil. We need to find a way of combining a civil spirit with a "passionate intensity" about what we believe. That observation -- the call for convicted civility -- kept teasing me, and I ended up writing a book on the subject.

Marty’s new book is a resource for people of conviction who want to be good citizens in a pluralistic society: "You want to do the right thing by your God, your tradition, your country, the public order, the law and the courts, and your fellow citizens. You have found that shouting, polarization and demeaning arguments are of no help. We hope the model of conversation presented in this book will be helpful," he states, The ‘we" signals that Marty is speaking for more than himself throughout most of this book. He is summarizing some of the lessons learned through the three-year Public Religion Project, which he directed (with the assistance of Jonathan Moore) under the sponsorship of the Pew Charitable Trusts. In the last chapter, however, he does offer a more personal take on the issues.

Though the first two words in the book’s title are "politics" and "religion," this is not a typical discussion of the relationship between the two. Once there was a real need for generic treatments of religion and politics. In the evangelical world, for example, it seemed important several decades ago to insist that there is indeed a positive relationship between biblical faith and active involvement in political life. But while these generic discussions serve their purpose, they also mask some important complexities. It is easy for Christians, for example, to get stuck on abstract issues, such as whether the believing community ought to be -- in terms borrowed from H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ-and-culture typology -- "above" the political order, "in tension" with it, "transforming" it, "of" it or "against" it. Helpful though this kind of analysis can be, it also can keep us from attending to the complex everyday realities of political life.

Back in the ‘70s, when evangelicals were debating Reformed-versus-Anabaptist perspectives on faith and politics, I participated in a forum in which a self-proclaimed "radical Christian" urged all of us to "stand over against everything this American political system stands for." As a parent of a grade-school student, I had a difficult time getting into that mind-set. I was too grateful for the traffic lights the "system" had installed on the corners of the busy streets my son had to navigate on his way to school, and for the school crossing guards the city government had hired to make his daily journey less dangerous, and for the fire inspectors who regularly visited his school to check for hazards, and so on. The more concrete one’s political focus, the less applicable did those "big" theological formulations seem.

This is a book that appreciates the messiness that characterizes the actual, many layered, multifaceted dimensions of the relationship of religion to politics. Does someone want to talk about "the wall of separation between church and state"? Well, Marty tells us, that phrase -- which is not found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights but comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson sent to a group of Connecticut Baptists -- will not be of much help to a congregation that needs to challenge a local zoning ordinance, or to ask the city police force for help in keeping the neighborhood noise level down during Sunday morning worship hours. When we attend to these kinds of realities, says Marty, "James Madison offers a more accurate characterization: there is a ‘line of distinction’ between civil and religious authorities -- a line that is often permeable, sometimes blurred, always contested."

Much of Marty’s discussion is devoted to sorting out the various entities that figure into the complex workings of religion in public life. Here, too, our preferences for abstraction are directly challenged. It is not enough to think about the public role of "the church" or "the synagogue" or "the mosque." The realities are too messy to be covered adequately by those formulations. Denominations speak out on many political issues. But so do ecumenical agencies and local congregations.

We must also make room in our schemes for the likes of the American Jewish Committee, World Vision, Bread for the World, the Christian Coalition, local right-to-life groups and denominationally linked gay-lesbian advocacy groups. Marty’s lengthy discussion of the role of denominations is fascinating -- especially his observations (which I find convincing) about the continuing relevance of denominational entities in our reportedly "postdenominational" religious culture.

The messiness that we must acknowledge in dealing with the complex variety of religious entities in the public arena has important implications for Christian thinking about political realities. Marty’s insistence that "the political arena is not a place where everything will be absolute, neat and pleasing" challenges some basic assumptions in the political theologies of both the left and the right.

This messiness is not something that we ought to eliminate or minimize. It is a good thing for us to find our way in the midst of messiness. Here some other key words from the book’s title and subtitle must be underscored: the relationship between politics and religion must be thought about with reference to the common good; our conversations must be about how religion figures into our shared life. This insistence that our strategies for public involvement must take seriously the health of the larger society obviously calls for intense theological investigation.

Marty acknowledges this need. He notes that "most religions have what we might call ‘theologies of public order’ thoughts about the common good that provide interpretations of the working of the body politic and the forces in it." He recommends that these various theological perspectives be given expression in the public arena, since "a variety of voices can help assure freedom."

Here I must confess to a tinge of disappointment about this book. Marty says nothing about what this challenge might mean for theological schools, whose attention to these topics will play an important role in educating the people -- pastors, denominational employees, lay leaders and the like -- whom he frequently singles out as important interpreters and "brokers" of the public involvement of religious groups.

Right now the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada is conducting a major study of the public character of theological education, with a special focus on how seminaries can educate leaders who take their public role seriously. The task is being carried out by four working groups, representing the Protestant mainline denominations, evangelicals, Roman Catholics and the university-related divinity schools. Here, too, there is some messiness: Dallas Seminary will approach the subject differently than will the Sacred Heart School of Theology, and the two of them will differ in turn from the approaches of McCormick Seminary or Harvard Divinity School.

It would have been helpful if Marty, himself a veteran theological educator, would have given some guidance for this important kind of messy conversation. But even without such words of encouragement, his theological colleagues can learn much from his environmental scan of the territory that they must explore.

Marty’s emphasis on religion’s role in the broadly "public" -- rather than the narrowly "political" -- arena is especially valuable. Religious groups have a public presence even when they officially eschew political involvement. They can hide this fact from themselves only by not taking the scope of the public arena into account. When a rabbi writes to a newspaper about Israeli policy, or when evangelical parents make their views about science and religion known to a school board, or when a Methodist congregation gives a send-off to a daughter of the church who is entering the navy chaplaincy, they are expressing a public faith.

Which brings us back to the phrases "common good" and "shared life." Some of my Christian ethicist colleagues get nervous when someone even hints that religion might be good for the larger pluralistic culture. Debates can get pretty heated these days about the dangers of sacrificing the "thick" texture of Christian discourse for the alleged benefits of a "thin" ethical contribution to the larger public arena. Marty, long a defender of "public religion," does not address this controversy explicitly, but his observations about the practical realities of religion in public life have clear relevance to the topic.

Certainly no careful reader can come away with the impression that Marty cares about religion only insofar as it can provide utilitarian benefits to the larger society. He knows that people of faith will serve the culture best by nurturing convictions that sometimes go against the cultural grain. It is not healthy for public life, Marty says, for the conversation about important issues to lapse into the "serenely civil." Of necessity "different interests, creeds, and personalities will be involved, and they will bring passion. Rather, the goal of the conversation is to help people envision and practice ways for those of good intentions to be true to themselves, their faith, their causes -- and do little damage to others along the way."

Having made that point, Marty quickly adds that this is "a rather limited way" to characterize a conversation "that has considerable promise for the republic." The kinds of "mediating structures" that are possible only because of passionate faith can also do much "to enliven" our shared life.

I think Marty speaks wisely here. The "thick" versus "thin" debate is often a confused one. The truth is -- and I am convinced that it is a profoundly theological truth -- that one of the obligations entailed by our "thick" Christian convictions is that we be willing to speak as carefully as we can in the public arena the "thin" language of "common good" and "shared life." Marty’s book is an important guide to all of us who want our lives as citizens to be immersed in that kind of thickness.

Why Conservatives Need Liberals

I have spent a number of years engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue. More recently, I have been involved in extensive exchanges with Muslim scholars. I regularly visit Utah for off-the-record discussions with Mormon leaders about deep disagreements between Mormons and evangelicals. I approach all these conversations with great enthusiasm. And yet I have found myself regularly breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of engaging in dialogue with fellow Presbyterians about homosexuality. Why the anxiety in this case?

It’s because there is so little room for genuine give-and-take in our Presbyterian discussions and at the same time so much hanging on them. The issue is vitally connected to the question of whether we can stay together as a denomination. In that sense, the Presbyterian debates do not feel like friendly arguments over the breakfast table, or even the more heated kinds of exchanges that might take place in the presence of a marriage counselor. Rather, it often feels as if we are already getting ready for the divorce court, under pressure to measure every word that we say with an eye toward the briefs that our lawyers will be presenting as we move toward a final settlement.

Barbara Wheeler and I have argued much about the issues that threaten to divide us, but we share a strong commitment to continuing the conversation. She regularly makes her case for staying together by appealing to a high ecclesiology. The church, she insists, is not a voluntary arrangement that we can abandon just because we do not happen to like some of the other people in the group. God calls us into the church, and that means that God requires that we hang in there with one another even if that goes against our natural inclinations.

I agree with that formulation. And I sense that many of my fellow evangelicals in the PCUSA would also endorse it. The question that many evangelicals are asking these days, though, is whether God expects us to hang in there at all costs.

One of my reasons for wanting to see us stick together is that a Presbyterian split would be a serious setback for the cause that I care deeply about, namely the cause of Reformed orthodoxy. I spend a lot of time thinking about how people with my kind of theology, have acted in the past, and I am convinced that splits inevitably diminish the influence of the kind of orthodoxy that I cherish -- for at least two reasons.

First, the denomination from which the dissidents depart is typically left without strong voices to defend orthodox. This is what happened in the early decades of the 20th century when J. Gresham Machen and his colleagues broke away from the northern Presbyterian church.

I know that this is not a very popular thing to say in this setting, but I happen to be a strong admirer of Machen. I think that he pretty much had things right on questions of biblical authority, the nature of Christ’s atoning work, and other key items on the theological agenda. But I have strong reservations about his ecclesiology and I regret that his views about the unity of the church led him to abandon mainline Presbyterianism. As long as he remained within the northern church, he had a forum for demonstrating to liberals that Calvinist orthodoxy could be articulated with intellectual rigor. When he and his friends departed, this kind of witness departed with them.

The evangelicals who stayed on in the northern church generally did so because they were not as polemical as the Machen group; they were also not nearly as inclined as the Machenites to engage in sustained theological discussion. This meant that the quality of theological argumentation in mainline Presbyterianism suffered for several decades -- some would even say up to our present time.

The second way in which the cause of Reformed orthodoxy was diminished has to do with what happened to the conservatives themselves after they left the mainline denomination. They quickly began to argue among themselves, and it was not long before new splits occurred in their ranks. The result was that conservative Calvinism itself became a fractured movement.

I worry much about what would happen to Presbyterian evangelicals if we were to leave the PCUSA. When we evangelical types don’t have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other. And I can testify to the fact that intraevangelical theological arguments are not always pleasant affairs. I would much rather see us continue to focus on the major issues of Reformed thought in an admittedly pluralistic denomination than get into the debates that seem inevitably to arise when evangelicals have established their own "pure" denominations.

In the 1970s and 1980s I spent considerable time in dialogue with Mennonite scholars about the differences between the Reformed and Anabaptist traditions on political and ethical questions. One of the most interesting encounters of this sort happened one evening at a Mennonite church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Myron Augsburger and I debated the issues of just war doctrine and pacifism. I had come prepared to launch immediately into a critic of pacifism from my Calvinist perspective. But when Augsburger and I met in the afternoon to talk over the format for the evening, he proposed a somewhat different approach. "Lot’s do it differently tonight," he urged. "Let’s each of us begin by talking in very personal terms about the things we respect in the other person’s position."

That is what we did, and it was a profoundly moving experience for me -- setting a very different tone for the airing of our disagreements than I had experienced in previous dialogues. I thought about that encounter as I was preparing for this discussion, and it occurred to me that this is the approach that Barbara Wheeler has taken on her several visits to Fuller Seminary.

I have learned much from people whom my fellow evangelicals are quick to label as liberal Protestants. In the environs in which I was nurtured, Harry Emerson Fosdick was considered an arch-villain. As a college student I decided to form my own assessment of Fosdick’s thought, and though I found much in his theology disturbing, I was deeply moved by many of his sermons. His articulate approach to issues of war and peace, and his profound commitment to the betterment of the human condition, left a strong impression on me.

Indeed, it was Fosdick’s influence, along with that of Walter Rauschenbusch and other advocates of the social gospel, that led me to experience considerable alienation from the evangelical community during my years of graduate study on secular campuses in the 1960s, when I joined protests against racial injustice and marched against the Vietnam war. And even though I continued to search for a more traditionally orthodox basis for my political commitments, I drew much inspiration and solace from the witness of Christian people of more liberal theological convictions who modeled for me a courageous commitment to the biblical vision of justice and peace. I was -- and I continue to be -- ashamed of the failure of evangelicals to take up these causes in the 1960s. And I was -- and I continue to be -- deeply grateful for the social witness of liberal Protestantism during those days.

I have spoken often to evangelical audiences about sexuality issues. And I have always made it very clear to them -- as I must to you -- that my views on same-sex relations are very traditional. I am convinced that genital intimacy between persons of the same gender is not compatible with God’s creating or redeeming purposes. But that kind of clarification of my understanding of biblical teaching for evangelical groups has usually been a preface to a plea for sexual humility.

I often tell of listening to a conservative spokesman express his views in this way "We normal people should tell these homosexuals that what they are doing is simply an abomination in the eyes of God." When I heard that, I tell my audiences, I wanted to cry out, "Normal? You are normal? Let’s all applaud for the one sexually normal person in the room!"

The fact is that none of us -- or at least very few of us -- can honestly claim to be normal sexual beings in the eyes of God. The labels we typically use in describing sexual orientation are blatant examples of false advertising. My homosexual friends are not very "gay." They have experienced much pain and loss in their lives. And the rest of us are not very "straight." We are crooked people, often bruised and confused in our sexuality.

None of this should be shocking to Calvinists. We are living in the time of our abnormality. We are all sinners who have been deeply wounded by the stain of our depravity and we are nowhere more vulnerable and given to temptation than in the sexual dimensions of our being. In our sexual lives, as in all other areas, we know that while we may be on a journey toward wholeness, we are a long way from our destination. We are already the redeemed sons and daughters of God, but "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." So in our brokenness we journey on, knowing that "when he shall appear" -- and only then – "we will be like him, and we will see him as he is."(1 John 3:2).

This is an important time for each of us to be honest about our sexual condition. Evangelicals have nothing to brag about in this area. It is not enough for us to tell those of you with whom we disagree how wrong we think you are. Nor is it very helpful for you folks to keep insisting that we can solve most of our theological problems in this area by focusing on a Jesus who cares deeply about a generic, unnuanced "inclusivity." If that is all we have to say to each other, there is no hope for the continuing unity of our denomination.

When I was on the faculty of Calvin College, I helped to arrange a special evening lecture on campus by my friend Virginia Mollenkott, who had recently come out publicly about her lesbian orientation. Many of the things she said to a packed auditorium that evening were off the theological charts for most of us, including me. But I will never forget how she concluded her talk by saying something like this: "You may disagree with everything I have said thus far, but I hope we can at least agree on this," she said. "Whatever your sexual orientation, there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- that you have to do or agree to before coming to the foot of the cross of Jesus. The only thing any of us has to say as we come to Calvary is this: ‘Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me, / and that thou bidst me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come.’"

I believe that in that plea she was expressing good Reformed doctrine. We do not have to have either our theology or our ethics well worked out before we can come together to Calvary. All we need to know is that we are lost apart from the sovereign grace that was made available to us through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.

Our only hope for moving on together as partners in the cause of the gospel is to bow together at the cross of Calvary acknowledging to each other and to our Lord that we all need to plead for mercy to the One who is, in the Heidelberg Confession’s wonderful words, our "only comfort in life and in death," and who "at the cost of his own blood . . . fully paid for all [our] sins." And then, having experienced together the healing mercy that comes from the one who alone is mighty to save, we can journey on as friends -- no longer strangers to each other -- who are eager to talk to each other, and even to argue passionately with each other about crucial issues.

I want with all my heart for this to happen to us in the Presbyterian Church -- that we take up our arguments about the issues that divide only after we have knelt and laid our individual and collective burdens of sin at the foot of the cross. Needless to say, if it does happen I would be surprised. But then the God whom we worship and serve is nothing if not a God of surprises.

Humility, Hope and the Divine Slowness

John Reeve, the 17th-century leader of the British sect known as the Muggletonians, strongly opposed the idea of an earthly millennial kingdom. He was convinced that Jesus had no interest in returning to earth to establish a political administration. After all, he asked, didn't Jesus suffer during his last stay on earth? Why would he want to come back as a politician and suffer again? I must confess that I am tempted, as I think back over this past decade as an evangelical social ethicist, to add my own spin to Reeve's argument. Even if Jesus didn't suffer enough during his first earthly tour of duty, isn't it likely that he has had his fill of "Christian politics" by now? Hasn't his capacity at least for political suffering finally reached its limit?

Ten years ago I was devoting much attention to the New Christian Right. At the beginning of the 1980s, "born-again politics" was being heralded as a major new force in North America. It is clear today, however, that the New Christian Right lacked the vision and leadership to live up to its promise -- or even to justify the fears of its opponents. While many New Rightists remain active in the abortion controversy, the enthusiasm for a more comprehensive political program has dissipated. The Moral Majority no longer exists, and several prominent New Right preachers have experienced public humiliation.

I did not altogether oppose born-again politics when it appeared on the scene. I spent my early years as an ethicist trying to convince my evangelical kinfolk that the gospel does indeed have clear political implications. The New Christian Right signaled a change of agenda: the arguments with Bible-believing Christians about whether the gospel is in fact political gave way to questions about the actual content of Christian politics. This struck me as an important advance.

And it was. Evangelicals are more aware these days of the political dimensions of the gospel than they were 20 years ago. But it is also clear that they have much theological homework to do on social, political and economic questions.

A staff member of a mainline church told me after a speech I gave recently that, much to his surprise, he agreed with just about everything I said. "Tell me," he asked, "how does a person like you survive in the evangelical world?" One thing that helps, I replied, is that I really am an evangelical.

Labels can outlive their usefulness, and those of us who insist upon being called "evangelical" must be sensitive to changing alignments in the Christian world. But I still find it helpful to assume a label that points to the centrality of the evangel, the good news that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.

To be sure, there is more to the gospel than a message about individual salvation. But there is not less to the gospel than that. I am encouraged by the increasing Christian awareness that proper discipleship requires us to take up the causes of peace, justice and righteousness. But no program of liberation is fully adequate that does not offer people the new life that comes from a personal acceptance of the claims of the gospel.

It is precisely this strong emphasis on the personal dimension, of course, that has made it so difficult for evangelicals to think clearly about structural issues. The categories necessary for a theological understanding of corporate life do not come easily for us. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the current of anti-intellectualism flowing through most pietism -- and the North American conservative evangelical community is essentially a coalition of pietist movements -- makes it difficult for evangelicals to work hard at mastering those categories.

Evangelical political embarrassments of this past decade are due in good part, I am convinced, to this kind of theological failure. New Right preachers were unable to cultivate a political perspective that could provide the nuances and staying power necessary for coping with complex political realities. Furthermore, their past patterns of cultural and ecclesiastical separatism have left them with few role models outside of their own groups. I for one would have been immensely pleased if, for example, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had gone to the Roman Catholic bishops for some private tutoring on matters of public moral pedagogy.

When it comes to political discussion, evangelical Christianity very much needs to cultivate those "communities of memory" whose cultural importance was underscored by the authors of Habits of the Heart. The resources of a forgotten past must be mined for their present relevance. Some people are already attempting to do this. For example, evangelical colleges and seminaries are conducting promising discussions on a variety of traditions of ethical discourse, including Anabaptist, Reformed, Franciscan, Puritan, African-American and Wesleyan. These ethical explorations must be intensified, and more time must be spent probing some very basic questions.

As a teenager I read J. B. Phillips's Your God Is Too Small. Though I can't remember any of the book's contents, the title has served me well as a reference point for thinking about the doctrine of God. Throughout my adult life I have regularly asked myself what variation on Phillips's title best summarizes how I and my closest spiritual kinfolk are limiting the deity. In the 1960s I came to see that my understanding of God had been too interwoven with racism and nationalism. During the next decade I thought much about how my concept of the deity had been too North Atlantic. The 1980s have given me opportunity to think about how patriarchal assumptions have distorted the doctrine of God.

Obviously, we learn none of those theological lessons once and for all. They are subject to ongoing reflection. But if I had to choose the variation on Phillips's title that best captures my most recent exercises in corrective theology, it would be your God is too fast.

I have been thinking a lot about God's "pace" in recent years. The importance of this topic became strikingly clear to me over lunch during an ecumenical consultation a few years ago. The small group at my table consisted of evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Somehow the question of "creation science" came up. While none of the evangelicals present promoted the idea of a literal six-day creation, we all had close ties to people who held literalist interpretations. So we tried to explain the phenomenon to our Catholic friends, putting the best face that we could on the literal-creationist perspective.

The Catholics had a difficult time generating any sympathy for the position we were outlining. Finally one Catholic scholar threw her hands up in despair, exclaiming in an agitated voice, "Don't these people realize that God likes to do things slowly?"

Her rhetorical question brought the issues into sharp focus for me. What she took for granted is precisely what many of my evangelical kinfolk do not realize; they insist that God likes to work fast. They think the only proper way to honor God as the creator of all things is to assert that God created everything quickly. And what holds for the deity's "macro" dealings with the universe applies also to the "micro" issue of individual salvation; if a person has genuinely been "saved," she would have known when it happened -- there is no mistaking the salvific activity of a God who is fond of doing things quickly and decisively.

I am convinced that one reason evangelicals have such difficulty taking questions of racial and economic justice seriously is that the problems in those areas seem so intractable. If God works quickly and decisively, then the fact that these problems haven't been solved yet must mean that God doesn't care very much about these particular areas of human concern.

The obvious defects of this way of viewing the processes of social change point to the need for a proper theological understanding of divine slowness. Both Catholic and Reformed thought provide resources for developing a deep appreciation for a more deliberate divine pace. In each case -- exemplified by the Reformed fascination with the idea of providence and the Roman emphasis on the development of dogma -- the notion of human history as an arena for the developmental unfolding of the divine purposes looms large.

The developmental understanding of God's attitude toward history does have important psychological and cultural corollaries. The imitatio dei seems to play a role here -- we tend to adjust our human pace according to our sense of how fast God is moving. The Reformed community has a long history of resisting all-at-once, perfectionist schemes, both in its understanding of the individual spiritual pilgrimage and in its programs of political reform. And my Roman Catholic friends are fond of quoting the Ignatian reminder that "God uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines" -- a sentiment that would sound very strange to many evangelical ears.

These less dramatic expectations seem quite appropriate to me these days, as do the theological themes that serve as their foundation. Not that I have sworn off everything associated with the theology of quickness and decisiveness. In his study of ''immediatism", in antislavery movements, historian David Brion Davis distinguishes between a subjective immediatism, according to which people directly and forthrightly condemned the slavery system, and a more programmatic immediatism, which looked for quick and simple solutions to the problem.

On many issues I am a subjective immediatist. Apartheid, for example, is a phenomenon that seems to demand decisive moral clarity. It is the more programmatic variety of immediatism that makes me nervous. But I would not even condemn that without qualification. I celebrate the sudden conversions that many individuals have experienced, and those signs of God's active intervention in human affairs force me to accept the possibility of sudden conversions of social structures as well. But I don't expect them as simply a matter of course.

Nothing about this new appreciation for development and slowness means that I have become a neoconservative. To be sure, I have learned some important lessons from the neoconservative movement, which has become an important voice in Christian dialogue about public policy during this past decade. At the very least, neoconservatism has helped me to understand more clearly the uneasiness that I have long felt toward the political and economic remedies that liberationist and radical Christian thinkers sometimes advocate. In that respect the neoconservative movement has introduced some balance into the intellectual dialogue.

One important lesson that we all should have learned from the neoconservatives by now is that the intentions behind many of our efforts on behalf of the poor and the oppressed do not always match the results. Indeed, immediatist-interventionist solutions often make matters worse in the long run. Furthermore, the fact that a specific policy or system does not intentionally aim at bettering the lot of the oppressed does not mean that it will not in fact eventually produce beneficial effects for them; poverty-stricken people are often served better by schemes that emphasize the production of wealth than they are by redistributionist programs. Those things seem to me to be important for Christians to admit.

But we must also acknowledge that not all immediatist-interventionist solutions fail to deliver what they promise. And not all that encourages the production of wealth benefits the poor in the long run. Thus I am also nervous about neoconservatism.

I have developed a cautious attitude toward programmatic solutions offered in the name of the gospel. But I do not face the next decade without reference points for evaluating programmatic proposals I am convinced, for example, that the God of the Bible does want us to commit ourselves to the cause of the poor and the oppressed. A willingness to focus on this cause in a very sustained and serious manner is itself an important reference point in formulating public policy. This doesn't eliminate the need for continued discussion about who among the wretched of the earth most need our direct ministry of compassion and empowerment. A serious dialogue about that topic can be very healthy, especially when accompanied by the firm conviction that the issues are so important that informed risk-taking is an urgent necessity.

Another subject I've confronted is pluralism. I am more ecumenical at the end of this decade than I was at the beginning in that I have a deeper appreciation for the ways in which God's gracious dealings with the Christian community make positive use of a variety of theological, denominational and liturgical schemes. I have become more pluralistic not merely in accepting plurality as a fact of life, but in considering some kinds of diversity to be very healthy for Christians.

One place in which I have been exploring the relationship between pluralism and ecumenism is in the book-length manuscript on public pluralism that I have been writing with a philosophy colleague, Sander Griffioen of the Free University of Amsterdam. This research project has occupied much of my scholarly attention for the past ten years.

Other events have reinforced this interest. Most important has been my move in 1985 from Calvin College, a midwestern school known for its strong Dutch Calvinist identity, to a west coast evangelical seminary characterized by a fascinating mix of denominational and cross-cultural diversity. I have discovered Fuller Seminary to be an exciting experiment in what David Hubbard describes as "evangelical ecumenism."

Also during the past decade I have as a board member and as an active participant in various consultations worked with the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, Minnesota. This experience of wrestling with ecumenical issues has profoundly influenced my understanding of the proper contours of theological pluralism.

The institute's unique "first-person approach" to ecumenical dialogue has allowed me to be ecumenical without compromising my sense of evangelical integrity. And it has also provided me with a circle of Roman Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant mentor-friends -- Margaret O'Gara, Tom Stransky, Tony Ugolnik, Roberta Bondi, Patrick Henry and Bob Bilheimer -- toward whom I have developed a strong sense of theological and spiritual accountability.

One of the major problems in properly understanding pluralism as such is that we must take into account so many pluralisms these days -- ethical, sexual, political, religious, theological, liturgical and others. No single evaluation covers all of these; there is no way of deciding for or against pluralism as such. To affirm the existing variety of Christian liturgies or political parties is one thing; it is quite another thing to affirm the existing variety of religions or sexual lifestyles. A theology of pluralism must take seriously the plurality of pluralisms.

The real challenge, of course, is to promote an appropriate pluralist sensitivity without slipping into an "anything-goes" relativism. The Bible offers encouragement. For example, the heavenly choir endorses an important many-ness when it sings the great eschatological hymn to the Lamb who shed his blood as a ransom for men and women "from every tribe and tongue and people and nation, and hast made them a kingdom and priests to our God" (Rev. 5:9).

It is precisely this vision of the culmination of God's plan, I am convinced, that provides the necessary spiritual resources for struggling creatively with the challenge of pluralism. Wheaton College's Arthur Holmes has put it nicely: humility and hope, he observes, are two very important spiritual characteristics of the Christian's intellectual life. We know that only the Creator has a clear and comprehensive knowledge of all things; thus we are humble. But God has also promised eventually to lead us into that mode of perfect knowing that is proper to us as human creatures; thus we hope. These attitudes can give us a patience that can enable us to accept complexities and live with seemingly unconnected particularities without giving in to despair or cynicism.

There is no better way to cultivate the appropriate blend of humility and hope than to remind ourselves constantly of our Christian identity as participants in the Lamb's global network. A self-conscious awareness of our actual involvement in this complex community of rich particularities can induce us to keep talking together even when it seems like we have run up against ultimate pluralisms.

Someone said about my recent book, Distorted Truth (Harper & Row, 1989), that my comments on "the battle for the mind" struck him as a George Bush-like call for a kinder, gentler evangelicalism. I have no quarrel with that characterization -- as long as we remember that kindness and gentleness already appear on the Apostle's list of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5.

I do hope that evangelicals will become a kinder and gentler people in the coming decade. To appreciate better God's slowness is to see that we are living during the time of the divine patience, a long-suffering in which we are called to participate. Nor is the cultivation of patience, in both our personal lives and our public involvements, a mere temporary strategy, as John Murray Cuddihy seems to suggest when, in his excellent studies of the concept of civility, he advises Christians that the best way to gain a civil disposition is to postpone triumphalism until the eschaton. Kindness and gentleness are themselves the very stuff of eschatological existence. The ultimate triumph of sanctifying grace in our lives will occur only when we have learned not to grasp for a triumphalist spirit. The triumph that we await is not our triumph, but the victory of the Lamb before whom all our knees will bow and all of our tongues -- evangelical ones -- will join in the larger ecumenical chorus that will declare that Jesus alone is Lord.

Evangelical involvement in the present public dialogue must be characterized by a kindness and gentleness that is fitting for creatures who are on their way to the eschaton. Not that there is no room for prophetic critique in our struggles with the crucial issues of contemporary human existence. But those corrective words must reflect our status as a people who have ourselves fled to the cross for healing and correction -- and who, having received there some measure of repair, are emboldened to point others to the Source of the tender mercies that have touched our lives.

I begin the 1990s with a stronger sense than ever of the mystery of the divine majesty, as well as of the mystery of our own created complexity. But I also sense in myself a new enthusiasm for reflecting carefully on these profound mysteries.

Allan Boesak has often remarked that North Americans have a difficult time thinking theologically about apartheid. And that is unfortunate, says Boesak, since bad theology has contributed much to South Africa's problems and good theology is an important part of the solution. My move from a college philosophy department to a theological seminary is one expression of my conviction that Boesak is right. In fact, while considering recently whether to move into seminary administration, I heard one of the most convincing arguments from a friend, herself an academic administrator, who preached a fine little homily to me about administration being a very important context for thinking theologically about people and institutions.

These remarks construe the theological task rather broadly, of course. But that seems quite proper. My understanding of the scope of theological reflection continues to be guided by John Calvin's advice in the opening pages of his Institutes: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of our human selfhood are intimately intertwined. Theological reflection requires that we relate all the information we have about God to all that falls within the scope of human concern.

That is no easy assignment But given my own most recent assessments of the divine pace, I am convinced that we have God's permission to take our time.

Changing My Mind about the Changeable Church

Change (implying a terminus ad quem) is intelligible only if we know the terminus a quo (the starting point). For me as an American Catholic theologian, that terminus a quo was the immigrant Catholic Church, the kind of church nostalgically memorialized in some of Andrew Greeley's novels. I was raised in that church, and some of my deepest religious and theological sensitivities -- perhaps especially those I do not thematically recognize -- took shape within it. Eugene Kennedy has described this church as follows:

The unlettered Catholic who came to the United States in the last century fashioned a way of life within the host Protestant culture that was tight, intellectually narrow, and wrapped in an invisible and largely impermeable membrane that resisted social osmosis with the rest of the country. It was also the most successful era of development in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. This Catholic structure defended itself proudly against doctrinal and moral compromise; it was, above all, obedient to the authority which was exercised for generations without any serious challenge by its bishops and clergy and other religious teachers. Immigrant Catholicism was, in fact, held together by the vigorous churchmen who retained their power over their flocks by exercising it regularly on an infinitely detailed category of behaviors, ranging from what the faithful could eat on Fridays to what they could think or do in the innermost chambers of their personal lives ["The End of the Immigrant Church," Illinois Issues, August 1982, pp. 15-21].

The moral theology that I was taught and that for some years I myself taught reflected the immigrant Catholic community Kennedy described as well as the ecclesiology that nourished it. It was all too often one-sidedly confession oriented, magisterium dominated, canon law related, sin centered and seminary controlled.

This represents my terminus a quo. In ten general areas my mind has since changed or my perspective has shifted. Interestingly, nearly all these changes pertain to ecclesiology; but they have very significant impacts on moral theology, both its method and its ultimate conclusions. Some of these perspective changes overlap significantly. That is not surprising since all of them, in one way or another, trace back to Vatican II and its ecclesiology. That council shook up the Catholic Church in much the same radical and vigorous way that the stirrings of freedom and democracy rocked the Eastern bloc countries last year. It was bound to affect the way I viewed myself, the church, the world and God, and therefore the way I did theology.

The first area about which I've changed my mind is the nature of the church. It is easy to fall into caricature here, and I repent for that in advance. Still, I believe that my early view of the church was dominantly pyramidal, with authority and truth descending from above (pope and bishops) to rank-and-file believers (the rest of us). This model powerfully supports an ecclesiastical gnosticism that exempts the hierarchy from standard forms of scholarly accountability and reduces the theological task to mediating authoritative documents. This ultramontanism peaked during the reign of Pius XII. At that time few of us felt terribly threatened by the highly authoritarian and obediential motifs of Humani generis. That is, we thought, just the way things are. Many Catholics experienced little or no discomfort with the pyramidal model of the church. It seemed natural to them, indeed juris divini. In those days triumphalism was not a reproach.

All of this came tumbling down with Vatican II. The theological and pastoral winds that blew freely from 1962 to 1965 led to a notion of church much more concentric than pyramidal. My colleague Richard McBrien, in a talk to moral theologians at Notre Dame in June 1988, neatly summarized in six points Vatican II's major ecclesiological themes.

The first theme he emphasized is the church as mystery or sacrament. The church is a sign as well as an instrument of salvation. As a sacrament, it causes by signifying. As McBrien noted, this powerfully suggests the need to be attentive to justice issues within as well as outside the church This principle of sacramentality undergirds the statement in the U.S. Catholic bishops' pastoral letter Economic Justice for All: "All the moral principles that govern the just operation of any economic endeavor apply to the church and its agencies and institutions; indeed the church should be exemplary" (no. 347).

The second theme is the church as people of God. All the faithful (not just the hierarchy and specialists) constitute the church. This has immediate implications for the elaboration and development of moral doctrine, for consultative processes and for the free flow of ideas in the church.

Third, the church as servant. Besides preaching the word and celebrating the sacraments, the church's mission includes addressing human needs in the social, political and economic orders. This suggests that these orders are also ecclesiological problems and that moralists and ecclesiologists must cooperate closely. It also suggests that moral theology, following John Courtney Murray, must continue to probe the relationship between civic unity and religious integrity.

Another theme is the church as collegial. The church is realized and expressed at the local level (parish/diocese/region/nation) as well as the universal. Understanding this helps raise and rephrase the question of the use and limits of authority in the moral sphere, and the meaning of subsidiarity and freedom in the application of moral principles and the formation of conscience.

Fifth, the church as ecumenical. Being the whole body of Christ, the church includes more than Roman Catholics. The obvious implication is that Catholic officials and theologians must consult and take account of the experience, reflection and wisdom resident in other Christian churches.

Finally, McBrien noted the ecclesiological nature of the church. The church is a tentative and unfinished reality. It is in via. A fortiori the church's moral and ethical judgments are always in via and share the messy, unfinished and perfectible character of the church itself

That such ecclesiological themes have deeply affected my own thinking and theological work should be self-evident. Indeed, the following nine points are explications of these basic ecclesiological shifts.

I've also changed my mind about the importance of lay witness. Before Vatican II, conscience formation by Catholics was one-sidedly paternalistic. The individual would approach a priest, usually in confession, expecting him to be prepared to give the answers. The person would detail the facts; the confessor would assess them with a licet or non licet. This reflected the neat, if artificial, division of the church into the teaching and learning church.

Vatican II shattered this easy compartmentalization. It insisted that "it is for God's people as a whole with the help of the Holy Spirit, and especially for pastors and theologians, to listen to the various voices of our day, discerning and interpreting them, and to evaluate them in the light of the divine word." It went on to issue a remarkable summons to laypeople.

Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give them a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission. Rather, enlightened by Christian wisdom and giving close attention to the teaching authority of the Church, let the layman take on his own distinctive role [Gaudium et spes].

I confess that in my early years as a theologian I thought it was my mission to have answers to the most complicated problems. Where else would people get answers? The notion that laypeople have a distinctive -- and indispensable -- role to play in discovering moral truth was hardly promoted by their designation as "the learning church." I have come to see and value lay experience and reflection and am richer for it.

I've also reconsidered the limitation of papal and episcopal teaching competence. Catholics accept the fact that Christ commissioned the church to teach authoritatively in his name. Even though the manner of executing this commission has varied throughout history, Catholics still hold that this duty falls in a special way on the pope and the bishops in union with the pope. The formula used since the Council of Trent to state the reach of this hierarchical competence is de fide et moribus (matters concerned with faith and morals). Thus Vatican II stated: "In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent of soul." The vague and sprawling nature of the phrase "faith and morals" fosters the idea that pope and bishops are equally and univocally competent on matters concerned with faith and morals.This would be particularly the case in a church conceived in a highly centralized and authoritarian way. In the encyclical Magnificate Dominum, Pius XII asserted that the power of the church over the natural law covered "its foundation, its interpretation, its application."

It is somewhat difficult to say exactly how my mind has changed here because I think that thought on this topic is still developing. Some years ago Karl Rahner argued that contemporary official formulations of the church's ordinary teaching competence are unnuanced. Furthermore, the American bishops in their pastoral letters on peace and the economy have distinguished between principles and their applications, and stated that the latter are "not binding in conscience." That is an old-fashioned way of saying that episcopal competence is not the same when the bishops are dealing with applications as it is when they propose general principles. This is significant when we remember that most of the controversial moral questions (for example, contraception) are matters of application of more general principles.

Just how we should state this hierarchical competence is not altogether clear. Undoubtedly, Pius XII had an overexpansive notion of his competence, built on the neoscholastic ecclesiology of his time. I do not suggest that pastors of the church should not offer moral judgments on human activities. Rather, I mean that the pope and bishops simply must consult those who are truly competent. Authority is not competence. Also, even after such consultation they must show appropriate caution and modesty. Horizontal activity in this world does not belong to the church's competence in the same way the deposit of faith does. Only with the ecclesiological moves made by Vatican II was I prepared to see this. Furthermore, I believe that a significant number of Roman curialists still do not share this view.

I have also reexamined ecumenism's role in the search for moral truth. Prior to Vatican II, serious ecumenism was in the quite lonely hands of a small band of theological pioneers. Official attitudes and practices were structured by the conviction that non-Catholic Christians were the adversaries of our central religious and moral tenets. Canon 1399,4 symbolized this. It forbade the reading of books written by Protestants that expressly treated religious themes. The very separation of non-Catholics from the one true church constituted disparagement of their religious and moral thought. My preconciliar attitude toward the work of my non-Catholic peers was condescending tolerance, a civil nod that said, "Yes, but we have the last word."

Vatican II changed all that. Not only did it recognize the ecclesial reality of other Christian churches, but it stated explicitly that "whatever is wrought by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of our separated brethren can contribute to our own edification." Many of us in the field of moral theology learn more from our non-Catholic colleagues than we do from some Catholic theologians. The perspectives of the '40s and '50s that shaped many of us strike us now as incredibly defensive and parochial. At that time to think of the Lambeth Conference as a possible source of enlightenment appeared theologically ridiculous. Now it seems to be required.

My thoughts on the place of dissent have changed. In preconciliar decades, public disagreement with authoritatively proposed moral conclusions was virtually unheard of and would have been hugely dangerous for theologians. Yves Congar, O.P., has noted that the ordinary magisterium reached a kind of high watermark of one-sidedness in the pontificate of Pius XII. In Humani generis the pope stated two points. First, the ordinary magisterium of the pope requires total obedience. "He who listens to you listens to me." Second, the role -- or a role -- of theologians is to justify the declarations of the magisterium. The pope went so far as to say that once he had expressed his judgment on a point previously controversial, "there can no longer be any question of free discussion among theologians." In that atmosphere a dissenting theologian was doomed.

At the practical level what changed many of us -- certainly me -- was the 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae on birth regulation. I suspect it is very difficult for non-Catholics to appreciate the profound effect this had on Catholic theologians. For decades before that, theologians wrote and taught that artificial contraception was a serious moral wrong threatening spiritual health and ultimately salvation. Some even argued that the matter was infallibly taught in Pius XI's Casti connubii. The issue began to come unstuck in the mid-'60s when the so-called Birth Control Commission's majority argued that the traditional teaching could and should be modified. Then came Humanae vitae, reasserting the intrinsic moral evil of contraceptive acts. Most theologians viewed the reasoning as obviously flawed and indeed as discontinuous with major emphases in Vatican II. Their integrity demanded that they say so. They did.

Perhaps more important than the issue of birth regulation are the implications of this massive dissent. It suggested that the magisterium could be inaccurate even on an important moral question. It meant that "the light of the Holy Spirit, which is given in a particular way to the pastors of the church," as Humanae vitae describes it, does not guarantee lack of error or replace human analysis. It meant that the pope can choose the wrong advisers. It meant that a preoccupation with authority can itself lead to false steps. It meant that the church must be willing to examine its past formulations openly and critically, for there can be deficiencies "even in the formulation of doctrine," as Vatican II put it. It meant that honest theological input is called for both before and after official statements. All this indicates, of course, that respectful dissent should be viewed not as a disloyal challenge to authority but as a necessary valuable component of our growth in understanding. The Humanae vitae debate opened my eyes to my critical responsibilities as a theologian. I am comfortable with this even though the present policies of the Holy See are attempting -- misguidedly, I believe -- to dismantle the theological foundations of this comfort.

Therefore, I am no longer as certain of what is changeable and unchangeable in the church. The Catholic Church has endured for two millennia (notwithstanding some quite gaping holes in the bark of Peter). Catholics believe that it will, because of God's provident presence to it, endure to the end of time. It is easy to promote the idea that because the church will endure, so ought everything in and about it. This is particularly true in a community that sees itself uniquely commissioned to guard the deposit of faith, even to the point of infallibly proclaiming it. Thus it happens that we come to regard as unchangeable what is actually changeable. In doing so we provide powerful theological and emotional supports for institutional inertia.

One of many examples of this is the official teaching on contraception. The pope's connecting this matter with abiding doctrinal truths is theologically unjustifiable -- a point the Cologne Declaration of German theologians underscored. Another example is the ordination of women. Official appeals to "God's plan" and "the will of Christ" try to transform the changeable into the unchangeable. I confess that prior to Vatican II, I would have viewed the ordination of women as forever impossible. Not so now. I have come to see it as not only possible but desirable and inevitable. I can cite two influences as largely responsible for this move. The first is the theology of Karl Rahner, who showed so often and so convincingly that what we once viewed as unchangeable really is not. The second is the privilege of experiencing personally the ministry of women. This has dissolved emotional obstacles that were far more formidable than any theological analysis anyway.

I would conclude, then, that by changing my attitudes on several deeply ingrained matters (such as contraception and women's ordination), I have uncovered a remarkably unthreatening attitude toward the changeable and unchangeable in the church in general.

I feel less compelled to claim certainty for my or the church's teachings. The Catholic Church, especially in the hundred years prior to Vatican II, seemed to believe it could achieve clarity and certainty in most moral matters, and that at a very detailed level. The pronouncements of the Holy See both generated and reinforced this belief I suppose that a church that sees itself commissioned to teach authoritatively on moral questions and that lays claim to a special guidance of the Holy Spirit in the process might find it uncomfortable (at least) to say "I don't know." When I look over the book-size notes I drew up for my students -- on justice, sexuality, cooperation, the sacraments, etc. -- I blush at the extent to which I shared this discomfort.

Credit it to wisdom, age or laziness -- or a dash of all three: my old compulsion to be certain has yielded to an unembarrassed modesty about many details of human life. Unlike some of my cantankerous and crusading co-religionists on the right, I am now quite relaxed in admitting with Vatican II that "the church guards the heritage of God's Word and draws from it religious and moral principles, without always having at hand the solution to particular problems." But of course!

I now also perceive differently the nature of effective teaching in the church. The church will always need to express itself clearly as it guards and promotes its inheritance. But this does not exhaust the meaning of effective teaching. If I have heard the following sentence once, I have heard it a thousand times: "The teaching of the church is clear." Clear, yes. Effective? Persuasive? Compelling? Meaningful? Those are different questions, questions whose importance some church leaders minimize or even fail to recognize -- as I did earlier in my theological life.

Viewed from the perspective of the taught (rather than from the authority of the teacher), teaching is much more a matter of having one's eyes opened to dimensions of reality previously opaque. It is a personal and liberating appropriation, not submission to an authority.

There are many ways of opening eyes other than throwing encyclicals at problems. Witness is surely one of them. For example, the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador have educated us enormously in the faith. Perhaps that is why the church treasures its martyrs: it knows that they are irreplaceable teachers. They say things textbooks cannot say. In this respect John Paul II is most effective as a teacher through his symbolic acts and liturgies and least effective when he explicitly sets out to teach. Somewhat similarly, the Catholic Church will remain a muted prophet if the witness of its own internal life speaks louder than its words -- for example, in the area of fairness and human rights.

I have become more convinced of the imperative of honesty. The distinguished exegete John L. McKenzie recently noted that the Catholic Church is never further from Christ-likeness and the gospel than when it exercises its magisterium. Because McKenzie has not always conquered dyspepsia, it is easy and convenient to write off such a blast as the pouting of a habitual malcontent. That would be a mistake.

McKenzie's immediate concern is what he regards (rightly, I believe) as the injustice of the procedures against Charles Curran. But the matter is much larger than that. It is a question of honesty in magisterial procedures. I do not believe it is the cynicism of advancing age that emboldens me to note this. I think it is genuine love of the church.

Why is it that Rome generally consults only those who already agree with it? Why does Rome appoint as bishops only those who have never publicly questioned Humanae vitae, the celibacy of priests and the ordination of women? Why does a bishop speak on the ordination of women only after retirement? Why are Vatican documents composed in secrecy? Why does the Holy See not at least review its formulations on certain questions that it knows were met with massive dissent and nonreception? The coercive atmosphere established by the Holy See in the past decade provokes such questions about the honesty, and ultimately the credibility, of the teaching office. In my earlier years I would have thought that love of the church requires benign silence on such issues. Now silence appears to me as betrayal.

Finally, I have a new appreciation of the dynamic nature of faith. Because God's great culminating intervention in Jesus must be passed from generation to generation, it is very tempting to identify faith with adherence to the creedal statements that aid such transmission. This is especially true in the West, where reflection on the faith was for centuries eagerly hosted by universities. The Reformation understandably deepened the emphasis on propositional orthodoxy and thus contributed significantly to a one-sided view of faith that has endured even into the present, and especially in the coercive atmosphere of the present.

Actually, faith is a response of the whole person. It is not something that one has once and for all -- like a book on a shelf, a pearl in a drawer, a diploma on a wall or a license in a wallet. It is not merely a practice, a statement or a structure. It is mysteriously both God's gift and our responsibility. We must recover and nourish it daily, in spite of our personal sins and stupidities, and in the face of the world's arrogant self-sufficiency. This task is much more daunting and frightening than propositional purity. It is the continuing personal appropriation of God's self-communication.

I find it ironic that the most radical change of my mind over the years has been a keener grasp of its own inadequacy when dealing with ultimacy.

Toward the Heart of the Matter

Have I changed? I hope so. Changelessness (immutabilitas) would not be a compliment even for God, and the old metaphysics was badly advised when it thought it had to pay this compliment to the divine being. No historical being -- and the God who has come into the world in Jesus of Nazareth has, no less than a human creature, a history -- can become himself or herself without changing. The less fundamental question remains, therefore, How have I changed? On that score good friends and perhaps even candid opponents could give a more precise account than I. After all, who knows him- or herself? I know myself rather poorly, and I of all people am especially eager to learn exactly -- at least on that good old Judgment Day -- "how my mind has changed."

There is, however, a series of unforgettable situations, encounters and experiences that has perceptibly influenced and molded me and without which -- if I am not completely deceived -- I would not be the person I am today. I shall restrict myself here to my "theological existence." It is, to be sure, virtually identical with my daily life. But even in the life of a theologian there is more than what is of public interest. For example, that I have become over the course of time a more or less adequate cook has an explicitly political cause. That fact, however, is unlikely to interest even my guests, provided they don't have to suffer any bad results of my culinary skills. The view, which is gaining more and more currency even in Europe, that everything in the life of a human being is of general interest and, for that reason, is open to public reporting I take to be a dangerous misperception (presumably originating in Calvinism) of the personal dignity of the human being, who is more than what deserves to be published about him or her. Individuum est ineffabile. Thank God.

The event or, more exactly, the chain of events which has moved me more than anything else recently is the collapse of "realized socialism" in the countries of the former East bloc, including my own homeland. I happened to be in the U.S. (for the first time, by the way) when the great 1989 demonstrations in Leipzig took place which finally brought about that "gentle revolution," as a consequence of which the partition of Germany has now come to an end. The careful reporting of the exciting events in distant Europe by the American media and the lively interest of my colleagues there certainly contributed to the fact that, in the middle of Texas and then in Chicago and New York, the time of the building of the Berlin Wall and the even more distant time of my youth in Magdeburg began to speak to me in a new way. I became aware how deeply experiences long ago had left their mark upon me. And so, considerably more than is usually the case in this series, I must return to my beginnings as I attempt to review my theological existence in its identity and in its changes.

In my parental home religion was not discussed, and my desire to study theology met with the concerned astonishment of my mother and the resolute refusal of my father. To be sure, my mother had taught her children to pray, but she feared that the choice of the pastoral vocation would not exactly open up bright prospects for the future in the socialist society of the German Democratic Republic. We lived in Magdeburg on the Elbe, which even though it was conquered by the American troops in 1945 was handed over to the Red Army camped on the other side of the river. And my father had nothing but ridicule for the Christian faith. That I nevertheless held fast to my intention and finally even realized it certainly cannot be explained merely as the adolescent rebellion of a son against his father's authority.

There was, however, one experience that affected me even more deeply than had my experiences at home, and which was decisive for my choice. It continues to shape me even now. That was the discovery of the church as the one place within a Stalinist society where one could speak the truth without being penalized. What a liberating experience in the face of the ideological-political pressure that dominated in school! Friends were arrested, I myself was interrogated more than once -- only because we dared to say what we thought. Immediately before the Workers' Revolt in 1953 I was denounced, together with other young Christians, as an "enemy of the republic" and expelled from school before a full assembly of teachers and students expressly convened on the day before the university entrance exams. Our fellow students were ordered to break off all contact with us. As I left the hall named after the Humboldt brothers -- but dominated by a completely different spirit! -- the upright among my teachers turned away in helpless silence. It was a scene pregnant with symbolism, in which the truth of the Ciceronian maxim (a maxim that had been pounded into us by the very same teachers) suddenly dawned on me: cum tacent, damant ("when they are silent they cry loudest"). In the Christian church, however, one was free to break through the silence and the pressure to lie that was growing stronger all the time. Here one dared to bear witness to the truth of the gospel in such a way that its liberating power could also be experienced in very worldly, very political terms.

If one begins to analyze why "realized socialism" finally failed -- now that the entire system has collapsed like a house of cards -- one should seek the decisive cause in its objective untruthfulness. Although far from espousing antisocialism in principle, I nevertheless cannot shut my eyes to the untruthful way in which the socialist ideals were implemented by a kind of power politics. One can argue about the ideals of socialism. But that also entails the possibility of arguing against them. And precisely this was not allowed.

Hand in hand with the ideological control of thought was a corresponding distrust of every deviation from Marxist dogma and its official interpretation by the Central Committee of the party: a total distrust that necessarily brought about the totalitarian surveillance state. Its hallmark did not consist chiefly in the fact that the dominant political class deceived itself along with the oppressed citizens. Rather, the monopoly on truth claimed by the Communist Party and implemented by governmental force was directed against truth itself, as is every claim to truth implemented by violence. It produced a perversion of thinking to which even the perpetrators had to fall victim. The pressure to deceive oneself along with the public dominated all aspects of the society, even economic decisions. Therefore, it must have been tantamount to a revolution when Mikhail Gorbachev began to demand glasnost. His courage to look reality in the face and to break the ideological taboos remains an act of political greatness, even if -- God forbid -- his politics of perestroika should, in the final analysis, fail.

What does all that have to do with my theological thinking? At least this much is clear: on the basis of these experiences in which I encountered the church as an institution of truth and, for that reason, as an institution of freedom, I decided to become (my father's veto notwithstanding) a theologian, and to this day I have not seriously regretted that decision. When my dear colleagues Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen Moltmann later initiated the project of a "political theology" and developed it with great impact, I insisted on the basis of those experiences that the political relevance of Christian faith consists, from beginning to end, in its ability and obligation to speak the truth. The political activity required of the church aims, above all else, to assist the cause of truth.

At first I pursued more far-reaching proposals in the European context with a certain restraint, because I feared a renewed political interdict (a clericalization of society from the left, so to speak) in any program that would bind all Christians theologically to a particular political course or even elevate "revolution" to a theological principle. On the other hand, the adherents of "political theology" appeared, in my eyes, to be much too abstract when it came to the concrete situations of life. They seemed to feign concreteness by all kinds of activism. At any rate, that's how the issue looked to me at first, at least in the European context. But the significance that "liberation theology" assumed, both in the context of the scandalous social injustice of the so-called Third World and in the context of South African racism, taught me better. The immeasurable shame that I felt as a white person in South African townships has completely persuaded me that the Christian is permitted, indeed commanded, to work against an unjust system, not only with thoughts and words but even with deeds. To be sure, the person of faith must assume individual responsibility for that decision. And in no instance should anyone be coerced theologically to take up violence.

To this day it irritates me that in this regard something like a liberation theology for the oppressed people in the world of "realized socialism" was apparently never considered. Even in the headquarters of the World Council of Churches on the Genevan route de Ferney, where injustice in other parts of the world was so courageously identified by name and resistance movements were energetically supported, one feigned blindness to the conditions in Romania, for example, right up until the end. That is an ecumenical scandal. And one can only hope that this dark shadow will not darken the undeniable achievements of ecumenism.

However much the political realization of Marxism-Leninism in the "socialist brother nations" failed to impress me positively, still the atheism to which Marxist theory and its adherents are committed posed a challenge that continues to engage me. It should give one pause to consider that people in the GDR apparently allowed themselves to be more impressed with the atheistic option of Marxism than with its political and economic form. At any rate, the great number of Germans living on the other side of the Elbe who don't belong to any religious community speaks for itself The encounter with atheism, quite apart from all statistics, has consistently stimulated my thought since the beginning of my teaching career.

Apropos my teaching career: I became a theological teacher literally overnight on account of the building of the Berlin Wall. When Erich Honecker, under orders from Walter Ulbricht, raised the wall, thereby cementing the division of Germany, the seminary students who lived in East Berlin were cut off from their professors who lived in West Berlin. In order to ease the academic emergency, Kurt Scharf, who would later become the bishop of Berlin, appointed me to a teaching position. Just a few weeks before I had received my doctorate in theology. (A few months later police headquarters in East Berlin wanted to take the doctorate away from me.) As a consequence, I was very poorly prepared. Thus I began to burn a lot of midnight oil. Often on the evening before I still didn't know what I would lecture on the next morning (yes, academic nights are long).

The theology that emerged in this fashion would today perhaps be called "contextual." It was contextual insofar as I asked myself how the language about God that the biblical texts empower us to speak can demonstrate its truth in a situation shaped by atheism. It seemed to me too cheap simply to demonize atheism or to unmask it as a pseudo-religion. I felt myself obligated, rather, to understand atheism better than it understands itself, and I tried to go into the heart of the matter. It soon became crystal clear to me that what manifested itself in the Eastern bloc in an extremely intolerant way completely determines the modern and postmodern world in a much more subtle way. Upon closer inspection I realized that not even religion and atheism must be mutually exclusive -- a paradox. The atheistic character of the age seems, therefore, to be something different from the "religionlessness" foretold by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Had not Schleiermacher already commented that "a religion without God can be better than one with God"?

The newly awakened religiosity of the past few years -- in Europe it has to do largely with a vagabond form of religion -- should not, therefore, be celebrated by a hasty apologetics as the overcoming of atheism. On the contrary, I have been and continue to be concerned with discovering a moment of truth in atheism, a moment which is at least as important as that to be found in a theistic metaphysics. Is it merely an accident that the young Christian movement was charged with atheism in its religious environment? Did not the radical negation of the ancient world of gods by the Old Testament prophets and by the Word of the crucified Son of God prepare the ground upon which modern atheism could thrive? Did not Nietzsche recognize, more clearly than many theologians, that the proclamation of the crucified God threatened to become a negation of Deity? The answer to this question is certainly not to be found in the "death-of-God theology" that aroused some interest in the U.S. a quarter of a century ago. But the fact that the expression "death of God" has a Christian origin should give us something to think about. I have thought about it, and I can conceive of the God who overcomes death only in such a way that God himself is nothing other than the unity of life and death on behalf of life. As such he bears the marks of our godlessness within himself: a godlessness the overcoming of which was and is his concern, not ours.

It goes without saying that I resolutely reject any old-style or new-style theological apologetics that denounces atheism as a deficient mode of human existence. What gives us the right to suppose that the atheist is less a human person than the pious Jew or Christian? On the basis of such religious propaganda the proclamation of the justification of the godless can hardly flourish. Whoever wishes to advocate the overcoming of godlessness through God would do much better to take the atheist seriously as a particularly mature specimen of homo humanus.

In my efforts not only to understand the truth of the gospel but also to assume personal responsibility for teaching it, it proved to be an invaluable aid that a friendly providence placed noteworthy teachers of very different orientations in the student's path. As I began to study Kant intensively with Gerhard Stammler and as I familiarized myself with both classical logic and symbolic logic, warnings were being issued about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. At the same time, however, I was being exhorted to study the texts of Heidegger by the New Testament scholar Ernst Fuchs, who put me in touch with his teacher Rudolf Bultmann. In an "illegal" semester spent outside of the GDR -- moving back and forth between Zurich, Basel and Freiburg -- I finally heard the master himself. At the time, Heidegger was "on the way to language" (unterwegs zur Sprache).

Toward the end of his life I had a conversation with Heidegger about the relation between thought and language, and I asked whether it wasn't the destiny of thought to be on the way to God (unterwegs zu Gott). He answered: "God -- that is the most worthy object of thought. But that's where language breaks down."

Admittedly, this was not the impression I had received during that memorable semester. At the time, Gerhard Ebeling in Zürich had introduced me to the thought of Martin Luther, while Karl Barth in Basel was making me familiar with his own thought. Barth's theology, flowing like a broad stream and suffering from an excess of argumentation, didn't exactly give the impression of a language breaking down. At first Barth looked upon me as a sort of spy from the Bultmann school and greeted me with unconcealed skepticism. But when I dared, in an unforgettable meeting of his group, not only to contradict the Basel criticism of Bultmann with a vehemence born of youthful audacity but also proceeded to interpret one section from Barth’s anthropology to his satisfaction, I was invited for a late-night dispute over a bottle of wine. And a few days later the entire Church Dogmatics stood in front of my door with the dedication: "To Eberhard Jungel, on the way into God's beloved eastern zone."

A few years later, when I myself had to offer lectures and seminars in dogmatics and was looking around for some helpful guidance, I immersed myself again in this magnum opus of my teacher. And behold, in the midst of a theological discussion that was increasingly losing all perspective I saw that I had encountered in Barth the thought of someone who truly believed in his subject matter. Barth's theology was autochthonous. From it one could learn that substantive concentration upon the truth to which the Bible bears witness is the best prerequisite for keeping faith in the present world. I gained a new acquaintance with the tradition, in relation to which there was neither a disrespectful criticism nor an uncritical respect. Thereby an ecumenical horizon opened up for me, without which I simply cannot conceive any future theology.

Above all, I was challenged to think about God from the event of his revelation, and that means from the event of his coming into the world: hence, as a God to whom nothing human is foreign and who, in the person of Jesus Christ, has come nearer to humanity than humanity is able to come near to itself. The Augustinian interior intimo meo ("nearer than I am to myself') became something of a hermeneutical key, not only for the correct understanding of God but also for the correct understanding of the human being, whose subjective godlessness is mercifully anticipated by God's objective humanity. In short, in contrast to the sterile Barth-scholasticism that dominated Germany at the time and that had built around the master's dogmatics a Chinese "Great Wall" not to be penetrated, in my case something like a "new frontiers" mentality grew out of my encounter with the person and work of Karl Barth.

It is no wonder, then, that it never occurred to me to settle down in the so-called Barth school. Nor in the Bultmann school either, for that matter. It didn't even occur to me to suppose that the Reformers always had the deeper insight and the most adequate solution to all theological problems. I say this with all due respect for the unusually incisive theology of the Reformers, which has not even yet come to the end of its historical influence. But the truth of theology is richer than that of its schools of thought. That is why to this very day I have steadfastly refused to succumb to the temptation to make disciples of my own. To be sure, students are undoubtedly eager for that sort of thing; and not a few of my listeners have pressured me to orchestrate something like a theological school.

But, according to the measure of my insight, a theological teacher can have "disciples" only in the sense that he teaches them to immerse themselves more thoroughly in the lifelong school of Holy Scripture, in order that there they may find the criteria for the training of their own faculty of judgment. The pastor, by the way, has an analogous task with respect to the congregation. Evangelical (i.e., Protestant) theology is at least in this respect the heir (perhaps even the mother?) of the Enlightenment, because it gives us the courage to use our own understanding as it has been trained by the hearing of God's Word. Only in this way is the consensus of believers in a common confession before God and before the world worth anything at all. In this sense theology must, I am convinced, pursue enlightenment in the light of the gospel -- beyond neoorthodoxy and neorationalism, but also beyond collectivism and individualism. In this way I have tried since 1961 to make theology both appetizing and obligatory to the students entrusted to me: as a theologia viatorum, a "theology of pilgrims," who are "on the way to the heart of the matter" (unterwegs zur Sache) and who must always keep widening the boundaries of their insight. "New frontiers . . ."

When I finally moved from East Berlin to Zürich and then to Tübingen, it was a step forward into new territory -- in a quite different sense, but no less momentous. I vacillated for a long time over whether to accept the invitation of a Swiss university and to leave "realized socialism" for the ostensibly capitalist world of the West. In the end, two conversations, one with Johannes Janicke, bishop of Magdeburg, and the other with Barth, played a crucial role in my decision. Quite independently of one another, they both gave me the same advice for the same reason: in Zürich I would be free of the fixation on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" that was unavoidable in the GDR and the corresponding danger of intellectual paralysis.

In fact, as I sought to orient myself in the colorful, sometimes too colorful, Western world, I noticed how in every respect life behind the iron curtain was in danger of becoming one-dimensional. In body and soul and with every fiber of my being I felt the dreary grayness of that walled-in world beginning to fall away from me. The intense love of truth that had hitherto determined my theological existence was now matched by a passionate love of life.

Perhaps that's the reason why faith in the Creator has increasingly occupied my theological attention. Previously the powerlessness of the crucified one had claimed my thought and challenged me to conceive of the doctrine of God, as much as possible, apart from metaphysics. Now, however, my concern was learning to think about the creative omnipotence in such a way that it proves itself to be divine power precisely in its capacity for powerlessness (even to the point of death on a cross). In direct contrast to the sweeping denunciation of the concepts power, dominion, achievement, etc., which is growing stronger in the Christian churches, it seems to me, rather, that theological clarification of these terms is called for. Neither the being of the Creator nor that of his creation is even conceivable apart from the exercise of dominion and power. I was provoked by the peace movement and the ecological crisis not to forgo the denounced terms but to determine their correct use.

In this regard the impetus my thought had received from Heidegger proved helpful. It became clear to me that the exercise of dominion and power ought not to be for imperial designs of one's own but must be understood as Dominium for the benefit of what exists, for the "saving of the phenomena." Therefore, dominion is only legitimate as dominion over oneself That holds true not only in the interpersonal realm but also in relation to the nonhuman creation. The mandate Dominium terrae given to the human being by the Creator (Gen. 1:26f.) is not obsolete, but its misuse is. Long before it had become fashionable, Heidegger had exposed the metaphysical origins of this misuse. His own "thought about being" (Seinsdenken) already implied something like an ecology at a time when people who would later become ecologists ridiculed him for being a romantic.

My encounter with this thinker, however, has proven to be of enduring significance in many respects, not least of which is that it prevented me from an anthropomonism in the doctrine of creation. I made a mental note of his statement: "Philosophy perishes when it has become anthropology." Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true for theology. We human beings must learn to understand ourselves as relational beings instead of as subjects in the center of things. We must learn to conceive of being as a being-together instead of as substance. Then and only then will the usurped Imperium become once again the Dominium terrae that the Creator entrusted to his creation.

The recognition of the perversion of the Dominium terrae into an anthropomonistic Imperium, visible in the contemporary crises that have been precipitated by the misuse of scientific knowledge, has made me newly aware of a philosophical and theological deficiency: we lack a gradation of evil. I stumbled onto this for the first time as a result of the attempts -- which, to be sure, have hitherto failed -- to locate the place of theology "after Auschwitz," and then again in the face of the political terrorism and the "terror of virtue" that became apparent in it. Even the Christian doctrine of sin seemed to me to be deficient, either in spite of or on account of every imaginable scholasticism regarding sin. It is high time that we expose the common reduction of evil to a mere infringement of the moral law as a trivialization from which evil profits. A gradation of evil, yet to be developed, must certainly proceed from this insight which, to be sure, is given only on the basis of the experience of reconciliation: anything that renders problematic being as a being-together deserves to be called evil. The tendency toward a lack of rationality, beginning in a misuse of the relational richness of life, finds its terrible consummation in death's perfect lack of relationality.

As a countermove, so to speak, to the demand for a gradation of evil, my interest has for some time been directed toward eschatology, which I interpret as the definitive being-together of the Creator with his creation and of the creatures with one another. Is there anything like that, at least in a preliminary way, before the last day? Can we implement in the world earthly analogies to the kingdom of God, at least in a fragmentary way? The answer to this question affects not only my concept of a political ethic but also considerations for a theology of the religions, the necessity of which Wolfhart Pannenberg and Hans Küng have vividly set before me. How can the being-together of the religions succeed when the Christian faith insists that Jesus Christ is the salvation of all people? Can theology and the church disavow that without losing their identity? I admire those of my colleagues who frankly admit that in this respect they have crossed the Rubicon and bid a resolute farewell to Solus Christus as an intolerant claim to absoluteness. But I fear that they have confused the Rubicon with the Halys . . .

Nonetheless, it remains an urgent task to travel the road toward a theology of the religions -- which would have to include atheism among its concerns -- in such a way that the christological particula exclusiva would not be misused in order to make a claim for the absoluteness of Christianity. The trinitarian being of God, which I understand as a community of mutual otherness, could be an incentive to develop models of earthly being-together: vestigia trinitatis, as it were, in which creatures would be enabled to exist in communities of mutual otherness (this could also be relevant for political ethics). To be sure, the kingdom of God wouldn't thereby be brought about. But in spite of that, the earth would be protected from becoming hell.

In a very concrete way I have been presented with the task and the opportunity to help build an earthly community of mutual otherness. Beginning this winter semester I will be a guest professor at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, in addition to keeping my teaching responsibilities in Tübingen (to which belongs, by the way, the office of the dean of the Tübingen Stift, where once Hegel, Schelling, Holderlin and other magnificent minds went to school). This will not simply be a return home -- although it touches me in a homey sort of way that among those who learned something in my classes in Berlin are a few who are counted among the new politicians of the GDR, specifically among the realists (Realpolitiker). Indeed, there waits for me in Halle a new generation. And working together with students who have been raised very differently in what was formerly the GDR certainly poses once again a new frontier in my theological existence. I anticipate that this will be one of the most beautiful redrawings of a border.

Changing the Paradigms

The invitation to write about "how my mind has changed" is at once challenging and troubling. It challenges one to construct a narrative that can capture change that has not only private but also public significance. Yet a woman writer lacks narrative models for recording the public significance of her thought and work. This lack is doubly troubling for the woman writer who is a feminist, because feminism as a movement for transforming patriarchal structures and relations of domination understands change in a quite different way from that of the individualistic biographic tradition presupposed by the question of how one's "mind has changed."

The feminist theologian approaching this question faces an additional dilemma insofar as the religious narrative of the Western introspective confessional tradition grounds identity in culturally "feminine" terms. Women's spiritual autobiography, as Carolyn Heilbrun has observed, does not admit claims to achievement, independence and autonomy or allow for the recognition of one's accomplishments as due to something other than luck or grace. Biographies of outstanding women conforming to the traditional narrative of womanliness or to the spiritual narrative of service cannot tell the stories of women's achievements as paradigmatic but only as exceptions to the rule, made possible by mere chance, inscrutable destiny or divine grace. Therefore, as Heilbrun argues in Writing a Woman's Life, we must reclaim for women an "impulse to power as opposed to the erotic impulse which alone is supposed to impel women. We know, we are without a text and must discover one." She insists, "women need to learn how publicly to declare their right to public power.... Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter."

If a woman who is a feminist theologian is to enter into the public introspective discourse shaping the story of important men in such a way that her insights matter, this discourse must change. This is especially true for public theological discourse, from which Christian women were excluded by law and custom for centuries. How is it possible to alter the discourse centering on male theological authorities in such a fashion that women's intellectual participation in it can matter? The search and struggle for recovering the theological voice of women by changing the discursive frameworks of theology in general and biblical studies in particular has absorbed my own thought and work in the past decade. Yet, as Nancy Miller has observed in a different context, women's quest for our own voices, stories and intellectual powers, for the ability to construct the world and the self in a different way, is fraught with danger. It is vulnerable because it lacks "plausibility" in a culture that defines women's identity and story in terms of love and attraction rather than power, thought and accomplishment.

I wanted to become many things when I was young: a hairdresser like my friend Rita, a poet like Goethe, an architect, a missionary and even a pope. Yet just as in the 1950s I could not imagine typing this article on a word processor, so could I not conceive of a woman as a theological scholar and authority in her own right. Although I fought for and achieved admission as the first woman to take the full program of theological studies that was reserved for priesthood candidates, I could not imagine as my male colleagues did that I could become a theologian like Karl Rahner, Rudolf Bultmann or Rudolf Schnackenburg -- decisively determining theological questions and exegetical discussions. Every time a student comes up to me and asks with whom I studied feminist theology or a younger colleague says she was inspired to become a theologian or biblical scholar after hearing me lecture years ago, I realize how much the situation has changed.

If I were to divide my theological career into periods in terms of "how my mind has changed," these periods would roughly correspond to the past three decades. Although at the time I neither could conceive of myself as a theologian nor was I aware of the intellectual history of women's emancipation, the roots of my feminist theological work nevertheless go back to the 1960s. Recently a request for biographical information led me to look again at my first book on the practice and theology of women's ministries in the church, Der vergessene Partner (The Forgotten Partner), published in 1964. I recalled that the last time I looked at the book, more than ten years ago, I felt embarrassed by the naïveté and piety of the young writer who sought to authorize her insights and proposals by quoting numerous theological, psychological and sociological authorities. This time around I had a different reaction. I marveled at the chutzpah of the young theological student who set out to write a thesis showing that the progressive theology articulated by such giants as Rahner or Yves Congar was inadequate, for it did not do justice to the pastoral praxis of women in the German Roman Catholic Church and in other Christian churches.

According to the publisher, some bishops considered the book too radical because it suggested that women should be involved in the spiritual formation of future priests. Moreover, I argued on theological grounds that women should demand ordination as bishops rather than just as deacons and priests. After this book was published I wrote an exegetical dissertation on priesthood in the New Testament which challenged me to rethink this proposal theologically. I argued (in a paper prepared in the late '60s for a conference held by St. Joan's Alliance) that women's incorporation into hierarchical-patriarchal structures can only lead to further clericalizing of the church -- not to changing it. Since the sponsoring group advocated the ordination of women even to the lowest ranks of the patriarchal hierarchy, it refused to publish the paper.

Although my first book did not question hierarchical structures and theoretical frameworks, it had important methodological implications that I could not have articulated at the time. Anticipating feminist and liberation theologies, it assumed that the experience of women and the praxis of church and ministry should be primary for articulating ecclesiology and spirituality. Most important, though lacking theoretical self-consciousness, I nevertheless acted as a theological subject attempting to rethink theological constructions from the marginal location of a "lay" woman engaged in the study of theology. I became painfully aware of this marginalization when I applied for one of the two doctoral scholarships available for New Testament students. Although I had completed two advanced theological degrees summa cum laude and published a book, my Doktor-vater refused to obtain a scholarship for me, explaining that he did not want to waste the opportunity on a student who as a woman had no future in the academy.

The decade of the '70s was marked by my move to the U.S., the establishment of my teaching career, my experience of ecumenical collaboration and especially my encounter with the women's liberation movement in society, academy and church. Moving to the U.S., I abandoned my goal to integrate my training in New Testament exegesis with my interest in practical theology in a professional teaching career because the religious situation and ecclesial contexts in the U.S. are quite different from those in Germany. Instead I focused on New Testament scholarship, specializing in the interpretation of the Apocalypse. This was a fortuitous change of mind because practical or applied theology is still deemed less scholarly and the field of religious education still regarded as a woman’s domain.

I was fortunate to begin my teaching career with a full-time graduate level position after completing my dissertation in Germany. Writing my first book and absorbing the emerging feminist literature to prepare for its translation into English had sensitized me to academic discrimination, especially against married women. Many institutions still had a written or unwritten nepotism rule that prevented the employment of couples. They also maintained policies that restricted married women to part-time positions. Therefore, I insisted that I would come to the U.S. only if I could obtain a full-time graduate level appointment. When I attended my first meeting of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature in 1971, I saw how unusual such an appointment was. This meeting brought together women members of academic societies in religion to initiate the Women's Caucus: Religious Studies. At this meeting I realized that most of the other married women present did not have full-time positions, even though in the '60s many departments were searching for qualified faculty.

It was most fortunate that I came to this country at a point when the women's movement in religion and the first attempts at articulating feminist theology began to emerge. Together with Carol Christ I became the first co-chair of the Women's Caucus: Religious Studies, which allowed me to get in touch with the ecumenical and intellectual development of this movement. Only later did I become involved with Roman Catholic groups such as the Women's Ordination Conference or the National Assembly of Religious Women, which contacted me because of my position at Notre Dame. Especially important was a sabbatical year at Union Theological Seminary (1974-75) when I participated regularly in the discussions of the New York Feminist Scholars in Religion launched by Carol Christ.

Together with my immersion in an interdenominational and interreligious academic dialogue, this ecumenical feminist discourse was extremely significant for the articulation of my own feminist theological perspective. It allowed me to move away from a certain theological parochialism characteristic of German theology departments and American Catholic universities. To elaborate a feminist theological analysis with women who brought to this discourse quite different religious experiences and institutional analyses proved crucial for articulating the theological paradigm shift in which we were engaged. The roots of the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion which Judith Plaskow and I cofounded ten years later go back to this time.

Yet because of my previous research focus on women in the church and my acquaintance with political theology and critical theory (Francis Schüssler Fiorenza was a student of J. B. Metz and edited an issue of Continuum on Jürgen Habermas during the late '60s), I felt uneasy about two trends within the emerging feminist theological discourse. The first, an anti-intellectual posture, tended to foster gender-typing and assertions of feminine essentialism and did not allow for critical discussion and intellectual differences. Scholarship, research, academic theology, differentiated language, intellectual leadership and disciplined study were termed "male" and therefore rejected. Even today, feminist students will occasionally accuse me of "male scholarship" because my book In Memory of Her is full of footnotes and written in a "logical-linear" style. Although I can understand such a sentiment, given the bad experiences women have had in academic institutions, I could never share this view. It tends to replicate the cultural stereotype that restricts logical thinking and disciplined intellectual work to men and thereby prohibits women from producing knowledge and from defining the world.

A second worrying trend was that feminist theory, though it criticized binary oppositions and asymmetric dualisms, nevertheless tended to sustain such dualisms by conceptualizing patriarchy in terms of gender antagonism and male-female oppression rather than in terms of the complex interstructuring of sexism, racism, class-exploitation and colonialism in women's lives. Since many feminists accepted the premise that biblical religion forms the bedrock of Western patriarchy, feminist studies in religion developed a dualistic strategy with respect to organized religion. Feminist theology was typed as either reformist or revolutionary. This "either-or" option was often expressed theologically with the biblical symbol of "Exodus." Plaskow reflected on this split at the first national Jewish Women's Conference in 1973, delivering a paper titled "The Jewish Feminist: Conflict in Identities." In it she "explored both the sexism of the Jewish tradition" and the contradictions she felt at the time "between Judaism and feminism as alternative communities."

Although I fully shared the trenchant feminist critique of the Christian tradition, I never felt such an irreconcilable contradiction between my Christian and my feminist identity. In my experience some Christian teachings had offered a religious resource for resisting the demands of cultural feminine roles. Moreover, I grew up with the notion that all the baptized are the church and are responsible for its praxis. This ecclesial self-understanding had been theoretically validated during my doctoral studies. At the end of my sabbatical at Union I wrote two articles. One attempted to articulate my own feminist theological perspective as a "critical theology of liberation." The other used insights from the emerging scholarship on the social world of early Christianity to delineate the role of women in the early Christian movement. Both articles contained in embryonic form the major epistemological and theological issues that occupied my thinking in the 1980s. Together with my response at the first Women's Ordination Conference in 1975 they also caused professional-political difficulties after my return as a tenured professor from my sabbatical at Union.

In the past decade, most decisive for me has been not so much a change of mind as a change of academic-geographical location. When I accepted the invitation to join the faculty of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge I had two compelling reasons: Aware of the Vatican's repression and removal of creative theologians in West German universities, I anticipated a similar development in the U.S. I made therefore a conscious decision not to remain in an academic situation where I would have to spend the rest of my career fighting ecclesiastical backlash. More important, EDS would allow me not only to develop my feminist theological interests in the context of the Boston Theological Institute and its rich theological and feminist resources, but also to focus on the theological education of women, since it provided the opportunity of developing a D.Min. program in feminist liberation theology and ministry. My move to Harvard Divinity School enhanced these opportunities. My theoretical explorations must be seen, however, not only in this context of theological education, but also in the context of my increasing involvement in feminist theological dialogue on a national and international level through lectures and workshops.

In the face of a growing religious right-wing backlash against civil rights movements, reactionary Christians and radical feminists alike have advocated a choice: either accept Christian teaching or become liberated and leave the bondage of patriarchal religion behind. This either-or position had political implications insofar as it neglected organized religion as a site for liberation struggles. It raised for me pressing theological questions: How could women reclaim the authority and resources of religion in the struggle to end patriarchal relations of subordination and exploitation? How could we cease to collaborate with our own religious oppression and at the same time claim our Christian birthright? How could we become religious agents and theological subjects in a patriarchal institution built on the silence and denial of women? How could we claim our theological voice and ritual power without being co-opted into becoming honorary churchmen? How could we articulate a different theology and praxis without becoming sectarian?

In order to address these questions I advocated the theological notion of "partial identification" and "spiritual resistance" at the Second Roman Catholic Women's Ordination Conference in 1978. At the same time I was searching for a positive alternative to the Exodus image that could articulate a Christian feminist identity. The biblical symbol of Exodus with its historical roots in American feminism has great currency among feminists in biblical religions. It was dramatized by Mary Daly, theologized by Rosemary Radford Ruether and advocated by liberation theology. Nonetheless, this image tends to engender the illusion that women can move out of the bondage of patriarchy into a "promised land" or feminist "other world." Yet no space exists -- not even in our own minds -- that is a "liberated zone" to which we could move. Whereas some privileged women could move out of patriarchal institutions, most of us could not.

Rather than engage in the illusion of Exodus, feminist theology had to find a symbol that encouraged women in biblical religions to choose how and where to attack the many-headed dragon of patriarchy. Those of us who are privileged in terms of race, class and education, I argued, have to do so in solidarity with those women who must struggle daily against multiple forms of patriarchal oppression and dehumanization in order to survive. Not Exodus but struggle is the common ground for women.

To choose organized religion as a site of struggle for liberation presupposes a sense of ecclesial ownership as well as repentance of complicity with patriarchal religion. Such a feminist strategy needs to abandon both the dualistic conceptualization of women as mere victims of patriarchal religion and the submissive collaboration of women in patriarchal religion and church. Only when women understand ourselves as church and not just as passive bystanders in the church can we reclaim the church as the ekklesia of women.

Ekklesia, the Greek word for church, describes the democratic assembly of full citizens responsible for the welfare of the city-state. To link ekklesia or church with women makes explicit that women are church and always have been church. It asserts that women have shaped biblical religion and have the authority to do so. It insists on the understanding and vision of church as the discipleship of equals. Thus women-church is not to be understood in exclusive, sectarian terms. Rather, it is a hermeneutical feminist perspective and linguistic consciousness-raising tool that seeks to define theologically what church is all about. As a movement it claims the center of biblical religion and refuses to relinquish its inheritance. Such an attempt to displace the feminist theological Exodus alternative requires a concept of patriarchy that can take into account women's different social locations.

Women of color have always insisted that white feminist theory must relinquish its dualistic conceptualization of patriarchy as the supremacy of all men and the equal victimization of all women and develop a feminist analysis that could uncover the interstructuring of sexism, racism, colonialism and class-exploitation in women's lives. They pointed to the invisibility of doubly oppressed women in the dualistic framework of feminist Euro-American theology. The appearance of Susan Moller Okin's study of Western political philosophy, Women in Political Thought, helped me to address theoretically this challenge of "Third World" women by developing a feminist systemic analysis that can distinguish between androcentric dualism and patriarchy. Patriarchy as a sociopolitical graduated male pyramid of systemic dominations and subordinations found its classical articulation in Aristotelian philosophy, which restricts full citizenship to Greek propertied, freeborn, male heads of households. The order of the patriarchal household becomes the model for the order of the state. It excludes freeborn women, slaves and barbarians -- women and men -- from citizenship and public leadership because their "natures" do not make them fit to "rule."

Patriarchy, which in its various mutations has persisted in antiquity and throughout recorded history, I argue, did not originate with Christianity but has been mediated by it. Although patriarchy as a complete sociopolitical system has been modified in the course of history, the classical politics of patriarchal domination has decisively shaped -- and still does so today -- modern Euro-American forms of democracy. At the heart of Western society resides the contradiction between patriarchal structures and democratic aspirations. This contradiction has produced ideological justifications for the political and intellectual exclusion of all but elite propertied men.

Modern civil rights and liberation movements thus can be understood as struggles against patriarchal deformations of democracy. The feminist movement in society and biblical religion prevails at the center of these struggles. Such a political reconceptualization of patriarchy allows one to distinguish between patriarchy and gender dualism, patriarchy and sexism. It helps one to conceptualize women's struggles for "civil rights" in the church and for our theological authority to shape Christian faith and community as an important part of women's liberation struggles around the globe.

This political reconceptualization of patriarchy and women's struggle had three important implications for my work as a biblical scholar. It allowed me to reconceptualize the study of "women in the Bible," by moving from what men have said about women to a feminist historical reconstruction of early Christian origins as well as by articulating a feminist critical process for reading and evaluating androcentric biblical texts. Such a critical feminist reconceptualization challenges the androcentric frameworks of the discipline as a whole.

First: The historical-political analysis of patriarchy and the struggles for democracy provided a reconstructive model that could make the agency and struggles of women historically visible. In Memory of Her does not seek to recover a feminist "golden age" in the beginnings of Christianity. Rather, it attempts to trace and make historically visible the visions and struggles of early Christian women and men in a patriarchal world. It seeks to reconstruct the points of tension between Christian vision and community and the patriarchal Greco-Roman society. It seeks to unmask historically and theologically how and why both the discipleship of equals and the patriarchal male pyramid of subordination have become constitutive of Christian identity throughout the centuries. Such a feminist reconstruction of Christian origins requires a disciplined historical imagination that can make women visible not only as victims but also as agents.

Second: Insofar as the Bible encodes both the "democratic" vision of equality in the Spirit as well as the injunctions to patriarchal submission as the "Word of God," its interpretation must begin with a hermeneutics of suspicion that can unravel the patriarchal politics inscribed in the biblical text. Since the Bible is written in androcentric, grammatically masculine language that can function as generic inclusive or as patriarchal exclusive language, feminist interpretation must develop a hermeneutics of critical evaluation for proclamation that is able to assess theologically whether scriptural texts function to inculcate patriarchal values, or whether they must be read against their linguistic "androcentric grain" in order to set free their liberating vision for today and for the future. Such a feminist hermeneutics of liberation reconceptualizes the understanding of Scripture as nourishing bread rather than as unchanging sacred word engraved in stone.

Third: The development of a feminist reconstructive-historical model as well as of a critical hermeneutics for liberation would not have been possible without the theoretical contributions of feminist historians, literary critics and political philosophers. Yet feminist scholarship, despite the increase of feminist theory in all academic disciplines in the past decade, continues to be marginalized under the heading "woman" as peripheral to biblical and theological discourse. Therefore those of us who sought to initiate a feminist theological paradigm shift in the early 1970s must now concentrate on changing the disciplinary discourses of academic religious scholarship and of Christian theologies. In my SBL presidential address and in my convocation address when beginning my tenure at Harvard Divinity School, I argued that theological disciplines and institutions must explicitly reflect on their rhetorical, public, sociopolitical functions. Only when religious and biblical studies decenter their stance of objectivist positivism and scientific value-detachment and become "engaged" scholarship can feminist and other liberation theologies participate in defining the center of the discipline. Not the posture of value-detachment and apolitical objectivism but the articulation of one's social location, interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks are appropriate in such a rhetorical paradigm of theological studies. In the course of graduate theological education students need to acquire not only methodological but also hermeneutical sophistication fitting to such a rhetorical paradigm.

Whereas in the '70s my "public image" was marked by scholarly bifurcation -- among scholars I was known as an "expert" on the Apocalypse and among women as an emerging feminist theologian -- this perception has changed dramatically in the '80s. While some regret the "ideological deviation" tarnishing my scholarly reputation, many take pride in and draw courage from my theological work. As Dorothy L. Sayers puts it: "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force." It is gratifying not to have been tamed.

Debating Evolution: The God Who Would Intervene

In the days before the Kansas School Board's August decision to strip the teaching of evolution from state science standards, the presidents of the Kansas university system issued a statement. "The simple fact is," they said, "people can believe both in God and in evolution." Lots of Americans believe that they can do just that. Nevertheless, it's not clear how belief in a personal God -- a God who creates and who answers prayers -- is to he aligned with the scientific view of the cosmos as an ancient universe governed by impersonal and tightly knit laws. Debate on how God can work in an evolutionary universe is unlikely to go away, since most scientists reject the notion that God works in the world while nearly all citizens accept it.

There is some common ground among scientists and religious Americans. Forty percent of Americans hold that God "guided" evolution from simpler to more complex life forms over millions of years. Similarly, four out of ten middle-ranking scientists -- a random sample we took from American Men and Women of Science (AMWS) -- also believe that God "guided" evolution. These believing scientists also said in the survey that they can accept a God who answers prayers. This implies a God who intervenes in nature and the world, though we did not probe the God question further. Some of the scientists, however, were obviously concerned about how to put a personal God into the world without disrupting any chains of natural law. One biologist said, "God created the universe and principles of energy and matter, which then guided subsequent evolution," and another asserted that God only created "the conditions that allowed the process to take place."

Only about 5 percent of the natural scientists we polled -- some 4,000 such professionals -- think that God created humans "pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." While rare among scientists, this is the view held by nearly half of all Americans -- a striking figure, considering that fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals make up only a quarter to a third of the population.

To get a further sense of the American debate on evolution, this year we surveyed deans at theological seminaries about their schools' approach to the topic. Seventy percent of academic deans at schools in the Association of Theological Schools responded. (The ATS has 237 members.) We asked them which view of natural history and human origins predominates on their ca pus, and gave them five options:

"Theistic evolution," the belief that God works in and through the evolutionary process; "progressive creation," in which God creates at various points over millions of years; "young earth creation," according to which God created the cosmos within the past 10,000 years; or, a mixture of the first two categories or the latter two. About two-thirds of the deans indicated that their schools adhere to either theistic evolution, progressive creation or a mixture of the two -- all suggesting an ancient universe. Less than a tenth of the schools supported a young-earth stance. Most of the rest of the schools -- about 25 percent -- mix progressive creation and young-earth creation, both having an emphasis on God's intervening acts of special creation.

Catholic schools made up the largest proportion of those at which theistic evolution dominates (50 percent). As recently as 1996 the pope stated that evolution was "more than a hypothesis," as long as one accepts that God intervenes to create the soul. Slightly over a third of the Protestant schools and nearly a fifth of the nondenominational enclaves also were thoroughly evolutionist.

Young-earth creationism dominated at less than a tenth of the Protestant outposts and a fifth of the nondenominational schools. Progressive creation is the dominant view at less than a tenth of Protestant institutions, and barely more of Catholic. Nearly a third of the Catholic schools reported a mix of theistic evolution and progressive creation. Each of the mixed stances, moreover, is established at roughly a quarter of the Protestant and nondenominational schools.

On the basis of this data, we suspect that at one-third of the schools--the ones that are purely evolutionist--students struggle to understand God's creative acts and response to prayers in a material universe that runs according to strict laws. The young-earth schools solve this problem by believing that miracle override nature. The majority of the schools--nearly six in ten--try to combine the view of a material universe driven by natural laws with a God who, in principle, can miraculously intervene.

Overall, nearly seven in ten students (66 percent)--there were about 70,000 enrolled last year--study God and the Bible against the backdrop of belief in an ancient earth and universe. That antiquity for them included evolution--total or in part--of life, a process that nearly all scientists define as purposeless, unguided, random.

In l914 and l933 Bryn Mawr psychology professor James Leuba asked scientists if they believed in "a God in intellectual and affective communication with man. . . a God to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer." Leuba called this an "interventionist God" and explained that he offered this definition because that is the God worshiped in every branch of the Christian religion." He found a low rate of belief among scientists.

We repeated his survey in the 1990s and found similar results. Far fewer scientists than members of the general pubic believe in a personal God. The natural scientists, especially the elite group who are members of the National Association of Scientists, have taken Einstein's advice that a personal God could not intervene in a world of "ordered regularity of all events" and that "religion should give up a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

When we asked the seminary deans about God as defined by Leuba, 92 percent accepted the definition: God is one "to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer." The 8 percent who did not almost certainly have a less interventionist God in mind.

Some of the theologians who accepted his definition of Cod nevertheless expressed ,some caveats. "This comes close to my belief, but does not touch all points," said one. 0thers felt uneasy about the formulation. They felt that these "forced choices" limited the ideas of God. Another said she held "a process theology of God that includes [the] reality of communion," and so, yes, she believes in a God who hears prayers. A Jesuit said the definition of God was "inadequately differentiated to allow for a significant response."

Questions about a personal God evoked saltier protests from the scientists. "This is a lot of damn rot!" one scientist said in response to Alibi's question. Anther told us that the God question is "utter nonsense" because "science presumes a repudiation of the supernatural." This kind of antagonism to religion is typical of those who hold the view that evolution actually disproves God's existence, or at least makes God irrelevant.

Theologians and scientists who do not wish to go this far have proposed two other models: a "separation" model of mutual respect between science and religion and a "dialogue and engagement" approach that says comparing the two fields is valid.

While many theologians like the dialogue model, they say the separation approach is most prevalent. In the separation model, theology and science abide by different rules on different turfs, say different things about life and bespeak "different levels of knowledge." As theologian-physicist Robert Russell of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences said: "Why would physics know if there is God or not? It's just irrelevant." The separation model makes it easy to reconcile God and evolution.

In the recent book Rocks of Ages, evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould promotes the separation model. Echoing the Vatican, Gould says that religion has a magisterium or teaching authority; but so does science. In his view, the two magisteria do not overlap -- he calls this the principle of nonoverlapping magisteria, or NOMA. He quotes Galileo's famous aphorism that theology tells "how to go to heaven" and science tells "how the heavens go."

We asked two more questions of our ATS educators to find out where they stood on the question of separation or dialogue between religion and science. We asked whether their schools offer a course on theology and science (a sign to us that "dialogue" was acceptable), and we asked what was "the most important or appropriate way that theology meets science." Four in ten schools had such a course and more doubtless would have had they not been hindered by financial restraints. Forty-seven percent of Protestant schools had such courses, as did about a third of Roman Catholic and nondenominational schools.

Our survey question about the "most important" way that theology meets science offered three options: theology 1) gives meaning, 2) defends the biblical account of creation or 3) provides ethics. Eight in ten of the theology educators said that "to give meaning and purpose to life in a material universe" was the most significant role for theology.

Fifteen percent of those surveyed said that theology's main role with respect to science is to "support the biblical account of the human creation and fall." Nearly half of those at schools favoring young-earth creation chose this option, as did a fifth of those at schools favoring progressive creation and a third of those at schools that favor both progressive and young-earth creation. Only 5 percent of the theological educators chose the third option: "to put ethical limits on sciences such as biotechnology."

One astronomer responded to our survey by saying that, though he does not believe in a personal God, "I try frequently to open my mind to an influence of what is good, and the subjective and psychological effects of this can be quite profound, such that I am happy to make contact with the religious tradition by saying that I am praying to God." Surely some Americans who believe in "God and evolution" have this sort of God in mind. But to Leuba, as well as to many others, Christian or not, such a God is no God at all. The question remains: Can a God who responds to our faith truly break into the evolutionary universe that science posits? .