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Torture, Terrorism and Theology: The Need for a Universal Ethic

Deciding how to respond to acts of torture and terrorism is one of the critical issues of our time. But sadly, our response is limited by two factors, one ethical and one political.

Ethically, we are in an age in which there is grave doubt among theologians, philosophers, jurists and social scientists as to whether any universal principles exist which can be reliably known and used by the international community to define torture or terrorism as fundamentally wrong. To be sure, many say that terrorism and torture are terrible. But when the question is posed as to whether there are any universal absolutes, or whether there are any intrinsically evil acts, or whether there are cross-cultural values which could be the basis for declaring such practices to be inherently wrong, we find only doubt and skepticism.

One of the greatest intellectual crises of our age, one with enormous practical implications, is the fact that most people simply do not believe that there are any universal principles of right and wrong, or, if there are such principles, that we can know them sufficiently to demand adherence to them. If this is so, then not only terrorism and torture, but every issue of human rights, is up for grabs.

Politically, we are in an age in which the sovereignty of the nation-state is everywhere assumed. We assume that every nation-state will make decisions based upon national interest or national ideology, and that no universal principles exist which can or could compromise national sovereignty. Even people in our churches are often more inclined to form opinions on international matters on the basis of national identity rather than Christian identity, which can never be confined to the boundaries of a nation-state.

Our difficulty in speaking about cross-cultural principles of right and wrong is compounded by the fact that international organizations, from the United Nations to the World Court, are fragile and nearly helpless in many of the most critical areas of conflict. At the same time, given what we know about the tendencies of absolute power to become exploitative and dominating, we are not sure that we want a single world government.

Terrorism and torture have been in the international news now for three generations. Only those who forget the genocides of Armenians in Turkey and minorities in Indonesia believe that such acts occur only in industrial societies. Only those who cannot remember the terrors and tortures of Stalin, Hitler, the Urgun, the Mau-Mau, Idi Amin and Pol Pot think that the phenomena are confined to certain cultural traditions. And only those who deny the reality of terrorism and torture in the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, the shah’s Iran, the Afghan "occupation," the Philippines under Marcos, or the current struggles in Central America, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Beirut attribute terrorism and torture to a single political ideology or economic system.

One thing that is new, however, about recent acts of terrorism is the fact that we find them so horrendous. Much of history did not find them so. Refined techniques of torture were well developed in ancient China and Rome, and among Native American tribes that had no discernible contact with one another. Terror was created in the raids for heads and women in Africa, Assam and Iryan Jaya, the raids for pillage by Vikings, Vandals and Visigoths, and the raids for land by nearly every people from the time of Genghis Khan to the settling of the American frontier to the development of logging companies in contemporary Brazil.

More than one-third of the world’s countries have been cited for using torture as an instrument of policy in the past decade, and at least that many have experienced terrorist actions at the hands of governments or revolutionaries. It appears, then, that terror and torture are both very old and very widespread practices. The fact that we now regard them as terrible is a moral triumph. And yet we don’t seem to know why or how this moral judgment can be justified.

We can, however, identify some of the elements that help to constrain terrorism and torture. Terrorism and torture tend to occur most where governments are not restrained by a democratically authorized constitution, where legal systems have little independence from military control, and where state authorities understand themselves to be the sole guarantors of order, development and stability. Thus, as the Swiss scholar Thorward Lorenzen has pointed out, "there is a higher rate of torture in socialist countries and in countries controlled by a dictatorship or a military regime" than elsewhere (quoted in "Packet one," American Christians for the Abolition of Torture).

We should also note the lessons learned from Patricia Weiss Fagan’s research on human rights in Latin America, conducted in the 1970s. She convincingly argues, among other things, that "where repression is especially severe, where institutions (schools, trade unions, churches, professional associations) have been purged and subject to constant governmental vigilance," little discussion of human rights occurs ("Human Rights in Latin America: Learning from the Literature," Christianity and Crisis [December 24, 1979], pp. 328 ff.). Torture and terror then become instruments of state, used to stifle protest and any attempt to raise questions about hunger, exploitation, economic inequities or lack of participation in decisions affecting the common life. Consciousness of, discussion of, action for and writing about human rights

can only occur where there exists some institutional umbrella that can protect human rights advocates and offer both political and material support for human rights activities: a church . . .; a press sufficiently independent so that it can report information the government would prefer not be made public and that can offer a forum for some opponents of the government; professional associations, academic and intellectual centers which are financially solvent and not directly controlled by military or government officials.

It is important to recognize, in this regard, that it is not simply the existence of a legal system, an educational system, a press or a religious institution that is important. Every complex civilization has these. Rather, it is the existence of a certain universalistic quality in the jurisprudence, the scholarship, the media and the religion that is decisive—a universalistic quality which, precisely because it transcends particular beliefs and practices, can bring the particulars of that situation under critical scrutiny.

Which returns us to the particular crisis of our time: the fact that current ideologies of religious, ethical, cultural and political pluralism do not provide the universalistic principles whereby we can state with clarity and confidence that some things are just plain wrong.

Indeed, modern trends in theology may well contribute to this crisis. In his stunning new book Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1983), Harold J. Berman argues that the roots of modern universalistic principles of law, morality, science and scholarship derive from essentially theological insights which are now in peril of being lost by neglect. In fact, it is quite possible that the theological positions that many today hold dear serve unwittingly to foment the perspectives that allow terrorism and torture to persist and increase.

Contemporary theology tends to be either contextualist or confessionalist, focusing in either case on "our experience." That is, many contemporary theologies tend to believe that we can derive the normative content of faith, truth and justice directly from the immediate contexts of our social, economic and political situations; at the same time, other contemporary theologies have abandoned even trying to argue that theological claims are in any sense normative. All we can do is "express" that which is already in our contexts or "confess" what is already in our hearts and experience. But since our contexts and our confessions differ, all anyone can do is to give theological legitimacy to the particular practices and convictions in which he or she is already involved. We therefore end up legitimating a new religious polytheism and a new social apartheid, and we deny the possibility of a universally valid theology or ethic.

How then can we say that terrorism or torture, or, for that matter, anything, is fundamentally, intrinsically, wrong, and that we ought to intervene to alter it? The answer is: we cannot. If we draw our imperatives from contextual indicatives; if we take our theories from concrete praxis; if our ethics and theology are derived from the contexts in which we find ourselves and from the confessions already present in the world’s faiths; if we reject all universal "abstractions" in favor of concrete experience, then we can expect terrorism and torture to be on the agenda of the future. For it is always possible to argue that contextual indicatives require terrorism and torture; it is always possible to say that praxis demands setting universalistic ethics aside; it is always possible to say that "our" experience overrides any cross-historical or cross-cultural principles. The facts of terrorism and torture are the facts of contextualism and confessionalism raised to the level of violence.

Such reflections, to be sure, run directly contrary to views widely shared by socially engaged, ecumenical Christians. Though many of these Christians are engaged in some of the most committed and exemplary actions for human rights that one can find, there is reason to fear that the present pattern of contextualist and confessionalist thought is unlikely to sustain the promise of those commitments. If we believe that terrorism and torture are, in fact, fundamentally contrary to the truth and justice of God and ought to be stopped everywhere, we must recognize that the theological foundations on which many contemporary contextualist and confessionalist theologies rest are inadequate to this task, whatever their contributions in other areas. Sadly, they do not have the cross-cultural, intellectual or moral amplitude necessary to address these issues.

Is there a way to avoid these perils? I believe that there is. The necessity of dealing with international institutions, with lawmakers who defend total national sovereignty, with an American public that is often fixated on its own context, and with churches preoccupied by their own confessions demands new steps toward a Christian public theology. A public theology is neither "biblical politics"; nor "civil religion." It is an attempt to identify in modes of discourse accessible to the public those first principles of truth and justice that are sufficiently clear as to be adopted as bases for public policy and the ordering of international life.

One of the groups beginning to explore the basis for such a theology is Philadelphia-based American Christians for the Abolition of Torture. ACAT invites pastors, theologians, human rights activists, and those with ties to specific problem areas of the world to join in the attempt to discern the theological foundations of right and wrong and to persuade themselves and others what it is that may be true and just beyond preferences and national interests, beyond our limited contexts and confessions. One critical action today might just be thinking—clarifying the basic theory on which to preach, teach and act for justice.

Several recent studies may give us clues as to how to begin this project. Walter Harrelson’s little book, The Ten Commandments and Human Rights (Fortress, 1980), is one of the most important recent attempts to show how the biblical understanding of human obligation under God gave rise to the principles present in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The failure of modern theology to articulate the importance of such motifs has eroded our understanding of what it takes to maintain freedom. Joseph Allen’s Love and Conflict: A Covenantal Model of Christian Ethics (Abingdon, 1984) connects God’s general covenant with humanity to the specific covenant Christians know in Jesus Christ, and to the particular obligations, duties and rights that have to be worked out in political, economic, personal and ecumenical life.

Kosuke Koyama’s Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai (Orbis, 1985) considers what the Christian appropriation of theonomous first principles might have to do with the cultures and religions of the East. He denies that all things can, or should be, culturally or nationally determined. He also denies both that the biblical grasp of universal moral principles is irrelevant to Eastern cultures, and that the West has a monopoly on those principles. The fact that we are in the midst of an enormous transformation toward a "universal civilization" suggests that only in a new confrontation with localistic, cultural and nationalistic idolatries of all sorts, and only by clariflying what universal realities are worth living and dying for, can we find hope. And A. J. Reichley’s Religion in American Public Life (Brookings, 1985) carefully analyzes the role that theologically based principles, interacting with certain humanistic ones present in philosophy, political theory and jurisprudence, played in the development of democratic government and human rights in America. He argues that we have come to a point where we must recognize that the secular values of egoism and contract and the ideology of contexualism simply cannot sustain crucial aspects of our civilization.

Yet much, if not most, of our intellectual, social and even religious leadership has begun to doubt whether anything theological is of fundamental and universal importance. Without a renewal of a "theistic-humanistic" vision, we are likely to plunge into a new version of the Hobbesian world where all contend against another for advantage, and where might makes right. Thus, the struggles against torture and terrorism require us to recover and recast a genuinely ecumenical and normative public theology, one willing to engage in the patient yet urgent task of identifying, clarifying and defending those universal principles of right and wrong inherent in the Christian understanding of life.

The Theological Challenge of Globalization

Globalization is a term frequently encountered in theological circles these days. It arises from the recognition that the world is shrinking, and that tomorrow's clergy and communities of faith will encounter a new dimension of pluralism. Cross-cultural experiences of a radical kind are increasingly a part of our everyday experience.

Globalization is in this sense a fact. But the term also points to an unrealized project: making our theological perspective large and supple enough truly to comprehend the social and religious pluralism of the globe. I want, then, to identify three distinct dimensions of globalization: the experience of deprovincialization, the fact of internationalization and the search for universality.

Part of the puzzlement and confusion of globalization comes from the shock of deprovincialization. For those who have had little exposure to anything but a specific religious tradition or a denominational faith, or a religionsaturated local or national culture, an introduction to world religions and to cosmopolitan cultures makes certainties less stable. Over the centuries, theological education itself has introduced generations to aspects of tradi tion or biblical history that manifest shifting accents, multiple meanings and constantly. revising patterns of piety and practice. However, modern historical and developmental views, including theories of progress, have allowed historical variety to be absorbed without strain on mind or soul or social imagination.

Today, deprovincialization occurs less often through immersion in classical texts than through immediate ex posure. Islam is on TV, Hinduism is in the religious sec tion at the bookshop, Confucians are members of the PTA. The daughter of a church member marries a Buddhist, a relative converts to Judaism, a lay leader in the church becomes fascinated with the Samurai sense of duty to a corporate unit—which threatens both his sense of the superiority of the Protestant ethic and his job—while his wife signs up for yoga class and his son becomes a Marxist.

Ethnocentrism in faith is simply no longer possible. Those who did not learn from the "comparative religion" or "history of religions" scholars of the past two centuries that non-Christian religions were out there, and

were at least as subtle, coherent and devoutl y held as anything homegrown, and those who did no t learn from World War II and the decolonial period not to identify cultural-linguistic traditions with Christianity, are learn ing from contemporary cross-cultural exposures that many things thought to be unique are in fact quite common.

Each may have a preferred example. Consider this one: Christians might think that the dynamics of grace and faith in human salvation could only be worked out in Christianity—until they learn, for example, about the in tricate, debates between the "cat doctrine" and the "monkey doctrine" in Bhakti Hinduism. The mother cat, wanting to save a kitten under threat, takes it by the scruff of the neck and moves it to a new place; the kitten is helpless by itself, although it trusts. In contrast, the baby monkey, hearing the warning cries of its elders, clings to the mother as she moves, and is thereby graciously saved. In the moment of true enlightenment, both movements occur.

The shock of deprovincialization makes us aware that Christianity is not the only great religion. This realization often ends, in students, with a tenuousness about what they do believe—an insecurity of faith, a doubt about the propriety of having strong convictions about anything, except as a purely personal commitment. The last thing anyone would ever want to do is to impose a view on someone else. Such an effect can bring about a proper modesty. It can also evoke a systematic loss of confidence that produces poor preachers with nothing to say beyond psychobabble or sociojargon. In mass cultures, a "wimp faith" also may evoke a militantly postured confidence—which we sometimes call "fundamentalism."

In scholars, deprovincialization takes a more subtle form. Often it appears in symposia about the relative incapacity of anyone to say much of anything with security about God, since everything we can say is a perspectival construal conditioned decisively by the sociohistorical situation from which one comes—a view that, oddly, always seems to be coupled with a plea to discuss the matter a lot more. Sometimes deprovincializa tion takes the form of inventive explorations of polytheism, with minimal wrestling with pertinent classical traditions. (It is intriguing, for instance, to see how little leading proponents of pluralism have engaged the doctrine of the Trinity, which long ago defined most of the problems of diversity and unity.)

Whatever we may think of these responses, however, the theological community today has come to substantive agreement on this point: isolated ignorance of other faiths is both socially irresponsible and religiously foolish. Max Mueller was surely correct when he said that whoever understands only one religion understands none.

Those who work in theological education are also aware, however, that we must also avoid intellectual or spiritual tourism—the tendency to explore the range and quaintness of the world's wondrous variety without asking about the truth-claims of various cultures, without attempting to discern the relative justice of alternative social practices, or without seeking commonalities that may overarch multiple lands and religions.

Beyond deprovincialization, beyond individual dis covery of and wonder at variety and pluralism, is the fact of internationalization. This term points to the reality that some aspects of modernity have transcended national and cultural boundaries and require a new awareness of interdependency and new levels of commonality—aspects of which are likely to destroy much of the variety we have known and to produce new varieties of cross-cultural and transnational interaction.

Arend Van Leeuwen argued in his greatest work a quarter of a century ago, Christianity in World History, that the sociohistorical forces of technology, urbanization, democracy and human rights, as worldly effects of prophetic Christian presuppositions, were in fact spiritual forces in secular garb, bearing with them deep implications for social transformation. They would shatter all the particular ontocracies of hierarchy and traditionalism in Asia and Africa, as they had begun to do in the West. That would both open the horizon to evangelization and spur the development of a global community.

His views were severely criticized at the time and remained highly controversial for more than two decades; they may well be in need of modulation still. But subse quent developments suggest that he may not have been entirely misguided. As we face the 21st century, not only blue jeans and soft drinks are exported from the West to the exploding cities of the globe; technology is eagerly pursued wherever people can get access to it. By technology I mean not only machines or pills or techniques but the central praxis of modernity—the most consistent and self-consciously methodical way of using contemporary science to alter the natural order so that it will serve human desires and needs. The most remarkable thing about the international embrace of technology is that modern humanity has agreed with Christianity that we have a right, indeed a duty, to change the world—a notion many cultures do not swallow easily.

In South India, where I teach as often as possible, the racks at the front of the bookstores are no longer filled, as they were a scant decade ago, with volumes dedicated to the preservation of village life, or to the intellectual, cultural or social history of South Asia, or to the writings of spiritual and political leaders calling the people to overcome imperialism and colonialism. They are filled with books on technology, computers, management and business.

And in the villages, the rice paddies are plowed while transistor radios next to the field broadcast the changing prices of oil—which influence fertilizer and marketing costs—along with the latest pop music from all over the world. Oxen are still used for plowing, water may have to be carried from the tank, and pujahs are still said at the local shrine, but the oxen are tied with nylon rope, not hemp; the water is carried in plastic, not earthenware or brass, pots; and the donations for pujah are broadcast on a PA system. The young adults are not to be seen; they have gone to the city—to technical school if they are lucky, bright and have family support.

Nor are Indian farmers the only ones to be plunged into this technological, global society. Indiana farmers listen to the weather reports from Asia on transistor radios in their barns. The news shapes their purchase of fertilizer and their marketing also. Their sons and daughters have also left for the city, training to become technicians, computer experts, managers or engineers.

We need not rely only on examples from farming. Most news programs broadcast the changing prices on the stock exchanges of Tokyo and London as well as New York. The gold, bond and financial markets are global and continuous.

As important as such indicators of internalization are, more remarkable developments can be found in other sectors—developments that run entirely against the forecasts of the best minds of several decades. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev has followed his earlier initiatives in reducing nuclear weapons by making two announcements of momentous import: economically, socialism does not work, and politically, democracy is the road to the future.

We do not know whether he will be able to lead the Soviet Union in new directions over the long haul. But it is more than remarkable that world leaders have celebrated his efforts by declaring the end of the cold war, and that both mixed-economy nations everywhere and socialist nations in developing countries are privatizing industry as fast as possible, as well as trying to reclaim democracy. What these and other developments appear to signal is the emergence both of new, interdependent, international structures for every sector of society, and of an international consensus about what the good society might look like in the 21st century—or, to be more modest about it, a temporary vision of what is not likely to work, and a willingness to adopt and adapt at least features of the West's technological, pluralistic, democratic capitalist experiment.

If this is so, internationalization poses the question of whether the United States as a nation has the depth of character to model and to guide what is likely to be, at least for a time, a global Pax Americana.

No civilization can endure for long if it is built on technological prowess, business acumen, political power, military might or, mass-culture artistry only. It may well be that no civilization can exist without those things; but peace cannot be established on these bases alone, and none of these can, by themselves, discern truth or assure justice. The various sectors of society depend, in the long run, on a deeper foundation—a religious orientation. That is what forms the cognitive and emotive skeleton to which the deepest loyalties of the people adhere, and on which institutions depend.

If it is the case that civilizations are, in their roots, dependent on the quality of religion, and if it is the case that America, by the cunning hand of Providence, has been thrust into the leadership of a global civilization, then we should attend to the question of whether the religion that guides us is genuinely universal.

For several reasons, theology in America is not fully prepared to address this question. Many of the structures of American life have been shaped by strands of Chris tianity deriving from the 16th century, a century divided against itself. Not only were "Roman" and "anti-Roman" parts of the church separated, but both sides contained a "protestant element" and a "reformation element. "

The one side is based on protest, on debunking false claims to universality in the name of particularity. This is a marvelous instrument to undercut pretense and expose fraud. It can demystify domination and exploitation. It gets us out from under pharaoh, from feudalisms, from slaveries, from patriarchies, from all the Babylo nian captivities to which nations, empires and human hearts are heir. The tradition of protest, centered in freedom, is a great tradition, now allied, against its earlier intent, with the dynamics of the free market.

But it has a fatal flaw. It knows no other norm. It cannot, finally, order, reconstruct and build. The other side of American theology, and of the Reformation and of Christianity generally, is "form"—the recovery and actualization of a normative vision of eternal truth, justice or righteousness. Here lies the notion of moral law, based in some relatively secure knowledge of how, so far as humans can know these things, God wants things to be. This is the motif in our heritage that forms a covenant for those wandering in the wilderness, after the escape into freedom. This is the element that turns protest into reconstruction. According to Ernst Troeltsch, it transmutes the autonomy won in the struggle against heteronomy into the discipline and restraint of theonomy. According to Paul Tillich, it weds the "Protestant Principle" to "Catholic Substance. "

This element of re-formation is, however, in poor repair today—especially among ecumenically oriented Christians who, in principle, would seem to be the logical custodians of this heritage. This element contains presuppositions about which many have doubts. It contains, for example, the suggestion that, by the grace of God, humans have a serious capacity to recognize in scriptures, traditions or experiences what is universally true or false, just or unjust.

Further, it suggests that we ought, that we have a right and indeed that we have a duty, to draw our own freedom into a disciplined constraint, on a universalist basis even when, or perhaps especially when, we are not constrained to do so by others.

These two sides of our heritage have become split into opposing schools in much of contemporary thought—with one side protesting constrictive rationalisms of all sorts in the name of freedom, and the other resisting all plunges into historicist relativism. But in most serious theology and the best sociology of religion, the mutually rejecting tendencies of Dionysius and Apollo, or of Rousseau and Kant, or of faith and science, are not taken with ultimate seriousness. The deepest orthodox, the widest catholic, the most reformed, and the best New World theology sees not opposition but complementarity in the voluntarist and intellectualist dimensions of life. Today, in America, it will be enough to try to regain a decent balance.

It may be useful to conclude, then, by suggesting some guidelines for theology as we move toward the next, inevitably global, century. Above all, theology will have to engage in a quest for norms beyond freedom and beyond a description of how things are. But even more than that is needed, both for the sake of theology and for salvation of the world. We must ensure that:

1. Our theology is public. Our guiding faith must be based in moral realities beyond private interest and beyond the privileged insights of our unique historical experience. The public which it addresses and for which it speaks cannot be that of particularity alone. If we may draw elements from these, we have to indicate why we do so beyond the fact that they accord with our interests and experience; and the criteria for such assessments have to be open and accessible to those who are not part of the experience and do not benefit from it. "Public" attached to theology means "worldwide" in a normative sense, or it is simply political.

2. To this public, we can make a case for our faith, beyond merely the confession of it. We should not ex pect anyone to take us seriously if we cannot do this. The dogmatic method in theology is very useful in proclaiming the faith to those who already (or almost) believe it; but in a global society, we shall have to take up the apologetic method again. That is, we shall have to make the substantive case for that which we hold to be true in the face of those who really do not know, and cannot quite imagine, what we are talking about—especially if we expect our faith to have some bearing on how we conduct public business. That means that we shall have to enter into philosophical and cultural-linguistic systems other than our own and show in their terms that what we say makes sense, or that that system is in itself confused on its own terms, and that we are prepared to abandon our beliefs if they cannot make sense in other viable systems and hence are not universal in significance.

3. Our faith leads ethically to the formation of inclusive, compassionate communities beyond particular solidarities. Communities, for instance, based on class, cas te and clan exclude any who are not of the "proper" physical condition—economically or genetically or sexually. They are, by definition, not universal, and are structured to resist universal equity and rights. They produce a pluralism, but it is a pluralism of exclusion, not of mutuality and care. Solidarities of interest may have temporary roles to play in some moments of life, but communities of compassion reach beyond them and break barriers that exclude persons from participation in the common life.

If these aspects of religion can be nurtured by theology into the conscience and character of America, it is likely that God—the only real basis of all that is universally true and just—will be served. And if these aspects are vital and alive in our interactions with the peoples of the world, and if we are called to global leadership, as is likely to be the case, we may assume this temporal vocation with fear and trembling, but perhaps also with a touch of grace.

Pannenberg on Marxism: Insights and Generalizations

Over the past three decades Wolfhart Pannenberg has distinguished himself as a theologian of world renown. The German professor came to prominence in America in the late 1960s in part because of his stalwart commitment to the historical nature of Jesus' resurrection as foundational for theology. He was also hailed as an early proponent of the "future" orientation in theology, which offered fresh insights into the understanding of God. Pannenberg, together with other Europeans such as Jargen Moltmann and Johannes Metz, spoke of God as "the power of the future." This attitude earned their views the perhaps somewhat erroneous labels "theology of hope" or "political theology. "

In recent years, however, Pannenberg has voiced caution concerning one of the offspring of European political theology, South America's liberation theology. In his Taylor Lectures at Yale in 1977, for example, he criticized Gustavo Gutierrez's understanding of liberation. His willingness to speak against this movement has not endeared him to some members of the American theological community, who have become increasingly supportive of liberation theology and increasingly willing to use Marxist categories in criticizing social structures. As a result, Pannenberg's reputation as a progressive theological innovator has in many circles faded, or he has been reevaluated as a neo-conservative. This interesting development has led Gary M. Simpson to ask, "Whither Wolfhart Pannenberg? " (Journal of Religion, January 1987).

Pannenberg has recently explained why he has absented himself from the "Marxist Christian project." In his address "Christianity, Marxisn - Liberation Theology," prepared for his United States tour this past spring, Pannenberg declared his strong opposition to Marxism and by implication any theology that appeals to Marxism for philosophical or sociological insight. By analyzing the Marxist system, he offered the philosophical basis for his cautionary stance toward liberation theology-a position prefigured in his discussion of alienation in Anthropology in 7heological Perspective (Westminster, 1985). His criticism did not focus directly on liberation theology itself, but on the philosophical Marxism it employs as a sociological tool.

Pannenberg's opposition to Marxist thought is not surprising, given his own European experience. During his life he has been exposed to various negative features of Marxism-Leninism. He spent his youth in a province of eastern Germany, which at the end of World War II the invading Russian forces made part of Poland. This experience afforded him firsthand knowledge of the Stalinist Marxism exported to post-World War II eastern Europe. His early student years were spent at the Free University of Berlin, established in the western sector of the city when the older city university fell under communist control. He later observed what he considered the institution's ironic shift toward Marxism. More recently, as a professor in Munich, Pannenberg has observed the power tactics of Marxist student groups who have bullied their way into university classrooms and sought to intimidate those professors who refuse to allow them to take over class sessions. As a result of these factors, Pannenberg finds Marxism to be the archenemy of the open, liberal, tolerant society he advocates.

Pannenberg contends that there are two basic reasons why Christians cannot use Marxism as a scientific, sociological tool in the task of understanding the dynamic of oppression in contemporary societies. First, building on the work of the Polish philosopher Adam Schaff and the Swiss theologian Fritz Lieb, Pannenberg; declared that Marxism harbors a flawed understanding of the person, an understanding that is irreconcilable with Christianity. Marxism declares the person to be a function of society. Each individual is the product of social interaction and therefore thoroughly dependent on social context. This idea gives rise to the Marxist rejection of religion. The religious claim that each person is endowed with dignity from his or her relation to God alienates the person from his or her true nature. To the Marxist, therefore, the church's existence testifies to the continuing presence of alienation in the social system, an alienation that ought to vanish after the socialist revolution.

That Pannenberg himself understands the social context's significant role in the development of the person is evidenced in his Anthropology. However, he concluded in his recent lecture that from the perspective of Christian personalism, it is actually the Marxist proposal that results in alienation. By suggesting that the individual is exclusively social, Marx alienates the individual "from the constitutive center of his or her human life, i.e., from God." In so doing Marxism deprives persons of autonomy and human dignity.

Further, the Marxist understanding of human nature views social history as the process of the human species' selfcreation. Christianity sees in this proposal a disastrous attempt to emancipate humanity from divine providence by setting the creation above the Creator. This Marxist proposal is too optimistic concerning human nature, for it fails to recognize the problem of sin as pride.

According to Pannenberg, this atheistic orientation "is not an accidental element in Marxist thought," but is intimately connected with the anthropology underlying its social theory. For this reason one cannot "use Marxist economic descriptions without buying their atheist implications. "

Pannenberg's assertion, of course, runs directly counter to the position of liberation theologians. They claim that they can employ Marxist categories to diagnose their nations' sociopolitical order without giving up their Christian commitment. But Pannenberg points out that Christians who use Marxist categories to appraise contemporary societies must address these difficulties in the Marxist philosophical anthropology. The theologian must always be on guard against unholy alliances with philosophical systems. There are signs that some theologians have already begun this reevaluation. J. Emmette Weir, for example, has cited Juan Luis Segundo's criticism of the social ineffectiveness of the Marxist concept of religion ("The Bible and Marx", Scottish Journal of Theology, August 1982) and has also noted that current exponents of liberation theology have shifted away from dependence on Marx- ("Liberation Theology Comes of Age," Expository Times, October 1986).

Pannenberg's second point, although not as significant theologically and philosophically as the first, is also formidable. He claims that as an economic theory Marxism is an unscientific oversimplification of complex realities. Contrary to Marx's theory, labor is not the only source of economic value, especially in the current technological age. On the basis of this observation, Parmenberg asserts that the question of economic and social justice is far more complex than Marxist categories would indicate. Marxism, therefore, is not an ideologically neutral, analytic instrument, as liberation theologians claim. Nor is it scientific, as its historically false prediction of the demise of the middle class has shown.

In spite of its flaws, Marxism, Pannenberg admits, is undeniably appealing to both Western and Third World intellectuals. He maintains that this is probably so because the system imparts moral value to political involvement in the class struggle. But in the end those who engage in this movement "turn out to be victims of the seductive power of an ideology."

Although he is sharply critical of Marxism and any theology that appeals to Marxist categories, Pannenberg is not unconcerned about social justice in Third World countries. In the closing section of his lecture, he affirmed recent Vatican statements on social justice. He also called for involvement in the struggle against "examples of clear injustice" in the world. He admitted that his proposal appears modest compared with "the quest for justice in the full and complete sense of the word." But in its defense he cited Alasdair MacIntyre's conclusion in After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) that no generally accepted concept of justice is available therefore, "even justice can only be provisional this side of the eschatological fullness of the kingdom of God."

In the question-answer session that followed the lecture, Pannenberg called on Christian theologians to follow the lead of the early church fathers and offer a more creative approach to the task of doing theology in the face of the world's injustices than that found in Marxist-oriented liberation theologies.

Marxism is certainly flawed, and its anthropological foundations are inimical to the Christian world view. At the same time, however, the picture has other aspects-to which Pannenberg did not give full due.

First, he seemed to assume too quickly the virtue of the capitalistic system and one of its foundational presuppositions the goodness of private property-over against the Marxist contention that money is one objectivation of human alienation. He appealed to the teaching of Jesus, who, he suggested, decried the idolization of money, but not its function as a medium of exchange. Although Pannenberg is technically correct, both Jesus' attitude toward money and the relationship between the accumulation of money and exploitation are more complex than he admits. There is no indication that Jesus advocated a Marxist-style elimination of money. Yet the Gospels quite obviously indicate that he thought the monied classes oppressed the poor and ought to put their wealth to good use by giving it to those in need. In this sense, then, Jesus did see the possession of wealth itself as a source of injustice and a sign of alienation (cf. Mark 10: 17-25; Luke 6:20-2 1; Luke 19:1-10).

Second, Pannenberg faults the Marxist historical analysis as unscientific, claiming that it has been disproved by historical events: the middle-class has increased, not dissolved, and the predicted socialist revolutions have not occurred. Yet Pannenberg's assumption that these unfulfilled predictions prove the falsehood of the system oversimplifies a complex historical development. In his lecture he failed to outline the important political, sociological and economic factors that account for this "unexpected" turn of events. The capitalism whose demise Marx predicted has survived in part because it was adequately flexible to adapt to changing conditions: it simply co-opted certain crucial aspects of socialism. This is evident,not only in democratic-socialist European countries such as Sweden but in Germany as well, where the working class shares greatly in the wealth produced in the land. In fact, some mix of capitalism and socialism is found in nearly all industrialized nations.

Finally, Pannenberg's analysis was most suspect when he spoke of the Third World situation. He completely rejected Lenin's contention that the industrialized world was saved from breakdown only by exporting its economic contradictions to overseas colonies and later to an economically dependent Third World. Lenin's theory, in spite of Pannenberg's disclaimer, does have some historical credence. Although colonial rule may have cost the European powers more than they gained economically (as has recently been maintained concerning the British experience), colonialism undoubtably had profound sociological and political effects on the industrialized nations.

In some unfortunate remarks Pannenberg laid the responsibility for poverty and human misery in the Third World at the feet of those countries themselves. He claimed, for example, that the acceptance of foreign credit and the activities of international corporations are dependent on the cooperation of the Third World governments. This naive contention fails to acknowledge the clout wielded by large banks and transnational corporations. In contract negotiations, Third World governments often deal with corporations whose incomes are larger than that nation's gross national product. Ruling oligarchies also play significant roles in international dealings. Rich landowning families with links to both government and the military often insure their own gain at the expense of their country's poorer citizens.

In summary, Pannenberg's critique of Marxism arises out of his largely European experience and his interaction as an academician with the writings of Marx, Lenin and other theoreticians. But despite the limitations of this context,

Pannenberg does offer a much-needed cautionary word to those who may become too quickly and uncritically enamored of a system which has significant flaws that are too often overlooked. The question of how Christians can appropriate Marxism is important to the contemporary church. Pannenberg's views are worthy of consideration by those attempting to deal with this question.

We must acknowledge that economic oppression is a global problem requiring global solutions. One dare not too quickly fault those Christians who, while ministering to the poor, are easily attracted to categories they find helpful in understanding their world context, regardless of those categories' sources. Marxism offers these people hope in the midst of despair, a vision of a better era in the future. The vision the poor receive from Marxism is, in a real sense, biblical; the great prophets longed for a day when all people would share in the fruit of the earth.

The biblical vision of the Kingdom of God, however, lies at the center of the proclamation of the church of God. This vision is rightfully the church's message, and not that of those who would not submit to the sovereign King. For this reason, Christians dare not lose sight of this vision, nor become content with partial victories here and there. Rather, the people of God must be drawn by the vision of God's reign into "the quest for justice in the full and complete sense of the word."

Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Quest for Ultimate Truth

German theology, which has always enjoyed great influence on this side of the Atlantic, has been dominated in the 20th century by Barthian and existentialist approaches. But since the 1960s a quite different project, focusing attention again on the classical quest for ultimate truth in the midst of contemporary, post-Enlightenment culture, has been developing as well. This has come through the work of several theologians, the foremost of whom is Wolfhart Pannenberg. In the 1960s Pannenberg's name was linked to one of the theological fashions of the day, the "theology of hope." But in the intervening decades he has demonstrated that his theological orientation cannot be characterized by a single phrase nor dismissed as a passing fad.

Since the publication of his first essays in the 1950s, Pannenberg's program has become the object of an intense debate spilling beyond the borders of his own country. This debate has afforded him a mixed reception in North America. On the one hand, he has been widely acclaimed as one of the significant theologians of the post-death-of-God era. Nearly every major work in theology written in the past two decades makes at least passing reference to him. And theologians of various persuasions and denominational traditions have accepted some of his emphases. On the other hand, more activist-oriented theologians have written him off as no longer relevant.

Yet Pannenberg must be included among the most creative contemporary thinkers; his program will probably exercise lasting influence on the theological world. As he reaches his 60th birthday this September, Pannenberg's career is entering a crucial phase. He has begun writing his magnum opus, a Systematische Theologie in three volumes. The first installment appeared in German last spring; the other two -are to follow over the next several years. The work delineates his commitment to several highly controversial theological propositions, which form the cutting edge of his work.

First, Pannenberg's central significance lies in his understanding of the nature of theology and the nature of truth to which theology is related. He is attempting to change the course of contemporary theology, to provide a new direction in understanding in order to combat what he perceives to be a widespread privatization of religious belief in general and of theology in particular.

Reminiscent of the classical view, Pannenberg sees theology as a public discipline related to the quest for universal truth. Truth is to be discerned through theological reflection and reconstruction. We must subject theological affirmations to the rigor of critical inquiry into the historical reality on which they are based. Theology must be evaluated on the basis of critical canons, as are the other sciences, which also seek to discover truth. Pannenberg believes that systematic theology should show the Christian faith's truth for all humanity and as it illuminates all human knowledge. As a result, he entertains no difference between apologetics and dogmatics. Thus the unfolding of Christian doctrine in his Systematische Theologie is also a demonstration of his conception of God.

In keeping with this understanding of truth and theology, he criticizes attempts to divide truth into autonomous spheres or to shield the truth in Christian tradition from rational inquiry. This forms the background to his lifelong battle against what he sees as modern Protestant theology's subjectivism. By nature, truth cannot be merely subjective, Pannenberg asserts. Rather, it can only be personal, when it can be claimed at least in principle to be true for all. He boldly maintains that theological assertions are not grasped merely by some blind "decision of faith." Faith is not a way of knowing in addition to reason, he declares, but is grounded in public, historical knowledge. For this reason. theology cannot be private and sheltered.

This aspect of Pannenberg's understanding of truth is balanced by another. In contrast to the classical tradition, he declares that truth is not found in the unchanging essences lying behind the flow of time, but is essentially historical and ultimately eschatological. Until the eschaton, truth will remain provisional and truth claims contestable. Therefore, theology. like all human knowledge, is provisional. It simply cannot pack into formulas the truth of God. The future alone is the focal point of ultimate truth. As a result. all dogmatic statements are hypotheses to be tested for coherence with other knowledge. This, he claims, is in accordance with the Scriptures, which declare that only at the end of history is the deity of God unquestionably open to all-an event. however, that is anticipated in the present.

A second contribution Parmenberg has made to theology lies in the implications he draws from his well-known understanding of God as the power that determines everything. Pannenberg asserts that the deity of God is connected to God's demonstration of lordship over creation. This means that the idea of God. if it corresponds to an actual reality, must be able to illumine not only human existence, but also experience of the world as a whole.

The reality of God remains an open question in the contemporary world, and Parmenberg takes this into his theological understanding. Even the contestability of the divine reality must be grounded in God, he maintains. In perceiving theology as a science, Pannenberg suggests that if God is ultimate truth, then the God hypothesis -- the claim that God is the unity of all reality -- must include within itself the current debate over God's existence. This also places God as the all-inclusive object of theology. Even though Christian dogmatics moves beyond the doctrine of God to include anthropology, creation, Christology, ecclesiology, etc., these belong to that one overarching topic, Pannenberg declares.

This understanding of God is evident in Pannenberg's link between the immanent Trinitv (God's eternal essence) and the economic Trinity (God as active in salvation history). His link arises from a thesis foundational to his development of Christian doctrine: all systematic theology is but the explication of what is implicit in God's own self-disclosure. On the basis of revelation, Pannenberg claims that the Trinity must be treated first, before discussing the unity of God found in the divine attributes. In this way, the doctrine of God is grounded in the divine economy, and the understanding of the immanent Trinity flows from the economic Trinity. Crucial to Pannenberg's development of this theme is ,his concept of self-differentiation. All three Trinitarian persons are mutually dependent on the others, he asserts. Here he offers an alternative to the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, which he finds detrimental to traditional theology. He perceives this mutual dependency in the process of salvation history and believes full revelation of God's unity will come with the eschatological completion of the divine plan for the world.

Panneberg also makes a significant contribution to anthropology. He proposes that humanity is in a certain sense naturally religious, for the structure of the individual human person and of corporate human life is pervaded by religion.,This is consistent with his view that one can expect to find the mark of the Creator in creation. As created by God, human destiny is to exist in the image of God, a destiny visible in human "openness to the world." This thesis is widely known. Less familiar are two further aspects developed in his systematic theology: his understanding of the intuition of the infinite and his view of religion as the struggle for truth.

Pannenberg's understanding of humanity's basic religious nature builds from Schleiermacher's early thought and from a reinterpretation of Descartes's concept of the infinite. In the background, however, are medieval discussions about what is first known, albeit dimly, to the human mind. Two contemporary concepts illuminate this question. The first is "exocentricism" as employed by 20th-century philosophical anthropology -- one must ground one's identity outside oneself -- but for which Pannenberg finds a foundation in Luther's understanding of faith. The other is Erik Erikson's idea of "basic trust."

Religious awareness, Pannenberg explains, arises out of the rudimentary consciousness of the difference between "I" and "world" found already in the act of trust, which is then augmented by one's presence in a family. As one experiences finitude and temporality in everyday life, an intuition of the infinite develops.

To this notion Pannenberg adds an innovative thesis. Intuition of the infinite does not itself constitute knowledge of God. Rather, gaining explicit knowledge from religious traditions allows one to reflect on the earlier immediate experience and to conclude that therein lay an "unthematized knowledge" of God. In other words, one can conclude that this basic intuition of the infinite relates to the theme of God only by reflecting on the process of religious history.

In this way Pannenberg connects this basic religious phenomenon to the experience of God found in religions, which become aware of the Godhead's activity and essence through the works of creation. As a result Pannenberg views the rivalry of religions as the location of the revelation of truth. Revelation occurs only as God gives Godself to be known, Pannenberg asserts with Barth. But the focal point of this revelation is the historical process. For Pannenberg this history is the history of religions. On the world-historical stage, conflicting truth claims, which are at their core religious, struggle for supremacy. The religion that best illumines all reality will in the end prevail and thereby demonstrate its truth value.

A fifth, significant area is Pannenberg's pneumatology. He rejects the prevalent tendency to reduce the Spirit's role to that of providing explanations for situations in which rational suggestions fail. In its stead, he promotes a much broader and more biblical doctrine that emphasizes the Spirit's all-pervasive, creative presence in creation and human life, climaxing in the new life of the believer. Pannenberg understands spirit as "field," a conception somewhat like the field theory introduced in 19thcentury science, which describes the interaction of material bodies in terms of interlocking networks called forces (e.g., magnetic fields).

This new pneumatology is evident in Pannenberg's doctrine of God. In agreement with the atheistic criticism of Feuerbach and others, he rejects as a mere projection the classical understanding of God as reason and will. The divine essence, Pannenberg maintains, may be better described in terms of the incomprehensible field or spirit, which likewise comes forth as the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

This same Spirit functions as the principle of the immanence of God in creation and the participation of creation in the divine life. Pannenberg relates the Christian affirmation of the Spirit as the source of life in creation to the biological discovery that life is essentially ecstatic. Every organism lives in an environment that nurtures it. And every organism is oriented by its own drives to move beyond its immediate environment toward the future of itself and its species. This is how creatures participate, in God through the Spirit, he asserts. The Spirit may be understood as the environmental network or, "field" in which and from which creatures live. The Spirit is also the "force" that lifts them above their environment and orients them toward the future. This work of the Spirit ultimately leads people to self-transcendence and forms the basis for the special life in Christ, found beyond oneself in the church.

Christology offers the context for another aspect of Pannenberg's theology. Well known is his emphasis on Jesus as the prolepsis of God's self-disclosure, which ultimately lies at the end of history., Equally familiar is the centrality of the resurrection for Pannenberg's Christology and his emphasis on the historicity of this event. The resurrection of Jesus is God's confirmation of Jesus' appearance and mission. Through it he experienced in the midst of history that eschatological transformation to which humanity is destined.

Not as well known, however, are two other aspects of Pannenberg's systematic-theological Christology that differ from. the approach taken in Jesus: God and Man (Westminster, 1977). That monograph presupposed the reality of God and unfolded solely in terms of a Christology "from below," focusing on Jesus' humanity. Pannenberg finds this approach insufficient for Christology pursued in a systematic-theological context. Assertions concerning God can never be derived from anthropology alone, but must also proceed from the idea of God. Therefore, he proposes that Christology be developed from a specifically Christian anthropology, undertaken with an awareness of the doctrine of God.

Pannenberg's other christological innovation is his reintroduction of the concept of logos, which in Jesus: God and Man he replaced with the idea of revelation as the point of departure for Christology. In the doctrine of creation he forges a link between the logos and the scientific concept of information. This link provides the logos the cosmological function he finds necessary for its use in Christology. He does not relate the logos to traditional physics, which abstracts laws from time. Rather, Pannenberg understands the logos as representing the order of the world as history. Jesus is the logos not as some cosmic abstract principle, but in his human life as Israel's Messiah and as the one who brings the proper relationship of the creature to the Creator.

Pannenberg would replace the traditional Protestant focus on guilt and forgiveness with a sacramental spirituality. This view is the outworking of his understanding of the church as the sign of the future kingdom of God. It serves the ecumenism toward which Pannenberg's theology is directed and which he sees as integral to the hope of humanity in general.

The linchpin of Pannenberg's proposal for an ecumenical sacramental spirituality lies in baptism, for in this rite the believer's identity and existence extra se in Christ are signified and grounded. Yet the central expression of this spirituality is found in the celebration of the Eucharist, which he sees as the proleptic sign of the future fellowship in the kingdom of God, which no political order can fulfill.

Pannenberg's ecumenical theology of the Eucharist seeks to include the concerns of all major Christian traditions. Integral to it are both an emphasis on the real presence of the risen Lord, reflecting the concern of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions, and on widening the rite beyond the elements themselves to encompass the entire celebration and the Spirit's crucial role in it, in keeping with the Orthodox and Reformed positions. He likewise advocates understanding the role of clergy as representing the unity of the church. All of this is directed to overcoming the major stumbling blocks to church unity. Unity is crucial, Pannenberg maintains, if the church is to exercise a positive influence in secular society.

The final contribution of Pannenberg's program is its eschatological orientation, for his entire systematic theology focuses on the eschaton, and thereby on hope. He understands the kingdom of God as the glory of the Trinity demonstrated in God's rulership over creation. He does not view it in terms of an ethical community, as does much of 19th-century theology, but in accordance with the exe2etical discoveries of the 20th century, which find the source of this term in the apocalyptic movement and the teachings of Jesus. The biblical message of the kingdom is eschatological in orientation, for it proclaims God's ultimate lordship over creation, which lordship has already broken into history in the appearance of Jesus. En route to the eschaton, the Christian community lives in hopeful expectation of the final consummation of the lordship of God over the entire world. Only then will the glory and reality of the triune God be fully demonstrated.

This theme of hope, like the other aspects of Pannenberg's theology, leads back to the center of his theology. As a public discipline. theology's purpose is to give a "rational account of the truth of faith," as Pannenberg stated in his essay "Faith and Reason" (Basic Questions in Theology, Volume 11 [Fortress, 197 11, pp. 52-53). Being oriented to a "rational accounting" is foundational to the mandate of the church itself, as he understands it. As a people of hope whose eyes are directed to the eschatological consummation in the kingdom of God, the Christian community dare not retreat into a privatized ghetto of individual or familial piety. Rather, it is called to remain in the world, where the struggle for truth occurs, and there to engage in the theological task. This is Pannenberg's calling.

In the future as in the past, Pannenberg's program will no doubt be criticized from all directions of the theological spectrum. Some may continue to charge him with being a fundamentalist, a rationalist, a Hegelian, a liberal, or whatever else epitomizes their own greatest theological opponent. To dismiss him, however, would be a disservice. Pannenberg has never wandered from his commitment to the fundamental orientation of the theological task as he sees it, one that enjoys a long, prestigious heritage. His thought represents a significant contemporary expression of the classical understanding of theology as the reasonable demonstration of the Christian truth-claim and the Christian conception of God. As such, it entails both in its entirety and in its various parts an important challenge to theology today.

Worship’s Focus: Seeking the Face of God

Recently I received another invitation to attend a "worship experience" at a nearby church. Now, I have nothing against a worship experience, for I have had some of my most powerful, most moving, most transforming experiences in the midst of Christian worship. Nonetheless, I am dismayed by the popular phrase "worship experience" to describe the church’s corporate worship. Worship has the capacity to transform us, because it focuses our hearts and minds on God -- God seen in one another, in ourselves and in the world around us. However, the phrase "worship experience" suggests that worship is important because it induces feelings. In this context worship is focused more on the worshiper than on the One worshiped.

I have various sorts of experiences as I worship, but I would be mistaken to call many of them worshipful. Some days I resent the mumbling couple in the pew before me. Occasionally I’m annoyed by a fly buzzing slowly past me (and I’m reminded of a line from a hymn my grandfather claimed to have sung: "There may be flies on you and me, but there ain’t no flies on Jesus") Once in a while I feel twinges of boredom as the sermon wears on, or pangs of regret as my mind wanders back to the letters I meant to write the past week. Sometimes I get downright crusty about the predominance of mediocrity in much of the church’s worship -- a flaky prayer, an inaudible lection, a tacky anthem.

In my least sanguine moments, I think that the primary purpose of worship is to force us to be patient with one another, to practice the Christian virtues among our fellow believers. Fortunately, people do attempt to practice these virtues -- or our "worship experience" might become a "brawl experience." In the midst of worship we experience the ambivalence of Christian community: its joy and its agony.

Worship often evokes good experiences for us which, though good and pleasing in themselves, are still not worshipful. We may be overwhelmed by the beauty of the organ music. We may adore the children’s choir. We might chuckle over the pastor’s jokes. We may even get teary-eyed during the anthem. Yet none of these perfectly commendable occurrences can appropriately be called worshipful experiences.

We need to ask ourselves what a true worship experience is so that if we had one, we could recognize it. Certainly we can’t define such an experience simply by means of a particular sensation. With only that, we might confuse the effects of an antihistamine tablet with the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Part of our problem with worship is that we ask for a particular experience to designate as the "worship experience." In The Abolition of Man (Macmillan, 1978) , C. S. Lewis points to a similar confusion in modern aesthetics. He says that insofar as the aesthetic judgment "this is sublime" can be reduced to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, it must be translated "I have humble feelings." Lewis argues that to equate "this is sublime" with "I have sublime feelings" is incorrect reasoning. In other words, the emotions that prompt a certain judgment and the judgment itself are almost opposites.

Therefore it is wrong to suppose that worshipfulness comes from an experience that we might isolate as a "worship experience." Instead, a sense of worshipfulness goes together with a range of feelings, including humility, wonder, awe, mystery, joy, peace, contentment, fellowship. People discover the possibility of having worshipful experiences only when they forget about their own experience altogether. For we are the most worshipful when we are the least conscious of the worship itself. Good worship is self-effacing; instead of calling attention to itself, it serves as a channel, a vehicle, through which we see ourselves and God more clearly. Worship should be like the icons of the Orthodox Church. These are intended not as objects of worship but as images and transparencies that direct and focus the worshiper’s attention on God. Like the icon, worship should point to a reality beyond itself.

This is not to say that aesthetic considerations are inappropriate to worship -- by no means. In worship God comes to us in, with and through the beautiful and festive dance we call the liturgy. But this great choreography must be shaped by faithfulness to God rather than by the subjectivity of the worshiper.

Only then can we hope to know those wonderful grace-filled moments; times when through prayer and song, listening to and reciting the familiar words of grace and the stories of redemption, our hearts soar; times when we are caught up in the stream of love -- when we sing praise to God with all our hearts and minds and souls and strength -- which flows from us to God through the ministry of Christ and his people and which we return to God with prayer and praise.

The current phrase ‘worship experience" merely serves to confuse us. Those who worship with the expectation that the act ought to generate certain experiences for them will undoubtedly have many experiences. But they will probably not be the sorts of experiences that Christian worship offers to those who seek only the face of God through song and prayer, preaching and sacrament. Liturgists can generate many powerful experiences, but when experience is the aim, this becomes cheap theater at best and manipulation at worst. Both are repulsive substitutes for an encounter with the power of the living God.

Disciplined by Theology: A Profile of Paul Holmer

Last year Yale Divinity School bid farewell to a teacher whose intellect and character shaped generations of students who sat for his lectures, sermons and seminars. Paul Leroy Holmer retired from a teaching career that spanned 40 years, a career that left its mark upon pastors, philosophers, seminaries and churches across the land.

In the course of his life as a teacher of philosophical theology, Holmer has been ' mistaken for many things. He has been labeled a reactionary by some, an antiintellectual bent on undermining the scholarly enterprise by others, and to still others he is a brooding, stubborn, unimaginative thinker.

Holmer's influence is also difficult to locate, perhaps because its weight has been felt more through his teaching than through his writing and more through the strength of his personality than through his authorship. However, the breadth and depth of Holmer's influence as teacher and colleague is evident in a newly released festschrift titled The Grammar of the Heart edited by Richard Bell, (Harper & Row). It features a diverse group of scholars, including Welsh philosopher D. Z. Phillips, the brilliant young Cambridge theologian Rowan Williams and liturgist and theologian Don Saliers. This collection only hints at the extent of the teacher's influence. Many of his colleagues, including Brevard Childs, whose work in Old Testament studies has helped, chart a new agenda for biblical studies in this country, and George Lindbeck, whose seminal work in theological methodology has attracted so much attention recently, owe a debt to Holmer.

The distinctiveness of Holmer's legacy lies in a sustained Kierkegaardian critique of contemporary religiosity which takes both theological and ecclesiastical establishments within its purview. At the same time he has labored to overcome contemporary suspicion of Christian beliefs created by modem scientific and philosophical conundrums. I had the opportunity recently to speak with him about his career and his perspective on theological education.

Holmer grew up in Minneapolis, the son of Swedish immigrants, steeped in the Swedish Covenant tradition of Lutheran pietism. As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota he studied with David Swenson, one of the first Americans to take an interest in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard. Swenson was at work on the first English translation of The Concluding Unscientific Postscript and seems to have taken special interest in his young student. He met with Holmer each Saturday morning for over a year to discuss the collected works of Nietzsche. At the end of the study Swenson handed Holmer a mimeographed copy of his translation of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. The clarity and precision Kierkegaard brought to Christian reflection made a deep and lifelong impression.

Holmer earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale with a dissertation devoted to Kierkegaard which was, he said in the preface, "unabashedly Swensonian. " Returning to teach at Minnesota, he divided his time between Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter and the University of Minnesota. Among those studying at Gustavus around that time were Lindbeck, who went on to hold the Pitkin chair of historical theology at Yale, and Sydney Ahlstrom, the great American church historian. In 1954 Holmer became full professor at the University of Minnesota's department of philosophy. He remained there until 1958 when he accepted part-time appointments at Dartmouth and Yale. Yale offered him a full-time position in the fall of 1960.

Yale Divinity School was an imposing intellectual environment when Holmer arrived in 1960. It was shaped by the presence of Kenneth Scott Latourette, H. Richard Niebuhr and Robert Lowry Calhoun. Yale was known as a place that earnestly attempted to understand and remain faithful to the history of the church and its theological traditions. "As I understood it through the years," Holmer reflects, "the lovely thing about Yale was that, through a previous generation of thinkers, Niebuhr, Calhoun, Latourette and others, it did take the history of the church and of theology with great seriousness. The aim was to discipline everybody by that, And that Yale tradition was something I fit into very easily when I first came there."

The disciplining effect of the theological tradition upon the individual has remained a central element of Holmer's teaching. He has always rejected the many attempts to make theology address special interests, and as a result has been something of a gadfly on the current theological scene. Christianity, as he understands it, is not a platform from which to push our favorite causes. Theology is a means of extending the gospel's claim upon us, and at its best helps us understand the shape God wants to give our lives. "The task for me has been to transform the individual and make the individual able to believe in the tradition. And so instead of theology being a set of -conceptual accommodations [to special interests] it looked to me as if theology should have a disciplining effect on the individual . . . to make belief in God, judgments and confidence in one's own self plausible through old-fashioned things like repentance, faith, hope, love.

Holmer has been suspicious of contemporary models of theology which seem to depend heavily upon distinctions between theory and practice and between intellect and emotion. Too often Christianity has been treated as a theory which theologians refine and which some of them choose to practice. One of the hallmarks of his teaching career has been his ability to plot the connections between "understanding" and "practice." Christianity should not be "understood" apart from the believer's capacity for "repentance," "'hope" and "despair."

Emotions, therefore, play an important part in the process of understanding Christianity. Sometimes, Holmer reminds us, the exercise of an emotion is the best display of understanding possible. A child who doesn't fear the flame has failed to understand fire. The person who knows joy and awe in God's presence is beginning to grasp the concept of "God," whereas the person who talks glibly about God without awe, fear or joy has failed to grasp something basic. Theology thus makes demands upon those who practice it. It is an imposing body of teachings and practices which shapes the pattern of our emotions, our actions, our desires and our thoughts. This vision of theology flies in the face of contemporary views which encourage each and every believer to "develop a theology" and which applauds the constant emergence of new theologies. According to Holmer it is not so much new words that we need in order to know God, but hearts and minds devoted and obedient to God's will. Theology, in Holmer's understanding, has a therapeutic task. It helps us clean up and rid ourselves of obstacles to understanding and belief. More often than not these obstacles are to be found in the individual rather than out in the world. The problem is not that the world is unsuited to Christian belief, but that we are unprepared to receive the word being offered.

As a teacher Holmer was alert to the danger of theology becoming an academic technique in his students, and he called their attention to the problem both indirectly and bluntly. When one particularly bright student had finished reading a paper filled with a long and aimless series of distinctions, Holmer turned to him and said, "You've got all the makings of a scholastic." A student who submitted a book-length paper that was impressively erudite received a short response from his teacher: "So what?" Another comment Holmer liked to make by way of keeping his students focused theologically was, "Think small, don't think big!" Don't suppose that an issue is important just because it looks big in the academic arena. Ideas are not important because they are big, Holmer reminded his students. Ideas become important when they have a context in our fives, our, cares and passions, our longings and hopes. Holmer never allowed his students to assume that they could have the words of faith without the religious life. "The religious life is the only foundation for having theological convictions; otherwise it's all puffery. I don't even want to draw a distinction between theory and practice. Because this is one area where those distinctions don't hold. But the declaration of that oneness is hard to do. You do it moment to moment. Having the practice devoid of the beliefs is responsible for a certain superficiality in church life. It turns it into a social context only. But then having the other, the religious convictions and beliefs without the religious life --that's contrary to the Scriptures. You can't have a separation like that."

Holmer's unwillingness to separate-the gospel teachings from the life of faith results-in a critical perspective on church and seminary. "My teeth have been put on edge both in the church and in the seminaries. And they've stayed on edge.," His interest clearly cuts across the kind 'of divisions which are standardized in seminary curricula. There theology stands on one side and preaching on the I other, "as if preaching is something independent of theology and as if preaching is optional and only certain people do that, whereas I would think that having the words of faith on your lips is one of the ways to be a Christian. There's something artificial about the contemporary seminary's rubrics. Letting the rubrics construe the teachings is really baleful. The more deeply you get into the subject- the less, the rubrics fit."

While on the faculty at Yale Holmer consistently made contact with local churches. In preaching and teaching Sunday !school he, has, distinguished himself as an academic who can make sense to church people and make sense of church, people. He has given unfailing support to the local church, and never ceased to elevate the ' role and significahce of the parish ministry. When planning to visit. some distant part of the country, Holmer often dropped local pastors a postcard letting them know of his willingness to preach.

Familiarity with the local church has also given him a critical perspective on the church. Holmer noticed early on that theology and the church didn't always support one another. In the '40s, '50s and '60s, theology became a university subject, increasingly. divorced from church life, Holmer says his interest lay in attempting to close the gap between theology and the churches that had other reasons for expanding and being socially viable.

The church’s claim on people still seems, in many instances, to be independent of theology. "Part of my interest has been to get more God-centered religion in the churches," Holmer explains. "That's what I need myself and that's what I seek when I go there. The fact is that you don't often find it and that the church has become an institution with its own vitality independent of that teaching tradition.... A lot of times the religion of the New Testament doesn't get articulated out there. It's a genial, natural religiosity of some genial, natural religiosity of some sort –communal felling."

Holmer's contact with pastors in the thick of parish work yields useful insights into the difficulties and pitfalls of work in the church. The challenge for parish ministers is to keep clarifying the task for themselves: "What is this congregation all about? Why do we do this every Sunday? Pulling us back to that awareness, of ourselves as sinners in need of, God-that's . the task. Once you see that, then you don't have to educate everybody.

"Part of the difficulty of ministry in the church is that we so easily lose sight of the theological basis of the task and begin to respond to the unfocused demands of the institution. Every profession receives its focus from some diagnostic facts ' of the human condition [for example, illness necessitates ' doctors and ignorance necessitates teachers]. All human beings are not in synchronization with God and the name for that diagnostic fact is sin. Now one doesn't have to parade the concept "sin" there., any more than you have to tell everybody that they're ignorant in order to teach. But the clergy ought to keep the diagnostic fact clear before themselves: there's something like an ill health of the human spirit, here."

Theology, for Holmer,.has involved mediating the abiding truths of the gospel and the particular issues of the present age. "You have to have some kind of grip on what the -gospel is and what it says, and that's something like getting the content of the New Testament and the preaching tradition in hand.... The second thing would be to understand the audience and the present age that informs people. . . . And therefore I would have to know people and to know them exceedingly well in order to address them with that gospel. Theology is a name for some kind of formal learning that would mediate between the contemporaries and that tradition, that gospel.

Mediating between the contemporary situation and the gospel did not mean, for Holmer, that the gospel was not often a "very disturbing thing," to use Luther's expression.

In the blush of the human potential movement, Holmer was invited to speak to a gathering of pastors in California. Much to the dismay of his listeners, he announced that "deep down we're very superficial. " On another occasion Holmer angered his California audience by exalting chastity, condemning adultery and quoting Plato to support his case. People achieve their integrity, he insists, not by some inner life they hide from their neighbors, but precisely through the commitments and responsibilities they accept for their lives and for the lives of others.

Holmer addressed a generation of students whose confidence in the meaningfulness of the Christian faith had been undermined by intellectual criticism. His own experience as an undergraduate in the heyday of logical positivism raised serious questions about the possibility of the meaningfulness of moral and religious language. The positivists espoused the philosophical doctrine that sense perceptions are the only admissible basis of human knowledge and precise thought. To them, religious claims looked muddleheaded and indefensible "The kind of student that I myself was, the kind of students that I have addressed best through the years, were students who have had the confidence in the meaningfulness of Christianity vitiated by intellectual criticism.. The intellectual criticism of our time that bothered me . . . was logical positivism and popular forms of positivism that said that science was the only form of knowing." Coupled with popular positivism was Freudianism, behaviorism and other psychological views that attacked the validity of thinking and created, according to Holmer, an enormous range of suspicion about beliefs and thoughts.

"And then with that was popular Marxism, in the '30s when I was a student, which made churches and an awful lot of learning look as if it were class-oriented and the work of the elites. Not that anyone read Marx; but Marx, along with Weber and lots of 19th-century German philosophy, made people think that all thoughts were relative and that everything was related to your socioeconomic elite."

The corrosive effects of modernity upon Christian faith gave Holmer an audience. He turned to Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein and the general philosophic culture they articulated. For his students, Holmer's exposition of Kierkegaard and later of Wittgenstein proved to be an intellectually and religiously liberating critique of the general suspicion surrounding religious conviction.

Holmer's ability to make use of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard sets him apart from both the philosophical and theological establishments in this country; it is his use of these thinkers that gives him his distinctive place in the American theological world. "Paul Holmer began to wed some of the ideas of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in ways that gave a new liveliness to their works and suggested some new directions in which moral philosophy and theology might develop," writes Richard Bell (The Grammar of the Heart, p. 3). "No longer was Kierkegaard just an 'existentialist' thinker, nor could Wittgenstein be constrained. within narrow 'analytic' bounds. They both were seen to address the human heart by their careful analysis of concepts that focused attention on how to understand human subjectivity and how to see our human affections and emotions as part of human life and culture."

Holmer never avoided the hard-headed intellectual questions posed by cultural positivism. His therapy begins by identifying the problem, coaxing the vague, often unarticulated suspicion of religious belief into the form of a direct philosophical or theological claim, setting the stage for a vigorous discussion. Holmer's critique frequently takes the form of an argument about the nature of language and meaning.

Our ability to speak meaningfully about God has little to do with our ability to verify the existence of some being to which we might attach the name "God. " Rather, the concept of "God" becomes meaningful as we learn to live in relation to that God. "Words do not 'mean' all by themselves," Holmer writes in his book The Grammar of Faith (Harper & Row, 1978, p. 134). "They are not like some coins that have value because they are made of silver or gold...Words may have meaning for one man and not for another. The question is the way they are used, how the person lives and what applications the expressions are given."

Conceptual clarity was a tool Holmer used with impressive skill. He taught his students that any number of concepts might be uncovered by examining the use of a single word such as "belief," "reason ... .. fact" and "understanding." I remember a discussion in the Yale Divinity School common room, devoted to the question of whether the school was a "caring" place. Henri Nouwen spoke passionately and at length about caring and its importance. Another faculty member added his remarks affirming the importance of being caring. Holmer, obviously irritated by what he took to be a tone of intellectual flabbiness, said, "You get the feeling we're all a lot of hothouse plants just crying for attention. I thought Christian caring was something specific. A doctor cares for the patient by restoring the patient's health. The teacher cares for the student by expunging ignorance in the student. Now Christian care means helping to overcome human sinfulness by the grace of God. That's Christian care.

Holmer identifies the lack of conceptual clarity as a major problem in today's intellectual climate. "Theology as a result has become vague, but it's a malaise it shares with the rest of the academic world -- vagueness and formlessness. Now, theology to me doesn't even seem to be very intellectually respectable. There's a distrust of exactness, clarity and formal learning that has pervaded so much of contemporary discourse that even the problems don't get a sharp, definitive statement. Then the theology that addresses it doesn't . have that much definitiveness.

Wittgenstein said that in his own work, he was trying to say the same thing in every sentence. Holmer's teaching is also, directed toward well-defined aims. I asked him to summarize the focus of his career: "When I look back upon the years that I spent, sure there's narrowness, but it's a narrowness that consists of two things. I was just trying on the one hand to discover where the dignity, honor and glory of being a-person lies. And that's what I was doing by reading novels, by reading world literature, by thinking the thoughts of the great thinkers. I was on an enterprise here of realizing my own humanity. And helping to share that with everybody. So that's one side. Kind of a secular version.

"Correlative to that is that the' glory of a human being -- moral, upright, seeking the truth -- is brought to a climactic point for me by what it is to be a. Christian'. Being a Christian is pulling all those things to a sharp focus. The loveliness of the Christian gospel is that, while all these other ways of being human will finally fail us, there is another way of being a human being [that will not fail] that is shown us in Christ Jesus."

The intensity, and singlemindedness of Holmer's teaching is rooted in a rich and,,living faith. Perhaps for that reason more than any other, his career as a teacher has been pervaded by a sense of gratitude and reverence. "It isn't something I have gripped so much as something that has gripped me. I have felt increasingly through the years, not decreasingly but increasingly, a tremendous enthusiasm for the Christian teaching. I can't "explain that.. any other way than by saying it's become easier in some respects, but also more necessary, for me to be a believer. And that's, I guess, what we mean by the grace of God."

The Unity We Seek

A bit of history is needed in order to understand the present-day ecumenical options. I shall start with the year in which my own ecumenical involvement began. Fifty-five years ago, in 1950, there was general agreement, at least in France where I was then studying, on the goal of ecumenism and how to attain it. The goal was a visibly united church, but this goal would not be reached by the conversion of individuals or groups from one ecclesial allegiance to another. Rather it would take place in God’s own time by means largely hidden but that can be pointed to by such words as convergence, rapprochement and integration. Each of the uniting bodies would have to change profoundly in order to enter into full communion, but they could do this, it was believed, without rejecting what is essential to their own identities.

The degree to which this quest would be successful before the eschaton God only knew, but to the degree that it was, the resulting ecumenical, catholic church would be richer and more variegated than anything we could imagine, and yet it would be genuinely one. This outlook is basically that of what can be conveniently named "convergence" ecumenism, which later became temporarily dominant.

Convergence ecumenism, insofar as it is understood as including Roman Catholics (and not just the Protestants and Orthodox who had organized the World Council of Churches in 1948), was in its beginnings when I encountered it, Those who were open to it were few in number and, on the Roman Catholic side, were suspect by church authorities. Yves Congar, OP., author of Chrétiens désunis (1937; published in English as Divided Christendom), the first and, in some respects, still the greatest catholic ecumenical manifesto, was officially silenced in 1954, but his work set the tone for the discussions in which I was one of the student auditors. The air was electric with hope and excitement despite suppressive measures.

The next decades brought far greater progress toward that goal than those who were active in 1950 had dared to hope. Congar’s trajectory may be taken as representative. His silencing was lifted; he greatly influenced Vatican II, became a cardinal, and is reported to have been the favorite theologian of Pope Paul VI.

Convergence ecumenism came to dominate the ecumenical establishment (by which I mean those who to one degree or another are professionally engaged in ecumenism, whether as students, teachers, bureaucrats or active participants in relevant meetings, commissions and assemblies). Three of the high-water marks of 20th-century ecumenism reflect this dominance: the WCC’s New Delhi statement on "the unity we seek" (1961), Vatican II’s Unitatis redintegratio (Decree on Ecumenism, 1964) and the WCC’s Faith and Order document Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, which, though not given its finishing touches until just before its publication in 1982, reflects in its substance agreements that had been reached a decade or more earlier. In short, it took only until around 1970 for convergence ecumenism to reach its apogee.

Since then, ecumenism has been in decline. Significant convergences on doctrinal issues have not ceased, as in, for example, the Lutheran – Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999), but these convergences tend to be the outcome of discussions already well advanced in earlier decades and are to be attributed more to institutional inertia than to continuing enthusiasm.

Nonconvergence strategies for moving toward visible unity have also weakened. Beginning already at the WCC assembly in Uppsala in 1968, the emphasis started to shift from the concerns of Faith and Order toward those of what ecumenists called Life and Work. It is almost as if the social activism of the 1920s and 1930s, summed up in the 1925 Life and Work slogan "Doctrine divides but service unites," were once again ecumenically triumphant.

A major change from 1925, however, is that since Uppsala it is the unity of the world, not that of the church in service to the world’s unity, that is more and more the direct goal. In the imagery employed by those in favor of the change, the paradigm is not the old "God-church-world" but rather "God-world-church." According to this new paradigm, Christians should discern from what God is doing in the world what they themselves should do; or, in language that those hostile to the change often quote: "The world sets the agenda." This type of Life and Work ecumenism had considerable momentum in the heyday of liberation theology, but since the end of the cold war, it has joined Faith and Order ecumenism in the doldrums. The survival of the ecumenism we have known seems doubtful.

The doubts are widespread even among those who are professionally involved in ecumenism and are all in favor of its continuance, though in new forms. Consider, for example, the report of a participant in a weeklong meeting of directors of ecumenical institutes from around the world held in July 200S at Bossey, the study institute of the WCC. There was, he writes, "nearly unanimous and almost immediate resistance" to the ‘traditionalist" notion

that the ecumenical movement has a single nature and a single goal. . . . Negotiating doctrines is giving way to. . . ecumenical spirituality. Most people don’t believe unity is the goal anymore; now it’s dialogue, the sharing of stories. At Bossey it became clear . . . that the nature of the ecumenical movement is to have many goals, and the goal of the ecumenical movement is to let its many natures flourish and interact. . . . Nearly everyone in the seminar, including those who have devoted careers of many decades to the movement, responded positively to this new focus. [The comments were made by Patrick Henry as executive director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research; they appear in the institute’s collection Ecumenical People, Programs, Papers.]

The new focus includes the so-called "wider ecumenism," which is concerned with interreligious rather than intra-Christian relations and is greatly outstripping the latter in popular interest. What is problematic about this focus is not interfaith dialogue but the failure to realize that this dialogue differs categorically from the search for Christian unity: the first is a matter of learning how to communicate with strangers, and the second, of overcoming estrangement within the family.

Once the two efforts are equated, favoring foreigners over family is perhaps inevitable if for no other reason than that there are many families of foreigners and only one family that is one’s own. Moreover, the turn from domestic to foreign affairs fits the now-dominant God-world-church paradigm, for to the extent that the world sets the agenda, the problems of religious pluralism will in our day seem more pressing than those of Christian disunity.

New external pressures will no doubt arise, but if it is these rather than the church’s own compass and rudder that determine direction, the demise of the ecumenism that flourished briefly in the 20th century is a certainty. That demise is what the directors of ecumenical institutes gathered at Bossey under WCC auspices expect, and that is what will occur if, to repeat, the world sets the agenda for the church.

If this happens, however, it will not be the first time in post-biblical history that the Zeitgeist has overridden concern for the unity of God’s chosen people. Already in the second century, gentile Christians expropriated even the name Israel from the Jews and proclaimed themselves the New Israel. Then in 1054 came the break between East and West, to be followed 500 years later by the Reformation that sundered Catholics and Protestants and greatly weakened concern for unity.

With the loosening in recent centuries of the Constantinian symbiosis of church and state, space opened for further fragmentation, especially, among Protestants but also for unitive countercurrents in the 19th century that led to the modern ecumenical movement in the 20th. During the cold war, the spirit of the age actively encouraged ecumenism. Western nations led by the U.S. favored a united church front to protect a purportedly Christian civilization from the communist threat (think, for example, of the ecumenical activities of John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under Eisenhower), while countries under Soviet control supported the participation of their chiefly Orthodox churches in the ecumenical movement as an Eastern counterpoise. It is a testimony to the Christian integrity of the ecumenical leaders of this period that they for the most part sought to resist (and partially succeeded in resisting) both Western and Eastern pressures. Even the Orthodox ecumenical delegations, infiltrated with KGB agents though they were, were by no means always pushovers.

Now, however, the winds of the world have shifted once again. Church unity may be needed more than ever, even for worldly reasons, in view of the tensions generated by the simultaneous growth of pluralism and globalism, but it is now in disrepute. None of the major social, cultural and political trends favor such unity. Efforts to mobilize Christians for political ends may be unprecedentedly massive on the right and are by no means lacking on the left; but as is illustrated by antiabortion alliances between Roman Catholics and conservative evangelicals and by antiwar protests gathering together both Christian pacifists and nonpacifists, these groupings are indifferent to ecumenism because, among other things, it has no public influence. The historically ecumenical churches have for the most part become ciphers in this respect, and uniting them is a matter of joining weakness to weakness, while the evangelicals and Pentecostals who do have political weight are un-ecumenical or anti-ecumenical. The renewal of unitive ecumenism will have to come from within Christian communities without the support of external pressure.

What kind of renewal-minded unitive ecumenism might be promoted? There are many ideal possibilities from which to choose, but of real, actually existing ones, I know of only two at this time. Both visions protest the neglect of unitive ecumenism, but one does so from within the ecumenical establishment and aims to retrieve emphases that have been lost, while the other originates outside ecumenical and denominational structures and is open to the possibility that new organizational forms may be needed either in whole or in part.

I shall take Michael Kinnamon (MK) as spokesperson for the insider or establishment protesters and the so-called Princeton Proposal (PP), with which I was involved, as representative of the outsiders.

Kinnamon’s formulation, represented by his book The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement (Chalice, 2003), comes out of an "unstructured" meeting on the future of ecumenism attended by 30 veterans of the movement a half dozen years ago. Many participants were surprised that the major topic came to be what a Catholic participant called "the erosion of the [theological] basis." As Kinnamon puts it: "If you don’t believe that God has acted in Christ for the salvation of the world, then the idea that God has created a new community in Christ of Jew and gentile as a sign and instrument of God’s mission will seem like pure idealism -- impossible and ultimately irrelevant. In the absence of such conviction, ecumenism will become simply another arena for pursuing political agendas." The Princeton Proposal presupposes the same conviction. (For the Princeton Proposal, see In One Body Through the Cross, edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson [Eerdmans, 2003].)

MK and PP also agree that the church’s unity is an end in itself. An inseparable part of the ecumenical task is to move the churches toward visible unity in, as the New Delhi statement put it (I abbreviate), "one baptism, one gospel, breaking the one bread, joining in common prayer, a corporate life reaching out in witness and service to all, a ministry and membership accepted by all, and the ability to act and speak together as occasion requires."

Unanimity disappears, however, when one turns to the relation between this unitive part of the ecumenical task and its other aspects. For Kinnamon, the "most significant" failure of the Princeton Proposal is that it

doesn’t adequately link the concern for Christian unity to the church’s ministry of justice. . . . The authors highlight Faith and Order while paying little attention to Life and Work. . . . [The PP] operates out of a God-church-world paradigm: the church must get its act together in order to carry the message of wholeness and reconciliation to the world. Many contemporary Christians think more in terms of God-world-church: the church participates in God’s reconciling mission in the world and thereby discovers something of its own unity. The movement has got to insist that these are not an either-or. . . .There is one ecumenical movement committed because of the gospel to both unity and justice [from his review of the Princeton Proposal in the CHRISTIAN CENTURY, September 6, 2003].

There are other omissions in PP that Kinnamon complains of, but the downplaying of Life and Work and the related absence of the God-world-church paradigm are the main ones, as we have just seen. The remedy for him is a synthesis of the new and the old.

As I understand the disagreement, the MX approach holds that Faith and Order (the cooperative search for unity) and Life and Work (the cooperative service of, e.g., justice) are coequal ends in themselves, for they issue from distinct paradigms. And yet they are inseparable because they reciprocally reinforce each other: the more unified the church, the better it serves "wholeness and reconciliation" (which are inseparable from justice). And the more it serves the cause of justice, the better it "discovers something of its own unity."

For the PP, in contrast, the God-church-world paradigm is the only one, and Faith and Order therefore takes precedence over Life and Work in somewhat the same way that faith takes precedence over works in Reformation teaching. Just as faith in God is an end in itself, so also church unity is an end in itself, and just as good works are the indispensable fruit and sign of true faith but not its end or its cause, so also cooperation "in witness and service to all," as New Delhi put it, is a necessary fruit and sign of church unity but not its end or cause. Without Life and Work, Faith and Order is dead, but without the primacy of Faith and Order, Life and Work is deadly; it becomes a countersign of the church, "simply another arena for pursuing political agendas," to use Kinnamon’s own words.

Kinnamon writes as if that disaster threatens only when Faith and Order is forgotten. But an unspoken premise of the Princeton Proposal is that the marginalization of Faith and Order that has occurred in the ecumenical movement is inescapable once Life and Work is legitimated by the world-sets-the-agenda-for-the-church paradigm. From this perspective, the MK synthesis is wishful thinking, and PP must be chosen if a choice is to be made.

As usual, however, there is a practical side to the theological conflict that complicates the choice. The conflicting ecumenical visions are designed for different constituencies. Kinnamon speaks especially to the ecumenically interested in the mainstream denominations that were originally and, now joined by the Roman Catholic Church, remain the mainstays of organized ecumenism. He does so as a member, a dissatisfied member, of the current establishment, but he seeks to retrieve lost emphases without abandoning more recent ones in order to formulate a synthesis as attractive as possible to all who are ecumenically interested. It is for practical reasons and not only theological ones that he stresses the importance for ecumenism of the Life and Work programs for justice, peace and the integrity of creation (as well as, to mention other topics of importance to him and his audience, the "celebration of diversity" and the need for an "ecumenical hermeneutic" to satisfy doubters that there is such a thing as the "apostolic tradition" to which ecumenism must be faithful). Even if one does not think his synthesis is viable, one can respect his motives. He is trying, it may be suggested, to make room in the ecumenical tent for the weaker brothers and sisters of whom scripture tells us we should take special care.

Moreover, it is not only these sisters and brothers but also the ecumenical cause that would suffer if Life and Work concerns were simply excised. Indeed, would not Kinnamon betray his duty to the largely liberal mainstream traditions that have nourished him in the faith and to which ecumenism is heavily indebted if he did not seek to correct what he sees as their ecumenical failures from within?

The audience that the Princeton Proposal has in mind is very different. It is chiefly evangelical and Pentecostal, on the one hand, and Roman Catholic and Orthodox on the other. While the majority of the (now disbanded) PP study group are members of Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, they believe that the future of the kind of ecumenism that originated from these and other mainline Protestant denominations now lies outside of them. It is among evangelicals, Pentecostals, Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, polar opposites though they seem, that there is a measure of agreement on where and how the apostolic tradition is to be located and retrieved. They do not find it necessary to invent a special "ecumenical hermeneutic" in order to legitimate their search for the tradition in scripture, under the guidance of the affirmations regarding God the Father. Son and Holy Spirit confessed, for example, in the Nicene Creed. Even professedly creedless evangelicals and Pentecostals do not deny the Trinity or that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. Without ever having heard of the catholic creeds in many cases, evangelicals and Pentecostals seek to read their Bibles in accordance with them, which makes theological convergence possible.

Proof of this possibility is evident in recent conversations between prominent Roman Catholics and evangelicals, but the main hope for bringing the fastest growing (and most fissiparous) portions of the Christian flock into the ecumenical enterprise probably lies in other ways of publicly witnessing to unity in Christ, of which the Princeton Proposal suggests a few. The sparseness of reference to Life and Work issues in the PP is regrettable, but these issues are so easily politicized when the audience is as varied as the one we thought of ourselves as addressing that no one actually proposed additional treatment of them.

Confession and Community: An Israel-like View of the Church

I picture the process of change in my theological thinking in both archaeological and architectural terms: I have dug down into earlier layers of experience, and built on what went before. In my childhood and youth, I encountered cultural and religious groups other than my own; later I would engage them theologically, in reverse order. The Chinese were the first I knew as different, then Jews, Roman Catholics and non-Lutheran Protestants, in that sequence. The latter engaged my theological attention first, and then the Roman Catholics and Jews. The Chinese I have yet to examine theologically, and now that I am in my 60s, perhaps I never will. Their tacit influence on in my thinking, however, lies deepest and it is only gradually that I have become aware of how pervasive it has been

I was born in north central China, far from port cities and displays of Western power, and lived there for 17 years until shortly before Pearl Harbor. Because of illness I did not go away to boarding school until I was 12, and my life was very different from the standard accounts of many Americans who grew up in the Far East, such as John Hersey. My parents were Swedish-American Lutheran missionaries who were more Sinicized than they realized. They contributed more than they knew to my childhood sense that the Chinese are the most intelligent, handsome and, at their Confucian best, cultivated of all peoples. To be sure—so my parents thought—they needed Christianity in order to make democracy work and escape communism, as well as for their souls’ salvation, but that belief did not make me suppose that Westerners are superior. I came to think that apostate Christians were much worse than non-Christian Chinese, as the Nazis were proving. Thus China laid the groundwork for a disenchantment with Christendom that led me 30 years later to hope for the end of cultural Christianity as the enabling condition for the development of a diaspora Christianity. (Some articles I wrote in the ‘60s and ‘70s seem to me close to Stanley Hauerwas’s position, but since then I have had reluctant second thoughts.)

Loyang, the city in which I was born and reared, was without electricity, running water, motorized transportation or even radios. The ways in which our neighbors lived and thought were as unmodern as those of the Han dynasty 2,000 years before. Further, famines, pestilences, brigandage and war (both civil and with the Japanese) engulfed our area repeatedly, and flight to safer places for short or long periods was common. Yet the processes and perceptions of life, I later came to think, were not greatly different from an American suburb, medieval ghetto or first-century Hellenistic household.

As I grew older I concluded that modernity is not unique in either its goodness or badness, but is just one epoch and culture among others, in some ways better and in some ways worse. Those who thought otherwise, I found pretentious, including most of the writers of the past 400 years whose works were staple fare in my student days in Minnesota, Connecticut and France. Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Bultmann I found unappealing. Instead, I favored an unlikely combination of, on the one hand, medieval thinkers and their contemporary interpreters such as Maritain and Gilson, and, on the other, the Reformers and their neo-Orthodox successors (who were fashionable) and confessional Lutherans (who were not). The only recent theologians I would now add to this list of major influences are Roman Catholics such as Rahner and von Balthasar. On the nontheological side I gained a new dimension in the ‘60s from Wittgensteinians, T. S. Kuhn, Peter Berger, Clifford Geertz and contemporary nonfoundationalists. Whatever their differences, they are not bewitched by modern uniqueness: they hold that the basic processes of the linguistic, social and cognitive construction of reality and experience are much the same in all times and places, however varied the outcomes. One need not grow up in China to find such views persuasive, but in my case it helped.

The dichotomy I perceived between Chinese and non-Chinese was soon overlaid by a more salient trichotomy among Christians, non-Christians and Jews. By the time I was six or so, I saw these as the three basic types of human beings. That I would have noticed Jews is odd, for I had never, as far as I knew, met any, and my parents, products of the rural Midwest, probably hadn’t either. The Old Testament, however, was as much a part of my upbringing as the New, and I early learned to think of the Jews as Jesus’ people. Some of them, furthermore, had once lived in our part of China, and my father was fascinated by the remains of their T’ang dynasty settlements. Now other Jews from other parts of the world were returning to the Holy Land, as the Bible foretold. By 11, I was imaginatively a Darbyite Zionist daydreaming of becoming a kibbutz fighter. The rise of Nazism first made me aware of anti-Semitism. Some of the German missionaries we knew were at first pro-Hitler. Refugees began arriving in China, and two Jewish boys were members of my high school graduating class of 20.

My premillennialist philo-Semitism did not survive adolescence, but the aftereffects persisted. I was conditioned against Marcionite tendencies—evident in some post-Reformation Lutheranism—to spiritualize and privatize Christianity and neglect the Old Testament. I was also predisposed to welcome, at a much later date, the work of my Yale colleagues Brevard Childs and Hans Frei on canonical reading and on narrative and figural scriptural interpretation, respectively. More and more I have come to think that only the postcritical retrieval of such classic premodern hermeneutical strategies can give due weight to the abiding importance of Israel (including contemporary Judaism) and Israel’s scriptures for Christians. This development in my thinking started late, beginning in the ‘70s, and first entered my published work in The Nature of Doctrine (1984). Now I am writing an ecclesiology that is in large part an "Israelology."

In contrast to my literary encounter with Jews, I knew Roman Catholics personally before I learned they were different. They were cousins, children of my mother’s brother, whom we visited when on furlough in the States. Only gradually did I realize that theirs was the church that had persecuted Luther, slaughtered the innocents of whom I read in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and supposedly taught that salvation was by works, not faith. I hoped that they trusted Jesus and not the pope’s rules and regulations, but believed their chances of salvation would certainly be greater if they were Bible-believing Protestants.

The sad state of the Catholics troubled me in childhood, but not until I was in college did this concern translate into a theological and philosophical interest promoted by reading Gilson and Maritain. That interest led to doctoral work in medieval philosophy and theology as preparation for specialization in contemporary Catholicism. After ten years of teaching medieval thought at Yale (mostly in the philosophy department), I was selected by the Lutheran World Federation to be a delegated observer to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and since then have done most of my research and writing in the context of participation in national and international ecumenical dialogue, mostly with Roman Catholics. It is the ecumenical movement even more than my teaching at Yale (since Vatican II, all in the divinity school and the department of religious studies) that has been the context of my thinking.

My ecumenical concerns have been tilted in a Catholic direction. Under the influence of three European Lutherans, Kristin Skydsgaard, Peter Brunner and Edmund Schlink, and one American, Arthur Carl Piepkorn, I came to think that Lutheranism should try to become what it started out to be, a reform movement within the Catholic Church of the West. By such a strategy it can best contribute to the goal of wider Christian unity. This goal and strategy have guided almost all my work since then, though my notions of appropriate and feasible tactics have been changing in the past decade.

My turn away from developments in post-Reformation Protestantism started in midadolescence, years before my tilt toward Rome. In my early years I made no distinction between Lutherans and other Protestants. In order to maintain as much of a common Christian front as possible, American Lutherans in China, including my parents, did not advertise their confessional and sacramental differences from those to whom they were closest, Protestant conservative evangelicals (or "evangelicalists," as some Europeans call them). This was easy for them, for they were for the most part pietists of biblicistic and conversionist proclivities, but it confused me. Their pietism, which I confused with Lutheranism, early made me restive, not least because of my precocious reading of Britannica articles on evolution and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (my father’s library was short on comic books). My restiveness was increased by memorizing Luther’s Small Catechism for confirmation, and by, arguments in boarding school with, for example, Southern Baptist classmates about such matters as infant baptism. Obviously Lutherans were different from other Protestants (that was a relief), but I still did not know what they were: I was looking for an identity.

That was provided in my sophomore and junior years by a new headmaster, Pastor Albue, a bright, personable and athletic young missionary, the idol of the high school students. He alerted me to the possibility of an unambiguously confessional Lutheranism that was devout but not pietistic, and quite unreticent about baptismal regeneration and the real presence. Others whom I came to know during the same period pointed in the same direction, most notably the Norwegian missionary scholar K. L. Reichelt, suspected of heresy by evangelicals because of his immense knowledge of and respect for Buddhism, but remembered by me for his Lutheran preaching.

Through such influences, I began to opt for a Reformation Christianity self-consciously opposed to modern Protestantism in both its conservative and liberal forms. Its starting point is neither biblicistic nor experientialist, and certainly not individualistic, but dogmatic: it commences with the historic Christian communal confession of faith in Christ. For the Reformers, as for the Orthodox and Catholic churches of East and West, that confession is the one expressed in the ancient trinitarian and christological creeds. The Reformers did not so much try to prove these creeds from Scripture (and certainly not from experience), but rather read Scripture in their light, and then used the Bible thus construed to mold experience and guide thought and action. God’s word, in their premodern hermeneutics, was ever applicable, and changed in import with the circumstances. It was not constrained to a single kind of meaning by inerrantist theories of inspiration or liberal ones of revelatory experience. My understanding of the implications of beginning with dogma has developed greatly (see The Nature of Doctrine ), but not the creedal and confessional starting point. That has remained the integrating center of my later theological work.

Although I early defined myself theologically in opposition to modern Protestantism (rather than in dialogue, as with Roman Catholicism, Judaism and China), I have constantly been preoccupied with Protestants. I have lived with conservative protestants in my youth, and liberal ones ever since I arrived at Yale as a student over 40 years ago. I keep hoping that evangelicals will not think my work compromises their emphases on the love of Jesus and on biblical authority, and that liberals will not suppose it is inconsistent with intellectual openness or commitment to peace and justice. The desire to communicate affects theology, and changes I have perceived in the climate of discourse have affected my thinking in recent years.

The most important change for my work in the past 20 years is the increasing polarization between the modern right and left in both Protestantism and Catholicism, and the corresponding decline of a center rooted in premodern communal traditions. That center had been constituted by the Protestant neo-orthodoxy and Catholic nouvelle theologie, which were ascending from the 1920s to the 1960s. They had sought renewal in the fight of contemporary needs by critically returning to the sources of the faith in Scripture and premodern tradition. They failed, on the whole, to escape the limitations of modern historical criticism and, with partial exceptions, did not retrieve premodern classic hermeneutics. Yet they provided the context for the flourishing in Protestantism and Catholicism of the unitive ecumenism that has been my life’s work.

Now, however, interest has shifted more and more to unmediated aggiornamento, the updating of faith and practice by direct translation into presumably more intelligible and relevant modern idioms and actions. This is a revival of the liberal strategy, familiar since the Enlightenment, of letting the world set the church’s agenda. What is different is chiefly the agenda and the tactics, for the world has changed. The dechristianization of the public realm proceeds apace, and communal traditions have weakened. The ecumenical focus has shifted from church unity, from reconciling the historic communities, to the service of the world, and therefore away from the kind of ecumenism that has been my chief concern. The new left is more extreme than the old, and is stronger in the historically mainline churches than ever before.

The extremism and the strength of the right is also increasing. Rightists also are unconcerned with church unity and community or, with ressourcement. They emphasize not the critical retrieval of the sources of the faith but recent traditions formed in earlier modern contexts. Roman Catholic traditionalists cling to a 19^th century version of Tridentism and, judging by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers, are more schismatic than the progressives. Protestant evangelicals are also fixated on the 19^th century and are systematically antiecumenical. After the interlude between the 1920s and ‘60s, the polarization between right and left characteristic of modern mass societies is on the rise and swamping the churches as never before.

Others share this picture of the present situation, but I find it less depressing than most for both nontheological and theological reasons. The four centuries of modernity are coming to an end. Its individualistic foundational rationalism, always wavering between skeptical relativism and totalitarian absolutism, is being replaced, as I earlier mentioned, by an understanding of knowledge and belief as socially and linguistically constituted. Ideologies rooted in Enlightenment rationalism are collapsing. This is unmistakably true of the leftist ones after the annus mirabilis 1989, but it is also true of liberal democratic capitalism on the right. Politically pragmatic liberalism may be practically necessary in pluralistic societies, but as an individualistic secular ideology it is no more viable in the long run than its illiberal counterparts . Societies need strong mediating communities through which traditions of personal virtue, common good and ultimate meaning are transmitted to new generations. It is hard to see how such communities can flourish without a religious dimension, and in traditionally Christian lands, that means a Christian one.

I once welcomed the passing of Christendom and found Richard John Neuhaus’s demurrers misplaced; but now, as I earlier mentioned, I am having uncomfortable second thoughts. The waning of cultural Christianity might be good for the churches, but what about society? To my chagrin, I find myself thinking that traditionally Christian lands when stripped of their historic faith are worse than others. They become unworkable or demonic. There is no reason to suppose that what happened in Nazi Germany cannot happen in liberal democracies, though the devils will no doubt be disguised very differently. From this point of view, the Christianization of culture can be in some situations the churches’ major contribution to feeding the poor, clothing the hungry and liberating the imprisoned. So it was in the past and, given the disintegration of modern ideologies, so it may be at times in the future. Talk of "Christian America" and John Paul II’s vision of a "Christian Europe" make me uncomfortable, but I have seen a number of totally unexpected improbabilities come to pass in my lifetime, such as Roman Catholic transformations and communism’s collapse, and cannot rule these out as impossible.

Whether or not re-Christianization occurs, however, our era is a new one, and the churches are in the midst of a vast transformation. My understanding of what is needed has developed in three interrelated directions in the past decade: hermeneutical, organizational and écclesiological. Renewal depends, I have come to think, on the spread of proficiency in premodern yet postcritical Bible reading, on restructuring the churches into something like pre-Constantinian organizational patterns, and on the development of an Israel-like understanding of the church.

These elements belong together. For classic hermeneutics, the Hebrew bible is the basic ecclesiological textbook. Christians see themselves within those texts, when read in the light of Christ, as God’s people, chosen for service not preferment, and bound together in a historically and sociologically continuous community that God refuses to disown whether it is faithful or unfaithful, united or disunited, in the catacombs or on the throne. It was in some such way as this that the Christians of the first centuries, whom we call catholic, used Israel’s story as a template for their own existence. It was they, not the Marcionite or gnostic Christians, who developed a communal life strong enough to become the great majority and win the Empire, despite their lack of social, economic, intellectual, political or military power.

They were also, however, supersessionists who claimed to have replaced Israel, thus denying that the Jews were any longer, except negatively, God’s chosen people; and they were triumphalists who believed that the church could not be unfaithful as Israel had been. The logic of Christian faith thereby became perversely opposed in a variety of ways to the fundamental belief in Jesus as the crucified Messiah. It has taken the disasters of Christian apostasy, often disguised as orthodoxy, in combination with historical-critical work to unmask the problems. We can now see that the early Christian errors resulted from self-serving gentile Christian misappropriations of intra-Jewish polemics over Jesus’ messiahship, and that these errors are blatantly opposed to much of the New Testament witness, especially Paul’s. But if these errors are rejected, so I have come to think, Christians can now apply Israel’s story to themselves without supersessionism or triumphalism. The story’s power is undiminished. "Oneness in Christ" gains a concrete specificity that it otherwise lacks. All Christians, whether Catholics, Protestants and. Orthodox or African, American and Chinese, belong to a single community of morally imperative responsibility for one another like the members of the early church or contemporary Jews.

These are the issues with which I am now struggling. I think I can show that none of the major Christian traditions is dogmatically opposed to an Israel-like view of the church, but acceptance of it involves a break with nearly 2,000 years of both modern and premodern Christian self-understandings. Unitive ecumenism, among other things, needs to be reconceived. It can no longer be thought of, as I have done most of my life, as a matter of reconciling relatively intact and structurally still-Constantinian communions from the top down. Rather it must be thought of as reconstituting Christian community and unity from, so to speak, the bottom up. It is here that the structuring of the church in the first centuries is especially instructive. The ecumenical journey when thus conceived will be longer but also more adventurous: renewal and unification become inseparable.

This focus on building Christian community will seem outrageous to some in view of the world’s needs, but it is a strength for those who see the weakening of communal commitments and loyalties as modernity’s fundamental disease. Perhaps no greater contribution to peace, justice and the environment is possible than that provided by the existence of intercontinental and interconfessional communal networks such as the churches already are to some extent, and can become more fully, if God wills.

By centering this article on communities, I have not mentioned, for example, those who taught me most about how—as distinct from what—to think theologically and historically: Robert L. Calhoun and H. Richard Niebuhr of Yale, and Paul Vignaux of Paris. Nor have I mentioned my daughter, a Christian student of rabbinics, from whom

I have learned much about Judaism; nor my wife, a Presbyterian and professor of religious studies, who has in various ways greatly heightened my appreciation of Calvin. Yet the communal focus, though oversimple, is not wrong. As far as my scholarly career is concerned, I have always been primarily interested in how ideas function in communal traditions of language and practice rather than in themselves or in their role in individual lives considered in isolation.

I seem to have come nearly full circle. The ecclesiology on which I am working concerns Chinese, Jews, Roman Catholics and Protestants within the horizon of a crumbling of modernity that brings Christians closer to premodernity than they’ve been in perhaps 300 years, and closer to the situation of the first centuries than they’ve been in more than a millennium and a half. We are now better placed than perhaps ever before to retrieve, critically and repentantly, the heritage in the Hebrew scriptures, apostolic writings and early tradition. This retrieval is also more urgent than ever if the churches are to become the kind of global and ecumenical community that the new age needs. Such are the convictions that now inform my thinking, and they are developments rather than departures from my early experiences and youthful theology. Archaeology and architecture almost coincide.

An ‘Intermediary Theology’: In Service of the Hearing of God’s Word

Sixth in a Series: New Turns in Religious Thought

Women theologians are still rarities; in another ten years this may not be the case. Fifteen years ago when I started work on a Ph.D. at Yale, they were even more rare, but I realized it less then than I do now. Formation counts, of course, and those early "sex-blind’ perceptions at Yale (preceded by similar ones at Smith College under the tutelage of some grandes dames of the feminist movement of the ‘20s) have stayed with me to the extent that while my femininity qualifies my theology it does so adjectivally and indirectly. My femininity was not then and is not now the determining factor in my theological pilgrimage and the projects emerging from it. Its impact initially was of a negative cast; that is, it made me aware that I was something of an outsider, and this role permitted me a perspective on academic theology which most of my male peers playing the game as regulars did not possess. To put it bluntly, I became disenchanted with theological gamesmanship of the doctoral variety and decided (with one baby born and another on the way) that I had no time for theological reflection if it were only an academic exercise.

The positive formative influences did not come from feminist sources, however, for what gave some substance to my critical perspective on theology were the tomes of Karl Barth and, even more importantly, the presence and writings of H. Richard Niebuhr. While few of us who were seminarians and graduate students in the late ‘50s and early 60s are still Barthians, many of us, were then, and whether we stayed with Barth or, more commonly, departed from him, the in-depth exposure to his Church Dogmatics left its mark. For me it has meant understanding the task of theology as serving the hearing of the word of God in a particular time and place. Such an understanding is of course the shared legacy of the so-called dialectical theologians of the ‘20s (one must include not, only Bultmann and Tillich here but the new hermeneutic movement as well), but it was Barth’s formulation of it that I found particularly potent, especially his insistence that the theologian is the helpmate of the preacher, both as servant and as critic.

For many of us at Yale during the late ‘50s and early 60s H. Richard Niebuhr and his central concerns provided a perspective from which we both criticized Barth and weaned ourselves away from him. More than that, Niebuhr’s deep appreciation of Schleiermacher and of liberalism’s concern for experience, relativity, the symbolic imagination and the role of the affections set the questions that many of us were to continue to wrestle with in our own subsequent theological careers.

It is precisely these concerns of liberalism, set in the context of Barth’s basic understanding of the task of theology, which have been the formative influences on my own work. My first book, Literature and the Christian Life (Yale, University Press, 1966), wrestled with this orthodox-liberal dilemma somewhat obliquely. I was bothered by theological critics of literature who, following Tillich’s too-easy baptizing of the secular order (epitomized in his phrase "as the substance of culture is religion, so the form of religion is culture"), tended to overlook the differences between Christianity and the insights of art. I wanted to insist that the Christian faith has an integrity which must be preserved and that the arts also have an integrity which must be preserved, so that whatever relation pertains between them must be one that compromises neither. At this stage I was "Barthian," I suppose, although in my anger at what I saw as illegitimate linkages between Christianity and literature, "graduate student cockiness" might be a more accurate appellation (the review of the book in The Christian Century was titled "Charming Audacity").

When I wrote about a legitimate relation between Christianity and literature which I could support, I turned in directions which I now recognize as distinctly Niebuhrian (though at the time I was not really conscious of that dependence), for it was in the moral life of the Christian that I centered. Since the nature and function of literature as I saw it was to acquaint us with the "felt" experience of life, to enlarge our sympathies and, quicken our sensibilities, and since the primary commandment of Christianity was to be disciples of Jesus Christ who had loved God and human beings totally, then the appropriate juncture between Christian faith and literature came at the point of living out our faithfulness. Literature could (but would not without a decision to let it) make us more sensitive to the actualities of the world, both its cosmological and anthropological dimensions, in which we are called to be faithful.

The connection was somewhat tenuous, it veered away from strictly "religious" issues, and only in the last chapter of the book did I venture a few comments suggesting a more "intrinsic" connection between the Christian view of human existence and the nature of human life manifest in Western literature. These closing comments, deeply influenced by the work of Erich Auerbach and William Lynch (as in a sense was the entire perspective of the book), were a feeler attempting to deal with Christianity’s distinctive mode of "secularity." Somehow I knew that Auerbach’s statement was on target: God himself in a lowly man, Jesus of Nazareth, meant that human life in all its problematic, historical, ambiguous reality is the realm of the truly significant. The dichotomy between the sublime and religious versus the lowly and secular is overcome here. I did not yet know what to do with this insight, and it took several years of reflection and eventually a study of Jesus’ parables to work it out.

III

While in retrospect I can see that much of my reflection was in keeping with theological currents in the mid-’60s (secularism, the death-of-God movement, personalism), I was not aware at the time that such was the case. I felt isolated both personally and intellectually: as a mother at home with young children I was in a different world from my male peers, and I was conscious that my first book had alienated many colleagues in the field of religion and literature (I had called much of the current enterprise into question). Apart from editing Soundings (a task which I did not assume until 1967), I had minimal stimulation from teaching and professional conversation. Nevertheless, very slowly the pot was beginning to simmer again with ingredients from the last chapter of Literature and the Christian Life.

The issue that engaged me was the nature of human existence as understood in Christian faith and in Western literature. At first it took the form of wanting to understand radical Christian life styles. I was interested in people like John Woolman and Bonhoeffer: Christians whose deep commitment led to radical stances, not of an ascetic but of a worldly sort. In 1967 I saw such work as concerned with case studies" (later I realized I was dealing with religious autobiographies), not in order to draw conclusions but to understand how a person’s destiny unfolds, much as the destiny of characters in our Western novels unfolds. The end result would not be an entirely academic one, for (like the parables, as I was to see later) such study points the finger finally to the reader, whose own life story is called into question.

At the time I first reflected on these matters I did not know that such thoughts were germinating in other minds as well. Even when I taught a course at Vanderbilt University divinity school in 1971 called "Forms of Religious Reflection," in which we looked at the limitations and possibilities for religious reflection of various literary genres (parables, autobiographies, novels, poems, etc.), I did not know that a movement was aborning concerned with story and autobiography in theological reflection -- a movement of which I was soon to feel very much a part. But teaching that course was a lightning bolt to me: all sorts of things fell into place, and without intending to (or having the time for it), I wrote the first draft of another book, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Fortress Press, 1975).

I have rehearsed this history in some detail because it is perhaps relevant that someone who was so "out of it" in many respects (a woman, a mother, an outsider not teaching regularly) should turn out to be "in it" nonetheless. It may say something about the quality of experience at a particular time which leads to changes in theological styles -- which are not merely a matter of reading the same books or attending professional meetings. My reflections arose, as I have indicated, in part from formative books and teachers, but they also grew out of grappling with Scripture (one of the lightning bolts here was the simple but profound insight of realizing once again the ineradicable connection of form and content -- for instance, what is said in a parable cannot be said in any other way), and with the complex business, endemic to academic theologians, of, as Kierkegaard would put it, becoming a Christian (not in general or for someone else but in particular and for me). The mix is the oldest one -- Scripture and what it means to be a Christian in one’s own time and place in history.

It is no surprise, then, that I find myself leaning toward a style of theological reflection that is shared by many of my peers. I will try to suggest some of the contours of this style in a general way. Others would characterize it differently; my own work and biases necessarily affect the scenario I write.

The broadest context for this style of theological reflection is the assumption widely held by many contemporary philosophers, scientists and literary critics (Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Susanne Langer, Max Black, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, Alfred North Whitehead, Philip Wheelwright, Elizabeth Sewell, Owen Barfield, etc.) that all new insight in whatever field is metaphorical. This epistemological assumption is, of course, post-positivistic and directly counter to positivism. It means that theological reflection is no longer alone (except for its perennial partner, the arts) in insisting on the necessary role of the imagination. The language used in scientific discovery and in philosophical discourse is also rife with images, metaphors, paradigms, and hence is on a continuity with poetic and religious language. This assumption means, therefore, that the image rather than the concept is primary, or as Ricoeur says, "the symbol gives rise to thought."

The spectrum of symbol to thought provides another, somewhat narrower context for the style of theological reflection I am suggesting. This spectrum is suggested by Robert Funk’s statement that the way from the parables of Jesus to theology is "circuitous and tortuous." The way between the primary form, the parable, and discursive thought is difficult, but as Funk’s statement suggests, the two are on a continuum and that continuum should be evident in all theology. The funding for this style of theological reflection is, then, from the imaginative genres of Scripture (parables, stories, confessions, prayers, and so on) rather than from philosophical concepts, the other major source for Western theology. The work of Amos Wilder, particularly his book Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel, which deals with major literary genres of the New Testament, as well as the work on parables as extended metaphors by such scholars as Robert Funk, Norman Perrin and Dan O. Via, Jr., has become important for many of us.

One footnote I would add here is the necessity for precision in discussing the primary forms of religious reflection which fund theology. Some theologians, for instance, who have become interested in "story" as a source for theology have used the term so broadly that it means everything and hence very little of significance. Any narrative, after all, whether historical, mythical, autobiographical or fictional, is a story, and the philosophically oriented theologians who have a tradition of precision rightly object to such vagueness. I have found it necessary and helpful to turn to one kind of story, the parables of Jesus which I understand as extended metaphors, and to move from this concrete and definable base to the broader implications for a style of theological reflection partaking of the characteristics of parables; i.e., secularity, epistemological relativism and skepticism, insistence on the unity of belief and life, and so on.

A third note of this style is its insistence on an experiential base. The influence of Schleiermacher and liberalism generally is evident here; also H. Richard Niebuhr’s concern with the role of the affections (à la Jonathan Edwards). Perhaps it is a reaction to Barth’s refusal to deal with this dimension; perhaps the theology arising from the women’s movement and black liberation is an ingredient also; perhaps it even partakes of some personalistic elements from the charismatic and Jesus movements. At any rate, among such people as David Burrell, Stephen Crites, Samuel McClendon, Donald and Walter Capps, James Wiggins, John Dunne and, in a different way, Richard R. Niebuhr and William Lynch, it is a concern with concrete, ordinary experience that for some has meant a renewed interest in religious autobiography -- Paul’s letters, Augustine’s Confessions, John Woolman’s Journal, Kierkegaard’s writings, the theological work of Teilhard de Chardin, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers, Dorothy Day’s autobiography and so on. The simplest way to characterize this note is to say it is a remarriage of theology with ethics, or a renewed insistence that Christian faith inexorably involves a style of living in a concrete, actual time and place. It is also on the part of some the insistence that, as Richard R. Niebuhr says, "believing is generated in experience," or as William Lynch puts it, faith is "a way of experiencing the world."

The insistence on experience, especially in an autobiographical form, might suggest a highly individualistic and personalistic note, but I do not think that this is the case. For life in the faith in this way of thinking is seen in a communal and ecclesiastical context, although in a broad, indeed an ecumenical fashion. The autobiographies which are of greatest interest to these theologians are those not of the mystics but of the activists, those who have been pastors, bishops, prophets and martyrs, who have struggled to work out their Christian belief in and for the church and the world. The autobiographies are vocational in the deepest sense; that is, these men and women, even the mystics such as Teresa of Àvila and Teilhard, are public figures deeply committed to the church and to its reformation. But no denominationalism is evident -- the contemporary theologians interested in this style are Roman Catholics as well as various kinds of Protestants (not to mention Jews such as Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein), and the classical autobiographies they turn to also cover the spectrum of Christian ecclesiastical allegiances.

Finally, as should now be evident, this is Christian theology and not phenomenology of religion. While some people whom I would include in this mode of thought are involved with "religious studies," particularly at the undergraduate level, and see autobiographies as a valid way of introducing students to different religious traditions (and I would agree that it is a valid way), the main drive, I believe, is focused on the central task of theology -- serving the hearing of the word of God in a particular time and place. Perhaps I should avoid presumption here and say more personally that while some may have other agendas, mine is definitely in terms of the service such theological reflection can render the perennial task of all Christian theology. I see the need of what I would call an "intermediary theology," a style of theological reflection which stays close to characteristics of the parables but also, as a discursive mode, is coherent, consistent and precise -- characteristics of systematic theology. "Bible stories" on the one hand and abstract, conceptual theology on the other hand will not, I think, address the hearing of the word. More theologians, concerned with excellence of an imaginative cast of mind, need to struggle in the "circuitous and tortuous" no-man’s land of a style of theological reflection which is highly imagistic, experiential and confessional on the one hand and coherent and consistent on the other hand. The theologian who exemplifies such a style most fully is the first Christian theologian, Paul of Tarsus -- a high standard, to be sure, but it is no coincidence that most major reformations of the church and theology have been sparked by and return to Paul. His mode of reflection constitutes a paradigm for those concerned with a theology in service of the hearing of God’s word.

Let me close with a caution, a caution to myself as well as to others engaged in this style of reflection. Recently I assigned a class Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation, a book that to my mind combines at a fairly systematic level many of the qualities I have been speaking about, most notably the insistence on the relation of Christian belief and life style. The students by and large found it to be one of the most "convincing" Christian theologies they had encountered -- it appeared to them to be a modern interpretation of the gospel.

The temptation of that book for those really taken by it is to experience an impatience with thought or reflection of any sort. One should simply stop thinking and writing and get on with the business of "doing" the gospel it depicts. The tendency of the style of theology I am suggesting is toward activism, or if not that, toward a lowering of standards for reflection. Gutierrez does not succumb to that temptation, even though he is personally involved in very practical political and social organizing in South America among the world’s most oppressed people. Nor did Paul succumb to it. While his letters are not models of philosophical precision, they are reflection of the highest order and in their own way are as precise (in the way that metaphors and images are precise) as are any philosophical concepts. The question in Christian theology is not reflection or action, belief or life style, but both together -- an incarnational religion has no other choice.

My own work for the next several years will undoubtedly lie within the contours of the style of theological reflection I have sketched, and I hope eventually to produce an "intermediary theology." The prospect both challenges and frightens me, but I am glad to be part of a group of persons who will provide both support and criticism for this venture. One must not expect too much of oneself or one’s time -- I do not expect from myself or from my peers a new systematic theology. Ours is not, I think, a time of giants. The Tillichs and Barths have departed, and I am not optimistic about the emergence of others to take their places -- nor am I convinced that a comprehensive systematic theology is possible or appropriate at this juncture. Our time may well be one of occasional theology, theology that is partial and particular, oriented to specific issues. That is not necessarily a depressing prospect, if it is well done by many hands. Paul was an occasional theologian; if he is the one setting the standard and the scope of such theology, it is high enough and wide enough for all of us.

Imaging a Theology of Nature: The World as God’s Body

In this essay, theologian Sallie McFague, author of the influential Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age, engages in what she calls heuristic theology. The aim of such theology is to interpret God, albeit with humility, in an ecologically responsible manner. Such is the need, so McFague claims, of our "ecological, nuclear age." McFague identifies four images that ecologically attuned Christians might find helpful: God as mother, as lover, as friend, and finally, God as embodied by the universe itself. The importance of McFague’s thinking is evidenced by the many references to her work in other essays in this anthology. She is one of the leading ecological theologians of our time.

I spent my last sabbatical in England, and I think all will agree that England is a green and pleasant land. I recall an early morning trip to Coventry on the bus: the lovely, gently rolling hills, quaint villages with thatched-roofed cottages -- very pastoral, idyllic. There were sheep dotting the hills, but also something else: huge, concrete towers of nuclear plants rising up through the morning mist. It seemed a strange juxtaposition: sheep and nuclear towers -- life and potential death. Our cruise missiles also dotted the countryside, though I did not see them. These towers and missiles symbolize a situation unique to our time. We are the first generation of human beings out of all the billions of humans who have ever lived who have the responsibility of nuclear knowledge. In perverse imitation of God, the creator of life, we have become potential uncreators. We have the knowledge and the power to destroy ourselves and much of the rest of life. And we will always have this knowledge -- regardless of nuclear disarmament. Jonathan Schell in his book The Fate of the Earth speaks of the "second death" -- the death of life (Schell, 99 ff.). The first death is our own individual one and difficult as that is to face, we at least know that birth will follow and others will take our place. But the death of birth is the extinction of life and that is too horrendous to contemplate, especially when we know we would be responsible for it.

Our nuclear knowledge brings to the surface a fundamental fact about human existence. We are part and parcel of the web of life and exist in interdependence with all other beings, both human and nonhuman. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin puts it in a moment of insight: "I realized that my own poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is in process of becoming" (Teilhard 1968a, 25). Or, as the poet Wallace Stevens says, "Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations and interconnections" (Stevens, 163). The evolutionary, ecological perspective insists that we are, in the most profound way, "not our own": we belong, from the cells of our bodies to the finest creations of our minds, to the intricate, ever-changing cosmos. We both depend on that web of life for our own continued existence and in a special way we are responsible for it, for we alone know that life is interrelated and we alone know how to destroy it. It is an awesome -- and unsettling -- thought.

As we near the close of the twentieth century we have become increasingly conscious of the fragility of our world. We have also become aware that the anthropocentrism that characterizes much of the Judeo-Christian tradition has often fed a sensibility insensitive to our proper place in the universe.²The ecological crisis, epitomized in the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, has brought home to many the need for a new mode of consciousness on the part of human beings, for what Rosemary Ruether calls a "conversion" to the earth, a cosmocentric sensibility (Ruether, 89).³

What does all this mean for theology, especially for a theology of nature? Theology, I believe, has special responsibility for the symbols, images, the language, used for expressing the relationship between God and the world in every age. The sciences are also concerned with interpreting reality -- the universe or universes, if you will -- although cosmology means different things to scientists than it does to theologians. Nonetheless, here is a meeting place, a place of common interest, to scientists and theologians. David Tracy and Nicholas Lash have called recently for a "collaborative" relationship between science and theology in order to "help establish plausible ‘mutually critical correlations’ not only to interpret the world but to help change it" (Tracy and Lash, 91).⁴ They note that relations between science and theology are not only those posed by a recognition of analogies between the two areas on methodological issues but, more pressingly, by a common concern with the cosmos. Thus, a focus on the cosmos with the intent both to understand it better -- and to orient our praxis within it more appropriately -- is one collaborative effort for science and theology in our time.

While cosmology may mean several different things, the theologian’s contribution is concerned with "accounts of the world as God’s creation," and, within that broad compass, one specific enterprise especially needed in our time involves "imaginative perceptions of how the world seems am where we stand in it" (Tracy and Lash, vii)⁵In other words. I propose that one theological task is an experimental one with metaphors and models for the relationship between God and the world that will help bring about a theocentric, life-centered, cosmocentric sensibility in place of our anthropocentric one.

This exercise would take place at the juncture between a theology of nature and a theocentric or life-centered ethic. That is, an analysis in some detail of one model of the God/world relationship -- that of the world or universe as God’s body -- would mediate between concepts and praxis, between a theoretical and a practical orientation.

As we begin this task we must keep in mind some criteria for any theology of nature pertinent to the closing years of the twentieth century. First, it must be informed by and commensurate with contemporary scientific accounts of what nature is. Second, it needs to see human life as profoundly interrelated with all other forms of life, refusing the traditional absolute separation of human beings from other creatures as well as of God from the world. Third, it will be a kind of theology that is creation-centered, in contrast to the almost total concern with redemption in some Christian theologies. It will be a theology that focuses, in the broadest and deepest sense, on the incarnational presence of God in the world. Finally, it will acknowledge and press the interconnectedness of peace, justice, and ecological issues, aware that there can be no peace or justice unless the fabric of our ecosystem is intact. What this means, I believe, is that for the first time in the history of the human race, we see the necessity of thinking responsibly and deeply about everything that is. That is a tall order, but once the scales fall from the eyes and one understands the profound relationships between issues of peace and war, justice to the oppressed, and concern for our home -- the earth -- there is no possibility of going back to piecemeal thinking. In other words, a theology of nature must be holistic.

One task that needs to be done within this overarching assignment is to imagine in some detail and depth the relationship between God and the world in a way not only consonant with these criteria, but in a fashion that would help it to come alive in people’s minds and hearts. Human behavior appears to be profoundly influenced by the imagistic, symbolical, narrative powers of human reflection. How would we, for instance, act differently if we imagined the world to be the body of God rather than considering it to be, as the tradition has, the realm of the Almighty King? That question is the basic one I want to consider in this paper.

The kind of theology I will be engaged in here, by no means the only kind, could be called heuristic theology; in analogy with some similar activities in the sciences, it "plays" with possibilities in order to find out, to discover, new fruitful ways to interpret the universe.⁶In the case of an heuristic theology focused on cosmology, the discovery would be oriented toward "remythologizing" creation as dependent upon God. More specifically, I propose as a modest contribution to the contemporary understanding of a theological cosmology for our time an elaboration of the model of the world as God’s body, both as a critique of and substitute for the dominant model of the world as the realm of God the king.

The following, therefore, will be a "case study," with a theological model for reenvisioning the relationship between God and the universe. Before turning to this study, however, we will make some preliminary comments on the method employed in this kind of theology as well as on metaphors and models, their character and status.

Imagination and Theology

Christian faith is, it seems to me, most basically a claim that the universe is neither indifferent nor malevolent, but that there is a power (and a personal power at that) that is on the side of life and its fulfillment. Moreover, the Christian believes that we have some clues for fleshing out this claim in the life, death, and appearances of Jesus of Nazareth. Nevertheless, each generation must venture, through an analysis of what fulfillment could and must mean for its own time, the best way to express that claim. A critical dimension of this expression is the imaginative picture, the metaphors and models, that underlie the conceptual systems of theology. One cannot hope to interpret Christian faith for one’s own time if one remains indifferent to the basic images that are the lifeblood of interpretation and that greatly influence people’s perceptions and behavior.⁷

Many of the major models for the relationship between God and the world in the Judeo-Christian tradition are ones that emphasize the transcendence of God and the distance between God and the world: God as king with the world as his realm, God as potter who creates the cosmos by molding it, God as speaker who with a word brings the world to be out of nothing. One has to ask whether these models are adequate ones for our time, our ecological, nuclear age, in which the radical interdependence and interrelationship of all forms of life must be underscored. Quite apart from that crisis, however, responsible theology ought to be done in the context of contemporary science and were it to take that context seriously, models underscoring the closeness, not the distance, of God and the world would emerge. A. R. Peacocke makes this point well when he says,

There is increasing awareness not only among Christian theologians, but even more among ordinary believers that, if God is in fact the all-encompassing Reality that Christian faith proclaims, then that Reality is to be experienced in and through our actual lives as biological organisms who are persons, part of nature and living in society (Peacocke, 16-17).

For a number of reasons, therefore, experimentation with models underscoring the intimacy of God and creation may be in order and it is this task, with one model, that I will undertake. I have characterized the theological method operative here as heuristic and concerned with metaphors and models. Let us look briefly at these matters. Heuristic theology is distinct from theology as hermeneutics or as construction but has similarities with both.⁸The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines heuristic adjectivally as "serving to find out" and, when employed as a noun related to learning, as "a system of education under which pupils are trained to find out for themselves." Thus heuristic theology will be one that experiments and tests, that thinks in an as-if fashion, that imagines possibilities that are novel, that dares to think differently. It will not accept solely on the basis of authority but will search for what it finds convincing and persuasive; it will not, however, be fantasy or mere play but will assume that there is something to find out and that if some imagined possibilities fail, others may succeed. The mention of failure and success, and of the persuasive and the convincing, indicates that although I wish to distinguish heuristic theology from both hermeneutical and constructive theology, it bears similarities to both.

If the characteristic mark of hermeneutical theology is its interpretive stance, especially in regard to texts -- both the classic text of the Judeo-Christian tradition (the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament) and the exemplary theologies that build on the classic text -- then heuristic theology is also interpretive, for it claims that its successful unconventional metaphors are not only in continuity with the paradigmatic events and their significance expressed in this classic text but are also appropriate expressions of these matters for the present time. Heuristic theology, though not bound to the images and concepts in scripture, is constrained to show that its proposed models are an appropriate, persuasive expression of Christian faith for our time. Hence, while heuristic theology is not limited to interpreting texts, it is concerned with the same "matter" as the classic texts, namely, the salvific power of God.⁹

If, on the other hand, the distinctive mark of constructive theology is that it does not rely principally on classical sources but attempts its articulation of the concepts of God, world, and human being with the help of a variety of sources, including material from the natural, physical, and social sciences as well as from philosophy, literature, and the arts, then heuristic theology is also constructive in that it claims that a valid understanding of God and world for a particular time is an imaginative construal built up from a variety of sources, many of them outside religious traditions. Like theology as construction, theology as heuristics supports the assertion that our concept of God is precisely that -- our concept of God -- and not God. Yet, while heuristic theology has some similarities to constructive theology, it has a distinctive emphasis: it will be more experimental, imagistic, and pluralistic.

Its experimental character means it is a kind of theology well suited for times of uncertainty and change, when systematic, comprehensive construction seems inappropriate if not impossible. It could be called "free theology,"¹⁰for it must be willing to play with possibilities and, as a consequence, not take itself too seriously, accepting its tentative, relative, partial, and hypothetical character.

Its imagistic character means it stands as a corrective to the bias of much constructive theology toward conceptual clarity, often at the price of imagistic richness.¹¹Although it would be insufficient to rest in new images and to refuse to spell out conceptually their implications in as comprehensive a way as possible, the more critical task is to propose what Dennis Nineham calls a "lively imaginative picture" of the way God and the world as we know it are related (Nineham, 201-2). It is no coincidence that most religious traditions turn to personal and public human relationships to serve as metaphors and models of the relationship between God and the world: God as father, mother, lover, friend, king, lord, governor. These metaphors give a precision and persuasive power to the construct of God that concepts alone cannot. Because religions, including Christianity, are not incidentally imagistic but centrally and necessarily so, theology must also be an affair of the imagination.

To say that heuristic theology is pluralistic is to insist that since no metaphor or model refers properly or directly to God, many are necessary. All are inappropriate, partial, and inadequate; the most that can be said is that some aspect or aspects of the God-world relationship are illuminated by this or that model in a fashion relevant to a particular time and place. Models of God are not definitions of God but likely accounts of experiences of relating to God with the help of relationships we know and understand. If one accepts that metaphors (and all language about God) are principally adverbial, having to do with how we relate to God rather than defining the nature of God, then no metaphors or models can be reified, petrified, or expanded so as to exclude all others. One can, for instance, include many possibilities: We can envision relating to God as to a father and a mother, to a healer and a liberator, to the sun and a mountain. As definitions of God, these possibilities are mutually exclusive; as models expressing experiences of relating to God, they are mutually enriching.

In summary, the theology I am proposing is a kind of heuristic construction that in focusing on the imaginative construal of the God-world relationship, attempts to remythologize Christian faith through metaphors and models appropriate for our time.

What, however, is the character and status of the metaphors and models that are the central concern of heuristic theology? A metaphor is a word or phrase used inappropriately.¹² It belongs in one context but is being used in another: the arm of the chair, war as a chess game, God the father. From Aristotle until recently, metaphor was seen mainly as a poetic device to embellish or decorate. Increasingly, however, the idea of metaphor as unsubstitutable is winning acceptance; what a metaphor expresses cannot be said directly or apart from it, for if it could, one would have said it directly. Here, metaphor is a strategy of desperation, not decoration; it is an attempt to say something about the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, an attempt to speak about what we do not know in terms of what we do know.

Metaphor always has the character of is and is not: an assertion is made but as a likely account rather than a definition." The point that metaphor underscores is that in certain matters there can be no direct description. It used to be the case that poetry and religion were thought to be distinctive in their reliance on metaphor, but more recently the use of metaphors and models in the natural and social sciences has widened the scope of metaphorical thinking considerably and linked science and theology methodologically in ways inconceivable twenty years ago.¹⁴

The difference between a metaphor and a model can be expressed in a number of ways, but most simply, a model is a metaphor with "staying power," that is, a model is a metaphor that has gained sufficient stability and scope so as to present a pattern for relatively comprehensive and coherent explanation.¹⁵The metaphor of God the father is an excellent example of this. In becoming a model, it has engendered wide-ranging interpretation of the relationship between God and human beings; if God is seen as father, human beings become children, sin can be seen as rebellious behavior, and redemption can be thought of as restoration to the status of favored offspring.

It should be evident that a theology that describes itself as metaphorical is a theology at risk. Jacques Derrida, in defining metaphor, writes, "if metaphor, which is mimesis trying its chance, mimesis at risk, may always fail to attain truth, this is because it has to reckon with a definite absence" (Derrida, 42). As Derrida puts it, metaphor lies somewhere between "nonsense" and "truth," and a theology based on metaphor will be open to the charge that it is closer to the first than the second. This is, I believe, a risk that theology in our time must be willing to run. Theology has usually had a high stake in truth, so high that it has refused all play of the imagination: through creedal control and the formulations of orthodoxy, it has refused all attempts at new metaphors "trying their chance." But a heuristic theology insists that new metaphors and models be given a chance, be tried out as likely accounts of the God-world relationship, be allowed to make a case for themselves. A heuristic theology is, therefore, destabilizing. Since no language about God is adequate and all of it is improper, new metaphors are not necessarily less inadequate or improper than old ones. All are in the same situation and no authority -- not scriptural status, liturgical longevity, or ecclesiastical fiat -- can decree that some types of language, or some images, refer literally to God while others do not. None do. Hence, the criteria for preferring some to others must be other than authority, however defined.

We come, then, finally, to the issue of the status of language about God. R. W. Hepburn has posed it directly:

The question which should be of the greatest concern to the theologian is . . . whether or not the circle of myth, metaphor, and symbol is a closed one: and if closed then in what way propositions about God manage to refer (Hepburn, 23).

The "truth" of a construal of the God-world relationship is a mixture of belief (Ricoeur calls it a "wager"), pragmatic criteria, and what Philip Wheelwright terms a "shy ontological claim," or, as in Mary Hesse’s striking remark, "God is more like gravitation than embarrassment" (Arbib and Hesse, 5). Belief in God is not taken to be purely a social construct. At least this is what a critical realist would claim. Thus, metaphors and models of God are understood to be discovered as well as created, to relate to God’s reality not in the sense of being literally in correspondence with it, but as versions or hypotheses of it that the community (in this case, the church) accepts as relatively adequate.¹⁶Hence, models of God are not simply heuristic fictions; the critical realist does not accept the Feuerbachian critique that language about God is nothing but human projection. On the other hand, any particular metaphor or model is not the only, appropriate, true one.

How does one come to accept a model as true? We live within the model, testing our wager by its consequences. These consequences are both theoretical and practical. An adequate model will be illuminating, fruitful, have relatively comprehensive explanatory ability, be relatively consistent, be able to deal with anomalies, and so on. This largely, though not totally, functional, pragmatic view of truth stresses heavily the implications of certain models for the quality of human and nonhuman life. A praxis orientation does not deny the possibility of the "shy ontological claim," but it does acknowledge both the mystery of God and the importance of truth as practical wisdom. Thus it acknowledges with the apophatic tradition that we really do not know the inner being of divine reality; the hints and clues we have of the way things are, whether we call them religious experiences, revelation, or whatever, are too fragile, too little (and often too negative) for heavy metaphysical claims. Rather, in the tradition of Aristotle, truth means constructing the good life for thepolis, though for our time this must mean for the cosmos. A "true" model of God will be one that is a powerful, persuasive construal of God as being on the side of life and its fulfillment in our time.¹⁷

God and the World

We turn now to consider models for the relationship between God and the world. The dominant model has been monarchical; the classical picture employs royalist, triumphalist metaphors, depicting God as king, lord, and patriarch, who rules over and cares for the world and human beings. Ian Barbour, theologian and philosopher of science, says of this model:

The monarchical model of God as King was developed systematically, both in Jewish thought (God as Lord and King of the Universe), in medieval Christian thought (with its emphasis on divine omnipotence), and in the Reformation (especially in Calvin’s insistence on God’s sovereignty). In the portrayal of God’s relation to the world, the dominant western historical model has been that of the absolute monarch ruling over his kingdom (Harbour, 156).¹⁸

This imaginative picture is so prevalent in mainstream Christianity that it is often not recognized as a picture. It is a powerful imaginative picture and a very dangerous one. As Gordon Kaufman points out in Theology for a Nuclear Age, divine sovereignty is the issue with which theologians in the nuclear age must deal. In its cruder versions, God is the king who fights on the side of his chosen ones to bring their enemies down; in more refined versions God is the father who will not let his children suffer. The first view supports militarism; the second supports escapism. As Kaufman states, two groups of American Christians currently rely on these images of God in their responses to the nuclear situation: one group claims that if a nuclear holocaust comes, it will be God’s will -- the Armageddon -- and America should arm itself to fight the devil’s agent, Communist Russia; the other passively relies on the all-powerful father to take care of the situation. Is divine sovereignty the appropriate imagery for our time? It may have been for some ages, but in our time, when the interdependence of all life and our special responsibility for it needs to be emphasized, is it for ours?

As Kaufman points out, the monarchical model results in a pattern of "asymmetrical dualism" between God and the world, in which God and the world are only distantly related and all power, either as domination or benevolence, is on God’s side (Kaufman, 39). It supports conceiving of God as a being existing somewhere apart from the world and ruling it externally either directly through divine intervention or indirectly through controlling the wills of his subjects. It creates feelings of awe in the hearts of loyal subjects and thus supports the "godness" of God, but these feelings are balanced by others of abject fear and humiliation: in this picture, God can be God only if we are nothing.

Very briefly, let me summarize a few major problems with this model as an imaginative framework for understanding God’s saving love as an inclusive one of fulfillment for all of creation. In the monarchical model, God is distant from the world, relates only to the human world, and controls that world through domination and benevolence. On the first point: the relationship of a king to his subjects is necessarily a distant one for royalty is "untouchable." It is the distance, the difference, the otherness of God, that is underscored with this imagery. God as king is in his kingdom -- which is not of this earth -- and we remain in another place, far from his dwelling. In this picture God is worldless and the world is Godless: the world is empty of God’s presence. Whatever one does for the world is not finally important in this model, for its ruler does not inhabit it as his primary residence, and his subjects are well advised not to become too enamored of it either.

Although these comments may at first seem like a caricature rather than a fair description of the classical Western monarchical model, they are the direct implications of its imagery. If metaphors matter, then one must take them seriously at the level at which they function, that is, at the level of the imaginative picture of God and the world they project. And one of the direct implications is distance and at best only external involvement. To be sure, kings want their subjects to be loyal and their realms peaceful, but that does not mean internal, intrinsic involvement. Kings do not have to, and usually do not, love their subjects or realms; at most, one hopes they will be benevolent.

But such benevolence extends only to human subjects: in the monarchical model there is no concern for the cosmos, for the nonhuman world. Here is our second objection to this model. It is simply blank in terms of what lies outside the human sphere. As a political model focused on governing human beings, it leaves out most of reality. One could say at this point that, as with all models, it has limitations and needs to be balanced by other models. Such a comment does not address the seriousness of the monarchical model’s power, for as the dominant Western model, it has not allowed competing models to arise. The tendency, rather, has been to draw other models into its orbit, as is evident with the model of God as father. This model could have gone in the direction of parent (and that is clearly its New Testament course), with associations of nurture, care, guidance, and responsibility, but under the powerful influence of the monarchical model, the parent becomes the patriarch, and patriarchs act more like kings than like fathers: They rule their children and they demand obedience.

The monarchical model is not only highly anthropocentric, but it supports a kind of anthropocentricism characterized by dualistic hierarchies. We not only imagine God in our image, but those images we use for imaging God also become standards for human behavior. Dualistic, triumphalistic thinking fuels many forms of oppression.¹⁹While the monarchical model may not be responsible alone for hierarchical dualism, it has supported it: the dualisms of male/female, spirit/nature, human/nonhuman, Christian/non-Christian, rich/poor, white/colored, and so forth. The hierarchical, dualistic pattern is so widespread in Western thought that it is often not perceived to be a pattern, but is felt to be simply the way things are. It appears natural to many that whites, males, the rich, and Christians are superior to other human beings, and that human beings are more valuable in all respects than other forms of life.

We come, then, to the third criticism of the monarchical model: God rules either through domination or benevolence, thus undercutting human responsibility for the world. It is simplistic to blame the Judeo-Christian tradition for the ecological crisis, as some have done, on the grounds that Genesis instructs human beings to have dominion over nature; nonetheless, the imagery of sovereignty supports attitudes of control and use toward the nonhuman world.²⁰Although the might of the natural world when unleashed is fearsome, as is evident in earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions, the power balance has shifted from nature to us, and an essential aspect of the new sensibility is to recognize and accept this. Nature can and does destroy many, but it is not in the position to destroy all, as we can. Extinction of species by nature is in a different dimension from extinction by design, which only we can bring about. This chilling thought adds a new importance to the images we use to characterize our relationship to others and to the nonhuman world. If we are capable of extinguishing ourselves and most, if not all, other life, metaphors that support attitudes of distance from, and domination of, other human beings and nonhuman life must be recognized as dangerous. No matter how ancient a metaphorical tradition may be and regardless of its credentials in scripture, liturgy, and creedal statements, it still must be discarded if it threatens the continuation of life itself. If the heart of the Christian gospel is the salvific power of God, triumphalist metaphors cannot express that reality in our time, whatever their appropriateness may have been in the past.

And this is so even if God’s power is seen as benevolence rather than domination. For if God’s rule is understood benevolently, it will be assumed that all is well -- that the world will be cared for with no help from us. The king as dominating sovereign encourages attitudes of militarism and destruction; the king as benevolent patriarch encourages attitudes of passivity and escape from responsibility.²¹ The monarchical model is dangerous in our time. It encourages a sense of distance from the world; it attends only to the human dimension of the world; and it supports attitudes of either domination of the world or passivity toward it. As an alternative model I suggest considering the world as God’s body.

In what ways would we think of the relationship between God and the world were we to experiment with the metaphor of the universe as God’s body, God’s palpable presence in all space and time? If the entire universe is expressive of God’s very being -- the incarnation, if you will -- do we not have the beginnings of an imaginative picture of the relationship between God and the world peculiarly appropriate as a context for interpreting the salvific love of God for our time? If what is needed in our ecological, nuclear age is an imaginative vision of the relationship between God and the world that underscores their interdependence and mutuality, empowering a sensibility of care and responsibility toward all life, how would it help to see the world as the body of God?

This image, radical as it may seem (in light of the dominant metaphor of a king to his realm) for imagining the relationship between God and the world, is a very old one with roots in Stoicism and elliptically in the Hebrew Scriptures. The notion has tantalized many, including Tertullian and Irenacus, and though it received little assistance from either Platonism or Aristotelianism because of their denigration of matter and the body (and hence did not enter the mainstream of either Augustinian or Thomistic theology), it surfaced powerfully in Hegel as well as in twentieth-century process theologies.²² The mystical tradition within Christianity has carried the notion implicitly, even though the metaphor of body may not appear: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" (Gerard Manley Hopkins, 27). "There is communion with God, and a communion with the earth, and a communion with God through the earth" (Teilhard 1968a, 14).

As we begin this experiment with the model of the world as God’s body, we must once again recall that a metaphor or model is not a description. We are trying to think in an as-if fashion about the God-world relationship, because we have no other way of thinking about it. No metaphor fits in all ways, and some are more nonsense than sense. The king-realm kind of thinking about the God-world relationship sounds like sense because we are used to it, but reflection shows that in our world it is nonsense. For a metaphor to be acceptable, it need not, cannot, apply in all ways; if it did, it would be a description. The metaphor of the world as God’s body has the opposite problem to the metaphor of the world as the king’s realm; if the latter puts too great a distance between God and the world, the former verges on too great a proximity. Since neither metaphor fits exactly, we have to ask which one is better in our time and to qualify it with other metaphors and models. Is it better to accept an imaginative picture of God as the distant ruler controlling his realm through external and benevolent power or one of God so intimately related to the world that the world can be imagined as God’s body? Which is better in terms of our and the world’s preservation and fulfillment? Which is better in terms of coherence, comprehensibility, and illumination? Which is better in terms of expressing the Christian understanding of the relationship between God and the world? All these criteria are relevant, for a metaphor that is all or mostly nonsense has tried and failed.

Therefore, a heuristic, metaphorical theology, though hospitable initially to nonsense, is constrained as well to search for sense. Christians should, given their tradition, be inclined to find sense in body language, not only because of the resurrection of the body but also because of the bread and wine of the eucharist as the body and blood of Christ, and the church as the body with Christ as its head. Christians have a surprisingly "bodily" tradition. Nonetheless, there is a difference between the traditional uses of body and seeing the world as God’s body: when the world is viewed as God’s body, that body includes more than just Christians, and more than just human beings. It is possible to speculate that if Christianity had begun in a culture less dualistic and antiphysical than that of the first-century Mediterranean world, it might have been willing, given the more holistic anthropology and theology of its Hebraic roots, to extend its body metaphor to God? At any rate, in view of the contemporary holistic understanding of personhood, in which embodiment is the sine qua non, the thought of an embodied divine person is not more incredible than that of a disembodied one; in fact, it is less so. In a dualistic culture where mind and body, spirit and flesh, are separable, a disembodied, personal God is more credible, but not in ours. This is only to suggest that the idea of God’s embodiment -- the idea as such, quite apart from particulars -- should not be seen as nonsense; it is less nonsense than the idea of a disembodied personal God.

We are imagining the world to be God’s body. The body of God, then, would be nothing less than all that is -- the universe or universes and everything they contain of which cosmologists speak. The body of God, as theologians would say, is creation, understood as God’s self-expression; it is formed in God’s own reality, bodied forth in the eons of evolutionary time, and supplied with the means to nurture and sustain billions of different forms of life. We give life only to others of our own species, but God gives life to all that is, all species of life and all forms of matter. In a monotheistic, panentheistic theology, if one is to understand God in some sense as physical and not just spiritual, then the entire "body" of the universe is "in" God and is God’s visible self-expression. This body, albeit a strange one if we take ours as the model, is nothing less than all that exists.

Would God, then, be reduced to the world or the universe? The metaphor does come far closer to pantheism than the king-realm model, which verges on deism, but it does not identify God totally with the world any more than we identify ourselves totally with our bodies. Other animals may be said to be bodies that have spirits; we may be said to be spirits that possess bodies.²⁴This is not to introduce a new dualism but only to recognize that, although our bodies are expressions of us both unconsciously and consciously, we can reflect about them and distance ourselves from them. The very fact that we can speak about our bodies is evidence that we are not totally one with them. On this model God is not reduced to the world if the world is God’s body. Without the use of personal, agential metaphors, however, including among others God as mother, father, healer, lover, friend, judge, and liberator, the metaphor of the world as God’s body would be pantheistic, for the body would be all there were.²⁵ Nonetheless, the model is most precisely designated as panentheistic; that is, it is a view of the God-world relationship in which all things have their origins in God and nothing exists outside God, though this does not mean that God is reduced to these things.²⁶

Nevertheless, though God is not reduced to the world, the metaphor of the world as God’s body puts God "at risk." If we follow out the implications of the metaphor, we see that God becomes dependent through being bodily in a way that a totally invisible, distant God would never be. Just as we care about our bodies, are made vulnerable by them, and must attend to their well-being, God will be liable to bodily contingencies. The world as God’s body may be poorly cared for, ravaged, and as we are becoming well-aware, essentially destroyed, in spite of God’s own loving attention to it, because of one creature, ourselves, who can choose or not choose to join with God in conscious care of the world. Presumably, were our tiny corner of this body destroyed, another could be formed; hence, God need not be seen to be as dependent on us or on any particular body as we are on our bodies. But in the metaphor of the universe as the self-expression of God -- God’s incarnation -- the notions of vulnerability, shared responsibility, and risk are inevitable. This is a markedly different basic understanding of the God-world relationship than in the monarch-realm metaphor, for it emphasizes God’s willingness to suffer for and with the world, even to the point of personal risk. The world as God’s body, then, may be seen as a way to remythologize the inclusive, suffering love of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. In both instances God is at risk in human hands: just as once upon a time in a bygone mythology human beings killed their God in the body of a man, so now we once again have that power, but in a mythology more appropriate to our time; we would kill our God in the body of the world. Could we actually do this? To believe in the resurrection means we could not. God is not in our power to destroy, but the incarnate God is at risk; we have been given central responsibility to care for God’s body, our world.

If God, though at risk and dependent on others, is not reduced to the world in the metaphor of the world as God’s body, what more can we say about the meaning of this model? How does God know the world, act in it, and love it? How does one speak of evil in this metaphor? In the monarchical model, God knows the world externally, acts on it either by direct intervention or indirectly through human subjects, and loves it benevolently, in a charitable way. God’s knowledge, action, and love are markedly different in the metaphor of the world as God’s body. God knows the world immediately just as we know our bodies immediately. God could be said to be in touch with all parts of the world through interior understanding. Moreover, this knowledge is empathetic, intimate, sympathetic knowledge, closer to feeling than to rationality.²⁷ It is knowledge "by acquaintance"; it is not "information about." Just as we are internally related to our bodies, so God is internally related to all that is -- the most radically relational Thou. God relates sympathetically to the world, just as we relate sympathetically to our bodies. This implies, of course, an immediacy and concern in God’s knowledge of the world impossible in the king-realm model.

Moreover, it implies that the action of God in the world is similarly interior and caring. If the entire universe, all that is and has been, is God’s body, then God acts in and through the incredibly complex physical and historical-cultural evolutionary process that began eons ago.²⁸ This does not mean that God is reduced to the evolutionary process, for God remains as the agent, the self, whose intentions are expressed in the universe. Nevertheless, the manner in which these intentions are expressed is internal and, by implication, providential -- that is, reflective of a "caring" relationship. God does not, as in the royal model, intervene in the natural or historical process deus ex machina fashion, nor does God feel merely charitable toward the world. The suggestion, however, that God cares about the world as one cares about one’s own body, that is, with a high degree of sympathetic concern, does not imply that all is well or the future assured, for with the body metaphor, God is at risk. It does suggest, however, that to trust in a God whose body is the world is to trust in a God who cares profoundly about the world.

Furthermore, the model of the world as God’s body suggests that God loves bodies: in loving the world, God loves a body. Such a notion is a sharp challenge to the long antibody, antiphysical, antimatter tradition within Christianity. This tradition has repressed healthy sexuality, oppressed women as sexual tempters, and defined Christian redemption in spiritualistic ways, thus denying that basic social and economic needs of embodied beings are relevant to salvation. To say that God loves bodies is to redress the balance toward a more holistic understanding of fulfillment. It is to say that bodies are worth loving, sexually and otherwise, that passionate love as well as attention to the needs of bodily existence are part of fulfillment. It is to say further that the basic necessities of bodily existence -- adequate food and shelter, for example --. are central aspects of God’s love for all bodily creatures and therefore should be central concerns for us, God’s coworkers. In a holistic sensibility there can be no spirit/body split: if neither we nor God is disembodied, then denigration of the body, the physical, and matter should end. Such a split makes no sense in our world: spirit and body or matter are on a continuum, for matter is not inanimate substance but throbs of energy, essentially in continuity with spirit. To love bodies, then, is to love not what is opposed to spirit but what is one with it -- which the model of the world as God’s body fully expresses.

The immanence of God in the world implied in our metaphor raises the question of God’s involvement with evil. Is God responsible for evil, both natural and humanly willed evil? The pictures of the king and his realm and of God and the world as God’s body obviously suggest very different replies to these enormously difficult and complex questions. In the monarchical construct, God is implicitly in contest with evil powers, either as victorious king, who crushes them or as sacrificial servant, who (momentarily) assumes a worldly mien in order to free his subjects from evil’s control. The implication of ontological dualism, of opposing good and evil powers, is the price paid for separating God from evil, and it is a high price indeed, for it suggests that the place of evil is the world (and ourselves) and that to escape evil’s clutches, we need to free ourselves from "the world, the flesh, and the devil." In this construct God is not responsible for evil, but neither does God identify with the suffering caused by evil.

That identification does occur in the metaphor of the world as God’s body. The evil in the world, all kinds of evil, occurs in and to God as well as to us and the rest of creation. Evil is not a power over against God; in a sense, it is God’s "responsibility," part of God’s being, if you will. A monistic, panentheistic position cannot avoid this conclusion.²⁹ In a physical, biological, historico-cultural evolutionary process as complex as the universe, much that is evil from various perspectives will occur, and if one sees this process as God’s self-expression, then God is involved in evil. But the other side of this is that God is also involved, profoundly, palpably, personally involved, in suffering, in the suffering caused by evil. The evil occurs in and to God’s body; the pain that those parts of creation affected by evil feel God also feels and feels bodily. All pain to all creatures is felt immediately and bodily by God: one does not suffer alone. In this sense God’s suffering on the cross was not for a mere few hours, as in the old mythology, but it is present and permanent. As the body of the world, God is forever "nailed to the cross," for as this body suffers, so God suffers.³⁰

Is this to suggest that God is helpless in relation to evil and that God knows no joy? No, for the way of the cross, the way of inclusive, radical love, is a kind of power, though a very different kind from kingly might. It does imply, however, that unlike God the king, the God who suffers with the world cannot wipe out evil; evil is not only part of the process but its power also depends on us, God’s partners in the way of inclusive, radical love. And what holds for suffering can be said of joy as well. Wherever in the universe there is new life, ecstasy, tranquility, and fulfillment, God experiences these pleasures and rejoices with each creature in its joy.

When we turn to our side of this picture of the world as God’s body, we have to ask whether we are reduced to being mere parts of the body. What is our freedom? How is sin understood here? How would we behave in this model? The model did not fit God’s side in every way, and it does not fit ours in every way either. It seems especially problematic at the point of our individuality and freedom. At least in the king-realm model, human beings appear to have some freedom since they are controlled only externally, not internally. The problem emerges because of the nature of bodies. If we are parts of God’s body -- if the model is totally organic -- are we not totally immersed, along with all other creatures, in the evolutionary process, with no transcendence or freedom? It appears, however, at least to us, that we are a special part. We think of ourselves as imago dei, as not only possessing bodies but being agents. We view ourselves as embodied spirits in the larger body of the world which influences us and which we influence. That is, we are the part molded on the model: self:body::God:world. We are agents, and God possesses a body: both sides of the model pertain to both God and ourselves. This implies that we are not mere submerged parts of the body of God but related to God as to another Thou. The presence of God p to us in and through God’s body is the experience of encounter, not of submersion. For the saving love of God to be present to human beings it would have to be so in a way different from how it is present to other aspects of the body of the world -- in a way in keeping with the peculiar kind of creatures we are, namely, creatures with a special kind of freedom, able to participate self-consciously (as well as be influenced unconsciously) in an evolutionary process. This gives us a special status and a special responsibility: We are the ones like God; we are selves that possess bodies, and that is our glory. It is also our responsibility, for we alone can choose to become partners with God in care of the world; we alone can -- like God -- love, heal, befriend, and liberate the world, the body, that God has made available to us as both the divine presence and our home.

Our special status and responsibility, however, are not limited to consciousness of our own personal bodies, or even of the human world, but extend to all embodied reality, for we are that part of the cosmos where the cosmos itself has come to consciousness. If we become extinct, then the cosmos will lose its human, although presumably not its divine, consciousness. As Jonathan Schell remarks, "In extinction a darkness falls over the world not because the lights have gone out but because the eyes that behold the light have been closed" (Schell, 128).³¹

It is obvious, then, what sin is in this metaphor of the world as God’s body: it is refusal to be part of the body, the special part we are as imago dei. In contrast to the king-realm model, where sin is against God, here it is against the world. To sin is not to refuse loyalty to the king, but to refuse to take responsibility for nurturing, loving, and befriending the body and all its parts. Sin is the refusal to realize one’s radical interdependence with all that lives; it is the desire to set oneself apart from all others as not needing them or being needed by them. Sin is the refusal to be the eyes, the consciousness, of the cosmos.

What this experiment with the world as God’s body comes to, finally, is an awareness, both chilling and breathtaking, that we, as worldly, bodily beings, are in God’s presence. We do not have to go to some special place -- a church, for instance -- or to another world, to find God, for God is present with us here and now. We have a basis for a revived sacramentalism, that is, a perception of the divine as visible, as present, palpably present in the world. But it is a kind of sacramentalism that is painfully conscious of the world’s vulnerability, its preciousness, its uniqueness. The beauty of the world and its ability to sustain the vast multitude of species it supports is not there for the taking. The world is a body that must be carefully tended, that must be nurtured, protected, guided, loved, and befriended both as valuable in itself -- for like us, it is an expression of God -- and as necessary to the continuation of life. We meet the world as a Thou, as the body of God where God is present to us always in all times and in all places. In the metaphor of the world as God’s body the resurrection is remythologized as a worldly, present, inclusive event -- the offering of the world, God’s body, to all: "This is my body." As is true of all bodies, however, this body, in its beauty and precariousness, is vulnerable and at risk -- it will delight the eye only if we care for it; it will nourish us only if we nurture it. Needless to say, then, were this metaphor to enter our consciousness as thoroughly as the royal, triumphalist one has entered, it would result in a different way of being in the world. There would be no way we could any longer see God as worldless or the world as Godless. Nor could we expect God to take care of everything, either through domination or through benevolence.

We see through pictures. We do not see directly. The pictures of a king and his realm and of the world as God’s body are ways of speaking, ways of imagining the God-world relationship. The one pictures a vast distance between God and the world; the other imagines them as intrinsically related. At the close of day one asks which distortion (assuming that all pictures are false in some respects) is better by asking what attitudes each encourages. This is not the first question to ask, but it may well be the last. The monarchical model encourages attitudes of militarism, dualism, and escapism; it condones control through violence and oppression; it has nothing to say about the nonhuman world. The model of the world as God’s body encourages holistic attitudes of responsibility for and care of the vulnerable and oppressed; it is nonhierarchical and acts through persuasion and attraction; it has a great deal to say about the body and nature. Both are pictures. Which distortion is more true to the world in which we live and to the good news of Christianity?

It may be, of course, that neither picture is appropriate to our time and to Christian faith; if so, others should be proposed. Our profound need for a powerful, attractive, imaginative picture of the way God is related to our world demands that we not only deconstruct but reconstruct our metaphors, letting the ones that seem promising try their chance.

The model of the universe as God’s body is admittedly an immanental one, significant in part because it redresses the heavily transcendent imagery for God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it also suggests, in its own way, a model of transcendence -- what one might call cosmocentric transcendence -- that is awe-inspiring. The common "creation story" emerging from the fields of astrophysics, biology, and scientific cosmology makes small any myth of creation from the various religious traditions: some ten billion or so years ago the universe began from a big bang exploding the "matter," which was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense, outward to create the untold number of galaxies of which our tiny planet is but one blip on the screen. From this beginning came all that followed, so everything that is is related, woven into a seamless network, with life gradually emerging after billions of years on this planet (and perhaps on others) and resulting in the incredibly complex, intricate universe we see today.³²To think of God as the creator and continuing creator/sustainer of this massive, breathtaking cosmic fact dwarfs all our traditional images of divine transcendence -- whether political or metaphysical. And yet, to think of the transcendence of God this way would not contradict the immanental body image. Rather, the two would come together in a cosmocentric, immanental model of transcendence: God the creator of the evolving, incredibly vast and complex universe understood as the divine "body."

What I am suggesting is that we learn to think differently about what the saving love of God must mean in our time if it is to be really for our time, addressing the question of the possible end of existence raised by ecological deterioration and nuclear escalation -- and that we do this by thinking in different images. The one I have suggested is just that: one image -- many others are needed. We must be careful, very careful, of the imagistic glasses through which we interpret God and the world. As Erich Heller, the German philosopher and literary critic, said: "Be careful how you interpret the world. It is like that."

Some treatments attempting to raise consciousness on the ecological, nuclear situation paint a picture of nuclear winter or the extent of death and destruction that will occur after such an event. But it is even more telling in terms of our perception of the world, of how wondrous it is and how much we do in fact care for it, to think small. Almost anything will do -- sheep on the English hills, a child’s first steps, the smell of rain on a spring day, whatever, as long as it is some particular, cherished aspect of the world -- and then dwell on its specialness, its distinctiveness, its value, until the pain of contemplating its permanent loss, not just to you or me, but to all for all time, becomes unbearable. This is a form of prayer for the world as the body of God that we, as lovers and friends of the world, are summoned to practice. This prayer, while not the only one in an ecological, nuclear age, is a necessary and permanent one. It is a form of meditation to help us think differently about the world, to enable us to work together with God to save our beleaguered planet, our beautiful, vulnerable earth, our blue and green marble in a universe of silent rock and fire.

Notes

1. This paper is based in part on material from my book, Models of God:Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. In that work I experiment with the models of God as mother/creator, lover/redeemer, friend/sustainer of the world understood as God’s body. The present essay is written in two tracks: the central argument, which appears as the text, and the Scholarly discussion, especially as regards issues pertinent to the Annecy meeting, which appears as the endnotes.

2. Present-day concern among theologians with anthropocentrism or homocentrism is wide-spread. James M. Gustafson, in the first volume of Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, states the concern succinctly with his pithy remark that while human beings are the measurers of all things, they are not the measure of all things (Gustafson, 82). Our anthropocentrism can, he believes, be overcome only by a profound acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God, a consent to divine governance that sets limits to human life and in which we "relate to all things in a manner appropriate to their relations to God" (p. 113). Only then will human beings, he says, "confront their awesome possibilities and their inexorable limitations" (pp. 16-17). Stephen Toulmin echoes these sentiments in an elegant statement on the cosmos understood on the model of our "home": "We can do our best to build up a conception of the ‘overall scheme of things’ which draws as heavily as it can on the results of scientific study, informed by a genuine piety in all its attitudes toward creatures of other kinds: a piety that goes beyond the consideration of their usefulness to Humanity as instructions for the fulfillment of human ends. That is an alternative within which human beings can both feel, and also be. at home. For to be at home in the world of nature does not just mean finding out how to utilize nature economically and efficiently -- home is not a hotel! It means making sense out of the relations that human beings and other living things have toward the overall patterns of nature in ways that give us some sense of their proper relations to one another, to ourselves, and to the whole" (Toulmin, 272). Sigurd Daecke finds anthropocentrism to be deeply embedded in Protestant theologies of creation reaching back to Luther ("I believe that God has created me") and Calvin (nature is the stage for salvation history) and finding a twentieth-century home in the humanistic individualism of Bultmann as well as the Christocentrism of Barth ("the reality of creation is known in Jesus Christ") (see Daecke). In a somewhat different vein, Tracy and Lash, while agreeing that the anthropic principle is untenable in science, find a certain kind of anthropocentrism appropriate in theology: (1) human beings are both products of and interpreters of the evolutionary process; (2) human beings are responsible for much of our world’s ills: "if we are the ‘center’ of anything, we are the center of ‘sin,’ of the self-assertive disruption and unraveling of the process of things, at least on our small planet" (Tracy and Lash, 280).

3. James M. Gustafson and WCC materials appear to prefer the phrases "theocentric" and "life-centered" to "cosmocentric" (see Gustafson, vol. I, esp. pp. 87-113). Each phrase highlights a somewhat different focus on a set of interrelated entities: God, life, and the total environment that both supports and includes life. It is helpful, I believe, to use all three in a variety of contexts; if only one is chosen, the intrinsic interrelations are forgotten.

4. Tracy and Lash contrast the collaborative model with two others, described as confrontational and concordist, neither of which is appropriate for our time. In a similar fashion Ernan McMullin asks for "consonance" between scientific and theological views. The theologian "should aim at some sort of coherence of world-view, a coherence to which science and theology, and indeed many other sorts of human construction like history, politics, and literature, must contribute" (McMullin, 52). It is in this spirit that the present essay is written. However, those of us concerned to find such relationships between distinct fields should heed the cautious word of Cambridge physicist Sir Brian Pippard when he says that each field thrives by virtue of its own methods and not by aping those of others: "The fabric of knowledge has not been woven as a seamless robe but pieced together like a patchwork quilt, and we are still in the position of being able to appreciate the design in individual pieces much more clearly than the way they are put together" (Pippard, 95-96).

5. Tracy and Lash define cosmology in a variety of ways. "The term can refer to theological accounts of the world as God’s creation; or to philosophical reflection on the categories of space and time; or to observational and theoretical study of the structure and evolution of the physical universe; or, finally, to ‘world views’: unified imaginative perceptions of how the world seems and where we stand in it" (Tracy and Lash, vii). Peacocke finds a similarity of intention in religious and scientific cosmologies: "Both attempt to take into account as much of the ‘data’ of the observed universe as possible and both use criteria of simplicity, comprehensiveness, elegance, and plausibility. . . . Both direct themselves to the ‘way things are’ not only by developing cosmogonies, accounts of the origin of the universe, but also in relation to nearer-at-hand experience of biological and inorganic nature" (Peacocke, 31). The intention of my modest effort with the model of the world as God’s body falls within these parameters.

6. Many philosophers of science claim that science is also an imaginative activity. Max Black insists that the exercise of the imagination provides a common ground between science and the humanities, "for science, like the humanities, like literature, is an affair of the imagination" (Black, 243). Mary Hesse suggests that "art" or "play" characterizes some aspects of scientific problem-solving: "A great deal of scientific theorizing, especially in fundamental physics and cosmology, is not too distant from the creation of science fiction, which might indeed be said to be speculative theory without the full rigor of experimental control" (Hesse, 50). See also my Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, chapter 3. for a treatment of the role of the imagination in science and theology.

7. Dennis Nineham writes that it is "at the level of the imagination that contemporary Christianity is most weak." He goes on to say that people "find it hard to believe in God because they do not have available to them any lively imaginative picture of the way God and the world as they know it are related. What they need most is a story, a picture, a myth, that will capture their imagination, while meshing in with the rest of their sensibility in the way that messianic terms linked with the sensibility of first-century Jews, or Nicene symbolism with the sensibility of philosophically-minded fourth-century Greeks" (Nineham, 42).

8. An outstanding example of theology as hermeneutics is the work of David Tracy, especially The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. A fine illustration of theology as construction is the work of Gordon D. Kaufman, especially The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God.

9. How that power is understood involves specifying the material norm of Christian faith. It involves risking an interpretation of what, most basically, Christian faith is about. My interpretation is similar to that of the so-called liberation theologies. Each of these theologies, from the standpoint of race, gender, class, or another basic human distinction, claims that the Christian gospel is opposed to oppression of some by others, opposed to hierarchies and dualisms, opposed to the domination of the weak by the powerful. This reading is understood to be commensurate with the paradigmatic story of the life, message, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, who in his parables, his table fellowship, and his death offered a surprising invitation to all, especially to the outcast and the oppressed. It is a destabilizing, inclusive, nonhierarchical vision of Christian faith, the claim that the gospel of Christianity is a new creation for all of creation -- a life of freedom and fulfillment for all. As Nicholas Lash has said in a variety of contexts, the story as told must be "a different version of the same story, not a different story" (Lash, 30, 44).

10. Robert P. Scharlemann uses this phrase to describe the kind of theology that constructs theological models, and he sees it as an alternative to other kinds of theology, confessional, metaphysical, biblicistic, religious thought. "It is free theology in the sense that it can make use of any of these materials -- confessional, metaphysical, biblical, religious, and secular -- without being bound to them" (Scharlemann, 82-83).

11. The relationship between image and concept that I support is articulated by Paul Ricoeur, whose well-known phrase "the symbol gives rise to thought" is balanced by an equal emphasis on thought’s need to return to its rich base in symbol.

12. There are probably as many definitions of metaphor as there are metaphoricians and one hesitates to contemplate how many of the latter there may be. In 1978 Wayne Booth, commenting on the explicit discussions of metaphor having "multiplied astronomically in the past fifty years," claimed that he had extrapolated with his pocket calculator to the year 2039 and determined "at that point there will be more students of metaphor than people" (Booth, 47). With that sobering introduction, I am grateful to Janet Martin Soskice for her straight-forward, uncomplicated definition of metaphor: "Metaphor is a figure of speech in which one entity or state of affairs is spoken of in terms which are seen as being appropriate to another" (Soskice, 96).

13. My position here is very close to that of Ricoeur, as found in The Rule of Metaphor and elsewhere.

14. The conversation between science and theology on the matter of metaphors and models is a long and interesting one, with the Annecy conference as one of its results. I am especially indebted to the work of Ian Barbour, Mary Hesse, Frederick Ferre, E. H. Hutten, Rom Harre, Max Black, and N. R. Hanson, among others, for their interpretations of this conversation. For my modest contribution to it, see Metaphorical Theology, chapters 3 and 4.

15. I find Ian Barbour’s definition of theoretical models in science serves as well in theology: "theoretical models are novel mental constructions. They originate in a combination of analogy to the familiar and creative imagination in creating the new. They are open-ended, extensible, and suggestive of new hypotheses . . . such models are taken seriously but not literally. They are neither pictures of reality nor useful fictions; they are partial and inadequate ways of imagining what is not observable" (Harbour, 47-48).

16. This perspective acknowledges with Nelson Goodman that, as Ernest Gombrich insists, "there is no innocent eye. The eye comes always ancient to its work. . . . Nothing is seen nakedly or naked" (Goodman, 7-8). This means, of course, that we are always dealing in interpretations of reality (the reality of God or anything else); hence, there are no descriptions but only readings. Some readings, however, are more privileged than others and this judgment will be made by the relevant community. New readings are offered in place of conventional or accepted ones, not with the view that they necessarily correspond more adequately to the reality in question in toto, but that they are a discovery/creation of some aspect of that reality overlooked in other readings, or one especially pertinent to the times, etc.

17. The heavily pragmatic view of truth suggested here is similar to that of some liberation theologians and rests on an understanding of praxis not simply as action vs. theory, but as a kind of reflection, one guided by practical experience.. Praxis is positively, "the realization that humans cannot rely on any ahistorical, universal truths to guide life" (Chopp, 36). It assumes that human life is fundamentally practical; hence, knowledge is not most basically the correspondence of some understanding of reality with "reality-as-it-is," but it is a continual process of analysis, explanation, conversation, and application with both theoretical and practical aspects. This understanding is not new; Aristotle’s view of life in the polis as understood and constructed is similar: such knowledge is grounded in concrete history within the norms, values, and hopes of the community. Likewise, Augustine’s Confessions is not a theoretical treatise on the nature of God, but a history, his own concrete, experiential history, of God acting in his life. On the present scene we see a clear turn toward pragmatism in the work of Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Richard Bernstein, and others. While I would not identify my position with the extremes of pragmatism, it is, nonetheless, a healthy reminder that religious truth, whatever may be the case with other kinds of truth, involves issues of value, of consequences, of the quality of lived existence.

18. Edward Farley and Peter C. Hodgson agree: "The Christian movement never abandoned the royal metaphor of God and God’s relation to the world. The logic of sovereignty, which presumes that God employs whatever means are necessary to ensure the successful accomplishment of the divine will, eventually pervaded the total criteriology of Christendom" (Farley and Hodgson, 68).

19. Many theologians have criticized the monarchical model as oppressive. Dorothee Soelle claims that authoritarian religion that images God as dominating power lay behind the "obedience" of Nazism and thus behind the Jewish Holocaust. John B. Cobb, Jr., and David R. Griffin view the classic Western God as "the Cosmic Moralist," whose main attribute is power over all creatures rather than responsive love that could lead to the fulfillment of all creatures. Jürgen Moltmann objects to the "monarchical monotheism" of Christianity, which supports hierarchalism and individualism, and insists instead that a social, Trinitarian doctrine of God is needed. Edward Farley claims that the royal metaphors for God have fueled the notion of "salvation history" and its "logic of triumph" (Farley 1982).

20. See the well-known essay by Lynn White which makes this accusation in its strongest form. See also a refutation of White’s argument in Peacocke, pp. 275 ff.

21. There is, however, another metaphorical tradition of benevolence that moves in a more positive direction: God as gardener, caretaker, and hence preserver of the world and its life. Here benevolence is not distant goodwill, as in the royal metaphor, but intimate nurture. Gardeners and caretakers "touch" the earth and the life they care for with the goal of creating conditions in which life other than their own can grow and prosper. Such benevolence promotes human responsibility, not escapism and passivity, and hence these metaphors are helpful ones in our time. For further analysis, see Phyllis Trible, pp. 85ff.

22. For a treatment of some of these theological traditions, see Grace Jantzen, chapter 3. The metaphor is widespread, especially in its form as an analogy -- self:body::God:world -- particularly among process theologians, as a way of overcoming the externality of God’s knowledge of and activity in the world. Theologians of nature, who take the evolutionary reality of the world seriously, also find it attractive as a noninterventionist way of speaking of God’s agency in history and nature. See, for example, Claude Stewart’s Nature in Grace. Even among more traditional theologies, the embodiment of God is receiving attention. Grace Jantzen’s position, for example, is that, given the contemporary holistic understanding of personhood, an embodied personal God is more credible than a disembodied one and is commensurate with traditional attributes of God.

23. See Jantzen’s fine study on the dualistic, antimatter context of early Christian theology (Jantzen, chap. 3).

24. John Cobb makes this point and adds that total identification with our bodies becomes impossible when they are sick, maimed, aging, enslaved, or dying. We are not our bodies at such times (Cobb).

25. At first glance, there might appear to be tension between the model of the world as God’s body and the models of God as mother, lover, and friend. Is the relationship narcissistic? Is it monistic? I firmly support Jay McDaniel’s view of "dialogical panentheism" vs. "emanationist panentheism," the former being consonant with the model of the world or universe as God’s body (McDaniel, 87), I find the kind of relationality implied in the model of the world as God’s body less narcissistic than some understandings of orthodox Trinitarianism, in which God’s "other" is God’s own self, with divine relationality seen in terms of the relations among the persons of the immanent Trinity. This solipsistic view is epitomized in C. S. Lewis’s statement that God is "at home in the land of the Trinity," and, entirely self-sufficient and needing nothing, "loves into existence totally superfluous creatures" (Lewis, 176). One might also ask about the "source" of God’s body, the world: How can someone be the mother of their own body? One must recall what this "body" is: it is nothing less than all that is -- the universe or universes of which the cosmologists speak. The body of God, then, is creation, understood as God’s self-expression; it is formed in God’s own reality (although not thereby identical with it), bodied forth in the eons of evolutionary time. What could this body be except God’s own creation? Could some other creator have made it -- if so, then that creator would be God. God could be said to be the mother of all reality, for God is the source of all that is. As Julian of Norwich writes of God as mother: "We owe our being to him [sic] and this is the essence of motherhood" (Julian of Norwich, chap. 60). The seeming incoherence here, I think, comes from the fact that our bodies are given to us, as are all other aspects of our existence. But as the creator of all that is, God is necessarily the source, the mother, of her own body.

26. Paul Tillich’s definition of pantheism is close to Karl Rahner’s and Herbert Vorgrimler’s definition of panentheism: "Pantheism is the doctrine that God is the substance or essence of all things, not the meaningless assertion that God is the totality of all things" (Tillich, 324); and "This form of pantheism does not intend simply to identify the world and God monistically (God = the ‘all’) but intends, instead, to conceive of the ‘all’ of the world ‘in’ God as God’s inner modification and appearance, even if God is not exhausted by the ‘all’ " (Rahner and Vorgrimler, 275).

27. Most theologians who employ the analogy of self:body::God:world speak in these terms about God’s knowledge of the world. Since God is internally related to the world, divine knowledge is an immediate, sympathetic awareness (see, e.g., Hartshorne, "Philosophical and Religious Uses of ‘God’ "in Process Theology: Basic Writings, edited by Ewert Cousins, page 109; also see Schubert Ogden, "The Reality of God," p. 123 of the same volume and Jantzen 1984, 81 ff.).

28. To understand the action of God as interior to the entire evolutionary process does not mean that some events, aspects, and dimensions cannot be more important than others. See, for example, the analysis of "act" of God by Gordon Kaufman, in which he distinguishes between "master" act (the entire evolutionary process) and "subordinate" acts such as Jesus’ march to the cross as an essential constituent of the master act (Kaufman 1979, 140 ff.).

29. This position is not unlike that of Boehme, Schelling, and Tillich that in some sense evil has its origin in God. In an evolutionary perspective, however, the issue of evil is so complex that to say that evil has its origin in God means something very different from what saying this means in nonevolutionary theologians such as the above.

30. The suffering of God as a way of dealing with evil of various sorts is a major topic with a wide variety of theologians, ranging from Jürgen Moltmann and Arthur Peacocke to Ian Barbour and most process theologians. In these discussions, the suffering God participates in the pain of the universe as it gropes to survive and produce new forms. It is obvious that not all species, let alone all individuals in any species, survive and flourish -- for a variety of reasons. In this kind of theodicy Gethesemane, the cross, and the resurrection are important foci for understanding the depths of God’s love, who, in creating an unimaginatively complex matrix of matter eventuating finally in persons able to choose to go against God’s intentions, nonetheless grieves for and suffers with this beloved creation, both in the pain its natural course brings all its creatures and in the evil that its human creatures inflict upon it. I find this discussion rich and powerful; nonetheless, I would raise a caveat concerning what it tends to underplay -- human sin and responsibility. By locating the discussion of evil in the context of the entire cosmic complex, one may overlook the particular powerful role that human beings increasingly play in bringing evil to their own species and to other species as well. Teilhard de Chardin in his Divine Milieu says that our lives have an active and a passive phase: in the first phase we must work with all our heart, mind, and soul to help bring about the great evolutionary project, while in the second phase we must accept the deterioration and death that always come (Teilhard 1968b). By stressing the suffering of God -- the passive side -- one may fail to underscore the peculiar position of human beings in the universe as the active agents who can choose or not choose to side with God as co-workers, co-creators. At the close of the twentieth century, with ecological deterioration accelerating and the nuclear threat ever with us, we need to feel not acceptance but the challenge to join forces on the side of life, for while we, like all creatures, are ultimately part of a universe that is brutal and may well end, we have, while we live, a part to play different from that of any other creature: we are responsible agents who can join with our loving parent to help our own and other species to survive and flourish. This means, of course, engaging in difficult and complex decisions of justice and care, as we seek to determine the economic, social, political, and cultural rights of individuals in our own species and as we pay attention to the rights of the silent, nonvoting majority which is made up of all the other species. But complexity is not the main problem, for creatures who can go to the moon, manage multinational corporations, and build nuclear arsenals have the ability to do considerably better than they do on justice and ecological issues. The main problem is the perversion of the human heart, which is turned in upon itself, as Augustine said, rather than being open to the other beings as well as to the Source of all being. In sum, divine suffering for the cosmos (including each sparrow that falls) must not obscure human responsibility for a tiny corner of it -- our earth.

31. I am indebted to Rosemary Radford Ruether for the import of this paragraph.

32. Brian Swimme, physicist and ecologist, writes in the following way of this awesome, cosmic fact: "Humans and yeast are kin. They organize themselves chemically and biologically in nearly indistinguishable patterns of intelligent activity. They speak the same genetic language. All things whether living or not are descendents of the supernova explosion. All that exists shapes the same energy erupting into the universe as the primeval fireball. No tribal myth, no matter how wild, ever imagined a more profound relationship connecting all things in an internal way right from the beginning. All thinking must begin with this cosmic genetical relatedness" (quoted in Cross Currents [Summer/Fall 1987]: 222).

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